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01.

PLOS Medicine 2026-05-29 DOI: HASH:ce33ca594d10abc18dde2823a4b8a3eb

Availability, appeal, and addictiveness by design: Tobacco and nicotine industry deliberate targeting of youth

作者:

Raglan Maddox↗

by Raglan Maddox, Becky Freeman, Charlotta Pisinger, Emily Banks Contemporary tobacco and nicotine products, particularly e-cigarettes, are deliberately designed, marketed, and distributed to maximize youth appeal, uptake, dependence, and use. Youth uptake is a predictable outcome of systems designed to maximize product availability, appeal, and addictiveness. In recognition of the World No Tobacco Day 2026 theme, "unmasking the appeal", this Perspective by Raglan Maddox and colleagues discusses how tobacco and nicotine products, particularly e-cigarettes, are deliberately designed and marketed to maximize youth appeal, and highlight the need for policies to ensure greater industry accountability and to tackle concerning uptake trends.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16617

Sycophancy as Material Failure under Pushback Loading: A Multi-Axis Characterization Across Three Loading Cases and up to Seventeen Material Charges

作者:

Ferdinand M. Schessl↗

Sycophancy in LLMs is documented across 70+ papers, but expert agreement on construct boundaries remains low (ICC=.184; Ye et al., 2026). The construct fragments because behavioral classification depends on which surface form is privileged. We adopt a materials-science framing: conversation as test specimen under load, LLM-model as material charge, pushback as progressive load, stance-flip as material failure. We characterize this failure across three loading cases (debate n=1000; false-presuppositions n=3400; ethical-setting n=3400; 10-17 material charges per case; 7800 specimens total) using 14 turn-level axis-measurements spanning velocity, damage accumulation, frame-drift, brittleness, and direction stability, plus three speaker-resolved axes from an independent pipeline. The measurements are Hooke-coupled ($\sigma = E \cdot \varepsilon$ analog) and reproduce across loading cases with effects up to $|r_{rb}| = 0.35$ on debate; the sign structure adds a second pattern: the ethical-setting case inverts the velocity and accumulation blocks. Variance composition partitions into two profiles: debate is charge-dominated (brittle-fracture-like: the material grade decides), false-presuppositions and ethical-setting are topic-dominated (creep-like: the load decides); the ratios (2.03 vs 0.13/0.17) are estimator-dependent, for debate even in direction. Cross-judge reliability (GPT-4o vs Haiku 4.5) shows debate scoring is judge-robust (Cohen's $\kappa = 0.88$) while false-presupposition scoring is judge-sensitive ($\kappa = 0.36$) – a caveat single-judge benchmarks must report. This is the methodological move Ye et al.'s diagnosis calls for: a multi-axis characterization that does not depend on which surface form of the construct one privileges.

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03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2505.13986

RIDGECUT: Learning Graph Partitioning with Rings and Wedges

作者:

Qize Jiang↗Angelo Zangari↗Linsey Pang↗Alice Gatti↗Mahima Aggarwal↗Giovanna Vantini↗Xiaosong Ma↗Weiwei Sun↗Sourav Medya↗Sanjay Chawla↗

arXiv:2505.13986v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise for combinatorial optimization problems on graphs by learning heuristics that generalize across instances. However, effectively incorporating domain knowledge into RL frameworks for graph partitioning remains challenging, as existing approaches typically rely on unconstrained node-level actions that lead to large action spaces and inefficient exploration. In this paper, we propose RidgeCut, an RL framework that constrains the action space to enforce structure-aware partitioning in the Normalized Cut problem. Using transportation networks as a motivating example, we introduce a novel concept that leverages domain knowledge about urban road topology – where natural partitions often take the form of concentric rings and radial wedges. By transforming the graph into linear or circular representations, our method enables the use of transformer-based policies and efficient learning via Proximal Policy Optimization. The resulting partitions from RidgeCut are not only aligned with expected spatial layouts but also achieve lower normalized cuts compared to existing methods. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world traffic graphs demonstrate that RidgeCut consistently outperforms existing methods while exhibiting strong inductive generalization across graph sizes. Although motivated by road networks, RidgeCut provides a general mechanism for embedding structural priors into RL frameworks for graph partitioning.

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04.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2602.24012

InfoNCE Induces Gaussian Distribution

作者:

Roy Betser↗Eyal Gofer↗Meir Yossef Levi↗Guy Gilboa↗

arXiv:2602.24012v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Contrastive learning has become a cornerstone of modern representation learning, allowing training with massive unlabeled data for both task-specific and general (foundation) models. A prototypical loss in contrastive training is InfoNCE and its variants. In this work, we show that the InfoNCE objective induces Gaussian structure in representations that emerge from contrastive training. We establish this result in two complementary regimes. First, we show that under certain alignment and concentration assumptions, projections of the high-dimensional representation asymptotically approach a multivariate Gaussian distribution. Next, under less strict assumptions, we show that adding a small asymptotically vanishing regularization term that promotes low feature norm and high feature entropy leads to similar asymptotic results. We support our analysis with experiments on synthetic and CIFAR-10 datasets across multiple encoder architectures and sizes, demonstrating consistent Gaussian behavior. This perspective provides a principled explanation for commonly observed Gaussianity in contrastive representations. The resulting Gaussian model enables principled analytical treatment of learned representations and is expected to support a wide range of applications in contrastive learning.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18008

PhaseWin: An Efficient Search Algorithm for Faithful Visual Attribution

作者:

Zihan Gu↗Ruoyu Chen↗Junchi Zhang↗Li Liu↗Xiaochun Cao↗Hua Zhang↗

Visual attribution is a fundamental tool for interpreting modern vision and vision-language models, particularly when their decisions must be inspected, diagnosed, or audited. Its goal is to explain how a model's decision depends on local regions of the visual input, typically by assigning an importance ordering over candidate image regions. Given an image partitioned into $n$ regions, faithful attribution can be cast as an ordered subset-search problem, in which progressively inserting the selected regions should recover the target model response as early as possible. Exhaustive search over region subsets incurs exponential cost, while the widely used greedy search still requires a quadratic number of model evaluations, because every selection step rescores all remaining candidates. We propose PhaseWin, an efficient subset-search algorithm for faithful visual attribution. PhaseWin reorganizes greedy region selection into a phased window-search procedure: rather than re-evaluating the full candidate set at every step, it alternates between global candidate screening, adaptive pruning, and localized window refinement, while preserving the essential region-ranking behavior of greedy search. We analyze PhaseWin under monotone evidence-accumulation conditions and show that, under feature-level structural assumptions, it attains controllable linear evaluation complexity together with near-greedy faithfulness guarantees. Extensive experiments on image classification, object detection, visual grounding, and image captioning show that, among all compared attribution methods, PhaseWin reaches high faithfulness with the fewest forward passes, empirically realizing the predicted reduction from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$. The code is available at https://github.com/Qihuai27/phasewin-va.

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06.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18933

Zero-Shot Active Feature Acquisition via LLM-Elicitation

作者:

Binyamin Perets↗Natalie Mendelson↗Shiran Vainberg↗Yehuda Chowers↗Shai Shen-Orr↗Shie Mannor↗

arXiv:2606.18933v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Active feature acquisition (AFA) sequentially selects which features to observe to reach a classification or ranking decision. Its central limitation is reliance on large amount of labeled data to fit probabilistic models guiding acquisition. Large language models (LLMs) supply unsupervised domain knowledge, but are poor sequential planners. Asking one to both know and decide conflates capabilities best kept separate. Here, we develop a framework for zero-shot AFA through disciplined elicitation: asking the LLM only for what it can be trusted to return, the unary deviations and pairwise co-variations that are the sufficient statistics of a Markov random field (MRF). We apply our framework to two settings: binary classification and top-$k$ identification. In practice, the LLM reliably returns only discriminative statistics, what distinguishes the classes rather than each class in isolation, which precludes classical AFA. We apply a maximum-entropy closure that resolves this gauge ambiguity. We evaluate on a cohort of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) patients, an active clinical setting where diagnostic ambiguity and patient heterogeneity obstruct stable treatment strategies. Our framework outperforms the LLM both on real labels and on its own extracted beliefs. Where it matters most, on the hardest patients, our top-$k$ acquisition policy markedly outperforms all existing methods.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12087

FORT-Searcher: Synthesizing Shortcut-Resistant Search Tasks for Training Deep Search Agents

作者:

Jia Deng↗Yimeng Chen↗Xiaoqing Xiang↗Ziyang Zeng↗Shuo Tang↗Wayne Xin Zhao↗Feng Chang↗Chuan Hao↗Yuan Wei↗Ran Tao↗Bryan Dai↗Ji-Rong Wen↗…

Training deep search agents requires verifiable questions whose answers remain unavailable until sufficient evidence has been acquired through search. Existing synthesis methods often increase apparent difficulty by enriching graph structures, but structural complexity alone does not guarantee realized search difficulty: the intended search process can collapse through a cheaper identifying route. We formalize this gap with a shortcut-aware difficulty framework and identify four actionable shortcut risks: evidence co-coverage, single-clue selectivity, exposed constants, and prior-knowledge binding. To diagnose their realized effects, we use trajectory signatures including solving cost, answer hit time, and prior-shortcut rate. Guided by this framework, we introduce FORT, a Framework of Shortcut-Resistant Training-Data Synthesis. FORT constructs shortcut-resistant training data by controlling shortcut risks across entity selection, evidence graph construction, question formulation, and adversarial refinement. Experiments show that FORT induces longer pre-answer search and fewer shortcut patterns than existing open-source deep search datasets. Using the resulting trajectories, we train FORT-Searcher with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) only, and it achieves the best overall performance among comparable-size open-source search agents on challenging deep search benchmarks. Relevant resources will be made available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/FORT-Searcher.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15037

ReportQA: QA-Based Radiology Report Evaluation

作者:

Yiming Shi↗Shaoshuai Yang↗Xi Chen↗Haolin Li↗Hengyu Zhang↗Che Jiang↗Kaiwen Wang↗Xun Zhu↗Dong Xie↗Fei Wang↗Dejing Dou↗Miao Li↗…

Radiology report evaluation is essential for advancing automated report generation. Natural language generation metrics have limited clinical relevance. Clinical efficacy (CE) metrics evaluate important medical findings, but focus mainly on presence and cover only a limited set of entities. Due to heavy reliance on manual annotations, it is difficult for CE metrics to extend clinical entities or attributes. In clinical practice, radiology reports serve as a medium for information transfer. Clinicians use them to perform downstream diagnostic tasks without directly inspecting images. Based on this insight, we propose ReportQA, a clinical-related and flexible radiology report evaluation framework, supporting detailed quantitative analysis of radiology report generation systems. We first collect datasets covering multiple imaging modalities and anatomical regions. We then construct knowledge trees of clinical entities and attributes with radiologist guidance, and use large language models (LLMs) to extract structured information from raw reports. Next, we generate QA pairs from predefined templates and apply quality control through self-filtering and report-based filtering. During evaluation, the report is treated as context, and an LLM acts as a judge model to answer the QA pairs. Based on the resulting QA accuracy, we introduce QAScore metric. Compared with existing metrics, QAScore shows better alignment with radiologist judgments. Experiments on multiple state-of-the-art vision-language models reveal that current report-based inference paradigms struggle to learn fine-grained clinical representations and exhibit strong negative prior biases. In contrast, question-driven inference provides a more effective alternative. For reproducibility and extensibility, we release the knowledge trees, structured reports, and QA pairs, along with the pipeline code for QA construction and evaluation.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2601.03112

DiT-JSCC: Rethinking Deep JSCC with Diffusion Transformers and Semantic Representations

作者:

Kailin Tan↗Jincheng Dai↗Sixian Wang↗Guo Lu↗Shuo Shao↗Kai Niu↗Wenjun Zhang↗Ping Zhang↗

Generative joint source-channel coding (GJSCC) has emerged as a new Deep JSCC paradigm for achieving high-fidelity and robust image transmission under extreme wireless channel conditions, such as ultra-low bandwidth and low signal-to-noise ratio. Recent studies commonly adopt diffusion models as generative decoders, but they frequently produce visually realistic results with limited semantic consistency. This limitation stems from a fundamental mismatch between reconstruction-oriented JSCC encoders and generative decoders, as the former lack explicit semantic discriminability and fail to provide reliable conditional cues. In this paper, we propose DiT-JSCC, a novel GJSCC backbone that can jointly learn a semantics-prioritized representation encoder and a diffusion transformer (DiT) based generative decoder, our open-source project aims to promote the future research in GJSCC. Specifically, we design a semantics-detail dual-branch encoder that aligns naturally with a coarse-to-fine conditional DiT decoder, prioritizing semantic consistency under extreme channel conditions. Moreover, a training-free adaptive bandwidth allocation strategy inspired by Kolmogorov complexity is introduced to further improve the transmission efficiency, thereby indeed redefining the notion of information value in the era of generative decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiT-JSCC consistently outperforms existing JSCC methods in both semantic consistency and visual quality, particularly in extreme regimes.

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10.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:78c2a7dab257abe9176b09b85e7085e5

Womens intentions and motivations towards health behaviour change before pregnancy: a cross-sectional survey of pregnant women in Australia

作者:

Steel↗Schoenaker↗McIntyre↗Rogers↗Hall↗Adams↗

Introduction: The preconception period (i.e. the weeks and months before pregnancy) is a critical window during which parental health behaviours can influence pregnancy outcomes and the childs long-term health. Modifiable factors such as nutrition, physical activity, substance use, and environmental exposures play a key role, yet womens ability to adopt and sustain healthy behaviours is shaped by complex psychological, social and environmental influences. This study applies the Theory of Planned Behaviour to identify the beliefs underpinning womens preconception behaviours, with the aim of informing support for effective and sustained health behaviour change. Methods: An Australian national retrospective cross-sectional survey of pregnant women (18-49 years), recruited through social media platforms. The 92-item survey captured respondent socio-demographics, pregnancy status and health conditions, health behaviours, and beliefs regarding preconception health behaviours. Respondents level of pregnancy planning was categorised using the London Measure of Unplanned Pregnancy (LMUP). Items regarding preconception beliefs were structured in accordance with the Theory of Planned Behaviour, with a focus on regular exercise, healthy diet, and alcohol avoidance. These beliefs variables were analysed using structured equation modelling to identify paths between latent variables and the items used to estimate each concept. Results: The study was completed by 430 pregnant women of whom 72.7% had a planned pregnancy. Most had a partner, were university educated and in good health. Structural equation modelling showed intention strongly predicted exercise ({beta}=0.65), healthy diet ({beta}=0.54) and alcohol avoidance ({beta}=0.64). Perceived control and partner norms influenced intentions, whereas health professional norms had limited effect. Positive beliefs were associated with folate supplement use and smoking cessation. Conclusion: These findings highlight intention as a key driver of preconception health behaviours, with perceived control and partner influences playing a more significant role than individual beliefs or health professional input. Effective interventions should therefore address structural barriers and actively involve partners, while respecting womens autonomy. Overall, couples-focused, multi-level strategies are likely essential to support meaningful and sustained preconception health behaviour change.

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11.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:bac1f07ecee8f054fce3dce9f736e379

Real-World Effectiveness and Safety of Avacopan in ANCA-Associated Vasculitis: A Systematic Literature Review and Meta-analysis

作者:

Ibiloye↗Kathe↗Mirkovic↗Martin↗Tu↗Gamburg↗Kumar↗Solanki↗Wallace↗

Background: The efficacy and safety of avacopan in ANCA-associated vasculitis (AAV) has been established in randomized trials of of avacopan as a glucocorticoid (GC) sparing therapy. However, real world evidence (RWE) has an important role in confirming effectiveness and evaluating safety in more generalizable settings. This study aimed to synthesize RWE on the effectiveness and safety of avacopan in adults with AAV. Methods: A systematic literature review and meta analysis of non interventional real world studies was conducted in accordance with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Eligible studies included adults with AAV treated with avacopan in routine clinical practice. Pooled estimates of effectiveness and safety outcomes were calculated using random effects meta-analyses. Primary outcomes included remission at 6 and 12 months and sustained remission at 12 months. Secondary outcomes included relapse, GC use and dosing, hepatotoxicity, infections, and treatment discontinuation. Exploratory outcomes included changes in estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) and dialysis related endpoints. Results: A total of 71 studies were included and contributed to quantitative analyses. Pooled remission for patients on avacopan was 87% (95% CI: 75%-94%) at 6 months and 93% (95% CI: 86%-97%) at 12 months, and sustained remission was 86% (95% CI: 74%-93%) at 12 months. Relapse at 12 months was low (7%; 95% CI: 4%-11%). GC use was 36% at both 6 and 12 months. Improvements in eGFR were observed at 6 months (18 mL/min/1.73 m2) and 12 months (18 mL/min/1.73 m2), and dialysis liberation was 66% in a limited subset. Among avacopan patients, 11% experienced any hepatotoxicity, including 7% with serious (defined as directly reported or requiring hospitalization) hepatotoxicity, while 7% experienced serious (defined as directly reported or requiring hospitalization) infection. Conclusions: In real world clinical practice, avacopan is associated with high remission rates, low relapse rates, and a consistent GC sparing effect, with effectiveness comparable to standard of care regimens. Findings support its clinical use with appropriate safety monitoring; however, the observed heterogeneity in hepatotoxicity and the limited comparative effectiveness evidence highlight areas requiring further investigation.

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12.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19583

Power-law hypothesis and (un)fairness of PageRank on undirected multi-type PAMs

作者:

Christian Borgs↗Florian Henning↗Remco van der Hofstad↗Nelly Litvak↗

arXiv:2606.19583v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The preferential attachment model (PAM) describes the sequential growth of a network based on the "rich-get-richer" principle. Several versions of it have become established for modeling, e.g., citation networks, capturing a power-law degree distribution. Directed versions of the preferential attachment model where the edges are directed from the new to the old vertices have been the subject of extensive research. They have been shown to exhibit remarkable properties such as heavier tails for the limiting graph-normalized PageRank than for the in-degrees. By contrast, for the undirected version, we recently showed that PageRank has similar tails as the degree. In the present paper, we discuss the PageRank asymptotics for a multi-type version of the undirected PAM (here vertices have different colors), complementing previous results of Antunes, Bhamidi, Banerjee and Pipiras on the asymptotics of PageRank on similar directed multi-type or colored PAMs. Our studies are motivated by the aim to go beyond the rigid rule of edge orientation in directed preferential attachment models. As the main result, for the case of a finite set of colors, we show that the power-law hypothesis for PageRank is fulfilled also for the colored undirected PAM, where, by contrast to the directed case, the power-law exponent is color-dependent for some choices of the initial color distribution and the attractiveness function. For the specific case of a two-type model, we discuss implications of our results on fairness in sampling underrepresented nodes from the network.

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13.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15057

AutoDojo: Adaptive Attacks Expose Superficial Defenses and User-Underspecification Limits in LLM Agents

作者:

Xinhang Ma↗Taoran Li↗Chaowei Xiao↗Zhiyuan Yu↗Ning Zhang↗Yevgeniy Vorobeychik↗

arXiv:2606.15057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indirect prompt injection (IPI) is a major security threat to LLM-powered agents. Thus, a growing body of work have proposed a variety of defensive approaches against IPI. These can be grouped into three broad categories: 1) prompt-based (using prompting as a way to prevent agents from following malicious instructions), 2) detection-based (identifying and filtering malicious instructions), and 3) system-level (using systems insights, such as control and data isolation, for defense). However, commonly used benchmarks for evaluating defense, such as AgentDojo, are inherently static, generating a fixed distribution of IPI attacks. Consequently, static benchmarks do not usefully evaluate defense robustness to adaptive threats. We address this issue by developing AutoDojo, an adaptive extension of AgentDojo that optimizes IPI against a given defense. Using AutoDojo against state-of-the-art IPI defenses across three task suites and five target models, we make two key observations. First, many defenses offer only limited protection: a cheap, black-box adaptive attack using a frontier LLM to iteratively optimize the injection raises attack success rate (ASR) well above the level achieved by static injections against nearly all evaluated defenses. Against a filter that reduces static ASR to 0\%, AutoDojo recovers 28\% overall and 64\% on action-open tasks. Second, for prompt-level and filter-based defenses, ASR is substantially higher on action-open tasks – where the user's request delegates the action itself to attacker-controlled content – than on precisely specified tasks. This is a structural limit: on such tasks the injection can pose as ordinary data rather than an explicit instruction, bypassing defenses that rely on detecting instruction-like text. AutoDojo is publicly available at https://github.com/xhOwenMa/AutoDojo.

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14.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2211.05142

Non-Markovianity-based ultrasensitive parameter estimation

作者:

Olli Siltanen↗

arXiv:2211.05142v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate parameter estimation is a central task in quantum metrology and sensing, where quantum resources can provide precision beyond classical limits. In realistic settings, however, system-environment interactions lead to decoherence, reducing these strategies to their classical counterparts. Noise is typically classified as Markovian or non-Markovian, with the latter often preserving quantum coherence longer and thus supporting better metrological performance. Still, the absence of noise is generally considered ideal. In this work, we uncover a striking reversal: certain non-Markovian environments not only outperform Markovian ones - including their quantum Cramér-Rao bounds - but can also surpass the entirely noiseless case. We demonstrate these findings numerically for an all-optical setup, which is experimentally feasible and can be extended to other physical platforms. In general, our results open new avenues for noise-assisted quantum metrology beyond conventional limits.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19257

DreamReasoner-8B: Block-Size Curriculum Learning for Diffusion Reasoning Models

作者:

Zirui Wu↗Lin Zheng↗Jiacheng Ye↗Shansan Gong↗Xueliang Zhao↗Yansong Feng↗Wei Bi↗Lingpeng Kong↗

Block diffusion language models accelerate decoding through parallel block-wise denoising, yet whether they can be reliably scaled for long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning remains unresolved. To this end, we develop DreamReasoner-8B, an open-source block diffusion reasoning model, and conduct a systematic study of how training and inference block sizes affect long-CoT reasoning. Our analysis reveals a stark performance disparity: training with large block sizes yields remarkably poor reasoning, whereas small block sizes preserve effective reasoning. To bridge this granularity gap, we propose block-size curriculum learning, which gradually transitions training from fine-grained to coarse-grained block sizes, thereby overcoming this limitation and enabling strong reasoning performance that generalizes across diverse inference block sizes. On mathematical and code reasoning benchmarks, DreamReasoner-8B achieves results competitive with leading open autoregressive models such as Qwen3-8B. This work establishes a practical foundation for efficient, reasoning-capable diffusion language models. We release our model at https://github.com/DreamLM/DreamReasoner.

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16.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2507.20424

Communication-Efficient Distributed Training for Collaborative Flat Optima Recovery in Deep Learning

作者:

Tolga Dimlioglu↗Anna Choromanska↗

arXiv:2507.20424v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study centralized distributed data parallel training of deep neural networks (DNNs), aiming to improve the trade-off between communication efficiency and model performance of the local gradient methods. To this end, we revisit the flat-minima hypothesis, which suggests that models with better generalization tend to lie in flatter regions of the loss landscape. We introduce a simple, yet effective, sharpness measure, Inverse Mean Valley, and demonstrate its strong correlation with the generalization gap of DNNs. We incorporate an efficient relaxation of this measure into the distributed training objective as a lightweight regularizer that encourages workers to collaboratively seek wide minima. The regularizer exerts a pushing force that counteracts the consensus step pulling the workers together, giving rise to the Distributed Pull-Push Force (DPPF) algorithm. Empirically, we show that DPPF outperforms other communication-efficient approaches and achieves better generalization performance than local gradient methods and synchronous gradient averaging, while maintaining communication efficiency. In addition, our loss landscape visualizations confirm the ability of DPPF to locate flatter minima. On the theoretical side, we show that DPPF guides workers to span flat valleys, with the final valley width governed by the interplay between push and pull strengths, and that its pull-push dynamics is self-stabilizing. We further provide generalization guarantees linked to the valley width and prove convergence in the non-convex setting.

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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.00947

Silent Failures in Federated Personalization of Foundation Models

作者:

YongKyung Oh↗Alex Bui↗

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.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11450

Exploring Adaptive Masked Reconstruction for Self-Supervised Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

作者:

Shengkai Sun↗Zhiyong Cheng↗Zefan Zhang↗Jianfeng Dong↗Zhihui Li↗Meng Wang↗

Recently, masked skeleton reconstruction models have emerged as strong action representation learners, driving significant progress in self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition. However, existing state-of-the-art methods must predict an exceedingly large number of spatiotemporal patches, significantly prolonging training time. Besides, by treating all spatiotemporal regions equally during reconstruction, these models are distracted from learning the critical motion patterns that underlie action semantics. To address these challenges, we propose Adaptive Masked Reconstruction (AMR), a faster and stronger pre-training framework. We first decouple the decoder from the encoder, enabling flexible prediction of larger spatiotemporal patches and dramatically reducing reconstruction complexity. Given that larger patches contain more complex information, which is challenging to predict and consequently degrades performance, we accordingly introduce an adaptive guidance module. This module identifies regions of high motion informativeness, guiding the model to focus on the most discriminative parts of each patch and alleviating reconstruction difficulty. Experiments on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and PKU-MMD datasets demonstrate that AMR not only accelerates pre-training substantially but also improves downstream recognition accuracy, surpassing current state-of-the-art approaches.

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19.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13529

Ride, Track, and Recover: Pilot Randomized Trial of a Wearable Digital Self-Management Intervention During a Veteran Endurance-Cycling Program

作者:

Alan Ta↗Nilsu Salgin↗Caleb Armstrong↗Kala Phillips Reindel↗Farzan Sasangohar↗

arXiv:2606.13529v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veterans is characterized by persistent hyperarousal and comorbid anxiety and depressive symptoms that are difficult to monitor and manage outside clinical settings. Thirteen veterans participating in a Project Hero cycling event in Texas were randomized by computer-generated sequence in a naturalistic setting to two arms: (1) digital intervention plus physical activity, or (2) physical activity only, plus a third at-home monitoring control cohort consisting of 7 veterans selected from the broader Project Hero veteran community. Continuous smartwatch sensing combined heart rate and accelerometer features to detect hyperarousal events, which were confirmed in real time by participants. Weekly self-report measures of anxiety, depression, and PTSD severity were collected. Generalized additive mixed models characterized nonlinear trajectories over time. Baseline-normalized hyperarousal trajectories differed significantly across conditions, with the digital intervention group (n=7) showing structured stabilization compared to late-study escalation in the physical-only group (n=3). Both cycling groups exhibited acute symptom improvements during the endurance event; however, the digital intervention group demonstrated a higher overall maintenance of gains. The at-home control group (n=4) showed gradual symptom declines. Perceived precision of ML detections varied substantially across individuals and was positively associated with symptom severity, with higher-severity participants confirming a greater proportion of detected events. These results suggest that coupling wearable detection with digital self-management tools may support stabilization of hyperarousal and symptom improvement while emphasizing the importance of personalization and human-centered design in wearable mental health systems.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16448

Hierarchical Fine-Grained Aerial Object Detection

作者:

Yan Zhang↗Fang Xu↗Wen Yang↗Gui-Song Xia↗

Fine-grained aerial object detection, driven by the intrinsic granularity of real-world object categories, is crucial for advanced scene understanding in remote sensing. Existing methods largely inherit the paradigm of coarse-grained object detection, relying solely on single-label supervision and thus struggling to distinguish model-level categories with subtle structural differences. However, for each specific model (e.g., Boeing 787), structured prior knowledge such as attributes and hierarchies offers discriminative semantics across multiple granularities. Motivated by this, we present ExpertDet, a scheme that incorporates expert-informed cues to enhance fine-grained aerial object detection. Specifically, we design Vision-aware Masked Attribute Modeling (VMAM), which aligns attribute semantics with visual structures by reconstructing randomly masked attributes from visual cues, enabling the detector to capture subtle structural distinctions. We further propose Hierarchical Visual Instance Promotion (HierVIP), which builds a visual prototype tree based on hierarchical relations and imposes taxonomy-aware constraints to preserve cross-level semantic continuity while enhancing category discrimination. Moreover, we curate a new fine-grained object detection benchmark for Precise recognition of model-specific Ships and Planes from aerial imagery, PSP, covering 106 ship classes and 30 airplane models, respectively, featuring the most extensive collection of model-specific categories among existing aerial object detection datasets to date. We benchmark state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on the PSP benchmark. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that ExpertDet consistently outperforms other fine-grained competitors across hierarchy levels. The dataset, benchmark, and code are available at https://nnnnerd.github.io/PSP-Benchmark/.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2603.01761

Position: Modular Memory is the Key to Continual Learning Agents

作者:

Vaggelis Dorovatas↗Malte Schwerin↗Andrew D. Bagdanov↗Lucas Caccia↗Antonio Carta↗Laurent Charlin↗Barbara Hammer↗Tyler L. Hayes↗Timm Hess↗Christopher Kanan↗Dhireesha Kudithipudi↗Xialei Liu↗…

arXiv:2603.01761v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models have transformed machine learning through large-scale pretraining and increased test-time compute. Despite surpassing human performance in several domains, these models remain fundamentally limited in continuous operation, experience accumulation, and personalization, capabilities that are central to adaptive intelligence. While continual learning research has long targeted these goals, its historical focus on in-weight learning (IWL), i.e., updating a single model's parameters to absorb new knowledge, has rendered catastrophic forgetting a persistent challenge. Our position is that combining the strengths of In-Weight Learning (IWL) and the newly emerged capabilities of In-Context Learning (ICL) through the design of modular memory is the missing piece for continual adaptation at scale. We outline a conceptual framework for modular memory-centric architectures that leverage ICL for rapid adaptation and knowledge accumulation, and IWL for stable updates to model capabilities, charting a practical roadmap toward continually learning agents.

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22.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2506.06010

Magnetic control of an exciton-polariton condensate in a van der Waals magnet

作者:

Heng Zhang↗Niloufar Nilforoushan↗Christian Weidgans↗Tobias Inzenhofer↗Marlene Liebich↗Josef Riepl↗Julian Hirschmann↗Imke Gronwald↗Kseniia Mosina↗Zden\v{e}k Sofer↗Ritaj Tyagi↗Jan Wilhelm↗…

arXiv:2506.06010v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quasiparticle condensates are among the most spectacular solid-state manifestations of quantum physics. Coupling macroscopic real-space wavefunctions to additional degrees of freedom, such as the electron spin, would add valuable control knobs for quantum applications. While creating spin-carrying superconducting condensates has attracted enormous attention, man-made condensates of light-matter hybrids known as exciton-polaritons have lacked an analogous spin-based perspective. Here we open a new door by demonstrating magnetically tunable exciton-polariton condensation in the van der Waals magnet CrSBr. Under photoexcitation, CrSBr microwires embedded in an optical cavity show the hallmarks of polariton condensation: a dramatic increase of the emission intensity from an excited laterally confined polariton state by multiple orders of magnitude, spectral narrowing of the emission line, and a continuous shift of the peak energy. Interferometry evidences an increase in spatial and temporal coherence. Owing to the strong coupling between the spin order and excitonic correlation, the energy of the condensate can be tuned by up to 10.5 meV by an external magnetic field of only 2 Tesla. Our results establish CrSBr microcavities as a powerful platform for exploring magnetic control of polariton condensates and mark a significant step toward spin-controlled coherent quantum light sources.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2602.22822

FlexMS: A Unified Public Benchmark for Molecule Tandem Mass Spectrum Prediction

作者:

Yunhua Zhong↗Yixuan Tang↗Yifan Li↗Pan Liu↗Zhiwen Yang↗Jie Yang↗Jun Xia↗

arXiv:2602.22822v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is central to small molecule identification, but current deep learning systems for spectrum prediction still remain difficult to evaluate and deploy in practice. While novel architectures constantly claim state-of-the-art performance, inconsistent metadata conditioning and entangled preprocessing pipelines hinder fair architectural comparisons. Besides, existing evaluations are often restricted to curated datasets, failing to capture the heterogeneity and cross-domain shifts of real-world metabolomics. Furthermore, current benchmarks lack difficulty-aware diagnostics and leave blind to how models behave under specific compute or data constraints. To address this, we present FlexMS, a modular public-data benchmark framework that standardizes MS/MS prediction across public resources while keeping molecular encoders, metadata conditioning, predictor heads, and downstream retrieval under one protocol. FlexMS establishes a fair evaluation playground which significantly lowers the barrier for integrating new predictive tools. Rather than solely optimizing for average scores, FlexMS augments aggregate accuracy with difficulty-aware diagnostics, providing actionable guidance on model selection across different compute constraints, data scales, and downstream retrieval objectives. Ultimately, FlexMS provides the community with a reproducible standard to identify which algorithmic conclusions are stable and which operating points are most viable in practice.

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24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2303.09209

Learning optimal policies from event logs through reinforcement learning: a comparison of deep and MDP-based approaches

作者:

Stefano Branchi↗Andrei Buliga↗Chiara Di Francescomarino↗Chiara Ghidini↗Riccardo Graziosi↗Francesca Meneghello↗Massimiliano Ronzani↗

arXiv:2303.09209v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prescriptive Process Monitoring is an emerging area within Process Mining that focuses on recommending actions to optimize business outcomes. Most existing works prescribe pre-defined interventions, i.e., sets of actions applied to ongoing process executions to achieve a specific objective or Key Performance Indicator (KPI). In contrast, only a few approaches have explored learning and evaluating optimal behavioral policies, i.e., general strategies that determine the best sequence of actions to maximize a desired KPI. In this paper, we address the problem of learning optimal behavioral policies by proposing an AI-based approach that learns an optimal policy directly from historical process executions using Reinforcement Learning (RL) to recommend the best actions for optimizing a KPI. To this end, we employ two RL techniques. The first is a classical model-based approach that extends previous work by the authors through the construction of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) capturing process behavior. The second is a model-free technique based on offline Deep RL. Unlike state-of-the-art work, we aim to minimize the use of domain knowledge and learn optimal policies directly from historical event data. This allows us to learn when to apply interventions and discover effective ones directly from data. Moreover, we target complex scenarios involving external actors, where the process owner controls only part of the activities. We adopt a data-driven Business Process Simulation (BPS) environment to evaluate the learned policies. Results show that both methods improve the targeted KPI with similar effectiveness, while the model-based approach outperforms offline Deep RL in computational efficiency.

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25.

PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01 DOI: HASH:5b61d8653afa2eb6729367f9fe427b23

Supervised deep learning with gene functional annotation for cell classification

作者:

Zhexiao Lin↗

by Zhexiao Lin, Yuanyuan Gao, Wei Sun Gene-by-gene differential expression analysis is a widely used supervised approach for interpreting single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. However, modern scRNA-seq datasets often contain large numbers of cells, leading to the identification of many differentially expressed genes with extremely small p-values but negligible effect sizes, thus making biological interpretation difficult. To overcome this challenge, we developed Supervised Deep learning with gene functional ANnotation (SDAN), a method that integrates gene functional annotation information (e.g., protein-protein interaction) with gene-expression profiles through a graph neural network. SDAN identifies functionally coherent gene sets that optimally classify cells, and the resulting cell-level classification scores can be aggregated to make individual-level predictions. We evaluated SDAN alongside three representative existing methods in three real-data applications aimed at identifying gene sets associated with severe COVID-19, dementia, and cancer immunotherapy response. Across all applications, SDAN consistently outperformed the alternative approaches by achieving two objectives simultaneously: accurate outcome classification and clear assignment of genes to functionally related gene sets.

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