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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

LASA: A Weak Supervision Method for Open-Vocabulary Scene Sketch Semantic Segmentation

Open-vocabulary scene sketch semantic segmentation aims to assign dense semantic labels to sparse line drawings based on flexible category vocabularies specified at inference time, without relying on pixel-level annotations during training. Unlike natural images, sketches lack texture and color cues, making semantic understanding heavily dependent on stroke layout and spatial configuration, a challenge that renders single-layer vision-language features inherently unstable. Our key observation is that attention maps from different Vision Transformer layers encode complementary spatial cues: shallow layers capture global structural layouts, while deeper layers focus on local stroke intersections and object parts. This suggests that cross-layer aggregation provides a more robust structural prior than any individual layer alone. Leveraging this insight, we propose a structure-aware framework built upon Layer-wise Accumulated Structural Attention (LASA), which aggregates multi-layer attention to guide hierarchical semantic alignment under weak supervision and refine predictions during inference. Experiments on FS-COCO, SFSD, and FrISS show that LASA improves mIoU by $+3.43$, $+8.01$, and $+15.74$ over the prior weakly supervised baselines, demonstrating consistent gains in both segmentation accuracy and spatial coherence. Our source code will be made publicly available.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

AI Coding Agents in Social Science: Methodologically Diverse, Empirically Consistent, Interpretively Vulnerable

The deployment of LLM-based agents in scientific analysis raises opposing concerns: that agents may reduce methodological diversity, or that they may amplify the analytic flexibility through which researchers reach motivated conclusions. We argue these worries target two empirically separable layers: a design layer of methodological choices, and a verdict layer in which a decision rule maps estimates to a substantive claim. We test both by running 20 independent executions of Claude Code and Codex on a prominent immigration and social-policy against a many-analysts human baseline. At the design layer, Codex matches human methodological diversity and Claude Code produces nearly three times as many specifications; both agents' effect estimates remain broadly aligned with the human consensus, and no agent model exactly matches any human model. A prompt-induced anti-immigration researcher prior reorganizes each agent's methodological decisions but, unlike for biased human analysts in the same data, does not shift aggregate estimates or final verdicts; nor do agents reroute along the methodological axes humans use to bias their estimates. At the verdict layer, an explicit confirmatory prompt flips Claude Code's verdicts from 10% to 90% support while leaving its coefficient distribution essentially unchanged, operating through rule omission rather than rule softening. AI agents can rival or exceed human methodological diversity at the design layer while remaining vulnerable at the verdict layer. In our setting, the locus of AI bias is not estimation but interpretation.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Position: Modular Memory is the Key to Continual Learning Agents

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.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Speaker Verification with Speech-Aware LLMs: Evaluation and Augmentation

arXiv:2603.10827v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech-aware large language models (LLMs) can accept speech inputs, yet their training objectives largely emphasize linguistic content or specific fields such as emotions or the speaker's gender, leaving it unclear whether they encode speaker identity. First, we propose a model-agnostic scoring protocol that produces continuous verification scores for both API-only and open-weight models, using confidence scores or log-likelihood ratios from the Yes/No token probabilities. Using this protocol, we benchmark recent speech-aware LLMs and observe weak speaker discrimination (EERs above 20% on VoxCeleb1). Second, we introduce a lightweight augmentation that equips an LLM with ASV capability by injecting frozen ECAPA-TDNN speaker embeddings through a learned projection and training only LoRA adapters. On TinyLLaMA-1.1B, the resulting ECAPA-LLM achieves 1.03% EER on VoxCeleb1-E, approaching a dedicated speaker verification system while preserving a natural-language interface.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Learning User Simulators with Turing Rewards

Learning to simulate human users in interactive settings could advance the training of agent assistants, evaluation of personalization systems, research in the social sciences, and more. Existing approaches generally do so by training a large language model (LLM) to match a single ground truth response, either by maximizing the log probability or by using a similarity reward. We instead propose {Turing-RL}: a Turing-Test-based reinforcement learning approach for training user simulator models. {Turing-RL} uses a discriminative Turing reward with an LLM judge to score how indistinguishable a generated response is from the real user's given the user's history, and the user simulator LLM learns to produce responses indistinguishable from what the user could have said with such rewards. Across two different domains–conversational chat and Reddit forum discussion–we find that {Turing-RL} consistently outperforms baseline methods on both LLM and human evaluation metrics. Our study suggests that optimizing for indistinguishability, rather than response matching, is effective for learning user simulators.

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

Reward as An Agent for Embodied World Models

arXiv:2606.19990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While RL has become a promising tool for refining world models, existing methods largely rely on conservative rollouts near the training distribution, limiting exploration, behavioral diversity, and richer dynamic discovery. In this work, we challenge this conservative paradigm. We argue that the core limitation is not exploration itself, but the lack of reliable verification strategies to support broader exploration. Without reliable verification, expanded exploration becomes highly susceptible to reward hacking, where policies exploit imperfect rewards without achieving genuine improvement. To evaluate this motivation, we instantiate our method in embodied world models, where physical plausibility, and task completion provide a rigorous testbed for scalable RL under complex dynamics. On the verification side, we introduce Reward as an Agent, an agentic reward framework that actively evaluates generated behaviors to provide robust reward signals and mitigate reward hacking under distribution shifts. On the exploration side, we introduce Dynamic-Aware Rollout Diversification through DynDiff-GRPO, which explicitly expands action-space exploration to diversify trajectories, broaden state-action coverage, and encourage richer embodied behaviors beyond conservative rollout regimes. By unifying Reward as an Agent with DynDiff-GRPO, we enable RL on a more reliable reward foundation with substantially diversified sampling, effectively mitigating reward hacking while yielding significant accuracy gains across multiple open-source world models, thereby demonstrating that broader exploration can scale successfully when grounded in robust verification.

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

Trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems: Mitigating Semantic Drift with the Argent Signaling Protocol

When multi-agent LLM systems produce bad answers, not all failures are equal: some answers are grounded in the right material but incomplete, while others are simply ungrounded and should be stopped. Current retry strategies treat both cases identically (try again and hope for the best), leaving human supervisors unable to tell whether a retry was warranted or whether the system should have halted instead. We introduce the Argent Signaling Protocol (ASP), a compact machine-readable header that accompanies every AI-generated response with structured quality signals: certainty (@C), grounding (@G), stochasticity (@S), and an assumption index that classifies the evidentiary basis of each claim. These signals enable a controller to distinguish repairable failures from containment failures and route each case differently. We evaluate ASP in two modes. In standalone mode, a 27-question document-grounded QA benchmark over the Array BioPharma/Ono license agreement compares baseline prompts against ASP-instrumented controller actions across three local GGUF models. On Qwen~(0.8B), ASP improves pass rate from 11.1% to 33.3% and mean term coverage from 36.7% to 65.4%; on Dobby~(8B), ASP produces 4 fail-to-pass recoveries, raising pass rate from 33.3% to 44.4%; on SmolLM3~(3B), ASP alternates between repair and containment per question. Aggregate improvement is meaningful (12/81 to 21/81 passes). In multi-agent mode, an ASP sidecar sits between a retrieval agent and a downstream decision agent; the sidecar blocks 100% of ungrounded upstream outputs from reaching the downstream agent (24/27 blocked, 0 ungrounded propagations).

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Development of an automated, imaging-based preoperative screening model for early identification of malnutrition in an abdominal surgery cohort

Background: Clinical malnutrition affects one in five abdominal surgery patients and increases postoperative complications and mortality. Current screening occurs after admission, closing the window for preoperative nutritional intervention. No objective, scalable preoperative screening tool exists. Objective: To determine whether automated volumetric CT-based body composition analysis improves preoperative identification of surgical patients at risk for clinical malnutrition compared to clinical variables or single slice imaging alone. Methods: Retrospective cohort study of adults undergoing elective abdominal surgery at a quaternary academic medical center (2018 to 2021) with a preoperative CT scan within 90 days and complete nutrition assessment. Clinical malnutrition was diagnosed by a registered dietitian using ASPEN/AND criteria. Three sex stratified Elastic Net models were compared: (1) base clinical variables; (2) base plus L3 single slice skeletal muscle index and attenuation; and (3) base plus comprehensive 3D volumetric quantification of five muscle groups and two fat depots. Discrimination (AUROC), calibration (Brier score), and clinical utility (decision curve analysis) were assessed via 10-fold cross-validation. Results: Among 1,143 patients (52.4% female; mean age 60.5 years), 231 (20.2%) were diagnosed with malnutrition. Malnourished patients had significantly higher complication rates (36.4% vs. 15.4%, p

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

MinhwaNet: Faithful but Insufficient Object Grounding in Korean Folk Painting

Korean folk painting (minhwa) is built from a small vocabulary of auspicious symbols, a tiger for protection, a pair of birds for marital harmony, a peony for wealth, that recur across many of its painted genres. This suggests an obvious computational approach, identify which symbols appear in a painting and read the genre from the inventory. Working with a public corpus that pairs whole paintings, eight-field bilingual curatorial captions, and a separate set of expert object crops, we find that this approach does not work. A model given only a list of which symbols a painting contains predicts the genre far worse than a model that fuses the image with the curatorial text, and forcing the genre representation to be object-grounded actively hurts accuracy. The visual evidence on which the genre prediction rests is nonetheless localized and inspectable. A leakage-safe object evidence map projected from a part-level detector is spatially faithful to where curators isolated symbolic objects and to a patch-based surrogate's own gradient saliency. We name this configuration a faithful-but-insufficient dissociation. The part-level explanation is honest about what the part-level model sees, yet the genre target turns on how symbols are arranged rather than on which ones appear. The same lens separates a content label that survives transfer to held-out source institutions, genre, from a style label that does not, era, a prediction we confirm on two further labels in the corpus. We release the multimodal system, a worked-example reading of one painting's evidence map against its catalogue, and a set of evaluation cautions that recur in long-tailed heritage collections.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

RSTR: Reducing SpatioTemporal Redundancy in Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved remarkable success in image generation, yet their deployment is hindered by high computational costs. We identify two sources of redundancy. First, temporal redundancy: Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) applies costly dual forward passes at every timestep, yet guidance matters only at specific steps, and variable scales at critical steps can compensate for skipping others. Second, spatial redundancy: under variable guidance, different transformer blocks exhibit heterogeneous sensitivity, yet uniform calibration across all blocks wastes computation while failing to address their varying requirements. We present RSTR, the first framework to jointly reduce spatiotemporal redundancy in diffusion transformers. Stage-1 addresses temporal redundancy through evolutionary search, discovering sparse guidance schedules with variable scales. Stage-2 addresses spatial redundancy through adaptive rank allocation, assigning calibration capacities to transformer regions based on their sensitivity. Experiments on DiT-XL/2, PixArt-$\alpha$, FLUX, and state-of-the-art Qwen-Image demonstrate 50%-70% compute savings while maintaining or improving quality. On DiT-XL/2, RSTR achieves 57% savings with 15% FID improvement; on Qwen-Image, 3.43$\times$ speedup with preserved quality.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Capturing Intransitive Dominance in Tennis Forecasting: A Graph Neural Network Approach

arXiv:2510.20454v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Intransitive player dominance, where player A beats B, B beats C, but C beats A, is common in competitive tennis. Yet, there are few known attempts to incorporate it within forecasting methods. We address this problem with a graph neural network approach that explicitly models these intransitive relationships through temporal directed graphs, with players as nodes and their historical match outcomes as directed edges. Our model (65.7% accuracy, 0.214 Brier score) forecasts competitively with established rating systems such as Weighted Elo. Although it does not improve on the baseline in unconditional accuracy, a forecast-encompassing test shows that it carries complementary information. A combined forecast significantly outperforms Weighted Elo, and there is some indication that the gain grows more strongly on the intransitive matchups our model targets. A graph-based representation of player interactions thus captures a forecasting signal that transitive rating systems discard, even between players who share no common opponents.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Logarithmic Large Deviations for Heavy-Tailed Sums

arXiv:2606.16487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We establish logarithmic large-deviation bounds for sums of independent nonnegative random variables with regularly varying tails. The normalization is chosen at the extreme-value scale and the speed is $\log n$. In contrast with Cramér's theorem, the resulting rate function is determined only by the tail index. The proof transfers a maximum large-deviation principle to sums in the one-big-jump region.

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

Provably Efficient Regularized Online RLHF with Generalized Bilinear Preferences

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

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

"Do Not Mention This to the User": Detecting and Understanding Malicious Agent Skills in the Wild

LLM-based coding agents increasingly rely on third-party extensions called skills, which bundle natural language instructions and helper scripts that execute with full user privileges. Community registries have emerged to distribute these skills, but the security implications remain unstudied due to the absence of labeled threat data. This paper presents a systematic security analysis of 98,380 skills collected from two major registries. Through a combination of static pattern matching and dynamic behavioral verification, we identify 157 skills exhibiting confirmed malicious behavior, encompassing 632 distinct vulnerabilities across 13 attack techniques. Our analysis reveals that these threats are deliberate rather than accidental: each malicious skill contains an average of 4.03 vulnerabilities spanning multiple attack phases. We identify two dominant attack strategies with statistically significant negative correlation – credential theft via remote code execution, and agent manipulation through adversarial instructions embedded in documentation. Over half of all confirmed cases originate from a single threat actor employing templated brand impersonation at scale. We further observe that attack sophistication correlates with concealment investment, with advanced skills universally employing undocumented capabilities while also exploiting platform-native trust mechanisms. Following responsible disclosure, registry maintainers removed all 157 (100%) of the reported skills. Our dataset and detection pipeline are publicly available to facilitate future research on securing LLM agent ecosystems.

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

Not What, But How: A Framework for Auditing LLM Responses across Positioning, Generalization, Anthropomorphism, and Maxims

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly used to answer subjective, information-seeking questions, where users are sensitive to how responses are communicated, not just whether the answers are correct. Existing LLM evaluations for subjective cultural queries largely focus on factual correctness, ignoring how the response is framed. To this end, we introduce FRANZ, an automated FRAmework for respoNse characteriZation to conduct communicative audit of LLM responses along four dimensions: cultural positioning, use of generalizing language, anthropomorphic cues, and adherence to conversational maxims. To enable this evaluation, we contribute SQUARE - a corpus of 376k subjective questions sourced from 57 subreddits, and mapped to 7 countries and 19 question categories. We demonstrate FRANZ's applicability by scoring responses from three open-weight LLMs. We observe that LLMs show statistically significant differences in the frequency with which they employ each response characteristic. Unlike single-dimensional audits, FRANZ reveals that insider positioning and anthropomorphism are positively coupled, with the degree of coupling varying by country, providing a diagnostic lens for identifying framing divergences.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

ActiTect: A Generalizable Machine Learning Pipeline for REM Sleep Behavior Disorder Screening through Standardized Actigraphy

arXiv:2511.05221v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Isolated rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) is a major prodromal marker of $\alpha$-synucleinopathies, often preceding the clinical onset of Parkinson's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, or multiple system atrophy. While wrist-worn actimeters hold significant potential for detecting RBD in large-scale screening efforts by capturing abnormal nocturnal movements, they become inoperable without a reliable and efficient analysis pipeline. This study presents ActiTect, a fully automated, open-source machine learning tool to identify RBD from actigraphy recordings. To ensure generalizability across heterogeneous acquisition settings, our pipeline includes robust preprocessing and automated sleep-wake detection to harmonize multi-device data and extract physiologically interpretable motion features characterizing activity patterns. Model development was conducted on a cohort of 78 individuals, yielding strong discrimination under nested cross-validation (AUROC = 0.95). Generalization was confirmed on a blinded local test set (n = 31, AUROC = 0.86) and on two independent external cohorts (n = 113, AUROC = 0.84; n = 57, AUROC = 0.94). To assess real-world robustness, leave-one-dataset-out cross-validation across the internal and external cohorts demonstrated consistent performance (AUROC range = 0.84-0.89). A complementary stability analysis showed that key predictive features remained reproducible across datasets, supporting the final pooled multi-center model as a robust pre-trained resource for broader deployment. By being open-source and easy to use, our tool promotes widespread adoption and facilitates independent validation and collaborative improvements, thereby advancing the field toward a unified and generalizable RBD detection model using wearable devices.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

MIRAGE: Auditing Anti-Muslim Bias in Frontier LLMs Across Reasoning, Agentic, and Time-Coupled Conditions

arXiv:2606.16562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Five years after the discovery of persistent anti-Muslim bias in large language models, most evaluations remain confined to single-turn prompt completion, a setting that no longer reflects how frontier LLMs are deployed. We introduce MIRAGE (Muslim-Identity Reasoning and Agentic Generation Evaluation), a benchmark of 1{,}200 prompts spanning three deployment-realistic conditions: direct completion, chain-of-thought reasoning, and simulated agentic decision-making across content moderation, lending triage, refugee claim summarization, and hiring screens. Across six frontier models, we find that (i) chain-of-thought reasoning amplifies rather than suppresses Muslim-violence associations by 12–34\% relative to direct completion, (ii) agentic decisions exhibit a 9–22 percentage-point asymmetry between Muslim and matched non-Muslim cases on identical evidence, and (iii) bias is sharply time-coupled to retrieved news context, increasing 18–27\% under recent-conflict retrieval. Existing prompt-based mitigations transfer poorly across our three conditions, suppressing direct-completion bias while leaving agentic asymmetry largely intact. We release MIRAGE and an open evaluation harness to support targeted mitigation research.

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

ParseFixer: An Agentic Framework for Document Parsing via Selective Multimodal Correction

In this report, we present our third-place solution for the DataMFM Challenge Track 1: Document Parsing. This track requires models to recover structured Markdown documents from document page images while preserving textual content and document structure. To address the complementary requirements of accurate content recovery and faithful structure reconstruction, we propose ParseFixer, an agentic framework for backbone parsing and selective correction. ParseFixer consists of two key modules: Full-Page Backbone Parsing (FBP) and Agentic Selective Correction (ASC). FBP produces stable initial Markdown outputs with MinerU2.5 Pro, while ASC detects high-value parsing failures and repairs them through a verify-and-rollback correction process. By placing selective multimodal correction after open-source backbone parsing, ParseFixer improves the recovery of key document elements without rewriting reliable backbone predictions. On the test set, our final system achieves an overall score of 61.78 and ranks third in Track 1, demonstrating its effectiveness for accurate document parsing. Our code will be released at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/CVPRW26-ParseFixer.

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

GenTrack2: An Improved Hybrid Approach for Multi-Object Tracking

This paper proposes a visual multi-object tracking method that jointly employs stochastic and deterministic mechanisms to ensure identifier consistency for unknown and time-varying target numbers under nonlinear dynamics. A stochastic particle filter addresses nonlinear dynamics and non-Gaussian noise, with support from particle swarm optimization (PSO) to guide particles toward state distribution modes and mitigate divergence through proposed fitness measures incorporating motion consistency, appearance similarity, and social-interaction cues with neighboring targets. Deterministic association further enforces identifier consistency via a proposed cost matrix incorporating spatial consistency between particles and current detections, detection confidences, and track penalties. Subsequently, a novel scheme is proposed for the smooth updating of target states while preserving their identities, particularly for weak tracks during interactions with other targets and prolonged occlusions. Moreover, velocity regression over past states provides trend-seed velocities, enhancing particle sampling and state updates. The proposed tracker is designed to operate flexibly for both pre-recorded videos and camera live streams, where future frames are unavailable. Experimental results confirm superior performance compared to state-of-the-art trackers. The source-code reference implementations of both the proposed method and compared-trackers are provided on GitHub: https://github.com/SDU-VelKoTek/GenTrack2

20.
Science (Express) 2026-06-18

Indium-free perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells with tin oxide recombination layer and electrodes | Science

作者: 未知作者

Indium-based transparent conductive oxides are widely used as electrodes and recombination layers in perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells, yet their scalability is constrained by indium scarcity and sputtering-induced damage. Here we report high efficiency and stable indium-free perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells enabled by reactive plasma deposited tin oxide (RPD-SnO x ). For RPD-SnO x as the recombination layer, a certified efficiency of 33.6% is achieved. Fully indium-free tandems that used RPD-SnO x as both recombination layer and electrodes delivering a champion PCE of 33.2% (1 cm 2 ) and a mini-module with a certified efficiency of 31.0% (207.9 cm 2 ). Dense and uniform self-assembled monolayer anchoring enabled by RPD-SnO x suppressed non-radiative recombination and reduced halide migration. Indium-free mini-modules exhibited high thermal, damp-heat, and outdoor operational stability and retained 65% of their maximum initial efficiency after 105 days of outdoor operation.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Kubo-Martin-Schwinger conditions for non-Hermitian systems

arXiv:2606.13251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the extension of the Kubo–Martin–Schwinger (KMS) thermal equilibrium condition to non-Hermitian Hamiltonians with real spectra and biorthogonal eigensystems, providing a systematic analysis through three complementary routes. Our central result is a thermodynamic characterisation of quasi-Hermiticity: for $H \in M_d(\mathbb{C})$ diagonalisable with real spectrum, the biorthogonal Gibbs functional $\omega_{\rm{bi}}(A) = Z_{\rm{bi}}^{-1} \sum_n e^{-\beta E_n}\langle\phi_n|A|\psi_n\rangle$ satisfies $\omega_{\rm{bi}}(A^\dag A) \geq 0$ for all $A$ if and only if $H$ is quasi-Hermitian. The proof constructs the metric $\eta$ directly from the eigenprojectors of $\omega_{\rm{bi}}$ via the Riesz representation theorem, with no prior choice of $\eta$, providing a metric-free certificate of quasi-Hermiticity outside the Mostafazadeh–Scholtz framework. Under the full quasi-Hermitian hypothesis, we prove that the $\eta$-Gibbs state $\omega_\eta(A) = Z_\eta^{-1}\, \rm{Tr}[\eta e^{-\beta H}A]$ satisfies all three analytic KMS conditions, using the Hadamard three-line theorem and Bari's theorem on Riesz bases. The result is non-trivial: the transported state $\hat\omega(X) = \rm{Tr}[e^{-\beta h}X\eta]/Z_\eta$ differs from the Gibbs state of the isospectral Hermitian partner $h = \eta^{1/2}H\eta^{-1/2}$ whenever $[\eta,h]\neq 0$, so the KMS property cannot be deduced from the Hermitian theory by similarity. The gap between this result and the full Haag–Hugenholtz–Winnink $C^*$-algebraic framework is identified. Failure modes at exceptional points and for complex spectra are analysed, and the relation to the Fagnola–Umanità quantum detailed balance condition for open systems is discussed.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

The Tone of Awareness: Topic, Sentiment, and Toxicity Maps During Mental Health Month on TikTok

Despite raising concerns about the mental health effects associated with the usage of TikTok, little is known about how related content is framed by creators and received by audiences. We collect the content of 28,341 TikTok videos and 80,130 comments from Mental Health Awareness Month (May) in 2023 and 2024 via the TikTok Research API, and study how the tone of awareness varies across topics and years. We characterize "tone" as the emotional and interpersonal framing of mental health discourse, operationalized through sentiment and toxicity measures. We extract topics from video text using BERTopic and log-odds keywords, then quantify topic-conditioned sentiment (XLM-T) and toxicity (Detoxify) separately for video transcriptions and comments. Sentiment captures the affective valence of content, while toxicity reflects the presence of harmful or abusive language. We find a stable set of recurring themes across years, spanning clinical conditions, emotional disclosure, self-care, and campaign-oriented content, with engagement highly skewed toward a small subset of topics. All sentiment and toxicity analyses are computed separately for video content and comments, allowing us to distinguish between content production and audience reception. Sentiment in videos is often negative for emotionally charged topics, while comments tend to shift toward more mixed or positive polarity, especially for suicide prevention. Toxicity is low in median overall, but exhibits longer-tailed outliers in comments than in videos that are more pronounced in comments and concentrated in specific topics (e.g., "Duet", "Suicide Prevention", and "Psychisch"). Overall, our results provide a topic-level decomposition of mental health discourse on TikTok during awareness-month campaigns.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

How to Detect and Measure the AI Dangers to Democracy

arXiv:2606.16054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Research on artificial intelligence and democracy has grown quickly over the last decade. A shared conclusion in this literature is that AI does not create new democratic problems so much as it makes old ones worse. We now see this across information ecosystems, in elections, and in public administration. However, despite growing evidence, we lack a clear way to prioritize risks in this area, compare them across domains, and identify where democratic control is most likely to break down. So, our problem is: How can we systematize the problems that AI systems pose to democratic processes? This paper argues that principal agent theory may fit the task. In many phases of democratic systems, principals delegate key functions to AI systems and their providers without really being able to monitor how these systems operate or the outputs they produce. Treating AI as a delegation problem helps identify accountability gaps and other governance failures. Most importantly, as we shall illustrate, it provides metrics for empirical assessments of AI impact on democracy. As a second analytical element, we draw on the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and its seven characteristics of trustworthy AI, which supply substantive criteria for evaluating delegated tasks. Operationalized across the three domains through measurable indicators and domain specific trustworthiness criteria, we propose an analytical framework that centers on institutional assessability as the central condition for democratic control over AI. However, we stress that how severe a harm is, and how much risk is acceptable, are evaluative judgments that current methodologies neither acknowledge nor operationalize. This becomes acute when such evaluative judgments are (silently) delegated to private vendors. We identify this as a strong limitation left for future work.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

BioAutoML-NAS: An End-to-End AutoML Framework for Multimodal Insect Classification via Neural Architecture Search on Large-Scale Biodiversity Data

Insect classification is important for agricultural management and ecological research, as it directly affects crop health and production. However, this task remains challenging due to the complex characteristics of insects, class imbalance, and large-scale datasets. To address these issues, we propose BioAutoML-NAS, the first BioAutoML model using multimodal data, including images, and metadata, which applies neural architecture search (NAS) for images to automatically learn the best operations for each connection within each cell. Multiple cells are stacked to form the full network, each extracting detailed image feature representations. A multimodal fusion module combines image embeddings with metadata, allowing the model to use both visual and categorical biological information to classify insects. An alternating bi-level optimization training strategy jointly updates network weights and architecture parameters, while zero operations remove less important connections, producing sparse, efficient, and high-performing architectures. Extensive evaluation on the BIOSCAN-5M dataset demonstrates that BioAutoML-NAS achieves 96.81% accuracy, 97.46% precision, 96.81% recall, and a 97.05% F1 score, outperforming state-of-the-art transfer learning, transformer, AutoML, and NAS methods by approximately 16%, 10%, and 8% respectively. Further validation on the Insects-1M dataset obtains 93.25% accuracy, 93.71% precision, 92.74% recall, and a 93.22% F1 score. These results demonstrate that BioAutoML-NAS provides accurate, confident insect classification that supports modern sustainable farming.

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

Toward General Digraph Contrastive Learning: A Dual Spatial Perspective

arXiv:2510.16311v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has emerged as a powerful tool for extracting consistent representations from graphs, independent of labeled information. However, existing methods predominantly focus on undirected graphs, disregarding the pivotal directional information that is fundamental and indispensable in real-world networks (e.g., social networks and recommendations).In this paper, we introduce S2-DiGCL, a novel framework that emphasizes spatial insights from complex and real domain perspectives for directed graph (digraph) contrastive learning. From the complex-domain perspective, S2-DiGCL introduces personalized perturbations into the magnetic Laplacian to adaptively modulate edge phases and directional semantics. From the real-domain perspective, it employs a path-based subgraph augmentation strategy to capture fine-grained local asymmetries and topological dependencies. By jointly leveraging these two complementary spatial views, S2-DiGCL constructs high-quality positive and negative samples, leading to more general and robust digraph contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on 7 real-world digraph datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach, achieving SOTA performance with 4.41% improvement in node classification and 4.34% in link prediction under both supervised and unsupervised settings.