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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

MAD: Manifold Attracted Diffusion

Authors:
Dennis Elbr\"achter↗Giovanni S. Alberti↗Matteo Santacesaria↗

arXiv:2509.24710v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Score-based diffusion models are a highly effective method for generating samples from a distribution of images. We consider scenarios where the training data comes from a noisy version of the target distribution, and present an efficiently implementable modification of the inference procedure to generate noiseless samples. Our approach is motivated by the manifold hypothesis, according to which meaningful data is concentrated around some low-dimensional manifold of a high-dimensional ambient space. The central idea is that noise manifests as low magnitude variation in off-manifold directions in contrast to the relevant variation of the desired distribution which is mostly confined to on-manifold directions. We introduce the notion of an extended score and show that, in a simplified setting, it can be used to reduce small variations to zero, while leaving large variations mostly unchanged. We describe how its approximation can be computed efficiently from an approximation to the standard score and demonstrate its efficacy on toy problems, synthetic data, and real data.

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02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Factor Analysing Predictive Processing: No Evidence for a General Factor Across Tasks

Authors:
Miller-Silva↗Knolle↗Greve↗de Beer↗Mujirishvili↗MacGregor↗L. J↗Corlett↗P. R↗Haarsma↗Powers↗A. R↗…

Background & Hypothesis: Dysfunctional predictive processing (PP), specifically the aberrant weighting of priors, is a frequently-proposed mechanism for psychosis and psychosis-like phenomena (schizotypy). Evidence for this theory mostly originates from single-task studies, which assume that all tasks load onto a single latent construct of PP performance, but the underlying factor structure of PP tasks is unknown. PP deficits in psychosis may be better described by a two-factor, hierarchical model: weakened lower-level (perceptual) priors compensated by higher-level (cognitive) priors. Study Design: This study implements a multi-paradigm approach in healthy participants to investigate latent constructs underlying PP and their relationship to schizotypy. Participants (N = 73) completed 6 tasks measuring reliance on priors across language, memory, visual, and auditory domains. A factor analysis investigated whether performance across tasks is captured by a single or two-factor model. Study Results: Although a two-factor model best described performance, factors reflected within-task correlations rather than a PP hierarchy. Cross-task PP measures were poorly correlated, suggesting that individuals' weighting of priors was task-specific. A full model including all task outcomes (not factors) significantly predicted the severity of schizotypal aberrant beliefs but no other schizotypal measures. Conclusions: These results do not evidence a single factor underpinning PP performance. It is therefore inappropriate to use results from single tasks to propose a generalised PP deficit in psychosis. Variation was also not captured by a two-factor hierarchical model of priors. Further multi-paradigm research is required to evaluate alternative models or additional variables that describe aberrant PP in psychosis.

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03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Marked random graphs with given degree sequence: large deviations on the local topology

Authors:
Rangel Baldasso↗Alan Pereira↗Guilherme Reis↗

arXiv:2401.00351v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the behavior of the empirical neighborhood distribution of marked graphs in the framework of local weak convergence. Here we extend known results by considering uniform random graphs with given degree sequences and i.i.d. marks on half-edges and vertices. We establish a large deviation principle for such families of empirical measures. The proof builds on Bordenave and Caputo's seminal 2015 paper, and Delgosha and Anantharam's 2019 introduction of BC entropy, relying on combinatorial lemmas that allow one to construct suitable approximations of measures supported on marked trees. Possible applications of these results are in the study of interacting diffusions on top of random graphs.

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

Data-Driven Decoding of Russell's Circumplex Model of Affect

Authors:
Amdjed Belaref↗Samir Sadok↗Zineb Noumir↗Renaud Seguier↗

Affective computing increasingly relies on deep learning to represent emotions, yet latent spaces often remain opaque, high-dimensional black boxes. This paper investigates whether Transformers' embeddings recover the geometric regularities of Russell's circumplex model. We unify two complementary experiments testing the hypothesis that, after training models on text and speech, their resulting latent spaces encode a topology consistent with valence-arousal and reproduce human-like neighborhood relations. Specifically, we evaluate deep representations extracted from Transformer-based text (RoBERTa) and speech (wav2vec 2.0) encoders, along with a multimodal Transformer fusion architecture, across naturalistic datasets like MSP-Podcast and controlled LLM-generated stimuli. Our analysis reveals that multimodal fusion of text and audio yields perfect topological alignment with Russell's primary emotion ordering. Furthermore, in a zero-shot setting using generic text embeddings, projected fine-grained emotion terms fall close to their established human-mapped coordinates. Our contribution is a novel, data-driven framework for validating emotion models, demonstrating that Russell's circumplex structure is intrinsically encoded in the embeddings of these modalities rather than being solely an artifact of human labeling, thereby bridging the gap between psychological theory and representation learning.

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

LaME: Learning to Think in Latent Space for Multimodal Embedding via Information Bottleneck

Authors:
Peixi Wu↗Biao Yang↗Feipeng Ma↗Bosong Chai↗Bo Lin↗Wei Yuan↗Fan Yang↗Tingting Gao↗Hebei Li↗Xiaoyan Sun↗

Reasoning-driven universal multimodal embedding has advanced rapidly by introducing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning into the embedding pipeline. Despite the strong performance across both general and complex tasks, this paradigm suffers from two core limitations: (i) autoregressive CoT reasoning incurs high computational cost, making it impractical for low-latency retrieval; and (ii) embedding performance is heavily coupled with CoT annotation quality, making large-scale training unreliable. These raise fundamental questions: Is textual CoT the optimal form of reasoning for embedding, and can effective embedding reasoning be accomplished in latent space? To this end, we propose LaME (Latent Reasoning Multimodal Embedding), which formulates embedding-oriented latent reasoning as a weakly supervised information bottleneck. LaME employs K learnable reason tokens as a fixed-capacity bottleneck, completing all reasoning within a single forward pass. The two weak supervision signals structurally decouple contrastive from autoregressive objectives and eliminate dependence on CoT annotations, while a two-stage training pipeline ensures stable convergence. Experiments on MMEB-v2 and MRMR show that LaME achieves competitive performance, surpassing some explicit CoT-based models, while delivering 60x faster inference than explicit CoT methods and 2x faster than latent baselines with throughput comparable to discriminative embedding models. Code will be released.

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

Prism: Cost-Efficient Multi-LLM Serving via GPU Memory Ballooning

Authors:
Shan Yu↗Yifan Qiao↗Mingyuan Ma↗Yangmin Li↗Shuo Yang↗Xinyuan Tong↗Yang Wang↗Zhiqiang Xie↗Yuwei An↗Shiyi Cao↗Ke Bao↗Deepak Vij↗…

arXiv:2505.04021v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference providers must maintain availability for many LLMs, including low-volume but essential models, making resource efficiency increasingly important as token prices fall. Analysis of production traces reveals a dynamic bursty-group pattern in which sets of models become active together and shift over time; existing space- and time-sharing approaches lack principled mechanisms to adapt to this variability, forcing trade-offs between SLO adherence and efficiency. We observe that elastic memory allocation can unify spatial and temporal sharing. Based on this insight, we have developed Prism, a memory-centric LLM co-serving framework that applies memory ballooning to reclaim memory across models and support both forms of sharing under a single scheme. Prism's balloon driver, referred to as kvcached, has been open-sourced at https://github.com/ovg-project/kvcached, and deployed in production environments across 10K+ GPUs.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Efficient and Sound Probabilistic Verification for AI Agents

Authors:
Alaia Solko-Breslin↗Pramod Kaushik Mudrakarta↗Mihai Christodorescu↗Somesh Jha↗Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham↗

arXiv:2606.20510v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Securing AI agents that operate in complex digital environments has become a critical need, and runtime monitoring approaches that formulate and enforce policies expressed in a formal language like Datalog offer a promising solution. However, existing approaches are restricted to deterministic policies. In many practical applications of AI agents, there is a need to enforce security policies in the face of ambiguity, leading to probabilistic predicates or state transitions (for example, a declassifier or Personally Identifiable Information (PII) detector that has some failure probability on each invocation). Furthermore, in many such applications, one cannot easily make the independence assumptions necessary to invoke prior work on probabilistic inference in Datalog. We address this by introducing a sound and efficient framework for such verification based on distributionally robust optimization, computing sound upper bounds on the probability of policy violation regardless of possible correlations between predicates. On standard benchmarks for terminal and tool calling agents, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms prior art and improves the security-utility trade-off while ensuring rigorous bounds on the probability of policy violation.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MeshLoom: Feed-Forward Non-Rigid Registration of Mesh Sequences

Authors:
Jianqi Chen↗Jiraphon Yenphraphai↗Xiangjun Tang↗Sergey Tulyakov↗Chaoyang Wang↗Peter Wonka↗Rameen Abdal↗

We present MeshLoom, a feed-forward registration network that directly reconstructs vertex deformations across mesh sequences. Our approach advances non-rigid registration beyond existing models, which are typically constrained by costly per-instance optimization, narrow object categories, pairwise-only inputs, or merely intermediate outputs. The network is simple and efficient, registering multiple meshes within seconds. At its core lies a topology-aware encoder–decoder design. Specifically, we first introduce a topology-aware point representation that encodes the anchor (reference) mesh's topology into its per-vertex features. This representation strengthens the network's understanding of the anchor-mesh geometry and disambiguates points that are Euclidean-close yet geodesically distant. We then propose a multi-modal encoder that fuses this anchor-mesh representation with complementary cues from each frame, such as shape latents and image features. These multi-source signals are compressed into a compact global motion embedding that captures dense inter-frame correspondence. A lightweight decoder then queries this global embedding with the anchor-mesh point representation, retrieving per-vertex deformations at target timestamps. Through extensive experiments across diverse motions and object categories, we show that MeshLoom achieves state-of-the-art results on non-rigid registration. In addition, we find that our global embedding-then-query paradigm naturally enables the network to generate deformations at intermediate timestamps, which extends MeshLoom to motion interpolation and mesh morphing. Project page: https://meshloom.github.io/ .

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Apparent Psychological Profiles of Large Language Models are Largely a Measurement Artifact

Authors:
Jelena Meyer↗David Garcia↗Dirk U. Wulff↗

Psychological instruments designed for humans are increasingly used to assign large language models (LLMs) stable psychological profiles that affect their usability, safety assessment, and use as proxies for human participants in research. Using a formal psychometric framework, we show that these profiles are largely a measurement artifact. Administering a battery of personality and risk-preference instruments spanning self-reports and behavioral tasks to 56 instruction-tuned LLMs alongside large human reference samples, we report four findings. First, differences between models are driven not by the traits an instrument targets but by a directional response bias, a tendency to respond toward one end of the scale, or one labeled option, regardless of item content; a variance decomposition attributes 81-90% of between-model variation to this bias, against 9-16% in humans. Second, the bias declines with model capability but is not eliminated by it. Third, because bias rather than trait drives responding, an instrument's apparent reliability is almost entirely predicted by its response orthogonality, a term we coin for the proportion of items for which trait and bias point in opposite directions. Fourth, the profile a model appears to have shifts with the items used and can be manufactured through item selection. These results demonstrate that the apparent psychological profiles of LLMs are artifacts of the instrument used to measure them, not properties of the models themselves. As instruments borrowed from human psychology are rarely fully orthogonal and may inherently lack validity for LLMs, we call for dedicated assessments centered on response orthogonality.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Feature-preserving Latent-EnKF for Data Assimilation of Flows with Shocks

Authors:
Hemanth Chandravamsi↗Hangchuan Hu↗Ponkrshnan Thiagarajan↗Tamer A. Zaki↗

arXiv:2606.12559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is widely adopted for sequential data assimilation, but fails for solutions with discontinuities, such as shocks in compressible flows. Uncertainty in shock location induces multimodal ensemble statistics that violate the Gaussian assumptions underlying the EnKF, producing large-scale spurious oscillations in the analysis state. We introduce a feature-preserving latent-EnKF that performs the ensemble update in a learned low-dimensional latent space, where shock and flow features admit a smooth manifold representation, thereby preserving sharp features during EnKF analysis. The updated latent state is mapped back to physical state through a shared decoder for all ensemble members. The algorithm eliminates the member-specific ordered training and positivity flooring used in prior approaches. Numerical experiments on a Sod shock tube and Mach 2 shock interaction with a 2D cylinder, using sparse and noisy observations, show accurate feature recovery of shocks and contact discontinuities without spurious oscillations.

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11.
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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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

TRACE: Learning to Compute on Circuit Graphs

Authors:
Ziyang Zheng↗Jiaying Zhu↗Jingyi Zhou↗Qiang Xu↗

arXiv:2509.21886v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning to compute, the ability to model the functional behavior of a circuit graph, is a fundamental challenge for graph representation learning. Yet, the dominant paradigm is architecturally mismatched for this task. This flawed assumption, central to mainstream message passing neural networks (MPNNs) and their conventional Transformer-based counterparts, prevents models from capturing the position-aware, hierarchical nature of computation. To resolve this, we introduce TRACE, a new paradigm built on an architecturally sound backbone and a principled learning objective. First, TRACE employs a Hierarchical Transformer that mirrors the step-by-step flow of computation, providing a faithful architectural backbone that replaces the flawed permutation-invariant aggregation. Second, we introduce function shift learning, a novel objective that decouples the learning problem. Instead of predicting the complex global function directly, our model is trained to predict only the function shift, the discrepancy between the true global function and a simple local approximation that assumes input independence. We validate this paradigm on various circuits modalities, including Register Transfer Level graphs, And-Inverter Graphs and post-mapping netlists. Across a comprehensive suite of benchmarks, TRACE substantially outperforms all prior architectures. These results demonstrate that our architecturally-aligned backbone and decoupled learning objective form a more robust paradigm for the fundamental challenge of learning the functional behavior of a circuit graph.

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

Uncertainty-Aware Reward Modeling for Stable RLHF

Authors:
Licheng Pan↗Haocheng Yang↗Haoxuan Li↗Yichen Sun↗Yunsheng Lu↗Shijian Wang↗Lei Shen↗Yuan Lu↗Zhixuan Chu↗Hao Wang↗

arXiv:2606.19818v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) aligns large language models by training reward models on preference data and optimizing policies to maximize predicted rewards. However, this pipeline faces two fundamental challenges: (1) reward models cannot signal when their predictions are unreliable, since they usually act as deterministic point estimators; and (2) modern group-based policy optimization can amplify unreliable reward signals, as exemplified by GRPO's uniform treatment of rewards during advantage computation. As policies explore increasingly diverse responses, these two limitations create a critical vulnerability: unreliable reward estimates may be granted disproportionate influence, triggering severe reward hacking. We propose Uncertainty-Aware Reward Modeling (UARM), which equips reward models with calibrated uncertainty via quantile-based conformal prediction and reweights GRPO advantages through heteroscedastic variance decomposition. Experiments across HelpSteer, UltraFeedback, and PKU-SafeRLHF demonstrate that UARM significantly improves reward model calibration, reduces reward hacking, and enhances downstream alignment quality compared to standard GRPO and uncertainty-agnostic baselines.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

To Cool, or Not to Cool? Displacement Sensing with Hot Quantum States

Authors:
Piotr T. Grochowski↗

arXiv:2606.13650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum-enhanced displacement sensing with bosonic systems is typically formulated assuming that the oscillator is cooled close to its ground state before nonclassical probe preparation. We investigate whether such near-ground-state initialization is necessary, or whether sensitive probes can instead be generated directly from thermal states. We analyze hot quantum probes produced by squeezing, number-raising, and Schrödinger-cat-state generation applied to thermal inputs. We identify two distinct mechanisms by which thermal mixedness can remain compatible with enhanced displacement sensitivity. First, projecting a mixed probe onto a definite parity sector removes the usual thermal suppression of the displacement quantum Fisher information, which can then increase with initial thermal occupation. Second, coherent superpositions of opposite displacements can retain sensitivity through coherence between their displaced components, even when the underlying state is mixed. We use these two mechanisms to classify hot-state protocols according to whether their sensitivity comes from parity selection, coherence between displaced components, or both. Finally, we formulate an experimentally relevant optimization problem comparing initial cooling with direct hot-state preparation under realistic decoherence and show that complete cooling is not universally optimal. Our results establish hot-state engineering as a route to quantum-enhanced bosonic displacement sensing without mandatory ground-state initialization.

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15.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Prescribed hormonal contraceptive use trends in the Estonian Biobank: A longitudinal observational study

Authors:
Jelisaveta Džigurski↗

by Jelisaveta Džigurski, Märt Möls, Kristi Läll, Hannah Currant, Mall Eltermaa, Estonian Biobank Research Team , Reedik Mägi, Lili Milani, Triin Laisk Background Hormonal contraceptives (HCs) are widely used and have well-documented population-level statistics. Previous studies with short follow-ups have focussed on individual HC use and side effects. However, the same aspects over longer periods, HC formulation switching, and the impact of genetic factors on HC side effects remain understudied due to the limited availability of suitable datasets. We investigated whether the Estonian Biobank (EstBB) is suitable for studying genetic risk for HC side effects. Methods and findings This is a longitudinal descriptive study combining prescribed HC purchase data collected from 2004 to 2022 with genetic and health data from 73,071 female EstBB HC users aged 15–55 at the time of purchase. HC usage was defined by the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) codes G02B, G03A, and G03HB01. Methods included calculating age-stratified annual user prevalence, inferring usage periods from purchases, assessing formulation switching, identifying the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10)-based side effect-related diagnoses and thromboembolism risk factors, and assessing carrier status for Factor V Leiden (FVL, rs6025) and prothrombin G20210A (PTM, rs1799963) genetic variants as proof-of-concept. Over 19 years, 20 HC formulations with five administration routes (oral pills, transdermal patches, vaginal rings, subdermal implants, intrauterine devices) were used. In the EstBB, combined HCs were the most commonly used among users aged 15–29, while progestin-only HC use increased with age and over time, comparable to the Estonian population. Overall, 64.2% (n = 46,920) of users switched formulations at least once, with 17.7% (n = 12,929) being rapid switchers. Side effect-related diagnoses were observed in 23.1% (n = 2,982) of rapid switchers, with excessive/irregular menstrual bleeding being the most common. Genetic analysis revealed that 5.3% (n = 3,886) of users carried at least one variant previously associated with increased thrombosis risk (3.5% (n = 2,556) carried FVL only, 1.8% (n = 1,276) PTM only, and 0.07% (n = 54) both). Carriers of thrombosis-associated variants had a significantly higher percentage of thrombosis (6.5%) than non-carriers (4.2%; OR = 1.61, 95% CI [1.40, 1.84], p 

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16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Partitioned Iterative Quantum Scheduling of Satellites for Urgent Disaster Response: Case study of Wildfire

Authors:
Lucas T. Braydwood↗Taejin Park↗Hirofumi Hashimoto↗Zoe Gonzalez Izquierdo↗Andrew Michaelis↗Eleanor Rieffel↗Shon Grabbe↗

arXiv:2606.12310v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The standard in Earth-observation tasks today is having near real-time access to surface images in response to changing conditions. For instance, as urban environments interface more with wildlands and wildfires become less predictable, their tracking with satellite resources becomes essential. This requires the coordination of increasingly large constellations of satellites, giving rise to challenging computational problems. With wildfire detection and tracking as a backdrop, we investigate the power of special purpose and novel computing paradigms to tackle the ensuing satellite scheduling problems, making a compelling case for quantum algorithms. We bring quantum scheduling algorithms closer to implementation by examining both the emerging iterative quantum algorithm framework, which comes with analytic guarantees compared to some classical algorithms, and distributed quantum computing methods whose relevance is on the rise as utility-scale problems begin to get solved with quantum computers. Drawing strength from several computing fronts, we develop a distributed/parallelization scheme in conjunction with the quantum algorithm design and apply these techniques to real-world datasets for wildfire detection. While our quantum subprocesses are currently too small to see significant quantum advantage, our results validate the utility of these techniques, and continue forging the path toward distributed quantum computing.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

LatticeBridge: Rare-Event Sequential Inference for Faithful Structured Sequence Synthesis

Authors:
Faruk Alpay↗Bugra Kilictas↗

Structured sequence generation often requires a model to satisfy several input-derived constraints in a single output. Standard decoding methods may assign high probability to fluent continuations while placing low mass on continuations that realize all required anchors jointly. We study this regime as a rare-event sequential inference problem. LatticeBridge combines a compact prefix language model, instance-compiled surface automata, and a twisted sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) decoder with resampling, multilevel splitting, and a source-support proposal term derived from instance-provided phrases. The constraint representation is compiled from each input instance and does not rely on manually curated lexical classes. On 2,610 attainable validation tasks spanning CommonGen, E2E NLG, and WikiBio, the particle decoder improves exact anchor satisfaction and mean anchor coverage over greedy, beam-filtered, and best-of-k ancestral baselines under a shared proposal model. Since exact anchor satisfaction alone does not rule out unsupported attribute substitutions, the evaluation reports required-anchor coverage, source coverage, source-intrusion diagnostics, overlap, runtime, and particle statistics jointly. The benchmark characterizes the faithfulness-overlap-latency frontier under a fixed proposal model.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Benchmarking Cross-Domain Audio-Visual Deception Detection

Authors:
Xiaobao Guo↗Zitong Yu↗Nithish Muthuchamy Selvaraj↗Bingquan Shen↗Adams Wai-Kin Kong↗Alex C. Kot↗

Automated deception detection is crucial for assisting humans in accurately assessing truthfulness and identifying deceptive behavior. Conventional contact-based techniques, like polygraph devices, rely on physiological signals to determine the authenticity of an individual's statements. Nevertheless, recent developments in automated deception detection have demonstrated that multimodal features derived from both audio and video modalities may outperform human observers on publicly available datasets. Despite these positive findings, the generalizability of existing audio-visual deception detection approaches across different scenarios remains largely unexplored. To close this gap, we present the first cross-domain audio-visual deception detection benchmark, that enables us to assess how well these methods generalize for use in real-world scenarios. We used widely adopted audio and visual features and different architectures for benchmarking, comparing single-to-single and multi-to-single domain generalization performance. To further exploit the impacts using data from multiple source domains for training, we investigate three types of domain sampling strategies, including domain-simultaneous, domain-alternating, and domain-by-domain for multi-to-single domain generalization evaluation. We also propose an algorithm to enhance the generalization performance by maximizing the gradient inner products between modality encoders, named ``MM-IDGM". Furthermore, we proposed the Attention-Mixer fusion method to improve performance, and we believe that this new cross-domain benchmark will facilitate future research in audio-visual deception detection.

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

Context-Guided Semantic Alignment for Feature Fusion Networks

Authors:
Hyungseop Lee↗Jiho Lee↗Woochul Kang↗

Feature fusion networks are fundamental components in modern object detectors, aggregating multi-scale features to detect objects of varying sizes. However, directly fusing features from different pyramid levels often introduces semantic inconsistency due to their heterogeneous representations. In this paper, we propose Feature Interaction NEtwork (FINE), a lightweight semantic alignment module that refines low-level features via high-level contextual guidance using cross-level attention prior to fusion. To bridge the structural gap and ensure computational efficiency, we introduce an Alignment-Aware Token Sampling that aligns corresponding spatial regions across scales, reducing the attention complexity by an order of magnitude. The resulting attention weights generate a spatial-channel modulation map that is upsampled and applied to the low-level features via residual element-wise modulation. This mechanism ensures that the network selectively enhances semantically relevant pixels while preserving the sub-pixel localization accuracy necessary for dense prediction tasks. FINE is generally applicable to various detectors and consistently improves detection accuracy without compromising efficiency.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Minimal surfaces, Knots, and Neural Networks

Authors:
Tancredi Schettini Gherardini↗Marco Usula↗

arXiv:2605.26234v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A recent conjecture by Joel Fine posits a relationship between the coefficients of the HOMFLY polynomial of a knot $K$ in the 3-sphere $S^3$, and the signed count of minimal surfaces in hyperbolic 4-space $\mathrm{H}^4$ meeting the sphere at infinity at $K$, with prescribed genus and self-intersection number. In this paper, we develop a novel machine learning framework based on Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) to solve the minimal surface equation in hyperbolic space. We utilise this framework to test Fine's Conjecture by constructing near-minimal surfaces bounding various families of knots in $S^3$. Furthermore, we develop an algorithmic method to find self-intersections and compute their sign. For every knot analysed, the computationally discovered minimal surfaces and their self-intersection numbers perfectly align with the predictions of Fine's Conjecture, providing empirical evidence for it.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Evaluating and Preserving Lexical Stress in English-to-Chinese Speech-to-Speech Translation

Authors:
Yuchen Song↗Xi Chen↗Mingze Li↗Satoshi Nakamura↗

Speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) systems have achieved impressive progress in semantic accuracy and speech naturalness. However, the cross-lingual transfer of lexical stress, a vital cue for emphasis and speaker intent, remains heavily underexplored, compounded by a lack of reliable automatic evaluation metrics for tonal languages like Chinese. We investigate English-to-Chinese S2ST stress transfer by constructing a stress-annotated Chinese dataset and an XLS-R-based Mandarin stress detector. Integrating this with the English EmphAssess system, we propose a novel objective metric for cross-lingual stress evaluation. Furthermore, we fine-tune CosyVoice3 to build a stress-aware S2ST system. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed S2ST architecture significantly outperforms existing systems in stress translation capability while maintaining competitive translation quality. Furthermore, our evaluation metric exhibits a strong correlation with human subjective judgments.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Relational Structural Causal Models

Authors:
Adiba Ejaz↗Elias Bareinboim↗

arXiv:2606.14892v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An artificial intelligence must have a model of its environment that is causal, supporting reasoning about interventions and counterfactuals, and also combinatorial, supporting generalization to unseen combinations of objects. In this work, we formally study when and how such a model can be learned. We develop relational structural causal models, extending structural causal models (Pearl 2009) to settings where objects and their relations vary. First, we show how answers to not only causal but also observational queries about unseen combinations of objects can not be identified without further assumptions. To enable such identification–including in the presence of unobserved confounding–we define relational causal graphs and derive symbolic identification criteria. Finally, we propose relational neural causal models, a provably correct approach that outperforms non-relational baselines on simulated traffic scenes with varying cars, signals, and pedestrians.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Link-Free Multi-Node Timing Synchronization for Scalable Quantum Networking

Authors:
Jacob E. Humberd↗Mohmad Junaid Ul Haq↗Angel Fraire Estrada↗Ike Deitch↗Tian Li↗

arXiv:2606.14077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Precise timing synchronization is essential for distributed quantum networking, enabling entanglement distribution, quantum teleportation, and entanglement swapping across remote nodes. Existing synchronization architectures rely on dedicated timing-distribution infrastructure, most notably White Rabbit networks, which constrain topology, scalability, and deployment in free-space and satellite environments. Here we demonstrate link-free synchronization of quantum network nodes using independently operating miniature rubidium atomic clocks and computational post-processing. We validate the approach on a deployed metropolitan-scale telecom fiber network spanning three geographically separated nodes. Following drift correction, atomic-clock-based synchronization achieves timing performance approaching that of a White Rabbit benchmark and remains stable over continuous 8-hour operation. As a stringent test of quantum-network functionality, we observe Hong-Ou-Mandel interference across spatially separated nodes with visibility exceeding 70%, statistically equivalent to that obtained using dedicated White Rabbit timing links. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first observation of quantum interference across a deployed metropolitan-scale telecom fiber network synchronized entirely without dedicated timing-transfer infrastructure. These results establish atomic-clock-based synchronization as a scalable, topology-independent alternative to conventional timing-distribution architectures and a practical pathway toward terrestrial, airborne, and space-based quantum networks where dedicated timing links are unavailable.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

BrainFusionNet: a deep learning and XAI model to understand local, global, and sequential features of MRI images for improved brain tumour detection

Authors:
Md Taimur Ahad↗Bo Song↗Yan Li↗

The noise of Magnetic Resonance Imaging MRI poses challenges for Deep Learning DL when tumor boundaries are obscured tumor location and appearance are complex Therefore we develop BrainFusionNet that combines Convolutional Neural Networks CNNs Vision Transformers ViT and Gated Recurrent Units GRUs to extract spatial contextual and sequential features from MRI images for improved brain tumor classification Furthermore explainable AI such as SHAP LIME and GradCAM are integrated to visualise and highlight image regions that contribute to BrainFusionNets decisionmaking process The proposed BrainFusionNet model is evaluated on two publicly available MRI datasets Kfold validation suggests 98 accuracy on both datasets The model was compared with the six stateoftheart SOTA CNNs and transfer learning Among the SOTA CNNs DenseNet121 and VGG16 achieved the highest accuracy of 96 The novelty of BrainFusionNet is that the hybrid model effectively extracts local and global features from MRI images even in smallscale tumor regions and small tumor sizes The model has a balanced sequential CNN architecture to capture lowlevel and deeperlayer features a customized ViT that captures local features stabilizes gradient flow and reduces the risk of vanishing gradients during MRI image training The CNN and ViT outputs are fed into a GRU for final classification Furthermore we analyze pixel intensities to determine whether MRI image quality affects image classification Our findings are very novel in image interpretation as we found that the distribution of pixel intensities in MRI images affects DL performance

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

The Theory of Mind Utility: Formal Specification of a Mentalizing Mechanism

Authors:
Nikolos Gurney↗Stacy Marsella↗

arXiv:2606.12721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inferring others' beliefs requires more than reading surface signals; it requires tracking who told them what, in what order, and how credibly. The Theory of Mind Utility (ToM-U) formalizes this epistemic state inference problem at the computational level of analysis, specifying what mentalizing computes and why without commitment to algorithmic or neural implementation. ToM-U achieves this by constructing Local Epistemic World Models (LEWMs) – directed typed graphs that represent agents, state nodes, and the epistemic relationships among them – and evaluating discrete candidate LEWMs against observed behavior until one achieves sufficient confidence. Five formal definitions specify the LEWM structure, agent node properties including ordered information access history, a bounded proliferation mechanism for recursive mentalizing, three inference procedures, and a residue function that captures the structured trace left by failed mentalizing attempts. ToM-U differs from Bayesian Theory of Mind and adjacent formal accounts, which presuppose rather than derive belief states, and from simulation theory and theory-theory, which lack a formal apparatus for epistemic state inference. The architecture generates directional, falsifiable predictions about mentalizing failure that follow from structural properties of the model rather than auxiliary assumptions, and positions ToM-U as a domain-agnostic mechanism upstream of goal inference and other downstream social cognitive processes.

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