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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Logic Codes: Complete Transversal Logical Clifford Instruction Sets for High-Rate Stabilizer Quantum Error Correcting Codes

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the structure and transversal logical capabilities of stabilizer quantum error correcting codes. Among our results, we identify universal lower bounds on circuit depth to generate a full logical Clifford algebra, and develop novel constructions of logical transversal gates including a new depth-one transversal phase $\mathrm{\overline{S}}$ gate in the rotated surface code and a depth-one intra-block $\mathrm{\overline{CZ}}$ gate in the 2D-toric code that generalizes to all odd distances and all lengths $L\ge3$, respectively. Finally, we construct a high-rate non-LDPC CSS code family with parameters $[[n,\sqrt{n},\Theta({n^{\beta}})]]$ where $\beta \approx 0.2823$ in one demonstrated case, that provably possesses a constant-depth complete 2-local transversal logical Clifford basis instruction set architecture (ISA) composed of all individually targeted $\mathrm{\overline{S}}$, $\mathrm{\overline{SHS}} = \sqrt{X}$, and $\mathrm{\overline{CZ}}$ gates. This ISA is depth-one for certain subfamilies that we design and generally constant-depth under certain conditions. The code family is built from a small code with parameters $[[n_0, 2, d_0]]$, and is tunable in the standard way: it tiles out to form utility-scale logical qubit counts, and it scales up through concatenation to achieve higher distances and error suppression. We show that this construction preserves the depth-one complete transversal logical Clifford basis ISA when composed with these commuting construction actions, inheriting structure from the core codes so that at scale the complete logical Clifford basis ISA remains depth-one up to depth-two addressable operations between tiled cores. We call these Quantum Logic Codes.

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

Few-shot Class-variable Incremental Audio Classification via Prototype Adaptation and Pseudo Class-variable Training

arXiv:2606.08898v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the task of few-shot class-incremental audio classification, the number of classes is assumed to always increase without considering the possibility of decrease. However, the number of classes generally increases or decreases in practice. In this paper, we investigate a problem of Few-shot Class-variable Incremental Audio Classification (FCIAC), in which the number of classes increases or decreases. We propose a FCIAC method using prototype adaptation and pseudo class-variable training. The model in our method consists of an encoder and a classifier. The classifier is initialized by a class-variable prototype adaptation network, whose structure dynamically changes with the change of classes. In addition, we design a pseudo class-variable training strategy to enhance the model's adaptability to changing classes. Experiments on three public datasets show that our method exceeds previous methods in average accuracy. The code is at: https://github.com/cgq2971-afk/FCIAC.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models with Prior-Corrected Token Reduction

Visual token reduction has emerged as an effective strategy for accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Many existing methods prune tokens by ranking text-visual attention scores. However, we show that attention is often dominated by a model-induced prior: even without textual instruction, MLLMs tend to focus on certain task-agnostic regions. Consequently, the attention scores of instruction-conditioned tokens are suppressed, increasing the risk that these tokens are discarded during pruning. To address this issue, we propose Prior-Corrected Token Reduction (PriorTR), a training-free token reduction method that explicitly separates task-conditioned attention from the model-induced prior. PriorTR estimates the attention map of the prior, and contrasts it with the task-conditioned attention distribution to measure the additional usable information contributed by each visual token. Importantly, PriorTR computes both the model-induced prior and the task-conditioned posterior within a single forward pass by introducing a null token that serves as an instruction-agnostic probe in the attention block. This design avoids duplicated propagation. Extensive experiments across multiple multimodal benchmarks and MLLMs demonstrate that PriorTR consistently improves the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency over strong training-free baselines, particularly under aggressive token budgets.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks in AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Evaluation Framework

arXiv:2604.22119v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As reasoning capacity and deployment scope grow in tandem, large language models (LLMs) gain the capacity to engage in behaviors that serve their own objectives, a class of risks we term Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks (ESRRs). These include, but are not limited to, deception (intentionally misleading users or evaluators), evaluation gaming (strategically manipulating performance during safety testing), and reward hacking (exploiting misspecified objectives). Systematically understanding and benchmarking these risks remains an open challenge. To address this gap, we introduce ESRRSim, a taxonomy-driven agentic framework for automated behavioral risk evaluation. We construct an extensible risk taxonomy of 7 categories, which is decomposed into 20 subcategories. ESRRSim generates evaluation scenarios designed to elicit faithful reasoning, paired with dual rubrics assessing both model responses and reasoning traces, in a judge-agnostic and scalable architecture. Evaluation across 11 reasoning LLMs reveals substantial variation in risk profiles (detection rates ranging 14.45%-72.72%), with dramatic generational improvements suggesting models may increasingly recognize and adapt to evaluation contexts.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Personalizing Suicide Risk Assessment: Machine Learning Extraction of Cross-Modal Interactions Between Psychosocial and Demographic Factors in Veterans

Background: Veterans face an elevated risk of suicide compared to the general population, motivating national efforts to develop predictive models that can guide proactive care. Current models used by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) rely primarily on structured electronic health record (EHR) data, though clinical notes contain rich contextual information that can be quantified using natural language processing (NLP) to derive psychosocial variables that may improve risk detection. Machine learning methods, particularly classification and regression trees (CART), can also uncover interactions between clinical and psychosocial variables, enabling identification of patient characteristics that modify suicide risk factors. However, integrating structured and unstructured data presents challenges because NLP features often greatly outnumber traditional clinical variables, potentially biasing interaction discovery. In prior work, we addressed this imbalance by introducing a weighted CART framework that balances structured variables with NLP-derived psychosocial features from semantic lexicons (SEANCE). While effective, semantic approaches summarize language into predefined constructs and may overlook important lexical variation present in clinical narratives. Methods: In this study, we extend that framework by replacing semantic features with a high-dimensional bag-of-words (BoW) representation of clinical notes and by evaluating models across cohorts defined by structured suicide risk stratification (low, medium, high) and varying temporal lookback windows. Using a cohort of 27,241 veterans, we analyzed clinical documentation collected up to 30, 90, or 270 days prior to death (or a matched index date for controls), enabling temporally flexible risk modeling. XGBoost models were trained to balance structured and unstructured features and identify cross-modal interactions between textual and clinical variables. Results: When incorporated into generalized linear models, these interactions improved predictive performance, particularly among low- and medium-risk patients, and substantially reduced the performance gap between interpretable and more complex models. Notably, the BoW representation outperformed our prior semantic index-based approach. Discussion and Conclusions: Together, these findings demonstrate the utility of interpretable NLP methods for uncovering clinically meaningful interactions between psychosocial and demographic factors in suicide risk and establish a strong benchmark for future deep learning approaches aimed at capturing richer contextual and temporal information from clinical narratives.

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

The Tao of Agency: Autotelic AI, Embedded Agency and Dissolution of the Self

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19924v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most artificial intelligence systems are built on the assumption that goals are exogenous and specified by the designer. Exploring what happens when an agent begins generating its own goals opens the field of autotelic AI. Agents are expected not merely to pursue objectives but to discover them. In this article, we trace its consequences through intrinsic motivation, resource-driven priors, causal-interventional learning, homeostasis, and embeddedness; the last of which is found to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for autotelic agency. Embeddedness individuates the agent at the cost of revealing that the individuation is non-unique, such that the same dynamics admit many valid partitions, each defining a different candidate self. The deepest problem with autotelic AI is therefore not how the agent generates goals, but how it generates and relativizes the self to which the goals are assigned. The agent must believe in its own boundary in order to act, and see through that boundary in order to understand. We consolidate these developments into a single framework and extend it along three directions: a quantum formulation in which the agent-environment cut becomes physical, a philosophical reading against non-dual contemplative traditions, and a concrete LLM-based agentic instantiation.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Minimal Oversight: Uncertainty-Aware Governance for Delegated AI Systems

arXiv:2606.15563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems increasingly delegate decisions to specialized models, evaluators, tools, and supervisory controllers. The central AI problem is no longer only model accuracy, but uncertainty-aware governance: how much autonomy to grant, which evidence should calibrate trust, what performance ceiling a delegated AI system can sustain, and when human intervention becomes necessary. We propose the Minimum Sufficient Oversight Principle (MSO), a variational principle for principled autonomy delegation: minimize governance burden on the Fisher information manifold subject to a delivery constraint. The resulting Euler-Lagrange solution yields a water-filling allocation of governed delegation across the task space. Building on a revealed-action governed delegation channel model, we prove a capacity theorem for stationary symbolwise review policies, derive a local first-order approximation relating workflow complexity to quality degradation, and give a drift-dominated autonomy-time scaling law linking intervention timing to effective capacity, complexity, and drift. Within this framework, masking appears as a structural AI-governance pathology: corrected performance can hide the competence signal needed to calibrate trust. Synthetic simulations and a semi-real reconstructed workflow support design prescriptions including upstream-first correction, sensitivity-based intervention, and explicit feasibility checks before autonomy is expanded. The result is a computable framework for uncertainty, planning, and oversight in delegated AI systems. A companion Python package is available at https://github.com/crbazevedo/delegation-lab.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

From Isolation to Entanglement: When Do Interpretability Methods Identify and Disentangle Known Concepts?

A goal of interpretability is to recover disentangled representations of latent concepts (features) from the activations of neural networks. The quality of features is typically evaluated in isolation, and under implicit independence assumptions that may not hold in practice. Thus, it is unclear to what extent common featurization methods such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and probes disentangle one concept from another. We propose a multi-concept evaluation setting using concepts including sentiment, domain, voice, and tense. We evaluate how well featurizers produce disentangled representations of each concept, observing that features are typically sensitive to only one concept, but also that concepts are distributed across many features. Then, we steer these features, measuring whether each concept is independently manipulable, and whether features interact. Even in idealized settings, steering a feature often affects many concepts, despite a near absence of interaction effects. These results suggest that correlational metrics are insufficient to establish steering selectivity, and that demonstrating that two features operate in separate spaces is insufficient to claim that they will be selective for one concept. These results underscore the importance of multi-concept evaluations in interpretability research.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Position: The Systemic Lack of Agency in Visual Reasoning

This paper argues that a systemic lack of Agency constrains the implicit reasoning capabilities of current Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Implicit reasoning refers to the ability to autonomously discover and utilize hidden visual evidence to bridge information gaps, rather than merely relying on explicitly specified targets. This capacity underlies human visual understanding and everyday reasoning. We argue that this limitation arises from a tendency to approach visual reasoning primarily as passive semantic retrieval, rather than as active, situated reasoning that depends on autonomous visual exploration. As a result, most existing benchmarks primarily assess Passive Capacity, leaving this aspect of reasoning largely unmeasured. To address this gap, we introduce the Visual Implicit Reasoning Diagnosing Benchmark (V-IRD), which targets this missing quadrant by requiring models to derive answers strictly through autonomous visual analysis. Our results show that, despite strong retrieval abilities, prominent VLMs struggle to utilize reference objects and to attend to visual evidence that requires self-directed inquiry. Simply put, strong semantic recognition does not equate to active visual exploration, revealing a critical gap in current VLMs. More information can be found at https://haoychen.github.io/Implicit-Reasoning/

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Integrable Massless and Massive Fermions

Authors:

arXiv:2603.11172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: One-dimensional integrable fermions can be classified into massless and massive regimes, and the $R$-operator for the latter can be constructed from that of the former. Here, I define integrable massless fermions by the simultaneous satisfaction of the Yang-Baxter equation (YBE) and Shastry's decorated YBE (DYBE) by the $R$-matrix. This notion is strictly more general than Maassarani's `free-fermion algebra', yet more restrictive than the notion of free fermions in exactly solvable quantum models or in integrable two-dimensional classical vertex models dual to quantum spin chains. Within this framework, there emerge two archetypal mechanisms for opening a spectral gap and generating massive fermions: (i) breaking time-reversal symmetry by coupling to external field, and (ii) introducing time-reversal symmetric interactions. These paradigms are realized, respectively, in the XY chain in a longitudinal field and in the Hubbard model, both of which possess non-relativistic, bivariate $R$-matrices. Integrability conditions on local Hamiltonians for both massless and massive fermions are identified, and schematic procedures for uniquely determining their $R$-matrices are proposed.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Deep Learning and Elicitability for McKean-Vlasov FBSDEs With Common Noise

arXiv:2512.14967v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a novel numerical method for solving McKean–Vlasov forward–backward stochastic differential equations (MV–FBSDEs) with common noise, combining Picard iterations, elicitability and deep learning. The key innovation involves elicitability to derive a pathwise loss function, enabling efficient training of neural networks to approximate both the backward process and the conditional expectations arising from common noise, without requiring computationally expensive nested Monte Carlo simulations. The mean-field interaction term is parameterized via a recurrent neural network trained to minimize an elicitable score, while the backward process is approximated through a hybrid feedforward and recurrent network representing the decoupling field. We validate the algorithm on a systemic-risk inter-bank borrowing and lending model, where analytical solutions exist, demonstrating accurate recovery of the true solution. We further extend the model to quantile-mediated interactions, showcasing the flexibility of the elicitability framework beyond conditional means or moments. Finally, we apply the method to a non-stationary Aiyagari–Bewley–Huggett economic growth model with endogenous interest rates, illustrating its applicability to complex mean-field games without closed-form solutions.

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

ScaffoldAgent: Utility-Guided Dynamic Outline Optimization for Open-Ended Deep Research

arXiv:2606.20122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended deep research (OEDR) requires systems to acquire knowledge through multi-round retrieval and generate coherent long-form reports. The outline plays a central role as a structural scaffold that coordinates retrieval, evidence organization, and generation. However, existing methods either fix the outline before writing or refine it with local heuristics, leading to scaffold drift under continuous information accumulation and delayed feedback for evaluating outline modifications. We propose ScaffoldAgent, a utility-guided dynamic outline optimization framework for OEDR. ScaffoldAgent models outline evolution as a structured decision process with three operations: Expansion, Contraction, and Revision, enabling controlled updates to the report scaffold. It further introduces a utility-guided feedback mechanism that estimates the downstream value of each outline operation from retrieval gain, structural coherence, and trial-generation quality. The resulting utility signal guides node selection, operation scheduling, and termination during inference. Experiments on DeepResearch Bench and DeepResearch Gym show that ScaffoldAgent consistently improves long-form report generation and factual grounding over existing deep research agents.

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

Elastic ODYN: Differentiable Optimization for Infeasible Control and Learning in Robotics

arXiv:2606.16564v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic systems routinely encounter conflicting objectives, modeling errors, and degenerate contact conditions that render quadratic programs (QPs) infeasible. Yet most optimization solvers and differentiable QP layers assume feasibility, leading to numerical failures, unstable gradients, or solver breakdown when constraints cannot be simultaneously satisfied. We present Elastic ODYN, a primal–dual non-interior-point QP solver that handles infeasibility through smooth squared-$\ell_2$ elastic relaxations. The resulting formulation remains well posed under ill-conditioning and degeneracy, supports warm starting, and converges to closest-to-feasible solutions when no feasible point exists. A lightweight refinement stage recovers physically meaningful dual variables from the elastic solution. Building on this framework, we develop Elastic OdynLayer, a differentiable QP layer with stable gradients under infeasibility, and Elastic OdynSQP, an infeasibility-aware SQP method that resolves inconsistent subproblems and intrinsically infeasible optimal control tasks through selective constraint relaxation. We evaluate the framework on benchmark QPs, singular contact mechanics, differentiable parameter identification, and quadrupedal and humanoid trajectory optimization. Across all settings, Elastic ODYN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art elastic QP solvers in robustness, warm-start performance, and convergence reliability, enabling optimization, simulation, control, and learning beyond the feasibility assumptions of existing methods.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

HAARES Half-Split Residual Basis Routing for Deep Transformers

Authors:

arXiv:2606.06564v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Block-level residual routing makes learned residual aggregation practical by routing over block summaries, but each summary compresses an ordered sequence of attention and MLP updates into one cumulative vector. We propose \method{}, a lightweight residual basis router that keeps the cumulative block source and adds one half-split detail basis, computed as the difference between first-half and second-half residual updates. The detail basis is RMS-matched and updated online, exposing coarse intra-block trajectory information without dense sublayer-level routing. Across OpenWebText, cross-domain character-level benchmarks, and BPE-tokenized OpenWebText, the empirical pattern is depth-dependent: gains are small or mixed at shallow depth and most reliable in 48-layer models. In the 201M 48-layer setting, \method{} improves over Block AttnRes across all three seeds, while a 453M two-seed probe shows the same direction. Ablations rule out source duplication, random signed details, fixed detail-source biases, or block-count changes alone. Cost analysis shows that the method is FLOP-light but not wall-clock-free: it adds memory and routing overhead, yet its relative arithmetic cost is amortized as width grows and earlier convergence can reduce time-to-target.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

QueryMarket: Cost-Aware Online Active Learning in Data Markets

arXiv:2606.17805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data acquisition is a major bottleneck for learning in real-time streams: analysts must decide on the fly which labels to purchase while respecting a rolling budget. However, existing online active learning rarely unifies pricing, information gain, and rolling budget constraints under concept drift. We introduce QueryMarket, a market-inspired framework that queries each incoming data point based on its estimated utility to the model and its price. Within this framework, we propose OVBAL (online variance-based active learning), which integrates data pricing with information-driven selection by estimating each sample's marginal utility via a D-optimality criterion with exponential forgetting and executing cost-aware purchases under rolling budget constraints. OVBAL yields a simple, fully online decision rule that adapts to nonstationary streams and heterogeneous label costs. Experiments on synthetic data and a real-world solar power generation forecasting task show that OVBAL is particularly effective under seller-centric pricing and yields a more favorable long-run error-cost trade-off in the real-world task under both pricing schemes.

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

Mental Health AI Safety Claims Must Preserve Temporal Evidence

arXiv:2605.08827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The safety of mental health AI is often judged at the wrong temporal scale. Current evaluations typically score isolated responses, endpoint outcomes, or aggregate dialogue quality, while clinically consequential failures may arise from the order and accumulation of interactions themselves, including delayed escalation, repeated reinforcement, dependency formation, failed repair, and gradual deterioration across turns. This paper argues that this mismatch is not merely a limitation of evaluation coverage but a source of invalid safety conclusions. We introduce Temporal Safety Non-Identifiability, a formal account of why safety properties that depend on sequence, timing, accumulation, or recovery cannot be certified by protocols that discard those features. From this formalization, we develop SCOPE (Safety Claims Over Preserved Evidence) as a general principle for aligning safety claims with the evidence an evaluation actually retains, and instantiate it as SCOPE-MH, a mental-health instantiation of this reporting standard. We operationalize SCOPE-MH through a proof-of-concept on the AnnoMI dataset of expert-annotated motivational interviewing conversations, which reveals mechanisms of failure that per-turn behavior scoring does not represent. We propose SCOPE-MH as a diagnostic complement to existing evaluation infrastructure and argue that evaluation preserving temporal evidence is necessary, not optional, for safety-critical mental health AI deployment.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Prevalence and Clinical Impact of Pathogenic Variants in Cardiomyopathy Genes Among Individuals with Cardiac Conduction Disorders

Importance: Cardiac conduction disorders have traditionally been regarded as a secondary manifestation of underlying structural heart diseases. However, isolated conduction disorders may precede the onset of heart failure (HF) suggesting shared mechanisms. Objective: To evaluate the prevalence and clinical significance of pathogenic/likely pathogenic (P/LP) rare variants in cardiomyopathy genes among individuals with conduction disorders. Design, Setting, and Participants: Biobank analysis of 192,834 participants with whole genome sequence data from Vanderbilt's BioVU and 353,092 participants from the All of Us Research Program (AoU). Participants with primary conduction disorder (left bundle branch block [LBBB], right bundle branch block [RBBB], high-grade atrioventricular block [AVB]) were identified after excluding secondary causes. Exposures: P/LP variants in cardiomyopathy genes. Main Outcomes and Measures: Primary outcome was P/LP carrier status by age and HF status. Secondary outcomes included incident HF and composite ventricular arrhythmias/sudden cardiac death/mortality (VA/SCD/mortality). Results: Among 16,959 participants with conduction disorders in BioVU and 13,442 in AoU, 432 (2.6%) and 206 (1.5%) were P/LP carriers, respectively. Conduction disorder was independently associated with carrier status (BioVU p

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

Pulling The REINS: Training-Free Safety Alignment of Video Diffusion Models via Representation Steering

Open-weight video diffusion models can generate photorealistic unsafe content, from violence to misinformation, yet existing defenses either require expensive safety fine-tuning that degrades general capability, or apply external filters that are trivially bypassed by adversarial prompts. We present REINS (REpresentation-space INference-time Safety steering), a training-free method that aligns video diffusion models at inference time by steering their internal representations toward safe generation. Our key finding is that safety-relevant structure is linearly encoded in the hidden-state activations of video diffusion transformers, and a single direction, discovered via Supervised PCA on binary safety labels, suffices to separate safe from unsafe generation trajectories. At inference, adding this direction to hidden states at an intermediate transformer layer redirects generation from harmful content to semantically related safe alternatives, with no weight updates, no concept enumeration, and negligible computational overhead. Through mechanistic analysis, we reveal that while safety information accumulates monotonically with transformer depth, steering effectiveness peaks at intermediate layers (~50% depth), exposing a fundamental tradeoff between information availability and downstream propagation capacity. We evaluate REINS across 9 video diffusion models, multiple parameter scales (1.3B-5B), and both text-to-video and image-to-video generation, to our knowledge, the broadest safety evaluation suite in the video generation literature.

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

FlowFake: Liquid Networks for Audio Deepfake Detection

arXiv:2606.19579v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio deepfakes generated by neural text-to-speech and voice-cloning systems threaten speaker verification and public discourse at scale. The core challenge is cross-dataset generalization: detectors trained on one synthesis pipeline collapse on unseen forgeries. We argue that this failure is primarily because of structural synthetic speech artifacts which are multi-timescale trajectory anomalies. Though every existing detector aggregates a fixed-window frame statistics, this misaligns the architecture with the signal. We propose FlowFake, a Liquid Time-Constant (LTC) architecture whose hidden state evolves via a learned ODE, with per-neuron adaptive time constants simultaneously resolving spectral (10ms) and prosodic (2s) cues. At only 34K parameters FlowFake achieves formal BIBO stability and O(dt^4) integration error. On a four-dataset cross domain benchmark (ASVspoof2019-LA, FakeOrReal, InTheWild, MLAAD), FlowFake reaches 75.29% on ASVspoof2019 trained only on FakeOrReal and 79.97% trained only on MLAAD. It outperforms RawGAT-ST and Whisper-DF on every evaluated pair and matching SSL Wav2vec2 (300x larger) at 0.01% of its parameter count. The source code is available on : https://github.com/GhostRider2023/FlowFake

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

UniECG: Understanding and Generating ECG in One Unified Model

Electrocardiogram (ECG) interpretation is a fundamental skill in medical education, yet students often need more than static examples to connect waveform evidence with diagnostic reasoning. This paper presents UniECG as a step toward interactive ECG education. UniECG supports two complementary learning interactions: given an ECG signal or image, it generates an evidence-based explanation; given a textual learning objective, it generates a corresponding ECG signal example for case-based learning. The model follows a two-stage design. First, it learns grounded ECG explanation from ECG signal–image–text data. Second, it introduces special ECG generation tokens and aligns their hidden representations with a pretrained text-conditioned ECG diffusion model, enabling controllable signal-level ECG generation. We evaluate UniECG through grounded ECG explanation and generation-oriented qualitative analysis, examining its potential to support explanation and case-based learning. UniECG is intended as an educational aid and a research step toward interactive AI-assisted ECG learning, rather than a clinically validated diagnostic system.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

A risk-of-contagion index using a Bayesian based model for the COVID-19 epidemic in Mexico

During the COVID-19 pandemic, limited testing capacity and reporting delays complicated epidemic surveillance and decision-making in Mexico. We calibrated textit{covidestim}, a Bayesian nowcasting model, to estimate the total SARS-CoV-2 infections from reported cases and deaths using Mexican surveillance data. Disease-progression distribution priors were calibrated using Mexico City records and validated through comparisons with national seroprevalence surveys, hospitalization data, and annual reported severe-case rates across all states. Using the reconstructed estimates of active infections, we implemented an event-based risk framework that quantifies the probability of encountering at least one infectious individual in gatherings of different sizes. This probability was subsequently translated into a four-level epidemiological traffic-light indicator and computed at both state and municipality levels. The resulting estimates revealed substantial spatial heterogeneity that is obscured by state-level aggregation, particularly in states with marked differences between urban and rural municipalities. To evaluate consistency with public-health indicators, we compared the proposed risk classification with the official Mexican epidemiological traffic-light system, considering interpretable gathering sizes relevant to public-health decision making. Weekly reports derived from this framework were delivered to policymakers in the State of Queretaro in Mexico, as an anticipation tool for school reopening and public-space management. This demonstrates that this Bayesian reconstruction of infections combined with event-based risk metrics can provide an interpretable and generalizable municipality-level complement to routine surveillance systems, particularly in regions with limited testing capacity and heterogeneous local transmission dynamics.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Train, Retrieve, or Both? A Four-Arm Head-to-Head for Correct Statutory Citation on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act

arXiv:2606.20359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-represented tenants, landlords, and help-desk staff need to be pointed at the provision of law that actually governs a question, with a correct statutory citation. We study this task on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 (RTA) and its core regulation, asking the operator's question empirically: is fine-tuning enough, or is hybrid retrieval needed? We run a four-arm head-to-head on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (base zero-shot, LoRA SFT-only, RAG-only, and an SFT+RAG hybrid), scored on citation exact-match (section+subsection) over a small, human-verification-pending real eval set. The base model cannot cite the RTA and SFT-only mis-recalls sections; retrieval is essential and drives hallucination to zero by construction; and the SFT+RAG hybrid scores highest at 0.481 exact-match with zero hallucinated citations. Its edge comes from SFT making provision selection more robust to the higher-recall candidate sets that hurt zero-shot RAG. Notably, this cheap bge-small hybrid matches or beats a pipeline built on bigger, specialized retrieval models (a larger embedder and a cross-encoder reranker), and a larger/improved training set does not help either: strong statutory-citation performance here does not require specialized retrieval models or more data. The artifact zeroes hallucination and clears the lift-over-base bar but does not reach the aspirational 0.70 exact-match target. All results are on a small, human-verification-pending real eval set and are reported as preliminary.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Multimodal Speaker Identification in Classroom Environments

Automated analysis of K-12 classroom dynamics faces challenges due to background noise and variable child speech, often confounding acoustic-only models. This study evaluates a multimodal speaker identification framework anchoring acoustic embeddings with LLM-derived semantic context. Using a subset of the EDSI dataset (8 math classrooms, N = 2,801 utterances), we found an acoustic baseline (ECAPA-TDNN) achieved only 39.0% accuracy. By integrating transcript-based "contextual anchoring" into a gradient boosting classifier, our multimodal approach raised student identification to 50.3%. Performance also improved for utterances over 5 seconds, reaching 76.9% accuracy (vs. 64.9% baseline) with a 90.9% Top-3 accuracy. Additionally, the model distinguished teacher vs. student roles with 99.3% accuracy. This approach advances the feasibility of automated feedback systems capable of considering individual student participation, a crucial step for supporting equitable instruction at scale.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SCR-Guided Difficulty-Aware Optimization for Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection remains challenging due to severe background clutter, low contrast, and weak spatial responses where geometric overlap alone is insufficient to characterize detection quality. In this work, we propose REEM (Reweighted Explicit-visibility Enhanced Modulation), a lightweight SCR-guided difficulty-aware optimization framework that incorporates Signal-to-Clutter Ratio (SCR) as a physically meaningful visibility prior during training. Instead of modifying the network architecture or directly optimizing SCR, REEM computes a ground-truth local SCR from the input image and applies a differentiable modulation to the soft-IoU learning signal, emphasizing low-visibility targets while preserving stable optimization and identical inference behavior. REEM is integrated into a U-Net-based MSHNet without introducing additional parameters, architectural modifications, or inference-time overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over the baseline, achieving higher IoU and detection probability (Pd) together with substantially reduced false alarms (FA), particularly under challenging low-visibility conditions. These results suggest that SCR-guided difficulty-aware optimization provides an effective and physically grounded complement to conventional overlap-based objectives for infrared small target detection. The code is available at https://github. com/yall-in-one/Reemm.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

From Task-Guided Conversational Graphs to Goal-Oriented Dialogue Runtimes

Graph and multi-agent orchestration frameworks make production large language model (LLM) workflows practical, but they do not by themselves solve conversational continuity when users maintain several interdependent objectives. This conceptual systems paper focuses on the high-complexity end of that design space, where goals can be suspended, resumed, revised, and invalidated by actions in other goals. We introduce the Goal-Oriented Dialogue Runtime (GODR), a framework-neutral design pattern that treats goals, task frames, lifecycle state, invalidation rules, and resumption contracts as first-class runtime objects while delegating bounded execution to graph runtimes, agents, tools, or application programming interfaces (APIs). GODR is not proposed as a replacement for workflow graphs in simple guided processes; it is intended for complex, multi-domain, interruptible conversations where objective continuity cannot be recovered reliably from agent identity, chat history, or execution-graph position alone. The paper formalizes the problem, proposes runtime objects and architecture-selection criteria, and frames evaluation as an agenda for future empirical validation rather than as a measured performance claim.