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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Mach's principle in atomic transitions

arXiv:2606.11608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the atomic transition probabilities in atom-mirror set-ups that are in circular motion. In one scenario, the atom is in circular motion inside a static cylindrical mirror. In the other scenario, the cylindrical mirror rotates around its central axis while the atom remains static. We report structural similarity in the atomic transition probabilities between these two cases – these probabilities are equivalent upon interchanging the field frequencies between the two scenarios. We interpret such an observation as a semi-classical phenomenon analogous to the classical Mach's principle.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MMDiff: Extending Diffusion Transformers for Multi-Modal Generation

Diffusion transformers have demonstrated remarkable generative capabilities, yet the rich perceptual representations computed across their denoising trajectory are discarded once the content is rendered. We present MMDiff, a framework that transforms a frozen diffusion transformer into a multi-modal generative system that jointly produces images alongside any combination of dense perceptual modalities using lightweight decoder heads. Our central finding is that perceptual information is temporally distributed along the denoising trajectory, and that multi-timestep feature fusion with spatially varying aggregation weights is essential, improving semantic segmentation results by up to 28.7% mIoU over single-timestep extraction. We further adopt concept-driven attention extraction for interpretable spatial guidance, and show that frozen diffusion features are competitive with and complementary to state-of-the-art encoders such as DINOv3. By training only lightweight decoder heads on a frozen backbone, we achieve strong performance in semantic segmentation, salient object detection, and depth estimation, and demonstrate that this framework enables effective synthetic data generation at scale.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Scalable Graph Condensation with Evolving Capabilities

arXiv:2502.17614v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid growth of graph data creates significant scalability challenges as most graph algorithms scale quadratically with size. To mitigate these issues, Graph Condensation (GC) methods have been proposed to learn a small graph from a larger one, accelerating downstream tasks. However, existing approaches critically assume a static training set, which conflicts with the inherently dynamic and evolving nature of real-world graph data. This work introduces a novel framework for continual graph condensation, enabling efficient updates to the distilled graph that handle data streams without requiring costly retraining. This limitation leads to inefficiencies when condensing growing training sets. In this paper, we introduce GECC (\underline{G}raph \underline{E}volving \underline{C}lustering \underline{C}ondensation), a scalable graph condensation method designed to handle large-scale and evolving graph data. GECC employs a traceable and efficient approach by performing class-wise clustering on aggregated features. Furthermore, it can inherit previous condensation results as clustering centroids when the condensed graph expands, thereby attaining an evolving capability. This methodology is supported by robust theoretical foundations and demonstrates superior empirical performance. Comprehensive experiments including real world scenario show that GECC achieves better performance than most state-of-the-art graph condensation methods while delivering an around 1000$\times$ speedup on large datasets.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Denoising Implicit Feedback for Cold-start Recommendation

arXiv:2606.19658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Implicit feedback is widely used in recommender systems due to its accessibility and generality, yet it usually presents noisy samples (e.g., clickbait, position bias). Meanwhile, recommenders inevitably face the item cold-start problem due to the continuous influx of new items. We identify that cold items are more prone to noisy samples due to the aforementioned factors, and researchers often overlook the significance of denoising implicit feedback for cold items. Previous denoising studies usually identify noisy samples based on heuristic patterns, such as higher loss values, and mitigate noise through sample selection or re-weighting. However, these methods have limited adaptability and are ineffective in cold-start scenarios. To achieve denoising implicit feedback for cold-start recommendation, we propose a model-agnostic denoising method called DIF. First, user preferences for content remain stable, which allows us to infer pseudo-labels indicating whether a user is interested in a cold item through content-similar warm items. Furthermore, to improve pseudo-label accuracy, we model the confidence of pseudo-labels based on the content similarity between the cold item and warm items, and then aggregate multiple pseudo-labels for each sample. Finally, we explicitly estimate the uncertainty of the noisy sample label by considering its relative entropy and the cold-start status of the item, which adaptively guides the role of pseudo-labels to correct the noisy labels at the sample level. DIF's superiority is supported by both theoretical justification and extensive experiments on real-world datasets. The method has been deployed on a billion-user scale short video application Kuaishou and has significantly improved various commercial metrics within cold-start scenarios.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Concept Flow Models: Anchoring Concept-Based Reasoning with Hierarchical Bottlenecks

arXiv:2606.19489v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance interpretability by projecting learned features into a human-understandable concept space. Recent approaches leverage vision-language models to generate concept embeddings, reducing the need for manual concept annotations. However, these models suffer from a critical limitation: as the number of concepts approaches the embedding dimension, information leakage increases, enabling the model to exploit spurious or semantically irrelevant correlations and undermining interpretability. In this work, we propose Concept Flow Models (CFMs), which replace the flat bottleneck with a hierarchical, concept-driven decision tree. Each internal node in the hierarchy focuses on a localized subset of discriminative concepts, progressively narrowing the prediction scope. Our framework constructs decision hierarchies from visual embeddings, distributes semantic concepts at each hierarchy level, and trains differentiable concept weights through probabilistic tree traversal. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that CFMs match the predictive performance of flat CBMs, while substantially mitigating information leakage by reducing effective concept usage. Furthermore, CFMs yield stepwise decision flows that enable transparent and auditable model reasoning with hierarchical class structures.

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

Quantum-Classical Hierarchical Equations of Motion

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a quantum-classical hierarchical equations of motion (QC-HEOM) approach for simulating non-Markovian open quantum systems. The method combines the ensemble-averaged classical path reference of the quantum-classical path integral formalism with a hierarchy of auxiliary quantum influence functionals. By incorporating thermal fluctuations through an ensemble average over reference trajectories, the hierarchy is required to represent only the residual quantum memory associated with the imaginary part of the bath response function. Consequently, unlike conventional hierarchical equations of motion, QC-HEOM does not require Matsubara or Padé expansions of the thermal kernel and exhibits only weak temperature dependence of the hierarchy size. Furthermore, because thermal fluctuations are supplied through reference classical trajectories, the framework naturally extends beyond harmonic baths and enables the incorporation of anharmonic and molecular environments through externally generated trajectories. We derive the formalism and demonstrate its exactness for a harmonic bath. Applications to an asymmetric spin-boson model and the seven-site Fenna–Matthews–Olson complex illustrate the accuracy of QC-HEOM. It reproduces benchmark quasi-adiabatic path integral and hierarchical equations of motion results while requiring substantially fewer auxiliary objects, particularly at low temperatures. These results establish QC-HEOM as an efficient framework for treating residual quantum memory in quantum-classical descriptions of open-system dynamics. The separation of thermal fluctuations from residual quantum memory through the use of Wigner trajectories provides an approximate route toward hierarchical treatments of complex anharmonic environments that are inaccessible to conventional HEOM approaches.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

CANN-EUCLID: unsupervised constitutive artificial neural network model discovery from full-field data

arXiv:2606.14565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Constitutive artificial neural networks (CANNs) provide interpretable material model discovery, but have so far been used in stress-supervised settings based on apparent stress-strain data from homogeneous tests. Because each test samples only a narrow loading path and provides homogenized rather than local stress information, robust discovery typically requires multiple loading modes to constrain the multidimensional response. This is challenging for soft biological tissues, where repeated testing, damage, and sample variability limit reliable information from a single specimen. Here, we combine CANNs with the stress-unsupervised full-field discovery framework EUCLID to identify sparse hyperelastic laws directly from displacement fields and reaction forces in one heterogeneity-inducing loading case. CANN-EUCLID minimizes equilibrium imbalance with sparsity-promoting regularization selecting compact active terms, without local stress measurements or a prescribed law. We evaluate the approach on isotropic and anisotropic benchmarks with prescribed ground-truth laws. When the ground truth is representable by the chosen CANN basis, our method recovers the correct terms with near-exact accuracy, including exponential terms with embedded parameters. When it is not contained in the basis, the method retains shared terms and approximates missing contributions using available basis functions. Generalization depends strongly on sampled deformation states: exponential strain-stiffening terms can be recovered accurately when sufficiently probed, but can produce large extrapolation errors when the stiffening regime lies outside the sampled domain. Forward FE validation simulations show that the discovered behavior accurately replicates the ground truth. These results establish stress-unsupervised CANN discovery as a promising framework for interpretable full-field constitutive model identification.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Geometry-Aware Dataset Condensation for Diffusion Model Training

Dataset condensation aims to construct compact datasets from real data via synthesis or selection. However, existing approaches are ill-suited for diffusion model training: synthetic data generation often yields low-fidelity samples unsuitable for authentic modeling, while real subset selection typically fails to preserve the distributional geometry required by diffusion likelihood objectives. To address this, we propose to reformulate real subset selection as a geometry-aware distribution alignment problem. By incorporating one-sided partial optimal transport, our method selectively aligns a compact subset with the full data distribution while allowing unmatched mass in low-density regions, ensuring the preserved geometric structure necessary for effective diffusion model training. To further ensure distributional fidelity, we complement geometric alignment with lightweight feature-statistics and semantic consistency regularization. An efficient two-stage discrete optimization strategy is proposed to achieve this alignment objective. Extensive experiments across diffusion variants, subset sizes, image resolutions, and training rounds show that our method achieves superior fidelity and distributional coverage in diffusion model training. Codes are available at https://github.com/2018cx/GADC.

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

An End-to-End Hybrid Framework for Rumour Detection in Low-Resources Algerian Dialect

The rapid growth of social media has intensified the spread of rumours. This issue is more challenging in the Algerian context due to the informal and code-switched nature of dialectal content, the scarcity of annotated resources, and the limited effectiveness of standard Arabic NLP tools on dialect text. This paper presents an end-to-end rumour detection hybrid framework for Algerian dialect social media content. We build a domain-specific annotated dataset by combining real social media posts, synthetic data, and the FASSILA corpus, with automatic labeling based on a similarity-based annotation process. A transliteration pipeline is also introduced to generate parallel datasets in Arabic script and Arabizi. We evaluate multiple approaches, including classical machine learning, deep learning, transformers, and hybrid models. Experimental results show that a hybrid approach combining transformer embeddings with a classical classifier achieves the best performance, reaching an F1-score of 0.84. We also find that domain-specific pre-training is more important than model size, with social media-trained models outperforming larger models trained on formal Arabic corpora. These results demonstrate the feasibility of rumour detection in low-resource Algerian dialect settings.

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

When Context Returns: Toward Robust Internalization in On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.11627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that on-policy distillation can internalize privileged context, such as system prompts or task hints, into a student model so that the context is no longer needed at inference time. Although this approach successfully improves the student's no-context performance, we identify an interesting and previously unstudied phenomenon: in many settings, reintroducing the original privileged context to the distilled student actually degrades its performance, even on instances it already solves correctly without context. We term this context-induced degradation and argue that robust internalization demands not only matching the teacher's context-conditioned behavior, but also remaining stable when the context is reintroduced, a property we call context removability. Motivated by this observation, we propose a lightweight consistency regularizer that first anchors the student's no-context output via stop-gradient, then penalizes the context-conditioned output for deviating from it via forward KL divergence. This simple addition requires only one extra forward pass per training step, yet it effectively mitigates context-induced degradation and, in many cases, even improves no-context performance. Across 12 configurations spanning diverse domains and model families, our method improves context-conditioned accuracy in the majority of settings, reduces context-induced harm in 11 out of 12 settings, and effectively eliminates response-length inflation. A mechanistic case study further confirms that context removability is achieved at the representation level, with hidden states remaining nearly identical regardless of whether the context is present.

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

Redesign Mixture-of-Experts Routers with Manifold Power Iteration

Router is the cornerstone component to the Mixture-of-Experts models. Serving as expert proxies, the rows of the router matrix compute their similarity to the MoE inputs to determine which subset of experts is activated. Ideally, each router row is designed to encode the expert matrix into this representative vector, such that its dot-product with token can better reflect token-expert affinity. However, there exists no design principles to enforce this condensation. In this paper, we propose to align each router row with the principal singular direction of the associated expert, as this direction provides the most expressive mathematical description of a matrix. Based on this principle, we propose a router redesign with Manifold Power Iteration (MPI). Specifically, it introduces a "Power-then-Retract" paradigm, where a power iteration step is performed on the router weights, followed by a retraction to impose a norm constraint to ensure both efficiency and stability. Theoretically, we show that MPI drives router rows to converge toward the principal singular directions of associated experts. Empirically, we pretrain MoE model across scales from 1B to 11B parameters to confirm that this alignment facilitates more effective MoE models.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Asymmetric and chiral dynamics of two-component anyons with synthetic gauge flux

arXiv:2512.19139v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this work, we investigate the non-equilibrium dynamics in a one-dimensional two-component anyon-Hubbard model, which can be mapped to an extended Bose-Hubbard ladder with density-dependent hopping phase and synthetic gauge flux. Through numerical simulations of two-particle dynamics and the symmetry analysis, we reveal the asymmetric transport with broken inversion symmetry and two dynamical symmetries in the expansion dynamics. The expansion of two-component anyons is dynamically symmetric under spatial inversion and component flip, when the sign of anyonic statistics phase or the signs of gauge flux and interaction are changed. In the non-interacting case, we show the dynamical suppression induced by both the statistics phase and gauge flux. In the interacting case, we demonstrate that both chiral and antichiral dynamics can be exhibited and tuned by the statistics phase and gauge flux. The dynamical phase regimes with respect to the chiral-antichiral dynamics are obtained. These findings highlight the rich dynamical phenomena arising from the interplay of anyonic exchange statistics, synthetic gauge fields, and interactions in multi-component anyons.

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

LIBERO-Occ: Evaluating and Improving Vision-Language-Action Models under Scene-Induced Occlusion via Viewpoint Imagination

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong performance on standard manipulation benchmarks, but most evaluations assume that task-relevant objects are fully visible. This assumption often fails in realistic settings, where occlusion makes manipulation partially observable. In this paper, we study scene-induced occlusion as a fundamental challenge for VLA models and introduce LIBERO-Occ, an occlusion-oriented extension of LIBERO. Experiments show that state-of-the-art VLAs suffer substantial performance degradation under occlusion. To address this issue, we propose Viewpoint Imagination (VIM), which generates a complementary view from an occluded primary observation and conditions action prediction on both observed and imagined evidence. VIM improves robustness across task suites, occlusion types, and severity levels without requiring additional cameras at deployment time, suggesting that viewpoint imagination is an promising mechanism for perception completion in partially observable manipulation. Our benchmark and corresponding code are available at: \href{https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ}{https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ}.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Inference-Time Decision Calibration for Temporal Classification

arXiv:2606.16034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Temporal classification errors are often treated as representation failures, but they can also arise from how available evidence is converted into decisions. This paper proposes a representation–calibration decomposition for temporal classification. We keep a trained native classifier frozen and separate two inference-time interventions: a conservative residual multi-scale branch that adds auxiliary logits to the native prediction, and a post-hoc branch-aware calibrator that recombines native and residual evidence at decision time. This design distinguishes missing temporal evidence from underused decision-level evidence without retraining the backbone. Across FI-2010, PTB-XL, UCI-HAR, MHEALTH, and HARTH, we find that gains are strongly regime-dependent. Residual multi-scale evidence is most useful in noisy or representation-limited settings, especially short-horizon FI-2010 and weaker recurrent backbones, while branch-aware calibration helps when native and auxiliary logits contain complementary evidence not fully exploited by the raw decision rule. Near-saturated settings show limited gains from either intervention. These results suggest that temporal classification should be understood not only as representation learning, but also as the problem of trusting, combining, and calibrating evidence from multiple views.

15.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-14

Antibody fine specificity correlates with protection from malaria for the RTS,S vaccine in young African children: A post hoc analysis of a phase IIb randomised controlled trial

Authors:

by Alessia Hysa, D. Herbert Opi, Joshua Waterhouse, Sandra Chishimba, Jessica L. Horton, Natalie Kingston, Hans J. Netter, David Wetzel, Michael Piontek, Gaoqian Feng, Jahit Sacarlal, Carlota Dobaño, Liriye Kurtovic, James G. Beeson Background The RTS,S/AS01 malaria vaccine was recently approved for implementation in children, but only provides modest and short-lived efficacy against malaria. RTS,S targets a portion of the Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) circumsporozoite protein (CSP), comprising the central NANP-repeat region and C-terminal domain. Mechanisms of immunity and correlates of protection for the RTS,S vaccine are not well defined, hindering progress towards generating highly effective CSP-based vaccines. Methods and findings We investigated epitope specificity and cross-reactivity of vaccine-induced antibodies to six peptides representing CSP epitopes in the N-terminal and central NANP-repeat region. We evaluated antibody reactivity in preclinical mouse vaccine studies, among CSP-specific monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), and in a large RTS,S phase IIb clinical trial in young children 1–4 years old (n = 735).The preclinical mouse vaccine studies and CSP-specific mAbs were used to initially evaluate IgG responses to the six peptides. Mice immunised with the central NANP-repeat region had IgG with cross-reactivity to an epitope in the N-terminal region. Additionally, we demonstrated that a single CSP-specific mAb could display cross-reactivity to several CSP epitopes. Through post hoc quantification and analysis of antibody responses in the RTS,S phase IIb clinical trial, we found that a subset of children generated IgG with specificity for a short NANP-repeat epitope (NANP2; amino acid sequence: NANPNANP) and cross-reactivity to an N-terminal epitope (J1; amino acid sequence: KQPADGNPDPNANPN). Notably, children with high IgG responses to NANP2 and J1 had a significantly reduced risk of clinical malaria, compared to children with low responses (IgG to NANP2 (aHR: 0.838 (95% CI [0.716, 0.981]; p = 0.028)) and J1 (aHR: 0.718 (95% CI [0.611, 0.844]; p 

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

LearnOpt: Recovering the Latent Cognitive Structure of Standardized Examinations via Knowledge Graphs and Constrained Optimization

arXiv:2606.15349v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standardized examinations are typically treated as uniform syllabus coverage problems. We argue they are better understood as adversarial systems with stable latent cognitive structures diverging systematically from official syllabi. We introduce LearnOpt, which recovers this structure from historical question papers and generates personalized, time-bounded study plans. Applied to nine years of NEET questions (2016-2024, n=1,496), LearnOpt builds an exam knowledge graph from LLM-tagged questions, extracts a five-category latent skill distribution, and formulates study planning as a knapsack-variant optimization over prerequisite-aware subgraphs with Bayesian Knowledge Tracing. Central finding: NEET's latent skill distribution is stable within a syllabus regime (consecutive-year KL divergence 0.004-0.032 for 2016-2021, non-significant under permutation testing) but shifts significantly with NCERT's 2023 syllabus rationalization: pooling 2016-2021 (n=1,072) vs 2023-2024 (n=392) gives KL=0.040 (p=0.0005), with Elimination/Negation questions rising from ~20-29% to ~31-35%. Latent structure, while not permanently stationary, is piecewise stable, with shifts detectable and attributable to curricular events. Within either regime, subject predicts skill profile more strongly than year. An optimization evaluation, using one real and two synthetic mastery profiles, shows the skill-weighted objective produces a modest but real reordering of recommended topics over a mastery-conditioned frequency baseline. Applying the pipeline to JEE Advanced reveals a profile dominated by Multi-concept Integration (80.9% vs. 33.3% for NEET), with a JEE-vs-NEET divergence (KL=0.505) exceeding NEET's largest cross-subject divergence: exam tier shapes latent cognitive structure more than subject, which shapes it more than time within a regime. Code, knowledge graph, and annotated dataset are released publicly.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A first-in-class pulsatile FXR agonist for bile-acid-related liver diseases

Authors:

Nuclear receptors are central regulators of metabolism1, yet therapeutic strategies that enforce continuous receptor activation frequently lead to reduced efficacy and unacceptable toxicity. Here we report a first-principles drug design strategy that aligns pharmacokinetics with physiological signalling cycles. We developed linafexor, a potent non-bile-acid agonist of the farnesoid X receptor (FXR)2; it is engineered for rapid systemic clearance, which enables pulsatile receptor activation that mirrors endogenous bile acid dynamics3–5. Linafexor has robust efficacy across multiple preclinical models of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis6, liver fibrosis7, primary biliary cholangitis and primary sclerosing cholangitis8,9. Transcriptomic analyses reveal that, unlike long-acting FXR agonists10,11, linafexor preserves cyclic FXR signalling, avoids receptor downregulation and prevents broad transcriptional dysregulation. Direct manipulation of delivery patterns demonstrates that sustained FXR activation—independent of compound identity—induces severe toxicity, establishing activation duration as a determinant of therapeutic index. In phase 1 clinical studies (ClinicalTrials.gov; NCT05082779), linafexor administered once daily produces transient FXR pathway engagement, marked by (1) induction of FGF1912–14, a key endocrine mediator of bile acid feedback regulation; and (2) suppression of C415, an intermediate reflecting hepatic bile acid synthesis, with no treatment-related adverse events. Together, these findings identify pulsatile FXR activation as a mechanistically grounded and clinically translatable strategy, and establish linafexor as a first-in-class therapeutic for bile acid–related liver diseases. Linafexor is a rapidly cleared FXR agonist designed to mimic natural bile acid signalling, achieving transient receptor activation with strong efficacy and reduced toxicity in preclinical and early clinical studies.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Graph Neural Networks for Semi-Supervised Image Classification with Multi-Feature Aggregation

Feature extraction involves the identification and extraction of salient characteristics or patterns, including edges, textures, shapes, and color attributes. Contemporary feature extractors predominantly leverage deep learning architectures, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (VITs). The availability of diverse feature extractors in the literature provides a wide range of feature representations. Features extracted from an image depend on the specific application, the chosen extractor, and its configuration. Therefore, integrating complementary information by combining distinct extractors offers a promising way to enhance performance. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), particularly Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), have emerged as powerful and widely adopted approaches for semi-supervised image classification, as they effectively leverage both labeled and unlabeled data while exploiting the underlying graph structures that capture relationships among samples. This study proposes a novel approach for GNNs in scenarios where labeled data is scarce, by integrating diverse sets of feature and graph representations derived from various extractors in classification scenarios. Experimental investigations were conducted, encompassing combinations of distinct feature and graph extractors, as well as rank aggregation strategies. The primary contributions of this work are underscored by the experimental findings, which demonstrate that the strategic combination of feature and graph representations, coupled with the application of manifold learning for graph processing, leads to significant improvements in classification accuracy across the majority of experimental conditions. Furthermore, the utilization of rank aggregation techniques to integrate features from different extractors was shown to enhance classification accuracy.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Exploring How Agent Voice Accents Shape Human-AI Collaboration in K-12 Group Learning

arXiv:2606.12805v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collaboration is widely recognized as a cornerstone of 21st-century education, yet teachers still encounter persistent challenges in fostering productive peer interaction. LLM conversational peer agents introduce new possibilities for mediating in-person group work, raising questions about how persona design, particularly their voice characteristics, shapes learners' perceptions, trust, and interactional dynamics. While prior work has examined agent accent effects in one-to-one settings, little is known about how these effects manifest in groups. We conducted a between-subjects mixed-methods study with 33 teachers examining how a GenAI voice agent with different accents (British, Indian, and African American) influenced collaboration and agent perception. Across surveys, group interaction analyses, and artifacts, we find that accent shaped participants' mental models and the roles the agent assumed in group interaction. The British-accented agent was largely treated as a tool and engaged in detached, utility-based ways, whereas Indian- and African American-accented agents were more readily anthropomorphized and integrated as peers. These role expectations influenced trust, engagement, and reliance over time. This work advances understanding of how GenAI's sociolinguistic design features shape group dynamics in CSCL, with implications for designing culturally inclusive AI partners in group learning.

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

Shachi: A Modular, Controllable Framework for LLM-Based Agent-Based Modeling of Emergent Collective Behavior

arXiv:2509.21862v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How collective behaviors emerge from the interactions of individual LLM-driven agents is a central question in artificial life, yet controlled study of these emergent dynamics has been hindered by the lack of a principled simulation framework for systematic experimentation. To address this, we introduce Shachi, a principled methodology and modular framework that decomposes an agent's cognition into core components: Configuration for intrinsic identity, Memory for contextual continuity, and Tools for extended capabilities, all orchestrated by an LLM reasoning engine. This decomposition treats each cognitive component as an independently controllable variable, enabling perturbation studies that trace how micro-level cognitive traits propagate into population-level dynamics. We investigate behavioral patterns across a 10-task benchmark spanning three levels of collective complexity. Shachi enables memory transfer across environment transitions, producing history-dependent behavioral shifts, and allows agents to simultaneously inhabit multiple environments, revealing cross-environment interference invisible in single-environment studies. Furthermore, in a real-world U.S. tariff shock case study, locally interacting agents with individually controlled cognitive components produce macro-level market dynamics directionally consistent with observed real-world outcomes. Our work provides a rigorous, open-source simulation framework for LLM-based ABM, aimed at fostering cumulative scientific inquiry into the emergent collective behaviors of interacting artificial agents.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

A Multi-Domain Benchmark for Detecting AI-Generated Text-Rich Images from GPT-Image-2

Text-rich images often contain privacy-sensitive, transactional, or decision-relevant information. As recent multimodal image generation models become increasingly capable of synthesizing realistic textual content and structured visual designs, detecting AI-generated text-rich images has become an important challenge for digital trust and content authenticity. Existing benchmarks, however, largely focus on object-centric images and provide limited coverage of scenarios where textual semantics and layout organization are central. In this paper, we introduce a multi-domain benchmark for detecting text-rich images generated by OpenAI's GPT Image 2. The benchmark contains 8,602 images across six representative categories: commercial posters, infographics, academic posters, receipts, tables, and UI screenshots. Using this benchmark, we evaluate five representative AI-generated image detectors in a zero-shot setting and analyze their overall, category-wise, and post-processing robustness. Our results show that detector performance is highly domain-dependent: methods that perform well in some categories often fail on others, and even the strongest conventional detector exhibits severe sensitivity to JPEG compression. We further conduct an exploratory evaluation with a multimodal vision-language model, revealing both its promise and its limitations on structured formats. These findings highlight the need for text- and layout-aware detection methods for modern AI-generated images. Our dataset is released at XXX.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Validating Field-Feasible Measures of Recent Khat Use: A Diagnostic Accuracy Study Comparing Amphetamine Immunoassay and Assisted Self-Report Against HPLC in an Ethiopian Male Cohort

Background: Khat (Catha edulis) is a widely consumed natural amphetamine-analog used across East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Accurate field-feasible measurement of recent khat use is a prerequisite for large-scale epidemiological research; yet no validated alternatives to laboratory reference methods have been identified in the scientific literature. This nested validation study evaluated the diagnostic accuracy of two point-of-care measures, a commercial amphetamine immunoassay and a Timeline Followback (TLFB) Assisted Self-Report (ASR), against high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) quantification of urinary norephedrine (NE), while additionally assessing agreement between the two field measures. Methods: A prospective, random sub-sample of 119 male participants aged 18-40 years from the Gilgel Gibe Field Research Center (GGFRC) longitudinal cohort, Ethiopia (validation timepoint T2, 2015), was used. Three index-reference comparisons were conducted: (1) amphetamine immunoassay (nal von minden, Drug-Screen AMP test, 300 ng/mL cutoff) vs. HPLC; (2) binary ASR (past-week use) vs. HPLC; and (3) binary ASR vs. immunoassay. Sensitivity (positive percent agreement, PPA), specificity (negative percent agreement, NPA), positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), overall accuracy (overall percent agreement, OPA), and Cohen's kappa were calculated with 95% confidence intervals. Pre-specified secondary analyses applied three pharmacokinetically-informed recall windows (0-2, 3-5, and 6-7 days prior to interview) to ASR. Results: Against HPLC (77 positive, 42 negative), the immunoassay showed perfect specificity (1.0 [0.916-1.0]) and PPV (1.0 [0.91-1.0]) but low sensitivity (0.52 [0.40-0.64]), NPV (0.53 [0.42-0.65]), overall accuracy (0.69 [0.60-0.77]), and weak kappa (0.43 [0.34-0.52]). Binary ASR showed high sensitivity (0.96 [0.89-0.99]), specificity of 0.60 [0.433-0.74], PPV (0.81 [0.72-0.89]), NPV (0.89 [0.72-0.98]), with overall accuracy 0.83 [0.75-0.89] and moderate kappa (0.60 [0.51,0.69]). Restricting ASR to use within 0-2 days improved specificity to 0.69 [0.52-0.84], PPV to 0.86 [0.77-0.93], overall accuracy to 0.87 [0.79-0.93], and kappa to 0.69 [0.61-0.78] (moderate), while sensitivity (0.96 [0.89-0.99]) and NPV (0.89 [0.72-0.98]) remained stable. Against the immunoassay, ASR achieved high PPA of (1.0 [0.91-1.0]), NPA of 0.35 [0.25-0.47], OPA of 0.57 [0.48-0.66], and minimal kappa (0.27 [0.19-0.35]). Conclusions: Time-stratified ASR (0-2 days) is a valid, scalable alternative to biological testing for recent khat use in resource-limited settings. The immunoassay's 300 ng/mL cutoff functions as a marker of heavy or recent high-dose khat use rather than any-use detection. Its perfect specificity and PPV make it valuable as a confirmatory test for substantial exposure, while its lower sensitivity reflects calibration to amphetamine rather than to khat-derived cathinone metabolite. Keywords: khat; Catha edulis; diagnostic accuracy; STARD; self-report; immunoassay; HPLC; Ethiopia; substance use measurement

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Arrival times of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate

arXiv:2606.20281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The times of flight of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate are theoretically investigated in the experimentally unexplored regime corresponding to detection close to the trap of the condensate. In this regime, there is no consensus on how to calculate the distribution of times of arrival onto the detector. For non-interacting particles, distinct theoretical predictions have been made in the past. This work analyses how these predictions are modified for an interacting Bose-Einstein condensate. For this purpose, a time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation is solved analytically and numerically.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Target-Side Paraphrase Augmentation for Sign Language Translation with Large Language Models

Sign language translation (SLT) remains constrained by the limited availability of paired sign-video/text corpora and by the heavy-tailed vocabularies typical of real-world datasets. We study a target-side augmentation strategy in which a large language model (LLM) generates controlled paraphrase variants of the reference spoken-language sentence while the sign input remains unchanged. Concretely, we use GPT-4o to produce semantically faithful variants of the training targets and train a Signformer-style pose-based Transformer under a two-stage schedule: pre-training on the augmented corpus followed by fine-tuning on the original references. We evaluate this strategy on three datasets that span complementary challenges: PHOENIX14T (German Sign Language), a real-world corpus with moderate lexical diversity; the Greek Sign Language Dataset with highly controlled, repetitive recordings; and LSA-T (Argentinian Sign Language), a naturalistic corpus with a large vocabulary and severe long-tail sparsity. This range allows us to characterize precisely when and why target-side augmentation is beneficial. On PHOENIX14T, augmentation improves BLEU-4 from 9.56 to 10.33, demonstrating that paraphrastic exposure helps the decoder generalize beyond memorized reference phrasing. The near-saturated GSL baseline and the extremely sparse LSA-T setting reveal the limits of the approach: in both cases, single-reference lexical overlap metrics are insufficient to capture the full picture, motivating a complementary semantic evaluation. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine LLM-generated target-side paraphrases as an augmentation mechanism for SLT, and the first to apply an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation protocol to SLT. This complementary evaluation reveals gains in semantic fidelity that lexical overlap metrics understate.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

WEQA: Wearable hEalth Question Answering with Query-Adaptive Agentic Reasoning

arXiv:2606.18147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models are remarkably capable at medical question answering, in some cases surpassing the accuracy of general physicians. However, answering questions about wearable health data remains challenging and understudied, as these ubiquitous sensors produce continuous, high-dimensional, and longitudinal data, which is non-trivial to align with text-centric distributions in LLM pretraining. The diversity of sensor modalities and user intents cannot be effectively handled by a fixed reasoning workflow or a single pretrained foundation model. To address these challenges, we propose WEQA, a query-adaptive agent framework that unifies LLM reasoning with specialized wearable analytical and modeling tools. An LLM controller is employed to synthesize execution plans and dynamically route each query to the appropriate combination of sensor analysis and pretrained models, and perform grounded response auditing with external knowledge. We also curate a benchmark spanning four open wearable datasets comprising analytic and predictive tasks in three different health domains. Experiments show that our framework is 24% more accurate than LLM and agentic baselines, and a blinded study with 12 medical experts and 8 users shows substantial gains in usefulness and clinical soundness.