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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

A Finite-Volume Scheme for the Continuum Extrapolation of Lattice Step-Scaling in (2+1)D Hamiltonian U(1) Gauge Theory

Authors:
Alessio Negro↗Emil Otis Rosanowski↗Lena Funcke↗Timo Jakobs↗Karl Jansen↗Paul Ludwig↗Carsten Urbach↗

arXiv:2606.20029v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a finite-volume scheme to perform controlled continuum extrapolations of the lattice step-scaling function, a key ingredient for determining the running coupling in a Hamiltonian lattice gauge theory in small volumes. As a testbed, we employ a dual Hamiltonian formulation of pure U(1) gauge theory in (2+1) dimensions and an operator basis that remains efficient toward weak coupling. We describe the implementation of static external charges on the spatial lattice and study, using matrix product states, the resulting confining string, from which we extract the static potential and a force-based renormalized coupling. Using the proposed finite-volume scheme, we demonstrate a stable continuum limit of the step-scaling function on the lattice sizes accessible to present Hamiltonian simulations. The method is readily extendable to other gauge groups and dimensions, providing a pathway toward Hamiltonian step-scaling studies in other theories.

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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Photon: Federated LLM Pre-Training

Authors:
Lorenzo Sani↗Alex Iacob↗Zeyu Cao↗Royson Lee↗Bill Marino↗Yan Gao↗Dongqi Cai↗Zexi Li↗Wanru Zhao↗Xinchi Qiu↗Nicholas D. Lane↗

arXiv:2411.02908v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling large language models (LLMs) demands extensive data and computing resources, which are traditionally constrained to data centers by the high-bandwidth requirements of distributed training. Low-bandwidth methods like federated learning (FL) could enable collaborative training of larger models across weakly-connected GPUs if they can effectively be used for pre-training. To achieve this, we introduce Photon, the first complete system for federated end-to-end LLM training, leveraging cross-silo FL for global-scale training with minimal communication overheads. Using Photon, we train the first federated family of decoder-only LLMs from scratch. We show that: (1) Photon can train model sizes up to 7B in a federated fashion while reaching an even better perplexity than centralized pre-training; (2) Photon model training time decreases with available compute, achieving a similar compute-time trade-off to centralized; and (3) Photon outperforms the wall-time of baseline distributed training methods by 35% via communicating 64x-512xless. Our proposal is robust to data heterogeneity and converges twice as fast as previous methods like DiLoCo. This surprising data efficiency stems from a unique approach combining small client batch sizes with extremely high learning rates, enabled by federated averaging's robustness to hyperparameters. Photon thus represents the first economical system for global internet-wide LLM pre-training.

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Closing the Reflection Gap: A Free Calibration Bonus for Agentic RL

Authors:
Yinglun Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.14211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs are increasingly deployed as agents that interact with external environments and observe feedback such as execution results, error messages, and tool outputs. A well-functioning agent should be able to leverage this feedback to accurately assess its own performance. Yet we find a persistent reflection gap: LLM agents tend to mis-assess their own outputs after observing concrete environment feedback – even for questions they correctly answered – and standard RL barely helps due to a credit-assignment mismatch. To close this gap, we propose RefGRPO, a simple yet effective fix that augments standard RL algorithms with two key ingredients: a free calibration bonus computed by contrasting the agent's own reflection with the actual outcome (requiring no additional reward model, LLM judge, or external annotation), and a dynamic schedule on its coefficient. Compared to standard RL baselines, our method simultaneously improves reflection calibration (e.g., reduces underconfidence rate $44.4\% \to 7.7\%$) and task accuracy (e.g., $75.1\% \to 76.5\%$) on text-to-SQL across five benchmarks. The resulting calibrated reflection turns the agent into its own verifier grounded in environment feedback, which further enables (i) better self-improvement that uses reflections as pseudo-rewards without outcome supervision, and (ii) more effective test-time selective prediction by committing only to rollouts flagged as correct.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

LaQual: An Automated Framework for LLM App Quality Evaluation

Authors:
Yan Wang↗Xinyi Hou↗Junjun Si↗Yanjie Zhao↗Weiguo Lin↗Haoyu Wang↗

arXiv:2508.18636v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Representing a new paradigm in software distribution, LLM app stores are rapidly emerging, offering users diverse choices for content generation, coding assistance, education, and more. However, current ranking and recommendation mechanisms in LLM app stores predominantly rely on static metrics, such as user interactions and favorites, making it challenging for users to efficiently identify high-quality apps. At the same time, current academic research focuses on specific vertical fields and lacks a general, automated evaluation framework applicable to the diverse LLM app ecosystem. To address the above challenges, we present LaQual, an automated framework for LLM app quality evaluation. LaQual integrates three key stages: (1) LLM app labeling and hierarchical classification for precise scenario mapping; (2) static indicator evaluation using time-weighted user engagement and functional capability indicators to filter low-quality apps; and (3) dynamic scenario-adapted evaluation, where an LLM generates scenario-specific evaluation metrics, scoring criteria, and tasks for comprehensive quality evaluation. Experiments on a mainstream LLM app store demonstrate the effectiveness of LaQual. Its automated scores show high consistency with human judgments. Through effective screening, LaQual can reduce the candidate LLM app pool by 66.7% to 81.3%. User studies further validate its significant outperformance over baseline systems, particularly in comparison efficiency (mean 5.45 vs. 3.30) and value of explanatory information (4.75 vs. 2.25). These results demonstrate that LaQual provides a scalable, objective, and user-centric solution for high-quality discovery and recommendation of LLM apps in real-world scenarios.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Multi-Head Attention-Based Feature Extractor Integration with Soft Actor-Critic for Porosity Prediction and Process Parameter Optimization in Additive Manufacturing

Authors:
Kianoush Aqabakee↗Leonardo Stella↗

arXiv:2606.20087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Additive manufacturing process optimization requires precise parameter control to minimize defects such as porosity. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) approaches using discrete action spaces suffer from slow convergence and susceptibility to local optima, limiting their effectiveness for high-precision manufacturing tasks. This study addresses these limitations by employing a continuous action space combined with a novel architecture that integrates a multi-head attention mechanism with the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm. The attention-based feature extractor enhances the agent's ability to capture subtle variations in low-dimensional input features, enabling more effective exploration-exploitation balance for navigating value spaces with local minima. We validate our approach on porosity prediction and process parameter optimization in laser powder bed fusion, demonstrating faster convergence and higher final reward values compared to standard RL methods including DQN, PPO, TD3, and vanilla SAC. The proposed methodology achieves a convergence value of 322.79 within 14 episodes, outperforming existing approaches while maintaining stability throughout training.

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

Evaluation Sovereignty in Metadata-Driven Classification: A Multi-Track Framework for Weakly Supervised Information Systems

Authors:
Raymond Vasquez↗

arXiv:2606.13436v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluation in machine learning is typically treated as a neutral measurement process. However, in operational information systems, evaluation outcomes are often conditioned by the processes used to generate labels. This paper does not seek to improve classification performance. Instead, it examines the validity of performance measurement under differing label-authority regimes. This issue is particularly relevant in large-scale metadata-driven systems, where labels are often incomplete, inconsistent, or weakly supervised. We introduce evaluation sovereignty, defined as the degree to which performance metrics are independent of label authority and supervision regime, and propose a multi-track evaluation framework that systematically varies training and evaluation label sources. Using hierarchical multi-label classification on large-scale scientific metadata, we demonstrate that models exhibiting strong performance under operational ("silver") evaluation degrade substantially under independent ("gold") evaluation, particularly for fine-grained classification. For example, Micro-F1 decreases from approximately 0.54 to 0.03. Notably, ranking-based metrics remain above baseline, revealing a divergence between latent model signal and classification validity. These findings suggest that commonly reported performance metrics may reflect alignment with labeling processes rather than true predictive capability. We therefore reconceptualize evaluation validity as a system-level property shaped by label governance and provide a practical methodology for auditing intelligent systems operating under weak supervision.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Explicit Context-Driven Neural Acoustic Modeling for High-Fidelity RIR Generation

Authors:
Chen Si↗Qianyi Wu↗Chaitanya Amballa↗Romit Roy Choudhury↗

arXiv:2509.15210v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Realistic sound simulation plays a critical role in many applications. A key element in sound simulation is the room impulse response (RIR), which characterizes how sound propagates within a given space. Recent studies have applied neural implicit methods to learn RIR using context information collected from the environment, such as scene images. However, these approaches do not effectively leverage explicit geometric information from the environment. To further exploit neural implicit models with direct geometric features, we present MiNAF, which queries a rough room mesh at given locations and extracts distance distributions as an explicit representation of local context. Our approach demonstrates that incorporating explicit local geometric features can better guide the model in generating more accurate RIR predictions. Through comparisons with conventional and state-of-the-art methods, we show that MiNAF performs competitively across various evaluation metrics.

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

General circuit mapping algorithm for neutral atom quantum computers

Authors:
Neven Gentil↗Lous S. Rianne↗Aida Todri-Sanial↗

arXiv:2606.20503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neutral atom quantum computers (NAQC) are emerging as a promising, scalable quantum computing platform because of their long qubit coherence, flexible qubit arrangement, and multiqubit gate capabilities. However, circuit execution often requires physically moving qubits, making compilation a critical optimization challenge. We propose a circuit independent mathematical framework built on graph-theoretic combinatorial optimization that determines the minimal number of required qubit transfers. This model captures spatial constraints specific to NAQC platforms with zone-limited gate operations and multi-qubit gates. From this framework, we encode the qubit mapping problem as a nonlinear integer program and solve it using a genetic algorithm, enabling trade-offs between minimizing the total traveled distance and the number of parallel transfer operations. Compared to the state-of-the-art scalable compiler for zoned architectures, our approach consistently finds fewer transfers. Depending on the optimization focus, our method produces shorter traveled distances or fewer parallel transfer operations. This work provides both theoretical guaranties and a practical tool for efficient, architecture-aware quantum circuit compilation. As a result, practitioners can generate hardware-aware mappings that reduce movement-induced errors and better exploit atom transfer parallelism, directly improving execution efficiency on NAQC devices.

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

Retrievable Gradients: Continual Post-Training Without Cumulative Weight Drift

Authors:
Weihang Su↗Jiacheng Kang↗Jingyan Xu↗Qingyao Ai↗Jianming Long↗Hanwen Zhang↗Bangde Du↗Xinyuan Cao↗Min Zhang↗Yiqun Liu↗

Continual post-training enables models to absorb emerging knowledge after deployment, but repeatedly updating shared parameters can accumulate weight drift, potentially causing catastrophic forgetting and degrading general capabilities. Retrieval-augmented generation avoids such parameter drift, yet often lacks the depth of parametric knowledge integration. In this paper, we propose ReGrad (Retrievable Gradients), a new paradigm that treats gradients as retrievable units of knowledge. ReGrad pre-computes document-specific gradients offline, stores them in an indexed Gradient Bank, and retrieves only query-relevant gradients at inference time for temporary weight adaptation. However, raw language-modeling gradients are optimized for token-level document reconstruction rather than for query-driven knowledge use. We therefore introduce a bi-level meta-learning objective that reshapes document-derived gradients into generalizable adaptation signals for downstream tasks. Experiments across general and domain-specific settings show that \textsc{ReGrad} outperforms CPT and RAG baselines, enabling scalable and reversible parametric knowledge injection without accumulating weight drift.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DiFlow-TTS: Compact and Low-Latency Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Discrete Flow Matching

Authors:
Ngoc-Son Nguyen↗Thanh V. T. Tran↗Hieu-Nghia Huynh-Nguyen↗Truong-Son Hy↗Van Nguyen↗

Zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) has made significant progress in replicating unseen voices, yet balancing generation quality and inference efficiency remains challenging. Autoregressive models suffer from high latency, while diffusion-based approaches are constrained by training-time configurations. Moreover, most flow-based methods operate in continuous space, which introduces optimization challenges because continuous token spaces are inherently more complex than discrete ones. To address these limitations, we propose DiFlow-TTS, a novel zero-shot TTS framework based on discrete flow matching. The model consists of a deterministic Phoneme-Content Mapper for linguistic modeling and a Factorized Discrete Flow Denoiser that simultaneously generates prosody and acoustic token streams. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple evaluation metrics.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Privacy-Preserving Text Sanitization for Distributed Agents Collaboration via Disentangled Representations

Authors:
Xuan Liu↗Hefeng Zhou↗Sicheng Chen↗Chao Yang↗Xingcheng Xu↗Jingjing Qu↗Jiong Lou↗Jie LI↗Xia Hu↗

When distributed agents exchange text across organizational boundaries, privacy leakage arises not only from explicit identifiers but also from distributional signatures such as formatting conventions, vocabulary choices, and syntactic patterns. We propose DiSan(Disentangled Sanitization), a privacy-preserving sanitization framework and a built-in component of Intern-Shannon for multi-agent collaboration. DiSan uses a two-stream encoder to factorize text into a source-invariant role subspace that preserves task semantics and a source-identifying style subspace that remains local. Federated proto-type alignment and adversarial regularization enable joint training without centralizing raw text. Experiments show that identifier-level masking is insufficient: masking 19.2% of tokens reduces TF-IDF stylometric attribution by only 18.6%. By contrast, DiSan reduces answer-level PII exposure by 20 times while maintaining 83% answer faithfulness on a distributed multi-agent RAG benchmark, and lowers Enron stylometric attribution by 73.2% under TF-IDF and 70.6% under a neural probe.

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

Multi-Turn Reasoning When Context Arrives in Pieces: Scalable Sharding and Memory-Augmented RL

Authors:
Shu Tong Luo↗Wenqin Liu↗Rui Liu↗Mingming Gong↗Jiaxian Guo↗

When a user reveals task-critical information across several conversation turns, LLM accuracy drops by up to 65% despite full context availability. We show that this Lost in Conversation degradation can be substantially mitigated by training models to maintain a compact rolling memory instead of attending to a growing history. To make such training scalable, we introduce a low-cost sharding pipeline that converts single-turn QA datasets into multi-turn fragmented-information episodes, eliminating the need for hours of manual annotation. Training only on sharded GSM8K, our memory-augmented policy significantly improves multi-turn accuracy and generalises zero-shot to harder math and out-of-domain long-context QA. Moreover, memory-trained models outperform full-history baselines even when given the full history at test time, suggesting that learning to compress induces more robust incremental reasoning than full-context exposure alone.

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13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Thermodynamic assessment of machine learning models for solid-state synthesis prediction

Authors:
Jane Schlesinger↗Simon Hjaltason↗Nathan J. Szymanski↗Christopher J. Bartel↗

arXiv:2602.04075v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning models have recently emerged to predict whether hypothetical solid-state materials can be synthesized. These models aim to circumvent direct first-principles modeling of solid-state phase transformations, instead learning from large databases of successfully synthesized materials. Here, we assess the alignment of several recently introduced synthesis prediction models with material and reaction thermodynamics, quantified by the energy with respect to the convex hull and a metric accounting for thermodynamic selectivity of enumerated synthesis reactions. A dataset of successful synthesis recipes was used to determine the likely bounds on both quantities beyond which materials can be deemed unlikely to be synthesized. With these bounds as context, thermodynamic quantities were computed using the CHGNet foundation potential for thousands of new hypothetical materials generated using the Chemeleon generative model. Four recently published machine learning models for synthesizability prediction were applied to this same dataset, and the resultant predictions were considered against computed thermodynamics. We find these models generally overpredict the likelihood of synthesis, but some model scores do trend with thermodynamic heuristics, assigning lower scores to materials that are less stable or do not have an available synthesis recipe that is calculated to be thermodynamically selective. In total, this work identifies existing gaps in machine learning models for materials synthesis and introduces a new approach to assess their quality in the absence of extensive negative examples (failed syntheses).

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

SAMark: A Self-Anchored Text Watermarking with Paragraph-Level Paraphrase Robustness

Authors:
Jiahao Huo↗Wenjie Qu↗Yibo Yan↗Kening Zheng↗Jiaheng Zhang↗Xuming Hu↗Philip S. Yu↗Mingxun Zhou↗

Semantic-level watermarking (SWM) improves robustness against text modifications by treating sentences as the basic unit. However, robustness to paragraph-level paraphrasing remains difficult because such attacks globally disrupt watermark signals by changing sentence order. In this work, we propose SAMark, a self-anchored watermarking framework that removes the dependency on sentence order by establishing a step-independent green region in semantic space. To improve detectability, we introduce a multi-channel hyperbolic scoring mechanism that amplifies watermark signals while suppressing noise from weakly aligned candidates. We further propose a diversity-aware filtering strategy that combines hard filtering with soft regularization, extending beyond simple n-gram repetition filters to address semantic redundancy. Experimental results show that SAMark achieves up to 90.2% TP@FP1% under typical paragraph-level paraphrasing attacks, outperforming the strongest prior baseline by more than 30% on average, while maintaining generation quality competitive with unwatermarked text and breaking the robustness-quality trade-off that limits prior methods.

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15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Symmetric Cooperative Motion in Higher Dimensions

Authors:
Louigi Addario-Berry↗Gavin Barill↗Hannah Cairns↗Jessica Lin↗

arXiv:2606.13459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove a distributional convergence result for a multidimensional version of symmetric cooperative motion which was introduced and studied in one dimension in [HRW, SCM1]. Our approach relies on framing the associated recursive distributional equation as a discretization of the porous medium equation. A major challenge is to analyze the behaviour of finite difference schemes which approximate weak solutions of the porous medium equation with unbounded initial data. In overcoming this difficulty, we perform a detailed analysis of the probability mass function of symmetric cooperative motion, in which we introduce several new comparison arguments for the discrete process. Consequently, along the way, we establish a novel multidimensional convergence result for a finite difference scheme approximating the ZKB/Barenblatt solution of the porous medium equation, which is of independent interest.

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16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

From Brewing to Resolution: Tracing the Internal Lifecycle of Code Reasoning in LLMs

Authors:
Siyue Chen↗Yifu Guo↗Yuquan Lu↗Zishan Xu↗Jiaye Lin↗Jianbo Lin↗Siyu Zhang↗Cheng Yang↗Junxin Li↗Yujia Li↗Yu Huo↗Ruixuan Wang↗…

arXiv:2606.17648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard accuracy metrics cannot explain why LLMs handle variable tracking but fail on semantically equivalent loops. We study an internal lifecycle of code reasoning in which models first brew the answer, making it linearly recoverable many layers before it becomes self-decodable, and then diverge into one of four resolution outcomes: Resolved, Overprocessed, Misresolved, or Unresolved. Understanding this lifecycle matters because similar task accuracies can mask fundamentally different failure modes that surface-level evaluation cannot detect. We introduce a dual diagnostic framework pairing layer-wise linear probing with Context-Stripped Decoding (CSD) and apply it to six code-reasoning task families across 16 models spanning Qwen, Llama, and DeepSeek architectures. All four outcomes carry substantial mass in every task family: overall Resolved is only 41.5%, with multiple tasks below 30%. Controlled sweeps over structure, depth, and operators expose task-specific failure bottlenecks: Function Call Resolved plunges from 61.1% to 2.5% as call depth increases from one to three. Across architectures and scales, the brewing scaffold remains stable, with normalized brewing duration 24-42% across all 16 models, while resolution success varies with capability. This indicates that the scaffold is a stable empirical regularity across the tested decoder-only Transformer families, whereas resolution success covaries with capability, scale, and training. Code: https://github.com/euyis1019/llm-brewing

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17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Cancer care disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada: A sequential mixed-methods study

Authors:
Timilshina↗Jacobson↗Birze↗Wodchis↗W. P↗Kuluski↗Strumpf↗Ammi↗

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly disrupted healthcare delivery worldwide, with cancer care among the most affected services. Prior studies documented delays in referrals, reduced specialist access, and increased provider burden. However, the extent to which these experiences were reflected at the system level remains unclear. Objective To document cancer care experiences and examine whether these experiences were reflected in population-level health system indicators across Ontario, Canada. Methods We used an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design. Qualitative data were collected through focus groups and semi-structured interviews with 32 participants, including patients with cancer (n=8), caregivers (n=5), healthcare providers (n=14), and decision-makers (n=5) across two hospital settings in Ontario, Canada. Emergent themes informed the development of quantitative indicators. We then conducted a retrospective population-based analysis of linked administrative health databases for cancer patients in Ontario (n=87,786) to assess the prevalence of identified themes. Results Four themes emerged: (I) delays in diagnosis and screening; (II) disrupted access to primary care; (III) barriers to specialist and mental health services; and (IV) fragmented care for patients with multimorbidity. Quantitative findings corroborated major themes. Screening rates declined for cervical (64.8% to 57.5%) and breast cancer (64.5% to 57.2%). While in-person primary care shifted almost entirely to virtual modalities (8.5% to 95.4%), overall visit volumes remained stable. Specialist care showed uneven patterns, with increased oncology visits but declines in cardiology and mental health services. Patients with multiple comorbidities experienced the largest reductions in non-oncology specialist care. Conclusion The pandemic disrupted key components of cancer care, particularly screening, access to certain specialist services, and care for patients with complex needs. Integrating qualitative and quantitative evidence highlights areas of system vulnerability and underscores the need for coordinated, resilient cancer care capable of maintaining essential services during future crises.

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18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Wellbeing After Stroke-2 (WAterS-2): a feasibility study with process evaluation exploring inclusive, accessible, online psychological support after stroke

Authors:
Longley↗Woodward-Nutt↗Cotterill↗Chouliaria↗Thomas↗Bamford↗Bowen↗Patchwood↗

Objectives: Explore feasibility and acceptability of upskilling a workforce to deliver a co-developed intervention, based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), to support psychological adjustment post-stroke targeting underserved groups. Design: Multi-site, single-arm feasibility study with embedded mixed-methods process evaluation (ISRCTN17628580). Setting: Four NHS community stroke services across England. Participants: 1. Stroke survivors [≥]18 years of age, [≥]4 months post-stroke, reporting psychological difficulties adjusting to stroke, able to consent and access remote group sessions in English; 2. Group facilitators from NHS stroke services, not ACT specialists. Intervention: WAterS-2: an eight-session, remotely-delivered ACT-informed group intervention. Outcome measures: Recruitment, fidelity, safety, acceptability and perceived value were assessed using fidelity checklists, post-intervention surveys and semi-structured interviews with stroke survivors and facilitators. Clinical outcomes including mood (HADS), wellbeing (ONS4), psychological flexibility (AAQ-ABI), measured post-group and three-months later. Results: Nineteen stroke survivors recruited (mean 9.6 months post-stroke; n=5 (26%) minoritised ethnicities; n=10 (52%) with aphasia). Thirteen facilitators - including two peer support workers - delivered the intervention with fidelity following structured training across four services. Drop-out was low (2/19; 11%); with 15 (79%) attending [≥]5/8 sessions. Remote data collection was feasible (79% follow-up completion), with no adverse events recorded. Acceptability was high: survivors valued peer connection, grounding and mindfulness practices. ACT metaphors were helpful for some but challenging for others, including some with aphasia. Online delivery was suitable but limited informal connection. Facilitators reported increased capability, incorporating ACT skills into routine care. NHS workforce pressures and geographically-constrained referral pathways limited recruitment reach. Conclusions: WAterS-2 is feasible, safe, acceptable and inclusive. A mixed workforce, including NHS peer support workers, can be upskilled to deliver with fidelity. Inclusion of underserved groups is achievable but requires active strategies beyond standard NHS referral routes. Findings inform a provisional logic model and a future pragmatic trial.

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

Context Compression Is Not One Thing: Readable Symbolic Re-expression vs. Coherent Summary at Matched Budget

Authors:
Sisong Bei↗Mikhail L. Arbuzov↗Ziwei Dong↗Dmitri Kalaev↗Alexey Shvets↗

We study context compression for multi-hop question answering with small language models. We propose Telegraph English, a readable symbolic format that rewrites retrieved passages into structured entity-relation statements, preserving reasoning evidence at lower token cost. In controlled experiments on MuSiQue, TwoWiki, and HotpotQA, Telegraph English outperforms three matched-budget compression baselines (character-level deletion, truncation, and random sub-sampling) on every dataset, with gains of 13 to 20 F1 percentage point. It also outperforms a coherent prose summary produced by the same encoder on the hardest dataset. A pre-registered depth-interaction hypothesis is null: the advantage does not grow with reasoning depth within datasets. We interpret these results as evidence that readable symbolic re-expression preserves entity content more densely than either natural language or coherent summarization at matched token budget.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A New k-Space Model for Non-Cartesian Fourier Imaging

Authors:
Chin-Cheng Chan↗Justin P. Haldar↗

For the past several decades, it has been popular to reconstruct Fourier imaging data using model-based approaches that can easily incorporate physical constraints and advanced regularization/machine learning priors. The most common modeling approach is to represent the continuous image as a linear combination of shifted "voxel" basis functions. Although well-studied and widely-deployed, this voxel-based model is associated with longstanding limitations, including high computational costs, slow convergence, and a propensity for artifacts. In this work, we reexamine this model from a fresh perspective, identifying new issues that may have been previously overlooked (including undesirable approximation, wrap-around, and nullspace characteristics). Our insights motivate us to propose a new model that is more resilient to the limitations (old and new) of the previous approach. Specifically, the new model is based on a Fourier-domain basis expansion rather than the standard image-domain voxel-based approach. Illustrative results, which are presented in the context of non-Cartesian MRI reconstruction, demonstrate that the new model enables improved image quality (reduced artifacts) and/or reduced computational complexity (faster computations and improved convergence).

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

M\"OVE: A Holistic LLM Benchmark for the German Public Sector

Authors:
Camilla Dalerci↗Thilo Michael↗Robin Schaefer↗Daniel Weinland↗

We present M\"OVE (Modelle für die \"Offentliche Verwaltung Evaluieren), a holistic benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in the context of the German public sector. While LLMs are increasingly adopted in public administration, model selection remains largely ad hoc, and existing benchmarks offer limited guidance: they are predominantly English-centric, US-centric in content, and focus exclusively on task performance. M\"OVE addresses these gaps by evaluating 39 models across two complementary dimensions. Performance criteria cover summarization, question answering, and topic extraction. Governance criteria assess hallucination tendencies, energy consumption, provider transparency, and alignment with German constitutional values and knowledge about positions by German political parties. In total, we utilize ten German-language datasets, including gold- and silverstandard datasets that we constructed to reflect public-administration domains. We employ a multi-metric evaluation strategy combining classical NLP metrics, embedding-based methods, and LLM-as-a-judge approaches. Our results show that no single model dominates across all criteria: top performers differ between tasks, and model size alone is a poor predictor of quality. We further evaluate the benchmark itself, analyzing its statistical precision, LLM judge reliability, the impact of our private datasets on model rankings, the sensitivity of our results to prompt formulation, and the validity of our energy consumption estimates. M\"OVE is designed as a living benchmark under active development; results are publicly available at https://moeve.bundesdruckerei.de/.

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22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Sensitivity of polaron-molecule observables to MDR/GUP-like ultraviolet deformations at low energies via quantum computing

Authors:
Ezequiel Valero↗Hugo Catala↗Victor Ilisie↗Germ\'an Rodrigo↗

arXiv:2606.14479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that impurity many-body observables can display enhanced sensitivity to ultraviolet deformations of generalized-uncertainty-principle and modified-dispersion-relation type at accessible energy scales. Using a deformed polaron-molecule Hamiltonian constructed to preserve the infrared sector, we quantify the impact of such deformations on spectral and Ramsey observables and implement the corresponding dynamics in a controlled quantum computing setting. We identify regimes near the polaron-molecule crossover where small ultraviolet deformations are strongly amplified, leading to experimentally resolvable changes in quasiparticle properties and spectral response. Our results establish a concrete sensitivity-based route to low-energy quantum-gravity phenomenology in a well-defined many-body platform and delimit the validity of the effective description. Furthermore, we report experimental validation on the QRed superconducting quantum processor (BSC-CNS).

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23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Effective Resistances and Commute Times in Sparse Random Geometric Graphs

Authors:
Filip O. Rupchin↗Peter J. Mucha↗

arXiv:2606.14895v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The commute time between two nodes in a network - the expected number of steps for a random walk to travel from one node to the other and then return - is a metric of broad importance arising in community detection, network routing, dimensionality reduction, and diffusion modeling. For random geometric graphs (RGGs), in which nodes are placed at random in a spatial domain and connected pairwise wherever their Euclidean distance is below a threshold radius, the relationship between commute times and the embedding geometry remains poorly understood outside very dense settings (where the role of the geometry disappears and commute times degenerate to a sum of inverse degrees). We develop and numerically validate a model for approximating commute times in sparse RGGs on a torus by combining theoretically motivated geometric contributions with an inverse degree sum. The geometric terms include a universal logarithmic contribution from the Laplacian, a quadratic correction encoding the compact topology of the torus, and a quartic angular term reflecting the square anisotropy of the domain. We fit this model to samples of node pairs across a range of graph sizes and mean degrees, demonstrating good predictive performance and that the geometric terms contribute significantly to model fit. We then study the continuous perturbation of the model from a regular square lattice to a fully random geometric graph, further validating the functional model form through this transition and showing how commute times in sparse RGGs retain meaningful geometric information about the embedding space.

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

WildIFEval: Instruction Following in the Wild

Authors:
Gili Lior↗Asaf Yehudai↗Ariel Gera↗Liat Ein-Dor↗

Recent LLMs have shown remarkable success in following user instructions, yet handling instructions with multiple constraints remains a significant challenge. In this work, we introduce WildIFEval - a large-scale dataset of 7K real user instructions with diverse, multi-constraint conditions. Unlike prior datasets, our collection spans a broad lexical and topical spectrum of constraints, extracted from natural user instructions. We categorize these constraints into eight high-level classes to capture their distribution and dynamics in real-world scenarios. Leveraging WildIFEval, we conduct extensive experiments to benchmark the instruction-following capabilities of leading LLMs. WildIFEval clearly differentiates between small and large models, and demonstrates that all models have a large room for improvement on such tasks. We analyze the effects of the number and type of constraints on performance, revealing interesting patterns of model constraint-following behavior. We release our dataset to promote further research on instruction-following under complex, realistic conditions.

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25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-11

‘Footballers are not superheroes’: we must tackle the mental and physical pressures of elite sport

Authors:
David Adam↗

As the men’s football World Cup gets under way, how the game weighs on the health of athletes still isn’t talked about enough, says player-turned-medic Vincent Gouttebarge. As the men’s football World Cup gets under way, how the game weighs on the health of athletes still isn’t talked about enough, says player-turned-medic Vincent Gouttebarge.

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