From Understanding Weak References, by Ethan Nicholas:
... An object which is only weakly reachable (the strongest references to it are WeakReferences) will be discarded at the next garbage collection cycle, but an object which is softly reachable will generally stick around for a while.
P. Haindl, G. Buchgeher, M. Khan, and B. Moser. Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results, ACM, (May 2022)
F. Arnold, and R. Jäschke. Proceedings of the Workshop Understanding LIterature references in academic full TExt at JCDL 2022, volume 3220 of ULITE-ws '22, page 7--15. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, (2022)