Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14897

An Analytical Methodology for Quantifying Airspace Conflict Rate and Complexity

Authors:

Andrew P. Kendall↗John-Paul Clarke↗

arXiv:2606.14897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Air traffic growth, advanced air mobility, and increasingly autonomous operations are driving the need for scalable and adaptive airspace design methodologies. Central to this challenge is quantifying how traffic flow structure and demand, governed in part by airspace geometry, influence conflict generation and operational complexity. This paper presents an analytical framework for computing conflict rate and conflict probability in structured airspace using stochastic flow models. Traffic streams are modeled as renewal processes with prescribed inter-arrival time distributions, while interactions between flows are captured through geometry-dependent minimum spacing constraints at merges and crossings. Within this formulation, closed-form upper bounds on the expected conflict rate and conflict probability per aircraft are derived as functions of flow configuration and demand. These metrics are interpreted as complementary measures of airspace complexity, reflecting controller workload and per-aircraft operational risk. The methodology is applied to representative hexagonal cell geometries with varying routing structures and flow distributions. Results reveal non-monotonic tradeoffs between routing flexibility, capacity, and conflict generation, with intermediate flow configurations outperforming both highly constrained and highly distributed cases. The proposed framework provides a tractable tool for evaluating airspace design alternatives and complexity-informed traffic management strategies.

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02.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12700

Measurement Geometry for Quantum Random Access Codes: Beyond Nayak Bound and Toward Optimality

Authors:

Seiseki Akibue↗Rudy Raymond↗Suguru Tamaki↗Kosei Teramoto↗

arXiv:2606.12700v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum random access codes (QRACs) ask how well N classical bits can be encoded into M qubits while allowing any single bit to be recovered. Although the Nayak bound remains the standard general upper bound on the decoding probability, numerical evidence suggests a stronger upper bound in the small-qubit regime. In this work, we formulate the optimal decoding probability in terms of decoding measurements, reformulating QRAC design as a spectral problem for noncommuting measurements. Using this formulation, we give an elementary proof of the Nayak bound by simplifying the Chernoff-bound argument. Moreover, we refine the argument to obtain upper bounds that improve over Nayak's bound in the entire finite-size regime. The equality conditions of our bounds justify defining mutually unbiased projector-valued measurements (MUPVMs), a generalization of mutually unbiased bases. We show that decoding measurement of any two-qubit QRAC attaining the conjectured bound must form MUPVMs. We also show that any MUPVM, assisted by one ancillary qubit, yields a QRAC with optimal N-scaling decoding probability. Finally, we propose a new MUPVM-based construction for the (M+2,M)-QRAC family attaining the conjectured bound.

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03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2509.16456

GPO: Learning from Critical Steps to Improve LLM Reasoning

Authors:

Jiahao Yu↗Zelei Cheng↗Xian Wu↗Xinyu Xing↗

arXiv:2509.16456v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in various domains, showing impressive potential on different tasks. Recently, reasoning LLMs have been proposed to improve the reasoning or thinking capabilities of LLMs to solve complex problems. Despite the promising results of reasoning LLMs, enhancing the multi-step reasoning capabilities of LLMs still remains a significant challenge. While existing optimization methods have advanced the LLM reasoning capabilities, they often treat reasoning trajectories as a whole, without considering the underlying critical steps within the trajectory. In this paper, we introduce Guided Pivotal Optimization (GPO), a novel fine-tuning strategy that dives into the reasoning process to enable more effective improvements. GPO first identifies the `critical step' within a reasoning trajectory - a point that the model must carefully proceed to succeed at the problem. We locate the critical step by estimating the advantage function. GPO then resets the policy to the critical step, samples the new rollout and prioritizes the learning process on those rollouts. This focus allows the model to learn more effectively from pivotal moments within the reasoning process to improve the reasoning performance. We demonstrate that GPO is a general strategy that can be integrated with various optimization methods to improve reasoning performance. Besides theoretical analysis, our experiments across challenging reasoning benchmarks show that GPO can consistently and significantly enhance the performance of existing optimization methods, showcasing its effectiveness and generalizability in improving LLM reasoning by concentrating on pivotal moments within the generation process.

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04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11918

The Art of Interrogation: Consistency Amplifies Factuality in Spatial Reasoning

Authors:

Theo Uscidda↗Marta Tintore Gazulla↗Maks Ovsjanikov↗Federico Tombari↗Leonidas Guibas↗

arXiv:2606.11918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit remarkable general capabilities but significantly underperform in spatial reasoning tasks. Existing approaches treat this gap as a knowledge deficit, relying on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to ingest labeled spatial data from external vision sources or synthetic engines. In contrast, we argue that for many tasks, spatial reasoning capabilities are already present in pre-trained LRMs but require alignment through logical coherence under geometric 2D and 3D constraints. In this work, we propose a self-supervised reinforcement learning (RL) framework that targets the internal reasoning process without requiring ground-truth annotations. By formalizing the notion of consistency verifiers – reward functions that check for geometric and semantic consistency under transformations – we demonstrate that models can improve their spatial reasoning abilities. We use both image transformations, like flipping, and textual transformations, like swapping the order of objects in the question, and propose a new optimal transport-based RL strategy, OT-GRPO, which is a minimal-matching variant of group relative policy optimization tailored to pairwise verifiers. We show that this label-free consistency training approaches the accuracy of models trained with ground-truth supervision and achieves similar generalization across diverse tasks and data domains.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19347

How LLMs Fail and Generalize in RTL Coding for Hardware Design?

Authors:

Guan-Ting Liu↗Chao-Han Huck Yang↗Chenhui Deng↗Zhongzhi Yu↗Brucek Khailany↗Yu-Chiang Frank Wang↗

Translating sequential programming priors into the parallel temporal logic of hardware design remains a crucial bottleneck for large language models(LLM). To investigate this, we introduce a new error taxonomy grounded in problem solvability, inspired by cognitive theory. Our taxonomy categorizes failures into syntactic, semantic, solvable functional, and unsolvable functional types. Evaluations reveal a strict empirical ceiling on the VerilogEval benchmark, as frontier models plateau at a 90.8% initial pass rate. These plateaus are defined by unsolvable functional errors, exposing persistent knowledge gaps immune to test time compute scaling. Furthermore, we expose a striking surface convergence gap: optimization readily eliminates syntax errors but concurrently exacerbates deeper functional failures. Our findings demonstrate that alignment techniques merely teach models to compile. While repeated sampling strategies can patch solvable errors, register-transfer level(RTL) coding capacity remains strictly bounded by pretraining knowledge. Addressing challenges in the current LLM based hardware generation pipeline requires more studies in model reasoning rather than alignment interventions.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2605.31419

Triangle Splatting SLAM

Authors:

Nicholas Fry↗Eric Dexheimer↗Kirill Mazur↗Paul H. J. Kelly↗Andrew J. Davison↗

We present a dense RGB-D SLAM system using differentiable triangles as the 3D map representation. While 3D Gaussian Splatting has emerged as the leading method for novel-view synthesis, triangles remain the standard primitive for traditional rendering hardware, game engines, and downstream tasks requiring explicit geometry such as simulation, collision, and editing. Recent offline methods have demonstrated that an unstructured 'triangle soup' can be optimised into a photorealistic mesh via Delaunay triangulation across a set of posed images. Building upon this insight, we present the first dense SLAM system to employ Triangle Splatting to perform both tracking and mapping through online differentiable rendering of a triangle soup. The map can be converted into a connected mesh on-the-fly via restricted Delaunay triangulation, enabling new online capabilities such as mesh deformation and collision checking. On Replica and TUM-RGBD, our system outperforms baselines on 3D geometry, matches the camera-tracking accuracy, and enables online mesh-based scene editing.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12337

Adjoint Method versus Physics-Informed Neural Networks in PDE-Constrained Inverse Problems

Authors:

Zhen Zhang↗Alessandro Alla↗George Em Karniadakis↗

arXiv:2606.12337v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) are central to computational mechanics and are commonly solved by adjoint-based optimization, while physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a flexible alternative. Their relative performance remains difficult to assess because the two approaches are often compared under different formulations, parameterizations, optimizers, and regularization choices. We present a fair comparison of adjoint optimization and PINNs for PDE-constrained inverse problems. From a common abstract formulation, we instantiate both methods on identical domains, governing equations, observation models, and regularization terms, while matching the optimizer, unknown parameterization, and arithmetic precision wherever applicable. The benchmarks include unsteady Burgers, noisy Darcy permeability inversion, three-dimensional Allen–Cahn reaction identification, and unsteady Navier–Stokes viscosity identification. The results show that the representation of the unknown largely determines the preferred method: grid-based fields favor the discrete adjoint, whereas neural representations are native to PINNs and relevant for closure and constitutive modeling. For time-dependent problems, adjoint inversion can be dominated by trajectory storage and differentiation, while PINNs provide satisfactory reconstructions at lower cost. A PINN-warm-started adjoint strategy then recovers adjoint-level accuracy at substantially reduced cost.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14886

Improved Knowledge Distillation for Land-Use Image Classification

Authors:

Arundhuti Sur↗Abhiroop Chatterjee↗Susmita Ghosh↗Emmett Ientilucci↗

In the present article, an improved Knowledge Distillation (KD) framework has been proposed for efficient compression of deep convolutional neural networks for land-use image classification task. Motivated by the need to achieve competitive classification accuracy while reducing computational complexity, a teacher-student learning paradigm is adopted in which a VGG16 network transfers knowledge to a lightweight MobileNetV2 model. The proposed framework integrates hard supervision from ground truth labels with a soft supervision strategy that combines Kullback-Leibler divergence and Cosine Similarity losses. Experiments conducted on three land-use datasets show that the proposed KD-based method yields improved performance, and achieves an accuracy of 99.04%, outperforming both baseline student training and single-loss distillation approaches, while retaining substantial model compression.

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09.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2505.09857

High-Order Hermite Optimization: Fast and Exact Gradient Computation in Open-Loop Quantum Optimal Control using a Discrete Adjoint Approach

Authors:

Spencer Lee↗Daniel Appelo↗

arXiv:2505.09857v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This work introduces the High-Order Hermite Optimization (HOHO) method, an open-loop discrete adjoint method for quantum optimal control. Our method is the first of its kind to efficiently compute exact (discrete) gradients when using continuous, parameterized control pulses while solving the forward equations (e.g. Schrodinger's equation or the Linblad master equation) with an arbitrarily high-order Hermite Runge-Kutta method. The HOHO method is implemented in QuantumGateDesign$.$jl (https://github.com/leespen1/QuantumGateDesign.jl), an open-source software package for the Julia programming language, which we use to perform numerical experiments comparing the method to Juqbox$.$jl (https://github.com/LLNL/Juqbox.jl). For realistic model problems we observe speedups up to 775x.

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10.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12252

Using Explainability as a Training-Time Reliability Signal for Efficient ECG Classification

Authors:

Veerendhra Kumar Dangeti↗Xiao Gu↗Ying Weng↗Shreyank N Gowda↗

arXiv:2606.12252v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training deep neural networks for clinical time-series analysis is computationally demanding, yet many healthcare settings lack the resources required for repeated model development and deployment. This challenge is particularly evident in electrocardiogram classification, where large datasets and long training schedules make efficiency practically important. Progressive Data Dropout reduces training cost by excluding samples from gradient updates once they are learned, but it relies on model confidence and may retain samples that are difficult due to noise or ambiguity rather than useful signal. In this work, we introduce ERTS, an explainability-based reliability training signal for efficient ECG classification. ERTS uses explanation quality during training to distinguish between informative and unreliable uncertainty. Building on progressive data selection, we compute Grad-CAM attention maps for candidate samples and derive a focus score that measures whether model predictions are supported by coherent and localised patterns. Samples with low focus are filtered out, while those with meaningful attention are prioritised for gradient updates. We evaluate ERTS across three ECG datasets and multiple backbone architectures, showing consistent improvements in macro-F1 alongside reduced effective training cost. These results suggest that explanation quality can serve as a practical signal for improving both efficiency and reliability in clinical time-series learning. Code will be released.

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11.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16784

Quantum Nonlocal Games on Graph Ensembles

Authors:

Joshua Tucker↗Chris Weeks↗Peter Drmota↗Ellis M. Ainley↗Ayush Agrawal↗Adam R. Martinez↗Erin Malinowski↗Jacob A. Blackmore↗David P. Nadlinger↗Gabriel Araneda↗David M. Lucas↗Carlos A. Perez-Delgado↗…

arXiv:2606.16784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum entanglement is one of the most striking discoveries in all of science. This effect allows, for instance, two spatially separated agents to coordinate their actions, without communication, to an extent that is both counter-intuitive, and provably impossible by any other physical means. A recently discovered example is that of mobile agents (players) performing spatial coordination tasks such as rendezvous, where the agents aim to meet on a network without communication. Until now, demonstrations of this advantage have relied on highly idealized conditions: agents are assumed to have complete knowledge of the topography, and experiments have been restricted to simulations using data generated by qubits within a single quantum processor. Here we address both limitations by developing a theory for graph ensembles that capture topographical uncertainty and by experimentally demonstrating the advantage in rendezvous scenarios between physically separated ion-trap systems with access to remote entanglement. Moreover, we simulate a broader set of problems on superconducting hardware. Surprisingly, when players are given the ability to gather more local information the quantum advantage increases – a feat impossible by classical means. Our findings establish a concrete route toward practical quantum advantages in motion coordination problems. More broadly, they point to a new way of using portable quantum devices to enhance collective decision-making in uncertain environments.

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12.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2603.27049

Overcoming the Incentive Collapse Paradox

Authors:

Qichuan Yin↗Ziwei Su↗Shuangning Li↗

arXiv:2603.27049v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-assisted task delegation is increasingly common, yet human effort in such systems is costly and typically unobserved. Recent work by Bastani and Cachon (2025); Sambasivan et al. (2021) shows that accuracy-based payment schemes suffer from incentive collapse: as AI accuracy improves, sustaining positive human effort requires unbounded payments. We study this phenomenon in a budget-constrained principal-agent framework with strategic human agents whose output accuracy depends on unobserved effort. Our first contribution is a general impossibility result showing that incentive collapse is not merely a limitation of simple linear payments, but arises for any payment rule based only on observed task accuracy.To overcome this barrier, we propose a sentinel-auditing payment mechanism that enforces a strictly positive and controllable level of human effort at finite cost, independent of AI accuracy. Building on this incentive-robust foundation, we develop an incentive-aware active statistical inference framework that jointly optimizes (i) the auditing rate and (ii) active sampling and budget allocation across tasks of varying difficulty to minimize the final statistical loss under a single budget. Experiments demonstrate improved cost-error tradeoffs relative to standard active learning and auditing-only baselines.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16583

Uncertainty Is Not a Safety Net for Clinical VQA, but Can It Anticipate Model Failure?

Authors:

Arnisa Fazla↗Alberto Testoni↗Ameen Abu-Hanna↗Barbara Plank↗Iacer Calixto↗

Safe deployment of clinical vision-language models (VLMs) requires reliable uncertainty estimation (UE): a signal indicating when predictions should be trusted or escalated to a clinician. We test whether current UE methods actually deliver this signal. Benchmarking 8 methods across 12 VLMs on clinical visual question-answering (VQA), we find that UE quality is not an intrinsic property of the UE method: it tracks model accuracy, degrading precisely where the model performance is weakest, and therefore where reliability is most needed. When we stress-test models by hiding the correct option among the multiple-choice answers (NOTA perturbations), accuracy collapses while uncertainty barely changes, leaving models systematically miscalibrated. Yet, we find that uncertainty on the unperturbed input reliably anticipates which predictions will collapse under NOTA, indicating that UE in current VLMs carries diagnostic information about model fragility. Our results position UE as a diagnostic tool for identifying fragile predictions and motivate perturbation-based evaluation as a path toward safe clinical deployment.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11670

ARGUS: Stacked Multi-View Identity Mosaic Injection for Subject-Preserving Video Generation

Authors:

Zijie Meng↗Jiwen Liu↗Yufei Liu↗Chengzhuo Tong↗Xiaoqiang Liu↗Yuanxing Zhang↗Yulong Xu↗Pengfei Wan↗

Subject-preserving video generation is not solved by frontal-face similarity alone: a generated person must remain recognizable across motion, large viewpoint changes, expression shifts, occlusion, scale variation, and conflicts among text, first-frame, and identity references. We argue that the central bottleneck is the point-reference paradigm, which collapses identity into a single static observation entangled with pose, accessories, lighting, background, and camera statistics. We introduce Argus, a Wan-based framework centered on Stacked Multi-View Identity Mosaic Injection (SMII). SMII converts MLLM-selected image/video identity evidence into a 3*3 stacked mosaic, synchronizes the mosaic with the current diffusion time, and injects it as negative-time read-only memory in Wan's native token space. This turns identity from an external clean adapter or a single reference image into a compact dynamic distribution. Around SMII, an MLLM Identity Director selects informative identity moments and resolves condition conflicts, while no-cross-pair counterfactual training, Temporal Identity Annealing, and Adaptive Self-Likeness Guidance improve robustness without paired subject-video supervision. We further release HardID-Celeb, a public-figure identity-stress benchmark, and introduce YawScore and OccScore to probe large-yaw and first-frame-occlusion robustness. Argus achieves state-of-the-art results on OpenS2V-Eval Human-Domain, reaching 64.38 Total Score, 71.86 FaceSim, 51.62 NexusScore, and 79.14 NaturalScore. On HardID-Celeb, Argus obtains 76.80 FaceSim and improves YawScore and OccScore by 12.60 and 15.10 points over the strongest baselines, demonstrating that dynamic identity memory and large-scale counterfactual self-supervision are highly effective for subject-preserving video generation.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12900

Zero-source LLM Hallucination Detection with Human-like Criteria Probing

Authors:

Jiahao Yang↗Shuhai Zhang↗Hailong Kang↗Feng Liu↗Qi Chen↗Mingkui Tan↗

Large language models (LLMs) often hallucinate by generating factually incorrect or unfaithful content, posing significant risks to their safe use. Detecting such hallucinations is particularly challenging under the zero-source constraint, where no model internals or external references are available, and detection must rely solely on the textual query-answer pair. In this paper, we propose Human-like Criteria Probing for Hallucination Detection (HCPD), a paradigm that emulates the multi-faceted reasoning of human evaluators. Its core is a Human-like Criteria Probing (HCP) mechanism, in which a LLM agent adaptively decomposes its judgment into a weighted set of interpretable criteria and aggregates criterion-specific scores into a final truthfulness measure. To achieve this adaptive capability, we introduce a reward-based alignment scheme using only weak supervision from semantic consistency. At inference, we employ a multi-sampling aggregation strategy to ensure robust decisions while preserving full interpretability. We further provide theoretical analysis supporting the reliability of our approach. Extensive experiments show that HCPD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, offering an effective and explainable solution for zero-source hallucination detection. Code is available at https://github.com/TRISKEL10N/HCPD.

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16.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16602

PhysGuard: Fisher-Guided Gradient Projection for Sim-to-Real Neural PDE Surrogates

Authors:

Changjian Zhou↗Junfeng Fang↗Negin Yousefpour↗Peng Wu↗Bin Yan↗Guillermo A Narsilio↗

arXiv:2606.16602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural operator models trained on simulation data often lose accuracy when applied to experimental measurements due to the sim-to-real gap. Standard fine-tuning with limited real data can reduce this gap, but it may also damage the core physics-relevant representations learned during pretraining. Although knowledge-preserving adaptation has been widely investigated in vision or language tasks, it remains unclear whether these methods are suitable for neural operators whose architectures and protected knowledge are fundamentally different. Neural operators need to preserve core-scale physical structures rather than semantic or visual features. We propose PhysGuard, a physics-preserving framework for accurate sim-to-real adaptation of neural operators. Specifically, PhysGuard uses the empirical Fisher Information Matrix computed on simulation data to identify physics-critical parameter directions, then restricts fine-tuning updates to directions that do not interfere with them. A layer-wise Gram-matrix formulation makes this efficient for models with millions of parameters, while an adaptive threshold automatically determines the protected subspace size. A spectral probe experiment shows that the dominant Fisher directions are strongly associated with low-frequency output structures. Experiments on benchmark across four neural operator architectures and different physical systems show that PhysGuard performs strongly on most evaluation metrics compared to baselines. The benefits are most evident under severe domain shift, where it reduces low-frequency error by up to 32\% compared to standard fine-tuning while maintaining adaptability. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhouChaunge/PhysGuard.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2510.09905

The Personalization Trap: How User Memory Alters Emotional Reasoning in LLMs

Authors:

Xi Fang↗Weijie Xu↗Yuchong Zhang↗Stephanie Eckman↗Scott Nickleach↗Chandan K. Reddy↗

When an AI assistant remembers that Sarah is a single mother working two jobs, does it interpret her stress differently than if she were a wealthy executive? As personalized AI systems increasingly incorporate long-term user memory, understanding how this memory shapes emotional reasoning is critical. We investigate how user memory affects emotional intelligence in large language models (LLMs) by evaluating 15 models on human-validated emotional intelligence tests. We find that identical scenarios paired with different user profiles produce systematically divergent emotional interpretations. Across validated user-independent emotional scenarios and diverse user profiles, systematic biases emerged in several high-performing LLMs where advantaged profiles received more accurate emotional interpretations. Moreover, LLMs demonstrate significant disparities across demographic factors in emotion reasoning and supportive recommendations tasks, indicating that personalization mechanisms can embed social hierarchies into models' emotional reasoning. These results highlight a key challenge for memory-enhanced AI: systems designed for personalization may reinforce social inequalities. To mitigate these disparities, we curate a general-purpose preference dataset designed to reduce demographic profiles' influence on emotional understanding.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2605.14568

Given, When, Then, Again: Mining Subscenario Refactoring Candidates in Behaviour-Driven Test Suites with ML Classifiers and LLM-Judge Baselines

Authors:

Ali Hassaan Mughal↗Noor Fatima↗Muhammad Bilal↗

Context. Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) test suites accumulate duplicated step subsequences. Three published refactoring patterns are available (within-file Background, within-repo reusable-scenario invocation, cross-organisational shared higher-level step), but no prior work automates which recurring subsequences are worth extracting or which mechanism applies. Objective. Rank recurring step subsequences ("slices") by refactoring suitability (extraction-worthy), pre-map each to one of the three patterns, and quantify prevalence across the public BDD ecosystem. Method. Every contiguous L-step window (L in [2, 18]) in a 339-repository / 276-upstream-owner Gherkin corpus is keyed by paraphrase-robust cluster identifiers and counted under three scopes. SBERT / UMAP / HDBSCAN clustering recovers paraphrase-equivalent slices. Three authors label a stratified 200-slice pool against a written rubric. An XGBoost extraction-worthy classifier trained under 5-fold cross-validation is compared with a tuned rule baseline and two open-weight Large Language Model (LLM) judges. Results. The miner produces 5,382,249 slices collapsing to 692,020 recurring patterns. Three-author Fleiss' kappa = 0.56 (extraction-worthy) and 0.79 (mechanism). The classifier reaches out-of-fold F1 = 0.891 (95% CI [0.852, 0.927]), outperforming both the rule baseline (F1 = 0.836, p = 0.017) and the better LLM judge (F1 = 0.728, p = 1.5e-4). 75.0%, 59.5%, and 11.7% of scenarios carry a within-file Background, within-repo reusable-scenario, and cross-organisational shared-step candidate, respectively; the figures are stable under a sweep of the classifier decision threshold. Conclusion. Paraphrase-robust subscenario discovery yields a corpus-wide census of BDD refactoring candidates; pipeline, classifier predictions, labelled pool, and rubric are released under Apache-2.0.

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19.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2605.26218

Practical Tests and Witnesses of Fermionic non-Gaussianity

Authors:

Tobias Haug↗Xhek Turkeshi↗Piotr Sierant↗

arXiv:2605.26218v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fermionic Gaussian states describe free fermions and underlie the mean-field picture of matter, from metals to superconductors; they are also efficiently simulable on classical computers. Departures from Gaussianity – the correlations produced by interactions – are therefore what make a fermionic system hard to simulate classically and useful for quantum computation, analogous to the role of magic in stabilizer-based quantum computation. Yet detecting and quantifying such non-Gaussianity at scale has remained challenging. Here we introduce practical tests and witnesses of fermionic non-Gaussianity built on fermionic antiflatness, a measure derived from the two-point covariance matrix. We estimate it with two protocols – a two-copy Bell measurement and a single-copy scheme using commuting Majorana bilinears – that determine whether a state is Gaussian or far from it at lower measurement cost than existing approaches, using only operations native to fault-tolerant hardware. For mixed states, a purity-corrected witness certifies non-Gaussianity and remains robust under strong noise; running it on the IQM quantum processor, we find that noise can both reduce and enhance non-Gaussianity. Finally, we show that preparing pseudorandom fermionic states requires extensive non-Gaussianity. Together, these tools enable the study and certification of non-Gaussian fermionic resources on present-day quantum devices.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2605.22641

More Context, Larger Models, or Moral Knowledge? A Systematic Study of Schwartz Value Detection in Political Texts

Authors:

V\'ictor Yeste↗Paolo Rosso↗

Detecting Schwartz values in political text is difficult because implicit cues often depend on surrounding arguments and fine-grained distinctions between neighboring values. We study when context and explicit moral knowledge help sentence-level value detection. Using the ValuesML/Touché ValueEval format, we compare sentence, window, and full-document inputs; no-RAG and retrieval-augmented settings with a curated moral knowledge base; supervised DeBERTa-v3-base/large encoders; and zero-shot LLMs from 12B to 123B parameters. The results show that more context is not uniformly better: full-document context improves supervised DeBERTa encoders by 3.8-4.8 macro-F1 points over sentence-only input, but does not consistently help zero-shot LLMs. Retrieved moral knowledge is more consistently useful in matched comparisons, improving each tested model family and context condition under early fusion. However, scaling from DeBERTa-v3-base to large and from 12B to larger LLMs does not guarantee gains, and simple early fusion outperforms the tested late-fusion and cross-attention RAG variants for encoders. Per-value analyses show that context and retrieval help most for socially situated or conceptually confusable values. These findings suggest that value-sensitive NLP should evaluate context, knowledge, and model family jointly rather than treating longer inputs or larger models as universal improvements.

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21.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11654

The Long Tail, Not the Front Page: Cold-Start Prediction of Crowd Highlight Salience

Authors:

Kazuki Nakayashiki↗Keisuke Watanabe↗

A social highlighter's most useful signal – which passages a crowd of readers marks – exists only for documents people have already read. Can the aggregate crowd salience of a document be predicted from its text before its marks accumulate? Prior work on this data found that zero-shot language models recover highlight locations worse than a trivial lead (position) baseline, so we ask whether a model trained on the highlight corpus can beat that baseline. Using a pre-registered ladder of models and a by-document cluster bootstrap, we find a small but robust edge: a logistic ranker over sentence embeddings and positional/contextual features beats the lead baseline by +0.044 average precision (95% CI [+0.029, +0.058]; clears a pre-registered margin delta=0.03 in 97% of resamples, and stable across pipeline re-runs). Two unsupervised extractive baselines (centroid, LexRank-style centrality) lose to lead, and the trained model beats them by +0.108, so the edge is not recovered by generic unsupervised proxies – it reflects learning from real reader marks. In product terms, precision@3 rises from 0.25 to 0.39 (+55% relative) and the model beats lead on 69% of documents. An ablation attributes the edge to the raw embedding (+0.014) and training augmentation (+0.010), each with a positive CI. The edge is not a temporal-generalization failure, and we find no evidence that content drift or near-duplicate leakage explains it. A standardized regression shows the advantage is governed mainly by document popularity (lower popularity, larger edge) and by label reliability. It nearly vanishes only on the most popular content; there it is the lead baseline that strengthens, not the model that weakens. Because our evaluation conditions on documents that eventually accumulated readers, these results are a retrospective cold-start simulation.

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22.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2502.19382

Functional central limit theorems for non-local branching Markov processes

Authors:

Christopher B. C. Dean↗Emma Horton↗

arXiv:2502.19382v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The aim of this paper is to study the fluctuations of a general class of supercritical branching Markov processes with non-local branching mechanisms. We establish functional central limit theorems and show that the limiting behaviour falls into three regimes, determined by the size of the spectral gap associated with the first-moment semigroup of the branching process. The main novelty is to develop a unified functional fluctuation theory for spatial branching Markov processes with non-local reproduction, allowing a general finite-dimensional spectral structure for the first-moment semigroup, including non-simple leading eigenvalues and nilpotent Jordan-type components. In doing so, we extend the classical small, critical and large fluctuation trichotomy beyond the finite-type and local spatial settings, and obtain limiting processes that capture the covariance structure induced by non-local offspring displacement.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11445

Forecasting Future Behavior as a Learning Task

Authors:

Mosh Levy↗Yoav Goldberg↗Asa Cooper Stickland↗

arXiv:2606.11445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trust in an AI system is often anchored by explanations of how it works, which one then uses to forecast its behavior on new inputs. For large reasoning models (LRMs), this conventional route is particularly difficult to follow: explanation methods for single token generations do not naturally generalize to long trajectories, and the trajectories themselves are often not faithful when read as natural language. We propose an alternative that bypasses the explanation step: treat behavior forecasting as a learnable task and train Behavior Forecasters that operates on a single reasoning trajectory to make the same forecasts one would typically seek from an explanation. The forecaster's training data is obtained by querying the LRM with no human annotation, and its inference is done in a single forward pass. We instantiate this approach on two tasks: how likely the LRM is to repeat its answer on re-runs, and how removing parts of the input changes its answer. We evaluate this approach on both tasks across three diverse reasoning datasets and find that trained Behavior Forecasters are more accurate than GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus-4.6 reading the same trajectories as naive readers, at a small fraction of their inference cost. We find that fine-tuning the backbone end-to-end and initializing it from the target LRM are each necessary for strong performance. These results show that the reasoning trajectory carries information about the LRM's future behavior that goes beyond what naive reading conveys.

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24.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:1d6c6712711a019fa04546322f33f17f

Quantitative insights into the role of phages and plasmids in the persistence of nontuberculous mycobacteria in chloraminated drinking water

Authors:

Lee↗Langenfeld↗Potgieter↗Ferdous↗S. M↗Vasagiri↗Bastien↗G. E↗Duhaime↗Wigginton↗Raskin↗Hegarty↗…

Nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) are opportunistic pathogens that persist in chloraminated drinking water systems, yet the roles of phages and plasmids in their persistence remain largely unexplored. Using genome-resolved and quantitative metagenomics, we characterized NTM, phages, prophages, and plasmids in a chloraminated building plumbing system. Bacterial metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) and viral operational taxonomic units (vOTUs) were quantified at mean concentrations of 8.41 * 10^7 and 8.00 * 10^8 copies/L, respectively, including seven NTM MAGs at a mean total concentration of 4.01 * 10^5 copies/L. NTM concentrations were highest at the site with the lowest bacterial and viral diversity. Predicted NTM-infecting virus concentrations were inversely related to NTM concentrations across sites, suggesting complex phage-host dynamics that warrant direct experimental investigation. NTM, putative phages, prophages, and plasmids encoded functions related to disinfectant tolerance, stress response, metal resistance, and secretion. These findings identify phage interactions, prophages, and plasmids as overlooked genomic and ecological dimensions of NTM persistence in engineered water systems.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2510.04127

Projection and Quantisation: A Unifying View of Learning to Hash, from Random Projections to the RAG Era

Authors:

Sean Moran↗

Approximate nearest-neighbour search underpins large-scale retrieval and retrieval-augmented generation, yet its methods are studied in communities that seldom read one another. We argue that they form one field with three design choices. We develop the projection-quantisation-organisation lens: every method places its projections, places its quantisation thresholds, and organises the resulting codes for search. We test the lens with a reproducible measurement, released as the open BitBudget benchmark, and report three findings. First, the quantisation axis delivers the largest memory savings: a one-bit code with full-precision re-ranking matches uncompressed quality for six of seven embedders, the scanned code one thirty-second of the float's size. Second, the orderings the lens anticipates, including a learned-embedding regime where binary codes overtake an inverted-file product quantiser at a matched byte budget, recur as the embedding is enlarged. Third, given class labels, an eight-byte supervised code more than doubles the retrieval quality of the two-kilobyte task-agnostic float it replaces. We also recast the semantic identifiers of generative retrieval as quantisation codes. The main contribution is a single, tested account of compact-code search, from random projections to the retrieval-augmented era.

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