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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum thermodynamics, quantum correlations and quantum coherence in accelerating Unruh-DeWitt detectors in both steady and dynamical state

arXiv:2512.18123v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the interplay between quantum thermodynamics, quantum correlations, and quantum coherence within the framework of the Unruh-DeWitt (UdW) detector model. By analyzing both the steady and dynamical states of various quantum resources (including steerability, entanglement, quantum discord, and coherence), we study how these resources evolve under Markovian and non-Markovian environments. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of both the Unruh temperature and the energy levels on three key quantum phenomena: thermodynamic evolution, quantum correlations, and quantum coherence, considering different initial state preparations. The hierarchical structure relating quantum correlations and quantum coherence is determined. We further examine the thermodynamic performance of a quantum heat engine, highlighting the influence of memory effects and classical correlations on heat exchange, work extraction, and efficiency. Our results reveal that non-Markovian dynamics can enhance the preservation of quantum correlations and improve the engine's efficiency compared to purely Markovian regime. These findings provide insights into the role of quantum correlations and quantum coherence in quantum thermodynamic processes and open avenues for optimizing quantum devices operating in relativistic or open-system settings.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

FreshRetailNet-LT: A Stockout-Annotated Censored Demand Dataset for Latent Demand Recovery and Forecasting in Fresh Retail

arXiv:2505.16319v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate demand estimation is critical for the retail business in guiding the inventory and pricing policies of perishable products. However, it faces fundamental challenges from censored sales data during stockouts, where unobserved demand creates systemic policy biases. Existing datasets lack the temporal resolution and annotations needed to address this censoring effect. To fill this gap, we present FreshRetailNet-50K, the first large-scale benchmark for censored demand estimation. It comprises 50,000 store-product time series of detailed hourly sales data from 898 stores in 18 major cities, encompassing 863 perishable SKUs meticulously annotated for stockout events. The hourly stock status records unique to this dataset, combined with rich contextual covariates, including promotional discounts, precipitation, and temporal features, enable innovative research beyond existing solutions. We demonstrate one such use case of two-stage demand modeling: first, we reconstruct the latent demand during stockouts using precise hourly annotations. We then leverage the recovered demand to train robust demand forecasting models in the second stage. Experimental results show that this approach achieves a 2.73% improvement in prediction accuracy while reducing the systematic demand underestimation from 7.37% to near-zero bias. With unprecedented temporal granularity and comprehensive real-world information, FreshRetailNet-50K opens new research directions in demand imputation, perishable inventory optimization, and causal retail analytics. The unique annotation quality and scale of the dataset address long-standing limitations in retail AI, providing immediate solutions and a platform for future methodological innovation. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Dingdong-Inc/FreshRetailNet-50K) and code (https://github.com/Dingdong-Inc/frn-50k-baseline}) are openly released.

03.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-05

Structural motif search across the protein universe with Folddisco

作者:

Detecting similar protein structural motifs in large structure collections is computationally expensive. We developed Folddisco, a fast structural motif search tool that uses an index of position-independent geometric features, including side-chain orientation, combined with a rarity-based scoring system. Folddisco is 20-fold faster in querying and fourfold more storage-efficient than existing methods while improving accuracy. Folddisco is freely available online ( https://folddisco.foldseek.com ), along with a webserver ( https://search.foldseek.com/folddisco ). Folddisco enables protein structural motif search in million scale databases.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PolicyGuard: Towards Test-time and Step-level Adversary Defense for Reinforcement Learning Agent

arXiv:2606.12896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are becoming increasingly popular, the security of RL systems deserve more attention and exploration. In particular, recent work has revealed that RL agents are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where a victim agent behaves normally under standard conditions but executes malicious actions when a specific trigger is activated. Existing backdoor defenses for RL either require access to the agent's internal parameters, operate only at the model or trajectory level, or are limited to specific attack types. To ensure the security of RL agents, we propose \texttt{PolicyGuard}, a test-time step-level backdoor defense which leverages Gaussian Process (GP) posterior variance and adapts pseudo trajectories to enable uncertainty computation for individual time step. Besides, we also provide theoretical foundations to explain the efficacy of GP posterior variance. Extensive experiments across seven RL games demonstrate that PolicyGuard achieves state-of-the-art detection performance in most cases, with average AUROC of 0.856 for perturbation-based attacks and 0.859 for adversary-agent attacks.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Decentralized Autoregressive Generation

arXiv:2601.03184v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The decentralization of autoregressive generation has attracted considerable attention in recent years as a solution to scaling bottlenecks. However, despite promising empirical results, this paradigm currently lacks rigorous theoretical justification. In this work, we formally establish the theoretical equivalence between decentralized and centralized training. To achieve this, we adapt the Discrete Flow Matching framework for autoregressive generation, leveraging its inherent properties to demonstrate that global models naturally decompose into independent experts. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments across diverse multimodal benchmarks, empirically validating that decentralized training maintains competitive parity with standard centralized architectures.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ChartFI: Benchmarking Faithfulness and Insightfulness of Chart Descriptions from Multimodal Large Language Models

Chart descriptions are essential for accessibility, cross-modal retrieval, and assisting readers in extracting insights from complex visualizations. As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly adopted for automated chart description generation, a critical question arises: how faithfully and insightfully do these models actually describe charts? Current benchmarks fall short on two fronts: existing datasets consist of simple, homogeneous charts paired with shallow, fact-enumerating descriptions; and prevailing metrics fail to capture the multi-faceted nature of description quality. To address these gaps, we present the Chart Faithfulness and Insightfulness Benchmark (ChartFI-Bench). We first summarize four dimensions that characterize high-quality chart descriptions: factual accuracy, salient feature emphasis, domain-informed guidance, and chart-text complementarity. Guided by these dimensions, we construct a high-quality benchmark comprising 896 chart-description pairs, which feature visually complex charts and semantically rich descriptions. Furthermore, we design four aligned evaluation metrics – Faithfulness, Coverage, Informativeness, and Acuity – to systematically assess the quality of descriptions across these dimensions. Experiments conducted on mainstream MLLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and reveal common weaknesses among existing models.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Data-Forcing Distillation: Restoring Diversity and Fidelity in Few-Step Video Generation

Recent progress has shown promise in distilling multi-step video diffusion models into efficient few-step students. Among them, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) and its successor DMD2 achieved strong generation quality and fast convergence. However, due to the nature of the reverse Kullback–Leibler (KL) objective, these methods exhibit two persistent failure modes: a substantial drop in sample diversity, and visibly over-saturated outputs that deviate from real-video appearance. In this work, we propose Data-Forcing Distillation (DFD), a simple post-training framework that restores diversity and fidelity in DMD with only a single-line of code change. At its core is the teacher score discrepancy to guide the student toward the real-data distribution, pulling it to missing modes (mitigating mode collapse) and away from problematic modes absent in real data (avoiding over-saturation). We provide an in-depth theoretical analysis of our framework and validate our approach on text-to-video, image-to-video, and autoregressive video generation. With only 100–300 steps of finetuning, DFD effectively restores diversity and fidelity on both Wan2.1-1.3B and Cosmos-Predict2.5-2B model, resolving the over-saturation artifacts with significantly better video dynamics and appearance, and even outperforms the teacher model.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

EverydayGPT: Confidence-Gated Routing for Efficient and Safe Hybrid GPT-RAG Conversational QA

Standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines route every query through retrieval and generation unconditionally, incurring unnecessary computation and propagating low-quality context to the generator. We introduce EverydayGPT, a lightweight conversational QA system built around a Confidence-Gated Routing (CGR) mechanism that formalises the routing decision as a joint policy over retrieval distance and extraction adequacy. The backbone is a 205M-parameter GPT trained from scratch on 10B tokens of FineWeb-Edu. CGR avoids invoking the costly GPT pathway (~5.9s) for 85 percent of queries by resolving them via fast RAG extraction (~45 ms), yielding over 120x latency reduction on the majority of queries while maintaining answer quality. On a 500-question in-domain benchmark, the system achieves F1 = 0.226 +/- 0.004 compared to 0.171 for GPT-only and 0.210 for unconditional RAG. Gains over strong baselines are modest but consistent, while efficiency improvements are substantial (6.3x mean latency reduction). A structured grounding audit finds no unsupported claims in the sampled set, with explicit scope limitations. We position this work as a study of routing strategies under resource constraints rather than a claim of state-of-the-art performance.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

High-Fidelity Two-Step Image Generation via Teacher-Aligned End-to-End Distillation

Few-step diffusion distillation has become increasingly mature for 4-8-step generation, yet pushing further to 2 steps remains challenging. In this work, we introduce Z-Image Turbo++, a high-quality 2-step image generation model distilled from the 8-step Z-Image Turbo teacher. Our method addresses the central bottlenecks of increased task difficulty and limited model capacity in 2-step generation through three simple but effective design choices tailored to this regime. First, we propose Distribution-Aligned Adversarial Learning, which uses teacher-generated images rather than external real images as real samples for GAN training, providing a more attainable and informative adversarial target. Second, we adopt Step-Decoupled Parameterization, assigning independent model parameters to the two denoising steps to better match their distinct capacity demands. Third, we perform End-to-End Training with Iterative Regularization, allowing the first step to receive gradients from final image quality while preserving a meaningful intermediate generation through an explicit step-1 loss. Together, these designs substantially narrow the quality gap between 2-step and 8-step generation in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, highlighting the potential of carefully tailored distillation strategies for improving the quality-efficiency trade-off in few-step generation.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

A Qualitative Review of GenAI-Based Methods for Data Generation and Augmentation in Industrial Computer Vision Applications

AI-driven computer vision applications require a profound database to ensure predictable behaviors and performance. Such predictable behaviors are especially important for industrial applications in gaining trust from users. However, such a database is not readily available in industrial applications, and its acquisition is not trivial either. Active learning methods can be applied to ramp up data within a project deployment to iteratively increase the database, and thus the application predictability. Unfortunately, we observe that this often leads to a loss of user trust in the application, which is difficult to regain once lost. This leads to a "chicken-and-egg" dilemma in which neither the database nor the application is developed. In this work, we review state-of-the-art methods and approaches to further boost the database the initial active data ramp-up phase. Here, we focus on recent advancements in GenAI-based data generation and augmentation methods and review their adaptability on an industrial computer vision classification use case. Although we observe a potential for automatic data ramp-up, we also see a domain miss match in between the source (training environment) and target (industrial use-case) - regarding context defined in natural language and object characteristics.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

HierSVA: A Data Synthesis Pipeline, Dataset, and Benchmark for LLM-Driven Hierarchical Hardware Formal Verification

arXiv:2606.13706v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present HierSVA, an integrated suite that combines a pipeline, dataset, and benchmark for LLM-driven hierarchical hardware formal verification. HierSVA-SP pairs an RTL preprocessing toolchain with an LLM-in-the-loop formal verification flow to produce reference SystemVerilog Assertions (SVA) on hierarchical RTL. Applying it to BaseJump STL yields HierSVA-DS, a dataset of 342 modules, with hierarchy metadata and depths 0–9, accompanied by a deep subset of 28 module-bug pairs with natural-language specifications and bug variants. HierSVA-B decomposes assertion quality into six metric axes: syntax correctness, assertion proof success rate, vacuity, specification faithfulness, mutation coverage, and formal core coverage. Applying HierSVA-B to twelve recent LLMs reveals three findings. First, the module-level compile rate is 67.1\%; among generated assertions in evaluable runs, 82.1\% prove non-vacuously, but the corresponding assertion sets detect only 70.2\% of eligible injected faults and cover 36.2\% of the formal core. Second, on 211 evaluable model–module entries in the deep subset, assertion sets flag buggy RTL with 0.87 recall, but 40\% of predicted-buggy outcomes are false positives on correct RTL, limiting precision to 0.60. Third, agentic mode improves S1-style provability and strength metrics, but gains plateau and oscillate. Codes and artifacts are available at \href{https://github.com/HierSVAAnon/HierSVACodeAndArtifacts}{https://github.com/HierSVAAnon/HierSVACodeAndArtifacts}. Dataset is available at \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/AnonymousHierSVA/HierSVA}{https://huggingface.co/datasets/AnonymousHierSVA/HierSVA}.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

ChatPlanner: A Large Language Model Framework for Personalized Public Transit Routing

arXiv:2606.15315v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized public transit routing in public transit systems remains challenging due to the difficulty of capturing and integrating diverse user preferences into routing algorithms. This paper presents ChatPlanner, a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable preference aware public transit routing. Our approach employs fine-tuned LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to extract routing parameters and interpret nuanced user preferences from natural language queries, subsequently integrating these preferences into the objective function of a public transit routing algorithm. This study designs preference aware datasets incorporating eight personas and five contexts to establish scoring standards for both fine-tuning and RAG. This work conducted three experiments to validate the solutions' feasibility, extraction of routing information and preferences, and solution set quality and completeness. Results demonstrate that ChatPlanner generates feasible solutions reliably. Fine-tuning enforces the required output structure and learns general preference patterns, while RAG provides query-specific context to resolve imprecise or conversational expressions and calibrate continuous scores. The combination of both achieves the highest accuracy in routing information extraction and user preference interpretation. Results based on selected case studies show that by capturing user preferences, ChatPlanner identifies valuable solutions across different dimensions that existing route planners overlook, generating more valuable route alternatives. This research establishes a new paradigm for integrating natural language understanding into transportation optimization.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

TextResNet: Decoupling and Routing Optimization Signals in Compound AI Systems via Deep Residual Tuning

arXiv:2602.08306v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Textual Gradient-style optimizers (TextGrad) enable gradient-like feedback propagation through compound AI systems. However, they do not work well for deep chains. The root cause of this limitation stems from the Semantic Entanglement problem in these extended workflows. In standard textual backpropagation, feedback signals mix local critiques with upstream contexts, leading to Attribution Ambiguity. To address this challenge, we propose TextResNet, a framework that reformulates the optimization process to achieve precise signal routing via four key innovations. Firstly, in the forward pass, it enforces Additive Semantic Deltas to preserve an Identity Highway for gradient flow. Secondly, in the backward pass, it introduces Semantic Gradient Decomposition via a Semantic Projector to disentangle feedback into causally independent subspaces. Thirdly, it implements Causal Routing, which routes projected signals to their specific components. Finally, it performs Density-Aware Optimization Scheduling to leverage the disentangled signals to dynamically allocate resources to key system bottlenecks. Our results show that TextResNet not only achieves superior performance compared to TextGrad, but also exhibits remarkable stability for agentic tasks in compound AI systems where baselines collapse. Code is available at https://github.com/JeanDiable/TextResNet.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

HilDA: Hierarchical Distillation with Diffusion for Advancing Self-Supervised LiDAR Pre-trainin

arXiv:2606.20189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for camera-to-LiDAR knowledge distillation offers a promising solution to the scarcity of annotated data needed to represent the immense geometric and kinematic diversity of real-world autonomous driving (AD). However, current approaches typically treat VFMs as black-box teachers, relying exclusively on frame-wise feature similarity. Consequently, they do not fully exploit the teacher's layer-wise semantic structure and global context, as well as the rich spatiotemporal information inherent in LiDAR sequences. We propose HilDA, a self-supervised pretraining framework for LiDAR backbones that better captures the semantic what and geometric where needed for driving tasks. HilDA combines hierarchical distillation comprising multi-layer distillation for progressive semantic alignment and global context distillation for scene-level semantics, with a temporal occupancy diffusion objective promoting spatiotemporal consistency. Models pre-trained with HilDA achieve state-of-the-art results on cross-modal distillation benchmarks and outperform models trained via prior distillation approaches on 3D object detection, scene flow, and semantic occupancy prediction. Code available at: https://maxiuw.github.io/hilda.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

3D Ising criticality with Platonic lattice superconducting qubits

arXiv:2606.16854v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The three-dimensional (3D) Ising model is a foundational model in statistical physics and critical phenomena, yet its analytical intractability has long impeded the precise determination of universal critical exponents. While high-precision estimates have been obtained through classical numerical methods and conformal bootstrap techniques, a direct quantum simulation of the 3D Ising criticality remains challenging, requiring nontrivial connectivity, sufficient system size, and high spectral resolution. In this work, assisted by the state-operator correspondence of conformal field theory, we perform a digital quantum simulation of the 3D Ising critical exponents using a multiply-connected 9-qubit superconducting quantum processor with a Platonic lattice geometry. Employing an extended variational quantum eigensolver equipped with a phase-based loss function, we variationally prepare the low-energy eigenstates of the transverse-field Ising model on a cubic Platonic lattice encoded in an 8-qubit register. The four lowest eigenenergies are extracted via Fourier-transform analysis and high-precision numerical fitting, agreeing with the exact diagonalization values up to +/- 0.001. The resulting scaling dimension Delta_epsilon = 1.5850 and critical exponent nu = 0.7067 match well with theory.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

ParkingTransformer: LLM-Enhanced End-to-End Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Parking

arXiv:2606.17082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous parking has emerged as a critical task within the realm of autonomous driving. However, existing methods suffer from black-box characteristics, lacking high-level semantic understanding and interpretability, which impedes the realization of seamless long-distance autonomous parking from the road to the target spot. To address these limitations, we propose ParkingTransformer, a novel framework that leverages multi-view perception and the scene understanding capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). By combining trajectory queries with LLMs implicit state features, our method interacts directly with historical information and raw sensor data to output planning trajectories, eliminating the need for dense Bird's-View (BEV) representations. To compensate for the inadequate spatial reasoning ability of LLMs, we introduce 3D positional encoding to explicitly inject spatial geometric awareness. Furthermore, a fixed-window streaming mechanism is designed for historical information processing, significantly improving long-term temporal processing efficiency and inference speed. Additionally, a coarse-to-fine decoding strategy is employed to progressively enhance trajectory precision. Extensive closed-loop experiments are conducted on the CARLA simulator and real-world vehicle platforms. The results demonstrate that our method achieves a driving score of 61.32 in CARLA simulator and an average success rate of 88.70% in real-world experiments, validating the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Higher-Order Token Interactions via Quantum Attention

arXiv:2606.11673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard dot-product self-attention computes, in a single layer, only pairwise (order-2) interactions between tokens; representing a generic order-$k$ interaction is known to require either super-quadratic resources in one layer or composition across depth. We introduce Quantum Higher-Order Attention (QHA), a shallow, hardware-realizable quantum attention head that, via data re-uploading and an all-to-all non-Clifford entangler, synthesizes order-$k$ token interactions inside the circuit and exposes them through a local single-qubit read-out. We prove (i) an expressivity separation: any single standard self-attention layer with embedding dimension $m$, $H$ heads and $p$-bit precision satisfying $mHp=o(N/\log\log N)$ cannot represent the order-$k$ correlation family that one QHA head represents with circuit depth $O(\log k)$ ($O(k)$ two-qubit gates); and (ii) a trainability guarantee for its local-design instantiation: with a local read-out and $O(\log n)$ depth the gradient variance is $\Omega(1/\mathrm{poly}(n))$ (no barren plateau), which we confirm empirically – while being explicit that the more expressive all-to-all instantiation we benchmark is trained empirically and shows exponentially decaying gradients. Empirically, at a $6.5\times$ smaller parameter budget, QHA generalizes hidden-subset parity of every order $k\le6$ from disjoint inputs, whereas the larger classical attention head collapses past order~2; consistent with theory, the size of the advantage tracks the target's Fourier degree - largest for parity and shrinking when low-order structure is present. As an application, QHA serves as a compact high-order interaction detector across three domains - genetic epistasis, learning-parity-with-noise, and graph triangle detection - reaching the noise ceiling at the smallest parameter budget where field-standard linear methods fail.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Gaussian DP for Reporting Differential Privacy Guarantees in Machine Learning

arXiv:2503.10945v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current practices for reporting differential privacy (DP) guarantees for machine learning (ML) algorithms such as DP-SGD provide an incomplete and potentially misleading picture. For instance, if only a single $(\varepsilon, \delta)$ is known about a mechanism, standard analyses show that there could exist highly accurate inference attacks against training data records, when, upon a more careful analysis, such accurate attacks do not exist for most practical mechanisms. In this position paper, we argue that using _non-asymptotic_ Gaussian Differential Privacy (GDP) as the primary means of communicating DP guarantees in ML avoids these potential downsides. Using two recent developments in the DP literature: (i) open-source numerical accountants capable of computing the privacy profile and $f$-DP curves of DP-SGD to arbitrary accuracy, and (ii) a decision-theoretic metric over DP representations, we show how to provide non-asymptotic bounds on GDP using numerical accountants, and show that GDP can capture the entire privacy profile of DP-SGD and related algorithms with virtually no error, as quantified by the metric. To support our claims, we investigate the privacy profiles of state-of-the-art DP large-scale image classification, and the TopDown algorithm for the U.S. Decennial Census, observing that GDP fits their profiles remarkably well in all cases. We conclude with a discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, and discuss which other privacy mechanisms could benefit from GDP.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Deep Q-Learning on Hölder Spaces

作者:

arXiv:2606.16846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the operator-theoretic core of Q-learning in continuous-time stochastic control with continuous states and actions. In value-based reinforcement learning, each Q-learning or DQN update is built from a Bellman optimality target; our analysis isolates this target in a diffusion setting and studies its regularity and approximation complexity. Under uniform ellipticity and Hölder-regular coefficients, we show that a Bellman update maps bounded inputs into an anisotropic regularity class, smoothing the state variable while leaving only Lipschitz dependence on the action variable. This yields a compact family of Bellman iterates and motivates a tensor-product DeepONet architecture adapted to the mixed regularity of the problem. We then derive explicit approximation and resource bounds, together with a stiffness–complexity trade-off as the time step $\delta \to 0$. The resulting theory makes a direct contribution to Q-learning theory at the level of Bellman target regularity and approximation in continuous stochastic control. At the same time, we do not claim a full convergence theorem for practical sampled Q-learning with exploration, replay, and stochastic gradient updates.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ReMoT: Reinforcement Learning with Motion Contrast Triplets

We present ReMoT, a unified training paradigm to systematically address the fundamental shortcomings of VLMs in spatio-temporal consistency – a critical failure point in navigation, robotics, and autonomous driving. ReMoT integrates two core components: (1) A rule-based automatic framework that generates ReMoT-16K, a large-scale (16.5K triplets) motion-contrast dataset derived from video meta-annotations, surpassing costly manual or model-based generation. (2) Group Relative Policy Optimization, which we empirically validate yields optimal performance and data efficiency for learning this contrastive reasoning, far exceeding standard Supervised Fine-Tuning. We also construct the first benchmark for fine-grained motion contrast triplets to measure a VLM's discrimination of subtle motion attributes (e.g., opposing directions). The resulting model achieves state-of-the-art performance on our new benchmark and multiple standard VLM benchmarks, culminating in a remarkable 25.1% performance leap on spatio-temporal reasoning tasks.

23.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-21

Semaglutide-associated risk of nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy in patients with type 2 diabetes: A systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies

by Jędrzej Chrzanowski, Magdalena Walicka, Jacek Burzyński, Małgorzata Zaraś, Arkadiusz Michalak, Wojciech Fendler Background Semaglutide, a glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist, is widely used for the management of type 2 diabetes (T2DM). Recent case reports have raised concerns about a potential association between semaglutide use and the development of nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION), a rare but vision-threatening condition. We aimed to evaluate whether semaglutide use is associated with an increased risk of NAION in patients with T2DM. Methods and findings We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies comparing patients with T2DM aged ≥12 years treated with semaglutide to those receiving other glucose-lowering therapies. We searched PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases from January 2023 to November 2025. Two reviewers independently extracted data on study design, population characteristics, and outcomes. Risk of bias was assessed using the Newcastle–Ottawa Scale, and ROBINS-I v.2. Certainty of the evidence was graded according to the GRADE framework. Pooled hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated using fixed-effects models; sensitivity analyses included crude and subgroup HRs, and overlapping study replacement. Leave-one-out analysis was conducted to assess small-study effects and publication bias. Results were contextualized within other meta-analyses, systematic reviews, consensus statements, and regulatory communications on the topic.Five eligible observational studies met the inclusion criteria, and 7 additional studies were included in the sensitivity analysis. Semaglutide use was associated with a significantly increased hazard of NAION compared with nonsemaglutide glucose-lowering regimens (HR 2.17, 95% CI [1.73, 2.74]; p 

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Multi-Level Architecture for Reusable Materials Ontologies – The OntoCrafter Ceramics Ontology (OCO) as Reference Implementation

arXiv:2606.14814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Materials Science and Engineering ontology landscape is fragmented along multiple axes simultaneously. Horizontally: a recent survey identified 94 ontologies of which over 40 are structurally incompatible; each new application domain – ceramics, polymers, batteries, smart materials – typically restarts ontology design from scratch. Vertically: EU regulation (CSRD, CSDDD, PPWR, CBAM, R2R, AI Act, ESPR) forces material, manufacturing, supply-chain, and lifecycle data into integrated digital product passports, leaving ontologies that only address horizontal fragmentation incomplete for any contemporary consumer. And mechanistically: a vocabulary that records that BNT-BT has $d_{33} \approx 580$ pC/N stores a fact but cannot surface why – Bi-6s$^2$ lone-pair stereo-activity, anomalous Born effective charges, soft modes, defect chemistry – without a systematic explanation skeleton. We propose a multi-level modular architecture with two independent classification axes – level of abstraction (L0 bridges, L1 material-agnostic laboratory-notebook, L2 material-class-specific, L3 categorical reasoning) and consumer audience (material vs. compliance) – in which the material-specific level is internally organised by a seven-tier mechanistic-explanation skeleton (Symmetry, Energy/DFT, Thermo/CALPHAD, Kinetics, Microstructure, Defect chemistry, Bonding) applicable to any crystalline ionic oxide. The level-and-audience modularity dissolves the horizontal fragmentation, the compliance audience absorbs the vertical regulation pressure, and the seven-tier organisation of Level 2 delivers the mechanistic explanation depth. We instantiate the architecture as the OntoCrafter Ceramics Ontology (OCO v0.94): 5,196 classes across 44 modules; 167,348 OWL axioms (40,454 logical); 1,674 properties; 829 cross-ontology bridge mappings; 1,172 SHACL shapes; 163 published competency questions.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Security and Privacy Prompts in the Wild: What Users Ask LLMs and How LLMs Respond

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used to fulfill users' information needs; users ask LLMs about the weather, pose educational questions, and consult them for legal assistance. One particularly understudied area is digital security and privacy (S&P), where users may seek LLMs' help on how to secure their online accounts or protect their computers from cyber attacks. To the best of our knowledge, no prior study has collected or analyzed the S&P questions users ask LLMs; prior research on LLM response quality relied on expert-authored S&P misconceptions or FAQs rather than user queries. Drawing from WildChat, a dataset of 3.2M user-LLM conversations collected in the wild, our study identifies 14,727 S&P prompts and categorizes them into nine categories covering a wide range of S&P topics. From the S&P prompts, we sampled 450 and performed a thematic analysis to characterize the S&P questions users ask LLMs. Separate from the thematic analysis, we curated 270 advice-seeking S&P prompts, where users ask for recommendations, guidance, or specific S&P information. We measured LLM response quality and consistency when posing the prompt to LLMs 10 times. We found that commercial LLMs outperform open-weight models (GPT 5.5 provided "good enough" responses on 98% of prompts; Llama 4 on 47%). However, among prompts that received high-quality responses on average, commercial models sometimes produce contradictory responses across runs, risking confusing or misleading users.