Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15485

The Perils of Agency: How Developers Perceive, Prioritize, and Address Risks in Agentic AI Products

Authors:

Hao-Ping Lee↗Jessica He↗David Piorkowski↗Thomas Serban von Davier↗Jodi Forlizzi↗Sauvik Das↗

arXiv:2606.15485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems act autonomously, use tools, adapt to context, and operate in complex real-world environments. However, these same characteristics can create or exacerbate product risks. We studied how industry developers (n=35) perceive, prioritize, and address the risks in their agentic AI products. We found that developers' perceptions of risk were closely tied to the qualities that made the product agentic, such as autonomy, tool use, and usage in a real-world context. Developers prioritized product and business risks before considering downstream societal risks like job displacement and end-user privacy. This prioritization also impacted developers' ability and motivation to mitigate agentic risks. Finally, developers lacked mature controls for containing agentic risks, often relying on constraining the same characteristics that make agents useful: e.g., autonomy and goal complexity. These findings reveal a capability vs. risk control tension in agentic AI development: developers need to address risks that emerge from agentic capabilities, yet they currently have limited support for doing so without constraining agentic functionality.

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12147

Towards Responsibly Non-Compliant Machines

Authors:

Marija Slavkovik↗Marie Farrell↗Louise Dennis↗Michael Fisher↗Simon Kolker↗Emily C. Collins↗

arXiv:2606.12147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider the problem of engineering autonomous intelligent agents that are capable to responsibly not comply with user requests. We argue that machine non-compliance comes in many different forms, and sketch the issues we should pursue on the road of accomplishing responsibly non-compliant intelligent machines. We anchor responsible non-compliance in justifications for task refusal, pathways to override the non-compliance, as well as careful tracking of security risks and liability transfers.

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03.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-09 DOI: HASH:6e64ad01d2b6fc2b841053c821a4122c

Don’t compete, collaborate: why collective funding applications are the future

Authors:

Sajedeh Rasti↗

Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them. Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them.

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04.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17445

Toward Controllable Catalyst Inverse Design via Large-Scale Autoregressive Pretraining

Authors:

Dong Hyeon Mok↗Jonggeol Na↗Seoin Back↗

arXiv:2606.17445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inverse design of heterogeneous catalysts remains challenging because catalyst surfaces exhibit substantial structural complexity with coupled surface-adsorbate interactions across a vast chemical space that is difficult to explore efficiently through conventional screening alone. Although machine learning-based high-throughput screening has accelerated catalyst discovery, its efficiency inevitably declines as the search space grows, motivating the development of generative models that can directly construct catalysts with target properties. Here, we present a conditional catalyst generative model based on the Generative Pretrained Transformer architecture with a numerical embedding layer that enables the generation of catalyst structures conditioned on both categorical and continuous properties within a single autoregressive framework. The model was pretrained on 133 million catalyst structures and subsequently fine-tuned on approximately 460,000 optimized structures with associated categorical properties and binding energies for conditional generation. The resulting model achieved 98% structural validity, 95% optimization validity, and high categorical condition fidelity, with a 93 % joint match rate for adsorbate type and composition. For binding energy conditioning, the match rate of approximately 20% represents a four-fold improvement over the baseline training distribution, and the generated distributions shift systematically toward the target values, enabling a 1.5 to 4-fold improvement in screening efficiency for reaction-targeted catalyst discovery without additional fine-tuning. These results show that large-scale autoregressive pre-training, combined with explicit property conditioning, provides a practical route toward controllable catalyst generation and accelerated catalysts discovery.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2605.29179

Sustainable Metal-Organic Framework Water Harvesters in the Artificial Intelligence Era

Authors:

Reid A. Coyle↗Shyam Chand Pal↗Peter Walther↗Saeun Park↗Bin Feng↗Zhiling Zheng↗

arXiv:2605.29179v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are excellent candidates for water harvesting due to their tunable pore environments, which can be precisely engineered to capture and release water in arid conditions. Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into MOF discovery can further accelerate the design of high-performance sorbents by identifying structural features that enhance atmospheric water harvesting (AWH), stability, and cycling efficiency. In this Perspective, we examine key MOF design principles, including cooperative adsorption, operational relative humidity (RH), uptake capacity, hysteresis, and scalability. We highlight recent design advancements such as multivariate strategies and long-arm linker extension, and examine how these principles tune pore capacity and hydrophilicity, while preserving stability and crystallinity. Furthermore, we discuss how AI, large language models (LLMs), and data mining can accelerate the discovery process through predictive synthesis, inverse design, and elucidating synthesis-structure-property relationships for the next generation of MOF water harvesters.

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06.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2502.13889

On the Addressability Problem on CSS Codes

Authors:

J\'er\^ome Guyot↗Samuel Jaques↗

arXiv:2502.13889v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent discoveries in asymptotically good quantum codes have intensified research on their application in quantum computation and fault-tolerant operations. This study focuses on the addressability problem within CSS codes: we ask what circuits might implement logical gates on strict subsets of logical qubits. With some notion of fault-tolerance, we prove several impossibility results: for CSS codes with non-zero rate, one cannot address a logical $H$, $HS$, $SH$, or $\mathsf{CNOT}$ to any non-empty strict subset of logical qubits using a circuit made only from 1-local Clifford gates. Furthermore, we show that one cannot permute the logical qubits in a code purely by permuting the physical qubits, if the rate of the code is (asymptotically) greater than 1/3 and the distance is at least 3. We can show a similar no-go result for $\mathsf{CNOT}$s and $\mathsf{CZ}$s between two such high-rate codes, albeit under a more restrictive assumption on the circuit, which we call "global" (though recent addressable CCZ gates use global circuits). This work pioneers the study of distance-preserving addressability in quantum codes, mainly by considering automorphisms of the code. This perspective offers new insights and potential directions for future research. We argue that studying this trade off between addressability and efficiency of the codes is essential to understand better how to do efficient quantum computation.

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07.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2602.06774

Towards Understanding What State Space Models Learn About Code

Authors:

Jiali Wu↗Abhinav Anand↗Shweta Verma↗Mira Mezini↗

arXiv:2602.06774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as an efficient alternative to the Transformer architecture. Prior work shows that, when trained under comparable conditions, SSMs can match or surpass Transformers on code understanding tasks. However, their internal mechanisms remain a black box. We present the first systematic analysis of what SSM-based code models learn along with the direct comparison between SSM and Transformer models in this domain. Our analysis shows that SSMs capture syntactic and semantic structure more effectively than Transformers during pretraining but forgets certain relations during fine-tuning on some tasks. To investigate this behavior, we introduce SSM-Interpret, a frequency-domain framework that exposes a spectral shift toward short-range dependencies during fine-tuning. Guided by these findings, we propose architectural modifications that significantly improve the performance of SSM-based code model by upto +6 MRR on NLCodeSearch. This demonstrates that our analysis not only explains model behavior but also leads directly to better designs.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25174

An iterative energy-based multimodal transformer for joint retrieval of wheat soil moisture, leaf area index, and plant height from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 time series

Authors:

Shubham Kumar Singh↗Peilei Fan↗Suraj A. Yadav↗Rajendra Prasad↗Prashant K Srivastava↗

Field-scale retrieval of surface soil moisture (SM), leaf area index (LAI), and plant height (PH) is essential for precision agriculture, yet it remains an ill-posed inverse problem. Concurrent variations in soil moisture and canopy density generate substantial ambiguities in radar backscatter and spectral responses, which reduces the effectiveness of traditional feedforward regression models in heterogeneous smallholder cropping systems. This study presents the Iterative Energy-Based Transformer (iEBT) for the joint retrieval of coupled soil-canopy states from Sentinel-1 C-band SAR and Sentinel-2 multispectral time series. Instead of direct regression, iEBT embeds multi-modal predictors within a shared sequence, produces an initial state estimate, and iteratively updates the target [SM, LAI, PH] vector through normalized gradient descent to minimize a learned scalar compatibility energy function. Using 700 quality-controlled field measurements from Varanasi, India, iEBT achieved the highest learned-model performance on the random test split, with a four-seed mean R^2 of 0.854 \pm 0.012 (R_SM^2 = 0.841, R_LAI^2 = 0.905, R_PH^2 = 0.821). WCM and PROSAIL were retained as physically interpretable SAR and optical reference models for comparison. Modality ablations confirmed that Sentinel-1 drives SM retrieval, while Sentinel-2 dominates LAI, whereas PH relies on combined structural-phenological signatures. Crucially, the model's terminal energy functions as an uncalibrated post-retrieval quality diagnostic; screening the 10% highest-energy samples markedly reduced target level root-mean-square errors. While leave-one-campaign-out validation highlights persistent cross-season domain shift challenges due to localized management variations, compatibility-guided multimodal fusion offers a structured self-diagnostic path toward reliable biophysical parameter estimation

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09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17340

Geometry-Consistent Endoscopic Representations for Image-Guided Navigation via Structured Foundation Model Adaptation

Authors:

Hongchao Shu↗Roger D. Soberanis-Mukul↗Hao Ding↗Morgan Ringel↗Mali Shen↗Saif Iftekar Sayed↗Hedyeh Rafii-Tari↗Mathias Unberath↗

Accurate vision-based navigation in monocular endoscopy is difficult due to limited depth cues, weak tissue texture, non-rigid deformation, and substantial appearance variation across domains, all of which complicate pose estimation, depth prediction, and image-to-anatomy alignment. Although recent vision foundation models have shown promise, their learned representations often remain insufficiently geometry-consistent, hindering stable feature correspondence and limiting their reliability for downstream navigation tasks. We propose a unified framework for learning geometry-consistent and domain-robust image representations for monocular endoscopy. The framework combines a synthetic data pipeline that provides accurate geometric supervision with Hierarchy-Aware Geometry-Semantic Adaptation, a structured alternative to standard LoRA that inserts low-rank adapters selectively across the transformer hierarchy and couples them with layer-wise training objectives to encourage geometric correspondence in intermediate features and semantic consistency in deeper features. Experiments on public and proprietary datasets show improved geometric and semantic representation quality, leading to better performance on downstream navigation tasks including pose estimation and monocular depth estimation. The learned representations show favorable synthetic-to-real transfer on clinical bronchoscopy and provide a useful initialization for adaptation to sinus endoscopy and colonoscopy under limited supervision. The framework also shows favorable scaling with model size and training data. These results support hierarchy-aware, geometry-guided adaptation as a practical approach for endoscopic representation learning.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14803

HSQ-VLM: A Novel Spatially-Constrained Quadrant Segmentation VLM Model for Explainability in Diabetic Retinopathy

Authors:

Shivum Telang↗

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is an aggressive retinal disease and a leading cause of global blindness, yet its clinical management is currently hindered by the black-box nature of diagnostic AI. While deep learning models achieve high classification accuracy, there is a critical lack of explainability methods capable of detailing the exact anatomical landmarks and lesion distributions that lead to a clinical decision for DR. Therefore, we propose HSQ-VLM, a novel quadrant segmentation pipeline on fundus images that utilizes a Landmark-Anchored Cartesian Cross-Attention mechanism to unify visual feature extraction with structured clinical reasoning. Unlike traditional methods that rely on arbitrary image partitioning, our pipeline implements 4-quadrant Topological Latent Partitioning (TLP) to dynamically align retinal features with a fovea-centered coordinate system. This allows the Vision-Language Model to generate natural language reports that quantify pathology with anatomical precision. On a dataset of 3,500 high-resolution fundus images, this innovative methodology achieved a lesion detection sensitivity of 99.6% for hemorrhages and 96.4% for microaneurysms, while demonstrating a significant reduction in boundary-ambiguity errors compared to standard segmentation baselines.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20523

SARLO-80: Worldwide Slant SAR Language Optic Dataset 80cm

Authors:

Sol\`ene Debuys\`ere↗Nicolas Trouv\'e↗Nathan Letheule↗Elise Colin↗Georgia Channing↗

arXiv:2606.20523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal foundation models have advanced rapidly thanks to large optical benchmarks, but comparable resources for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remain limited. Existing SAR–optical datasets largely rely on low-resolution, intensity-only Ground Range Detected~(GRD) products and do not preserve complex-valued SAR measurements or native acquisition geometry, which restricts physically grounded multimodal learning. In particular, large-scale public datasets combining very-high-resolution (VHR) SAR SLC, aligned optical imagery, and natural-language descriptions are still lacking. We present a VHR SAR–optical–text dataset built from open-access Umbra spotlight acquisitions distributed as Sensor Independent Complex Data (SICD). From around 2,500 worldwide scenes (VV/HH, 20cm–2m native resolution), we standardize all SAR data to an 80cm slant-range grid via band-limited FFT resampling and tile the imagery into 1024 by 1024 patches. For each SAR patch, we retrieve a high-resolution optical tile and warp it into the SAR grid using local coordinate correspondences for local pixel-level alignment. We further generate three caption variants (SHORT/MID/LONG) per sample to support vision–language training and evaluation. Our dataset contains 119,566 triplets (complex and amplitude slant-range SAR patch, aligned optical patch, natural-language description) covering 257 locations across 72 countries and a broad range of land types and infrastructures. We release fixed train/validation/test splits and the full preprocessing and baseline code to enable reproducible benchmarks for multimodal alignment on cross-modal retrieval and conditional generation in native SAR geometry. The dataset is publicly available on the Hugging Face Hub at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ONERA/SARLO-80.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12620

HybridCodeAuthorship: A Benchmark Dataset for Line-Level Code Authorship Detection

Authors:

Luke Patterson↗Li Wang↗Adam Faulkner↗

arXiv:2606.12620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Thanks to the rapid adoption of AI code assistants powered by large language models (LLMs), industry codebases are, increasingly, a hybrid of AI- and human-authored code. For risk management and productivity analysis purposes, it is crucial to enable fine-grained location detection of AI-generated code. To develop algorithms for this task, quality benchmarks are needed to assess performance. However, existing benchmarks tend to comprise academic, LeetCode-style problems and presume a code snippet is either completely human-authored or completely AI-authored, which is not reflective of the diverse intents and styles of industry codebases utilizing AI code assistants. To fill these gaps, we introduce HybridCodeAuthorship, a novel benchmark of Python code files with interleaved human- and AI-authored lines of code to simulate authentic utilization of AI code assistants. In this paper, we first present our dataset construction pipeline, which leverages CodeSearchNet, a massive collection of links to open sourced repositories on GitHub. We then benchmark the performance of two state-of-the-art AI-generated code detection algorithms at both the line- and chunk-level. Experimental results demonstrate that HybridCodeAuthorship is a challenging benchmark with a top-scoring algorithm, AIGCode Detector, obtaining a highest F1 score of 0.48 and 0.56 on chunk-level and line-level code detection tasks, respectively.

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13.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13383

Beyond the Unruh vacuum: multi-time correlations in black hole collapse and evaporation

Authors:

Konstantinos Xenos↗Charis Anastopoulos↗Andreas F. Terzis↗

arXiv:2606.13383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The black hole information paradox originates from the thermal character of Hawking radiation, which appears to erase information about the collapsing matter. However, thermality constrains only observables defined at a single time and leaves the structure of temporal quantum correlations largely unexplored. Here we show that multi-time quantum-field correlations provide a concrete mechanism for the survival of pre-collapse information in black hole evaporation. Using a two-dimensional model of gravitational collapse and evaporation, we demonstrate that late-time multi-time correlations are not fully reproduced by the Unruh vacuum. In particular, they contain a contribution that depends explicitly on parameters characterizing the pre-collapse state, despite the thermal character of the asymptotic radiation. Our results identify measurable multi-time correlations as carriers of information in Hawking radiation and suggest that formulations of the black hole information paradox based solely on single-time observables are incomplete.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25606

Expresso-AI: Explainable Video-Based Deep Learning Models for Depression Diagnosis

Authors:

Felipe Moreno↗Sharifa Alghowinem↗Hae Won Park↗Cynthia Breazeal↗

Given the widespread prevalence of depression and its consequential impact on individuals and society, it is crucial to obtain objective measures for early diagnosis and intervention. As a multidisciplinary topic, these objective measures should be interpretable and accessible to health care professionals, ensuring effective collaboration and treatment planning in the realm of mental health care. Even though current automated depression diagnosis approaches improved over the last decade, a critical gap exists as they often lack affect-specificity and interpretability, limiting their practical application and potential impact on mental health care. In particular, interpretability from temporal activities from videos when deep models are used is not fully explored. In this study, we present a novel framework for analyzing Deep Neural Networks' decisions when trained on facial videos, specifically focusing on automatic depression severity diagnosis. By fine-tuning Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) pre-trained on Action Recognition datasets on depression severity facial videos from AVEC depression dataset, our framework is able to interpret the model's saliency maps by examining face regions and temporal expression semantics. Our approach generates both visual and quantitative explanations for the model's decisions, providing greater insight into its reasoning. In addition to this interpretability, our video-based modeling has improved upon previous single-face benchmarks for visual depression diagnosis, resulting in enhanced predictive performance. Overall, our work demonstrates the successful development of a framework capable of generating hypotheses from a facial model's decisions while simultaneously improving depression's predictive capabilities.

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15.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:01d138e34909a39376400ff9f3f9d9ea

Hyperlipidemia Pharmacotherapy in Skilled Nursing Facilities: A Real-World Evidence Study

Authors:

Ashraf↗Mathers↗K. E↗Wagner↗Saumur↗

Objectives: To estimate hyperlipidemia medication order prevalence and associated variables in U.S. skilled nursing facility (SNF) residents. Design: Retrospective, observational study. Setting and Participants: Electronic Health Record data from 447,080 SNF residents with a hyperlipidemia diagnosis identified in PointClickCare's Life Sciences clinical database (January-April 2025) were reviewed. Methods: The presence and absence of medication orders for hyperlipidemia treatments recommended by the American Heart Association were assessed. Descriptive analyses summarized demographic and clinical characteristics, and a modified Poisson regression model was used to estimate risk ratios for having a medication order, adjusting for demographic, clinical, and facility characteristics. Results: Overall, 83.3% of residents diagnosed with hyperlipidemia had at least one hyperlipidemia medication order. Statins were ordered by 96.2% of active order residents, while other medication classes i.e., omega-3 fatty acids, cholesterol absorption inhibitors, fibrates were less common (

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16.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2603.01696

Cross-modal Identity Mapping: Minimizing Information Loss in Modality Conversion via Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Haonan Jia↗Shichao Dong↗Xin Dong↗Zenghui Sun↗Jin Wang↗Jinsong Lan↗Xiaoyong Zhu↗Bo Zheng↗Kaifu Zhang↗

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often omit or misrepresent critical visual content in generated image captions. Minimizing such information loss will force LVLMs to focus on image details to generate precise descriptions. However, measuring information loss during modality conversion is inherently challenging due to the modal gap between visual content and text output. In this paper, we argue that the quality of an image caption is positively correlated with the similarity between images retrieved via text search using that caption. Based on this insight, we further propose Cross-modal Identity Mapping (CIM), a reinforcement learning framework that enhances image captioning without requiring additional annotations. Specifically, the method quantitatively evaluates the information loss from two perspectives: Gallery Representation Consistency and Query-gallery Image Relevance. Supervised under these metrics, LVLM minimizes information loss and aims to achieve identity mapping from images to captions. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method in image captioning, even when compared with Supervised Fine-Tuning. Particularly, on the COCO-LN500 benchmark, CIM achieves a 20% improvement in relation reasoning on Qwen2.5-VL-7B.

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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2512.02080

The 4/$\delta$ Bound: Designing Predictable LLM-Verifier Systems for Formal Method Guarantee

Authors:

Pierre Dantas↗Lucas Cordeiro↗Youcheng Sun↗Waldir Junior↗

arXiv:2512.02080v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The integration of Formal Verification tools with Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a path to scale software verification beyond manual workflows. However, current methods remain unreliable: without a solid theoretical footing, the refinement process acts as a black box that may oscillate, loop, or diverge. This work bridges this critical gap by developing an LLM-Verifier Convergence Theorem, providing the first formal framework with provable guarantees for termination in multi-stage verification pipelines. We model the interaction not as a generic loop, but as a sequential absorbing Markov Chain comprising four essential engineering stages: \texttt{CodeGen}, \texttt{Compilation}, \texttt{InvariantSynth}, and \texttt{SMTSolving}. We prove that for any non-zero stage success probability ($\delta > 0$), the system reaches the \texttt{Verified} state almost surely. Furthermore, because of the sequential nature of the pipeline, we derive a precise latency bound of $\mathbb{E}[n] \leq 4/\delta$. We stress-tested this prediction in an extensive empirical campaign comprising over 90,000 trials. The results match the theory with striking consistency: every run reached verification, and the empirical convergence factor clustered tightly around $C_f\approx 1.0$, confirming that the $4/\delta$ bound accurately mirrors system behavior rather than serving as a loose buffer. Based on this data, we identify three distinct operating zones – marginal, practical, and high-performance – and propose a dynamic calibration strategy to handle parameter drift in real-world environments. Together, these contributions replace heuristic guesswork with a rigorous architectural foundation, enabling predictable resource planning and performance budgeting for safety-critical software.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2509.22020

Task-Adaptive Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Weather Foundation Models

Authors:

Shilei Cao↗Hehai Lin↗Jiashun Cheng↗Yang Liu↗Guowen Li↗Xuehe Wang↗Juepeng Zheng↗Haoyuan Liang↗Meng Jin↗Chengwei Qin↗Hong Cheng↗Haohuan Fu↗…

arXiv:2509.22020v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While recent advances in machine learning have equipped Weather Foundation Models (WFMs) with substantial generalization capabilities across diverse downstream tasks, the escalating computational requirements associated with their expanding scale increasingly hinder practical deployment. Current Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, designed for vision or language tasks, fail to address the unique challenges of weather downstream tasks, such as variable heterogeneity, resolution diversity, and spatiotemporal coverage variations, leading to suboptimal performance when applied to WFMs. To bridge this gap, we introduce WeatherPEFT, a novel PEFT framework for WFMs incorporating two synergistic innovations. First, during the forward pass, Task-Adaptive Dynamic Prompting (TADP) dynamically injects the embedding weights within the encoder to the input tokens of the pre-trained backbone via internal and external pattern extraction, enabling context-aware feature recalibration for specific downstream tasks. Furthermore, during backpropagation, Stochastic Fisher-Guided Adaptive Selection (SFAS) not only leverages Fisher information to identify and update the most task-critical parameters, thereby preserving invariant pre-trained knowledge, but also introduces randomness to stabilize the selection. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of WeatherPEFT on three downstream tasks, where existing PEFT methods show significant gaps versus Full-Tuning, and WeatherPEFT achieves performance parity with Full-Tuning using fewer trainable parameters. The code of this work is available at https://github.com/ShileiCao/WeatherPEFT.

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19.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.09022

Steady-State Approximation Error of Heterogeneous Mean-Field Models

Authors:

Lei Ying↗

arXiv:2606.09022v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper studies heterogeneous mean-field models in which agent parameters are sampled from a population distribution. We establish an $O(1/M)$ bound on the steady-state mean-square error between the occupancy measure of the $M$-agent system and the corresponding annealed mean-field equilibrium. The analysis extends Stein's method for homogeneous mean-field models and reveals a fundamental difference between homogeneous and heterogeneous systems. While stability of the mean-field dynamics is sufficient in the homogeneous setting, heterogeneous systems further require uniform robustness of the occupancy dynamics with respect to perturbations of the initial condition. The results are illustrated through a heterogeneous SIS epidemic model.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.22183

Action with Visual Primitives

Authors:

Weilong Guo↗Yuchen Wang↗Renping Zhou↗Yunfeng Zhang↗Rui Fang↗Yuyang Pang↗Wenda Xu↗Gao Huang↗

arXiv:2605.22183v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation. A common design in current architectures maps language instructions and visual observations to actions in a single forward pass. While conceptually simple, this formulation entangles instruction comprehension, spatial scene understanding, and motor control within a single learning objective. As a result, the action expert must implicitly relearn cognitive and perceptual capabilities already present in the pretrained VLM, which can limit both learning efficiency and generalization. We introduce AVP (Action with Visual Primitives), an end-to-end architecture that implements this visual-primitive-centric interface: the VLM infers the next-stage target and emits visual-primitive tokens that condition a flow-matching action expert, with supervision derived from end-effector kinematics. Real-robot experiments on general pick-and-place tasks show that AVP improves the success rate by 37.04% over pi_0.5 and outperforms other recent methods, with consistent gains in data efficiency, spatial-compositional generalization, and object-level transfer.

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21.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14600

LoSoNA: A Benchmark for Local Social Norm Adaptation in Group Conversations

Authors:

Mateusz Winiarek↗Maksymilian Bilski↗Mateusz Jacniacki↗

Online group chats are social spaces with local conversational norms that are rarely stated explicitly. The ability and willingness of LLM-based agents to recognize and adapt to these norms remains mostly unexplored. We introduce LoSoNA, a benchmark for local social norm adaptation in multi-party chat. Each scenario gives a subject model a curated group-chat transcript in which non-subject participants demonstrate a hidden local norm, followed by a final elicitor turn that forces a response revealing whether the subject has inferred that norm. We evaluate eight frontier and open-weight models under four prompting conditions that vary how explicitly the model is told to treat the prior conversation as evidence for how it should answer. Naive prompting remains limited for most models; explicit norm-aware prompting helps unevenly, with Gemini 3.1 Pro reaching $84.2\%$ and Claude Fable 5 reaching $81.6\%$, while several other models show small gains or regressions. LoSoNA contributes to recent calls for evaluating LLM social capabilities by testing whether models can infer local conversational norms from precedent and use them in a one-turn group-chat response.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12502

A Mathematical Theory of Value: a synthesis on goal-directed agency under resource constraints

Authors:

Cheng Qian↗

arXiv:2606.12502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose that value – the quantity goal-directed agents create, destroy, and exchange – is a lawful structural quantity in the same category as information. Following Shannon's method, we make one ruthless abstraction: value is the rate at which an agent converts a resource into goal-progress, relative to a frame fixed by its goal. A scale-invariance axiom forces a logarithmic measure, $V=\sum_i k_i \ln e_i$; compounding of a reinvested resource forces the same form via the ergodicity argument of Peters (2019). The two routes are kin rather than independent; their agreement is a consistency check, not an over-determination. We derive a coding theorem of value: $\Delta G \le I(X;Y)$, achieved by Bayes-proportional allocation; realized value decomposes as $G=D(q\|r)-D(q\|p)$, identifying misalignment with measurable waste. For populations, value is frame-relative while price is frame-independent; a fleet that pools its resource and fuses its perception inherits the ceiling $G_{\mathrm{fleet}} \le I(X;Y_{1:m}) \le H(X)$ (a corollary; an earlier sum-form claim was wrong and is corrected in v5). A dynamical layer yields an is/ought asymmetry from which alignment emerges as a control-stability condition with a closed-form residual. We test the single-frame laws on live language models in a pre-registered scale-up: perception mutual information tracks realized capability rather than parameter count (Spearman $\rho = 0.977$ pooled over 30 model$\times$domain points), out-of-sample $\Delta G$ tracks $I(X;Y)$, and over-confidence is measurable dissipation; a further pre-registered test shows the bridge is shape-invariant across four task shapes ($n=42$, slope 0.953). None of the mechanisms is individually new – generalized Kelly, Armstrong & Mindermann (2018), classical control; the contribution is their unification and the governance mapping (incentive design over oversight) that follows.

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23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20115

When Calibration Fails the Vulnerable Hospital: Federated Conformal Risk Control via Risk-Curve Shrinkage

Authors:

Nafis Fuad Shahid↗

arXiv:2606.20115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conformal risk control (CRC) provides distribution-free guarantees on segmentation quality by calibrating a prediction-set threshold on held-out data. In federated deployments, the standard approach pools calibration scores across sites into a single threshold. We provide the first quantification, on real multi-institutional brain tumor data (FeTS-2022, 1,251 subjects, 20 institutions), showing that this naive pooled CRC protects the average hospital but violates coverage at 40% of individual institutions, with the worst site exceeding the target false-negative rate by 7.8 percentage points. The naive alternative, per-site local CRC, largely restores coverage but inflates prediction sets by 83x, rendering them clinically useless. We propose a shrinkage-based federated CRC protocol: each site transmits only its empirical risk curve (G scalars) to a server, which computes a shrinkage-regularized threshold per site. A single hyperparameter n0 smoothly trades worst-case coverage for prediction-set efficiency; leave-one-site-out sensitivity analysis identifies n0=19, achieving 2.7/20 violations at 2.0x stretch. We further show that direct Lagrangian optimization of coverage budgets fails, concentrating risk on vulnerable hospitals, and that the finite-sample correction term is essential: removing it triples violations. The marginal CRC guarantee is preserved by construction under the stated site-mixture assumption; per-site coverage is validated across four targets with three seeds. No patient-level images, masks, or per-volume scores leave any site.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12608

Shopping Reasoning Bench: An Expert-Authored Benchmark for Multi-Turn Conversational Shopping Assistants

Authors:

Shuxian Fan↗Seonwoo Min↗Youna Hu↗Botao Xia↗Jayakrishnan Unnikrishnan↗Rowan Musselmann↗Yifan Gao↗Qingyu Yin↗Priyanka Nigam↗Bing Yin↗

Conversational shopping assistants now serve hundreds of millions of customers, yet no existing benchmark jointly evaluates the open-ended multi-turn reasoning, domain expertise, and criterion-level quality that real shopping conversations demand. Shopping reasoning is unique among language model applications. Unlike factual question answering or verifiable code generation, it requires balancing subjective preferences, budget constraints, and cross-product trade-offs across multi-turn dialogue, capabilities absent from previous e-commerce and general-purpose benchmarks. We introduce the Shopping Reasoning Bench, an expert-authored benchmark of 525 missions (232 single-turn, 293 multi-turn) with 10863 importance-weighted binary rubrics authored by retail domain experts. These criteria are organized under a taxonomy of five reasoning categories and fifteen subcategories covering diverse demands such as preference refinement, trade-off analysis, and compatibility assessment. An evaluation of nine models across three families (GPT, Claude, Gemini) shows that pass rates reach only 57–77% overall. On multi-turn missions, all models score 13–29 points lower on optional above-and-beyond criteria than on required ones, and performance degrades 4–18 points as conversations progress. These gaps show that current models handle basic shopping assistance but fall short of expert-level advice, making Shopping Reasoning Bench a challenging testbed for future shopping assistant development.

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25.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2604.07257

Quantifying and detecting quantum-state texture

Authors:

Xiangyu Chen↗Qiang Lei↗

arXiv:2604.07257v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum-state texture is a recently proposed quantum resource that characterizes the inhomogeneity of a quantum state's matrix element distribution in the computational basis, enriching our understanding of quantum state structure. To expand its quantification toolkit and establish detection methods, in this article, we investigate the resource theory of texture from both quantitative and detection perspectives. First, we construct a texture measure $\mathcal{T}^{GR}_{\alpha,z}(\rho)$ based on the $\alpha$-$z$ Rényi relative entropy and present some of its inherent properties. Second, we analyze the mathematical relationships between several existing texture measures, revealing connections among different quantifiers. Finally, drawing on the witness concept from other resource theories, we systematically introduce texture witnesses into the texture theory and provide examples of texture witnesses with special properties.

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