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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Who Pays the Price? Stakeholder-Centric Prompt Injection Benchmarking for Real-world Web Agents

arXiv:2606.13385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Web agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world environments, where they operate over untrusted web content and execute actions with direct consequences. This makes them vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks, in which seemingly benign content embeds adversarial instructions that manipulate agent behaviour. Existing security benchmarks adopt an attack-centric perspective, focusing on the technical feasibility of injections while overlooking the nuanced distribution of resulting harms. In practice, however, prompt-injection risk is victim-dependent: a single exploit can produce asymmetric consequences for different stakeholders, and the same attack pattern may exhibit substantially different effectiveness depending on whom it targets. To capture these properties, we introduce \sysname, a stakeholder-centric benchmark to systematically categorize and attribute harm in real-world web agent systems. It distinguishes between affected entities (e.g., user, seller, platform), decomposes the attacks into concrete objectives, and evaluates each case with complementary outcome- and process-level metrics. Our results reveal substantial and heterogeneous vulnerabilities: not a single attack objective is reliably resisted by current agents, and failures distribute across qualitatively distinct modes ranging from stealthy parasitism (attack succeeds without disrupting the user's delegated task) to misaligned disruption (task disrupted without attack success) and compounded failure (both adversarial objective and task integrity simultaneously violated). These patterns are missed by conventional evaluation, highlighting the need for stakeholder-aware assessment of LLM-based agents in real-world deployments. Benchmark is available at https://github.com/StakeBench/SBC.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Protein Representation Learning with Secondary-Structure and Energy-Filtered Hydrogen-Bond Graphs

arXiv:2606.19374v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based representations are widely used in protein modeling, yet many existing approaches rely primarily on sequence adjacency or geometric proximity, which only partially reflect the principles governing protein folding. Proteins instead adopt complex three-dimensional conformations organized around secondary structure elements, such as $\alpha$-helices and $\beta$-sheets, which encode recurring local motifs and stabilizing hydrogen-bond interactions. In this work, we introduce a secondary-structure-aware graph neural network for protein representation learning. Residue-level node representations are augmented with secondary structure assignments, and graph edges are constructed from hydrogen-bond interactions filtered by their energetic strength. This design enables the model to capture both local structural context and long-range couplings that are central to protein stability and function. We evaluate the proposed approach on commonly used protein benchmarks and observe consistent improvements over existing graph-based methods. In addition, the resulting graph representations offer enhanced biological interpretability, as the learned connectivity aligns with established structural motifs. These findings suggest that incorporating secondary structure and energy-filtered hydrogen-bond topology provides an effective inductive bias for protein representation learning. The code is released at https://github.com/mohamedmohamed2021/SSProNet

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

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

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.

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

PermaVid: Consistent Video Generation Across Edits via Disentangled Context Memory

Consistent video generation under editing operations requires persistence: when edits modify scene appearance or layout, subsequent generations should remain coherent across time and viewpoints. However, existing memory designs struggle to maintain long-term consistency after such modifications, as stored contexts may become outdated or invalid. To address this, we propose PermaVid, a novel framework built upon a multi-modal context memory that disentangles spatial context into semantic appearance and geometric structure, together with an edit-aware memory update and retrieval strategy that keeps memory evolution aligned with subsequent observations. Specifically, we develop two complementary memory banks: an RGB context memory that captures appearance-aware observations while implicitly encoding geometry, and a depth context memory that preserves geometry-only structure disentangled from semantics. Building on this design, we introduce a memory-guided video generation model that performs multi-modal feature fusion under reference conditions drawn from mixed-modality memory contexts. Experiments demonstrate that our method maintains strong long-term semantic and structural consistency after edits, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Sparsity Curse: Understanding RLVR Model Parameter Space from Model Merging

arXiv:2606.18521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm that surpasses Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) in eliciting reasoning intelligence and resisting catastrophic forgetting. Recent studies further reveal that RLVR induces highly sparse and off-principal parameter updates compared to SFT. This naturally raises the question: does such sparsity make RLVR models more amenable to model merging? If so, model merging would offer a scalable, training-free path to aggregate diverse reasoning capabilities from independently trained RLVR models. Surprisingly, we find the opposite, uncovering a sparsity curse: the sparse RLVR updates are spread farther apart in parameter space, forming near-orthogonal shortcuts that make aggregation inherently fragile. This is likely rooted in the stochasticity of RL optimization and the diversity of emergent reasoning patterns. Unlike SFT models that converge to shared, flat basins and merge naturally, RLVR models suffer severe degradation under standard merging methods. Through systematic empirical analysis of the update geometry, we characterize the mechanisms behind this failure and propose Sensitivity-aware Resolving Merging (SAR-Merging), a merging recipe tailored for the unique structure of RLVR parameter spaces. SAR-Merging resolves conflicts in overlapping update regions via Fisher Information-based sensitivity arbitration, followed by magnitude-aware sparsification and rescaling to preserve fragile reasoning pathways. Experiments on mathematical and coding benchmarks demonstrate that SAR-Merging substantially outperforms existing merging methods on RLVR models, enabling both single-task enhancement and multi-capability fusion.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Matrix Product Operator Encodings of the Magnus Expansion and Dyson Series

arXiv:2605.21597v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a matrix product operator (MPO) encoding of the Magnus expansion and the Dyson series for one-dimensional quantum lattice models with time-dependent Hamiltonians. The MPO construction can be made accurate up to arbitrary order in the time step, it can be applied to both finite and infinite systems, and it can handle long-range interactions. The resulting MPO can be combined with state-of-the-art time evolution algorithms based on matrix product states, allowing for drastic improvements in simulating evolution under time-dependent Hamiltonians. Our MPO construction can also be used for the optimization of quantum circuits in the context of quantum simulation of time-dependent Hamiltonians.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

MolmoMotion: Forecasting Point Trajectories in 3D with Language Instruction

Motion forecasting is central to visual intelligence: agents must anticipate how objects will move in order to plan actions, reason about physical interactions, and synthesize realistic futures. We argue that 3D points in world coordinates provide a general representation that is class-agnostic, view-stable, compact, and directly useful for downstream tasks. We formalize the task of goal-conditioned 3D point motion forecasting: given a short visual history, a set of 3D query points on an object of interest, and a language description of the intended goal, the model predicts the future 3D trajectory of each point. We introduce a full stack to study this task at scale: (1) MolmoMotion-1M is a large corpus of action-described, object-grounded 3D point trajectories annotated from 1.16M unconstrained videos; (2) PointMotionBench is a human-verified benchmark spanning 111 object categories and 61 motion types; and (3) MolmoMotion is a general motion forecasting model that supports both autoregressive coordinate prediction and flow-matching-based trajectory generation. MolmoMotion accurately predicts diverse motion patterns with different language instructions, and significantly outperforms existing motion prediction baselines on PointMotionBench. Finally, we show that the learned 3D motion prior transfers well to downstream applications: it improves training efficiency and generalization for robot manipulation, and its predicted trajectories provide effective motion guidance for generative models to synthesize videos with more realistic object motion.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

MetaPilot: genome-aware adaptive search-space refinement for unified DDA and DIA metaproteomics

Metaproteomic peptide identification is constrained by the structure and size of the protein search space. Pooled gene catalogues provide coverage but obscure genome-level evidence, and current workflows for data-dependent (DDA) and data-independent (DIA) acquisition diverge in their database strategies. We present MetaPilot, a genome-aware workflow that uses conserved marker-protein evidence to rank candidate genomes from MGnify catalogues and construct adaptive, sample-specific search spaces. Applied to paired DDA/DIA datasets of defined mixtures and fecal samples, MetaPilot adapted genome selection to community complexity and reproduced published peptide evidence while expanding the detectable peptide space. In DDA-independent reanalysis of Orbitrap human gut DIA data, MetaPilot identified 24.4% more peptides than the published DDA-derived library and 2.06-fold more than the matched DDA-assisted DIA search. On timsTOF DIA-PASEF mouse intestinal data, it outperformed uMetaP by 41.8~119.7%, enabling genome-resolved functional interpretation without DDA-PASEF input.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

OmniSapiens: A Foundation Model for Social Behavior Processing via Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization

arXiv:2602.10635v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Socially intelligent AI systems must reason across diverse human behavioral tasks and generalize to new social contexts. However, behavioral data is inherently heterogeneous, comprising diverse modalities and prediction targets that produce uneven training signals across samples, creating imbalanced learning dynamics that challenge existing AI models. To address this, we develop Omnisapiens-7B 2.0, a foundation model for social behavior processing that explicitly addresses learning from heterogeneous behavioral data. This is enabled through Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization, a new RL method that rebalances learning signals across samples by approximating each sample's contribution to the policy update and using these estimates to drive geometrically centered, inertially smoothed advantage modulation for stable training. Omnisapiens-7B 2.0 achieves the best and most consistent performance across 10 behavioral tasks, while also attaining the best performance on all five held-out benchmarks, with gains of up to +12.02% and +9.37% respectively. Furthermore, it demonstrates more consistent and interpretable reasoning traces, supporting reliable real-world behavioral applications. Our model is available at https://github.com/MIT-MI/human_behavior_atlas.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fun with Graph States: Nonlocal Bell Pairs and the Arf Invariant

arXiv:2606.06582v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study inner products and partial amplitudes of graph states–a commonly employed class of quantum states, which are specified by graphs. We find that the magnitudes of these quantities are simply related to the rank of the adjacency matrix of the graph over F_2 while the phase is determined by the Arf invariant of its quadratic refinement. These facts motivate a nonlocal tensor factorization of the Hilbert space, with respect to which all graph states are products of Bell pairs with unentangled ancillae. These results may illuminate the quantum advantage in the framework of Measurement-Based Quantum Computation and suggest that graph states can be usefully visualized in the language of algebraic topology. In addition, we develop a specialized technique for computing expectation values of qubit-wise permutations in graph states, which is useful for calculating multi-invariants.

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

Fourier analysis of quantum neural network with non-linear data embedding

arXiv:2606.14206v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fourier analysis has become a crucial tool for understanding the expressivity of Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC) models, as well as an important indicator of barren plateaus (BP). While existing literature has only studied angle-embedded VQCs in a noiseless environment, here we develop the Fourier analysis of VQCs with non-linear data embedding, with particular focus on amplitude embedding, which provides a naturally compact encoding scheme. We first investigate a subtle difference in the domain of input features within amplitude embedding that leads to a distinct expressivity of the zero-frequency Fourier coefficient. By assuming that the ensemble of unitaries generated from the parameter space forms at least a 2-design with respect to the unitary group, we derive, via Weingarten calculus, that the mean of the Fourier coefficients is concentrated at zero, and the variance scales at an exponentially decaying order with respect to the multi-dimensional frequency magnitude. When a noise channel with unitary Kraus operators and probabilities $\{p_k\}$ is taken into account, the variance is further suppressed by a factor $\left(\sum_k p_k^2\right)^{Q}

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Trading symmetry for Hilbert-space dimension in Bell-inequality violation

arXiv:2601.02893v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In quantum information, asymmetry, i.e., the lack of symmetry, is a resource allowing one to accomplish certain tasks that are otherwise impossible. Similarly, in a Bell test using any given Bell inequality, the maximum violation achievable using quantum strategies respecting or disregarding a certain symmetry can be different. In this work, we focus on the symmetry involved in the exchange of parties and explore when we have to trade this symmetry for a lower-dimensional quantum strategy in achieving the maximal violation of given Bell inequalities. For the family of symmetric Collins-Gisin-Linden-Massar-Popescu inequalities, we provide evidence showing that there is no such trade-off. However, for several other Bell inequalities with a small number of dichotomic measurement settings, we show that symmetric quantum strategies in the minimal Hilbert space dimension can only lead to a suboptimal Bell violation. In other words, there exist symmetric Bell inequalities that can only be maximally violated by asymmetric quantum strategies of minimal dimension. In contrast, one can also find examples of asymmetric Bell inequalities that are maximally violated by symmetric correlations. The implications of these findings on the geometry of the set of quantum correlations and the possibility of performing self-testing therefrom are briefly discussed.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Oranits: Mission Assignment and Task Offloading in Open RAN-based ITS using Metaheuristic and Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2507.19712v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we explore mission assignment and task offloading in an Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN)-based intelligent transportation system (ITS), where autonomous vehicles leverage mobile edge computing for efficient processing. Existing studies often overlook the intricate interdependencies between missions and the costs associated with offloading tasks to edge servers, leading to suboptimal decision-making. To bridge this gap, we introduce Oranits, a novel system model that explicitly accounts for mission dependencies and offloading costs while optimizing performance through vehicle cooperation. To achieve this, we propose a twofold optimization approach. First, we develop a metaheuristic-based evolutionary computing algorithm, namely the Chaotic Gaussian-based Global ARO (CGG-ARO), serving as a baseline for one-slot optimization. Second, we design an enhanced reward-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, referred to as the Multi-agent Double Deep Q-Network (MA-DDQN), that integrates both multi-agent coordination and multi-action selection mechanisms, significantly reducing mission assignment time and improving adaptability over baseline methods. Extensive simulations reveal that CGG-ARO improves the number of completed missions and overall benefit by approximately 7.1% and 7.7%, respectively. Meanwhile, MA-DDQN achieves even greater improvements of 11.0% in terms of mission completions and 12.5% in terms of the overall benefit. These results highlight the effectiveness of Oranits in enabling faster, more adaptive, and more efficient task processing in dynamic ITS environments.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Reform of the intermediate level of the health system in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Adaptations and limits in the stabilization of the personnel of the Provincial Health Division: A cohort study.

Background: Human resources are one of the pillars of health systems. Since the World Health Organization's report on human resources issues, several countries have integrated this component into the various reforms aimed at strengthening their health systems. This study aims to explore the effects of reforming the intermediate level of a health system operating in a fragile state context. Methodology Our study was conducted in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It was a cohort study of the staff of the 14 Provincial Health Divisions (PHD) out of the 26 existing in the DRC. We established a database of the staff of these 14 PHD from 2016, just after the implementation of the intermediate level reform and the allocation of this staff by the Ministry of Health. We did a recall in 2021, in each of these PHD to survey this staff through a structured questionnaire and supplemented by the files of the agents available in each PHD. Sociodemographic, economic and academic variables were collected and analyzed. Data were entered into an Excel 2016 database and processed with SPSS software version 25. The chi-square test was used for comparison of proportions with a statistical significance level of p < 0.05. Risk ratios ratios (RR) and their 95% confidence intervals were calculated as measures of association. The error threshold was set at 5%. Results A total of 657 agents with an average age of 45.2 years had been identified in 2016 at the start of the survey and in 2021, 118 or 18% of them were no longer part of the PHD agents. Among the causes of absence noted: 48% of agents placed on leave, 16% promoted to other functions within the health system, 16% desertion and dismissal and 11% cases of death. 19.8% of absentees are executives, 19.5% men against 10.3% women; 22.3% of absentees in unstable provinces against 16.6% in stable ones. The factors associated with the absence of agents in the PHD remain the reaching of retirement age [RR (95% CI) = 5.5 (1.2-24.9) ]and male agents [RR (95% CI) = 3.2 (1.3-7.9)]. Among the agents who remained, 92% kept their initial position, 6% were subject to an internal permutation accompanied by a promotion. The factors associated with the stability of human resources at the level of the Provincial Health Division are: female gender, manager with experience or seniority > 5 years, Age > 35 years, Stable province, Presence of a partner bonus. Conclusion Even in a crisis and fragile context, health system reform is possible. It is possible to organize staff recruitment through a selection process independent of the political authorities of the Ministry of Health and supported by the technical services of the Ministry and partners . Experience and the presence of a financial bonus are motivating factors for staff stability. The involvement of Technical and Financial Support Partners in the recruitment process helped the Ministry of Health to minimize political influence in the recruitment of middle-level executives.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Stable and Steerable Sparse Autoencoders with Weight Regularization

arXiv:2603.04198v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract human-interpretable features from neural network activations, but their learned features can vary substantially across random seeds and training choices. To improve stability, we studied weight regularization by adding L1 or L2 penalties on encoder and decoder weights, and evaluate how regularization interacts with common SAE training defaults. On MNIST, we observe that L2 weight regularization produces a core of highly aligned features and, when combined with tied initialization and unit-norm decoder constraints, it dramatically increases cross-seed feature consistency. For TopK SAEs trained on language model activations (Pythia-70M-deduped), adding a small L2 weight penalty increased the fraction of features shared across three random seeds and roughly doubles steering success rates, while leaving the mean of automated interpretability scores essentially unchanged. Finally, in the regularized setting, activation steering success becomes better predicted by auto-interpretability scores, suggesting that regularization can align text-based feature explanations with functional controllability.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Distributional Statistical Models: Weak Moments, Cumulants, and a Central Limit Theorem

作者:

arXiv:2604.20634v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many important statistical models fall outside classical moment-based methods due to the non-existence of moments or moment generating functions. We propose a generalised probabilistic framework in which a probability law is represented by a tempered distribution $T \in \mathcal{S}'$, on the same footing as a density, a distribution function, or a characteristic function. Information about the law is extracted by evaluating $T$ on test functions regularised by a given positive Schwartz kernel $\varphi \in \mathcal{S}$ – the kernel serving as a probe, not as part of the law. Expectations are defined via the action of distributions on regularised test functions, yielding well-defined weak moments, weak characteristic functions, and weak cumulants of all orders. These extend classical quantities and retain key algebraic properties such as additivity under independence and natural affine transformation rules. The main results are: (i) a systematic algebra of weak cumulants; (ii) a weak moment problem where existence of all moments holds unconditionally and uniqueness depends on the kernel, with uniqueness results under Gaussian kernels (via Hermite completeness), positive Schwartz kernels with an exponential tail bound and square-integrable densities (via a Carleman-type criterion), and kernels with exponential decay (via Denjoy-Carleman quasi-analyticity); and (iii) a weak central limit theorem formulated as convergence of weak characteristic functions to a Gaussian limit, covering cases where the classical theorem fails. The framework is illustrated with Student's $t$, stable, and hyperbolic distributions. As a statistical consequence, the weak first moment yields a consistent estimator of the location parameter in the Cauchy model, where no classical moment-based estimator exists. A full statistical treatment is given in a companion paper.

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

Stochastic Thermodynamics and SDE-based Generative Models

作者:

arXiv:2606.18290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: SDE-based generative models, including diffusion models and the Schrödinger bridge, have found broad applications in signal processing tasks such as speech enhancement, image restoration, and time-series generation. This note presents a modeling framework for such models within the context of stochastic thermodynamics. The main results of this note are trajectory-level definitions of work, heat, and entropy production, along with a generalized Jarzynski identity and a second-law-like inequality. The proposed framework extends the original Jarzynski setup to accommodate time-dependent bath temperature and nonconservative driving forces. This thermodynamic perspective may deepen our understanding of diffusion models and the Schrödinger bridge from a nonequilibrium statistical mechanics viewpoint.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Audited Conformal Prediction for Classification under Unknown Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.14909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of uncertainty quantification for a pretrained classification model deployed under unknown distribution shift. We propose Audited Conformal Prediction (ACP), a method that leverages a small labeled dataset from the target population to train an auxiliary audit model identifying inputs where the legacy model is likely to fail. By integrating the audit model's outputs into the conformal prediction framework, ACP produces prediction sets that guarantee marginal coverage while achieving substantially higher conditional coverage in practice than existing approaches. We develop and analyze two complementary integration strategies – one targeting marginal coverage with improved conditional performance, the other providing explicit group-conditional coverage guarantees – and establish theoretical guarantees for both. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the method and illustrate trade-offs between prediction set size and conditional coverage.

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

Object Tokens as a Bridge Between Segmentation and Visual Question Answering in Robotic Surgery

Visual Question Answering (VQA) in robotic surgery, referred to as surgical VQA, requires high-level understanding of complex surgical scenes and the integration of visual perception with language reasoning, with the potential to support surgical training and intraoperative decision-making. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown promising performance through parameter-efficient fine-tuning; however, most existing approaches rely on coarse visual grounding, typically limited to bounding boxes, which fails to capture the fine-grained spatial structure of surgical objects. In this work, we propose a unified framework that jointly performs pixel-level segmentation and visual question answering within a single framework. Our approach integrates a VLM with a Segment Anything Model (SAM)-based decoder and represents scene elements as object tokens generated by the VLM. These object tokens guide answer prediction and are further projected to the SAM-based decoder to produce segmentation masks. By optimizing the object token embeddings through both segmentation and question answering objectives, the model learns spatially grounded representations that enhance visual reasoning while providing explicit pixel-level grounding. We evaluate the proposed method on the private RAMIE (Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Esophagectomy) dataset and the public EndoVis18 dataset, where it consistently outperforms baseline methods for surgical VQA. These results demonstrate that incorporating context-aware object tokens into vision-language models improves fine-grained surgical scene understanding.

20.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-11

Clinical Profile and Genomic Characterization of the 2026 Bundibugyo Virus Index Case in Uganda

Bundibugyo virus disease (BVD) remains a high-consequence threat in Eastern and Central Africa, where cross-border mobility, nonspecific early symptoms, and delayed recognition can obscure transmission. In this case report, we describe Uganda’s 2026 BVD index case: a male patient who traveled from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Uganda and was admitted to a private hospital in Kampala on 11 May 2026 after more than two weeks of vomiting and diarrhea, with epigastric pain, weakness, and hiccups. He deteriorated rapidly, developing acute kidney injury, pulmonary edema, hepatic dysfunction, hypoxemia, delirium, atrial flutter, possible disseminated intravascular coagulation, and multiorgan failure, and died on 14 May. A posthumous EDTA whole-blood specimen tested at the Central Emergency Response and Surveillance Laboratory was positive for orthoebolavirus RNA and confirmed as Bundibugyo virus (BDBV) by RT-qPCR. Sequencing achieved 99% genome coverage at ≥100× depth. The 2026 BDBV genome formed a distinct lineage approximately equidistant from the 2007–2008 Butalya and 2012 Isiro variants, differing by 216–227 nucleotides (~1.2% sequence divergence). Here, we demonstrate the value of fatality surveillance, private-sector surveillance, diagnostic optimization through national specimen referral, and rapid molecular-genomic diagnostics for early detection, transmission chain interruption, and public health response coordination.

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

RIDGECUT: Learning Graph Partitioning with Rings and Wedges

arXiv:2505.13986v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise for combinatorial optimization problems on graphs by learning heuristics that generalize across instances. However, effectively incorporating domain knowledge into RL frameworks for graph partitioning remains challenging, as existing approaches typically rely on unconstrained node-level actions that lead to large action spaces and inefficient exploration. In this paper, we propose RidgeCut, an RL framework that constrains the action space to enforce structure-aware partitioning in the Normalized Cut problem. Using transportation networks as a motivating example, we introduce a novel concept that leverages domain knowledge about urban road topology – where natural partitions often take the form of concentric rings and radial wedges. By transforming the graph into linear or circular representations, our method enables the use of transformer-based policies and efficient learning via Proximal Policy Optimization. The resulting partitions from RidgeCut are not only aligned with expected spatial layouts but also achieve lower normalized cuts compared to existing methods. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world traffic graphs demonstrate that RidgeCut consistently outperforms existing methods while exhibiting strong inductive generalization across graph sizes. Although motivated by road networks, RidgeCut provides a general mechanism for embedding structural priors into RL frameworks for graph partitioning.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Compact Object-Level Representations with Open-Vocabulary Understanding for Indoor Visual Relocalization

Indoor visual relocalization plays a critical role in emerging spatial and embodied AI applications. However, prior research was predominantly devoted to low-level vision schemes, struggling to perceive scene semantics and compositions, which limits both interpretability and applicability. In this paper, we explore the issue of how to organize rich object information in a scene, including semantics, layout, and geometry, into a structured map representation, thereby utilizing object units exclusively to drive the camera relocalization task. To this end, we propose OpenReLoc, a camera relocalization system designed to provide scene understanding and accurate pose estimation capabilities. Leveraging recent foundation models, we first introduce a multi-modal mechanism to integrate open-vocabulary semantic knowledge for effective 2D-3D object matching. Additionally, we design object-oriented reference frames as position priors, paired with a reference frame selection strategy based on the Distance-IoU (DIOU), enabling extension to scalable scenes. Moreover, to ensure stable and accurate pose optimization, we also propose a dual-path 2D Iterative Closest Pixel loss guided by object shape. Experimental results demonstrate that OpenReLoc achieves superior relocalization recall and accuracy across various datasets. Our source code will be released upon acceptance.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

"I Didn't Make the Micro Decisions": Measuring, Inducing, and Exposing Goal-Level AI Contributions in Collaboration

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly shape how users form, refine, and extend their goals, attributing contributions in human-AI collaboration becomes critical for users calibrating their own reliance and for evaluators assessing AI-assisted work. Yet existing methods focus on final artifacts, missing the process through which goals themselves are jointly shaped. We introduce a goal-level attribution framework, CoTrace, that decomposes explicit goals into verifiable requirements and traces both direct contributions and indirect influences across dialogue turns. Applying CoTrace to 638 real-world collaboration logs, we find that while models account for only 11-26% of goal-shaping contribution, they contribute substantially more on introducing lower-level concrete requirements, and make various kinds of indirect contributions. Through controlled simulations, we show that interaction design choices significantly affect model goal-shaping behavior. In a user study, exposing participants to goal-level analyses shifts their perceived contributions by nearly 2 points on a 5-point scale, revealing systematic miscalibration in how users understand their own AI-assisted work.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Another Look at Log-PCA for Probability Measures: A Dynamical Formulation and Statistical Convergence

arXiv:2606.17196v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper is concerned with learning principal variations of random probability measures on $\mathbb{R}^m$ under the Wasserstein geometry. We introduce a new dynamical formulation to interpret the log-PCA, a linearized principal geodesic analysis, as a variational approach. Our differentiable version, termed as the Wasserstein Tangential PCA (WT-PCA), captures the local principal modes of geodesic variations of a (weighted) probability measure on the Wasserstein space via its covariance operator at barycenter. Based on the dynamical perspective and leveraging parallel transport structure of the optimal transport problems, we derive a general statistical convergence rate of the empirical WT-PCA when estimated from data in terms of the 2-Wasserstein distance between the population and empirical barycenter reference measures.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On the Wasserstein distance between a hyperuniform point process and its mean

arXiv:2404.09549v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the existence of bounds on the expected $p$-Wasserstein distance between a random measure and its mean under the assumption that the $p$-th centered moments of the counting statistics are controlled uniformly in space. The average Wasserstein transport cost is shown to be bounded from above and from below by some multiples of the number of points. $D$-dimensional versions of those results are also obtained. As a corollary, we prove that for any value of $p\geq 1$ the Ginibre point process can be seen as a perturbed lattice with identically distributed perturbations with a finite $p$-th moment.