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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Mach's principle in atomic transitions

Authors:
Subhajit Barman↗Bibhas Ranjan Majhi↗

arXiv:2606.11608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the atomic transition probabilities in atom-mirror set-ups that are in circular motion. In one scenario, the atom is in circular motion inside a static cylindrical mirror. In the other scenario, the cylindrical mirror rotates around its central axis while the atom remains static. We report structural similarity in the atomic transition probabilities between these two cases – these probabilities are equivalent upon interchanging the field frequencies between the two scenarios. We interpret such an observation as a semi-classical phenomenon analogous to the classical Mach's principle.

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

All Smoke, No Alarm: Oracle Signals in Agent-Authored Test Code

Authors:
Dipayan Banik↗Kowshik Chowdhury↗Shazibul Islam Shamim↗

arXiv:2606.18168v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software practitioners increasingly use AI coding agents that generate test code alongside production code in open source pull requests (PRs). Recent studies report more than 932,000 agent-authored PRs across more than 116,000 repositories, yet whether their test files contain meaningful verification logic remains underexplored. Test files lacking explicit assertions execute code without verifying behavior, so quality gates based on test-file presence overestimate verification strength. The goal of this paper is to help practitioners assess the verification strength of agent-authored patches by characterizing oracle signals and their link to merge outcomes and review effort. We conduct an empirical study of 86,156 test-file patches from 33,596 agent-authored PRs across 2,807 GitHub repositories produced by five coding agents: OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Devin, Cursor, and Claude Code. A qualitative analysis of 384 stratified patches informs a syntactic taxonomy of eight oracle signal categories. Applied at scale, 80.2% of test patches contain weak or no explicit oracle signals. While raw merge rates are lower for strong-oracle PRs, a regression analysis adjusting for agent, PR size, repository popularity, task type, and language shows strong oracles significantly improve merge likelihood (OR = 1.28, p < 0.001). Our findings suggest that test file counts substantially overestimate verification strength and that practitioners can adopt oracle-aware quality checks to more accurately evaluate agent-authored contributions.

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03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Leishmaniasis on YouTube: a critical appraisal of the quality, reliability, and transparency of educational content

Authors:
NANTALAGA↗K. C↗Nantege↗

Background: Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease of significant global public health importance, for which accurate information is essential to support prevention and early care-seeking, particularly in endemic, resource-limited settings. YouTube is a widely used source of health information, but the quality and reliability of leishmaniasis-related content have not been evaluated. We aimed to assess the quality, reliability, and transparency of English-language YouTube videos on leishmaniasis. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of YouTube videos retrieved via the YouTube Data API on 15 June 2026 using the terms "leishmaniasis," "cutaneous leishmaniasis," and "visceral leishmaniasis." After applying eligibility criteria and screening the 150 most-viewed eligible videos, 48 videos were included. Two reviewers independently assessed each video using the modified DISCERN (mDISCERN) tool, the Global Quality Score (GQS), and the JAMA benchmark criteria, with disagreements resolved by consensus. Inter-rater agreement was assessed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and associations were examined using Spearman's rank correlation. Results: Of 402 videos retrieved, 48 met the inclusion criteria. The median GQS was 3.00 (IQR 2.00-4.00) and median mDISCERN was 3.00 (IQR 2.38-4.50), indicating moderate quality and reliability, while the median JAMA score was 2.00 (IQR 1.00-2.00), reflecting limited transparency; no video met all four JAMA criteria. The overwhelming majority of videos (47/48, 97.9%) were of professional or institutional origin. Inter-rater agreement was good to excellent (ICC 0.883 for GQS, 0.896 for mDISCERN, 1.000 for JAMA). The instruments were strongly inter-correlated (mDISCERN-GQS rho = 0.841, p < 0.001). Quality scores did not correlate positively with views, likes, or video duration; comments correlated weakly and negatively with mDISCERN (rho = -0.337, p = 0.031) and JAMA (rho = -0.381, p = 0.014). Conclusions: YouTube videos on leishmaniasis are of moderate quality and reliability but limited transparency, and are produced almost exclusively by professional sources. Video popularity, length, and age were not indicators of quality. There is a need for experts and institutions to produce clearly authored, well-sourced, and transparent educational content on this neglected tropical disease.

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04.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

Fung-AI: An AI/ML-driven pipeline for antifungal peptide discovery

Authors:
Daniel S. Berman↗

by Daniel S. Berman, Libby M. Lewis, Tom D. Curtis, Olivia N. Tiburzi, Daniel F. Q. Smith, Arturo Casadevall, Laura J. Dunphy Emerging fungal pathogens represent a concerning threat to both global health and food security. In this study, we aimed to address our rising vulnerability to fungal pathogens through the development of the Fung-AI pipeline: an AI/ML-driven approach for antifungal discovery. A generative adversarial network (GAN) was trained to generate novel candidate antifungal peptide sequences. Next, in silico antifungal and hemolytic classifiers were built to further prioritize AI-generated peptides for experimental validation. From a pool of ~10,000 candidates, thirteen peptides were selected for testing over two-stages of experimentation. Five peptides were found to display mild antifungal activity against the wheat pathogen, Fusarium graminearum, with minimal inhibitory concentrations (MICs) ranging from 250 µg/mL to 500 µg/mL. Four of the five peptides also showed activity against the human pathogen, Candida albicans (MIC: 500 µg/mL). Two of our AI-generated antifungal peptides additionally demonstrated low cytotoxicity in HepG2 human liver carcinoma cells (LC50 > 704.2 µg/mL) indicating that they may be useful as scaffolds for future optimization for therapeutic applications. None of our peptides were found to considerably inhibit the emerging pathogen C. auris, suggesting the need for pathogen-specific down-selection of candidate peptides. Overall, we present a proof-of-principle, generative-AI-based approach for the rapid design of de novo antifungal peptides.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

AI for Social Good: An Investigation of the Causal Relationship Between Environmental Regulations and Their Effects on Air Pollution in London, UK

Authors:
Yang Han↗Jacqueline CK Lam↗Victor OK Li↗Yiu-Wai Man↗

arXiv:2606.15257v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Air pollution regulation is central to urban public health governance, but estimating its effects is difficult because policies are implemented non-randomly and pollution trajectories are shaped by meteorology, socioeconomic change, temporal trends, and overlapping interventions. This study develops an uncertainty-aware Bayesian deep learning framework to estimate the aggregate effect of air pollution regulations on PM$_{2.5}$ concentrations in London from 2010 to 2020. The framework integrates daily PM$_{2.5}$ observations from Inner London monitoring stations, meteorological covariates, annual socioeconomic indicators, month-of-year and day-of-week indicators, and daily regulation status data for 32 policy measures. A Bayesian LSTM captures temporal dependencies in environmental and socioeconomic covariates, Bayesian embedding layers represent temporal and regulation status inputs, and a regulation status prediction branch supports propensity score-based adjustment for non-random policy implementation. Regulatory effects are estimated by comparing observed PM$_{2.5}$ concentrations with counterfactual predictions under a hypothetical no-regulation scenario, with uncertainty summarized across repeated Bayesian training runs and bootstrap resampling. Results show that London's regulations were associated with an average PM$_{2.5}$ reduction of 1.88 $\mu$g/m$^3$, a relative reduction of 12.35%, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.64-2.12 $\mu$g/m$^3$. Estimated effects were limited before 2013, became clearer from 2013 to 2017, and were strongest in 2018 and 2019. The findings suggest that sustained and cumulative regulatory interventions contributed to measurable improvements in London's air quality. This study demonstrates how uncertainty-aware causal AI can support environmental accountability, public health protection, and evidence-based governance for environmental decision-making.

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

TNODEV: Toolbox for Neural ODE Verification

Authors:
Abdelrahman Sayed Sayed↗Pierre-Jean Meyer↗Mohamed Ghazel↗

arXiv:2606.16567v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODE) have started to appear in safety critical settings such as continuous-time controllers for cyber-physical systems and classifiers integrated into automated decision pipelines, raising the question of whether their behavior can be formally verified. Existing tools dedicated to neural ODE provide only a single reachability call without iterative input set refinement, limiting the precision of their verdicts to whatever one reachability call can deliver. We present TNODEV, the first sound formal verifier for neural ODE that integrates a falsification checker, a fast interval-based reachability backend based on continuous-time mixed monotonicity, a verification and refinement loop with three input-set splitting heuristics, and a parallel scheduler in a single end-to-end pipeline. TNODEV supports safe-set inclusion verification on pure neural ODE, neural ODE in closed loop with a neural network controller and general neural ODE (GNODE), with the safe set specified either as an interval or as the half-space intersection induced by a target classification label. We evaluate TNODEV on a range of benchmarks across safe-set inclusion and classification-robustness properties, including a direct reachability comparison against NNV~2.0 and CORA and a verification comparison against NNV2.0 on MNIST general neural ODE classifiers.

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

The Discrete-Log Clock: How a Transformer Learns Modular Multiplication

Authors:
Huu Danh Nguyen↗

arXiv:2606.17399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When small transformers grok modular multiplication, prior work reports that the learned embedding has a "dense" Fourier spectrum requiring all frequencies. This contrasts with modular addition, where only a sparse set of key frequencies suffices. We show this density is an artifact of analyzing in the wrong basis. The natural Fourier transform for multiplication is not the standard additive DFT but the multiplicative character transform, which decomposes functions on the multiplicative group $(\mathbb{Z}/p\mathbb{Z})^*$ into its irreducible representations. Applying this transform to a grokked transformer trained on $a \cdot b \bmod 113$, we find the embedding spectrum becomes highly sparse (Gini coefficient 0.58 vs. 0.07 in the additive basis) with only 4 key frequencies carrying significant energy. Furthermore, 96.9% of MLP neurons are cleanly tuned to a single multiplicative frequency, and neuron activation heatmaps reveal 2D-periodic structure when reordered by the discrete logarithm. These results demonstrate the transformer reduces multiplication to addition in discrete-log space, implementing a "Discrete-Log Clock" algorithm analogous to Nanda et al.'s Clock algorithm for addition. The methodology generalizes: matching the analysis basis to the algebraic structure of the task reveals interpretable structure where standard tools see noise.

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08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LLM Consumer Behavior Theory: Foundations of a Novel Research Field

Authors:
Manon Reusens↗Sofie Goethals↗David Martens↗

arXiv:2606.18005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents that make consumption decisions on behalf of users. This shift raises fundamental questions for consumer theory, which has traditionally modeled humans as the primary decision-makers. In this paper, we introduce LLM Consumer Behavior Theory, a new field of study concerned with analyzing consumer behavior in agentic markets. Drawing on classical and behavioral economics alongside recent advances in Natural Language Processing, we formalize how human preferences are reflected and acted upon by LLM-based agents, and how agent-level decisions aggregate into market demand. We unify previously fragmented literature on LLM decision-making, human behavior simulation, and preference elicitation under a common economic lens, highlighting where assumptions, such as rationality and heterogeneity, may fail in agentic markets. Rather than providing empirical validation, this paper outlines the scope of LLM consumer behavior and identifies open research questions related to alignment, preference representation, and market dynamics.

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

Delta-Epsilon-Common Knowledge and Quantitative Agreement Theorems

Authors:
Christina Pawlowitsch↗Stefan Schrott↗Daniel Toneian↗

arXiv:2606.11902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aumann defined common knowledge mathematically and established his now famous Agreement Theorem. We present a novel approach to quantifying how close individuals are to commonly knowing events, $(\delta,\epsilon)$-common knowledge, which is defined for any (and not just countable) probability spaces, and provide quantitative versions of the key results in this field. Specifically, we do this for Aumann's Agreement Theorem and Nielsen's extension thereof to random variables, as well as for the setting in which posteriors are communicated back and forth between individuals. Our results apply in particular to noisy communication settings.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Estimating Mutual Information between Time Series and Temporal Event Sequences Across Diverse Analysis Tasks

Authors:
Haoji Hu↗Huaqing Mao↗Yijun Lin↗Xiaowei Jia↗Jinwei Zhou↗Minoh Jeong↗Yao-Yi Chiang↗

arXiv:2606.01602v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pairwise dependence measures such as correlation and causality are fundamental to temporal data mining, yet there is still no principled and robust way to quantify dependence between heterogeneous data types, especially between continuous time series and discrete temporal event sequences. Existing approaches rely on ad hoc transformations or mutual-information estimators that are highly sensitive to quantization, repeated values, and event redundancy, leading to biased or unstable results in practice. We propose a nonparametric mutual information estimator that directly measures the dependence between time series and event sequences without data transformation, learning, or ad hoc discretization. Our method models the continuous-discrete duality of real-world time series to handle quantization and repeated-value artifacts and introduces a latent event clustering strategy to mitigate bias from event co-occurrence and redundancy. Together, these yield a robust and unified framework that bridges discrete and continuous mutual information. We evaluate the proposed estimator on four representative tasks: discrete-continuous time-delayed mutual information for causality analysis, global and local temporal repetition discovery, discrete covariate selection for time series forecasting, and continuous feature selection for classification. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show consistent improvements over existing methods in accuracy, robustness, and interpretability, positioning our approach as a general-purpose dependence operator for heterogeneous temporal data, similar to Pearson correlation for homogeneous time series. Code available at: https://github.com/HaojiHu/Multimodal-Temporal-Data-Quantification

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

SkillAudit: Ground-Truth-Free Skill Evolution via Paired Trajectory Auditing

Authors:
Haowen Gao↗Haoran Chen↗Can Wang↗Shasha Guo↗Liang Pang↗Zhaoyang Liu↗Huawei Shen↗Xueqi Cheng↗

arXiv:2606.14239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are structured procedural packages that guide frozen LLM agents in specialized workflows. Skills rarely remain sufficient after deployment: edge cases, API changes, and deployment constraints become visible only through use, making skill evolution a practical necessity. Existing methods depend on privileged feedback such as held-out validation scores, hidden test outcomes, or environment rewards – signals often unavailable when a practitioner has only a task description and workspace data. We introduce SkillAudit, a framework for evolving agent skills without ground-truth feedback. The key idea is paired trajectory auditing: at each iteration, the same task is executed with and without the candidate skill, isolating how the skill changes agent behavior without external labels. To turn behavioral differences into edit guidance, SkillAudit uses Process-Aligned Contrastive Evaluation (PACE), a cluster of evaluators that maps trajectory divergences to diagnostic signals linked to specific passages in the skill document. A structural verifier, compiled once from the task specification and then fixed, checks task constraints and rolls back harmful updates. SkillAudit routes edits through two pipelines: Refine removes noisy or irrelevant guidance from broadly useful skills, while Repair replaces passages that conflict with the task. Across 89 containerized tasks spanning 8 professional domains, SkillAudit achieves 73.9% average task reward, outperforming an agent without skills (40.9%) and the static expert skill (56.7%). These gains are obtained without accessing hidden tests, reference solutions, or external scoring functions during evolution.

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

Exposing the Unsaid: Visualizing Hidden LLM Bias through Stochastic Path Aggregation

Authors:
Matteo Pelossi↗Rita Sevastjanova↗Thilo Spinner↗Mennatallah El-Assady↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit representational and syntactic biases that are difficult to evaluate due to the stochastic nature of text generation. Standard auditing methods rely on a single output inspection or static automated metrics. These approaches obscure the underlying probability distributions and fail to capture biases hidden in lower-probability generation branches. This paper introduces TreeTracer, a visual analytics tool designed to evaluate LLM bias through aggregated comparison. Using a systematic perturbation analysis pipeline, the tool replaces ontology-defined terms in each input prompt, aggregates hundreds of stochastic generations into a syntax-aligned hierarchical structure, and then performs classification-aware node merging with an auxiliary language model. The resulting structure is visualized through a custom Sankey diagram. By juxtaposing two ontology-driven trees, the workspace enables direct comparison between semantic contexts and supports systematic bias detection. Because any visualization reflects only a subset of the model's learned behavior, the system further applies contrastive inference to compute and directly display counterfactual token probabilities across contexts, reducing the risk of misinterpreting the presence of bias. We validate the workspace through case studies comparing an unaligned baseline model GPT-2 XL against the constitutionally aligned Apertus models. The visual aggregation successfully exposes hidden representational harms, such as counterfactual pronoun suppression and conversational marginalization of individuals. A preliminary user study confirms that the aggregated comparative interface reduces cognitive load and effectively supports analysts in detecting systemic biases.

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

A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination

Authors:
Bing Xu↗Mukund Varma T↗Cheng Wang↗Tzu-Mao Li↗Lifan Wu↗Bartlomiej Wronski↗Ravi Ramamoorthi↗Marco Salvi↗

Global illumination (GI) is essential for realistic rendering but remains computationally expensive due to the complexity of simulating indirect light transport. Recent neural methods have mainly relied on per-scene optimization, sometimes extended to handle changes in camera or geometry. Efforts toward cross-scene generalization have largely stayed in 2D screen space, such as neural denoising or G-buffer based GI prediction, which often suffer from view inconsistency and limited spatial understanding. We propose a generalizable 3D light transport embedding that approximates global illumination directly from 3D scene configurations, without using rasterized or path-traced cues. Each scene is represented as a point cloud with geometric and material features. A scalable transformer models global point-to-point interactions to encode these features into neural primitives. At render time, each query point retrieves nearby primitives via nearest-neighbor search and aggregates their latent features through cross-attention to predict the desired rendering quantity. We demonstrate results on diffuse global illumination prediction across diverse indoor scenes with varying layouts, geometry, and materials. The embedding trained for irradiance estimation can be quickly adapted to new rendering tasks with limited fine-tuning. We also present preliminary results for spatial-directional radiance field estimation for glossy materials and show how the normalized field can accelerate unbiased path guiding. This approach highlights a path toward integrating learned priors into rendering pipelines without explicit ray-traced illumination cues.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Morphology-Aware Sample Assignment: Overcoming IoU Insensitivity for Surface Defect Detection

Authors:
Pengfei Liu↗Yuhan Guo↗

Intersection-over-Union (IoU), as a pivotal metric for evaluating the spatial alignment between candidate proposals and ground-truth annotations, directly determines the quality of positive sample sets and the training efficacy of visual detection models. Through theoretical modeling and analysis, we uncover a non-sensitive region on the IoU response curve, within which samples yield nearly identical IoU scores despite distinct geometric overlaps. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a set of morphological similarity metrics covering area, shape, and aspect ratio, to refine the positive sample assignment process, thereby ensuring more discriminative and reliable matching. A supplementary matching score is derived via mean-based aggregation of these multidimensional similarities, compensating for the intrinsic limitation of IoU in representing structural correspondence. Theoretically, incorporating morphological similarity reshapes the response distribution of the matching function, yielding both effective directional gradients and polygon-like iso-response contours, which tightly confine high-response regions around each ground-truth instance and substantially enhance the precision of positive sample selection. Experiments based on the YOLOv9 framework demonstrate consistent performance gains on both NEUDET and GC10- DET datasets. Notably, the proposed approach is fully plug-and-play and incurs zero additional inference overhead, thereby ensuring deployment efficiency for industrial visual inspection.

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15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Mitigating Legibility Tax with Decoupled Prover-Verifier Games

Authors:
Yegon Kim↗Juho Lee↗

arXiv:2602.23248v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language models become increasingly capable, it is critical that their outputs can be easily checked by less capable systems. Prover-verifier games can be used to improve checkability of model outputs, but display a degradation in accuracy compared to a baseline trained only to maximize correctness – a phenonemon named legibility tax. We propose a solution by decoupling the correctness from the checkability condition and instead training a "translator" model that turns a fixed solver model's solution into a checkable form. This allows us to first train the solver to maximize correctness, and then train the translator to translate the solver into a checkable form while retaining the solver's answer. To accommodate this new objective of translation, we formulate a decoupled prover-verifier game (DPVG) where the equilibria correspond to faithful and checkable translators.

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16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Enhancing Underwater Light Field Images via Global Geometry-aware Diffusion Process

Authors:
Yuji Lin↗Qian Zhao↗Zongsheng Yue↗Junhui Hou↗Deyu Meng↗

This work studies the challenging problem of acquiring high-quality underwater images via 4-D light field (LF) imaging. To this end, we propose GeoDiff-LF, a novel diffusion-based framework built upon SD-Turbo to enhance underwater 4-D LF imaging by leveraging its spatial-angular structure. GeoDiff-LF consists of three key adaptations: (1) a modified U-Net architecture with convolutional and attention adapters to model geometric cues, (2) a geometry-guided loss function using tensor decomposition and progressive weighting to regularize global structure, and (3) an optimized sampling strategy with noise prediction to improve efficiency. By integrating diffusion priors and LF geometry, GeoDiff-LF effectively mitigates color distortion in underwater scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods across both visual fidelity and quantitative performance, advancing the state-of-the-art in enhancing underwater imaging. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/linlos1234/GeoDiff-LF.

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

Manipulation of Topological Corner States via Subchiral Symmetry

Authors:
Hai-Tao Ding↗Tianqi Chen↗Leong-Chuan Kwek↗Jiangbin Gong↗

arXiv:2606.17975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Higher-order topological phases provide robust corner modes, but their use requires controllable creation, isolation, and transfer of individual modes and their superpositions. Here we demonstrate, using the two-dimensional Benalcazar-Bernevig-Hughes model as an example, that subchiral symmetry provides a general control principle for manipulating topological corner modes. The conventional chiral symmetry decomposes into four subchiral symmetries, each associated with one zero-energy corner mode. By selectively breaking these subsymmetries with controlled intercell hoppings, we reduce the fourfold corner-state manifold step by step to single isolated modes. We further design adiabatic protocols that transfer either a single corner state or a superposition of two corner states between selected corners, while preserving the relative phase in the latter case. Both numerical simulations and IBM quantum-processor implementations show that the proposed protocols can be executed with high fidelity, establishing subchiral symmetry as a route to programmable higher-order topological state manipulation.

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Morphology-resolved scrambling in a chaotic quantum billiard

Authors:
Pranaya Pratik Das↗

arXiv:2606.16865v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chaotic quantum systems can retain spatial memory through scarred eigenstates, but whether these static structures control scrambling remains unclear. This work establishes a morphology-resolved connection between scarred eigenstates and eigenstate-resolved OTOCs in a peanut-shaped quantum billiard. Scalar localisation diagnostics, including differential entropy and continuum participation ratios, detect anomalous concentration but discard spatial architecture. A scale-normalised density overlap, in contrast, directly compares probability density profiles, revealing families of orthogonal eigenstates with nearly identical spatial morphology. Comparing the complete OTOC time traces of these orthogonal eigenstates reveals that morphological recurrence has dynamical content: moderate density overlap yields no universal prediction, whereas strongly recurring morphologies exhibit nearly identical OTOC growth and saturation. Thus, scarred structures act as spatial templates for operator growth, not merely static violations of ergodicity. This morphology-resolved framework turns eigenstate shape into a quantitative predictor of scrambling and provides a scale-controlled diagnostic of weak ergodicity breaking in quantum chaos.

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19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity in Germany: A repeated cross-sectional analysis from 1998 to 2024

Authors:
Emmert-Fees↗K. M. F↗Meyer↗Laxy↗Hanselmann↗

Background: Smoking inequalities by socioeconomic status have widened consistently in Germany, but sex-specific trends after 2013 and inequalities in daily cigarette consumption among smokers (intensity) are unknown. We analyzed trends in absolute and relative socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity among German adults across three decades. Methods: We used 14 waves (1998-2024) of population-representative cross-sectional data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate sex-specific trends in smoking prevalence and intensity in adults aged 25-64. Inequalities were quantified across strata of education, occupation, and equivalized household income using the absolute and relative concentration index with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals. Results: Overall smoking prevalence declined from 35.05% (CI: [33.90%, 36.20%] in 1998 to 22.19% (CI: [21.15%, 23.24%]) in 2024, and mean intensity from 17.49 (CI: [17.09,17.90]) to 13.33 (CI: [12.88, 13.79]) cigarettes/day. Over this period sex-differences in both outcomes narrowed almost completely. Absolute and relative inequalities in smoking prevalence widened across all SES dimensions, particularly for education and occupation. By 2024, inequalities were larger among women than men driven by a stagnating or rising smoking prevalence among low-SES women at least until 2018 alongside continued declines in higher-SES women and for men. Inequalities in smoking intensity, particularly related to income, were generally smaller than those in prevalence. Conclusion: Socioeconomic smoking inequalities in Germany widened from 1998 to 2024 primarily driven by reductions among higher-SES groups and increases in low-SES women. However, recent reductions in low-SES women may indicate a new phase in the smoking epidemic. Health equity considerations should be integrated into a targeted German tobacco control strategy.

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

Know Thy Reasoner: Not All Language Models Explore Alike

Authors:
Moulik Choraria↗Argyrios Gerogiannis↗Anirban Das↗Supriyo Chakraborty↗Sourya Basu↗Sambit Sahu↗Lav R. Varshney↗

arXiv:2604.10827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Compute scaling for LLM reasoning trades off exploring solution approaches (breadth) against refining promising ones (depth), yet why a given trade-off works, and why it often fails to transfer across models, remains unclear. We argue that the optimal strategy depends on the model's diversity profile, the spread of probability mass across solution approaches, and that this must be characterized before any exploration strategy is adopted. We formalize this with a framework decomposing reasoning uncertainty, deriving when depth-based refinement outperforms parallel sampling, and validate it across three model families at both inference and training. Our central finding is that the diversity regime dictates the strategy: low-diversity aligned models benefit from depth-based refinement with lightweight intrinsic signals, whereas high-diversity base models are often harmed by it, and instead need breadth or stronger signals to compensate.

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21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Wealth-Related Inequalities in Cesarean Section Utilization Among Facility-Based Births in Bangladesh: Evidence from Public and Private Healthcare Facilities

Authors:
Mahmud↗

Background Bangladesh has experienced a rapid increase in cesarean section (CS) utilization over the past two decades. While previous studies have documented socioeconomic disparities in CS use, evidence on how wealth-related inequalities differ between public and private healthcare facilities remains limited. This study assessed the magnitude and drivers of socioeconomic inequality in CS utilization among facility-based births in Bangladesh. Methods We analyzed data from 3,008 facility-based births reported in the 2022 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS). Survey-weighted multivariable logistic regression was used to identify factors associated with CS utilization. Wealth-related inequality was assessed using concentration curves and the Erreygers-corrected concentration index (ECCI). Regression-based decomposition of the standard concentration index was performed to quantify the contribution of socioeconomic, demographic, and healthcare-related factors to observed inequalities overall and separately for public and private facilities. Results Overall, 71.2% of facility-based births were delivered by CS, with substantially higher prevalence in private facilities (84.2%) than in public facilities (35.9%). Women delivering in private facilities had markedly higher odds of CS than those delivering in public facilities (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]: 9.07; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 7.17-11.47). Significant pro-rich inequality was observed overall (ECCI: 0.154; 95% CI: 0.117-0.191), with inequality substantially greater in public facilities (ECCI: 0.189; 95% CI: 0.114-0.264) than in private facilities (ECCI: 0.049; 95% CI: 0.014-0.084). Decomposition analysis showed that household wealth was the dominant contributor to inequality, particularly the richest wealth quintile, accounting for 81.5% of overall inequality, 63.8% in public facilities, and 109.7% in private facilities. Conclusions Wealth-related inequalities in CS utilization remain substantial in Bangladesh despite widespread use of the procedure. Although pro-rich inequality exists across both sectors, inequality is considerably greater in public facilities and is driven by different mechanisms across facility types. Policies should simultaneously improve equitable access to medically necessary CS and reduce unnecessary procedures, particularly within the private sector.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Towards Provably Fair Machine Learning: Bayesian Approaches For Consistent and Transparent Predictions

Authors:
Owen O'Neill↗Fintan Costello↗

arXiv:2606.12615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: ML classifiers deployed in high-stakes domains produce predictions whose quality varies systematically across subgroups. For granular subgroups defined by intersections of multiple features, predictions are often inconsistent with the observed data: the model's outputs contradict the evidence available for that subgroup. This problem is exacerbated by regularisation, which improves aggregate performance by collapsing small subgroups into larger groups, disproportionately affecting demographic minorities. We define two requirements for consistent prediction: determinism (identical individuals receive identical predictions) and statistical consistency (we cannot reject, at significance level alpha, the hypothesis that the predictions for a subgroup were drawn from the Bayesian optimal target distribution inferred for that subgroup). From these requirements we derive the Fair Bayesian classifier, which enforces both across every group and subgroup simultaneously and abstains whenever no consistent deterministic prediction is possible. On three benchmark datasets (Adult, COMPAS, and Bank Marketing), standard classifiers produce statistically inconsistent predictions for a substantial proportion of subgroups. Our classifier achieves zero consistency error by construction while exceeding baseline accuracy and multicalibration on every dataset tested. Statistical consistency provides a principled foundation for prediction quality with direct implications for algorithmic fairness. Minority demographics are disproportionately concentrated in small subgroups, precisely where frequentist inference is least reliable; addressing this inference problem is therefore a necessary step toward fair ML. By enforcing Bayesian consistency at the finest resolution the data supports, the our classifier demonstrates that exhaustive subgroup fairness with principled abstention is achievable in practice.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

XAI-Grounded Explanation Generation for Speech Deepfake Detection with Training-Free Multimodal Large Language Models

Authors:
Yupei Li↗Qiyang Sun↗Xiaoliang Wu↗Chenxi Wang↗Berrak Sisman↗Bj\"orn W. Schuller↗

Speech deepfake detection (SDD) systems require trustworthy explanations for reliable decision-making. Existing explanation ways mainly fall into two categories. Traditional explainable AI (XAI), such as gradient-based attribution, produces low-level attribution signals tightly coupled with model decisions, and harder to be understood by human than natural language explanations. Meanwhile, large language model (LLM)-based explanation generation often produces generic and ungrounded descriptions due to the lack of heuristic evidence and task-specific supervision, stemming from limited grounded explanation datasets for SDD. We therefore propose a training-free explanation framework that integrates XAI evidence with multimodal LLMs to generate grounded and specific explanations. Using the PartialSpoof dataset, we construct a grounded explanation dataset and show that methods with XAI increase inside accuracy by over 45\%, verified through human evaluation and faithfulness checks.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Frozen Multimodal Embeddings for Personality and Cognitive Ability Assessment in Asynchronous Video Interviews

Authors:
Kuo-En Hung↗Hung-Yue Suen↗Shih-Ching Yeh↗Hsiang-Wen Wang↗

Predicting psychological traits from asynchronous video interviews (AVIs) is a challenging multimodal learning problem because labeled datasets are limited while each response contains high-dimensional visual, acoustic, and verbal signals. This paper presents our solution for the ACM Multimedia AVI Challenge 2026, which evaluates two tasks: Track~1 predicts self-reported HEXACO personality traits from personality-related interview responses, and Track~2 classifies cognitive ability levels from structured AVI responses. We treat the problem as a small-sample representation learning task. Instead of fine-tuning large pretrained models, we use frozen multimodal encoders, including CLIP for visual features, Whisper for acoustic features and transcripts, and RoBERTa, E5, and DeBERTaV3 for textual representations, followed by low-capacity downstream models. For Track~1, our trait-specific regression and late-fusion system achieves an average validation MSE of 0.2696, improving over the official baseline of 0.3334. Ablation results show a three-step improvement from a global model (0.3189), to per-trait modeling (0.2871), to per-trait late fusion (0.2696), corresponding to a 19.1\% relative MSE reduction over the official baseline. For Track~2, a compact subject-attribute baseline reaches 0.5781 accuracy, while our multimodal ensemble reaches 0.5313, both above the official baseline of 0.4062. We interpret this result as evidence of possible subject-attribute shortcuts in the validation split rather than robust cognitive inference from AVI content. Overall, our findings suggest that AVI-based psychological assessment benefits from trait-specific multimodal modeling, but cognitive ability prediction requires careful control of dataset shortcuts.

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

UltraSketchLLM: Sub-1-Bit LLM Compression via Sketch and Hardware-Friendly Operators

Authors:
Sunan Zou↗Xueting Sun↗Ziyun Zhang↗Guojie Luo↗

arXiv:2506.17255v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) require larger GPU memory size these days, necessitating efficient and extreme weight compression methods. Existing compression methods are either theoretically limited by 1 bit per weight or face severe performance degradation and inefficiency. To deploy LLMs in resource-constrained scenarios, we introduce UltraSketchLLM, compressing LLMs with data sketch. It reduces peak GPU memory footprint with a high compression rate down to 0.5 bit per weight. Combined with hardware-friendly implementation, UltraSketchLLM keeps tolerable performance degradation and extremely low latency overhead with 14.9x speedup compared to naive sketch solution.

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