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

Geometry-Aware Style Transfer in 3D Gaussian Splatting

In this paper, we present a novel geometry-aware style transfer framework for 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) that simultaneously transfers appearance attributes and geometric structures. Unlike prior works that primarily focus on color-based stylization and often overlook structural adaptation, our method explicitly incorporates geometry adaptation through a decoupled optimization scheme that alternately updates color and geometry parameters. This strategy alleviates potential interference between color and geometry updates, leading to stable and consistent scene-level geometry transformation. The decoupled optimization is enabled by the proposed geometry-aware contrastive feature matching (GCFM). GCFM integrates RGB, depth, and edge cues into a contrastive objective and is employed in both optimization phases to effectively transfer structural characteristics from style images to Gaussian primitives. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves superior performance in both qualitative fidelity and quantitative metrics, significantly outperforming existing 3DGS-based stylization methods. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/oweixx/gast}{https://github.com/oweixx/gast}.

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

Democracy in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.13026v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interfacing Artificial Intelligence (AI) with democracy is one of the most profound challenges of our times. On the one hand, AI comes with opportunities to overcome long-standing challenges in democracy, such as low participation in deliberative and voting processes with poor representation of people. On the other hand, new risks arise from AI algorithms that are privacy-intrusive, biased, manipulative, spread misinformation and influence election results. Moving beyond the over-simplistic question of whether AI is good or bad for democracy, the Handbook on Democracy in the Era of Artificial Intelligence asks instead: how to upgrade democracies and the principles they are built on, using AI? How to engage with AI and on what terms? Which new values and design principles are required to build democratic resilience? In 34 chapters by 59 authors across the world from different disciplines, we explore how AI can empower collective intelligence for democracy (Part 1) and what is the future of deliberative democracy using large language models and social media (Part 2). We also illustrate the role of AI for building resilient self-governance systems (Part 3) and the challenges of transforming democracy in the age of AI (Part 4). We conclude with broader perspectives (Part 5) that re-imagine the interplay of democracy and AI.

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

Two Wrongs, No Right: Auditing Social-Desirability Bias in LLM Annotators for Computational Social Science

作者:

LLM annotators are increasingly used in computational social science (CSS), but it is unclear whether their alignment-shaped errors preserve the empirical conclusions a researcher would report. We audit three open-source 7B instruction-tuned models (Zephyr, Mistral-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Instruct) across six TweetEval tasks under four prompt conditions (72 cells) and find that social-desirability failures do not run in a single direction. Zephyr exhibits leniency bias, systematically under-applying harmful labels (offensive language: false benign rate 0.729, false alarm rate 0.031). Mistral and Qwen exhibit overcorrection, over-applying the same labels (Mistral hate-speech FAR = 0.604). All three models exhibit neutrality bias on abortion stance, underestimating opposition prevalence by 24 to 40 percentage points and inflating the neutral label. None of the four prompting interventions we test (neutral, safety framing, depersonalized, chain-of-thought) corrects these failures across models; safety framing can worsen stance distortion. Strikingly, Zephyr's hate-speech prevalence estimate matches the gold rate exactly while its class-conditional errors are large in both directions, an accidental cancellation that misleads aggregate validation. We translate these patterns into a three-part taxonomy with diagnostic FBR/FAR signatures and a lightweight gold-sample validation protocol. The headline for trustworthy CSS: a model that looks calibrated on aggregate metrics can still flip the substantive empirical conclusion a researcher would report.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Predicting brain tumour enhancement from non-contrast MR imaging with artificial intelligence: a multi-cohort retrospective diagnostic accuracy study

Brain tumour MRI typically requires both pre- and post-contrast imaging, but gadolinium is not always desirable (frequent follow-up, renal impairment, allergy, paediatric patients). We developed and validated a deep learning model to predict tumour contrast enhancement from non-contrast MRI alone. We assembled 11,089 brain MRI studies (2006-2024) from 10 datasets across four countries and three continents, spanning adult and paediatric populations with glioma, meningioma, metastases, and post-resection appearances. Three architectures were trained to detect and segment enhancing tumour from T1w, T2w and FLAIR alone. Performance was assessed in a 1,109-study held-out test set (primary endpoint: patient-level enhancement detection; secondary: voxel-level Dice). Eleven expert radiologists attempted the same task on a 564-case subset (100 cases each), blinded to history, prior imaging, and referral. The best model, nnU-Net, achieved 83.0% balanced accuracy (95% CI 79.1-87.2; sensitivity 91.5%, specificity 74.4%) for detection, with R2 = 0.859 for enhancement volume. Of enhancing cases, 76.8% reached Dice >= 0.3, 67.5% >= 0.5, and 50.2% >= 0.7. Under blinded conditions, radiologists' majority vote was lower (71.7% balanced accuracy; sensitivity 77.6%, specificity 65.8%). The proportion reaching Dice >= 0.3 varied by pathology (meningioma 93%, presurgical glioma 76%, metastases 74%, postoperative glioma 74%) and was lowest for paediatric cases (45%). Deep learning can identify contrast-enhancing brain tumours from non-contrast MRI. These models show promise as a triage or decision-support adjunct, such as in flagging studies likely to enhance so that contrast can be added to a non-contrast protocol, and may reduce gadolinium dependence in neuro-oncology imaging. Future work should optimise these models with radiologists.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SPEA2$^+$: Improved Density Estimation in SPEA2 with Provable Runtime Guarantees

arXiv:2606.12382v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm 2 (SPEA2) is a popular and prominent evolutionary algorithm for solving multi-objective optimisation problems. Despite its popularity, theoretical analyses of SPEA2 have only appeared recently. Moreover, these analyses focus exclusively on how SPEA2 handles non-dominated solutions and disregard the algorithmic components responsible for handling dominated solutions. We conduct a first runtime analysis of SPEA2 for which these components are analysed. We prove that, unlike other prominent algorithms, including NSGA-II, NSGA-III and SMS-EMOA under the same setting of constant population size and duplicate elimination, SPEA2 is unable to cover the Pareto front of the OneTrapZeroTrap benchmark efficiently. Our results indicate that using k-th nearest-neighbour distance in the fitness assignment provides an insufficient signal to maintain diversity among dominated individuals. To address this issue, we propose an improved variant, SPEA2$^+$, that considers all pairwise distances. The new algorithm achieves the same performance guarantees as the other prominent algorithms on OneTrapZeroTrap, while matching the performance of the original SPEA2 on simpler problems. Experimental results complement our theoretical findings.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

OCOO-T : A SIMPLE AND SCALABLE VIRTUAL CELL MODEL FOR TRANSCRIPTIONAL PERTURBATION RESPONSE PREDICTION

Predicting single-cell transcriptional responses to genetic, chemical and cytokine perturbations is a fundamental challenge in computational biology and AI Virtual Cell (AIVC) modeling, with direct implications for drug discovery and the elucidation of gene regulatory networks. Existing approaches often rely on auxiliary cell-state encoders, hierarchical variational autoencoders, dedicated Transformer encoder-decoder modules, or gene-interaction priors to compress high-dimensional expression profiles into latent representations. While effective, these designs increase architectural complexity and may limit scalability and generalizability. This paper introduces OCOO-T, a minimalist flow-matching-based AIVC model for transcriptional perturbation response prediction. OCOO-T utilizes a vanilla Transformer stack that operates directly on continuous gene expression profiles and formulates perturbation response prediction as a continuous-time denoising process. Perturbation embeddings, dosage information, and cell-line/cell-type specificity are integrated through adaptive layer normalization and in-context tokens. Comprehensive evaluations on Tahoe100M, Replogle, and PBMC benchmarks demonstrate that OCOO-T achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse perturbations and cell types while effectively scaling to long transcriptional profiles through patching and depatching of cellular contexts. By leveraging the simplicity of Transformer-based denoising for single-cell omics, OCOO-T provides an effective and scalable framework for in-silico cellular simulation.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum Correlation Hierarchy and Teleportation in Dephased Hydrogen Hyperfine System

arXiv:2606.11731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the dynamics of quantum correlations in the hydrogen hyperfine spin system subject to Markovian phase noise. Treating the electron and proton spin degrees of freedom as an open two-qubit system governed by an isotropic hyperfine Hamiltonian and local dephasing, we obtain the exact time-dependent density matrix and derive analytical expressions for the full X-state family. We compute concurrence($C$), trace-distance measurement-induced nonlocality (Trace MIN–$\mathcal{N}_1$), and average steering coherence (ASC) in closed form and establish their strict ordering $ C(t)\leq \mathcal{N}_1(t)\leq \mathrm{ASC}(t) $ at all times. Entanglement is identified as the most fragile resource, undergoing sudden death at a finite time. Trace MIN exhibits dephasing-immune freezing for states with nonzero population imbalance, while ASC is the most robust quantity, persisting longest in every scenario studied.We additionally demonstrate that the dephased thermal hyperfine state serves as a resource for quantum teleportation, deriving a closed-form expression for the average fidelity and establishing that the teleportation advantage window coincides exactly with the entanglement survival interval, $\mathcal{F}_A > 2/3 \Longleftrightarrow \mathcal{C} > 0$, for the full X-state family with maximally mixed marginals. We identify four distinct dynamical regimes and map all three correlation measures onto directly measurable Pauli spin correlators, enabling experimental reconstruction of the full hierarchy without full state tomography.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Merged amplitude encoding for Chebyshev quantum Kolmogorov–Arnold networks: trading qubits for circuit executions

arXiv:2603.02818v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum Kolmogorov–Arnold networks based on Chebyshev polynomials (CCQKAN) evaluate each edge activation function as a quantum inner product, creating a trade-off between qubit count and the number of circuit executions per forward pass. We introduce merged amplitude encoding, a technique that packs the element-wise products of all $n$ input-edge vectors for a given output node into a single amplitude state, reducing circuit executions by a factor of $n$ at a cost of only 1–2 additional qubits relative to the sequential baseline. The merged and original circuits compute the same mathematical quantity exactly; the open question is whether they remain equally trainable within a gradient-based optimization loop. We address this question through numerical experiments on 10 network configurations under ideal, finite-shot, and noisy simulation conditions, comparing original, parameter-transferred, and independently initialized merged circuits over 16 random seeds. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests show no significant difference between the independently initialized merged circuit and the original ($p > 0.05$ in 28 of 30 comparisons), while parameter transfer yields significantly lower loss under ideal conditions ($p < 0.001$ in 9 of 10 configurations). On 10-class digit classification with the $8\times8$ MNIST dataset using a one-vs-all strategy, original and merged circuits achieve comparable test accuracies of 53–78\% with no significant difference in any configuration. These results provide empirical evidence that merged amplitude encoding preserves trainability under the simulation conditions tested.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

MultiMem: Measuring and Mitigating Memorization in Multi-Modal Contrastive Learning

arXiv:2606.22220v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Memorization in machine learning models enables high performance on rare in-distribution samples by capturing their atypical patterns. However, it also causes harmful retention of noise and outliers, degrading generalization. While memorization has been extensively studied in both supervised and self-supervised learning in the vision domain, it remains unexplored in multi-modal contrastive learning. We address this gap by introducing MultiMem, the first metric designed to quantify memorization in multi-modal contrastive learning. Through our systematic analysis, we demonstrate that cross-modal semantic misalignment has the strongest influence on memorization, with text being the dominant modality driving memorization, followed by video, image, and audio. We show that targeted augmentations applied across all modalities effectively reduce memorization as measured by our MultiMem metric and improve model performance. Overall, this work establishes the first framework for measuring and mitigating memorization in multi-modal contrastive learning, preventing harmful data retention and contributing to higher-performing models.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

The Saturable Electronic Reluctance Switch: Switchable low-power and low-noise generation of magnetic fields using permanent magnets

arXiv:2605.05158v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Across many areas of science, there is a need to generate magnetic fields that are both ultra-stable and switchable on and off. Current-carrying wire configurations are switchable but are susceptible to current noise. Existing current-controlled approaches to switching the field produced by a permanent magnet involve altering the magnets magnetisation, which typically requires large field pulses and produces excessive power dissipation in high frequency applications. We present a hybrid technique to switch the field of any arbitrary magnet through use of a non-linear ferromagnetic circuit, named the Saturable Electronic Reluctance Switch (SERS). The circuit achieves a linear and monotonic ramp of the magnetic field up to a current threshold, above which the field becomes constant. Crucially, the applied current has minimal influence on the magnetic field stability and demagnetisation of the magnet is avoided. The power dissipated in each switching cycle is expected to be many orders of magnitude less than for existing permanent magnet switching approaches. SERS is also robust to fabrication errors, suppressing noise in the control current by several orders of magnitude in a non-ideal device. To illustrate its application, a SERS-driven device is proposed for generating ultra-stable magnetic field gradients in a scalable trapped-ion quantum computer. We find this device offers an order of magnitude reduction in power dissipation compared to state-of-the-art current carrying wires, while reducing magnetic field noise originating from current fluctuations by up to five orders of magnitude.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

ChronoID: Infusing Explicit Temporal Signals into Semantic IDs for Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2606.14260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic IDs are crucial in generative recommendation, but with a fundamental limitation: temporal information is not well incorporated into semantic IDs. Instead, time influences recommendation only implicitly (e.g., through session construction heuristics, preference alignment, or sequence order), while existing semantic ID learning remains entirely time-agnostic. This design conflates interactions occurring under distinct temporal contexts into identical semantic representations, implicitly assuming that item semantics and user intent are temporally stationary. Such an assumption is misaligned with real-world recommendation scenarios, where evolving interaction rhythms play a central role. In this work, we investigate where and how the explicit time should be incorporated into semantic ID for generative recommendation. First, we systematically characterize the design space along three orthogonal dimensions of temporal signals and present a unified framework, ChronoID, for time-aware semantic ID learning. Then, by contributing a new time-explicit generation recommendation benchmark, ChronoID answers the questions: what is the effective way of infusing time, how to design the architecture, and where does the gain come from.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

The Importance of Phase in Neural Representations: An Internal Oppenheim-Lim Test of Image Classifiers

Oppenheim and Lim (1981) showed that natural images stay recognizable when reconstructed from their Fourier phase alone, while the magnitude carries little of their identity. We ask whether trained image classifiers reproduce this asymmetry inside their hidden layers, and we test it causally: given two images, we transplant the phase of one onto the magnitude of the other at a chosen layer and record which image the prediction follows. In PRISM2D, GFNet, and ViT-B/16 the prediction follows the phase or sign donor, and deleting all image-specific magnitude barely moves accuracy, so identity rides on phase while image-specific magnitude is largely dispensable to the readout. ResNet-50 at first seems to break the pattern, because transplanting sign after its ReLUs does nothing; a fair intervention before the ReLU reveals a strong latent sign code in the late blocks, and a DC-only control shows the readout consumes a channel-wise spatial average. Controls rule out the trivial case in which magnitude simply stops depending on the image. The architectures therefore share a phase/sign identity code but expose it in different bases, set by rectification and readout geometry, which gives a mechanistic account of the texture–shape gap between CNNs and attention models.

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

Augmentation techniques for video surveillance in the visible and thermal spectral range

In intelligent video surveillance, cameras record image sequences during day and night. Commonly, this demands different sensors. To achieve a better performance it is not unusual to combine them. We focus on the case that a long-wave infrared camera records continuously and in addition to this, another camera records in the visible spectral range during daytime and an intelligent algorithm supervises the picked up imagery. More accurate, our task is multispectral CNN-based object detection. At first glance, images originating from the visible spectral range differ between thermal infrared ones in the presence of color and distinct texture information on the one hand and in not containing information about thermal radiation that emits from objects on the other hand. Although color can provide valuable information for classification tasks, effects such as varying illumination and specialties of different sensors still represent significant problems. Anyway, obtaining sufficient and practical thermal infrared datasets for training a deep neural network poses still a challenge. That is the reason why training with the help of data from the visible spectral range could be advantageous, particularly if the data, which has to be evaluated contains both visible and infrared data. However, there is no clear evidence of how strongly variations in thermal radiation, shape, or color information influence classification accuracy. To gain deeper insight into how Convolutional Neural Networks make decisions and what they learn from different sensor input data, we investigate the suitability and robustness of different augmentation techniques...

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

Z-Plane Neural Networks: Bounded Geometric Activation Replaces ReLU and LayerNorm

arXiv:2606.15669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep neural networks rely on Euclidean scalar activations (e.g., ReLU) and global normalization techniques (e.g., LayerNorm) to prevent gradient instability in deep architectures. However, these mechanisms inherently cause dead neurons, discard critical directional information, and destroy the orthogonality of feature representations. Inspired by the frequency-modulation transmission of biological axons, we propose the Z-Plane Neural Network, which maps hidden states into 2D phasor bundles on a hypersphere. We introduce a novel geometric activation function, Radial Bounding($\mathbf{x} / \max(1, \|\mathbf{x}\|_2)$), which limits the energy magnitude while preserving the phase (direction). We demonstrate mathematically that this isotropic activation maintains 1-Lipschitz continuity and prevents gradient vanishing by preserving tangential gradients. Empirically, a 100-layer Z-Plane Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP)-entirely devoid of ReLU and LayerNorm-successfully converges on the MNIST dataset with 98.34% accuracy and absolute numerical stability, proving that bounded geometric activation alone is sufficient for stable deep learning.

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

Configurable Clinical Information Extraction with Agentic RAG: What Works, What Breaks, and Why

arXiv:2606.19602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Patient contexts span hundreds of heterogeneous documents and thousands of structured data points, yet the document-level metadata that AI systems need for retrieval and triage is absent or incomplete. Standard retrieval-augmented generation fails on this data, mishandling temporal reasoning, cross-document dependencies, and missing metadata. We deploy ACIE (Agentic Clinical Information Extraction) at University Medicine Essen: an on-premise agentic RAG pipeline that reasons over complete patient contexts and grounds every answer in source passages for clinician verification. We quantify the metadata gap, trace the architectural decisions it shaped, and evaluate extraction alongside an independent retrospective lymphoma registry study, in which nuclear-medicine physicians verify every extracted value against its cited sources. Across 7,326 judgments, clinicians accepted 96.5\% of extractions, with per-type acceptance ranging from 80\% to 99\%.

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

MeEvo: Metacognitive Evolution Combined with Natural Evolution for Automatic Heuristic Design

arXiv:2606.14202v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD) by enabling heuristic generation through reasoning and code synthesis. Existing LLM-based AHD architectures mainly follow two paradigms: Natural Evolution, which uses crossover and mutation to explore heuristic programs, and Metacognitive Evolution, which refines reasoning through reflection. However, Natural Evolution discards reasoning traces, weakening knowledge inheritance and exploitation, while Metacognitive Evolution lacks population-level recombination, limiting exploration and increasing the risk of premature convergence. These limitations reduce search efficiency, stability, and solution quality on complex problems. To address this gap, we propose MeEvo, a dual-layer AHD framework that cyclically couples Natural Evolution and Metacognitive Evolution. Natural Evolution explores heuristic code while recording reasoning traces, fitness values, and errors into a shared history; Metacognitive Evolution then reflects on this history to generate improved heuristics that re-enter the parent pool for the next cycle. This design enables population-driven exploration and reflection-driven refinement to reinforce each other. Experiments on five optimization problems with two LLM backbones show that MeEvo achieves stronger and more stable performance than existing LLM-based AHD architectures, especially on complex constrained tasks.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

The Ornstein$-$Uhlenbeck process on $\mathscr P_2$ with a volatility operator

arXiv:2606.14917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We analyze a diffusion ${(\mu_t)}_{t\geq 0}$ on the $2$-Wasserstein space $\mathscr P_2$ over $\mathbb R^d$ for which \begin{equation*} |\mu_t|_2^2-|\mu_0|_2^2-2ct+2\int_0 ^t|\mu_s|_2^2\,d s,\qquad t\geq 0, \end{equation*} is a martingale, where the constant $c\in(0,\infty)$ equals the trace of a volatility operator on a Hilbert space and $|\mu_t|_2:=(\int_{\mathbb R^d}x^T x\mu_t(d x ))^{1/2}$. The invariant measure of ${(\mu_t)}_{t\geq 0}$ is a Gaussian on $\mathscr P_2$, as introduced by P. Ren and F.-Y. Wang. Moreover, the Dirichlet form and its generator are given explicitly on a dense subspace of $L^2$.

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

Distilling Drifting Transformers with Representation Autoencoders

arXiv:2606.15553v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Representation Autoencoders (RAEs) have improved diffusion and flow models by semantically richer latent space owing to the strongly label-wise clustered DINO features in the pretrained encoders. Yet in the distillation stage, the severe anisotropy and large curvatures caused by the rich semantic representations would hinder the convergence and performance, making the trajectory-based distillation unstable. In this work, we argue that the RAE latent space is compatible with distillation via the newly proposed Drifting Models. We first quantitatively study the curvatures and isotropy statistics across different autoencoders, and theoretically reveal that Drifting Model itself is highly likely to fail on extremely scattered spaces like reconstruction-based VAEs. These motivate us to apply the drifting paradigm directly to representation autoencoders. Our proposed method, Drift-RAE, distills pretrained flow models in RAE latent spaces using Drifting, together with insightful modifications that improve training stability by thereotically aligning drifting fields with other frameworks. Regarding the experimental evidences, we achieve 1.77 FID on ImageNet 256 dataset using only 10k distillation steps, surpassing state-of-the-art RAE distillation methods and appearing comparative with the original Drifting Model without requiring an auxiliary MAE feature extractor. The code will be made publicly available.

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

G2IA: Geometry-Guided Instance-Aware Retrieval and Refinement for Cross-Modal Place Recognition

Cross-modal place recognition (CMPR) enables camera-only robots to localize against pre-built LiDAR maps in autonomous navigation scenarios. This image-to-point-cloud setting is challenged by two coupled ambiguities: the modality gap between perspective RGB appearance and sparse metric geometry, and perceptual aliasing among urban places with similar roads, facades, intersections, and object arrangements. Instead of treating CMPR as a single global descriptor matching problem, we argue that reliable retrieval requires both geometry-aware representation alignment and fine-grained candidate verification. In this paper, we propose G2IA, a geometry-guided instance-aware framework for image-to-point-cloud place recognition. In the retrieval stage, visual geometry priors from VGGT and instance features are integrated to construct place descriptors that are more compatible with LiDAR-derived map representations. In the refinement stage, the retrieved candidates are re-ranked by explicitly verifying whether local instance shapes and their relative spatial layouts are consistent across modalities. Experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that G2IA consistently improves image-to-point-cloud place recognition under different localization thresholds, and exhibits strong cross-dataset generalization.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Evaluating Universal Machine Learning Force Fields Against Experimental Measurements

arXiv:2508.05762v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Universal machine learning force fields (UMLFFs) promise to revolutionize materials science by enabling rapid atomistic simulations across the periodic table. However, their evaluation has been limited to computational benchmarks that may not reflect real-world performance. We introduce UniFFBench, a comprehensive evaluation framework featuring the MinX dataset – a diverse collection of 1,500+ mineral systems spanning 85 elements, extreme thermodynamic conditions (0–5000 K, 0–1000 GPa), and structural complexity, including partial occupancy and disorder. This diversity, combined with experimental reference values for validation, enables assessment of UMLFF generalization across chemical space and conditions substantially beyond typical training scenarios. Our systematic evaluation of six state-of-the-art UMLFFs reveals a substantial ``reality gap'': models achieving impressive performance on computational benchmarks often fail when confronted with experimental complexity. Even the best-performing models exhibit higher density prediction error than the threshold required for practical applications. We observe disconnects between simulation stability and mechanical property accuracy, with prediction errors correlating with training data representation rather than the modeling method.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Silent Failures in Federated Personalization of Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.00947v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models are increasingly personalized on decentralized private data through federated learning and are now deployed at scale under growing regulatory requirements for post-market monitoring. We argue that this convergence creates a distinct and under-recognized class of trustworthiness failures, which we term "Silent Failures." These include amplified bias, fairness collapse, and alignment erosion that may remain difficult to detect because federated learning's privacy constraints limit visibility into model behavior. A landscape analysis of existing benchmarks reveals a structural divide. Federated benchmarks evaluate system performance but provide limited insight into model behavior, whereas centralized trustworthiness benchmarks assess behavior but require model access incompatible with federated privacy. We introduce a taxonomy of six silent failure modes arising from the interaction of foundation model personalization, dataset shift, and core federated constraints. Our analysis shows that privacy-preserving training alone is insufficient for trustworthy deployment. We conclude with a research agenda for privacy-preserving behavioral evaluation and propose that silent failures become a standard diagnostic category for trustworthy federated artificial intelligence.

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

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

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.

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

Probabilistic Contrastive Pretraining for Multi-task ADME Property Prediction

arXiv:2606.11508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) properties is critical to drug discovery, but remains challenging because ADME endpoints are noisy, interdependent, and often data-limited. We propose a molecular graph-transformer pretraining framework that combines chemistry-specific self-supervision with contrastive mutual information machine learning (cMIM). Our method encodes molecular graphs into latent variables, reconstructs SMILES strings from the graph-derived latent codes, and augments the contrastive objective with domain-specific self-supervised chemistry tasks. Rather than treating these tasks as auxiliary regularizers with separately tuned loss weights, we formulate reconstruction, contrastive discrimination, and chemistry-specific supervision as unit-weighted log-probability factors in a single probabilistic latent-variable objective. For fine-tuning, we propose a multi-task GNN readout architecture with task-specific multilayer perceptron heads, preserving shared representation learning while mitigating negative transfer and improving the modeling of heterogeneous, nonlinear task relationships. Across Biogen, ExpansionRX, and ChEMBL-MT, the resulting Contrastive KERMT pretraining improves over the KERMT baseline by 7.6%, 9.9%, and 9.5% respectively (averaged over significantly-improved endpoints). Adding ADME-adjacent molecules to the pretraining corpus further improves transfer, and the contrastive component sharpens chemically meaningful latent neighborhoods.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Scratched Lenses, Shifted Depth: Passive Camera-Side Optical Attacks

Physical adversarial attacks on vision systems are typically studied through scene manipulation, such as adversarial patches or projections, where the adversary controls what the camera observes. Camera-side attacks using stickers or auxiliary optics have also been explored, but they treat attacks as image-space perturbations from designed patterns. This misses how physical imperfections interact with scene-dependent lighting and optics. We identify a threat: passive lens-side damage that is persistent yet trigger-conditioned, producing optical artifacts that bias geometric inference under particular visual conditions. We instantiate this threat through Scratch-induced Lens Adversarial Streak Hijacking SLASH, a physical-world attack caused by small scratches on a camera lens or protective cover. Scratches interact with bright light sources and specular reflections to create structured streak artifacts that distort depth cues. Since the perturbation is fixed in the optical path but triggered by the scene, it is both persistent and selective. We formulate the attack in optical space, model the scratch pattern as a trigger-conditioned optical channel, and optimize one fixed configuration across diverse viewing conditions. We evaluate SLASH on monocular depth estimation and monocular 3D object detection in digital and real-world settings. Under the fixed-scratch constraint, directional depth shifts reach up to 32% relative error for monocular depth estimation, with consistent effects on monocular 3D object detection. Physical experiments confirm transfer to real camera recordings, inducing depth shifts above the model's natural prediction baseline. These findings reveal an attack surface where benign-looking hardware imperfections act as latent, scene-triggered adversarial mechanisms, challenging assumptions about physical robustness and motivating defenses for secure vision systems.