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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TMR-GGNN: Credit Card Fraud Detection based on Time-Aware Multi-Relational Guided Graph Neural Network

arXiv:2606.18444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, credit card fraud detection has faced significant challenges due to highly imbalanced data, evolving fraud patterns, and complex relational structures among transaction entities. To address these issues, this research proposes a novel framework called Timeaware Multi Relational Guided Graph Neural Network (TMR GGNN). Particularly, the proposed TMR GGNN extends the encoder decoder Graph Neural Network GNN architecture by modeling heterogeneous interactions across customers, merchants, devices, and IPs over temporal windows. Subsequently, the proposed TMR GGNN approach constructs a dynamic, multi relational graph and incorporates a time aware relational attention mechanism within the encoder to adaptively weigh the transaction relevance based on temporal proximity and semantic context. Consequently, the decoder employs a contrastive learning module to distinguish between real and synthesized transaction patterns, while improving the models generalization of rare fraud cases. Additionally, to effectively manage severe class imbalances and emphasize discriminative learning, a composite loss function combining Information Noise Contrastive Estimation (InfoNCE) based contrastive loss with Focal Loss is introduced. This integration assists in improving fraud identification while mitigating false negatives.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

ScholarSum: Student-Teacher Abstractive Summarization via Knowledge Graph Reasoning and Reflective Refinement

Abstractive summarization plays a crucial role in enabling efficient understanding of scientific literature, yet it inherently demands both linguistic fluency and factual faithfulness. Existing approaches often fail to reconcile these two requirements. Extractive methods rely on rigid sentence splicing that disrupts macro-level logical coherence, while large language model (LLM)-based generative approaches, despite mastering linguistic fluency, exhibit limited factual consistency. In this work, we propose ScholarSum, a hierarchical reflective graph-based framework that emulates a student-teacher writing process for fluent and faithful scientific summarization. ScholarSum first organizes the document into a hierarchical knowledge graph by segmenting it into semantically coherent units, whose multi-layered community structure captures global logic and macro-level themes. Guided by this global structure, the student generates an initial draft, which is subsequently refined through fine-grained evidence retrieval. To ensure factual consistency, a teacher-like reviewer then iteratively examines the draft, identifies unsupported content, and prompts targeted re-retrieval and rewriting until the summary meets rigorous quality standards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ScholarSum significantly outperforms previous baselines in terms of both completeness and faithfulness. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/ScholarSum.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Cumulant expansion approach to the decay dynamics of interacting Mössbauer nuclei after strong impulsive excitation

arXiv:2510.00970v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent progress in accelerator-based x-ray sources brings higher excitation of ensembles of Mössbauer nuclei closer to experimental feasibility. Yet, a theoretical modeling of the decay dynamics of the interacting nuclear ensemble after the impulsive excitation is still an open challenge. Here, we derive a set of nonlinear equations which is capable of efficiently modeling large nuclear ensembles for arbitrary degrees of excitation. As key signature for higher excitation, we identify a non-linear time-evolution of the nuclear dipole phase, which can be tuned via the scattering geometry, and interferometrically be measured. Furthermore, we identify interesting finite-size effects in the nuclear dynamics of small ensembles. Our results provide important guidance for future experiments aiming at the non-linear excitation of nuclei. We further envision the exploration of finite size-effects in Mössbauer spectroscopy with highest spatial resolution, i.e., small sample volumes.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Stop When Further Reasoning Won't Help: Attention-State Adaptive Generation in Reasoning Models

By incorporating test-time compute scaling, large reasoning models (LRMs) can solve complex problems through explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning processes. However, they often suffer from overthinking, resulting in redundant token outputs and degraded accuracy. Current methods to mitigate this issue remain limited: training-based approaches require substantial computational resources, while training-free methods rely on well-crafted prompts or unreliable confidence signals. In this work, we investigate early stopping from the perspective of attention distributions and propose a simple method, ASAG, which infers the model's reasoning state and adaptively adjusts the generation strategy. The proposed framework is training-free and plug-and-play, enabling seamless integration into existing LRMs. Extensive experiments on nine benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements across mainstream LRMs with varying parameter scales, including the DeepSeek-R1-Distill and Qwen3 series. Specifically, ASAG improves average accuracy by 3.2% while reducing the number of generated tokens by nearly 40% across all reasoning tasks on Qwen3-8B.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Moving Beyond Diffusion: Hierarchy-to-Hierarchy Autoregression for fMRI-to-Image Reconstruction

Reconstructing visual stimuli from fMRI signals is a central challenge bridging machine learning and neuroscience. Recent diffusion-based methods typically map fMRI activity to a single neural embedding, using it as static guidance throughout the entire generation process. However, this fixed guidance collapses hierarchical neural information and is misaligned with the stage-dependent demands of image reconstruction. In response, we propose MindHier, a coarse-to-fine fMRI-to-image reconstruction framework built on scale-wise autoregressive modeling. MindHier introduces three components: a Hierarchical fMRI Encoder to extract multi-level neural embeddings, a Hierarchy-to-Hierarchy Alignment scheme to enforce layer-wise correspondence with CLIP features, and a Scale-Aware Coarse-to-Fine Neural Guidance strategy to inject these embeddings into autoregression at matching scales. These designs make MindHier an efficient and cognitively aligned alternative to diffusion-based methods by enabling a hierarchical reconstruction process that synthesizes global semantics before refining local details, akin to human visual perception. Extensive experiments on the NSD dataset show that MindHier achieves superior semantic fidelity, 4.67$\times$ faster inference, and more deterministic results than the diffusion-based baselines.

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

MuVAP: Multimodal Multiparty Voice Activity Projection for Turn-taking Prediction in the Wild

arXiv:2606.16731v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current multiparty turn-taking models often rely on complex microphone arrays or multi-camera setups, limiting their applicability in human-robot interaction scenarios. We introduce MuVAP, a causal multimodal framework that extends Voice Activity Projection by grounding acoustic predictions in face tracks, enabling speaker-aware turn-taking predictions from a monaural audio stream and a single camera view. To address the combinatorial complexity of modeling multiple speakers, we propose Role-Relative Projection, which maps any N-speaker interaction onto a fixed current versus next floor-holder state. Because existing audiovisual datasets contain disruptive editing cuts that break causal tracking, we introduce the Audio-Visual Conversation Corpus, a 31-hour dataset of unedited, single-camera multiparty conversations. Evaluations demonstrate that MuVAP outperforms strong baselines on Shift-Hold and next-speaker prediction tasks across two- and three-speaker settings.

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

Sovereign Assurance Boundary: Certificate-Bound Admission for Agentic Infrastructure

arXiv:2606.11632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic infrastructure introduces a critical control-plane authorization problem: non-deterministic reasoning systems can propose high-stakes mutations to production resources, yet existing security mechanisms – such as identity and access management (IAM), policy engines, consensus protocols, and audit logs – either enforce static, context-unaware permissions or merely record actions post-execution. This paper introduces the Sovereign Assurance Boundary (SAB), a certificate-bound runtime admission layer for autonomous execution authority. SAB intercepts agent proposals at an assurance airlock, compiles them into typed execution contracts $C$, and binds these contracts to cryptographic evidence digests $H(E)$ and policy versions. The contracts are then routed through consequence-aware certification paths. Upon successful admission, the system emits a signed Sovereign Assurance Certificate ($\Omega$) that is strictly scoped to a specific execution identity, revocation epoch, and validity window. Finally, a sovereign execution broker verifies $\Omega$ and performs fresh pre-execution revocation and drift checks before invoking infrastructure APIs. We detail the airlock-broker architecture, formalize its admission and revocation invariants, and report preliminary feasibility measurements from a Go prototype evaluated over 2,500 admission attempts. Ultimately, this broker-enforced model prevents autonomous reasoning from directly mutating state, transforming delegated execution authority into a cryptographically verifiable, evidence-bound, revocable, and replayable runtime artifact.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Overcoming Rank Collapse in Feedback Alignment

arXiv:2606.11123v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Backpropagation (BP) is widely viewed as biologically implausible, in part because it requires feedback weights to be the transpose of forward weights for error propagation. Interestingly, when training a network with fixed random feedback weights to circumvent this issue, learning aligns the forward weights with the feedback weights, leading the backpropagated error signal to become an approximation of the standard gradient used by BP. This process, called Feedback Alignment (FA), occurs in MLPs and very shallow CNNs but does not scale well to deeper architectures. In this work, we first investigated differences between BP and FA models, trained on CIFAR10, specifically focusing on the effective rank of the signal. We found that the FA error has a considerably lower rank and hence is constrained to a lower-dimensional subspace compared to BP, limiting exploration of the parameter space. Motivated by this observation, we evaluated two mechanisms for increasing the effective dimensionality of FA: Muon, an optimiser that orthogonalises weight updates; and hidden activity normalisation, which promotes activation orthogonality. Across larger architectures and benchmarks, we find that these methods consistently improve over FA baselines, for example, on CIFAR100 with a Resnet-18, accuracy increases by 9 percentage points. Our results identify low-dimensional gradient dynamics as a key obstacle to scaling FA and suggest that inducing higher-dimensional update geometry is a promising route toward scaling alternatives to backpropagation.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Toward the Whole Picture: Accumulative Fingerprint Mapping and Reconstruction for Small-Area Mobile Sensors

Small-area fingerprint sensing on mobile devices creates a fundamental mismatch between acquisition and recognition: each touch captures only a tiny, pose-varying local patch, while reliable biometric matching ultimately requires a stable and sufficiently complete fingerprint representation. Existing pipelines largely cope with this mismatch by treating repeated touches as independent partial templates, which leads to repeated registration, repeated matching, and no guarantee of adequate global coverage. In this paper, we advocate a different formulation, namely accumulative fingerprint mapping and reconstruction for small-area mobile sensing. Rather than matching every partial patch separately, the proposed perspective converts a sequence of local observations into a unified fingerprint state that is progressively refined as new touches arrive and can be matched only once after consolidation. As a concrete baseline, we present a classical pipeline that performs patch-wise structural feature extraction, feature-level registration and fusion, fingerprint map construction, and phase-based ridge reconstruction. More importantly, we position this baseline within a broader mobile fingerprint framework that integrates structured token learning, two-stage pose reasoning, and diffusion-based generative reconstruction. This viewpoint reframes mobile fingerprint recognition from multi-capture multi-match processing to accumulative map building, state refinement, and one-shot matching, offering a principled route toward efficient, pose-robust, and deployment-friendly biometrics for small-area mobile platforms. The baseline implementation has been publicly released at https://github.com/XiongjunGuan/FpReconstruction.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

DDI_single: Single-Sequence-Based Protein Domain Assembly

Authors:

Domains are the basic units of protein structure and function. Appropriate inter-domain organization is critical to enable cooperative execution of multiple related functions. It is thus a crucial step to determine the full-length structure of multi-domain proteins for the purpose of elucidating their functions and designing new drugs to regulate these functions. Existing structure prediction algorithms are generally better at solving the internal conformation of domains, rather than modeling the relative positions between domains. To address the challenge of accurately determining multi-domain protein conformations, we develop a single-sequence-based domain assembly algorithm called DDI_single. DDI_single directly extracts features from the amino acid sequence using the protein language model ESM-1b, and accurately predicts the interactions between residue pairs of structural domains through a novel gated cross-attention module, thus achieving the correct assembly of structural domains. With the knowledge of domain definition, DDI_single achieves more than 20% higher accuracy in the task of predicting the relative distances of residue pairs between domains than that of the single-sequence-based structure prediction algorithm trRosettaX_single. When assembling domains with known spatial conformations, DDI_single correctly assembles 74.4% of the samples in the test set (TM-score>0.5). When assembling domains with unknown spatial conformations, in cases where the internal spatial conformations of domains are correctly modeled, DDI_single correctly assembles 73.9% of the samples.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Creating and Evaluating K-12 GenAI Assessment Graders Through Context Engineering

arXiv:2606.12422v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The integration of large language models (LLMs) into educational assessment represents a transformative shift in classroom grading practices. While automated scoring systems and machine learning techniques have existed for decades, generative AI (GenAI) now enables educators to implement standards-based grading (SBG) with unprecedented efficiency and scale. This paper examines the theoretical foundations and evaluates an LLM grader that uses commercially available foundation models with context and prompt engineering to score student work against a rubric. Drawing on an empirical interrater agreement study using Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) data, we observed the Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) and Proportional Reduction in Mean-Squared Error (PRMSE) across mathematics, science, and ELA, using Claude Sonnet 4, Haiku 4.5, GPT-5, and GPT-5 Mini. The results demonstrate that LLM graders, especially when based on foundational models with more parameters, achieve substantial agreement with human raters in mathematics and science assessments, while the performances vary in ELA, suggesting generic foundation models can be effective at scoring in given contexts. Additional analysis of teacher and student feedback reveals strong acceptance of AI-generated narrative feedback but skepticism toward numerical scores, suggesting that LLMs function most effectively as formative tools rather than summative evaluators. Our findings indicate that thoughtfully designed hybrid models that combine AI efficiency with teacher judgment can reduce workload, enhance feedback quality, and support equitable assessment practices without displacing professional expertise.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SAGE: Scalable AI Governance & Evaluation

arXiv:2602.07840v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating relevance in large-scale search systems is fundamentally constrained by the governance gap between nuanced, resource-constrained human oversight and the high-throughput requirements of production systems. While traditional approaches rely on engagement proxies or sparse manual review, these methods often fail to capture the full scope of high-impact relevance failures. We present SAGE (Scalable AI Governance \& Evaluation), a framework that operationalizes high-quality human product judgment as a scalable evaluation signal. At the core of SAGE is a bidirectional calibration loop where natural-language Policy, curated Precedent, and an LLM Surrogate Judge co-evolve. SAGE systematically resolves semantic ambiguities and misalignments, transforming subjective relevance judgment into an executable, multi-dimensional rubric with near human-level agreement. To bridge the gap between frontier model reasoning and industrial-scale inference, we apply teacher-student distillation to transfer high-fidelity judgments into compact student surrogates at 92$\times$ lower cost. Deployed within LinkedIn Search ecosystems, SAGE guided model iteration through simulation-driven development, distilling policy-aligned models for online serving and enabling rapid offline evaluation. In production, it powered policy oversight that measured ramped model variants and detected regressions invisible to engagement metrics. Collectively, these drove a 0.25\% lift in LinkedIn daily active users.

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

Pix2Pix-Hybrid: Structure-Guided Conditional Synthesis of Hajj Crowd Images with Multi-Channel Conditioning and Weak Attribute Supervision

Developing accurate crowd-counting models for Hajj pilgrimage scenes remains challenging because domain-specific annotated images are scarce and data collection during large gatherings raises privacy concerns. To address these limitations, this paper proposes Pix2Pix-Hybrid (P2P-H), a hybrid conditional GAN for structure-guided Hajj crowd-image synthesis and data augmentation. P2P-H builds on Pix2Pix and employs a U-Net generator conditioned on eight input channels that jointly encode structural cues (edges and grayscale) and contextual attributes (crowd density and time of day). To capture detailed textures in dense scenes, the framework integrates two multi-scale PatchGAN discriminators operating at different resolutions. The training procedure combines adversarial, perceptual, and feature-matching objectives with adaptive data augmentation and stabilization strategies. The model was trained on 993 real Hajj frames collected from 60 publicly available video sources, with conditioning attributes derived automatically to reduce manual labeling effort. Using this framework, we constructed CrowdH, a synthetic dataset of 10,000 high-resolution Hajj crowd images. Experimental results show that P2P-H improves structure-preserving conditional synthesis quality compared with Pix2Pix and StyleGAN2-ADA baselines and shows favorable transfer to other crowd datasets. To assess downstream utility, we further constructed CrowdH-Mix-469, an annotated mixed real-synthetic dataset comprising 384 real Hajj images and 85 selected synthetic images,and evaluated five crowd-counting models under real-only and real-plus-synthetic training. The selected synthetic data reduced MAE across all five models, with the strongest gain observed for CSRNet.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

ProGRank: Probe-Gradient Reranking to Defend Dense-Retriever RAG from Corpus Poisoning

arXiv:2603.22934v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves large language model applications by grounding generation in retrieved evidence, but also introduces corpus poisoning as a new attack surface. In this setting, an adversary injects or edits passages so that they enter the Top-$K$ results for target queries and influence downstream generation. Existing defences often rely on content filtering, auxiliary models, or generator-side reasoning, which complicates deployment. We propose ProGRank, a post hoc, training-free retriever-side defence for dense-retriever RAG. ProGRank stress-tests each query–passage pair under mild randomized perturbations, extracts probe gradients from a small fixed parameter subset, and derives two instability signals: representational consistency and dispersion risk. It then combines these signals with a score gate for reranking. ProGRank preserves the original passage content, requires no retraining, and supports a surrogate-based variant when the deployed retriever is unavailable. Experiments across datasets, retrievers, attacks, and retrieval-stage and end-to-end settings show that ProGRank improves robustness and maintains a favorable robustness–utility trade-off, including under adaptive evasive attacks.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Magneto-Optical Trapping of a Metal Hydride Molecule

arXiv:2512.22350v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We demonstrate a three-dimensional magneto-optical trap (MOT) of a metal hydride molecule, CaH. We are able to scatter $\sim$$10^{4}$ photons with vibrational loss covered up to vibrational quantum number $\nu=2$. This allows us to laser slow the molecular beam near zero velocity with a "white-light" technique and subsequently load it into a radio-frequency MOT. The MOT contains $230(40)$ molecules, limited by beam source characteristics and predissociative loss of CaH. The temperature of the MOT is below one millikelvin. The predissociative loss mechanism could, in turn, facilitate controlled dissociation of the molecule, offering a possible route to optical trapping of hydrogen atoms for precision spectroscopy.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Developing and Evaluating an Online Educational Program for Falls Prevention Care in Community Optometric Primary Care Settings: A Pilot Study

Introduction Globally, falls are the leading cause of injury hospitalisation, with vision being a significant falls risk factor. Community optometrists, as primary eye care professionals, are well positioned to contribute to falls prevention care. However, scant studies have evaluated if education could enable optometrists to incorporate falls prevention care into practice. This two-phase pilot study aimed to design and develop an online education program for community optometrists to deliver primary falls prevention care and to evaluate optometrists reaction to, and learning from, the education. Methods In phase one, an education program was designed by optometrists and falls experts and published online. In phase two, community optometrists were recruited through convenience sampling to undertake the education. Guided by the New World Kirkpatrick model(R) of training evaluation, reaction and learning were evaluated using pre/post surveys. Quantitative data were analysed using Wilcoxon sign-rank tests and McNemar Exact Tests and qualitative responses using inductive content analysis. Results Participants (n=13) reported high levels of satisfaction and engagement with the online education and unanimously endorsed its relevance to clinical practice. Participants demonstrated significantly improved knowledge and awareness of falls prevention post-education, compared to pre-education and were significantly more confident to enact falls prevention care. Perceived enablers to providing falls prevention care included having access to practical resources and ongoing education. Time constraints during consultation and cost to patients for further care if subsequent referrals were made were identified as possible barriers to providing falls prevention care. Conclusion Online education improved community optometrists knowledge and confidence to provide falls prevention care. Further research that evaluates the effectiveness of continuing education for optometrists to enact falls prevention care into practice is required.

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

KFTD: Koopman-Fourier Time-Differentiable Network for Continuous Ocean Spatiotemporal Forecasting

arXiv:2606.17070v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate oceanic forecasting is critical for climate monitoring and disaster early warning. However, ocean spatiotemporal forecasting encounters the double challenges of modeling complex dynamical systems and ensuring computational efficiency. We present Koopman Fourier Time-Differentiable (KFTD) Network, a time continuous twostage paradigm that decouples interpolation from prediction to achieve efficient and scalable spatiotemporal modeling. We map complex nonlinear dynamics into the Koopman linear space and exploit Fourier analysis to enable continuous time interpolation at arbitrary sub-steps. A lightweight residual network consumes the high fidelity intermediate states to yield the final forecast. Unlike diffusion models, KFTD eliminates multi step noise sampling and directly evolves the system in continuous time, yielding a 4 computational speedup. We further introduce a DPP Loss that supports arbitrary PDE constraints in an endtoend manner, breaking the physical consistency bottleneck of pure data-driven approaches. Empirical results on four ocean datasets confirm that our continuous time framework reduces MSE by an average of 5.6% (up to 12.7% for SST) and improves efficiency over MCVD by 76.25%.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Independent Chiral Control in Theory-Space Models:A Rank-Preserving Framework and Its Application to Neutrino Mass Generation

Authors:

arXiv:2409.09033v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a general framework of rank-preserving, element-wise matrix transformations for engineering fermion mass hierarchies in theory-space constructions. We prove that preservation of massless modes requires the transformation function to be separable, $g_f(i,j)=g^{(L)}_f(i)g^{(R)}_f(j)$, which in turn enables independent control of left- and right-chiral zero-mode profiles directly at the level of the theory-space mass matrix. This formalism unifies and extends the clockwork mechanism, permits controlled deformation of Kaluza–Klein spectra, and enhances hierarchy generation in GIM-like fine-cancellation scenarios. As a concrete application, we show that in theory-space models for neutrino masses, suitable transformations allow sub-eV light neutrinos to arise from TeV-scale new physics with only $\mathcal{O}(40)$ additional fermionic sites, while remaining consistent with charged-lepton flavor-violation bounds. In contrast, the corresponding untransformed models asymptote at the MeV scale and cannot access the phenomenologically required regime without extreme field multiplicities or hierarchical parameters.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Is Spurious Correlation Removal Always Learnable?

arXiv:2606.12930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Invariant learning can fail even when the invariant structure is statistically identifiable. We show a conditional computational barrier: under a black-box samplable supervised sparse recovery primitive motivated by average-case sparse-recovery reductions, there exist samplable multi-environment instances with a one-dimensional predictive invariant subspace ($k=1$) that are learnable with polynomial samples by exhaustive search, while any polynomial-time constant-accuracy recovery algorithm would contradict the primitive. We further quantify environment diversity by a separation parameter $\gamma$, which controls identifiability and the curvature of invariance objectives. Under sufficient diversity and local Gaussian regularity, the minimax risk is $\mathbb{E}[\dist(\hat{V},V_{\mathrm{inv}})^2]=\Theta(k(d-k)/(n|\mathcal{E}|))$, and under label-induced shifts a phase transition occurs at $n^*\propto k(d-k)/(|\mathcal{E}|\gamma^2)$ with refined estimation error scaling proportional to $1/\gamma^2$. Synthetic and real datasets illustrate the predicted gaps and transitions and motivate simple diversity diagnostics.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Semantic Robustness Certification for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) are now widely used in downstream tasks. However, real-world applications often expose VLMs to distribution shifts induced by semantic variation (e.g., shape, size, and style). Robustness certification determines if a model's prediction changes when transformations are applied to its input. While most certification frameworks study geometric or pixel-level transformations over inputs, this work proposes a novel framework that enables certifying VLM robustness under semantic-level transformations. Leveraging the open-vocabulary capability of VLMs, we use text prompts as semantic proxies to construct transformations parameterized by an extent that controls the degree of semantic variation. By characterizing the VLM decision boundary in closed form, our framework quantitatively certifies extent intervals for which the predicted class remains unchanged under the semantic transformation. Our framework is the first to certify VLM robustness under semantic-level variations without requiring additional data for each variation, making it practical to apply. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show that our framework enables certifying robustness under diverse semantic variations across scenarios.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Fuzzy-Geometric Branch-Point Modeling for Structure-Aware Augmentation of Handwritten Chinese Characters

Data scarcity and structural distortion significantly limit handwriting recognition in high-security authentication. Existing augmentation methods often cause topological and morphological damage, particularly when processing complex Chinese characters where stroke intersections, ligatures, and sharp turns render traditional branch-point detection unreliable. To address this, this paper proposes a fuzzy geometry-driven structure-aware (FGSA) augmentation framework. We model branch points as fuzzy sets within the skeleton space, constructing a continuous branch-point membership field by integrating topological neighborhood evidence with direction field divergence. This membership field is adaptively optimized via an unsupervised surrogate objective, enabling robust stroke decoupling without manual annotation. Finally, kinematically-aligned samples are synthesized through parameterized cubic Bézier reconstruction and multi-strategy perturbations, ensuring a balance between structural fidelity and sample diversity. Moreover, we establish LZUSig, a large-scale, highly challenging dataset specifically dedicated to fine-grained structural degradation in Chinese handwritten signatures. Extensive experiments on CASIA-HWDB1.1, ChiSig, and LZUSig demonstrate that FGSA significantly reduces the word-level error rate ($\Delta$WER), achieving optimal recognition gains over the compared baselines. More importantly, it strikes a robust trade-off among task gain, structural fidelity, and discriminative feature preservation, offering a highly controllable solution for handwriting augmentation.

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

Massive Open-Vocabulary Keyword Spotting

Automatic speech recognition systems have been shown to under-perform when it comes to transcribing words rarely seen in the training data, namely specialized terminology. Open-vocabulary keyword spotting, combined with contextual biasing, has been shown to mitigate this issue. However, existing systems can only handle glossaries of a few hundred terms without becoming an infeasible bottleneck. We propose a system that stores features with a memory footprint up to 128 times smaller than a comparable baseline and allows users to process massive databases while remaining open-vocabulary. Without fine-tuning the speech recognition model, our system achieves a comparable entity recall as uncompressed solutions, even in languages not seen during training.

23.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-08

Post-adjuvant chemotherapy in ctDNA-positive patients with resected colorectal cancer: a randomized phase 3 trial

Authors:

Tumor-informed circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) enables detection of molecular residual disease (MRD) after curative resection of colorectal cancer (CRC), but whether early intervention improves outcomes remains uncertain. ALTAIR was a randomized, double-blind, phase 3 trial embedded in the CIRCULATE-Japan platform evaluating a post-adjuvant ctDNA surveillance strategy with treatment initiation upon molecular recurrence. Patients with resected stage 0–IV CRC who became ctDNA positive after completion of standard-of-care therapy and had no radiological evidence of disease were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive trifluridine/tipiracil (FTD/TPI) or placebo for 6 months. The primary endpoint was investigator-assessed disease-free survival (DFS). Between July 2020 and June 2023, 243 patients were randomized to FTD/TPI (n = 122) or placebo (n = 121). Median DFS was 9.30 months with FTD/TPI and 5.55 months with placebo (hazard ratio = 0.79, 95% confidence interval: 0.60–1.05, P = 0.107), and the primary endpoint was not met. FTD/TPI increased grade 3 or higher hematologic adverse events (73.0% versus 3.3%) without new safety signals. These findings indicate that post-adjuvant intervention with FTD/TPI did not significantly improve DFS in ctDNA-positive patients without radiological disease. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT04457297 . In the randomized, double-blind phase 3 ALTAIR trial, patients with resected colorectal cancer who became positive for circulating tumor DNA during post-adjuvant surveillance received trifluridine/tipiracil hydrochloride therapy, which did not significantly prolong disease-free survival compared with placebo.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Learning the Koopman Operator using Attention Free Transformers

arXiv:2606.23957v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning Koopman operators with autoencoders enables linear prediction in a latent space, but long-horizon rollouts often drift off the learned manifold, leading to phase and amplitude errors on systems with switching, continuous spectra, or strong transients. We introduce two complementary components that make Koopman predictors more robust. First, we add an attention-free latent memory (AFT) block that aggregates a short window of past latents to produce a corrected latent before each Koopman update. Unlike multi-head attention, AFT operates in linear time and adds only $\approx$30k parameters ($3d^2 + T^2$, fewer than matched multi-head attention), yet captures the local temporal context needed to suppress error divergence. Second, we propose dynamic re-encoding: lightweight, online change-point triggers (EWMA, CUSUM, and sequential two-sample tests) that detect latent drift and project predictions back onto the autoencoder manifold. Across three benchmark systems – Duffing oscillator, Repressilator, IRMA – our model consistently reduces error accumulation compared to a Koopman autoencoder and matched-capacity multi-head attention. We also compare against GRU and Transformer autoencoders, evaluated both from initial conditions and with a 50-step context, and find that Koopman+AFT (with optional re-encoding) attains markedly lower long-horizon error while maintaining lower inference latency. We report improvements over horizons up to 1000 steps, together with ablations over trigger policies. The result is a fast, compact predictor that stays on the learned manifold over long horizons.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Immunological mechanisms of mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases

Authors:

Nucleoside-modified mRNA–lipid-nanoparticle (mRNA–LNP) vaccines confer a high level of protection against severe COVID-19 and, since their first authorization for human use in 2020, have saved millions of lives. The efficacy of this vaccine platform relies on the induction of powerful and coordinated innate and adaptive immune responses. A deep understanding of the mechanisms of action by which mRNA–LNP vaccines drive protective immunity is crucial for advancing the development of next-generation mRNA vaccines with improved immunogenicity and tolerability. A flurry of recent studies has shed light on aspects of this vaccine modality’s modus operandi. Nonetheless, key gaps in knowledge remain, including understanding how LNPs are sensed by the immune system and exert their adjuvant activity, identifying the specific signals and cellular pathways critical for eliciting protective immune responses and determining whether it is feasible to uncouple vaccine immunogenicity and reactogenicity. Here we review the known and unknown features of the immunological mechanisms of mRNA–LNP vaccines for infectious diseases. Furthermore, we discuss how the components of this vaccine platform can be modified to fine-tune immune responses against challenging pathogens for which effective vaccines do not exist or need improvement. A Review of the immunological mechanisms of mRNA–lipid-nanoparticle vaccines for infectious diseases discusses how the components of this vaccine platform can be modified to fine-tune immune responses against challenging pathogens.