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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

AIGS-Net: Compact Illumination Field Modeling via 2D Gaussian Splatting for Fast Low-Light Image Enhancement

Existing low-light image enhancement methods often face a bottleneck between the representation capacity of illumination-field modeling and computational complexity. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Adaptive Illumination Gaussian Splatting Network (AIGS-Net), an ultra-lightweight architecture for fast low-light enhancement. Unlike conventional static priors, AIGS-Net constructs an input-adaptive 2D Gaussian Splatting illumination field. The opacity of Gaussian basis functions is dynamically modulated by relative luminance statistics of the input image, and spatially varying illumination compensation is rendered through ordered alpha compositing. To guide adaptive illumination compensation efficiently, a zero-parameter nonlinear multiscale contextual encoding module is introduced to extract low-frequency structures and local contrast cues without additional convolutional weights. To suppress noise amplification and sensor-induced color bias, AIGS-Net integrates noise-mask estimation, locked single-channel Gamma mapping, cross-channel consistency regularization, and target color-alignment constraints. Experiments on LOL and LSRW benchmarks show that AIGS-Net improves detail recovery and color fidelity while requiring only approximately 40 learnable parameters, achieving an effective trade-off between enhancement quality and extreme inference efficiency.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Exponential Convengence of DLRA for SDEs

arXiv:2606.15843v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study dynamical orthogonal (DO) approximations of stochastic differential equations and investigate their long-time behaviour. The DO formulation represents the solution by a low-rank decomposition and leads to a coupled system consisting of an evolution equation on the Stiefel manifold and a reduced stochastic process. We establish the well-posedness of the strong DO system and derive quantitative error estimates between the original stochastic differential equation and its low-rank approximation in the Wasserstein distance. Our main contribution is the analysis of invariant probability measures for the DO dynamics. Under suitable dissipativity, Lipschitz continuity, and non-degeneracy assumptions on the coefficients, we prove the existence of an invariant probability measure for the strong DO system. The proof combines uniform moment estimates, a Krylov–Bogoliubov argument for an associated frozen system, and a Kakutani-Fan-Glicksberg fixed-point theorem to recover the self-consistent dynamics. We further show that the induced low-rank process admits an invariant probability measure and discuss the structure of invariant measures through several illustrative examples. These results provide a rigorous foundation for the use of dynamical low-rank approximations in the approximation of long-time statistical properties of stochastic dynamical systems.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Empirical Validation and Predictive Utility of the Perinatal Grief Scale in Men after Perinatal Loss

Background. The Perinatal Grief Scale (PGS) is a widely used instrument for assessing grief following pregnancy loss, yet no study has validated it specifically in men despite documented use in several studies. This gap is critical given fathers' persistent underrepresentation in perinatal bereavement research and the absence of empirically supported screening thresholds for this population. Methods. This cross-sectional validation study used data from the OPALE project (Observatory on PerinatAL hEalth) conducted by the CiaoLapo Foundation in Italy. Among 276 fathers who experienced stillbirth or miscarriage, we examined criterion validity by testing the association between PGS scores and trauma-related symptomatology assessed via three validated instruments: the Revised Impact of Event Scale (RIES, n=103), National Stressful Events Survey Short Scale (NSESSS, n=95), and SCL-90 (n=173). We systematically tested multiple threshold combinations to identify optimal discriminative performance. Results. The PGS demonstrated excellent criterion validity. The optimal threshold (PGS >=92) showed sensitivity 81.0%, specificity 81.8%, and Youden's J index 0.628. Fathers scoring >=92 had 19.12 times the odds of high trauma symptoms (95% CI: 9.35 to 39.14, p

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Time-Frequency Grid States for Reconstruction and Correction of Channel-Induced Distortion in Entangled Photons

arXiv:2606.12216v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Characterization of time-frequency (TF) quantum states requires reliable reconstruction of their TF distributions. However, imperfect transmission or measurement channels can distort reconstructed joint spectral intensities (JSIs), especially when the underlying perturbation mechanism is unknown. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a reconstruction and correction framework that uses a TF grid state as an intrinsic frequency-domain reference. By analyzing the displacement of the grid points, a Gaussian process regression model is employed to reconstruct a correction mapping for the nonlinear coordinate deformation without assuming a prior physical model of the distortion. The learned mapping reduces the residual coordinate deviation of the TF grid state by approximately a factor of 11 and, when applied to an independent frequency-entangled test state, improves the Gaussian-shape fidelity from 76.2\% to 90.0\%. These results establish TF grid states as practical metrological resources for diagnosing and correcting distortions in TF quantum systems, providing a pathway toward distortion-resilient quantum communication and high-dimensional quantum information processing.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

"Is This Not Enough?": Asymmetries in Institutional Accountability and Collective Sensemaking in the Case of Canada's Algorithmic Visa Triage System

arXiv:2606.13071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper examines how algorithmic accountability in Canada's visa system is articulated institutionally and experienced by applicants across borders. We analyzed Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC)'s Algorithmic Impact Assessment (AIA) for the temporary resident visa (TRV) triage system using the algorithmic decision-making adapted for the public sector (ADMAPS) framework and analyzed Reddit discussions among applicants using a mixed-methods approach. We show that while institutional artifacts emphasize transparency, procedural safeguards, and bounded impacts, applicants engage in collective sensemaking to interpret opaque decisions, often relying on peer knowledge amid uncertainty. We identify three asymmetries between how institutional accountability is structured and how people perceive the process: epistemic asymmetry in access to decision logic, jurisdictional asymmetry in exposure shaped by geopolitical positioning, and temporal–relational asymmetry in how waiting and uncertainty are experienced. We emphasize why it is important to shift attention from institutional design to the uneven distribution of experiences with public-sector algorithmic governance. Together, these contributions demonstrate how algorithmic governance systems in the context of transnational migration produce structured asymmetries not captured by institutional disclosure frameworks, and how extending ADMAPS can account for those uneven translations of accountability.

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

HairPort: In-context 3D-aware Hair Import and Transfer for Images

Transferring hairstyles between images is an important but challenging task in computer graphics, computer vision, and visual effects. It enables users to explore new looks without physically altering their hair, with applications in virtual try-on systems, augmented reality, and entertainment. Most prior works operate best under small pose gaps, and they fall short under large viewpoint and scale differences, where missing hair content must be synthesized rather than transferred. We propose HairPort, a 3D-aware hairstyle transfer framework that attempts to solve these issues by explicitly separating hair removal from transfer and enforcing geometric consistency before synthesis. We introduce a Bald Converter, which produces realistic bald versions of faces through LoRA-based in-context adaptation of FLUX.1 Kontext. To train our Bald Converter, we introduce a new dataset, Baldy, containing 6,000 paired bald and original images across diverse identities and conditions. We also use a 3D-Aware Transfer Pipeline that reconstructs and re-renders the reference hairstyle from the target viewpoint before compositing it onto the source image. Being 3D aware, our method supports large pose and scale discrepancies between the source and target. Finally, a conditional flow-matching generator synthesizes the transferred result from the bald source and geometry-aligned reference guidance. Together, our method enables accurate, pose-consistent, and identity-preserving hairstyle transfer, outperforming existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

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

Does the Data Processing Inequality Reflect Practice? On the Utility of Low-Level Tasks

The data processing inequality is an information-theoretic principle stating that the information content of a signal cannot be increased by processing the observations. In particular, it suggests that there is no benefit in enhancing the signal or encoding it before addressing a classification problem. This assertion can be proven to be true for the case of the optimal Bayes classifier. However, in practice, it is common to perform "low-level" tasks before "high-level" downstream tasks despite the overwhelming capabilities of modern deep neural networks. In this paper, we aim to understand when and why low-level processing can be beneficial for classification. We present a comprehensive theoretical study of a binary classification setup, where we consider a classifier that is tightly connected to the optimal Bayes classifier and converges to it as the number of training samples increases. We prove that for any finite number of training samples, there exists a pre-classification processing that improves the classification accuracy. We also explore the effect of class separation, training set size, and class balance on the relative gain from this procedure. We support our theory with an empirical investigation of the theoretical setup. Finally, we conduct an empirical study where we investigate the effect of denoising and encoding on the performance of practical deep classifiers on benchmark datasets. Specifically, we vary the size and class distribution of the training set, and the noise level, and demonstrate trends that are consistent with our theoretical results.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Benchmarking Web Agent Safety under E-commerce Deceptive Interfaces

As autonomous web agents are increasingly deployed to perform real-world tasks, ensuring their safety has become a critical concern. In this work, we study web agent behavior under realistic deceptive interfaces in the e-commerce domain. We introduce WebDecept, a lightweight and configurable plugin framework that enables controlled injection of deceptive interface patterns into existing web environments. Using WebDecept, we instantiate seven deceptive patterns commonly observed on the open web, including targeted advertisements, domain redirection, and shopping manipulation. By injecting these patterns into the frontend during task execution, we perform controlled evaluation of multiple multimodal web agents. Our results show that current web agents are highly susceptible to multiple classes of deceptive interfaces, and that prompt-based constraints are often insufficient to mitigate these failures. We further analyze how the design choices of deceptive patterns influence the success of such manipulations. These findings highlight safety challenges that should be addressed as web agents are scaled toward real-world deployment.

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

Decision-Weighted Flow Matching for Contextual Stochastic Optimization

arXiv:2606.16790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conditional generative models are increasingly used as scenario generators for stochastic optimization, but standard training objectives emphasize uniform distributional fit rather than the downstream decisions induced by generated scenarios. This creates an objective mismatch: errors in statistically common regions may have little effect on decision regret, whereas errors in decision-sensitive regions can substantially change the optimal action. We propose Decision-Weighted Flow Matching (DW-FM), a regret-aligned training framework that preserves the simplicity of standard flow matching while reweighting its velocity-regression objective using decision-sensitive endpoint information. Theoretically, we connect downstream regret to pathwise velocity mismatch through a loss-induced decision discrepancy and an adjoint transport argument, yielding an ideal regret-aligned surrogate and practical endpoint-weighted objectives with regret guarantees. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of DW-FM on three CVaR-based contextual stochastic optimization benchmarks spanning synthetic portfolio, semi-real financial, and traffic-CVaR tasks, where DW-FM improves downstream regret over standard baselines.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

LUCID: Learning Embodiment-Agnostic Intent Models from Unstructured Human Videos for Scalable Dexterous Robot Skill Acquisition

arXiv:2606.11628v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The most widely-adopted robot learning pipelines today learn skills from robot demonstrations or structured human data, which are expensive to collect and tied to specific embodiments. In contrast, unstructured human videos provide a scalable alternative. They contain diverse manipulation demonstrations across objects, scenes, and strategies, but are not directly connected to robot action. We propose LUCID, a two-stage framework that learns task intent from unstructured human videos drawn from internet-scale datasets and learns robot control in massively-parallel simulation. The intent model predicts short-horizon intent (what should happen next in the scene) from the current observation in closed loop. An embodiment-specific sensorimotor policy converts this intent into robot actions. The intent interface is shared across controllers, so the same intent model can be applied to different embodiments, from our primary dexterous hand to a parallel-jaw gripper. We evaluate LUCID on five real-world manipulation tasks: stirring, wiping, and binning supervised by only internet video, with zero-shot transfer to novel scenes and object instances; and push-T and cable routing supervised by 1 hr each of self-collected smartphone video. Project page: https://lucid-robot.github.io/.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Toward a National Registry for Inborn Errors of Immunity in Peru: A Qualitative Implementation Study

Background: Peru lacks an integrated information system for patients with Inborn Errors of Immunity (IEI). Although disease registries are essential tools for data management and health planning, their success depends on implementation science approaches that account for local contextual factors. This study reports Phase I of a three-phase mixed-methods implementation project to design and develop a national IEI registry. Methods: Phase I consisted of a phenomenological qualitative study exploring stakeholder perspectives. Semi-structured focus groups and in-depth interviews were conducted with 29 key stakeholders across four groups: policy-makers, clinical experts, end-users (immunologists, residents, allied health personnel), and patient organization representatives. Interviews followed a guide structured around four a priori domains (structure, navigation, feasibility, and perception of existing systems). Discussions were conducted in Spanish, audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and coded using ATLAS.ti. A hybrid thematic analysis combining deductive and inductive coding was performed. Data elements proposed for the registry were triangulated with qualitative findings. Results: Thirty-six initial codes were consolidated into 15 categories, which were further integrated into four overarching themes conceptualized as pathways toward intention to use: (1) Environment, where governance, regulatory backing, and sustainable financing were identified as key enablers, while limited interoperability emerged as a structural barrier; (2) Technical Dimension, emphasizing usability, alignment with clinical workflow, and a hierarchical data architecture (demographic, clinical, therapeutic); (3) Users, highlighting clinical leadership, protected time, digital readiness, and perceived usefulness as stronger motivators than financial incentives; and (4) Patients, underscoring data protection, transparency, trust, and advocacy as essential for legitimacy and sustainability. Conclusions: A national IEI registry in Peru is perceived as necessary and feasible if implemented with strong regulatory foundations, interoperable design, robust data security, and user-centered architecture. These findings informed the development of an initial functional prototype and the operational plan for Phase II, focused on usability evaluation.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

High-efficiency telecom conversion of heralded atomic biphoton wavepackets

arXiv:2603.09824v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate high-efficiency telecom frequency conversion of heralded atomic biphoton wavepackets using a diamond-type atomic ensemble. By placing a 2.5 MHz heralded-photon spectrum within the high-efficiency region of the converter response, we achieve a conversion efficiency of 79.4(2.6)% while maintaining strong time-resolved correlations and well-defined temporal wavepackets. For a broader 17.4 MHz input bandwidth, the conversion efficiency is reduced to about 55%, whereas the temporal waveform remains largely preserved. This behavior reflects the nearly flat central response of the converter, which mainly causes spectral-edge loss rather than temporal-mode distortion. These results identify spectral matching as an effective route to efficient and low-distortion telecom conversion of narrowband quantum light from atomic systems.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Infections and suicide and self-harm: a population-based matched cohort study

Background Infections have been associated with adverse mental health outcomes, including suicide, but evidence beyond severe or central nervous system infections is limited. We investigated associations between a range of acute infections and subsequent suicide/self-harm outcomes. Methods We conducted six infection-specific matched cohort studies using English primary care records from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink Aurum (2007-2024), linked to hospital admissions and mortality data. Adults ([≥]18 years) with a primary care record of infection (gastroenteritis, lower respiratory tract [LRTI], skin/soft-tissue [SSTI], urinary tract [UTI], sepsis, meningitis/encephalitis [positive control]) were matched (age, sex, practice, calendar period) to up to five comparators without infection. We estimated hazard ratios (HRs) for suicide/self-harm outcomes using Cox regression, stratified by matched set and implicitly adjusting for matching factors, with additional adjustment for deprivation, lifestyle factors, and comorbidities. We examined whether associations varied over time, by infection severity, antimicrobial treatment, sex, and prior mental health conditions. Findings Cohorts ranged from 18,192 individuals with meningitis/encephalitis (matched to 90,915 without) to 398,099 with SSTI (matched to 1,743,747). After adjustment, individuals with infection had a higher hazard of suicide/self-harm outcomes than comparators across all cohorts: sepsis (HR 1.79, 95% CI 1.65-1.93), gastroenteritis (1.62, 1.55-1.70), meningitis/encephalitis (1.56, 1.32-1.84), UTI (1.41, 1.33-1.50), SSTI (1.37, 1.31-1.43), and LRTI (1.37, 1.31-1.44). Risk was highest in the year post-infection, attenuating over time, and was higher among severe infections and those without prior mental health conditions. Interpretation Common acute infections recorded in primary care are associated with increased risk of suicide and self-harm, particularly following severe infections and in the year post-infection. Findings support suicide risk monitoring following acute infection, particularly among individuals without prior mental health conditions, and highlight infection prevention as a potentially modifiable strategy in vulnerable populations. Funding Wellcome and La Caixa. Copyright This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

AIPatient Arena: EHR-grounded evaluation of large language models in end-to-end clinical consultation workflows

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly considered for use in clinical consultation tasks, yet most medical evaluations remain static, single-turn, or narrowly outcome-based, limiting their ability to reflect the sequential, uncertain, and interactive nature of real-world care. Here, we propose AIPatient Arena, an EHRs-grounded evaluation framework for assessing the clinical utility of LLMs across eight dimensions of clinical competence. The framework integrates EHR data into patient-specific knowledge graphs, enabling multi-turn physician-patient interactions. We applied AIPatient Arena on a primary cohort of 437 patients and two out-of-distribution validation cohorts of 119 and 67 patients. We observe that LLMs performed well in medical interview questioning skills (QS; mean scores, 4.43-4.99/5), ethical and professional conduct (ET; 4.38-4.93/5), and clarity and transparency of clinical explanations (EX; 3.80-4.72/5). Performance was moderate in information integration (II; 3.19-4.21/5) and medication safety and justification (MS; 3.13-3.78/5), but persistent weaknesses were observed in handling of ambiguous patient responses (HR; 2.57-3.32/5), information coverage (IC; 2.08-3.02/5), and diagnostic accuracy and reasoning (Dx; 2.63-3.55/5). Process-based evaluation revealed recurrent interaction failures, including repetitive questioning, omission of past medical history, and inadequate handling of uncertainty. Richer conversational context improved diagnostic reasoning but yielded limited gains in treatment planning. These findings indicate that final-answer accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating clinical readiness and highlight the importance of assessing how models gather, interpret, and communicate information throughout a consultation. AIPatient Arena provides an EHR-grounded framework for workflow-oriented pre-deployment evaluation of medical LLMs.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Where Did the Variability Go? From Vibe Coding to Product Lines by Regeneration

arXiv:2606.19042v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In vibe coding, an emerging AI-driven paradigm, an LLM generates an entire program from a natural language prompt, but what happens to the variability that traditional software engineering carefully builds into code? To answer this question, we conducted an exploratory analysis on 10 vibe coded C/C++ projects, which suggests that there is near-zero in-artifact variability, i.e., at compile and runtime. All variability decisions are resolved at a single new binding time, generation time, the moment the LLM produces the source code. Rather than treating this as a defect to fix, we propose Variability by Regeneration (VbR), to our knowledge the first product-line approach in which the LLM acts as the derivation engine, generating a purpose-built, free of dead code binary for each variant from a declarative specification, while a variant dispatcher transparently routes user requests to the matching binary. We formalise VbR, contrast it with classical SPL derivation, and demonstrate its full pipeline on a wc product family. For SPL engineering, variability in AI-generated software belongs in the specification, not in the code.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Pseudoperplexity Probes Memorization in Protein Language Models

Protein Language Models (pLMs) have significantly advanced computational biology. Yet their scale and reliance on redundant training data raise a fundamental question: do pLMs generalize the statistical grammar of proteins, or do they simply memorize their training data? To investigate this, we used pseudoperplexity as a probe for sequence-level memorization, comparing ProtT5's pseudoperplexity on a pre-training proxy dataset against a post-training holdout of genuinely novel sequences. To ensure a valid comparison, we matched the datasets by sequence length, cluster size, and taxonomic family. As a statistical baseline, we trained n-gram language models; analysis of higher-order n-gram composition and a statistically significant divergence in perplexity confirmed that the post-training sequences were genuinely novel at the local sequence level. ProtT5 showed a statistically significant difference in pseudoperplexity between seen and unseen sequences, though further analysis revealed this memorization signal to be modest. These findings suggest that ProtT5 exhibits detectable but limited memorization of its training data as measured by a pseudoperplexity-based probe.

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

PhaseWin: An Efficient Search Algorithm for Faithful Visual Attribution

Visual attribution is a fundamental tool for interpreting modern vision and vision-language models, particularly when their decisions must be inspected, diagnosed, or audited. Its goal is to explain how a model's decision depends on local regions of the visual input, typically by assigning an importance ordering over candidate image regions. Given an image partitioned into $n$ regions, faithful attribution can be cast as an ordered subset-search problem, in which progressively inserting the selected regions should recover the target model response as early as possible. Exhaustive search over region subsets incurs exponential cost, while the widely used greedy search still requires a quadratic number of model evaluations, because every selection step rescores all remaining candidates. We propose PhaseWin, an efficient subset-search algorithm for faithful visual attribution. PhaseWin reorganizes greedy region selection into a phased window-search procedure: rather than re-evaluating the full candidate set at every step, it alternates between global candidate screening, adaptive pruning, and localized window refinement, while preserving the essential region-ranking behavior of greedy search. We analyze PhaseWin under monotone evidence-accumulation conditions and show that, under feature-level structural assumptions, it attains controllable linear evaluation complexity together with near-greedy faithfulness guarantees. Extensive experiments on image classification, object detection, visual grounding, and image captioning show that, among all compared attribution methods, PhaseWin reaches high faithfulness with the fewest forward passes, empirically realizing the predicted reduction from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$. The code is available at https://github.com/Qihuai27/phasewin-va.

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

Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines

arXiv:2606.19134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines (PQLRM), a multi-objective reinforcement learning algorithm for tasks whose reward structure is specified by a set of reward machines (RMs). PQLRM combines Pareto Q-Learning (PQL), which maintains sets of vector-valued Q-estimates to approximate the Pareto front, with enhancements from Q-Learning with Reward Machines (QRM), which exploits the factored automaton structure of the reward signal. This yields a multi-policy algorithm that remains sample-efficient under non-Markovian, RM-encoded rewards. Experimental trials show that PQLRM converges faster than a naive PQL baseline applied to the cross-product MDP and can synthesize Pareto-optimal policies that QRM cannot.

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

ControlMap: Controllable High-Definition Map Generation for Traffic Scenario Simulation

arXiv:2606.15930v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simulation is central to validating autonomous driving systems, yet current pipelines are limited by insufficient scenario diversity due to costly High Definition (HD) map creation. Scaling HD maps requires expensive data collection and manual processing. Moreover, existing generative models lack the fine-grained control necessary to target specific road topologies during generation. This paper presents a data-driven pipeline for controllable HD map generation using latent diffusion and ControlNet for spatial conditioning. To our knowledge, we are the first to inject spatial guidance signals into a diffusion model for HD map synthesis. Furthermore, our model supports adjustable conditioning strength through classifier-free guidance and city-level style transfer via city label conditioning. To complement existing metrics, we introduce two novel metrics to evaluate adherence to the control signal and similarity to ground-truth maps. Experiments demonstrate that our model generates realistic HD maps that faithfully follow input road topologies while accurately preserving city-specific details.

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

A Mechanistic Understanding of Pronoun Fidelity in LLMs

Faithful and robust pronoun use is important for fair and coherent generations, yet large language models largely fail when multiple referents use different pronouns. To study the interplay of reasoning, repetition, and bias in this task, prior work relies exclusively on behavioural approaches, which may not reflect a model's internal workings. Therefore, we provide a mechanistic, model-internal perspective on pronoun fidelity, testing whether three mechanisms – group entity binding (G), recency bias (R), and stereotypical bias (S) – are causally implemented across several SOTA language models. Using Boundless Distributed Alignment Search, we find all three coexist as causal subspaces distributed across network depth. No single mechanism fully explains model behaviour, but a combination of the three consistently accounts for 91-99.5%. An attention head analysis further reveals two competing copying routes; group binding and stereotype share a localized concept-level route that retrieves a bound occupation-pronoun unit, while recency uses a distributed token-level route that repeats surface forms. In sum, pronoun fidelity arises from competition between simultaneously active causal subspaces.

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

Fault Lines: Navigating Ethics and Responsible AI Where National Policy Meets Local Practice in Public Sector Transformation

arXiv:2606.13039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The UK government has adopted a pro-AI stance to help transform public service delivery in the face of severe financial pressures, but the path to translate this vision into responsible AI practice remains ill-defined. While UK policy is often set at the national level, local authorities are responsible for most public service delivery, and the rapid advance of AI-first narratives in the public sector is exposing fault lines in knowledge and practice at this national-local interface. This paper examines how responsible AI is interpreted and implemented at the interface between the UK's central government and local authorities, taking the high-stakes area of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) as a case study. We present a thematic analysis of 17 semi-structured interviews with policymakers, practitioners, and third-sector professionals to identify barriers and enabling conditions for responsible AI where national policy meets local practice. We identify five interconnected challenges facing local authorities: shadow usage of AI and data privacy risks, market-government asymmetry in AI provision, insufficient workforce readiness, a lack of standardised definitions and measurements, and gaps in human accountability. For each, participants proposed actionable steps, from strengthening data protection frameworks and rebalancing the market-government relationship to enhancing workforce capacity. Our examination of SEND brings these challenges into sharper focus, showing how high-stakes decisions affecting vulnerable children and families intensify tensions around accountability, fairness, and human oversight, exposing the limits of a principle-based regulatory approach. We argue that responsible public sector AI requires both national policy adjustments and structural reforms to institutional capacity, values, and governance mechanisms at the local level.

22.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-12

Efficacy and target engagement of dopamine agonist pramipexole for anhedonic depression: a randomized placebo-controlled trial

Anhedonia is a core and disabling symptom of mood disorders with limited treatment options. We evaluated the efficacy and safety of the dopamine agonist pramipexole in patients with mood disorders characterized by clinically significant anhedonia. In this single-center, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, adults with major depressive disorder, dysthymia or bipolar depression and elevated Snaith−Hamilton Pleasure Scale (SHAPS) scores were assigned (1:1) to flexible dose, once-daily oral pramipexole as add-on treatment or placebo for 9 weeks. The primary outcome was change in SHAPS score from baseline to week 9. Analyses were conducted in the modified intention-to-treat population. Eighty-five participants were randomized, and 82 were included in the analysis. The primary outcome was met: pramipexole was associated with a greater reduction in SHAPS scores compared to placebo (mean difference: −4.04, 95% confidence interval: −6.89 to −1.18, P = 0.006, Hedges’ g = 0.62). Exploratory analyses indicated that pramipexole was associated with increased light physical activity and relative preservation of reward-related ventral striatal activation. Improvements in anhedonia were sustained during a 6-month open-label extension. Pramipexole was generally well tolerated compared to placebo. Pramipexole significantly improved anhedonia and showed a favorable safety profile, supporting its potential as an augmentation strategy in mood disorders. ClinicalTrials.gov identifiers: NCT05355337 and NCT05825235 . Pramipexole, in patients with major depressive disorder, dysthymia or bipolar depression, reduced Snaith−Hamilton Pleasure Scale scores significantly compared to placebo.

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

IGLU: The Integrated Gaussian Linear Unit Activation Function

Activation functions are fundamental to deep neural networks, governing gradient flow, optimization stability, and representational capacity. Within historic deep architectures, while ReLU has been the dominant choice for the activation function, modern transformer-based models increasingly are adopting smoother alternatives such as GELU and other self-gated alternatives. Despite their empirical success, the mathematical relationships among these functions and the principles underlying their effectiveness remains only partially understood. We introduce IGLU, a parametric activation function derived as a scale mixture of GELU gates under a half-normal mixing distribution. This derivation yields a closed-form expression whose gating component is exactly the Cauchy CDF, providing a principled one-parameter family that continuously interpolates between identity-like and ReLU-like behavior via a single sharpness parameter $\sigma$. Unlike GELU's Gaussian gate, IGLU's heavy-tailed Cauchy gate decays polynomially in the negative tail, guaranteeing non-zero gradients for all finite inputs and offering greater robustness to vanishing gradients. We further introduce IGLU-Approx, a computationally efficient rational approximation of IGLU expressed entirely in terms of ReLU operations that eliminates transcendental function evaluation. Through evaluations on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and WikiText-103 across ResNet-20, ViT-Tiny, and GPT-2 Small, IGLU achieves competitive or superior performance on both vision and language datasets against ReLU and GELU baselines, with IGLU-Approx recovering this performance at substantially reduced computational cost. In particular, we show that employing a heavy-tailed gate leads to considerable performance gains in heavily imbalanced classification datasets.

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

SceneMiner: Identity-Preserving Multi-Task Fine-Tuning for Unified BEV Scene Mining

Mining hard, safety-critical scenes from driving logs is bottlenecked by the absence of difficulty labels, and no single proxy, collision risk, trajectory ambiguity, or semantic rarity suffices to find such scenes on its own. We present SceneMiner, a unified, camera-only bird's-eye-view pipeline that emits complementary mining signals from a frozen vision-language backbone in a single forward pass, with no LiDAR or radar: a retrieval embedding for text-prompted scenario search, a multi-label scene-tag distribution, and a continuous physics-based risk score (a motion forecast is a byproduct, not a contribution). Building such a multi-head model exposes our central finding, a failure mode we term cross-task interference: adding or upgrading one head shifts a shared activation stream and degrades weight-frozen sibling heads, so freezing parameters alone is insufficient. Our contribution, identity-preserving multi-task fine-tuning, removes this interference by zero-initializing every new sub-module and freezing every parameter that feeds the shared stream. The mining heads are thereby preserved bit-identically while training only ~102k parameters. The tagging head reaches mAP 0.4614 (micro-F1 0.5557) on 20 scene tags by pooling each scene into 32 visual tokens, and the embedding head supports text-prompted retrieval, validated qualitatively. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/sceneminer_anonymous-64E5

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Earth Science Foundation Models: From Perception to Reasoning and Discovery

arXiv:2605.12542v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large foundation models (FMs) are transforming Earth science by integrating heterogeneous multimodal data, such as multi-platform imagery, gridded reanalysis data, diverse geophysical and geochemical observations, and domain-specific text, to support tasks ranging from basic perception to advanced scientific discovery. This paper provides a unified review of Earth science foundation models (Earth FMs) through two complementary dimensions: depth, which traces the evolution of model capabilities from perception to multimodal reasoning and agentic scientific workflows, and breadth, which summarizes their expanding applications across the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, anthroposphere, and cryosphere, as well as coupled Earth system processes. Using this framework, we review representative multimodal Earth foundation models and compile more than 200 datasets and benchmarks spanning diverse Earth science tasks and modalities. We further discuss key challenges in multimodal data heterogeneity, scientific reliability and continual updating, scalability and sustainability, and the transition from foundation models to agentic and embodied Earth intelligence, and outline future directions toward more integrated, trustworthy, and actionable AI Earth scientists. Overall, this paper offers a structured roadmap for understanding the development of Earth foundation models from both capability depth and application breadth.