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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

LLM-Based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for Assessing the Explainability of Facial Skin Disease Classification Models

Authors:
Gyuyeon Na↗

This study proposes a domain-specific LLM-based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for assessing Grad-CAM explanations in facial skin disease diagnosis models. While previous studies have primarily focused on improving classification performance through data augmentation techniques, relatively few studies have systematically examined whether model explanations are grounded in clinically relevant lesion regions. In this study, geometric augmentation, color-based augmentation, and mixed augmentation strategies were applied to facial skin disease classification models based on EfficientNet-B0, MobileNetV3, and ResNet18. Grad-CAM was employed to generate visual explanations representing the models' decision-making processes. Furthermore, an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation framework was designed using GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, and Claude Sonnet 4.6 to assess Grad-CAM explanations from the perspectives of lesion localization and explanation trustworthiness. To improve evaluation consistency and clinical grounding, a progressive prompt engineering strategy was introduced, incorporating evaluation rubrics, clinical knowledge, penalty rules, and structured output formats.

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

Compositional Skill Routing for LLM Agents: Decompose, Retrieve, and Compose

Authors:
Xueping Gao↗

LLM agents increasingly rely on external skills – reusable tool specifications – but real-world tasks often require composing multiple skills, not just selecting one. We formalize this as the Compositional Skill Routing problem: given a complex user query and a large skill library, decompose the query into atomic sub-tasks, retrieve the appropriate skill for each sub-task, and compose an executable plan. We present SkillWeaver, a decompose-retrieve-compose framework combining an LLM task decomposer, a bi-encoder skill retriever with FAISS indexing, and a dependency-aware DAG planner. To support evaluation, we introduce CompSkillBench, a benchmark of 300 compositional queries over 2,209 real MCP server skills spanning 24 functional categories, sourced from the public MCP ecosystem. Our experiments reveal that task decomposition quality is the primary bottleneck: standard LLM decomposition reaches only 34.2% category recall at the step level. To address this, we propose Iterative Skill-Aware Decomposition (SAD), a retrieval-augmented feedback loop that iteratively aligns decomposition with available skills. SAD improves decomposition accuracy from 51.0% to 67.7% (+32.7%, Wilcoxon p < 10^-6) in a single iteration; DA-conditioned analysis confirms that correct granularity is the prerequisite for effective retrieval (CatR@1 rises from 34% to 41% when DA=1). SkillWeaver reduces context window consumption by over 99%, and transfer experiments confirm generalization (+35.6% relative DA gain even when target categories are absent from the retrieval pool).

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Controlled Chaos in 4D SCFTs

Authors:
Florent Baume↗Atakan \c{C}avu\c{s}o\u{g}lu↗Vivek Chakrabhavi↗Jonathan J. Heckman↗

arXiv:2606.23785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chaotic dynamics play an important role in a number of physical systems. One of the qualitative hallmarks of this behavior is the appearance of a sufficiently "complex" spectrum of energy levels. This also makes it challenging to directly verify the onset of chaos in interacting quantum field theories. We present a class of 4D superconformal field theories (SCFTs) given by orbifolds of 4D $\mathcal{N} = 4$ Super Yang–Mills theory in which operator mixing in a controlled subsector is described by an effective spin chain in one spatial dimension with nearest neighbor interactions tuned by the marginal couplings of the SCFT. Tuning the marginal couplings results in a chaotic spectrum, while generically the spin chain exhibits Anderson localization. We diagnose the onset of chaos by analyzing the statistical distribution of eigenvalues of the dilatation operator, in particular properties such as eigenvalue level repulsion, spectral rigidity, and the spectral form factor. We also show that other diagnostics such as Krylov complexity sometimes do not faithfully capture this information. This structure defines a chaotic billiard in the target space of the stringy realization. We also comment on the large $N$ holographic dual description, where the controlled single spin chain approximation must be supplemented by multi-trace dynamics, i.e., the splitting and joining of multiple spin chains.

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

Stable Menus of Public Goods: AI-Enabled Progress

Authors:
Sara Fish↗

arXiv:2606.16989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Using an open problem from the EC 2025 paper "Stable Menus of Public Goods" as a testbed, we conduct experiments to understand the effectiveness of different AI-for-EconCS research workflows. Specifically, we study three questions: Does providing human intuition in the prompt help? Does automated multi-turn interaction help? And, does an LLM outperform a first-year PhD student? Regarding the first two questions, we provide evidence for the following workflow suggestions: (1) prompting with human intuition can encourage the LLM to have better "taste", (2) multi-turn workflows help when the pipeline encourages "ambitious" steps. Regarding the third question, using an unpublished manuscript written by the paper's senior authors prior to collaborating with the first-year PhD student, we compare the effectiveness of the LLM with that of the first-year PhD student, and find that the LLM is slightly less effective.

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05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Structure preserving properties of higher order moment closures for TASEP

Authors:
Kilian Pioch↗Lars Gr\"une↗Thomas Kriecherbauer↗Michael Margaliot↗

arXiv:2604.15925v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) is a stochastic model for the unidirectional flow of interacting particles on a 1D-lattice that is much used in systems biology and statistical physics. Its master equation describes the evolution of the probability distribution on the configuration space. The size of the master equation grows exponentially with the length of the lattice. It is known that the complexity of the system may be reduced using mean-field approximations. We provide a rigorous definition of a family of such models using moments of any order and an extension to the pair approximation for obtaining closures for the system. The dimension of these models grows linearly with the lattice size and exponentially in the order of the approximation. Moreover, we show that the states of these models still have a probabilistic interpretation and that basic structural properties of the master equation are preserved. This extends known results on the Ribosome Flow Model which can be viewed as the first order approximation for TASEP.

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

Steady-State Approximation Error of Heterogeneous Mean-Field Models

Authors:
Lei Ying↗

arXiv:2606.09022v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper studies heterogeneous mean-field models in which agent parameters are sampled from a population distribution. We establish an $O(1/M)$ bound on the steady-state mean-square error between the occupancy measure of the $M$-agent system and the corresponding annealed mean-field equilibrium. The analysis extends Stein's method for homogeneous mean-field models and reveals a fundamental difference between homogeneous and heterogeneous systems. While stability of the mean-field dynamics is sufficient in the homogeneous setting, heterogeneous systems further require uniform robustness of the occupancy dynamics with respect to perturbations of the initial condition. The results are illustrated through a heterogeneous SIS epidemic model.

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

SCAN: Enhance Time Series Anomaly Detection via Multi-Scale Neighborhood-Centered Clustering

Authors:
Xingze Zheng↗Hanyin Cheng↗Siyuan Wang↗Yiting Hao↗Peng Chen↗Yuan Jun↗Yang Shu↗

arXiv:2606.19255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series anomaly detection plays a crucial role in a wide range of real-world applications. Reconstruction-based methods have become the mainstream paradigm, but they suffer from over-generalization and under-generalization problems, which are challenging to balance. To address this, we introduce multi-scale clustering to enhance reconstruction-based methods. At the representation level, we integrate the cluster center representations of normal patterns to constrain the model to target representative normal patterns for reconstruction, preventing dominance of powerful capacity and representation capability. At the anomaly criterion level, we derive anomaly confidence score based on cluster membership probability and combine it with reconstruction error, providing dual criteria for detection. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the cluster center representations and anomaly confidence score depends on the clustering performance. Accordingly, we extract neighborhood-centered representations for multi-view clustering to improve clustering performance. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets from diverse application domains demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of SCAN.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

TimeRouter: Efficient and Adaptive Routing of Time-Series Foundation Models

Authors:
Kanghui Ning↗Yushan Jiang↗Kashif Rasul↗Anderson Schneider↗Yuriy Nevmyvaka↗Dongjin Song↗

arXiv:2606.11625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series foundation models (TSFMs) are increasingly explored as predictive experts within emerging agentic time-series systems. However, TSFMs exhibit heterogeneous inductive biases, and no single model consistently dominates across forecasting regimes, making expert selection a critical challenge. Existing systems often delegate this decision to LLM-based controllers, incurring substantial inference overhead. We present TimeRouter, an efficient routing framework that leverages empirical complementarity across a pool of pretrained TSFMs through lightweight discriminative routing, selective gating, and ensemble fallback. Concretely, TimeRouter combines a learned routing head, a selective gate, and an ensemble fallback, enabling adaptive expert selection without invoking an LLM at inference time. TimeRouter achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GIFT-EVAL leaderboard, with an LB MASE of 0.6765. Beyond benchmark performance, our ablation studies provide empirical insights into TSFM routing design, highlighting the importance of pool composition and selective gating. Taken together, these results position TimeRouter as a modular and lightweight routing layer for future agentic time-series systems built upon foundation-model pools. Our code is available at https://github.com/UConn-DSIS/TimeRouter.

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09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Arrangements of Consecutive Numbers in Mallows Permutations

Authors:
Katarzyna Rybarczyk↗

arXiv:2606.12410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the random variable that counts the number of specific arrangements of clustered consecutive numbers in permutations under the Mallows distribution. We provide an asymptotic expression for the expected value of this random variable. This result extends and tightens the previously known result by Pinsky (2022) concerning clustered consecutive numbers in Mallows permutations. Moreover, we identify a range of parameters for which the distribution of the number of arrangements of clustered consecutive numbers in Mallows permutations is close to a Poisson distribution.

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10.
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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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Online Convex Optimization with Sublinear Noisy Probes

Authors:
Simone Di Gregorio↗Anupam Gupta↗Stefano Leonardi↗Matteo Russo↗

arXiv:2606.14640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study Online Convex Optimization (OCO) over a convex set $K\subseteq \mathbb R^d$, where in each round $t$ the learner selects $x_t\in K$ and then observes a convex loss $f_t:K\to[0,1]$, with the goal of minimizing regret to the best fixed decision in hindsight. We introduce a unified probing model that generalizes two recent lines of work: sublinear best-expert queries in the experts setting, and pairwise (comparison-based) feedback available every round in OCO. In our framework, the learner has a budget of $k\le T$ pairwise probes; on a probed round it may query two points and learn which one has smaller loss. Our main result shows that even a sublinear and noisy probe budget can provably improve worst-case regret in the full feedback OCO regime. With $k$ $\delta$-noisy pairwise probes, we obtain: $ Reg_T \le O\left(\min\left\{\sqrt{dT\ln T},\; \frac{dT\ln T}{k|1-2\delta|}\right\}\right) $, which is tight (up to logarithmic factors in $T$) across $T$, $k$ and $\delta$. Specifically regarding the noise parameter $\delta \in [0,1]$, the regret guarantee smoothly degrades as the oracle response approaches a coin flip, i.e., $\delta$ is close to $\frac{1}{2}$. When applying the same techniques to a finite $K$ for the prediction with $d$ experts setting, the resulting rates are instead completely tight in all parameters, including $d$. Our analysis gives a streamlined treatment of pairwise probing in OCO by quantifying the benefit of probing via a variance reduction effect, combined with a second-order (variance-based) analysis of Continuous Exponential Weights.

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12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Nonlinear cascaded quantum network with giant emitters

Authors:
Xin Wang↗Jia-Qi Li↗Zhihai Wang↗Anton Frisk Kockum↗Lei Du↗Tao Liu↗Franco Nori↗

arXiv:2404.09829v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chiral quantum optics is central to developing scalable quantum networks, yet existing approaches rely predominantly on linear single-photon regimes. It remains unclear how to generate directional multiphotons. Here we show that giant emitters coupled to nonlinear quantum optical baths enable tunable directional correlated photons, revealing a mechanism for multiphoton directional emission. We demonstrate that the propagation phases of correlated photons, together with the coupling phases of giant emitters, can generate destructive interference in one direction while enhancing emission in the opposite direction, making directionality fully tunable. Building on this mechanism, we introduce a nonlinear cascaded quantum network paradigm mediated by correlated flying qubits, providing a configurable building block enabling distinct many-body applications beyond linear unidirectional setups. These results reveal a rich landscape for engineering multiphoton propagation and correlations through interference in giant emitter-nonlinear bath architectures, offering pathways for quantum networks and strongly correlated light-matter platforms.

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

AAPA: Adversarially Anchored Preference Alignment for Post-Training of Large Language Models

Authors:
Faqiang Qian↗Kang An↗Weikun Zhang↗Ziliang Wang↗Xuhui Zheng↗Liangjian Wen↗Yong Dai↗Mengya Gao↗Yichao Wu↗

arXiv:2509.25148v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Post-training alignment of large language models often combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on expert demonstrations with reinforcement learning (RL) from preference or verifiable feedback. SFT provides a useful behavioral anchor but can overfit to static demonstrations, whereas RL encourages exploration but may drift from expert behavior or exploit imperfect rewards. We propose AAPA (Adversarially Anchored Preference Alignment), a plug-in framework that augments existing post-training objectives with a sentence-level adversarial anchoring signal. AAPA compares policy rollouts with offline, pre-collected expert responses using a fixed lightweight discriminator, and therefore requires neither online teacher inference nor discriminator co-training during policy optimization. The same anchoring term can be added to SFT, GRPO, and CHORD while preserving their original training pipelines. Experiments on instruction-following benchmarks show that AAPA consistently improves the corresponding base objectives across model scales. In particular, the staged AAPA configuration improves over a strong GRPO baseline by 5.77\% on \texttt{Qwen3-0.6B} and 3.75\% on \texttt{Qwen3-4B}. Further analyses on response length, log-probability distributions, and discriminator variants suggest that adversarial anchoring provides a stable semantic grounding signal for preference optimization. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/IsFaqq/AAPA}.

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14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Human migration has surged since 2000 — these maps reveal where people are going

Authors:
Miryam Naddaf↗

Modelling with artificial-intelligence tools has filled gaps in migration data, revealing detailed global population movements from 1990 to 2023. Modelling with artificial-intelligence tools has filled gaps in migration data, revealing detailed global population movements from 1990 to 2023.

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15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Metrics for Evaluating Biological AI Model Predictive Accuracy at the Data-Substrate Level

Authors:
Ewing↗M. A↗

Reports in the biological literature disagree on whether a given model can predict a biological outcome from a given data sample — one study finding a model capable, another, on the same kind of data, finding it is not. This is particularly a challenge in relation to LLMs–where the models are large and opaque, with weights and training data inaccessible.textbf{ }Such disagreements cannot be settled by directly inspecting the model. To address this challenge, we considertextbf{ }an alternative approach: assessing whether the data sample is adequate to support the prediction asserted. For a given dataset, its substrate — the underlying structure of the data — determines what any model can recover, independent of architecture or capacity. At the same time, predicting the present state of a biological process and predicting the direction of its future change are different tasks; the second is supportable among AI models only where the data encode direction as determinable from the state — a property we call encoding — and is unsupportable where the same observed state precedes change in opposite directions — a property we call non-identifiability, in the informational rather than the statistical sense. We introduce two generic metrics, Predictive Blindness Risk (PBR) and Prediction Indeterminacy Measure (PIM), that evaluate a data substrate for predictive accuracy directly — without access to model weights, architecture, or training data — and locate the regions of a data substrate where a predictive claim can be supported and where it cannot. Using human biological subjects, we employ the Yale Brain Metastases Longitudinal Data (1,430 human subjects; 11,892 MRI studies; four sequences) and show that direction of change was non-identifiable across regions encompassing the majority of transitions; a nonlinear AI model gained essentially nothing over majority-direction prediction there while recovering direction near-perfectly where the state encoded it; and model accuracy tracked data-substrate resolvability continuously (Spearman {rho} = -0.95 to -1.00). The metrics adjudicate, before any model is trusted and from the data alone, where claims of predictive accuracy — of state, or of the law of change — can be supported.

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

Geometry-Consistent Endoscopic Representations for Image-Guided Navigation via Structured Foundation Model Adaptation

Authors:
Hongchao Shu↗Roger D. Soberanis-Mukul↗Hao Ding↗Morgan Ringel↗Mali Shen↗Saif Iftekar Sayed↗Hedyeh Rafii-Tari↗Mathias Unberath↗

Accurate vision-based navigation in monocular endoscopy is difficult due to limited depth cues, weak tissue texture, non-rigid deformation, and substantial appearance variation across domains, all of which complicate pose estimation, depth prediction, and image-to-anatomy alignment. Although recent vision foundation models have shown promise, their learned representations often remain insufficiently geometry-consistent, hindering stable feature correspondence and limiting their reliability for downstream navigation tasks. We propose a unified framework for learning geometry-consistent and domain-robust image representations for monocular endoscopy. The framework combines a synthetic data pipeline that provides accurate geometric supervision with Hierarchy-Aware Geometry-Semantic Adaptation, a structured alternative to standard LoRA that inserts low-rank adapters selectively across the transformer hierarchy and couples them with layer-wise training objectives to encourage geometric correspondence in intermediate features and semantic consistency in deeper features. Experiments on public and proprietary datasets show improved geometric and semantic representation quality, leading to better performance on downstream navigation tasks including pose estimation and monocular depth estimation. The learned representations show favorable synthetic-to-real transfer on clinical bronchoscopy and provide a useful initialization for adaptation to sinus endoscopy and colonoscopy under limited supervision. The framework also shows favorable scaling with model size and training data. These results support hierarchy-aware, geometry-guided adaptation as a practical approach for endoscopic representation learning.

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

Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retrieval

Authors:
HyunJin Kim↗Jaejun Shim↗Young Jin Kim↗JinYeong Bak↗

arXiv:2606.17664v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unsupervised dense retrievers offer scalability by learning semantic similarity from unlabeled documents via contrastive learning, but they struggle to capture the temporal relevance, retrieving semantically related but temporally misaligned documents-an important aspect when a document collection spans multiple time periods (e.g., retrieving documents from 2018-2025 for "Who is the president in 2019?" introduces temporal ambiguity). Existing methods rely on supervised training with explicit timestamps, which are not always feasible. We propose TPOUR (Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retriever), which uses our novel training method Temporal Retrieval Preference Optimization (TRPO). TRPO reinterprets preference learning in the temporal dimension, guiding the retriever to favor temporally aligned documents. TPOUR further generalizes to unseen time periods via interpolation in a learned time embedding, enabling continuous temporal alignment. Experiments on temporal information retrieval (T-IR), TPOUR outperforms both unsupervised and supervised baselines. Compared to Qwen-Embedding-8B, despite being about 72.7x smaller, TPOUR Contriever improves average nDCG@5 by +4.04 (+12.15%) on explicit and +4.98 (+15.21%) on implicit queries. We provide our code at https://github.com/agwaBom/TPOUR.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Large Language Models Do Not Always Need Readable Language

Authors:
Jiayi Zhu↗Haoxuan Peng↗Junxi Wang↗Liang Ke↗Chen Zhang↗Linfeng Zhang↗

Large language models (LLMs) are commonly prompted and interfaced with human-readable natural language, even when the intended reader is another model. This paper investigates whether semantic information can be encoded in compact, non-standard textual forms that sacrifice human readability while remaining recoverable by LLMs. We refer to this class of model-centric textual representations as BabelTele, approached here not as a fixed protocol but as an empirical probe into LLMs' capacity to generate and interpret such representations. Through readability diagnostics, model likelihood measures, human questionnaires, and downstream task evaluations, we find that BabelTele can substantially depart from ordinary natural language while preserving core semantics for instruction-tuned LLMs. As a task-agnostic representational paradigm, BabelTele demonstrates high information density, maintaining 99.5% semantic fidelity even when the text volume is condensed to 27.9% of its original length. We further evaluate its semantic robustness in cross-model transfer, agent memory, and multi-agent communication. Results suggest that BabelTele can reduce context overhead while generally maintaining reliable downstream performance, although its effectiveness depends on the compressor-reader pair and task setting. These findings indicate that human readability, natural-language typicality, and model-side semantic recoverability can be partially decoupled, opening a path toward model-native representations in future exploration of LLM systems.

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19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Grid-state deformation in a no-jump non-Hermitian bosonic dimer

Authors:
B. M. Rodriguez-Lara↗H. Ghaemi-Dizicheh↗S. Dehdashti↗A. Hanke↗A. Touhami↗J. N\"otzel↗

arXiv:2606.17036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the no-jump evolution of ideal grid states in a lossy bosonic dimer with differential decay. The effective non-Hermitian quadratic dynamics induces a complex symplectic flow in phase space that deforms both the primitive lattice vectors and the origin seed. The average decay rate controls common attenuation, while coherent hopping and differential decay control the reduced dimer deformation. The reduced sector contains elliptic, parabolic, and hyperbolic regimes with imaginary spectra, an exceptional point, and real spectra, producing oscillatory, linear, and exponential lattice deformations. Although projected lattice areas can change, the deformation comes from a determinant-one complex symplectic flow on the full four-dimensional phase space. For a Gaussian regularization of the origin seed, we derive the associated complex width matrix and identify the positivity conditions that preserve Gaussian form. For an initial two-mode qunaught product state, the lossless limit recovers the standard beam-splitter generation of a square GKP$+$ Bell pair, while the no-jump dynamics produces its non-Hermitian deformation with a postselection cost set by the no-jump probability.

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

Practical Anonymous Two-Party Gradient Boosting Decision Tree

Authors:
Chenyu Huang↗Fan Zhang↗Minxin Du↗Sherman S. M. Chow↗Huangxun Chen↗Huaming Rao↗Danqing Huang↗Bo Qian↗Peng Chen↗

arXiv:2605.26903v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Structured data is well handled by gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT), which are usually trained on vertically partitioned features across mutually distrustful parties. High speed and interpretability make GBDTs popular in finance and healthcare, where neural networks may fall short. Enabling secure computation for GBDTs poses unique challenges, requiring secure record alignment for comparison. Relying on private set intersection (PSI) is a de facto approach. Mistaking PSI for a safety measure actually exposes which record identifiers (IDs) are shared between the datasets. Although circuit-PSI could help, it is costly for generic uses. New ideas are needed to efficiently train in a "dark forest". Aiming to hide the IDs, we initiate the study of anonymous GBDT training on split data held by two parties. Dual circuit-PSI in our design lets the parties alternate as receiver to run pick-then-sum over local features. Via oblivious programmable pseudorandom functions, we propagate circuit-PSI outputs as shared state across runs. Avoiding universal alignment, we resolve the neglected dilemma that ID hiding incurs a cost that scales with domain size. Next, we halve the cost of ciphertext packing used to convert single-instruction multiple-data homomorphic encryption from (ring) learning with errors in prior secure GBDT (Usenix Security' 23) and related secure machine-learning computations. Comparative experiments show our protocol remains competitive with leaky approaches in efficiency. Enabling ID-hiding aggregation, our techniques can extend to other vertically partitioned analytics.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Learning to Emulate Chaos: Adversarial Optimal Transport Regularization

Authors:
Gabriel Melo↗Leonardo Santiago↗Peter Y. Lu↗

arXiv:2604.21097v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chaos arises in many complex dynamical systems, from weather to power grids, but is difficult to accurately model with data-driven methods such as machine learning emulators. While emulators are promising tools for accelerating simulations and solving inverse problems, they still struggle to learn chaotic dynamics, where sensitivity to initial conditions renders exact long-term forecasts infeasible, especially given noisy data. Recent work instead trains emulators to match the statistical properties of chaotic attractors, but these approaches often rely on handcrafted summary statistics or large, diverse multi-environment datasets. In this work, we propose a family of adversarial optimal transport objectives that can jointly learn high-quality summary statistics and a physically consistent emulator from a single noisy trajectory. We theoretically analyze and experimentally validate a Sinkhorn divergence formulation (2-Wasserstein) and a WGAN-style dual formulation (1-Wasserstein) of our approach. Numerical experiments across a variety of chaotic systems, including ones with high-dimensional spatiotemporal chaos, show that emulators trained using our proposed objectives have significantly improved long-term statistical fidelity.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Reconstructing Template-Memorized Images from Natural Prompts

Authors:
Sol Yarkoni↗Mahmood Sharif↗Roi Livni↗

arXiv:2507.07947v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative models, such as diffusion models, have raised concerns related to privacy, copyright infringement, and data stewardship. To better understand and control these risks, prior work has introduced techniques and attacks that reconstruct images, or parts of images, from training data. While these results demonstrate that training data can be recovered, existing methods often rely on high computational resources, partial access to the training set, or carefully engineered prompts. In this work, we present a new attack that requires low resources, assumes little to no access to the training data, and identifies seemingly benign prompts that can lead to potentially risky image reconstruction. We further show that such reconstructions may occur unintentionally, even for users without specialized knowledge. For example, we observe that for one existing model, the prompt ``blue Unisex T-Shirt'' generates the face of a real individual. Moreover, by combining the identified vulnerabilities with real-world prompt data, we discover prompts that reproduce memorized visual elements. Our approach builds on insights from prior work and leverages domain knowledge to expose a fundamental vulnerability arising from the use of scraped e-commerce data, where templated layouts and images are closely tied to pattern-like textual prompts. The code for our attack is publicly available at https://github.com/TheSolY/lr-tmi.

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

Shopping Reasoning Bench: An Expert-Authored Benchmark for Multi-Turn Conversational Shopping Assistants

Authors:
Shuxian Fan↗Seonwoo Min↗Youna Hu↗Botao Xia↗Jayakrishnan Unnikrishnan↗Rowan Musselmann↗Yifan Gao↗Qingyu Yin↗Priyanka Nigam↗Bing Yin↗

Conversational shopping assistants now serve hundreds of millions of customers, yet no existing benchmark jointly evaluates the open-ended multi-turn reasoning, domain expertise, and criterion-level quality that real shopping conversations demand. Shopping reasoning is unique among language model applications. Unlike factual question answering or verifiable code generation, it requires balancing subjective preferences, budget constraints, and cross-product trade-offs across multi-turn dialogue, capabilities absent from previous e-commerce and general-purpose benchmarks. We introduce the Shopping Reasoning Bench, an expert-authored benchmark of 525 missions (232 single-turn, 293 multi-turn) with 10863 importance-weighted binary rubrics authored by retail domain experts. These criteria are organized under a taxonomy of five reasoning categories and fifteen subcategories covering diverse demands such as preference refinement, trade-off analysis, and compatibility assessment. An evaluation of nine models across three families (GPT, Claude, Gemini) shows that pass rates reach only 57–77% overall. On multi-turn missions, all models score 13–29 points lower on optional above-and-beyond criteria than on required ones, and performance degrades 4–18 points as conversations progress. These gaps show that current models handle basic shopping assistance but fall short of expert-level advice, making Shopping Reasoning Bench a challenging testbed for future shopping assistant development.

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25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Randomized, Controlled, Double Blind Clinical Study to Evaluate Use of Hydron Alkaline Ionised Water (HAIW) in Healthy Participants

Authors:
Malhotra↗V. K↗Tamoli↗Kalbhor↗Nipanikar↗Dubey↗Singhvi↗Sharma↗

Background and Objectives: Alkaline Ionized Water (AIW) is considered among the highest quality healthy drinking water worldwide and is widely discussed for its various health benefits. Hydron Alkaline Ionized Water (HAIW) is produced through electrolysis, resulting in a stable pH of approximately 9.5 with a negative Oxidation Reduction Potential (ORP), making it an antioxidant beverage. The objective of this study was to evaluate the safety of HAIW and its effects on digestion, sleep, energy, and overall quality of life in healthy participants compared to Packaged Drinking Water (PDW). Materials and Methods: A randomized, controlled, double blind, prospective clinical study was conducted in which a total of 24 healthy participants between the age group of 21 to 40 years were randomized in a 1:1 ratio to either HAIW Group or Packaged Drinking Water Group with equal gender distribution. Participants were hospitalized for 7 days and asked to consume at least 3 litres of the assigned water daily. Primary outcomes were safety-related laboratory parameters and adverse event monitoring. Secondary outcomes included assessment of digestion (appetite, digestion, bowel habits), urine parameters, sleep quality, freshness after waking, fatigue, energy/stamina/strength, quality of life, and global assessment Results: All 24 participants completed the study with no dropouts. Baseline demographics were comparable between the two groups. Assessment of primary safety-related laboratory parameters including Complete Blood count, liver function tests, renal function tests, blood sugar, Electrocardiogram and serum electrolytes showed non-significant change from baseline to 7 days and remained within normal limits in both groups, with non-significant difference between groups (p>0.05). HAIW showed significantly better improvement in appetite, digestion, and bowel habits from Day 2 onwards compared to Packaged drinking water. Sleep quality and freshness after waking up showed significant improvement from Day 3 and Day 2 respectively in the HAIW and PDW group, with significantly better improvement in HAIW group. Fatigue scores showed significant reduction at Day 6 and 7 in both groups with non-significant difference between groups. A total of 5 adverse events were reported (3 in HAIW, 2 in PDW), all unrelated to study products and were mild in nature. Global assessment showed excellent to good overall safety and tolerability in both groups. Conclusion: HAIW was well tolerated by all participants without any adverse effects. All laboratory safety parameters remained within normal range. HAIW demonstrated significant improvements in digestive function (appetite, digestion, bowel habits), sleep quality, and freshness after waking as compared to PDW. The study concludes that HAIW can be safely consumed. HAIW improves digestive and sleep-related functions.

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