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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-23

Comparisons of core component delivery in cardiac rehabilitation programs by country income classification and decade based on the 2025 Global Audit Update: A survey study

Authors:
Gabriela Lima de Melo Ghisi↗

by Gabriela Lima de Melo Ghisi, Rachael P. Carson, Karam Turk Adawi, Rongjing Ding, Warner M. Mampuya, Mariya P. Jiandani, Jimena Martinez, Monserrat Cruz Rivero, Claudia V. Anchique, Dinah L. van Schalkwijk, Jonathan Gallagher, Buket Akinci, Dion Candelaria, Jirapa Champaiboon, Daniel F. Quesada-Chaves, Tone M. Norekvål, Iwona Szadkowska, Borut Jug, Evangelia Kouidi, Marta Supervia, Won-Seok Kim, Chamila Mettananda, Lilian Mbau, Gulsim T. Aimakova, Sherry L. Grace, on behalf of the ICCPR Global Cardiac Rehabilitation Audit Update Investigators Background Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains a leading global health burden. Cardiac rehabilitation (CR) is essential to reducing morbidity and improving patient outcomes. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, CR delivery worldwide has evolved, yet these changes have not been systematically charactemkjrized. The objective of this study was to characterize globally: (1) the delivery of core CR components, including risk factors assessed, patient education practices, and program resources; (2) differences in these elements by country income classification and relative to the initial 2016 Global CR Audit. Methods and findings A cross-sectional Audit update was conducted. Program-level data were collected from May 1st to September 1st 2025 using a REDCap survey adapted from previous Audits. Eligible respondents were leads of phase II/post-discharge CR programs providing at least an initial assessment, structured aerobic exercise, and ≥1 additional core component. ICCPR associations and local leaders supported program identification. Main outcomes were core components delivered (10 assessed), risk factors assessed (14 assessed), patient education dose (hours/patient/program), and program resources (17 assessed). Generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) tested differences by income classification and (when applicable) changes since 2016. Of 7,025 programs identified globally, 1,505 (62% median country response rate) initiated a survey from 90/113 (80%) countries with CR. The median number of core components offered was 8/program (p25, p75 = 6, 10), with upper-middle income countries offering significantly more components overall (median = 9), and also high-income countries offering more than low-income countries (8 versus 6, p 

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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

A geometric and deep learning reproducible pipeline for monitoring floating anthropogenic debris in urban rivers using in situ cameras

Authors:
Gauthier Grimmer↗Romain Wenger↗Cl\'ement Flint↗Germain Forestier↗Gilles Rixhon↗Valentin Chardon↗

The proliferation of floating anthropogenic debris in rivers has emerged as a pressing environmental concern, exerting a detrimental influence on biodiversity, water quality, and human activities such as navigation and recreation. The present study proposes a novel methodological framework for the monitoring the aforementioned waste, utilising fixed, in-situ cameras. This study provides two key contributions: (i) the continuous quantification and monitoring of floating debris using deep learning and (ii) the identification of the most suitable deep learning model in terms of accuracy and inference speed under complex environmental conditions. These models are tested in a range of environmental conditions and learning configurations, including experiments on biases related to data leakage. Furthermore, a geometric model is implemented to estimate the actual size of detected objects from a 2D image. This model takes advantage of both intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics of the camera. The findings of this study underscore the significance of the dataset constitution protocol, particularly with respect to the integration of negative images and the consideration of temporal leakage. In conclusion, the feasibility of metric object estimation using projective geometry coupled with regression corrections is demonstrated. This approach paves the way for the development of robust, low-cost, automated monitoring systems for urban aquatic environments.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Learning Optimization Proxies for Sequential Contextual Stochastic Programs: An Order Fulfillment Application

Authors:
Tinghan Ye↗Shuaicheng Tong↗Changkun Guan↗Beste Basciftci↗Pascal Van Hentenryck↗

arXiv:2606.25362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequential contextual stochastic programs model real-time decision systems in which each time epoch commits to an action under uncertainty whose consequences propagate into future decisions. In many practical contexts, these programs require obtaining solutions rapidly as new information becomes available. These problems can be represented through scenario approximations to be solved by off-the-shelf optimization solvers, which achieve high decision quality offline but typically run in seconds to minutes per instance, falling short of the sub-second responses that peak periods of planning require. This paper develops a learning-based optimization proxy: a scenario-embedded neural network trained offline on solver-generated labels, paired online with a decoder that enforces feasibility, replacing the per-epoch solve with a single forward pass. The framework is specialized to omnichannel order fulfillment, where each arriving order requires a sub-second assignment of products to distribution centers and carrier services under stochastic delivery times and future demand. A two-stage contextual stochastic program is introduced to formulate this problem, and its contextual sample average approximation (C-SAA) supplies the offline labels, while a composite training loss combines label imitation, a constraint-violation penalty, and self-supervised cost alignment. In a calibrated simulator built from JD.com transactional records, a detailed computational study is provided. The proxy reduces decision latency by roughly 2800x relative to the online finite-sample C-SAA reference and improves over it by 3.3% in realized fulfillment cost. Relative to established fulfillment policies, the proxy lowers total realized cost by at least 10.7% and roughly halves the late-delivery rate.

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

Multiagent Protocols with Aggregated Confidence Signals

Authors:
Ali Elahi↗Barbara Di Eugenio↗

arXiv:2606.13591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Confidence is used for reliability, oversight, and a range of downstream decision tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP), yet no existing method produces or evaluates a confidence for the output of a multiagent system. Prior work uses confidence within multiagent debate (MAD) to weight messages, trigger debate, or calibrate individual agents, but it never aggregates these into a single confidence for the system itself. We introduce three protocols that produce a final answer along with a single aggregated confidence by first transforming raw confidence signals to make them comparable across models, then combining them via soft voting or a probability fusion we call Bayesian fusion. This aggregated confidence is substantially more discriminative (AUARC) than that of the best single agent or the standard debate baselines, while correctness (F1-score) stays stable and recovers the losses MAD incurs on more ambiguous tasks. Analyzing two estimators, sequence probability and self-report, alongside parametric and non-parametric calibrators, we find that calibration improves F1 for both estimators while AUARC is less reliant on it. We evaluate six homogeneous and heterogeneous debating pairs per benchmark, across five benchmarks and four task types, spanning a range of model capabilities and sizes.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Measurement incompatibility and quantum steering via linear programming

Authors:
Lucas E. A. Porto↗S\'ebastien Designolle↗Sebastian Pokutta↗Marco T\'ulio Quintino↗

arXiv:2506.03045v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The problem of deciding whether a set of quantum measurements is jointly measurable is known to be equivalent to determining whether a quantum assemblage is unsteerable. This problem can be formulated as a semidefinite program (SDP). However, the number of variables and constraints in such a formulation grows exponentially with the number of measurements, rendering it intractable for large measurement sets. In this work, we circumvent this problem by transforming the SDP into a hierarchy of linear programs that compute upper and lower bounds on the incompatibility robustness with a complexity that grows polynomially in the number of measurements. The hierarchy is guaranteed to converge and it can be applied to arbitrary measurements – including non-projective POVMs (Positive Operator-Valued Measures) – in arbitrary dimensions. While convergence becomes impractical in high dimensions, in the case of qubits our method reliably provides accurate upper and lower bounds for the incompatibility robustness of sets with several hundred measurements in a short time using a standard laptop. We also apply our methods to qutrits, obtaining non-trivial upper and lower bounds in scenarios that are otherwise intractable using the standard SDP approach, although such bounds are significantly looser than the ones obtained in the qubit case. Finally, we show how our methods can be used to construct local hidden state models for states (i.e., to prove that a state cannot lead to steering under any possible local measurements), or conversely, to certify that a given state exhibits steering; for two-qubit quantum states, our approach is comparable to, and in some cases outperforms, the current best methods.

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

Beyond Monolingual Deep Research: Evaluating Agents and Retrievers with Cross-Lingual BrowseComp-Plus

Authors:
Yuheng Lu↗Qingcheng Zeng↗Heli Qi↗Puxuan Yu↗Fuheng Zhao↗Rui Yang↗Hitomi Yanaka↗Naoto Yokoya↗Weihao Xuan↗

Deep research agents are increasingly evaluated on their ability to search for evidence, reason over retrieved sources, and produce grounded answers. Existing browsing benchmarks, however, largely assume that the user's query and the supporting evidence are written in the same language, leaving open whether agentic search systems can operate when relevant evidence appears in another language. We introduce XBCP (Cross-lingual BrowseComp-Plus), a controlled benchmark that preserves the English question-and-answer space of BrowseComp-Plus but varies the languages of the supporting documents. XBCP instantiates two complementary settings: in the cross-lingual setting, each query is paired with evidence in a single assigned language. In the multilingual setting, the full evidence corpus is distributed equally and randomly across 12 languages spanning high-resource and low-resource regimes. We evaluate four deep research agents using sparse and dense multilingual retrievers, measuring answer accuracy, evidence recall, search behavior, calibration, citation fidelity, and oracle retrieval. Results reveal substantial degradation when evidence is translated. Even strong, dense retrievers lose evidence recall, and agents become less calibrated and cite evidence less reliably. Notably, accuracy remains lower even when all gold evidence is supplied directly. These findings suggest that cross-lingual deep research exposes both retrieval failures and an independent, agent-side difficulty in integrating language-mismatched evidence.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Mana: Dexterous Manipulation of Articulated Tools

Authors:
Zhao-Heng Yin↗Guanya Shi↗Pieter Abbeel↗C. Karen Liu↗

Articulated tool manipulation remains a major challenge in dexterous robotics due to the need to coordinate internal degrees of freedom and contact-rich interactions. While prior work has largely focused on rigid objects, articulated tool use remains underexplored because of its physical complexity and the difficulty of learning functional grasping and manipulation policies. We present Mana (Manipulation Animator), a general sim-to-real framework that reinterprets dexterous manipulation as an animation problem. Inspired by computer animation, Mana employs a coarse-to-fine pipeline that transforms procedurally-generated grasp keyframes into manipulation trajectories through motion planning and reinforcement learning. The data generation process is largely automatic, requiring only a few mouse clicks to specify functional affordances (

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08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

FENCE: A Financial and Multimodal Jailbreak Detection Dataset

Authors:
Mirae Kim↗Seonghun Jeong↗Youngjun Kwak↗

Jailbreaking poses a significant risk to the deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs). VLMs are particularly vulnerable because they process both text and images, creating broader attack surfaces. However, available resources for jailbreak detection are scarce, particularly in finance. To address this gap, we present FENCE, a bilingual (Korean-English) multimodal dataset for training and evaluating jailbreak detectors in financial applications. FENCE emphasizes domain realism through finance-relevant queries paired with image-grounded threats. Experiments with commercial and open-source VLMs reveal consistent vulnerabilities, with GPT-4o showing measurable attack success rates and open-source models displaying greater exposure. A baseline detector trained on FENCE achieves 99 percent in-distribution accuracy and maintains strong performance on external benchmarks, underscoring the dataset's robustness for training reliable detection models. FENCE provides a focused resource for advancing multimodal jailbreak detection in finance and for supporting safer, more reliable AI systems in sensitive domains. Warning: This paper includes example data that may be offensive.

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

Fast-dLLM++: Fr\'{e}chet Profile Decoding for Faster Diffusion LLM Inference

Authors:
Siva Rajesh Kasa↗Yasong Dai↗Sumit Negi↗Hongdong Li↗

Diffusion large language models promise parallel token generation, yet inference remains bottlenecked by deciding which masked tokens can be safely committed together. Fast-dLLM addressed this with KV caching and confidence-guided parallel decoding, but its decoding theory uses a homogeneous high-confidence assumption that effectively reduces each candidate set to its weakest selected token. We argue that this leaves speed on the table because real decoding steps exhibit heterogeneous confidence profiles. We propose Fast-dLLM++, a training-free extension that introduces Fr\'{echet profile decoding}: selecting parallel commit sets from the full sorted confidence profile rather than a single worst-case confidence. The resulting rule is a heterogeneous-confidence generalization of Fast-dLLM's factor selector and it recovers the previous rule exactly in the equal-confidence case and adds a provable heterogeneity bonus when the selected tokens have uneven confidences. Fast-dLLM++ leaves the model, diffusion process, and cache implementation entirely unchanged, making it a drop-in replacement for existing Fast-dLLM decoding. Experiments on GSM8K, MATH, HumanEval, and MBPP with the LLaDA-8B model show that the theoretical improvement translates directly into empirical gains: profile-aware selection improves the accuracy–throughput frontier by exploiting safe parallelism that weakest-token rules miss, achieving up to 37\% higher throughput at comparable accuracy. Our code release is at https://github.com/Ringo-Star/FastdLLM_plusplus.

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

Scaling Generative Foundation Models for Chest Radiography with Rectified Flow Transformers

Authors:
Fabio De Sousa Ribeiro↗Emma A. M. Stanley↗Charles Jones↗Tian Xia↗Dominic C. Marshall↗Laurent Renard Trich\'e↗Christopher V. Cosgriff↗Panagiotis Dimitrakopoulos↗Sotirios A. Tsaftaris↗Ben Glocker↗

arXiv:2606.19460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the first generative foundation model for chest radiograph synthesis trained from scratch at the billion-parameter scale. Existing radiographic AI models often suffer from poor generalisation across patient subpopulations, institutions, and acquisition settings, resulting in limited real-world clinical utility. Controlled, high-fidelity synthesis of chest radiographs is a promising path toward diversifying clinical datasets and evaluating the robustness of diagnostic models. Therefore, we present the largest specialist generative foundation model for chest radiographs to date, with over 1.3B parameters, trained for 1.6T tokens on a curated, heterogeneous dataset comprising 1.2M radiographs and clinical expert-guided metadata. Our model supports controllable radiograph generation and editing across multiple demographic subgroups, acquisition views, and a dozen pathologies. Moreover, we significantly advance the state of the art in radiograph synthesis fidelity, producing images that are indistinguishable from real radiographs to clinical experts.

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12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Less is More: Quality-Aware Training Data Selection for Scientific Summarization

Authors:
Maria Nefeli Paraskevopoulou↗Tatiana Passali↗Grigorios Tsoumakas↗

Scientific long-document summarization datasets commonly treat author-written abstracts as gold reference summaries, although their quality and alignment with the source article vary. At the same time, publicly available scientific summarization datasets remain limited in scale and structure for modern long-context models. In this work, we address both challenges by a) constructing and releasing one of the largest biomedical and life science datasets for long-document summarization, containing 1.88 million PMC articles, and b) analyzing the reference quality of author-written abstracts with source-grounded and model-based metrics. We show that author-written abstracts vary in their alignment with the full article and that these quality signals can guide training-data selection. Training on selected high-quality subsets outperforms random sampling at matched training sizes and can match or exceed larger random subsets on factuality-oriented metrics. Our findings suggest that reference quality is an important factor in scientific summarization and that quality-aware data selection can improve training efficiency.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Guiding Federated Graph Recommendation with LLM-encoded knowledge

Authors:
Thi Minh Chau Nguyen↗Hien Trang Nguyen↗Duc Anh Nguyen↗Van Ho-Long↗Thanh Trung Huynh↗Zhao Ren↗

arXiv:2606.15277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based recommender systems are highly effective at extracting collaborative signals from user–item interactions, and federated learning (FL) allows these models to be trained while preserving user privacy. However, aggregating graph representations across distributed, non-IID clients remains a challenge; structural embeddings learned locally often misalign, and naive averaging fails to capture meaningful cross-client relationships. Most existing federated graph methods rely exclusively on structural aggregation, neglecting the rich, global semantic context available in large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we propose a novel framework that uses LLM-encoded knowledge to guide federated graph recommendation. Specifically, clients learn structural representations from local graphs while simultaneously summarizing their typical interaction patterns into compact semantic vectors via a frozen LLM. The central server then uses these LLM-encoded semantic signals to discover related preference patterns across clients, guiding the selective aggregation of their structural representations. This enables semantically informed cross-client collaboration without exposing raw data. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that guiding structural alignment with LLM-encoded knowledge consistently improves recommendation accuracy over existing federated graph baselines.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Modality-Aware Feature Matching in Visual and Vision-Language Applications: A Comprehensive Survey

Authors:
Weide Liu↗Wei Zhou↗Jun Liu↗Ping Hu↗Jun Cheng↗Jungong Han↗Weisi Lin↗

Feature matching is a cornerstone task in computer vision, essential for applications such as image retrieval, stereo matching, 3D reconstruction, and SLAM. This survey comprehensively reviews modality-based feature matching, exploring traditional handcrafted methods and emphasizing contemporary deep learning approaches across various modalities, including RGB images, depth images, 3D point clouds, LiDAR scans, medical images, and vision-language interactions. Traditional methods, leveraging detectors like Harris corners and descriptors such as SIFT and ORB, demonstrate robustness under moderate intra-modality variations but struggle with significant modality gaps. Contemporary deep learning-based methods, exemplified by detector-free strategies like CNN-based SuperPoint and transformer-based LoFTR, substantially improve robustness and adaptability across modalities. We highlight modality-aware advancements, such as geometric and depth-specific descriptors for depth images, sparse and dense learning methods for 3D point clouds, attention-enhanced neural networks for LiDAR scans, and specialized solutions like the MIND descriptor for complex medical image matching. Cross-modal applications, particularly in medical image registration and vision-language tasks, underscore the evolution of feature matching to handle increasingly diverse data interactions.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

ASSCG: Just-Right Gating over Chattering for Fast-Slow LLM Planning in Autonomous Driving

Authors:
Sining Ang↗Yuan Chen↗Liu Haiyan↗Xuanyao Mao↗Jason Bao↗Xuliang↗Bingchuan Sun↗Yan Wang↗

Large language models (LLMs) can improve autonomous driving planning but are costly to query online, and existing fast-slow planners often rely on hand-designed triggering rules that either over-call the slow system or call it at the wrong times. We formulate slow-system invocation as a resource-aware sequential decision problem and propose the Adaptive Slow-System Control Gate (ASSCG), which makes frame-level Query/Cache/Drop decisions to refresh, reuse, or suppress slow guidance. ASSCG uses an RWKV backbone for efficient long-horizon gating and is trained with supervised fine-tuning followed by GRPO-style compute-aware reinforcement fine-tuning. We apply ASSCG to two different fast-slow architectures: (i) AsyncDriver on nuPlan Hard20 closed-loop evaluation, where ASSCG improves score to 67.28 (+2.28) while reducing average end-to-end inference latency by 60%; and (ii) a RecogDrive-based dual system that we build by replacing its original VLM-2B module with a lightweight ViT-based fast planner and adding an LLM slow planner, evaluated on NAVSIM, where ASSCG achieves 91.4 PDMS (+0.6) and increases average speed by 25%. The project page, including video visualizations and additional results, is available at https://williamxuanyu.github.io/asscg/.

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

TokenPilot: Cache-Efficient Context Management for LLM Agents

Authors:
Buqiang Xu↗Zirui Xue↗Dianmou Chen↗Chenyang Fu↗Chiyu Wu↗Caiying Huang↗Chen Jiang↗Jizhan Fang↗Xinle Deng↗Yijun Chen↗Yunzhi Yao↗Xuehai Wang↗…

As LLM agents are deployed in long-horizon sessions, context accumulation drives up inference costs. Existing approaches utilize text pruning or dynamic memory eviction to minimize token footprints; however, their unconstrained sequence mutations alter layouts, introducing prefix mismatches and cache invalidation. This reveals a critical trade-off between text sparsity and prompt cache continuity. To address this, we present TokenPilot, a dual-granularity context management framework. Globally, Ingestion-Aware Compaction acts as a framework harness to stabilize prompt prefixes and eliminate open-world environmental noise at the ingestion gate. Locally, Lifecycle-Aware Eviction monitors the ongoing residual utility of context segments, enforcing a conservative batch-turn schedule to offload content segments only when task relevance expires. Experiments on PinchBench and Claw-Eval under both isolated and continuous modes demonstrate that TokenPilot reduces costs by 61% and 56% in isolated mode, and 61% and 87% in continuous mode, while maintaining competitive performance compared to prior systems. TokenPilot has been integrated into LightMem2 at https://github.com/zjunlp/LightMem2.

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

Induced Resource Theories and Harvesting via Quantum Probes

Authors:
Ron Nystr\"om↗Simone Cepollaro↗Nicola Pranzini↗Stefano Cusumano↗Alioscia Hamma↗Esko Keski-Vakkuri↗

arXiv:2606.17287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider scenarios in which a quantum system with a well-defined resource theory is used as a probe to interact with an environment, such as a quantum field, for which a resource-theoretic description is absent or incomplete. We clarify if and how the harvesting of a resource in the probe can tell us about the state of the environment. This is particularly ambiguous when the probe-environment interaction is not a free operation, or the concept of such free operations cannot be defined altogether. We propose a framework and precise conditions under which it becomes possible to interpret resource generation on the probe as evidence of resources in the environment, thereby introducing an effective notion of resources for the latter. Our results clarify in which sense resources can be said to be harvested from the environment and provide a systematic way to analyse such processes beyond fully controlled resource-theoretic settings. More generally, this work may provide a step towards a more general understanding of the interplay of different quantum resources.

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

DeceptionX: Explainable Deception Detection with Multimodal Large Language Models

Authors:
Jiayu Zhang↗Shuo Ye↗Jiajian Huang↗Yawen Cui↗Taorui Wang↗Wei Xia↗Zeheng Wang↗Haowen Tang↗Hui Ma↗Zitong Yu↗

Deception detection is a critical and highly challenging task within affective computing and behavioral analysis. Existing deep learning methods typically treat this task as a straightforward classification problem; however, this black-box approach lacks interpretability and fails to capture the complex logical deduction processes utilized by human experts when identifying lies. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown potential, applying them effectively requires a bridge between low-level audiovisual cues and high-level logical reasoning. In this paper, we propose DeceptionX, a novel MLLM framework that shifts the paradigm of deception detection from black-box classification to an interpretable Observe-Think-Summarize reasoning process. To address the scarcity of high-quality reasoning data, we first constructed DeceptChain, a high-quality dataset developed through a human-in-the-loop process. This dataset synthesizes fine-grained visual and auditory evidence (such as micro-expressions and vocal tremors) into structured chain-of-thought reasoning data. Furthermore, we propose a three-stage training pipeline and a Discrepancy-Aware Redundancy Elimination~(DARE) strategy for DeceptionX to further enhance the model's generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeceptionX not only outperforms existing MLLM baselines and state-of-the-art methods on standard real-world benchmarks but also provides transparent, expert-level reasoning paths, bridging the critical gap between accuracy and interpretability in multimodal deception detection.

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

A Recipe for Long-Context Reasoning in Large Language Models via On-Policy Optimization and Distillation

Authors:
Miguel Moura Ramos↗Duarte M. Alves↗Andr\'e F. T. Martins↗

Existing approaches to post-train models for long-context tasks face complementary limitations: (i) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) provides stable supervision but suffers from exposure bias; (ii) reinforcement learning methods such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) train on model-generated trajectories but struggle with long-horizon credit assignment and sparse rewards; and (iii) on-policy distillation (OPD) provides dense token-level guidance but does not directly optimize task rewards. We study these complementary strategies for long-context alignment and derive a recipe that combines GRPO with OPD-style teacher guidance: the student learns from its own rollouts using outcome-level rewards, while a stronger teacher provides dense token-level regularization in place of the standard reference policy. This is especially useful when process-level supervision is difficult to obtain. To support this study, we introduce LongBlocks, a synthetic multilingual dataset spanning multi-hop reasoning, contextual grounding, and long-form generation. Through controlled ablations, we isolate the roles of cold-start initialization, teacher anchoring, and data mixing, showing that our recipe yields a more stable and effective path to long-context reasoning than GRPO or OPD while preserving short-context capabilities.

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

Towards Verifiable Agentic Data Science: Solving Irregular TSQA Via Tool-Grounded Reasoning

Authors:
Sanhorn Chen↗Xiaoyang Chen↗Boyu Liu↗Roy Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.15107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series data in real-world deployments is overwhelmingly irregular. Observations are asynchronous, missing values are informative rather than random, and sampling frequencies vary across sensors and operational windows. However, existing Time Series Question Answering (TSQA) benchmarks mostly assume regularly sampled inputs, leaving a fundamental gap in understanding how large language models (LLMs) and AI agents perform under irregular conditions. To bridge this gap, we introduce IRTS-ToolBench, a benchmark of 1,700 questions spanning 10 task types across 13 domains. IRTS-ToolBench is designed to be used independently by any researcher working on LLM-based irregular time series analysis, providing standardized inputs and a reproducible evaluation protocol. Code can be found in https://github.com/SanhornC/IRTS-ToolBench.

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22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

A Contactless Heat Engine Driven by Nonreciprocal Fluctuation-Induced Torques

Authors:
Dhruv Shah↗Kiryl Asheichyk↗David Gelbwaser-Klimovsky↗Noah Graham↗Mehran Kardar↗Matthias Kr\"uger↗

arXiv:2606.25053v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We describe a contactless heat engine in which quantum and thermal electromagnetic fluctuations act as the working medium. The setup consists of two concentric cylinders held at different temperatures. The inner cylinder stably levitates within the outer one due to repulsive nonequilibrium Casimir forces. The chirality of the setup is broken by using nonreciprocal dielectric materials, akin to application of a magnetic field along the common cylinder axis. Using Rytov fluctuational electrodynamics, we show that heat transfer and torque can be expressed in terms of an angular-momentum-resolved heat flux density, $\Phi_n(\omega)$: each exchanged photon carries energy $\hbar \omega$ and angular momentum $\hbar n$. In reciprocal media contributions from modes $n$ and $-n$ cancel and there is no net torque; nonreciprocity breaks this symmetry and powers rotation of the inner cylinder. Even in the absence of contact, electromagnetic fluctuations produce a frictional torque opposing rotation that we compute. This enables computation of characteristic steady state rotations, and estimation of the engine efficiency (which remains bounded by the Carnot limit). The cylindrical setup provides a natural realization of fluctuation-induced angular-momentum transfer and a possible route toward nanoscale contactless engines.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Local correlations in long-range dual-unitary kicked Hamiltonian chains

Authors:
Vladimir Al. Osipov↗Marc Cedric Spyra↗Jana Carolina Schumann↗Thomas Guhr↗Boris Gutkin↗

arXiv:2606.13857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many-body Floquet models with exact space–time symmetry, such as the kicked Ising spin chain (KIC), provide natural examples of systems with dual-unitary dynamics. The requirement of exact space–time symmetry is, however, highly restrictive, as it permits only nearest-neighbor interactions. Based on a pair of Hadamard matrices, we construct a wide family of dual-unitary kicked spin chains with long-range interactions. We show that local two-point correlations in such models propagate along the light-cone edges \( |n| = r|t| \), where \(r\) is the interaction range, and can be derived analytically for operators with local support. This approach is illustrated using the example of a kicked Ising spin chain with next-to-next-neighbor interactions.

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24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum Routers: A Switching-Fabric Framework for Quantum-Native Forwarding

Authors:
Jessica Illiano↗Caterina De Risi↗Angela Sara Cacciapuoti↗Marcello Caleffi↗

arXiv:2606.17773v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Forwarding in quantum networks cannot be realized by directly transposing classical switching fabrics, since the no-cloning theorem and the quantum measurement postulate constrain the direct relay of quantum information while ruling out copy-based buffering and inspection. In this paper, we propose a switching-fabric framework for quantum routers based on multipartite entanglement. Specifically, we formalize the notion of an entanglement-based switching fabric, in which a graph state acts as the forwarding resource and entanglement forwarding is realized through local Pauli measurements. We translate the classical notions of blocking and non-blocking operation into structural conditions for entanglement-based fabrics, by deriving the edge-controlled (EC) design principle for non-blocking operation. We instantiate this principle through a monolithic EC crossbar and a modular Clos-type EC fabric, for which we characterize resource scaling and identify the regime where the modular design becomes more resource-efficient than the monolithic one. Finally, a forwarding-latency analysis establishes a fundamental distinction between matching-oblivious and matching-driven forwarding: the proposed EC fabrics realize all requested input-output entanglement links with constant forwarding depth under sufficient measurement parallelism, whereas matching-driven EPR-based fabrics exhibit latency that scales with the number of requested connections. The proposed framework provides a hardware-agnostic foundation for quantum-router switching fabrics.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Can AI Reason Like an Urban Planner? Benchmarking Large Language Models Against Professional Judgment

Authors:
Yijie Deng↗He Zhu↗Wen Wang↗Junyou Su↗Minxin Chen↗Wenjia Zhang↗

Problem, Research Strategy, and Findings: The rise of large language models (LLMs) raises a key question for urban planning: which forms of professional planning knowledge can AI replicate, and which still require human judgment? Although AI tools are increasingly used in planning practice, there is still no systematic framework for testing whether they can reason with the contextual sensitivity, value awareness, and institutional literacy central to planning expertise. This paper introduces Urban Planning Bench (UPBench), a domain-specific evaluation framework that assesses LLM reasoning through a 4x5 matrix of four knowledge pillars and five cognitive levels adapted from Bloom's revised taxonomy. Evaluating 25 LLMs with automated scoring and expert review, we find a non-monotonic cognitive curve: models perform better on higher-order analytical tasks than on factual recall and integrative judgment. This suggests that planning knowledge often treated as lower-order is deeply shaped by institutional, jurisdictional, and temporal context, making it hard for LLMs to generalize. We summarize these limits as four epistemic diagnostics: regulatory hallucination, conceptual conflation, wickedness paralysis, and phronetic deficit. Takeaway for Practice: The findings support differential delegation in planning. LLMs can assist with cross-disciplinary synthesis, literature review, scenario generation, and preliminary policy analysis. However, they remain unreliable for jurisdiction-specific regulation, normative conflict resolution, and context-sensitive procedure. Agencies should require verification for AI-assisted regulatory analysis, while planning education should emphasize institutional literacy, normative judgment, and contextual sensitivity.

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