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01.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-22

Biological aging and generational shifts in early-onset cancer risk

作者:

Incidence of early-onset cancer is rising globally in recent generations, which underscores the need to elucidate the influence of emerging generational risk factors. Systemic and organ-specific aging reflects the cumulative impact of exposures and may provide an integrative and complementary approach to understand early-onset cancer risk. Here among 154,169 young adults from the United Kingdom Biobank, systemic aging measured by PhenoAge increased across birth cohorts, with 23% s.d. increase for those born 1965–1974 versus 1950–1954, and was associated with early-onset solid cancer risk (hazard ratio (HR)per s.d. 1.08; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.03–1.13), driven by lung, gastrointestinal and uterine cancers, independent of genetic risks of aging and cancer. Patterns were consistent using alternative systemic aging measures, including the Klemera–Doubal method-defined age gap and metabolomic-based age gap. These findings were validated partially among 10,262 participants in the United States All of Us Research Program. Proteomics-based organ-specific aging analyses linked immune aging with early-onset lung cancer (HRper s.d. 1.89; CI, 1.20–2.97) and adipose tissue aging to early-onset colorectal cancer (HR 1.60; CI, 1.11–2.32). Greater age gap, reflecting more advanced biological aging relative to chronological age, may serve as a driver associated with risk of early-onset solid cancers, highlighting the importance of uncovering underlying mechanisms to guide effective prevention strategies. Analyses of population cohorts found that young adults exhibited earlier systemic and organ-specific aging, which was associated with increased risk of early-onset cancer compared with older adults born decades earlier.

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

Objects Before Words: Object-First Inductive Biases for Grounding Language in Child-View Video

Learning grounded word meaning from natural experience requires resolving two ambiguities in infant-view recordings: when the named referent appears and where it is in a cluttered frame. In SAYCam-style data, caregiver speech is sparse and weakly synchronized with egocentric video, so single-frame contrastive pairing yields noisy positives in which the intended object is absent or entangled with distractors. We propose BabyMind, an object-first bias for child-view contrastive learning under sparse, noisy supervision. BabyMind extracts candidate object embeddings using an offline mask-based region interface, links candidates across a short utterance-centered window into lightweight object files via tracking, and aligns utterances to bags of object files with a prototype-space multiple-instance contrastive objective. Track-coherence and global-object agreement regularizers stabilize learning and transfer object-file structure into the global frame embedding used at evaluation. On SAYCam-S, BabyMind improves Labeled-S 15 forced-choice accuracy by +2.6 points over CVCL and yields consistent gains on in-vocabulary out-of-distribution benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/sathiiii/BabyMind.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Digital self-efficacy as a potential intermediary between vision impairment and daily internet use among older adults: A cross-sectional analysis of HINTS 2024

Background: Older adults with vision impairment often experience barriers to using digital technology. The indirect associations between vision impairment and digital access and skills via digital self-efficacy and frustration among older adults remain largely unknown. Objective: This study aimed to 1) explore factors associated with digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration among older adults with vision impairment; 2) examine associations between vision impairment and digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration among older adults; and 3) examine whether digital self-efficacy and frustration may help explain associations between vision impairment and digital access and skills among older adults. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study using nationally representative data from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) 2024. Respondents aged 60 and older were included. Vision impairment was assessed using a self-reported item. Outcomes included self-reported digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration. Survey-weighted multivariable logistic regression and generalized structural equation modeling were conducted, adjusting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, and the number of comorbidities. Results: Among 3,149 older adults (mean [SD] age, 70.7 [10.0] years; 45.6% female), 7.1% (n=223) reported vision impairment. Among older adults with vision impairment, 65.6% (95% CI, 53.5% to 75.9%) used the internet daily, and 79.5% (95% CI, 66.8% to 88.2%) used a smartphone in the past 12 months. In multivariable logistic regression analyses among older adults with vision impairment, older age was associated with lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.90), smartphone use (OR, 0.85; 95% CI, 0.75 to 0.97), wearable device use (OR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.97), and using the internet to send a message to a healthcare provider (OR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.80 to 0.93). Older adults who self-identified as racial and ethnic minority groups (e.g., Black/African American, Hispanic) had lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.15; 95% CI, 0.05 to 0.50) and using the internet to send a message to a healthcare provider (OR, 0.17; 95% CI, 0.04 to 0.73) compared with Non-Hispanic White older adults. Vision impairment was associated with lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.60; 95% CI, 0.37 to 0.99) and digital self-efficacy (OR, 0.53; 95% CI, 0.32 to 0.86). Digital self-efficacy was associated with higher odds of daily internet use (OR, 2.95; 95% CI, 2.04 to 4.26). Generalized structural equation modeling identified an indirect association between vision impairment and daily internet use via digital self-efficacy (coefficient, -0.68; 95% CI, -1.24 to -0.12). Conclusions: Findings suggest that reduced digital self-efficacy may help explain the observed association between vision impairment and daily internet use among older adults. Interventions targeting digital self-efficacy, including accessible interface designs, personalized coaching, and peer support, may help bridge the digital divide among older adults with vision impairment.

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

Distilling latent electrostatics from foundation machine learning interatomic potentials

arXiv:2606.15001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have enabled atomistic simulations across broad regions of chemical and materials space, but many remain computationally expensive and lack explicit electrostatics, limiting their use for systems governed by long-range interactions and electrical response. Previously, we introduced Latent Ewald Summation (LES), which learns latent atomic charges and long-range electrostatics from density functional theory (DFT) energy and force labels alone. Here, we use LES to extract electrostatics that are latent in foundation models: energies and forces predicted by a teacher model are used to train a lightweight LES-augmented student MLIP, with optional fine-tuning on additional DFT data. The resulting models reduce computational cost while providing access to Born effective charge tensors, and infrared spectra. We benchmark student models distilled from a broad set of foundation MLIPs, including UMA, MACE, Orb, eSEN, GemNet-OC, PET, and EquiformerV2-based models, against experimental infrared spectra for liquid water, concentrated hydrochloric acid, and the anatase TiO2(101)-water interface. Across these systems, electrostatic response can be extracted from most foundation MLIPs. The benchmark further shows that the underlying DFT level and dataset used to train the teacher model play a larger role than architecture in determining electrostatic and spectroscopic accuracy. For the TiO2-water interface, fine-tuning with a modest amount of higher-level DFT data improves structural and infrared predictions. LES-based distillation therefore provides a practical route for converting foundation MLIPs into efficient, electrically responsive models, while also testing the physical fidelity encoded in foundation models.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Provably Efficient Regularized Online RLHF with Generalized Bilinear Preferences

arXiv:2602.23116v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the problem of regularized best-response max-regret minimization in online RLHF under general preferences and bandit feedback. While various regularizers are utilized to robustify alignment, known polylogarithmic regret guarantees remain heavily specific to KL. To investigate whether such fast rates extend beyond KL, we adopt the Generalized Bilinear Preference Model (GBPM) – capturing intransitive preferences over $d$-dimensional item-wise features via a rank-$2r$ skew-symmetric matrix – to isolate the impact of generic regularization. Crucially, under GBPM, we prove that the dual gap of any greedy policy is bounded by the squared estimation error, derived using only strong convexity and skew-symmetry. Under a feature coverage assumption, we establish a generic polylogarithmic regret of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\eta d^4 C_{\min}^{-1} (\log T)^2 \wedge d^2 C_{\min}^{-1/2} \sqrt{T})$ with Greedy Sampling, and a dimension-wise improved regret (for well-conditioned arm-sets) of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(C_{\min}^{-2} \sqrt{\eta r T} \wedge r^{1/3} C_{\min}^{-4/3} T^{2/3})$ with Explore-Then-Commit, where $\eta^{-1}$ is the regularization coefficient, $T$ is the time horizon, and $C_{\min}$ is an arm-set dependent quantity. This demonstrates that ``fast'' regrets are not KL-specific, but rather a fundamental consequence of generic strongly convex geometry.

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

NTS-CoT: Mitigating Hallucinations in LLM-based News Timeline Summarization with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

The rapid updates of online news make tracking event developments challenging, highlighting the need for timeline summarization (TLS). Hallucinations, where LLM-generated content deviates from source news, still remain a critical issue in LLM-based TLS and are not well studied in existing works. To bridge this gap, we identify two primary types of hallucinations: unfaithful content during news summarization and information omission in date-event summarization. Then, we propose NTS-CoT, a novel framework that leverages Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to mitigate hallucinations in TLS. The framework consists of three key modules: i) Element-CoT to capture essential news elements for faithful summarization, ii) Date Selection to combine temporal saliency and event prominence for timestamp selection, and iii) Causal-CoT to infer causal relationships and reduce omissions in date-event summarization. Extensive experiments, including quantitative analysis on three TLS benchmarks and human evaluation, demonstrate that NTS-CoT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, effectively mitigating hallucinations and improving LLM-based TLS performance. Our source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NTS-CoT .

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Discovering Lattice Reduction Strategies via Self-Play

arXiv:2606.15301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovász (LLL) algorithm is a seminal contribution to computer science used for lattice basis reduction, yet its polynomial-time outputs produce bases that are far from optimal as the dimension grows. We show that deep reinforcement learning can discover strictly superior, generalizable reduction strategies by interacting with the primitive action space of LLL. We formulate lattice reduction as a single-player Markov Decision Process (MDP) and train a deep residual network using an AlphaZero-style self-play pipeline augmented with adaptive-horizon MCTS (Monte Carlo Tree Search), which couples multi-step network predictions with an entropy-gated expansion mechanism. The resulting policy, DeltaStar, is trained exclusively on small $8$-dimensional $q$-ary lattices and requires fewer primitive row operations than LLL. Crucially, it generalizes zero-shot to unseen moduli and higher dimensions up to $n=32$ without retraining.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Categorical Robustness Assessment for Machine Learning based Network Intrusion Detection Systems

arXiv:2606.12075v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) heavily utlize Machine Learning (ML) but ML models can be manipulated via adversarial attacks. These attacks add carefully crafted perturbations to network traffic data that leads to misclassifications. While prior work has demonstrated adversarial vulnerabilities in isolated settings, systematic cross-architecture as well as class and category of attack based comparisons under controlled attack conditions remain limited, leaving practitioners without clear guidance on which models to deploy in adversarial environments. This paper asks a simple question: what type of classifier architectures actually hold up when attackers try to manipulate the systems? We put three popular architectures through their paces: a 1D Convolutional Neural Network, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, and a Random Forest (RF) ensemble. Using the ACI-IoT-2023 dataset (over 1.2 million samples spanning 12 attack types), we subject each model with FGSM and PGD adversarial attacks, which apply gradient-based perturbations in normalized feature space consistent with established adversarial ML evaluation protocols, at perturbation budgets ranging from $\epsilon=0.01$ to $\epsilon=0.1$. Surprisingly, Random Forest achieved near-perfect baseline accuracy (99.98\%), yet collapsed catastrophically under attack, dropping 73 percentage points at the smallest perturbation we tested. CNN, on the other hand, retained 95.5\% accuracy at $\epsilon=0.01$ and degraded gracefully as perturbations increased. LSTM fell somewhere in between. These findings flip the conventional wisdom where high baseline accuracy means nothing if a model shatters at the first sign of adversarial pressure. For practitioners deploying intrusion detection in adversarial environments, we recommend CNN-based architectures and provide scenario-specific deployment guidance.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Zero-source LLM Hallucination Detection with Human-like Criteria Probing

Large language models (LLMs) often hallucinate by generating factually incorrect or unfaithful content, posing significant risks to their safe use. Detecting such hallucinations is particularly challenging under the zero-source constraint, where no model internals or external references are available, and detection must rely solely on the textual query-answer pair. In this paper, we propose Human-like Criteria Probing for Hallucination Detection (HCPD), a paradigm that emulates the multi-faceted reasoning of human evaluators. Its core is a Human-like Criteria Probing (HCP) mechanism, in which a LLM agent adaptively decomposes its judgment into a weighted set of interpretable criteria and aggregates criterion-specific scores into a final truthfulness measure. To achieve this adaptive capability, we introduce a reward-based alignment scheme using only weak supervision from semantic consistency. At inference, we employ a multi-sampling aggregation strategy to ensure robust decisions while preserving full interpretability. We further provide theoretical analysis supporting the reliability of our approach. Extensive experiments show that HCPD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, offering an effective and explainable solution for zero-source hallucination detection. Code is available at https://github.com/TRISKEL10N/HCPD.

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

The Reverse Telescoping Coordinate System for Positive Definite Matrices: Geometry, Computation, and Generative Modeling

arXiv:2606.15442v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We design a new unconstrained coordinate system where a $p\times p$ symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrix $\Theta$ is represented by a reverse telescoping map $\Theta(x)=\rm{RT}(x)$, with $x=(v,d,r)\in\mathbb{R}\times\mathbb{R}^{(p-1)}\times\mathbb{R}^{p(p-1)/2}$, representing respectively the log volume or log determinant; and the shape, as encoded by log relative diagonal scales and partial covariances among the nodes. This construction results in important properties not available in other charts, e.g., matrix logarithm, such as Jacobian depending on only the log-determinant. A useful feature of our construction is $x$ contains a lossless symbolic representation of both the matrix and its inverse. Many important computations involving a matrix and its inverse can be performed in $O(p^2)$ in the transformed domain, while it is the rendering of results in matrix forms (on demand) that must incur an $O(p^3)$ cost. Moreover, two unit-determinant matrices in the transformed domain can be joined by a straight line with pathwise unit determinant. For generative modeling, this allows designing a split volume-shape flow model trained by conditional flow matching for transporting the shape over the unit-determinant path, with a separate one-dimensional flow for transporting the volume or the determinant. The forbidding SPD constraint, tamed thus into a powerful guiding force, leads to the surprising insight that it is in some sense easier to design a volume-normalized shape flow for SPD compared to the unconstrained $\mathbb{R}^{p\times p}$, with no intrinsic notion of volume to aid normalization, unlike the determinant of SPD matrices. We apply our construction for up to $p=200$ in generative modeling of SPD matrices on a difficult synthetic bimodal target, and in generating brain connectivity networks by models trained on fMRI data; as well as in intrinsic diffusion on the SPD manifold.

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

ARROW: Augmented Replay for RObust World models

arXiv:2603.11395v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual reinforcement learning challenges agents to acquire new skills while retaining previously learned ones with the goal of improving performance in both past and future tasks. Most existing approaches rely on model-free methods with replay buffers to mitigate catastrophic forgetting; however, these solutions often face significant scalability challenges due to large memory demands. Drawing inspiration from neuroscience, where the brain replays experiences to a predictive World Model rather than directly to the policy, we present ARROW (Augmented Replay for RObust World models), a model-based continual RL algorithm that extends DreamerV3 with a memory-efficient, distribution-matching replay buffer. Unlike standard fixed-size FIFO buffers, ARROW maintains two complementary buffers: a short-term buffer for recent experiences and a long-term buffer that preserves task diversity through intelligent sampling. We evaluate ARROW on two challenging continual RL settings: Tasks without shared structure (Atari), and tasks with shared structure, where knowledge transfer is possible (Procgen CoinRun variants). Compared to model-free and model-based baselines with replay buffers of the same-size, ARROW demonstrates substantially less forgetting on tasks without shared structure, while maintaining comparable forward transfer. Our findings highlight the potential of model-based RL and bio-inspired approaches for continual reinforcement learning, warranting further research.

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

Functional Equivalence in Attention: A Comprehensive Study with Applications to Linear Mode Connectivity

arXiv:2606.17830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural network parameter spaces are inherently non-injective, as distinct parameter configurations can realize identical functions through functional equivalence. While this symmetry is well understood in classical fully connected and convolutional models, it becomes substantially more intricate in modern attention-based architectures. Existing analyses of multihead attention have largely focused on the vanilla formulation, overlooking positional encodings that fundamentally reshape architectural symmetries. In this work, we provide a formal study of functional equivalence in Transformers with positional encodings. Focusing on the two most widely used variants–sinusoidal and rotary positional encodings (RoPE)–we show that sinusoidal encodings preserve the equivalence structure of vanilla attention, whereas rotary encodings significantly reduce the symmetry group, thereby enhancing expressivity. This offers a principled explanation for the growing prominence of RoPE in practice. We further examine how positional encodings affect linear mode connectivity, and through an alignment algorithm, empirically demonstrate that the presence and variability of connectivity across Transformer settings crucially depend on the positional encoding.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Beyond Independent Genes: Learning Module-Inductive Representations for Single-Cell Gene Perturbation Prediction

arXiv:2602.04901v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting transcriptional responses to genetic perturbations is a central problem in functional genomics. In practice, perturbation responses are rarely gene-independent but instead manifest as coordinated, program-level transcriptional changes among functionally related genes. However, most existing methods do not explicitly model such coordination, due to gene-wise modeling paradigms and reliance on static biological priors that cannot capture dynamic program reorganization. To address these limitations, we propose scBIG, a module-inductive perturbation prediction framework that explicitly models coordinated gene programs. scBIG induces coherent gene programs from data via Gene-Relation Clustering, captures inter-program interactions through a Gene-Cluster-Aware Encoder, and preserves modular coordination using structure-aware alignment objectives. These structured representations are then modeled using conditional flow matching to enable flexible and generalizable perturbation prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple single-cell perturbation benchmarks show that scBIG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly on unseen and combinatorial perturbation settings, achieving an average improvement of 6.7% over the strongest baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/ttruan2426-dot/scBIG.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Learning Dynamics Reveal a Hierarchy of Weight-Induced Layerwise Gram Metrics

arXiv:2606.09744v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study feed-forward ReLU networks with fixed readout and quadratic loss. The aim is to rewrite gradient descent not primarily as a dynamics in weight space, but as a collective dynamics closed in terms of fields defined on the training-set space. For a single hidden layer, the weight variables can be eliminated from the activation dynamics, yielding a closed equation for the residuals governed by a collective kernel that factorizes into an input-geometric matrix and a dynamical co-activation matrix. For deeper networks, the residual dynamics retains a clean layer-wise kernel structure. However, from depth three onward, closure requires a hierarchy of weight-induced Gram operators that mediate information transport across layers. Moreover, the conjugate-field dynamics is governed by operators satisfying a backward pullback recursion, of which the weight-induced Gram operators are the first nontrivial instances.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Mordal: Automated Pretrained Model Selection for Vision Language Models

Incorporating multiple modalities into large language models (LLMs) is a powerful way to enhance their understanding of non-textual data, enabling them to perform multimodal tasks. Vision language models (VLMs) form the fastest growing category of multimodal models because of their many practical use cases, including in healthcare, robotics, and accessibility. Unfortunately, even though different VLMs in the literature demonstrate impressive visual capabilities in different benchmarks, they are handcrafted by human experts; there is no automated framework to create task-specific multimodal models. We introduce Mordal, an automated multimodal model search framework that efficiently finds the best VLM for a user-defined task without manual intervention. Mordal achieves this both by reducing the number of candidates to consider during the search process and by minimizing the time required to evaluate each remaining candidate. Our evaluation shows that Mordal can find the best VLM for a given problem using $8.9\times$–$11.6\times$ lower GPU hours than grid search. We have also discovered that Mordal achieves about 69\% higher weighted Kendall's $\tau$ on average than the state-of-the-art model selection method across diverse tasks.

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

Diffusion-based Cumulative Adversarial Purification for Vision Language Models

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding, yet their susceptibility to adversarial perturbations poses a significant threat to their reliability in real-world applications. Despite often being imperceptible to humans, these perturbations can drastically alter model outputs, leading to erroneous interpretations and decisions. This paper introduces DiffCAP, a novel diffusion-based purification strategy that can effectively neutralize adversarial corruptions in VLMs. We theoretically establish a provable recovery region in the forward diffusion process and meanwhile quantify the convergence rate of semantic variation with respect to VLMs. These findings manifest that adversarial effects monotonically fade as diffusion unfolds. Guided by this principle, DiffCAP leverages noise injection with a similarity threshold of VLM embeddings as an adaptive criterion, before reverse diffusion restores a clean and reliable representation for VLM inference. Through extensive experiments across six datasets with three VLMs under varying attack strengths in three task scenarios, we show that DiffCAP outperforms existing defense techniques by a substantial margin. Notably, DiffCAP significantly reduces both hyperparameter tuning complexity and the required diffusion time, thereby accelerating the denoising process. Equipped with theorems and empirical support, DiffCAP provides a robust and practical solution for securely deploying VLMs in adversarial environments. The source code is available at https://github.com/JasonFu1998/DiffCAP.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Sovereign Execution Brokers: Enforcing Certificate-Bound Authority in Agentic Control Planes

arXiv:2606.20520v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous agents are increasingly connected to cloud, deployment, and data-control workflows, but production mutation authority should not reside inside non-deterministic reasoning processes. Existing access-control mechanisms authorize identities, while assurance layers certify proposed actions; neither alone provides a mandatory enforcement point for certified authority at the moment of mutation. This paper introduces the Sovereign Execution Broker (SEB), a runtime enforcement boundary for certificate-bound agentic infrastructure. SEB consumes certificates issued by the Sovereign Assurance Boundary (SAB), verifies that the requested mutation matches the certified execution contract, checks validity windows, policy epochs, revocation epochs, and live-state drift, mints scoped execution identity, invokes infrastructure APIs, and records signed decision and outcome records. By separating proposal, admission, and execution, SEB turns certified authority into a short-lived, revocable, auditable runtime capability, provided that production mutation APIs reject non-broker identities. We present the SEB execution model, certificate and replay-verification predicates, scoped identity semantics, bypass-prevention deployment patterns, failure behavior, and a concrete prototype implementation. We evaluate the prototype on AWS and Kubernetes clusters, measuring latency overheads, revocation propagation, drift detection, and security under fault injection.

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

MiroBench: Benchmarking Realism in Agentic Simulation of Real-world Discussions

arXiv:2606.14715v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly used to simulate real world interactions, but it remains unclear whether simulated behaviors preserve the content patterns and interaction dynamics of real human behaviors. Existing evaluations remain fragmented, which makes it difficult to compare systems or measure progress. In this paper, we focus on Reddit discussions as a concrete first step toward evaluating real-world social simulation. Reddit threads provide public, topic-grounded, multi-party interactions where people share experiences, debate, seek advice, express emotion, and collectively respond to products, events, and social issues. These discussions offer an observable window into broader social behavior, making them a useful setting for testing whether LLM agents can reproduce not only fluent text, but also the distributional patterns and interaction dynamics of real online communities. We introduce MiroBench, a benchmark for Reddit discussion simulation built from 4,292 real Reddit threads. MiroBench uses statistical tests to compare generated and real discussions across four major aspects: repetition and semantic uniformity, narrative content, toxicity and aggression, and structural complexity. Experiments across five domains and five models show that current simulators remain distributionally mismatched with real Reddit threads, while a lightweight prompt-based improvement procedure provides only limited gains. MiroBench offers a concrete benchmark for measuring, diagnosing, and improving realism in LLM-based social simulation.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Mining Architectural Quality Under Agentic AI Adoption: A Causal Study of Java Repositories

arXiv:2606.13298v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding tools are now used by a majority of developers, and agentic use of these tools has popularized the practice colloquially called "vibe coding". Yet causal evidence on their effect on software architecture is scarce. Prior causal work has measured code-level outcomes (complexity, static analysis warnings); whether such degradation propagates to architecture-level outcomes remains unknown. We mine 151 open-source Java repositories, 74 with detectable agentic AI adoption (identified via configuration files and Co-Authored-By commit trailers) and 77 propensity-matched controls, across a 13-month per-repository window yielding 1,811 monthly Arcan snapshots. We estimate the causal effect of adoption on architectural smell density (ASD) with a staggered difference-in-differences design and the Borusyak imputation estimator, applying a causal design recently used for code-level metrics to the architecture level. Total smell counts are essentially unchanged (+1.1%, p = 0.82) while lines of code grow +12.8% (p = 0.003); the resulting 6.7% ASD decline (p = 0.004) is therefore a denominator effect rather than an architectural improvement. Per-type estimates and robustness checks (wild cluster bootstrap, Lee bounds, stale-observation sensitivity) corroborate the pattern; pre-trends are flat (Wald p = 0.90), consistent with parallel trends. Density-normalized outcomes can mislead when treatment affects system size: raw counts and explicit decomposition are required for causal mining studies of AI tool adoption. The complete replication package, including the curated 151-repository monthly panel, is publicly available.

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

MR-GVNO: A Geometry-Aware Variational Physics-Informed Neural Operator for Mindlin-Reissner Plates on Irregular Domains

arXiv:2606.16624v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Plate and shell structures are widely used in engineering, making rapid response prediction under varying geometries, materials, and loads highly desirable. However, conventional finite element methods require repeated modeling and solution, resulting in high computational costs. This study proposes a geometry-aware variational neural operator for Mindlin-Reissner plate problems, termed MR-GVNO. The method uses boundary point clouds to represent irregular geometries and employs separate encoders for spatially varying material fields, pressure loads, and scalar physical parameters. A cross-attention mechanism integrates these inputs with query point information to predict transverse deflections and rotations at arbitrary locations. MR-GVNO is trained without labeled solution data using a variational physics-informed loss derived from the discretized total potential energy. It directly processes irregular point clouds and allows different physical fields to be discretized independently, avoiding interpolation onto a common grid. Numerical experiments on single-hole, double-hole, and L-shaped plates demonstrate accurate response prediction under homogeneous and heterogeneous materials and uniform and random loads. The model also achieves millisecond-level full-field inference and favorable cross-geometry generalization.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Conditions for Unitarity in Timeless Quantum Theory

arXiv:2504.01579v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum timeless approaches solve the problem of time by recovering the usual unitary evolution of quantum theory relative to a clock in a stationary quantum Universe. For some Hamiltonians of the Universe, such as those including an interaction term with the clock, the dynamics is substantially altered and can be non-unitary. This work derives necessary and sufficient conditions for the relative dynamics to be unitary and finds the general form of the unitary evolution operator. A physical interpretation of these conditions is given in terms of the clock's rate. Unitary dynamics is associated with rates that are constant in time and independent of the clock's internal structure.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Conditional Local Importance by Quantile Expectations

arXiv:2411.08821v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Global variable importance measures are commonly used to interpret the results of machine learning models. Local variable importance techniques assess how variables contribute to individual observations. Current, popular methods, including LIME and SHAP, provide useful measures of feature contribution in the prediction space, while leaving opportunities for improved characterization of local structure in the model loss space. Additionally, they are not natively adapted for multi-class classification problems. We propose a new model-agnostic method for calculating local variable importance, CLIQUE, that highlights locally dependent relationships, provides improved stability over permutation-based methods, and can be directly applied to multi-class classification problems. Simulated and real-world examples show that CLIQUE emphasizes locally dependent information, captures interaction behavior beyond what can be evaluated by correlations, and assigns zero importance in regions where the response is invariant to changes in variables.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FAConformer: Frequency-Aware Convolutional Transformer for Auditory Attention Decoding

arXiv:2606.14120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Auditory attention decoding (AAD) aims to infer the attended speaker from neural responses in multi-speaker acoustic environments and is a key problem for neuro-steered hearing systems. Although recent studies have achieved encouraging progress, existing AAD models still do not fully exploit frequency domain electroencephalography (EEG) information. In particular, most approaches introduce multi-band information through handcrafted feature extraction or direct cross-band feature concatenation, which mainly exploit frequency information at a shallow level and may overlook band-specific patterns and cross-band interactions. To address these limitations, this paper proposes FAConformer, a frequency-aware CNN-Transformer framework for AAD that explicitly integrates band-specific encoding and adaptive cross-band interaction. Specifically, FAConformer first decomposes EEG signals into multiple frequency bands and assigns each band to an independent CNN-Transformer encoder for band-specific modeling. The resulting band-wise features are then adaptively fused by a carefully designed frequency-aware attention (FAA) module that models cross-band dependencies by treating band-wise features as tokens. Further, band-wise auxiliary supervision (BAS) is introduced to prevent weakly contributing branches from being under-optimized during joint training. In this way, FAConformer performs frequency-aware modeling that more effectively exploits frequency domain information. Extensive experiments on two public AAD datasets with three decision-window lengths demonstrated that FAConformer consistently outperformed 12 competitive baselines, surpassing the current state-of-the-art model by 4.9%. Further analyses of band importance, ablation, and parameter sensitivity verify the effectiveness, robustness, and interpretability of the proposed framework. Code is available at https://github.com/wzwvv/FAConformer.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

VidCRAFT3: Camera, Object, and Lighting Control for Image-to-Video Generation

Controllable image-to-video (I2V) generation transforms a reference image into a coherent video guided by user-specified control signals. While precise control over camera motion, object motion, and lighting is essential for high-fidelity creation, existing methods often treat these factors independently. This overlooks the physical coupling among viewpoint, geometry, and illumination in dynamic scenes, leading to visual inconsistencies such as mismatched shadows and perspective drift under simultaneous changes. We present VidCRAFT3, a unified and flexible I2V framework that explicitly models cross-factor interactions among geometry, motion, and illumination, enabling both independent and joint control over camera motion, object motion, and lighting direction. Image2Cloud provides explicit 3D geometric priors for accurate camera motion control. ObjMotionNet encodes sparse object trajectories into multi-scale motion features to guide realistic object motion. A Spatial Triple-Attention Transformer integrates lighting direction through lighting cross-attention for consistent relighting. To address the scarcity of jointly annotated data, we construct the VideoLightingDirection (VLD) dataset with accurate per-frame lighting direction annotations, and introduce a three-stage progressive training strategy that enables robust learning without fully joint annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VidCRAFT3 achieves state-of-the-art performance in control precision and visual coherence across diverse scenarios.