Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12295

Findings of the MAGMaR 2026 Shared Task

Authors:

Alexander Martin↗Dengjia Zhang↗Joel Brogan↗Francis Ferraro↗Jeremy Gwinnup↗Reno Kriz↗Teng Long↗Kenton Murray↗Andrew Yates↗Xiang Xiang↗

This overview paper presents the results of the shared task for the second workshop on Multimodal Augmented Generation via Multimodal Retrieval (MAGMaR). In this shared task participants submitted systems focused on either (i) video retrieval or (ii) grounded generation of articles given retrieved videos. Teams could submit to either task. For the retrieval task, we had 2 participating teams that submitted a total of 17 systems – all of which beat a baseline derived from the winner of last year's shared task. On the generation side, we had 4 teams submit 16 systems. All teams had at least one generated report that was labeled the best by a human annotator.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12902

PRISM: Prosody-Integrated Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Empathetic Spoken Dialogue

Authors:

Wen Zhang↗Xiaocui Yang↗Zhuoyue Gao↗Shi Feng↗Daling Wang↗Yifei Zhang↗

Empathetic spoken dialogue systems require not only semantically appropriate responses but also emotionally aligned prosodic expression. However, cascade pipelines often discard acoustic cues during speech-to-text conversion, while end-to-end speech models lack interpretable control over emotion and knowledge integration. To address these challenges, we propose PRISM, a multi-agent framework for empathetic spoken dialogue that decouples speech perception, response generation, and speech synthesis into coordinated components. PRISM introduces a prosody-to-language translation mechanism to stabilize large language model reasoning and enables on-demand invocation of external knowledge tools for empathetic dialogue generation. Experimental results demonstrate that PRISM achieves consistent improvements in empathy, prosodic appropriateness, and text response generation quality across objective and subjective metrics. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Bxzfrm/PRISM.

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03.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15760

The Data Manifold under the Microscope

Authors:

Marios Koulakis↗Constantin Seibold↗

arXiv:2606.15760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A significant gap exists between theory and practice in deep learning. Generalization and approximation error bounds are often derived for simplified models or are too loose to be informative. Many rely on the manifold hypothesis and on geometric regularity such as intrinsic dimension, curvature, and reach. Progress requires insight into data-manifold geometry and suitable benchmarks, yet existing options are polarized: analytic manifolds with known geometry but limited applicability, or real-world datasets where geometry is only coarsely estimable. We introduce a benchmarking framework for studying data geometry. We repurpose and extend dSprites and COIL-20 with additional transformation dimensions and dense, axis-aligned sampling, and pair them with finite-difference estimators that recover curvature, reach, and volume at near-ground-truth accuracy in a regime where general-purpose estimators are unreliable or difficult to deploy. The framework is intended as a controlled testbed, useful as a calibration environment for geometric estimators and a sandbox for probing theoretical assumptions. To illustrate its use, we present two application studies, namely assessing the scaling behavior of the bounds of Genovese et al. and Fefferman et al., and tracking the layer-wise geometry of a $\beta$-VAE, highlighting the behavior of current bounds and the value of controlled benchmarks for guiding and validating future theory. A reference implementation is available at https://github.com/koulakis/manifold-microscope.

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04.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12372

UniIntervene: Agentic Intervention for Efficient Real-World Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Haoyuan Deng↗Yitong Gao↗Yudong Lin↗Haichao Liu↗Zhenyu Wu↗Ziwei Wang↗

arXiv:2606.12372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (HiL-RL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for real-world robotic manipulation, enabling online policy improvement with human guidance. However, current HiL-RL frameworks remain intervention-intensive, relying on frequent human corrections to redirect the policy out of unproductive exploration, which incurs high labor cost and limits real-world scalability. To address this, we propose UniIntervene, an agentic intervention model that detects unproductive exploration and autonomously recovers the policy toward high-value states, taking over the bulk of interventions from human operators. Specifically, UniIntervene first performs future-conditioned action-value estimation, predicting the latent consequence of the current action and evaluating its induced value, which provides a more stable progress signal. Building on this, a temporal value-risk critic aggregates recent value dynamics and triggers intervention when the estimated value exhibits sustained stagnation or degradation. When intervention is required, UniIntervene retrieves a high-value recovery target from a memory of past intervention episodes and produces executable corrective actions through a goal-conditioned recovery policy. In this way, UniIntervene turns intervention from passive human correction into a value-aware recovery process for efficient real-world RL. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that UniIntervene improves the average success rate by 8.6% while reducing human interventions by 57% relative to state-of-the-art HiL-RL baselines.

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05.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17756

A fairness-aware extension of Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis for ranking

Authors:

Guilherme Dean Pelegrina↗Renata Pelissari↗

arXiv:2606.17756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fairness has become a central concern in ranking problems involving individuals or social groups, particularly under the Responsible Artificial Intelligence agenda. In Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis (SMAA) provides a robust framework for handling uncertainty and incomplete preference information, but it does not explicitly address fairness in the resulting rankings. This paper proposes SMAA-Fair, a fairness-aware extension of SMAA for ranking problems. The approach reweights the simulated rankings generated by SMAA according to their level of group fairness, so that fairer rankings contribute more strongly to the acceptability indices and central weights vector. The framework is independent of the aggregation model and can incorporate different fairness metrics. In this study, Statistical Parity, normalized discounted Kullback–Leibler divergence (rKL) and normalized discounted cumulative Kullback–Leibler divergence (nDKL) are adopted. Rankings are derived from the fairness-adjusted acceptability matrix using expected ranking and maximum acceptability ranking. We also derive the central weight according to the degree of fairness in the obtained rankings. Numerical experiments with synthetic and real data show that SMAA-Fair improves the representation of protected groups among favourable ranking positions, while preserving robustness to preference uncertainty.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14125

Conditioning Matters: Stabilizing Inversion and Attention in Diffusion Image Editing

Authors:

Zheyuan Zhan↗Hongchen Li↗Can Wang↗Yinfei Ma↗Mingzhen Huang↗Ruoshi Bai↗Jiawei Chen↗Siwei Lyu↗Defang Chen↗

Inversion-based image editing offers flexible and training-free control but still struggles with inversion accuracy and the trade-off between editing fidelity and background preservation. While recent methods improve inversion formulations or attention interactions, the role of textual conditioning in shaping diffusion dynamics and editing behavior remains underexplored. We show both empirically and theoretically that the precision of textual conditioning influences inversion stability by modulating the geometry of the diffusion velocity field, while also affecting the consistency of cross-branch attention during editing. These effects directly impact background preservation and semantic fidelity. Building on this analysis, we propose SimEdit, a conditioning-aware framework with two complementary components: (a) conditioning refinement, which constructs conditioning signals with improved semantic precision and structural alignment to facilitate stable inversion and consistent attention manipulation, and (b) token-wise cross-branch attention control, which separates edit-relevant and structure-preserving components and modulates them asymmetrically during attention manipulation. Extensive experiments on PIE-Bench demonstrate that SimEdit consistently improves both inversion reconstruction quality and editing performance over previous attention-manipulation approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/zju-pi/SimEdit.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2508.17077

CP4SBI: Local Conformal Calibration of Credible Sets in Simulation-Based Inference

Authors:

Luben M. C. Cabezas↗Vagner S. Santos↗Thiago R. Ramos↗Pedro L. C. Rodrigues↗Rafael Izbicki↗

arXiv:2508.17077v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current experimental scientists have been increasingly relying on simulation-based inference (SBI) to invert complex non-linear models with intractable likelihoods. However, posterior approximations obtained with SBI are often miscalibrated, causing credible regions to undercover true parameters. We develop $\texttt{CP4SBI}$, a model-agnostic conformal calibration framework that constructs credible sets with local Bayesian coverage. Our two proposed variants, namely local calibration via regression trees and CDF-based calibration, enable finite-sample local coverage guarantees for any scoring function, including HPD, symmetric, and quantile-based regions. Experiments on widely used SBI benchmarks demonstrate that our approach improves the quality of uncertainty quantification for neural posterior estimators using both normalizing flows and score-diffusion modeling.

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08.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13782

MA-ProofBench: A Two-Tiered Evaluation of LLMs for Theorem Proving in Mathematical Analysis

Authors:

Lushi Pu↗Weiming Zhang↗Xinheng Xie↗Zixuan Fu↗Bingxiang He↗Hongya Lyu↗Xin Li↗Jie Zhou↗Yudong Wang↗

arXiv:2606.13782v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made notable progress in automated theorem proving, yet existing formal benchmarks remain limited in both mathematical coverage and difficulty. Most are concentrated in areas that are easier to formalize, such as algebra and elementary number theory, and provide limited coverage of subfields that require deeper reasoning, including mathematical analysis. To address this gap, we introduce MA-ProofBench, to the best of our knowledge, the first formal theorem-proving benchmark dedicated to Mathematical Analysis. The benchmark contains 200 formalized theorems covering 6 core topics and 27 subcategories, including measure and integration theory, complex analysis, and functional analysis. The problems are divided into two difficulty levels, an undergraduate level (Level I, 100 problems) and a Ph.D. qualifying level (Level II, 100 problems), to evaluate how well LLMs perform formal reasoning at different mathematical depths. Each problem is constructed through a human-led, LLM-assisted formalization pipeline followed by independent expert review, ensuring that the formal statements remain faithful to the original mathematics. We evaluate a range of recent general-purpose reasoning models and formal theorem provers on MA-ProofBench. However, most models perform poorly: even the best-performing model, GPT-5.5, achieves only 16% Pass@8 on Level I and 5% on Level II, while most models stay close to 0% on Level II. Further analysis identifies Mathlib hallucinations and incomplete proofs as the two dominant failure modes, while an evaluation on the natural-language version of the benchmark exposes a clear gap between informal and formal reasoning. MA-ProofBench is intended to serve as a reliable reference for tracking progress in formal mathematical reasoning in advanced domains.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15837

Learning a Sampling-Free Variational DNN Plugin from Tiny Training Sets to Refine OOD Segmentation With Uncertainty Estimation

Authors:

Jimut B. Pal↗Suyash P. Awate↗

Deep neural networks (DNNs) frequently fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) medical images because of variations in scanners and acquisition protocols. Retraining DNN models to address these distribution shifts is often impractical due to the high cost of acquiring and annotating new medical datasets. To address this, we introduce VarDeepPCA, a novel lightweight variational DNN framework designed to restore/refine degraded segmentation maps by leveraging intrinsic geometric priors. Unlike existing approaches that require target-domain data or extensive pre-training, our VarDeepPCA explicitly learns a distribution of valid anatomical geometries using only small in-distribution (ID) datasets. Theoretically, our novel variational learning framework leverages a reinterpretation of the softmax mapping to implicitly perform exact distribution modeling, thereby enabling computationally efficient, sampling-free learning and inference. This also enables VarDeepPCA to provide uncertainty estimates associated with its restored segmentation maps. We empirically validate our framework across 4 distinct clinical applications, using 14 publicly available datasets, involving segmentation of the myocardium, neuroretinal rim, prostate, and fetal head. Comparisons against 15 existing methods demonstrate that VarDeepPCA consistently restores segmentation maps produced by the existing methods on OOD data to (i) significantly improve anatomical plausibility of geometries and clinical utility of the segmentations, and (ii) significantly reduce errors, without needing any more training data than that used by existing methods.

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10.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2603.10562

Quantization Robustness of Monotone Operator Equilibrium Networks

Authors:

James Li↗Philip H. W. Leong↗Thomas Chaffey↗

arXiv:2603.10562v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Monotone operator equilibrium networks are implicit-layer models whose output is the unique equilibrium of a monotone operator, guaranteeing existence, uniqueness, and convergence. When deployed on low-precision hardware, weights are quantized, potentially destroying these guarantees. We analyze weight quantization as a spectral perturbation of the underlying monotone inclusion. Convergence of the quantized solver is guaranteed whenever the spectral-norm weight perturbation is smaller than the monotonicity margin; the displacement between quantized and full-precision equilibria is bounded in terms of the perturbation size and margin; and a condition number characterizing the ratio of the operator norm to the margin links quantization precision to forward error. MNIST experiments confirm a phase transition at the predicted threshold: three- and four-bit post-training quantization diverge, while five-bit and above converge. The backward-pass guarantee enables quantization-aware training, which recovers provable convergence at four bits.

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11.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:f34a6c3c9d1b52daa265c99de17cd612

TifBERT: a self-supervised foundation model for normalization-robust bulk RNA-seq representation learning

Authors:

Hosseini↗Sharma↗

Bulk RNA sequencing remains central to translational genomics, yet foundation-model development has largely focused on single-cell data. Existing transformer approaches for bulk RNA-seq often rely on expression discretization, numerical reconstruction, external gene embeddings, or restricted gene sets, limiting robustness across normalization schemes and cohorts. Here, we introduce TifBERT, a self-supervised framework for full-transcriptome bulk RNA-seq representation learning. TifBERT converts each unordered expression profile into a sample-specific gene sequence using term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) ordering, prioritizing genes that are both highly expressed within a sample and selectively expressed across the cohort. It is then pretrained using masked gene modeling, predicting gene identities from transcriptomic context rather than reconstructing expression values. Pretrained on harmonized TCGA Pan-Cancer data spanning five RNA-seq normalization schemes, TifBERT learns contextual representations across approximately 10,000 genes without expression binning, landmark-gene restriction, or external biological embeddings. Across 33 TCGA cancer types, TifBERT achieved 90.83% accuracy, 0.996 macro AUC-ROC, and 0.903 MCC. It also captured pathway-level biology, achieving mean sample-wise and pathway-wise Pearson correlations of 0.754 and 0.762 across 1,387 PARADIGM pathway activities. Independent evaluation on GTEx healthy tissues showed preservation of tissue-level transcriptomic structure without retraining. In comparison with existing models, TifBERT achieves competitive subtype discrimination with substantially greater stability and produces markedly richer embedding geometry (effective rank 95.6 versus 6.3), without requiring expression discretization or in-distribution pretraining exposure. Together, TifBERT provides a scalable, normalization-independent foundation model for reusable bulk transcriptomic representation learning

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12.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2511.04389

Minimum measurements quantum protocol for band structure calculation

Authors:

Michal Krej\v{c}\'i↗Lucie Krej\v{c}\'i↗Ijaz Ahamed Mohammad↗Martin Plesch↗Martin Fri\'ak↗

arXiv:2511.04389v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Protocols for quantum measurement are an essential part of quantum computing. Measurements are no longer confined to the final step of computation but are increasingly embedded within quantum circuits as integral components of noise-resilient algorithms. However, each observable typically requires a distinct measurement basis, often demanding a different circuit configuration. As the number of such configurations typically grows with the number of qubits, measurements constitute a major bottleneck. Focusing on electronic structure calculations in crystalline systems, we propose a measurement protocol that restricts the required measurement configurations to an absolute minimum of just three, independent of the number of qubits. This makes it one of the few known protocols that do not scale with qubit number. In particular, we derive the measurement protocol from the symmetries of tight-binding (TB) Hamiltonians and implement it within the Orthogonal-Ansatz Variational Quantum Eigensolver (OA-VQE) algorithm. We demonstrate its performance on three systems, namely a two-dimensional CuO$_2$ square lattice (3 qubits), bilayer graphene with hexagonal (Honeycomb) lattice (4 qubits) and three-dimensional diamond lattice (10 qubits). Beyond tight-binding systems, the protocol can be extended to enable efficient initial state preparation for many-body Hamiltonians, such as multi-orbital Hubbard models in a momentum space.

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13.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:069862f3d761b178dc6280137b3fcb3e

These ‘master’ proteins protect us from deadly mutations — and could inspire new drugs

Authors:

Philip Ball↗

Biology has clever ways to mask the effects of potentially harmful gene mutations. Scientists are investigating how this ‘buffering’ works — and how to exploit it. Biology has clever ways to mask the effects of potentially harmful gene mutations. Scientists are investigating how this ‘buffering’ works — and how to exploit it.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2512.21315

Does the Data Processing Inequality Reflect Practice? On the Utility of Low-Level Tasks

Authors:

Roy Turgeman↗Tom Tirer↗

The data processing inequality is an information-theoretic principle stating that the information content of a signal cannot be increased by processing the observations. In particular, it suggests that there is no benefit in enhancing the signal or encoding it before addressing a classification problem. This assertion can be proven to be true for the case of the optimal Bayes classifier. However, in practice, it is common to perform "low-level" tasks before "high-level" downstream tasks despite the overwhelming capabilities of modern deep neural networks. In this paper, we aim to understand when and why low-level processing can be beneficial for classification. We present a comprehensive theoretical study of a binary classification setup, where we consider a classifier that is tightly connected to the optimal Bayes classifier and converges to it as the number of training samples increases. We prove that for any finite number of training samples, there exists a pre-classification processing that improves the classification accuracy. We also explore the effect of class separation, training set size, and class balance on the relative gain from this procedure. We support our theory with an empirical investigation of the theoretical setup. Finally, we conduct an empirical study where we investigate the effect of denoising and encoding on the performance of practical deep classifiers on benchmark datasets. Specifically, we vary the size and class distribution of the training set, and the noise level, and demonstrate trends that are consistent with our theoretical results.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2512.14366

Optimizing Rank for High-Fidelity Implicit Neural Representations

Authors:

Julian McGinnis↗Florian A. H\"olzl↗Suprosanna Shit↗Florentin Bieder↗Paul Friedrich↗Mark M\"uhlau↗Bjoern Menze↗Daniel Rueckert↗Benedikt Wiestler↗

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) based on vanilla Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are widely believed to be incapable of representing high-frequency content. This has directed research efforts towards architectural interventions, such as coordinate embeddings or specialized activation functions, to represent high-frequency signals. In this paper, we challenge the notion that the low-frequency bias of vanilla MLPs is an intrinsic, architectural limitation to learn high-frequency content, but instead a symptom of stable rank degradation during training. We empirically demonstrate that regulating the network's rank during training substantially improves the fidelity of the learned signal, rendering even simple MLP architectures expressive. Extensive experiments show that using optimizers like Muon, with high-rank, near-orthogonal updates, consistently enhances INR architectures even beyond simple ReLU MLPs. These substantial improvements hold across a diverse range of domains, including natural and medical images and novel view synthesis, with up to +9 dB PSNR over the same architecture. Code is available at (https://rank-inrs.github.io).

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16.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2412.03716

A Water Efficiency Dataset for African Data Centers

Authors:

Noah Shumba↗Opelo Tshekiso↗Pengfei Li↗Giulia Fanti↗Shaolei Ren↗

arXiv:2412.03716v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) computing and data centers consume large amounts of freshwater, both directly for cooling and indirectly for electricity generation. While most attention has been paid to developed countries such as the U.S., this paper presents the first-of-its-kind dataset that combines nation-level weather and electricity generation data to estimate water usage effectiveness for data centers in 41 African countries across five different climate regions. We also use our dataset to evaluate and estimate the water consumption of inference on two large language models (i.e., Llama-3-70B and GPT-4) in 11 selected African countries. Our estimates suggest that writing a 10-page report using Llama-3-70B could consume as much as {0.66 liters} of water, while the water consumption by GPT-4 for the same task may go up to about {59 liters}. For writing a medium-length email of 120-200 words, Llama-3-70B and GPT-4 could consume about {0.13 liters} and {2.9 liters} of water, respectively. All the numbers for generative model inference tasks are based on public information available in 2024, when we initially prepared the analysis. Since then, AI inference systems have improved substantially. For example, recent disclosures suggest that energy efficiency improved by more than 30x between May 2024 and May 2025. Accordingly, our 2024 estimates should be interpreted as historical reference values rather than as representative of current performance. Interestingly, given the same AI model, 9 of the 11 selected African countries consume less water than the global average, mainly because of lower water intensities for electricity generation.

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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2505.22829

Bridging Distribution Shift and AI Safety: Conceptual and Methodological Synergies

Authors:

Chenruo Liu↗Kenan Tang↗Yao Qin↗Qi Lei↗

arXiv:2505.22829v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper bridges distribution shift and AI safety through a comprehensive analysis of their conceptual and methodological synergies. While prior discussions often focus on narrow cases or informal analogies, we establish two types connections between specific causes of distribution shift and fine-grained AI safety issues: (1) methods addressing a specific shift type can help achieve corresponding safety goals, or (2) certain shifts and safety issues can be formally reduced to each other, enabling mutual adaptation of their methods. Our findings provide a unified perspective that encourages deeper integration between distribution shift and AI safety research.

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18.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15762

Snyk VulnBench JS 1.0: Can LLMs Find the Same Bugs Twice?

Authors:

Liran Tal↗Johannes Kloos↗Arsenii Rudich↗Stephen Thoemmes↗Manoj Nair↗

arXiv:2606.15762v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We ran 300 repeated vulnerability-finding scans to measure how repeatable agentic large language model (LLM) security review is on the same JavaScript code, prompt, and benchmark harness. The headline result is that LLM security findings were unevenly repeatable: reference-matched findings were stable, but extra model reports varied heavily from run to run. Across 250 model runs, 80 of 161 unique unmatched findings appeared in only one of five identical repetitions, while only 22 appeared in all five. By contrast, when Claude matched a Snyk Code reference finding, the behavior was much more stable: 134 of 158 unique reference-matched findings appeared in all five repetitions. The benchmark also shows complementarity. Models consistently found familiar, high-signal exploit shapes, and in one case surfaced a likely Snyk Code product gap. Snyk Code static application security testing (SAST) was deterministic and better at systematically enumerating repeated data-flow sinks. The results support combining agentic LLM review with deterministic SAST rather than treating either technique as a replacement for the other.

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19.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10 DOI: HASH:346557f606212ac6d39ce7537e185cda

Gendered pathways to adolescent mental health: An empirical assessment of a new conceptual framework

Authors:

Alaze↗Hagen↗Schamberger↗Razum↗Miani↗

Introduction Gender norms and roles are important determinants of physical and mental health in the key period of adolescence. Yet, the gendered pathways to mental health in adolescents are not fully understood. Using a conceptual framework for global adolescent mental health that we developed based on a Delphi process, we empirically investigated the associations between six gender-related constructs and adolescent mental health. Methods We used cross-sectional Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) data from Ethiopia (2020) to explore the associations between sex, gender norms, psychological competencies, gender attitudes, gender roles, with the latter two also serving as mediators, and psychological distress (GHQ-12), using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). Results The SEM model contained measurements from 1,584 adolescents, including 843 girls and 741 boys, with a median age of 13 years. Out of 14 pathways tested, we found statistically significant associations between psychological competencies and psychological distress; sex and gender attitudes; and between gender norms and psychological competencies, gender attitudes, and gender roles. Hence, the gender-related constructs were mostly associated with each other, rather than with psychological distress. Conclusion The gender-related constructs are strongly interrelated, thereby attenuating their individual effects on psychological distress. The interplay of gender-related constructs should be considered when developing interventions to promote mental health in adolescents.

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20.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14488

Nonlinear Two-Time-Scale Stochastic Approximation: A Sharp Phase Transition and How to Beat It

Authors:

Dhruv Sarkar↗Vaneet Aggarwal↗

arXiv:2606.14488v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent finite-time analyses of nonlinear two-time-scale stochastic approximation show that under contractive assumptions the slow iterate $Y_k$ with stepsizes $\beta_k=\Theta(k^{-1})$ and $\alpha_k=\Theta(k^{-a})$, $a\in(1/2,1)$, generally satisfies a mean-square rate of order $k^{-a}$; decoupled $k^{-1}$ rates require strong local linearity. We identify a sharp regularity-dependent boundary. In a rate-determining normal form where the slow drift contains a locally linear leakage and a nonlinear remainder of order $1+\rho$ ($\rho\in[0,1]$), the uncorrected recursion satisfies \[ \mathbb{E}\|Y_k\|^2 \le C\bigl(k^{-1}+k^{-a(1+\rho)}\bigr), \] and a matching scalar Gaussian lower bound shows that the slower term is unavoidable without modifying the update. Thus the decoupled $k^{-1}$ rate is guaranteed for the uncorrected recursion exactly when $a(1+\rho)\ge 1$. This lower bound concerns only the naive update; it is not an information-theoretic obstruction. We demonstrate this by equipping the normal-form recursion with an auxiliary online bias estimator \[ M_{k+1}=M_k+\gamma_k(R(X_k)-M_k),\qquad \beta_k\ll\gamma_k\ll\alpha_k, \] and subtracting $M_k$ from the slow update. Under the same stability, moment, and remainder assumptions, the corrected recursion achieves $\mathbb{E}\|\widetilde Y_k\|^2=O(k^{-1})$ for every $\rho\in[0,1]$, including regimes where the uncorrected update provably suffers the slower rate. Finally, we prove localized transfer theorems that extend the phase-transition mechanism to general nonlinear TTSA in fast-manifold coordinates. The proofs are non-asymptotic and rely on two Abel-transform cancellations: one for the locally linear fast-error leakage, and one for the tracked nonlinear bias.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2603.15481

TabKD: Tabular Knowledge Distillation through Interaction Diversity of Learned Feature Bins

Authors:

Shovon Niverd Pereira↗Krishna Khadka↗Yu Lei↗

arXiv:2603.15481v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data-free knowledge distillation enables model compression without original training data, critical for privacy-sensitive tabular domains. However, existing methods does not perform well on tabular data because they do not explicitly address feature interactions, the fundamental way tabular models encode predictive knowledge. We identify interaction diversity, systematic coverage of feature combinations, as an essential requirement for effective tabular distillation. To operationalize this insight, we propose TabKD, which learns adaptive feature bins aligned with teacher decision boundaries, then generates synthetic queries that maximize pairwise interaction coverage. Across 4 benchmark datasets and 4 teacher architectures, TabKD achieves highest student-teacher agreement in 14 out of 16 configurations, outperforming 5 state-of-the-art baselines. We further show that interaction coverage strongly correlates with distillation quality, validating our core hypothesis. Our work establishes interaction-focused exploration as a principled framework for tabular model extraction.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17800

MaineCoon: Pursuing A Real-Time Audio-Visual Social World Model

Authors:

Lichen Bai↗Tianhao Zhang↗Shitong Shao↗Dingwei Tan↗Qiyu Zhong↗Zhengpeng Xie↗Haopeng Li↗Qinghao Huang↗Dandan Shen↗Tengjiao Ji↗Wei Wang↗Peicheng Wu↗…

As an increasing majority of global video content is consumed on social platforms for interactive social purposes, video generation models built for social worlds are important but largely overlooked by previous studies. In this work, we define the position of social world models and build a prototype model as the first step towards this goal. While previous world models successfully simulate physical environments or gaming world exploration, they remain fundamentally detached from human-centric social dynamics. To bridge this gap as the first step to social world models, we present MaineCoon, the first real-time audio-visual autoregressive model that has 22B parameters and is capable of real-time streaming generation and sub-second interaction, with a record-breaking frame rate of up to 47.5 FPS, on a single GPU. To the best of our knowledge, MaineCoon is also the first real-time audio-visual generation model specifically optimized for social-interactive applications. To enable efficient and stable training, we introduce several novel techniques into MaineCoon, including self-resampling, cross-modal representation alignment, domain-aware preference optimization, and reinforced online-policy distillation (ROPD). We also design the first agentic streaming inference framework that supports thousand-second-scale or even longer generation while mitigating drift with agentic cache management and prompt planing. These innovations significantly accelerate training while optimizing real-time inference performance. We believe this work not only sets a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance benchmark for high-quality, low-latency, and long-horizon audio-visual autoregressive models, but also points out the paradigm shift desired for next-generation AI-native social platforms.

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23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2601.02322

Environment-Adaptive Covariate Selection: Learning When to Use Spurious Correlations for Out-of-Distribution Prediction

Authors:

Shuozhi Zuo↗Yixin Wang↗

arXiv:2601.02322v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A common approach to out-of-distribution prediction restricts models to causal or invariant covariates to avoid spurious associations that may change across environments. Despite its theoretical appeal, this strategy can underperform empirical risk minimization when only a subset of the causal parents of the outcome is observed. In such settings, non-causal covariates can serve as proxies for unobserved causal parents and improve prediction when the proxy relationship is stable, but they can hurt when shifts disrupt that relationship. Thus, the optimal covariate set can depend on the specific shift encountered. Because different shifts leave signatures in the unlabeled covariate distribution, we propose an environment-adaptive covariate selection algorithm that maps environment-level summaries to environment-specific covariate sets. These summaries may be hand-crafted or learned from multi-environment data, and prior causal knowledge can be incorporated as constraints. Across simulations and applied datasets, the proposed method improves over static causal, invariant, and other non-adaptive rules under diverse shifts.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18876

Test-Time Adaptation in Optical Coherence Tomography Using Trajectory-Aligned Time-Independent Flow

Authors:

Veit Hucke↗Thomas Pinetz↗Gregor Reiter↗Ursula Schmidt-Erfurth↗Hrvoje Bogunovi\'c↗

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is essential in ophthalmology, but inconsistent image quality especially in low-cost devices hinders automated analysis. To address this, we introduce a flow-matching-based test-time adaptation method that generates high-quality surrogate images from noisy inputs. Typically, domain gaps between test and training data cause pixel distribution mismatches during the denoising process. We overcome this by matching the test image's histogram to synthetic reference trajectories, successfully aligning the input with expected distributions. Additionally, we remove the network's time conditioning to account for slight deviations in real-world noise distributions. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in segmenting critical biomarkers for two stages of Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD). Code is available: https://github.com/Veit21/tta-flow.

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25.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12 DOI: HASH:0c09cfc8263a9574de0cb9e7b3721c39

The Geometry of Allostery: A Laplacian Minor Hierarchy for Many-Body Protein Communication

Authors:

Senguler Ciftci↗Erman↗

Quantifying how cooperative, many-body relationships drive allostery in protein networks remains a major challenge. To address this, we develop the Laplacian minor hierarchy, a mathematical framework that characterizes the geometric invariants of a protein network. Lower-order minors yield standard metrics including the partition function and effective distances, whereas higher-order minors define novel topological measures: cooperation indices, each bounded between zero and one, that characterize pathway correlations at increasing levels of complexity, the third-order minor determines whether allosteric pathways are correlated or uncorrelated, and the fourth-order minor quantifies how distinct pathways communicate through intermediary residues. We apply this framework to analyze the evolutionary adaptation of the PSD95pdz3 domain from Class I to Class II ligand specificity via mutations G330T and H372A. The cooperation index demonstrates a distinct evolutionary hierarchy: the G330T mutation establishes distributed pathway couplings that the H372A mutation subsequently exploits, whereas H372A alone produces minimal global changes. Furthermore, the fourth-order analysis identifies His317 as a critical intermediary node bridging the class-switching (330-372) and class-bridging (330-400) allosteric pathways. These results demonstrate that allosteric dependencies emerge only when mutations accumulate in specific combinations, with a hierarchical organization of pathways structured around position 330 and intermediary nodes His317 and Phe400. Rather than predicting allosteric mechanisms, this framework provides a mechanistic explanation for why and how allostery emerges during protein evolution.

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