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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

The impact of generative artificial intelligence on academic development of Chinese students in humanities and social sciences

Authors:
Lei Fan↗Fangxue Liu↗

arXiv:2606.24104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence(GenAI) is reshaping learning in higher education, with particularly pronounced implications for the humanities and social sciences(HSS), where learning outcomes are commonly expressed through written and interpretive forms that align closely with GenAI's capabilities. Yet, systematic evidence on the educational impacts of GenAI on HSS students remains limited. Addressing this gap, this study draws on a large-scale survey of HSS students in China to examine its role in academic development. Guided by relevant learning theories, this study focuses on four dimensions: patterns of use, effects on learning processes and academic performance, challenges associated with GenAI use, and preferred approaches to curricular integration. We found that more than half perceived enhanced learning motivation, independent thinking and creativity, although a substantial minority reported little change or even decline. Comparatively, a notably larger majority reported academic performance gains, although these gains may partly reflect limitations in conventional assessment practices. The study identifies variations in perceived learning and performance improvements among students with differing durations of GenAI experience, along with observable disciplinary differences and modest gender differences. While an overwhelming majority valued the importance of ethical considerations, only slightly more than half were satisfied with privacy protection. Limited accuracy and overreliance emerged as the most pressing concerns reported by students. Students favored partial or optional curricular integration supported by practice-oriented training, and widely recognized GenAI's significance for their future professional development. Grounded in student perspectives, this study offers evidence-based recommendations for the responsible and pedagogically meaningful integration of GenAI

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

PETRA: Transforming Web Text for Petroleum-Engineering Domain Adaptation

Authors:
Kirill Dubovikov↗Omar El Mansouri↗Hachem Madmoun↗Yanda Li↗Sandeep Kumar↗Aya El Mir↗Supriyo Ghosh↗Writabrata Bhattacharya↗Adrian Garcia-Garcia↗Onkar Pandit↗Sunil Kumar Sahu↗Federico Castanedo↗…

Petroleum-engineering search exposes a supervision gap for strong general retrievers: relevant evidence exists in public web text, but domain relevance labels are scarce. To address this gap, we propose PETRA, a large-scale Petroleum Engineering Text for Retrieval Adaptation dataset and pipeline that converts noisy public web data into a curated domain corpus and synthetic supervision for dense retrieval and reranking. PETRA contains 1.36M curated chunks, approximately 2B token equivalents, $\approx$859k, embedding training rows from $\approx$224k anchors, and roughly 400k teacher-scored reranker candidate rows. Its construction combines high-recall energy-domain curation, an energy-domain classifier with 98.4% test accuracy, chunk-grounded query generation, LLM-written hard negatives, and retrieval-mined candidate lists. PETRA improves first-stage in-domain Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG) from 0.703 to 0.763 through score fusion. Reranker adaptation improves the public Earth Science benchmark by 44% relative and a six-task reasoning-intensive panel by 23%. Failed training recipes show that high train-holdout accuracy on synthetic labels does not predict retrieval gains; retrieval-mined data helps only after being repackaged as teacher-scored candidate lists sampled from the inference-time candidate distribution.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Algorithm for Open-System Battery Cathodes by Modeling Multiple Strongly Coupled Holstein Polarons with Chain-Mapped Caldeira-Leggett Dynamics

Authors:
Joshua M. Courtney↗

arXiv:2606.16017v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cathode lithiation occupies a chemical regime of tightly localized orbitals, narrow bandwidths, and strong electron-lattice coupling. The defining electrochemical observables (open-circuit voltage and differential capacity) are open-system, reservoir-equilibration quantities that closed-Hamiltonian quantum simulation cannot produce, set by exchange with electron, Li$^+$, and phonon baths. We present a fault-tolerant quantum algorithm that recovers them through a unitary chain-mapped Caldeira-Leggett embedding, rendering the baths Trotterizable. The resulting fourth-order Trotter step has a T-gate count polynomial in system size, validating its open-system dynamics against hierarchical equations of motion (HEOM) at strong coupling and the Lindblad limit at weak coupling. For single-carrier olivine LiFePO$_4$, a single voltage anchor on an otherwise DFT-fixed Hamiltonian places the differential-capacity peak within the $\pm5$ mV reproducibility of the experimental plateau. For multi-carrier spinel LiMn$_2$O$_4$, whose $1{:}1$ Mn$^{3+}$/Mn$^{4+}$ filling makes the inter-site Coulomb repulsion dynamically active, the same kernel yields a two-plateau voltage curve with a $125$ mV split, within $17\%$ of the observed $150$ mV. We deliver an end-to-end fault-tolerant resource estimate for such a multi-carrier, three-reservoir observable: $368$ logical qubits and $\sim3\times10^5$ T-gates per step, or $\sim1.7\times10^{12}$ T-gates for a full voltage curve (parallelizable over $\sim10^3$ trajectories), leaving the production-scale dynamical run as a milestone for future hardware. The same kernel reproduces macroscopic quantum coherence, two-band superconductivity, and the Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein resonance without modification, placing dynamical battery chemistry and similar Hamiltonians within scope for fault-tolerant quantum simulation.

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04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Bayesian modeling of longitudinal metatranscriptomes of broiler meat spoilage microbiomes shows shared predictive signature associated with spoilage at refrigerated temperatures

Authors:
Nushi↗Manninen↗Johansson↗Honkela↗Björkroth↗

Microbial spoilage of packaged meat is driven by complex microbial succession and related metabolic activity, yet conventional shelf-life assessment is mainly based on shelf-life studies relying on culturing and sensory analysis. In routine quality assurance, results are obtained retrospectively, and they are only indirectly linked to the metabolic activity related to sensory deterioration. Functional, time informative approaches that capture the active metabolic state of the spoilage microbiome and predict the rate of spoilage are lacking. We developed a censoring-aware Gaussian process (CAGP) framework to model longitudinal pathway expression profiles from broiler meat metatranscriptomes collected over consecutive storage days at 4 or 6{degrees}C. Samples were annotated using odor-based sensory scores defining fresh, early-spoilage, and late-spoilage phases. Because observed zeros in pathway-level data may reflect non-detection rather than true absence, the model treats low values as left-censored observations below a detection threshold while estimating smooth temporal trajectories with uncertainty. In leave-one-out prediction within the 4{degrees}C time series, predicted sampling days differed from the true days by an average of 0.43 days, and predicted spoilage phases agreed with the sensory classification. Trajectories learned at 4{degrees}C also transferred to an independent 6{degrees}C time series at the spoilage-phase level, suggesting that shared functional spoilage programs are preserved despite temperature-dependent changes in spoilage rate. Cross-entropy ranking further identified pathway modules carrying time- and phase-informative signals across temperatures. Overall, this framework provides a probabilistic approach for linking metatranscriptomic functional dynamics to sensory spoilage progression, supporting shelf-life assessment beyond retrospective microbial enumeration.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

InvestPhilBench: A Multi-Layer Dynamic Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Model Procedural Reasoning in Expert Investment Philosophy

Authors:
Mingguang Chen↗Bo Qu↗

arXiv:2606.25984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as investment research assistants, yet no benchmark tests whether they can accurately reconstruct and apply the specific procedural decision frameworks of expert investors. We introduce InvestPhilBench, a multi-layer dynamic benchmark spanning eight cognitive tiers, from principle identification (L1) to novel framework extrapolation (L8). The v0.6 release comprises 118 primary-source-verified investment principle cards, 25 decision framework cards with explicit topology metadata, and 243 QA questions (197 dev / 46 held-out test). For reproducible scoring at scale we introduce the Benchmark Automated Scoring Pipeline (BASP) – five algorithmic metrics (OGRS, KCCS, SAP@k, IVP, CKCA) – the Failure Mode Detection Protocol (FMDP) with computable rules for six failure modes, and Gate Reconstruction Accuracy (GRA), a per-gate metric for questions with gold reasoning programs. In this release, InvestPhilBench is primarily a benchmark-and-methodology contribution. A four-model sanity wave on the 188-question development split shows a sharp provider-tier split (BASP 0.906 vs. 0.438); these mixed-judge numbers are confounded upper bounds. The central finding: the BASP composite saturates at the frontier (Claude L4 = 0.932) while GRA still exposes a procedural deficit (frontier L4 GRA approx. 0.77, L7 GRA 0.57-0.62) – composite scoring rewards fluent prose and hides the procedural gap. v0.6 implements a unified judge and true model-in-the-loop retrieval/oracle conditions; the de-confounded multi-model leaderboard and full three-condition run are v1.0 deliverables. On a 100-item expert-annotated gold set the automated BASP composite tracks the human reference at Pearson r = 0.72 (MAE = 0.10), with attribution (SAP@3) the weakest sub-metric and the failure-mode detector running sensitive-but-over-flagging.

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

PORTER: Language-Grounded Event Representations for Portable Structured EHR Foundation Models

Authors:
Lin Lawrence Guo↗Adam Paul Yan↗Emily Vettese↗Lillian Sung↗

Most electronic health record (EHR) foundation models encode clinical events as discrete event tokens from a fixed vocabulary and therefore cannot directly represent events containing unseen concepts or new combinations of concepts and attributes such as numeric values. This limits transfer across institutions and even across deployment pipelines within the same institution. We introduce PORTER, a language-grounded structured EHR foundation model that decouples event representation from this fixed vocabulary. PORTER represents events through their descriptions using a frozen text encoder, integrates numeric values through a dedicated pathway, and learns clinical dynamics over patient timelines with an autoregressively pretrained temporal backbone. Across 74 clinical prediction tasks at a pediatric hospital, PORTER matched the mean AUROC of a fixed-vocabulary model with the same temporal backbone and pretraining objective. When the same patient timelines were rendered using event descriptions not seen during pretraining, PORTER transferred without retraining or vocabulary mapping, recovering 97.1% of the mean AUROC of a model trained directly on the target vocabulary. When transferred to MIMIC, PORTER outperformed the fixed-vocabulary model, which dropped 69% of events because their tokens were unseen. Mechanistic analyses showed cross-vocabulary transfer tracked preservation of patient-level representation geometry rather than the scale of the text encoder, and the numeric pathway improved sensitivity to magnitude without disrupting clinical concept identity. PORTER also achieved higher AUROC than a task-specific text serialization comparator, at 329-fold lower amortized compute. PORTER is a step toward vocabulary-independent EHR foundation models that reduce the need for vocabulary harmonization while preserving in-domain performance and enabling efficient cross-task reuse.

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07.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-03

IsoPepTracker: An interactive web application for peptide-driven isoform analysis

Authors:
Araf Mahmud↗

by Araf Mahmud, Chen Huang Alternative splicing affects 95% of multi-exon genes, generating protein isoforms with distinct functions. While current alternative splicing analyses effectively identify splice events at the RNA level, they provide limited protein-level insight. To address this gap, we developed IsoPepTracker (https://www.isopeptracker.org), a user-friendly web application for analyzing and visualizing differential peptides across canonical and novel isoforms that are theoretically detectable by shotgun mass spectrometry-based proteomics. IsoPepTracker features four modules: Canonical Isoform Analysis, Novel Isoform Discovery, Peptide Sequence Search, and Alternative Splicing Analysis. Each module is tailored for distinct and complementary proteogenomics analyses. Users can input genes, novel cDNA sequences, peptides, or alternative splicing results to pinpoint peptides of interest and identify their associations with target genes or isoforms. We demonstrate the straightforward application of IsoPepTracker in proteogenomics through case studies. IsoPepTracker not only provides informative peptide signatures to understand the protein-level consequences of alternative splicing but also supplies peptide candidates for validation in shotgun proteomics.

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08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Bag of Dims: Training-Free Mechanistic Interpretability via Dimension-Level Sign Patterns

Authors:
Varun Reddy Nalagatla↗

arXiv:2606.12629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that the standard basis of transformer hidden states already provides a training-free, architecture-general feature basis. Individual dimensions encode semantic content via their signs and confidence via their magnitudes, functioning as independent binary registers. We validate this Bag of Dims framework across three model families (Qwen 3.5-4B, Gemma 3-4B, Mistral 7B) through four progressive experiments. Sign patterns alone carry predictive content: replacing all magnitudes with unity achieves 72-93% top-5 next-token accuracy through the LM head, and pure Hamming scoring without any decoder reaches 80-90% top-4096. These sign patterns organize into semantic features: using a single-token type cache (one forward pass per vocabulary token, no context), we discover 175 categories via per-dimension sign consistency (mean AUC 0.80) from 50 anchors with zero training. A trained probe adds only +0.018 AUC and converges to axis-aligned weights, confirming negligible cross-dimension structure. This structure extends to attention: all 175 categories remain discoverable in K and V projections. On the write side, static FFN weight inspection links 20% of features to individual writer neurons (>0.70 agreement; random controls: 0%), with top-200 neuron coalitions achieving >0.70 agreement on 99.9% of prototypes via majority vote. Fully unsupervised discovery (random seeds, no labels) scales to 1500 features at 100% yield and 99% sparsity across all three models, with pairwise MI of 0.0014 bits confirming low inter-dimension coupling. These results establish that the standard basis already suffices for feature reading throughout the transformer compute pathway, requiring no training, no optimization, and no GPU-days beyond a single forward pass per vocabulary token.

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

Distribution Alignment for One-Shot Federated Learning via Optimal Transport

Authors:
Daniele Berardini↗Vito Paolo Pastore↗Vittorio Murino↗

arXiv:2606.16655v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One-Shot Federated Learning (OSFL) addresses extreme communication regimes in which clients interact with the server only once, amplifying the impact of heterogeneous client data distributions. In particular, the interaction of domain shift and label shift across clients induces misaligned feature representations that cannot be corrected through iterative optimization. Existing OSFL methods rely on distillation, server-side generation or ensemble-based aggregation, but assume aligned representations or address domain and label shift separately. We introduce SLOT-Align (Single-round, Learning-free Optimal Transport Alignment), a geometry-aware feature harmonization framework for OSFL. SLOT-Align uses a shared frozen encoder to extract compact feature statistics, constructs a global reference via Bures-Wasserstein barycenters, and aligns local representations using closed-form geodesic optimal transport maps. The method is computationally efficient and can be combined with existing OSFL pipelines relying on frozen encoders without modifying their training procedures. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks, pretrained backbones, and OSFL methods show that SLOT-Align consistently improves accuracy and robustness under joint domain and label shift.

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

SG2Loc: Sequential Visual Localization on 3D Scene Graphs

Authors:
Nicole Damblon↗Olga Vysotska↗Federico Tombari↗Marc Pollefeys↗Daniel Barath↗

Visual localization in complex indoor environments remains a critical challenge for robotics and AR applications. Sequential localization, where pose estimates are refined over time, is important for autonomous agents. However, traditional methods often require storing extensive image databases or point clouds, leading to significant overhead. This paper introduces a novel, lightweight approach to sequential visual localization using 3D scene graphs. Our method represents the environment with a compact scene graph, where nodes represent objects (with coarse meshes) and edges encode spatial relationships. For each image in the localization phase, we extract per-patch semantic features, predicting object identities. Localization is performed within a particle filter framework. Each particle, representing a camera pose, projects the coarse object meshes from the scene graph into the image, assigning object identities to patches based on visibility. The similarity of the per-patch features, in the input image, and object features from the scene graph determines the weight of a particle. Subsequent images are incorporated sequentially, refining the pose estimate. By leveraging a compact scene graph and efficient semantic matching, our method significantly reduces storage while maintaining performance on real-world datasets. The code will be available at https://github.com/DmblnNicole/sg2loc.

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

Robustness of Mixtures of Experts to Feature Noise

Authors:
Dong Sun↗Rahul Nittala↗Rebekka Burkholz↗

arXiv:2601.14792v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite their practical success, it remains unclear why Mixture of Experts (MoE) models can outperform dense networks beyond sheer parameter scaling. We study an iso-parameter regime where inputs exhibit latent modular structure but are corrupted by feature noise, a proxy for noisy internal activations. We show that sparse expert activation acts as a noise filter: compared to a dense estimator, MoEs achieve lower generalization error under feature noise, improved robustness to perturbations, and faster convergence speed. Empirical results on synthetic data and real-world language tasks corroborate the theoretical insights, demonstrating consistent robustness and efficiency gains from sparse modular computation.

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12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Clifford Volume and Free Fermion Volume: Complementary Scalable Benchmarks for Quantum Computers

Authors:
Attila Portik↗Orsolya K\'alm\'an↗Thomas Monz↗Zolt\'an Zimbor\'as↗

arXiv:2512.19413v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As quantum computing advances toward the late-NISQ and early fault-tolerant eras, scalable and platform-independent benchmarks are essential for quantifying computational capacity in a classically verifiable manner. We introduce two volumetric benchmarks, Clifford Volume and Free Fermion Volume, that assess quantum hardware by testing the execution of random Clifford and free fermion operations. These two groups of unitaries possess a combination of properties that make them ideal for benchmarking: (i) each is individually efficient to simulate classically, enabling verification at scale; (ii) together they form a universal gate set; (iii) they serve as essential algorithmic primitives in practical applications (including shadow tomography and quantum chemistry); and (iv) their definitions are formulated abstractly, without explicit reference to hardware-specific features such as qubit connectivity or native gate sets. This framework thus enables scalable and fair cross-platform comparisons and tracks meaningful computational advancement. We demonstrate the practical feasibility of these benchmarks through extensive numerical simulations across realistic noise parameters and through experimental validation on Quantinuum's H2-1 trapped-ion quantum computer, which achieves a Clifford Volume of 34.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Latent Space Analysis for Interpretable Uncertainty in Melanoma Classification

Authors:
Ciro Listone↗Aniello Murano↗

Melanoma is a highly aggressive skin cancer, making early and accurate diagnosis critical. While deep learning excels in skin lesion classification, standard ``black-box" models struggle to explain diagnostic uncertainty, limiting clinical trust. This work introduces a hybrid framework combining a class-aware adversarial Variational Autoencoder and an XGBoost classifier, transcending simple binary classification by leveraging a generative latent space for interpretable decision support. Guided by adversarial training, the model learns the visual characteristics of skin lesions and projects them into a continuous latent space, ensuring that similar images are grouped closely together. Trained on this latent space, the XGBoost classifier achieves a robust AUC of 0.868, competing closely with state-of-the-art models. For borderline cases, the framework enables clinicians to leverage the latent topology through Content-Based Image Retrieval. This provides a dual benefit: it allows the clinician to visually compare an ambiguous lesion against biopsy-confirmed precedents and acts as an early warning sign since a borderline classification can indicate that a lesion shares features of both nevi and melanomas, potentially requiring close monitoring. Our approach translates algorithmic hesitation into transparent, evidence-based visual support, bridging the gap between predictive performance and clinical trust.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

VDE Bench: Evaluating The Capability of Image Editing Models to Modify Visual Documents

Authors:
Hongzhu Yi↗Yujia Yang↗Yuanxiang Wang↗Tong Li↗Zhenyu Guan↗Tianyu Zong↗Jiahuan Chen↗Chenxi Bao↗Tiankun Yang↗Haopeng Jin↗Yixuan Yuan↗Xinming Wang↗…

In recent years, image editing models have made significant progress, enabling users to manipulate visual content in a flexible and interactive manner through natural language instructions. However, an important yet underexplored research direction remains dense visual document image editing, which involves modifying textual content within images while faithfully preserving the original text style and background context. Existing methods primarily focus on English scenarios and images with relatively sparse text, and thus cannot adequately address dense, structurally complex documents or non-Latin scripts such as Chinese. To bridge this gap, we propose VDE Bench (Visual Doc Edit Bench), a rigorously human annotated and evaluated benchmark specifically designed to assess the performance of image editing models on bilingual Chinese-English and complex visual document editing tasks. The benchmark comprises a high quality dataset of 942 instruction based image editing samples, whose seed images encompass dense Chinese and English text documents including academic papers, posters, presentation slides, examination materials, and newspapers. Furthermore, we introduce a novel evaluation framework that systematically quantifies editing performance at the OCR parsing level, thereby enabling fine grained assessment of text modification accuracy. Based on this benchmark, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of representative image editing models. Human verification demonstrates a high degree of consistency between human judgments and automated evaluation metrics. VDE Bench constitutes the first systematic benchmark for evaluating the performance of image editing models on bilingual dense text visual documents.

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15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

High burden of subclinical TB in Africa revealed from a postmortem cohort.

Authors:
Ahimbisibwe↗NAKIBUULE↗Ssejjoba↗M. M↗Lekuya↗Kizito↗A. M↗Cose↗Mulwana↗Bisoboka↗C. P↗Turyasingura↗…

Tuberculosis (TB) is increasingly recognised as a spectrum of infection and disease, yet the prevalence of viable, asymptomatic Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb) infection remains uncertain. Subclinical Tuberculosis (scTB), defined as microbiologically confirmed M.tb infection in the absence of recognised symptoms, is under detected by symptom, sputum and imaging-based approaches. We conducted postmortem examinations of 94 adults who died from non-infectious causes, none of whom were clinically suspected of TB or reported TB related symptoms prior to death. Lung and extrapulmonary tissues were cultured for M.tb. Viable M.tb was confirmed in six individuals, corresponding to a prevalence of 6.4% (95% CI: 2.4 to 13.4%). These findings provide direct tissue-based evidence that viable, asymptomatic M.tb infection can persist beyond the reach of conventional clinical detection. Our data suggest that a biologically active reservoir of infection may exist undetected within high-burden settings, with implications for surveillance strategies aimed at TB elimination.

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16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Estimating condition number with Graph Neural Networks

Authors:
Erin Carson↗Xinye Chen↗

arXiv:2603.10277v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we propose a fast method for estimating the condition number of sparse matrices using graph neural networks (GNNs). For efficient deployment of GNNs, we introduce a graph feature construction with $\mathrm{O}(\mathrm{nnz} + n)$ complexity, where $\mathrm{nnz}$ is the number of non-zero elements in the matrix and $n$ denotes the matrix dimension. We propose two schemes for estimating the matrix condition number using GNNs; One follows by decomposing the condition number and predicts the relatively more computationally intensive part $\|\mathbf{A}^{-1}\|$, without explicitly forming the inverse, while the other is to predict the whole condition number $\kappa$. Our approach can be extended to an arbitrary norm. Extensive experiments are conducted for the estimation of the 1-norm and 2-norm condition numbers, which show that our method achieves a significant speedup over the traditional numerical estimation methods. Our software for GNN condition number estimator is made publicly available at https://github.com/inEXASCALE/sparse-kappa.

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17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

On-site interactions in quantum thermal machines: efficiency, rectification and entanglement beyond local and global master equations

Authors:
Salvatore Araceli↗Teddy H. M. Ong↗Baptiste Debecker↗Kai M\"uller↗Oliver Lunt↗Andrew J. Daley↗Fran\c{c}ois Damanet↗

arXiv:2606.14593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in experimental techniques have opened new routes for harnessing non-equilibrium dynamics in mesoscopic quantum systems. In this context, we study the impact of on-site interactions on the transport properties of a continuous quantum thermal machine composed of two coupled oscillators connected to two thermal reservoirs. In the weak system-reservoir coupling regime, where a long-standing debate concerns which reduced description should be preferred, we first show that the Redfield master equation (RME) provides an accurate and unifying framework that interpolates between two well-known limits: the local and global master equations. By relying on the Hierarchy of Pure States (HOPS), a numerically exact stochastic method, we then explore the full parameter space and show that interactions can be leveraged to tune the efficiency of the thermal machine at high temperatures (while leaving it essentially unchanged at low temperatures), induce non-reciprocal transport under asymmetric reservoir couplings, and generate steady-state entanglement within the junction. We derive expressions for system-bath correlators, such as heat and particle currents, consistently across different frameworks. Our work features on-site interactions to enhance the versatility of quantum thermodynamic junctions and clarifies the role of non-Markovianity and non-linearities in quantum transport.

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Effective Geometry and Position-Dependent Mass in Dual-$q$ Quantum Mechanics

Authors:
A. Boumali↗A. Makhlouf↗

arXiv:2606.12444v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work investigates the deformed-derivative formalism introduced by Borges, with emphasis on the relation between the linear operator $D_{(q)}$ and its nonlinear dual counterpart $D^{(q)}$. Directly inserting the dual derivative into the kinetic term leads to a nonlinear Schrödinger equation and obscures the usual interpretation of superposition and probability. We show that this nonlinearity can be removed by a simultaneous transformation of the coordinate and of the wave function. The transformed problem is an ordinary linear Schrödinger equation in a deformed coordinate, and its representation in the physical coordinate is equivalent to a Hermitian position-dependent-mass (PDM) Hamiltonian. In this formulation, the deformation parameter $q$ determines both the effective mass profile and the associated metric. The formalism is applied to the free particle, the infinite square well, the rectangular barrier, and the harmonic oscillator in the weak-deformation regime. Comparison with the nonadditive-translation approach of Costa Filho et al. shows that the Borges dual-$q$ framework provides an alternative route to the same effective geometric structure. For $q1$, the effective length is increased, which lowers the spectrum and suppresses tunneling relative to the undeformed limit $q=1$.

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

SCALE: Self-uncertainty Conditioned Adaptive Looking and Execution for Vision-Language-Action Models

Authors:
Hyeonbeom Choi↗Daechul Ahn↗Youhan Lee↗Taewook Kang↗Seongwon Cho↗Jonghyun Choi↗

arXiv:2602.04208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for general-purpose robotic control, with test-time scaling (TTS) gaining attention to enhance robustness beyond training. However, existing TTS methods for VLAs require additional training, verifiers, and multiple forward passes, making them impractical for deployment. Moreover, they intervene only at action decoding while keeping visual representations fixed-insufficient under perceptual ambiguity, where reconsidering how to perceive is as important as deciding what to do. To address these limitations, we propose SCALE, a simple inference strategy that jointly modulates visual perception and action based on 'self-uncertainty', inspired by uncertainty-driven exploration in Active Inference theory-requiring no additional training, no verifier, and only a single forward pass. SCALE broadens exploration in both perception and action under high uncertainty, while focusing on exploitation when confident-enabling adaptive execution across varying conditions. Experiments on simulated and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that SCALE improves state-of-the-art VLAs and outperforms existing TTS methods while maintaining single-pass efficiency.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Zero-Shot Test-Time Canonicalization using Out-of-Distribution Scoring

Authors:
Dominik Lindner↗Johann Schmidt↗Tom Siegl↗Martin Becker↗Sebastian Stober↗

arXiv:2606.24178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pretrained vision models often misclassify inputs that are rotated, scaled, or sheared, even though these affine transformations leave the object class unchanged. Robustness is usually restored either by building equivariance into the architecture or by retraining with augmentation, both of which require changing or retraining the model. Test-time canonicalization instead leaves the classifier untouched. It undoes the transformation of each input, mapping it to a canonical form near the training distribution before classification. Existing canonicalizers, however, rely on a narrow set of logit-based energy scores and bespoke search procedures, leaving the design space of scoring functions and optimizers unexplored. We reframe canonicalization as out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, which lets any OOD score serve as the energy minimized over transformations. Across benchmarks ranging from handwritten characters and sketches to natural images and 3D point clouds, we systematically evaluate around twenty OOD scores and nine search algorithms, finding that distance-based scores paired with random search and local refinement perform best overall. Because canonicalizing an already-aligned input can hurt accuracy, we add a gated mechanism that transforms an input only when its OOD score indicates this is needed, preserving most in-distribution accuracy while retaining the robustness gains on transformed inputs. Code is available at github.com/johschm/its.

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

CineCap: Structured Reasoning with Spatio-Temporal Anchors for Cinematographic Video Captioning

Authors:
Xinyu Mao↗Yuhui Zeng↗Xiaokun Liu↗Wenyu Qin↗Meng Wang↗Xin Tao↗Pengfei Wan↗Xiaohan Xing↗Max Meng↗

arXiv:2606.24636v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cinematographic captioning aims to describe how a video is filmed using professional film-language concepts such as camera movement, shot size, depth of field, composition, and shooting angle. This capability is important for fine-grained video understanding and controllable movie-quality video generation, yet remains underexplored in existing multimodal large language models. Unlike question-answering-based evaluation of cinematic understanding, cinematographic captioning requires a unified open-form description over multiple cinematographic dimensions. This task is challenging for two main reasons: the model must infer professional cinematographic concepts from subtle visual evidence, and it must generate captions that are both comprehensive and accurate. Accordingly, we propose CineCap, a framework that combines structured reasoning with spatio-temporal anchors and reinforcement learning with comprehensiveness, accuracy, and gated coverage rewards. The former grounds professional cinematographic descriptions in explicit visual evidence and organizes them into compact atomic reasoning for supervised fine-tuning, while the latter improves the balance between descriptive completeness and factual correctness. In addition, we construct CineCap Bench, a benchmark of 472 manually annotated video-caption pairs for systematic evaluation. Extensive experiments show that CineCap consistently outperforms strong proprietary and open-source baselines, establishing a new state of the art for cinematographic captioning. The code, model checkpoint, and benchmark are publicly available in https://github.com/Hectormxy/CineCap.git.

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

HOLO-MPPI: Multi-Scenario Motion Planning via Hierarchical Policy Optimization

Authors:
Youngjae Min↗Jovin D'sa↗Faizan M. Tariq↗David Isele↗Navid Azizan↗Sangjae Bae↗

arXiv:2606.16480v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world must plan motions across diverse scenarios without per-scenario retuning. End-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) can generalize across scenarios but often becomes brittle under distribution shift, reward misspecification, and stochastic interactions. Model predictive path integral (MPPI) control enables strong real-time refinement without gradients, but its performance depends on a well-shaped sampling prior, while manually designing the priors does not scale to multi-scenario deployment. We present HOLO-MPPI (High-level Offline, Low-level Online MPPI), a multi-scenario motion planning framework that combines high-level policy learning with low-level stochastic optimal control. Offline, we learn a high-level policy that proposes scenario-robust plans in an abstract action space, with a learned world model for online rollout. Online, the policy serves as a data-driven prior generator that parameterizes MPPI's sampling distribution conditioned on the current observation and goal. MPPI then optimizes low-level control sequences around this prior in real time to adapt to local disturbances. We instantiate HOLO-MPPI in autonomous driving by designing an effective high-level action space and tailored model architectures. Our evaluation across diverse driving scenarios shows that HOLO-MPPI improves upon MPPI and end-to-end RL baselines while maintaining real-time control.

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24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Vascular Phenotyping in Parkinson's Disease: Diabetes Mellitus Operationalizes a Microvascular Metabolic Syndrome Cluster Across PPMI Diagnostic Cohorts

Authors:
Belnavis↗Chiu↗Chen↗Thorpe↗Ofori↗

Background: Diabetes mellitus elevates Parkinson's disease (PD) risk, via hypothesized cerebrovascular mediation. Whether the diabetes/prediabetes vascular-risk phenotype concentrates in cardiometabolic risk or macrovascular events across prodromal and clinically diagnosed PD remains unresolved. Objectives: To quantify the vascular-risk burden associated with diabetes/prediabetes across the PPMI diagnostic cohorts to test whether this association differs by cohort. Methods: Cross-sectional analysis of 413 PPMI participants (76 healthy controls, 145 prodromal PD, 192 clinically diagnosed PD) examined diabetes/prediabetes (n = 73) and seven vascular risk factors. The Vascular Burden Score (0 to 7) was a priori partitioned into microvascular and macrovascular sub-scores. Modified Poisson regression estimated adjusted prevalence ratios (aPR), adjusted for age, sex, and body mass index. A cohort-by-diabetes interaction tested cross-cohort consistency. Sensitivity analyses incorporated nigral diffusion tensor imaging (PD-risk biomarker) and FreeSurfer white matter hypointensity volume (cerebrovascular marker). Results: Diabetes/prediabetes elevated Vascular Burden Score ({beta} = 0.53, 95% CI 0.29 to 0.77, p < 0.001) versus non-diabetic participants, with a non-significant cohort-by-diabetes interaction (F = 0.29, p = 0.747). Three microvascular factors survived false discovery rate correction: obesity (aPR 2.28), hypertension (aPR 1.60), and hyperlipidemia (aPR 1.45). Macrovascular events showed no diabetic amplification ({beta} = -0.06, p = 0.25). In the imaging-phenotyped subset, Vascular Burden Score components contributed classifier variance distinct from nigral microstructure. Conclusions: Diabetes/prediabetes operationalize a microvascular cluster stable across prodromal and idiopathic PD. Cardiometabolic phenotyping may complement established PD-risk biomarkers (dopamine transporter SPECT, nigral diffusion), pending longitudinal validation linking vascular phenotype to dopaminergic markers.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Adaptive and Explicit safe: Triggering Latent Safety Awareness in Large Reasoning Models

Authors:
Ke Miao↗Jiaxin Li↗Hongliang Chen↗Yuke Hu↗Zhan Qin↗

arXiv:2606.16808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex tasks, they remain highly vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreaks and direct harmful queries. To address this vulnerability, prior works depend heavily on external manual data annotation for safety alignment. However, we observe that LRMs can inherently identify safety risks when being re-presented with original queries alongside their own reasoning trajectories – a capability we term Latent Safety Awareness. To leverage this safety awareness, we first employ Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to explicitly induce safe tags to trigger safety analysis and guidance following the initial reasoning content for unsafe queries, while preserving standard responses for general queries to ensure adaptive triggering. Subsequently, we apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to further enhance the correctness and stability of the safety analysis and guidance. Notably, responses required for both training stages are entirely generated by models being optimized. With (Safe Trigger) SFT and DPO, experimental results demonstrate significant safety enhancement. For example, the Attack Success Rate (ASR) of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B, on average, drops 24.65% and 36.72% on harmful and jailbreak benchmarks, respectively. Finally, our Safe Trigger method exerts almost no negative impact on general performance or user experience.

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