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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-11

Connected or chained by social media? Child and adolescent mental health in a digital era

Authors:
Silja Kosola↗

by Silja Kosola Social media has evolved from connection to compulsion, disproportionately harming children and adolescents. Addictive designs together with developmental vulnerability fuel mental health risks and highlight the urgent need for stricter age limits and stronger protections. In this Perspective, Silja Kosola outlines how social media disproportionately harms child and adolescent mental health, and argues that while recent policy changes aimed at protecting youth from social media are welcome, stricter age limits and greater accountability of social media companies are needed.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Beyond Runtime Enforcement: Shield Synthesis as Defensibility Analysis for Adversarial Networks

Authors:
Achraf Hsain↗Sultan Almuhammadi↗

arXiv:2606.13621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shielded reinforcement learning is typically presented as a runtime safety mechanism that compiles temporal-logic specifications into automata restricting an agent's actions. We argue this is the wrong product. The same automata-theoretic machinery – specification compilation, product game construction, attractor computation, and winning-region extraction – is better read as a design-time analytical instrument whose outputs are structural insights about a system rather than runtime constraints on a deployed agent. We instantiate this through a constrained two-player safety game for network defense. The two specifications are enforced asymmetrically: the defender specification defines the unsafe region of the game, whereas the attacker specification restricts the adversary's legal actions during attractor computation. Solving the game yields a defensibility verdict – a formal certificate that a topology-specification pair is or is not defensible – with the associated winning region and shield. Beyond the binary verdict, we derive topology-level metrics from the attractor structure and combine them with post-convergence behavior from shield-constrained adversarial multi-agent reinforcement learning. Together these form a defensibility fingerprint capturing both a network's formal safety properties and its operational behavior under adaptive play. A what-if analysis shows that formal defensibility and operational effectiveness capture distinct aspects of security: small architectural changes can produce large shifts in operational outcomes while leaving formal safety margins nearly unchanged. Shield synthesis is thus most valuable not as a deployment mechanism for safe agents, but as a framework for answering architectural questions about whether, where, and how a system can be defended. The defensibility verdict is the output, not the safe policy.

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Topical Phase Transitions in Artificial Intelligence Research: Large-Scale Evidence and an Early-Warning Signature for Emerging Topics

Authors:
Rasul Khanbayov↗Hasan Kurban↗

arXiv:2606.12828v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Do research topics in artificial intelligence grow gradually, or do they advance through abrupt, detectable jumps? Analyzing 80,814 accepted main-track papers from five premier AI conferences (ACL, CVPR, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS) spanning 2017 to 2025, we show major AI topics advance through topical phase transitions: remaining marginal for years, then surging across venues within one to three years. Large language models became the dominant cross-venue topic by 2025, diffusion models rose with comparable abruptness, and language-model methods crossed into computer vision via vision-language models, whereas reinforcement learning compounded smoothly, distinguishing genuine phase transitions from ordinary growth. This structure is our primary contribution: a large-scale, cross-venue characterization of how AI research reorganizes. We then ask whether a transition leaves a detectable footprint before it peaks. We define an early-warning signature, four publication-dynamics criteria frozen on 2017-2021 data, and evaluate it out of sample on 2023-2025 transitions, obtaining a precision of 27% and recall of 63% against a 13.5% base rate. Applied to 2025 data, the signature flags reasoning and test-time compute, agentic AI, multimodal LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, and world models as topics to monitor over 2026-2028. The source code is also publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/KurbanIntelligenceLab/ai-phase-transitions.

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

Stepwise Token Selection for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models

Authors:
Landi He↗Shawn Young↗Lijian Xu↗

In multimodal large language models (MLLMs), inference cost is largely dominated by the visual token prefix rather than the language backbone, making token reduction a key factor for improving efficiency. Existing approaches typically assign independent importance scores to visual tokens and retain a fixed number of top-ranked tokens, implicitly assuming token independence and a uniform compression ratio across inputs. In this work, we reformulate visual token pruning as a sequential decision-making process. Specifically, we introduce a pointer-style selection mechanism that iteratively chooses informative tokens, conditioning each decision on previously selected ones, and dynamically determines when to stop via a learned termination action. This enables joint optimization of both the selected subset and its size. To enable end-to-end training under standard language modeling objectives, we design a differentiable relaxation based on a variance-preserving noise interpolation scheme, allowing gradients to propagate through the discrete selection process. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-v1.5-7B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms fixed-ratio baselines across different compression levels. Under aggressive pruning that removes 88.9% of visual tokens, our method preserves 94.6% of the original accuracy while achieving a 1.88x speed-up in prefill latency.

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

MAND: Modality-Aware Novelty Detection for Open-World Egocentric Activity Recognition

Authors:
Hyejeong Im↗Wonseon Lim↗Dae-Won Kim↗

Multimodal egocentric activity recognition integrates visual and inertial cues for robust first-person behavior understanding. However, deploying such systems in open-world environments requires detecting novel activities while continuously learning from non-stationary data streams. Existing methods rely on the main fused logits for novelty scoring, without fully exploiting the complementary evidence available from individual modalities. Because these logits are often dominated by RGB, cues from other modalities, particularly IMU, remain underutilized, and this imbalance worsens as catastrophic forgetting accumulates. To address this, we propose MAND, a modality-aware framework for multimodal egocentric open-world continual learning. At inference, Modality-aware Adaptive Scoring (MoAS) adaptively adjusts modality contributions using sample-wise reliability and refines novelty scoring with deviation and disagreement penalties. During training, Modality-aware Representation Stabilization Training (MoRST) preserves the discriminative capacity of each modality across tasks through modality-specific heads and modality-wise logit distillation. Experiments on a public multimodal egocentric benchmark show that MAND consistently improves novel activity detection and known-class accuracy while substantially reducing FPR95, indicating more reliable open-world recognition. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/HyeJeongIm/MAND}{github.com/HyeJeongIm/MAND}.

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

SimSiam Naming Game: A Unified Approach for Emergent Communication and Representation Learning

Authors:
Nguyen Le Hoang↗Tadahiro Taniguchi↗Tianwei Fang↗Akira Taniguchi↗Masatoshi Nagano↗

Emergent Communication (EmCom) investigates how agents develop symbolic communication through interaction without predefined language. Recent frameworks, such as the Metropolis–Hastings Naming Game (MHNG), formulate EmCom as the learning of shared external representations negotiated through interaction under joint attention, without explicit success or reward feedback. However, MHNG relies on sampling-based updates that suffer from high rejection rates in high-dimensional perceptual spaces, making the learning process sample-inefficient for complex visual datasets. In this work, we propose the SimSiam Naming Game (SSNG), a feedback-free EmCom framework that replaces sampling-based updates with a symmetric, self-supervised representation alignment objective between autonomous agents. Building on a variational inference–based probabilistic interpretation of self-supervised learning, SSNG formulates symbol emergence as an alignment process between agents' latent representations mediated by message exchange. To enable end-to-end gradient-based optimization, discrete symbolic messages are learned via a Gumbel–Softmax relaxation, preserving the discrete nature of communication while maintaining differentiability. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-100 show that the emergent messages learned by SSNG achieve substantially higher linear-probe classification accuracy than those produced by referential games, reconstruction games, and MHNG. These results indicate that self-supervised representation alignment provides an effective mechanism for feedback-free EmCom in multi-agent systems.

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

A Risk Decomposition Framework for Pre-Hoc Fine-Tuning Prediction

Authors:
Yuxiang Luo↗Chen Wang↗Nan Tang↗

arXiv:2606.17649v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The high cost of fine-tuning LLMs poses a significant economic barrier; pre-hoc performance prediction offers a critical solution to substantially reduce this expense. However, the theoretical limits of pre-hoc performance prediction remain unexplored. We formulate it as a stochastic estimation problem under information constraints, decomposing prediction risk into two components: an intrinsic limit (static data-model compatibility) and a reducible optimization variance. We prove that optimization variance admits a necessary lower bound on its decay rate, implying fundamental constraints on how quickly uncertainty dissipates, regardless of the predictor used. Based on these dynamics, we derive a budget-optimal probing principle and introduce a predictability phase diagram that organizes tasks into three distinct regimes: Static-Sufficient, Dynamic-Critical, and Noise-Dominant. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks validate these theoretical regimes and demonstrate the efficiency of our probing strategy.

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

Two-Stage Fine-Tuning of ResNet50 for High-Sensitivity Melanoma Detection on Dermoscopic Images

Authors:
Aryan Bhagat↗

Melanoma is the most dangerous form of skin cancer with five-year survival rates exceeding 99% when detected early but falling sharply once the disease spreads. This paper proposes and evaluates a two-stage fine-tuning approach for ResNet50 applied to binary melanoma classification on dermoscopic images. The core challenges addressed are class imbalance and suboptimal transfer learning from single-stage fine-tuning. After stratified train/validation/test splitting, random oversampling was applied exclusively to the training set to achieve a 1:1 class balance. Stage 1 trained only the classification head with the ResNet50 base frozen, while Stage 2 fine-tuned all layers jointly at a low learning rate of 1e-5 to prevent catastrophic forgetting of learned visual features. On an independent test set of 3,826 images, the model achieved an AUC-ROC of 0.9559, accuracy of 88.34%, sensitivity of 87.56%, specificity of 89.13%, and F1-score of 88.29%. An ablation study confirms the two-stage protocol significantly outperforms single-stage fine-tuning, with sensitivity gains of over 4%. Grad-CAM visualizations demonstrate correct lesion localization. A fully deployable Streamlit detection application is provided alongside all training code.

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09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-18

Daily briefing: The proteins that protect us from deadly mutations

Authors:
Flora Graham↗

Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States. Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States.

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

Machine-learning clustering of close-in exoplanet populations: links to pebble accretion

Authors:
Yi Duann↗Anders Johansen↗Haiyang S. Wang↗H. Jens Hoeijmakers↗

arXiv:2606.11737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Close-in exoplanets exhibit a wide range of orbital architectures and physical properties shaped by both formation conditions and migration processes. Although population-synthesis models predict distinct planetary populations, establishing a quantitative connection between observed exoplanets and synthetic populations remains challenging. We investigate the intrinsic organisation of close-in exoplanets using physically motivated dynamical parameters and connect the resulting populations to pebble-accretion formation pathways. A two-stage Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is applied to an observed sample of close-in exoplanets, performing unsupervised probabilistic clustering in a feature space dominated by dynamical descriptors of planet-star interactions. The resulting clusters are mapped onto a pebble-accretion synthetic population within a statistically motivated three-dimensional parameter space. Formation-related quantities, including gas availability, gas fraction, and ice-rock mass ratio, are then used to interpret the mapped populations. We identify statistically supported sub-populations without imposing predefined classification boundaries, including very-massive gas giants, hot giants, warm-Jupiter-dominated systems, and lower-mass giants. The mapped synthetic populations reveal systematic differences in formation timing, gas accretion, and solid growth histories. In particular, very-massive gas giants are preferentially associated with earlier formation epochs than hot-giant and warm-Jupiter-dominated populations. These results demonstrate that physically motivated machine-learning approaches can provide a statistically robust framework for linking observed exoplanet populations to theoretical planet formation pathways.

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

IMPACTeen: Intentions, Manipulation, Persuasion, Annotations, and Consequences in Teen Communication Dataset

Authors:
Aleksander Szcz\k{e}sny↗Wiktoria Mieleszczenko-Kowszewicz↗Maciej Markiewicz↗Beata Bajcar↗Tomasz Adamczyk↗Jolanta Babiak↗Grzegorz Chodak↗Przemys{\l}aw Kazienko↗

IMPACTeen is a dataset of textual social influence scenarios spanning interpersonal, media-based, and digital settings in an adolescent context. It contains 1,021 texts, 5,100 individual annotation records, and gold labels for social influence techniques, with each text annotated from five distinct perspectives: teenagers, parents, psychologists, communication experts, and teachers. The resource was constructed through constrained LLM generation, followed by a two-step human editing and validation phase aimed at ensuring youth-context realism. A multi-dimensional annotation covered influence presence, techniques, intentions, consequences, resistance, reactions, and annotation confidence. The dataset supports research on social influence detection, annotator disagreement, cross-lingual modeling, and the training and evaluation of language models. The dataset was created in Polish and is accompanied by a corresponding English version.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Provable Recovery of Locally Important Signed Features and Interactions from Random Forest

Authors:
Kata Vuk↗Nicolas Alexander Ihlo↗Merle Behr↗

arXiv:2512.11081v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Feature and Interaction Importance (FII) methods are essential in supervised learning for assessing the relevance of input variables and their interactions in complex prediction models. In many domains, such as personalized medicine, local interpretations for individual predictions are often required, rather than global scores summarizing overall feature importance. Random Forests (RFs) are widely used in these settings, and existing interpretability methods typically exploit tree structures and split statistics to provide model-specific insights. However, theoretical understanding of local FII methods for RF remains limited, making it unclear how to interpret high importance scores for individual predictions. We propose a novel, local, model-specific FII method that identifies frequent co-occurrences of features along decision paths, combining global patterns with those observed on paths specific to a given test point. We prove that our method consistently recovers the true local signal features and their interactions under a Locally Spike Sparse (LSS) model and also identifies whether large or small feature values drive a prediction. We illustrate the usefulness of our method and theoretical results through simulation studies and a real-world data example.

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13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Spatiotemporal downscaling and nowcasting of urban land surface temperatures with deep neural networks

Authors:
Solomiia Kurchaba↗Angela Meyer↗

arXiv:2605.13566v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a key variable for various applications, such as urban climate and ecology studies. Yet, existing satellite-derived LST products provide either high spatial or high temporal resolution, resulting in a fundamental trade-off between the two. To address this trade-off, we combine observations from a geostationary and a polar orbiting satellite and provide LST fields at high spatial and high temporal resolution (1 km at 15-min intervals). We demonstrate their application for intraday forecasting of LSTs. To estimate LST fields at high spatiotemporal resolution, a U-Net model is trained to map LST fields from SEVIRI/MSG (3 km and 15 min resolution) to LST fields from Terra/Aqua MODIS (1 km, 4 overpasses per day) that are collocated in space and time. The presented model has been trained on LSTs across large European cities with a population exceeding 1 million inhabitants, and achieves an RMSE = $1.92${\deg}C and near-zero bias MBE = $0.01${\deg}C on the hold-out test set. As a second step, we present an LST nowcasting model based on ConvLSTM architecture, trained across downscaled LST fields with forecast lead times of 15 to 75 minutes. The nowcasting model outperforms a persistence and a Climatological Rolling Median benchmarks, with RMSEs of $0.57$ to $1.15${\deg}C for the considered lead times and biases ranging from $-0.1$ to $0.14${\deg}C. An additional validation conducted against independent MODIS overpasses confirms robust performance. Our LST forecast model at high spatiotemporal resolution is directly applicable to operational satellite-based LST monitoring.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Physics-Informed Variational Quantum Classifier for Phase Detection in Strongly Correlated Matter

Authors:
Hugo Catal\'a↗Ezequiel Valero↗Germ\'an Rodrigo↗

arXiv:2606.14489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The characterisation of quantum phases in strongly correlated systems is a crucial milestone for the deployment of quantum sensors. In this work, we present a Physics-Informed Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) designed to detect the topological phase transition between the Fermi polaron quasiparticle and the molecular bound state. Unlike conventional Machine Learning approaches, our quantum architecture is constructed via the Trotterised time-evolution of an effective Hamiltonian, ensuring that the learnable parameters correspond to interpretable physical quantities. We show that the VQC efficiently discovers the optimal interferometric protocol, specifically the evolution time and effective bath interactions required to maximise the visibility of Ramsey fringes, thereby clearly distinguishing the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) and Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) regimes. Furthermore, we report the validation of this classifier on the QRed superconducting quantum processor (BSC-CNS). Despite the intrinsic hardware noise and decoherence, the VQC preserves the relative ordering of the topological phases. We demonstrate that the physics-informed architecture achieves a linear gate complexity $\mathcal{O}(N)$, bypassing the exponential memory wall of classical simulation and ensuring scalability to many-body regimes.

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

Pushing the Boundaries of Natural Reasoning: Interleaved Bonus from Formal-Logic Verification

Authors:
Chuxue Cao↗Jinluan Yang↗Haoran Li↗Kunhao Pan↗Zijian Zhao↗Zhengyu Chen↗Yuchen Tian↗Lijun Wu↗Conghui He↗Sirui Han↗Yike Guo↗

arXiv:2601.22642v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable capabilities, yet their stochastic next-token prediction creates logical inconsistencies and reward hacking that formal symbolic systems avoid. To bridge this gap, we introduce a formal logic verification-guided framework that dynamically interleaves formal symbolic verification with the natural language generation process, providing real-time feedback to detect and rectify errors as they occur. Distinguished from previous neuro-symbolic methods limited by passive post-hoc validation, our approach actively penalizes intermediate fallacies during the reasoning chain. We operationalize this framework via a novel two-stage training pipeline that synergizes formal logic verification-guided supervised fine-tuning and policy optimization. Extensive evaluation on six benchmarks spanning mathematical, logical, and general reasoning demonstrates that our 7B and 14B models outperform state-of-the-art baselines by average margins of 10.4% and 14.2%, respectively. These results validate that formal verification can serve as a scalable mechanism to significantly push the performance boundaries of advanced LLM reasoning.

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

TivTok: Broadcasting Time-Invariant Tokens for Scalable Video Tokenization

Authors:
Weiliang Chen↗Yuanhui Huang↗Xuebo Wang↗Yueqi Duan↗

Video tokenization is fundamental to scalable video generation, as the number of tokens directly determines the computational cost and the length of videos that can be modeled. Existing tokenizers mainly improve scalability by compressing videos into fewer tokens, but they often continue to represent persistent content, such as static backgrounds and consistent object appearances, repeatedly across frames and chunks. In this paper, we propose TivTok (Time-Invariant Tokenizer), a reuse-aware video tokenizer that makes persistent information reusable across time. TivTok represents a clip with Time-Invariant (TIV) tokens that encode information shared across frames and Time-Variant (TV) tokens that encode frame-specific residuals. To obtain this factorization, we introduce Scope-Induced Factorization (SIF), which assigns different attention scopes to the two token groups: TIV tokens attend to the full clip, whereas each TV token only accesses its corresponding frame together with the TIV tokens. In the decoder, Invariant Broadcasting (IB) reuses the same TIV tokens across frames and chunks for parallel reconstruction and long-video tokenization. Experiments show that TivTok achieves an rFVD of 12.65 on the standard $16{\times}256{\times}256$ benchmark and improves compression efficiency by 2.91$\times$ for 128-frame videos compared with the evaluated baselines, while using only 1.1\% of the tokens required by downsample-based tokenizers in our evaluation.

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17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Exact Fourier dimensions of dyadic Mandelbrot cascades under minimal integrability

Authors:
Yin Cai↗Guozheng Cheng↗Xiang Fang↗Menghan Li↗Hongdou Qu↗Chengbo Xiao↗

arXiv:2606.08683v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We determine the Fourier dimension of dyadic Mandelbrot cascades under the minimal Kahane-Peyriere integrability condition. The interval theorem is proved in a vector-valued dyadic cascade model in which sibling weights may have arbitrary dependence. For every balanced energy-admissible vector law, almost surely on non-extinction, dim_F(mu)=dim_E(mu)=dim_2(mu)=D_E(X). In the canonical scalar case, under W>=0, E W=1, E[W log_2^+ W]

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

MyPCBench: A Benchmark for Personally Intelligent Computer-Use Agents

Authors:
Lawrence Keunho Jang↗Andrew Keunwoo Jang↗Jing Yu Koh↗Ruslan Salakhutdinov↗

Current benchmarks for computer-use agents evaluate models in impersonal environments. This leaves a gap between evaluation and deployment where personal assistants are expected to work across a user's whole digital life, including their context, historical data, and logged-in accounts. This gap is widest on web tasks, where live web evaluations cannot exercise sites that require logging in or personal information, the kind of site a real personal assistant has to drive. We introduce MyPCBench, which tests computer-use agents as personal assistants on a Linux desktop populated with 17 simulated real-world web applications and a full desktop stack, all seeded for one canonical persona, Michael Scott from The Office. We define 184 tasks in this environment, each inspired by a real request drawn from the OpenClaw community, and benchmark six closed and open-weight models with a uniform computer+bash tool surface. We find that the best model, Claude Opus 4.6, fully solves 55.4\% of the tasks, the only model above 50\%. Model failures cluster on tasks that span many applications and on long trajectories, where personalization stresses an assistant the most. We release the environment, task set, and agent harness at https://mypcbench.com.

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

How Reliable are Fairness Audits with Unreliable Data?

Authors:
Yash Vardhan Tomar↗

arXiv:2506.23033v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fairness audits are a key component of responsible machine-learning deployment. Yet, audit-recommendation reliability under incomplete protected-label access is still poorly understood. In this work, we focused on protected-label missingness in fairness mitigation audits. We introduced a seed-calibrated stress test to separate missingness effects from seed-to-seed movement already present under complete labels. Across ACS/Folktables tasks, missingness settings that retain some protected labels usually do not move selected mitigation methods beyond a complete-label seed-to-seed baseline. At $0%$ protected-label access, candidates collapse to an empirical-risk-minimization baseline and deterministic tie-breaking rather than revealing a broad missingness effect. We also found that threshold optimization can turn fairness gains on a single protected axis into intersectional harm above a seed baseline, and this threshold-optimizer finding persists under random-forest validation. Overall, our results highlight that protected-label missingness should be reported with seed-null calibration, candidate-set context, and intersectional consequences before it is treated as evidence of audit fragility.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

How do Self-Supervised Remote Sensing Vision Models Transfer to Downstream Tasks?

Authors:
Julia Romero↗Qin Lv↗Morteza Karimzadeh↗

Self-supervised geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) learn transferable representations from remote sensing data, but their downstream behavior is difficult to characterize. We study six representative GeoFMs spanning joint-embedding, reconstruction, and multimodal pretraining families, and evaluate transfer across classification, regression, and segmentation benchmarks under different label availability and downstream pipelines. We find that model rankings change across tasks and adaptation settings. Layerwise probing shows that, in most cases, task-relevant information is more accessible in intermediate transformer blocks compared to final-layer embeddings, and that GeoFMs exhibit distinct depthwise profiles. In segmentation case studies on PASTIS and Sen1Floods11, downstream adaptation settings such as decoder design and fine-tuning can be as impactful as the choice of GeoFM, and standard dense-prediction heads may be poorly aligned with how GeoFMs organize information over depth. Finally, CKA analysis on case studies shows that fine-tuning does not rewrite GeoFMs uniformly across depth, and the strongest changes are localized to the first linear layer of the MLP in ViT blocks. These results help explain why GeoFM rankings shift across benchmarks and motivate more representation-aware evaluation and adaptation strategies.

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21.
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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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Position: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces!

Authors:
Subbarao Kambhampati↗Karthik Valmeekam↗Siddhant Bhambri↗Vardhan Palod↗Lucas Saldyt↗Kaya Stechly↗Soumya Rani Samineni↗Durgesh Kalwar↗Upasana Biswas↗

arXiv:2504.09762v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has become a standard method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. These intermediate tokens have been called \say{reasoning traces} or even \say{thinking traces} – implicitly anthropomorphizing the traces, and implying that these traces resemble steps a human might take when solving a challenging problem, and as such can provide an interpretable window into the operation of the model's thinking process to the end user. In this position paper, we present evidence that this anthropomorphization isn't a harmless metaphor, and instead is quite dangerous – it confuses the nature of these models and how to use them effectively, and leads to questionable research. We call on the community to avoid such anthropomorphization of intermediate tokens.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Rethinking the Pointer Loss in Table Structure Recognition: Geometry-Aware Pointer Loss for Spatial Locality

Authors:
Hong-Jun Choi↗Jongho Lee↗Jaeyoung Kim↗

Table Structure Recognition (TSR) using a pointer network achieves impressive results by predicting HTML sequences while aligning tags to detected text (or cell) regions. However, our analysis reveals that when pointer networks fail, 79.6% of errors occur between spatially adjacent cells (Manhattan distance

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

ViT-FREE: Efficient Face Recognition via Early Exiting and Synthetic Adaptation

Authors:
Tahar Chettaoui↗Guray Ozgur↗Eduarda Caldeira↗Naser Damer↗Fadi Boutros↗

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have gained significant attention in computer vision and shown strong potential for face recognition (FR). However, their high computational cost makes deployment on resource-constrained devices challenging, motivating the need for methods that balance efficiency and accuracy. In this work, we investigate early exiting in pretrained ViTs as a simple yet effective training-free strategy for efficient FR inference. Leveraging the uniform feature dimensionality across transformer encoder blocks, we introduce ViT-FREE, a multi-exit framework that enables face verification directly from intermediate representations without modifying or retraining the backbone model, and thus, reducing inference cost. Empirically, we show that patch embeddings and attention maps evolve progressively across depth, exhibiting high similarity between consecutive ViT blocks and increasing alignment with the final representation. This indicates gradual feature refinement and attention convergence, suggesting that intermediate layers already provide stable and discriminative representations suitable for early exiting. Through extensive experiments on multiple FR benchmarks, we systematically analyze the accuracy-efficiency trade-off across exit depths. Our results demonstrate that later exits achieve a highly favorable balance, with exiting at layer 10 yielding up to a 20% speedup while incurring only a 1.5 drop in verification performance on benchmarks such as IJB-C. Also, we propose ViT-FREE_FT, a lightweight exit-specific fine-tuning strategy that adapts only the projection layers using a small synthetic dataset while keeping the transformer backbone frozen. This approach improves the performance of shallow exits while preserving the efficiency benefits and leaving deeper exits largely unaffected.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Compiler-First State Space Duality and Portable $O(1)$ Autoregressive Caching for Inference

Authors:
Cosmo Santoni↗Anmol Thapar↗

arXiv:2603.09555v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: High-throughput Mamba-2 inference is usually tied to fused CUDA and Triton kernels, limiting portability across accelerator backends. We show that the state space duality (SSD) recurrence has a compiler-friendly structure: diagonal per-head dynamics, fixed-size chunking, einsum-dominated compute, and static control flow. Expressing this structure in standard JAX primitives gives a single-source inference path with no custom kernels, a registered JAX PyTree cache, and a compiled on-device autoregressive loop. On a single Google Cloud TPU v6e, batch-1 prefill reaches approximately 140 TFLOPS, or 15% model FLOP utilisation (MFU), the roofline ceiling for this regime, and cached decode reaches up to 64% hardware bandwidth utilisation (HBU). At a 4096-token context, cached decode is 27x–36x faster than full-prefix recomputation across five Mamba-2 checkpoints from 130M to 2.7B parameters. The same source runs unmodified on NVIDIA L40S, where cached decode remains sequence-length independent across all model scales. WikiText-103 validation perplexity matches the Triton reference mamba_ssm v2.2.2 within +/-0.0005 points, and hidden states agree to float32 rounding tolerance. Code is available at https://github.com/CosmoNaught/mamba2-jax.

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