Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16415

Posterior Twins: Distributional Behavioral Simulation for Enterprise Decisions

Authors:

Ankit Das↗

arXiv:2606.16415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enterprise behavioral simulation requires more than producing a plausible response. Many decisions depend on the shape of a population under a proposed action: which segments accept, defect, hesitate, or move into risk-sensitive states. This paper introduces Posterior Twins, a memory-grounded digital-twin approach that represents likely behavior as an updated distribution under a specific decision context. We evaluate a family of Twinning Labs behavioral-model operating points on a 226-example held-out behavioral-response benchmark and report both modal accuracy and Wasserstein-1 distance. The results show that modal accuracy and distributional fidelity identify different operating regimes. TL-Twin Alpha achieves the lowest observed Wasserstein-1 distance in the reported result set ($W_1 = 1.16$), while TL-Twin Delta and TL-Twin Gamma provide balanced operating points near the modal-accuracy frontier. The paper frames these results as a systems result: governed memory, behavioral model routing, scenario orchestration, distributional aggregation, and auditability are necessary for turning simulated behavior into reusable enterprise decision evidence.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13808

The Culture Funnel: You Can't Align What isn't in the Data

Authors:

Ananya Sahu↗Mehrnaz Mofakhami↗Daniel D'Souza↗Thomas Euyang↗Julia Kreutzer↗Marzieh Fadaee↗

Current cultural alignment approaches focus on inference-time interventions, assuming models already contain sufficient cultural knowledge. We argue modern LLM pipelines suffer from a cultural data funnel. Using a multidimensional tagging framework across pretraining, fine-tuning, alignment, and reasoning datasets, we show explicit cultural signals decline sharply during post-training, while geographically concentrated, task-specialized data dominates. Multilinguality enhances geographic diversity of cultural knowledge but does not ensure balanced representation. Our tags improve downstream cultural benchmark performance, demonstrating that advances require shifting focus in training data pipelines. To facilitate future research, we release our culturally tagged dataset with 5.6M samples at https://huggingface.co/datasets/CohereLabs/CultureMarkers.

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03.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18183

A Diffusion Approximation for Temporal-Difference Learning with Linear Features under Markovian Noise

Authors:

M. Forzo↗E. Monzio Compagnoni↗A. Russo↗A. Pacchiano↗

arXiv:2606.18183v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation is a core method for policy evaluation. Its classical continuous-time description is an ordinary differential equation (ODE), which captures the asymptotic mean dynamics but neglects stochastic fluctuations determining the error floor. We introduce a stochastic differential equation (SDE) approximation for linear TD(0) under Markovian noise. The resulting model distinguishes the contraction dynamics governed by the projected Bellman operator from the influence of Markovian sampling. As a consequence, the model explains the constant-stepsize error floor through the interaction between Markovian long-run covariance and the contraction geometry of the projected Bellman operator.

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04.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24 DOI: HASH:f2186605eb40ab0c8a153cfd5e28cba0

Durability and Seasonal Variation in the Effectiveness of Nirsevimab over Three Seasons in Connecticut

Authors:

Xu↗Aparicio-Llorente↗Warren↗Kennedy-Shaffer↗Pitzer↗V. E↗Weinberger↗D. M↗Oliveira↗C. R↗PROVE-ID Group Authors↗

Background Nirsevimab has been widely administered in the United States since 2023 to protect infants and young children from severe disease caused by respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Although early post-licensure studies have shown high effectiveness against medically attended RSV infection, uncertainty remains about the durability of protection, effectiveness beyond the first RSV season, and the extent to which changing RSV seasonality influences real-world effectiveness. Objective To estimate the effectiveness of nirsevimab against medically attended RSV infection across three consecutive RSV seasons and to examine how effectiveness varies by season and time since immunization. Methods We conducted a test-negative case-control study utilizing electronic health records of infants and young children tested for RSV by polymerase chain reaction in outpatient and inpatient settings within the Yale New Haven Health System between October 1, 2023, and March 1, 2026. Effectiveness of nirsevimab was estimated using multivariable logistic regression, adjusting for age, weekly RSV activity, pre-existing risk factors, and other potential confounders. Variation in effectiveness was examined by season, encounter setting, and time since immunization up to 24 months. Results Overall, 17,755 infants and young children were tested for RSV infection, of whom 2,388 (13.4%) were cases and 15,367 (86.6%) were controls. The overall effectiveness of nirsevimab was 67.3% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 59.8, 73.3%) against all medically-attended RSV infections, 60.2% (95% CI: 49.6, 68.5%) against RSV-associated outpatient visits, and 88.9% (95% CI: 82.3, 93.0%) against RSV-associated hospitalization. Effectiveness against medically attended RSV infection declined across seasons, from 76.7% (95% CI: 60.5, 86.3%) in 2023/24 to 54.4% (95% CI: 33.0, 68.9%) in 2025/26. Lower season-specific effectiveness in later seasons corresponded with progressively delayed RSV activity over. Protection against RSV-associated hospitalization declined with increasing time since immunization, from 92.5% (95% credible interval [CrI]: 85.9, 96.4%) at 1 month, to 77.2% (95% CrI: 60.4, 87.6%) at 6 months, and 39.9% (95% CrI: 2.4, 63.3%) at 12 months post-immunization, after which effectiveness plateaued. Conclusions Nirsevimab remained effective against RSV-associated hospitalization through 6 to 12 months after immunization. Delayed RSV activity was associated with lower effectiveness, highlighting the importance of aligning administration with local RSV circulation.

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05.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2406.09852

Asymptotic behavior of some strongly critical decomposable 3-type Galton–Watson processes with immigration

Authors:

Matyas Barczy↗D\'aniel Bezd\'any↗

arXiv:2406.09852v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the asymptotic behavior of a critical decomposable 3-type Galton-Watson process with immigration when its offspring mean matrix is triangular with diagonal entries 1. It is proved that, under second or fourth order moment assumptions on the offspring and immigration distributions, a sequence of appropriately scaled random step processes formed from such a Galton-Watson process converges weakly. The limit process can be described using independent squared Bessel processes $({\mathcal X}_{t,1})_{t\geq0}$, $({\mathcal X}_{t,2})_{t\geq0}$, and $({\mathcal X}_{t,3})_{t\geq0}$, the linear combinations of the integral processes of $({\mathcal X}_{t,1})_{t\geq0}$ and $({\mathcal X}_{t,2})_{t\geq0}$, and possibly the 2-fold iterated integral process of $({\mathcal X}_{t,1})_{t\geq0}$. The presence of the 2-fold iterated integral process in the limit distribution is a new phenomenon in the description of asymptotic behavior of critical multi-type Galton-Watson processes with immigration. Our results complete and extend some results of Foster and Ney (1978) for some strongly critical decomposable 3-type Galton-Watson processes with immigration.

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06.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.24912

Velocity Prediction in Automatic Guitar Transcription

Authors:

Jackson Loth↗Xavier Riley↗Simon Dixon↗Emmanouil Benetos↗

arXiv:2606.24912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) models have achieved a high level of success in polyphonic transcription of various instruments. Velocity, typically a measure of note intensity, is less commonly predicted in these models due to the absence of velocity labels in available datasets and lack of a proper definition for instruments other than piano. We present a methodology and model for velocity prediction in Automatic Guitar Transcription (AGT) which uses virtual instruments to generate synthetic training data with velocity labels. We first pretrain a model on this synthetic data. These weights are then transferred to a different model and trained on real guitar audio, allowing the model to retain the working velocity prediction while also achieving high performance and generalisability from the real training data. The velocity prediction is shown to outperform a baseline model which does not use the pretrained velocity weights, when evaluated on synthetic data. In addition, using the pretrained velocity weights offers a small improvement in note transcription, though the magnitude of this improvement is limited and not always significant depending on the testing data. Overall the model achieves results comparable to the state of the art in guitar transcription, while also successfully predicting velocity.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18846

From Bounding Boxes to Visual Reasoning: An On-Policy Data Annotation Tool for Vision-Language Models

Authors:

Like Zhang↗Runliang Niu↗Shiqi Wang↗Xiyu Hu↗Qianli Xing↗Pan Wang↗Qingzu He↗Qi Wang↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) are rapidly advancing toward sophisticated grounded structured visual reasoning. Training models for such advanced capabilities demands a new genre of data that seamlessly unifies spatial coordinates, open-vocabulary descriptions, structured attributes, and topological relationships into a singular representation. However, existing data annotation tools fundamentally fail to meet these intricate demands, suffering from three systematic bottlenecks: limited expressiveness, severe annotation-training decoupling, and poor data reusability. To bridge this infrastructure gap, we introduce an open-source annotation tool, ScreenAnnotator. First, we define a unified annotation atom schema that binds spatial, semantic, and structural primitives into a single unit. Second, we implement an on-policy annotation loop embedded with a Bayesian Annotation Verifier (BAV). Finally, we design a template-driven multi-task data synthesis process dynamically transforms static atoms into diverse multi-dimensional reasoning tasks, eliminating redundant re-annotation. The on-policy loop drives the annotation accept rate to nearly 100% on flowcharts and 77% on GUI screenshots, while steadily reducing per-image annotation time as labeled data accumulate. In the flowchart scenario, fine-tuning a VLM yields 76.1% average accuracy, which is a 35.1% point absolute gain. Our code is available at: https://github.com/WnQinm/Annotator.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16847

Follow the Latent Roadmap: Navigating Revocable Decoding for Diffusion LLMs with Anchor Tokens

Authors:

Yizhen Yao↗Qinglin Zhu↗Runcong Zhao↗Xiangxiang Dai↗Yanzheng Xiang↗Yulan He↗Lin Gui↗

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer a promising avenue for parallel generation but face a trade-off between decoding speed and quality. While revocable decoding strategies attempt to mitigate errors by verifying and remasking tokens, they typically operate within a mixed-quality context. This leads to two critical failures: Error Propagation, where new tokens absorb toxic information from erroneous context, and Local Error Reinforcement, where errors mutually reinforce each other to evade detection. To alleviate these challenges, we propose ASRD (Anchor Supervised Revocable Decoding), a training-free framework that operates within the embedding space. ASRD explicitly decouples the decoding context into trusted Anchor Tokens, which are identified via temporal consistency, and uncertain candidates. Leveraging a dynamic Anchor Tokens Cache, we introduce two complementary mechanisms: (1) Anchor-Guided Generation, which injects entropy-weighted anchor signals into masked positions to implicitly rectify attention toward the reliable global skeleton; and (2) Anchor-Perturbed Verification, which applies orthogonal perturbations to uncertain candidate tokens, destabilizing and remasking errors driven by fragile local consensus. Extensive experiments on math and coding benchmarks demonstrate that ASRD outperforms recent remasking baselines, achieving accuracy improvements of up to 6.4\% while accelerating inference throughput by up to 7.2$\times$.

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09.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15596

Interplay of insurance and financial risks in a non Levy-Renewal environment

Authors:

Dimitrios G. Konstantinides↗Charalampos D. Passalidis↗

arXiv:2606.15596v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we consider a multivariate risk model, with common counting process and common process of logarithmic returns for the investment portfolio. We assume that the claim-vectors, the counting process and the logarithmic returns of the investment portfolio satisfy a weak dependence structure. Further, we consider that the counting process represents an inhomogeneous renewal process, and the logarithmic returns represent a cadlag process with independent but not necessarily stationary increments. Under these conditions we provide an asymptotic expression for the infinite-time entrance probability of the discounted aggregate claims into some rare set xA, where A denotes a set from a general set family, crucial for the actuarial practice, when the common distribution of the claim vectors belong to a multivariate heavy-tailed distribution class. This result, is derived under a moment condition for the financial risks, and underlines the multivariate linear single big jump principle. When we restrict the distribution class of the claim-vectors to multivariate regular variation, we find more explicit asymptotic expressions, weakening the moment conditions on the financial risks. The asymptotic formulas, derived through double dependence solution, become more direct and practical in applications. With respect to the technical part, due to non Levy-Renewal framework, the classical Kesten-Goldie theorems are not applicable, nor their extensions. The way we make the discretization of the process of the discounted aggregate claims permits to derive uniform asymptotics with respect to the number of summands, that facilitate the approximation of the infinite sums of the main results.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18780

SAMA: Semantic Anchor-aligned Augmentation for Unified Low-Resource Multimodal Information Extraction

Authors:

Quanjiang Guo↗Chong Mu↗Jiazhou Pan↗Ming Jia↗Ling Tian↗Hui Gao↗Zhao Kang↗

Multimodal Information Extraction (MIE)-covering tasks such as Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER), Relation Extraction (MRE), and Event Extraction (MEE)-is essential for understanding multimedia content but remains constrained by severe data scarcity. Although data augmentation is a promising remedy, existing approaches are impeded by coarse cross-modal alignment and fragmented, task-specific designs that fail to exploit shared semantic knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Semantic Anchor-aligned Multimodal Augmentation (SAMA), a unified framework for generating high-fidelity, task-aware synthetic data. SAMA constructs structured semantic anchors from ground-truth labels to guide a Collaborative Multi-Experts Multimodal Large Language Model (CME-MLLM), which integrates a Universal Adapter for shared semantics with Task-Specific Adapters to produce diverse yet constraint-compliant textual samples. For image synthesis, SAMA employs an Anchor-Preserving Diffusion mechanism that uses anchor-weighted prompts and latent conditioning to maintain critical semantic anchors while diversifying visual contexts. To eliminate the need for manual verification, SAMA further introduces a Dual-Constraint Filtering module that selects synthetic samples based on both cross-modal consistency and anchor fidelity. Extensive experiments across benchmark datasets for MNER, MRE, and MEE demonstrate that SAMA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art augmentation baselines under both fully supervised and low-resource settings, underscoring its versatility, robustness, and effectiveness.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15693

Imperfect Visual Verification for Code Edition : A Case Study on TikZ

Authors:

Charly Reux↗Mathieu Acher↗Djamel Eddine Khelladi↗Cl\'ement Quinton↗Olivier Barais↗

arXiv:2606.15693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs have significantly advanced code generation, enabling the synthesis of functional programs. While recent systems achieve strong performance on many coding benchmarks, tasks involving programs such as TikZ that generate visual artifacts remain challenging, in particular on visual code customization. Unlike generation from scratch, customization requires localized, semantics-preserving edits: the model must locate relevant code, modify it according to the instruction, and preserve the remaining structure and rendering. Approaches based on post-hoc iterative refinement/correction where a verifier provides feedback to guide corrections, have shown promise. However, in the case of programs with a visual outcome such as in TikZ, where correctness is harder or likely impossible to formalize and evaluate automatically, deterministic verifiers do not exist. Hence, developers can only rely on imperfect verifiers. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to answer:to what extent can iterative refinement remain effective when the verifier itself is unreliable?} We use TikZ as a focused case study that isolates the core difficulties of the problem (weak code structure, fine-grained visual semantics, and difficult feature localization) in a controlled and challenging setting. We define visual code customization as an iterative editing problem with an imperfect oracle, and introduce a framework for analyzing such iterative refinements. We conduct a large-scale study and evaluate multiple LLM-based and tool-augmented visual verifiers within iterative refinement pipelines, and perform extensive manual annotation of refinement trajectories to assess verifier behavior and feedback quality. Our findings show that even imperfect verifiers can determine with moderate accuracy whether visual instructions are applied to code, achieving F1-scores up to 0.815. Feedback improves iterative refinement, especially for weaker models, adding 11–20 perfect customizations for Qwen3-vl-30b-a3b-Instruct, while stronger models like Gemini-3 gain fewer improvements (+5) but benefit more from accurate verification that prevents premature acceptance. Feedback is effective only when it precisely identifies image issues, provides actionable guidance, addresses all relevant problems, and remains grounded in the original instruction.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16161

Multimodal LLM-Empowered Re-Ranking for Generalizable Person Re-Identification

Authors:

Jiachen Li↗Xiaojin Gong↗

Domain Generalizable (DG) person re-identification (Re-ID) has attracted growing research interest due to its potential for deployment in unseen real-world scenarios. Most existing approaches address DG Re-ID by focusing on training domain-generalizable encoders but ignore the possible refinements in inference stage. In contrast, this work explores an alternative direction which improves inference re-ranking to enhance DG Re-ID. Conventional re-ranking methods typically rely on neighborhood-based distances to refine the initial ranking list, inherently depending on features produced by the Re-ID encoder. However, they deteriorate on target domains since the encoder lacks sufficient generalizability to produce reliable feature distances on unseen scenarios. Inspired by the remarkable generalization capabilities of recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we propose an MLLM-empowered distance metric to improve re-ranking in DG Re-ID. Specifically, we first adapt an MLLM to Re-ID data through supervised fine-tuning, which incorporates a domain-agnostic prompt and a query-candidate hard mining scheme. Then, the adapted MLLM is employed to compute a $\mu$-distance during inference, which is robust to domain gap and significantly enhances subsequent re-ranking performance. Our approach is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into previous re-ranking frameworks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently yields substantial performance improvements across multiple DG Re-ID benchmarks. The code of this work will be released at https://github.com/RikoLi/MUSE soon.

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13.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2603.08558

Impact of Connectivity on Laplacian Representations in Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Tommaso Giorgi↗Pierriccardo Olivieri↗Keyue Jiang↗Laura Toni↗Matteo Papini↗

arXiv:2603.08558v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning compact state representations in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) has proven crucial for addressing the curse of dimensionality in large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) problems. Existing principled approaches leverage structural priors on the MDP by constructing state representations as linear combinations of the state-graph Laplacian eigenvectors. When the transition graph is unknown or the state space is prohibitively large, the graph spectral features can be estimated directly via sample trajectories. In this work, we prove an upper bound on the approximation error of linear value function approximation under the learned spectral features. We show how this error scales with the algebraic connectivity of the state-graph, grounding the approximation quality in the topological structure of the MDP. We further bound the error introduced by the eigenvector estimation itself, leading to an end-to-end error decomposition across the representation learning pipeline. Additionally, our expression of the Laplacian operator for the RL setting, although equivalent to existing ones, prevents some common misunderstandings, of which we show some examples from the literature. Our results hold for general (non-uniform) policies without any assumptions on the symmetry of the induced transition kernel. We validate our theoretical findings with numerical simulations on gridworld environments.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.10931

It Takes One to Bias Them All: Breaking Bad with One-Shot GRPO

Authors:

Naihao Deng↗Yilun Zhu↗Naichen Shi↗Clayton Scott↗Rada Mihalcea↗

Warning: This paper contains several toxic and offensive statements. Modern large language models (LLMs) are typically aligned through large-scale post-training to ensure fair and reliable behavior. In this work, we investigate how easily such guardrails can be broken by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We show that one-shot GRPO training on a single biased example is sufficient to induce systematic bias, with stereotype-driven reasoning generalizing across attributes, categories, and benchmarks. We further find that models differ in their susceptibility based on the initial likelihood of producing biased outputs. Our results reveal a critical vulnerability in post-training: alignment can be overridden by a single example.

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15.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:b2879555027a8a36b99a0407967c4b73

Modelling the decadal expansion of West Nile virus in Italy: the role of climatic, anthropogenic, and macroecological drivers

Authors:

Marcolin↗Bella↗Del Manso↗Dorigatti↗Pezzotti↗Poletti↗Riccardo↗Di Marco↗

Abstract BACKGROUND West Nile virus (WNV) is a growing health burden in Italy. Anticipating human infection risk is hampered by the pathogen's complex ecology, highlighting the need for comprehensive early-warning tools. AIM We aimed to model municipal-level WNV risk in Italy and characterize its decadal expansion in Italy, providing a comprehensive ecological understanding of viral emergence. METHODS We applied a machine learning framework to annual human WNV case data from 2014 to 2024. The model integrated a suite of environmental, socio-economic, and macroecological predictors to generate risk projections. We evaluated the model's performance through multiple validation settings. We also performed an anticipation test for the 2025 epidemic season, using 2024 environmental data to assess the model's predictive accuracy against observed 2025 human cases. RESULTS Our model achieved robust performance (True Skill Statistic > 0.4) and captured WNV progressive expansion from 184 predicted positive municipalities in 2014 to 2,012 in 2024 (an 11-fold increase in 11 years). Seasonal minimum temperature was the primary risk driver, followed by monitoring year and population density, indicating active spatial spread. Environmental suitability consistently preceded clinical detection. Municipalities with cases in 2023-2024 exhibited significantly higher predicted suitability during 2018-2022 than those without cases (average risk 0.58 vs 0.20). Our model successfully identified emerging risk hotspots along the Adriatic coast and southern Italy before the official human spillover of 2025. CONCLUSION Embedding macroecological drivers into WNV risk modelling provides an improved understanding of drivers of rapid WNV expansion. Our model enables proactive risk mapping, surveillance efforts, and targeted public health measures.

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16.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24585

LLMs Prompted for Legal Context Object More: Overrefusal from Small On-Premises LLMs in Criminal Legal Context

Authors:

Anastasiia Kucherenko↗Fran\c{c}ois Brouchoud↗Dimitri Percia David↗Andrei Kucharavy↗

arXiv:2606.24585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While the validity of LLMs' use in the legal context remains subject to ethical and legal debate, legal professionals are already experimenting with personal LLMs, if only for translation and reformulation. However, even such a seemingly innocuous use can introduce biases through case processing speed if LLM assistants selectively refuse assistance on certain topics. To better anticipate such biases, we investigate several modern small LLMs that are most likely to be used as on-device assistants, to assess the impact of overrefusal on legal prompts. Surprisingly, we find that authority-style prefixes (``you are acting as an assistant of the national supreme court'', ``[...] defense lawyer'') systematically increase refusal rates by 2–20x over the no-prefix baseline, while a known role-play jailbreak prefix shows mixed effects, sharply increasing refusals in some models and barely shifting them in others. The finding suggests that small on-prem deployable LLMs are unstable under contextual framings that a real institutional user might naturally introduce, and further investigation is essential to minimize opportunities for bias.

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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2602.07294

Fin-RATE: A Real-world Financial Analytics and Tracking Evaluation Benchmark for LLMs on SEC Filings

Authors:

Yidong Jiang↗Junrong Chen↗Eftychia Makri↗Jialin Chen↗Peiwen Li↗Ali Maatouk↗Leandros Tassiulas↗Eliot Brenner↗Bing Xiang↗Rex Ying↗

arXiv:2602.07294v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: With the increasing deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the finance domain, LLMs are increasingly expected to parse complex regulatory disclosures. However, existing benchmarks often focus on isolated details, failing to reflect the complexity of professional analysis that requires synthesizing information across multiple documents, reporting periods, and corporate entities. Furthermore, these benchmarks do not disentangle whether errors arise from retrieval failures, generation inaccuracies, domain-specific reasoning mistakes, or misinterpretation of the query or context, making it difficult to precisely diagnose performance bottlenecks. To bridge these gaps, we introduce Fin-RATE, a benchmark built on U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and mirroring financial analyst workflows through three pathways: detail-oriented reasoning within individual disclosures, cross-entity comparison under shared topics, and longitudinal tracking of the same firm across reporting periods. We benchmark 17 leading LLMs, spanning open-source, closed-source, and finance-specialized models, under both ground-truth context and retrieval-augmented settings. Results show substantial performance degradation, with accuracy dropping by 18.60% and 14.35% as tasks shift from single-document reasoning to longitudinal and cross-entity analysis. This degradation is associated with increased comparison hallucinations, temporal and entity mismatches, and is further reflected in declines in reasoning quality and factual consistency–limitations that existing benchmarks have yet to formally categorize or quantify.

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18.

PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12 DOI: HASH:9c22c6478c6ccd5ff39937a7bdfe39e0

A new method for augmenting short time series, with application to pain events in sickle cell disease

Authors:

Kumar Utkarsh↗

by Kumar Utkarsh, Nirmish R. Shah, Tanvi Banerjee, Daniel M. Abrams Researchers across different fields, including but not limited to ecology, biology, and healthcare, often face the challenge of sparse data. Such sparsity can lead to uncertainties, estimation difficulties, and potential biases in modeling. Here we introduce a novel data augmentation method that combines multiple sparse time series datasets when they share similar statistical properties, thereby improving parameter estimation and model selection reliability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through validation studies comparing Hawkes and Poisson processes, followed by application to subjective pain dynamics in patients with sickle cell disease (SCD), a condition affecting millions worldwide, particularly those of African, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Indian descent.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11201

To Intervene or Not: Guiding Inference-time Alignment with Probabilistic Model Blending

Authors:

Jin Gan↗Xin Li↗Jun Luo↗

The wide deployment of LLMs has made model alignment necessary to make newly trained models safely and effectively respond to user instructions. Among different methods, inference-time alignment is often cheaper as it intervenes (i.e., offers guidances) only during output generation. Existing proposals apply guidances extracted from certain aligned models without properly assessing their reliability. Nonetheless, our systematic evaluation reveals that guidance effectiveness varies drastically across models; since ineffective guidances lead to further confusion and thus further interventions, the resulting excessive interventions typically indicate poor performance. To make interventions more effective and thus more efficient, we introduce BlendIn, an inference-time alignment framework that shifts from binary decisions to creating hybrid distributions integrating both models' knowledge. BlendIn stabilizes inference-time alignment by performing quality-aware alignment and proportionally weighting each model's contribution based on reliability. Compared with existing works, it preserves beneficial guidance while downweighting unreliable suggestions. BlendIn provides both diagnostic signals and mitigation strategies for misaligned guidance, achieving consistent and up to 50% performance improvement on challenging model pairs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/DecayingSeart/BlendIn.

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20.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.12546

Quantum Field-Theoretic Predictions of {\Psi}-Epistemic Models of Quantum Mechanics

Authors:

\.Inan\c{c} \c{S}ahin↗

arXiv:2605.12546v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: {\Psi}-epistemic models of quantum mechanics imply that the quantum state does not correspond to physical reality, but instead reflects the observer's knowledge of the underlying quantum system. The epistemic view of the quantum state has the potential to shed light on several foundational problems of quantum theory and has attracted considerable attention in the literature. On the other hand, the Pusey-Barrett-Rudolph theorem demonstrated that broad classes of {\psi}-epistemic models must lead to predictions that deviate from those of quantum mechanics. Although the original theorem involved entangled joint measurements on composite systems, alternative no-go theorems involving measurements on single quantum systems were developed shortly thereafter. Experimental investigations of the deviations predicted by {\psi}-epistemic models from quantum mechanics are still ongoing. So far, such tests have been performed within the framework of non-relativistic quantum mechanics and predominantly rely on quantum information based measurement procedures. In this work, we show that {\psi}-epistemic models can give rise to deviations from standard quantum field-theoretic predictions through modifications of polarized scattering cross sections and decay widths. Our results do not require a relativistic formulation of ontological models or of the Harrigan-Spekkens criterion; the essential assumption is merely that measurements implemented through relativistic processes can still be represented within the ontological framework by well-defined response functions and probabilities. The present work constitutes a proof-of-principle study demonstrating that particle physics tests of the ontological status of the quantum state are possible and that {\psi}-epistemic models may exhibit experimentally distinguishable signatures in particle phenomenology.

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21.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24548

Are Text-to-Image Models Inductivist Turkeys? A Counterfactual Benchmark for Causal Reasoning

Authors:

Jiayi Lei↗Yuandong Pu↗Xingyu Han↗Rongpeng Zhu↗Jing Xu↗Jinyao Wang↗Zijian Zhou↗Bin Fu↗Yuewen Cao↗Yihao Liu↗Yongsheng Li↗

Text-to-image (T2I) generation models have achieved remarkable progress in producing visually realistic images from natural language prompts. Yet it remains unclear whether their success reflects genuine causal understanding or sophisticated pattern matching over visual-textual correlations. Inspired by Russell's inductivist turkey, we introduce Counterfactual-World (CF-World), a counterfactual benchmark designed to investigate whether text-to-image models can generate images under rules that systematically contradict real-world priors. CF-World organizes each scenario into three progressive levels: factual generation under ordinary world knowledge, explicit counterfactual generation with direct visual instructions, and implicit counterfactual generation requiring causal deduction from altered rules. We evaluate both open-source and closed-source T2I models using a Vision Language Model (VLM)-based evaluator (CF-Eval). Furthermore, we introduce two metrics: Prior Resistance Rate (PRR), which measures a model's ability to overcome entrenched real-world priors, and Reasoning Retention Rate (RRR), which assesses whether models can maintain reasoning-dependent counterfactual generation without explicit visual cues. Experiments show that all models exhibit sharp degradation from factual to counterfactual settings. Further analyses suggest that these failures arise because current T2I models encode world knowledge and visual appearances as tightly coupled patterns. Consequently, their heavy reliance on frequent visual co-occurrences within the training data forces them to default to familiar commonsense priors when tasked with rendering counterfactual worlds.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.09697

Discriminative Span as a Predictor of Synthetic Data Utility via Classifier Reconstruction

Authors:

Radhika Amar Desai↗Modigari Narendra↗

In many real-world computer vision applications, including medical imaging and industrial inspection, binary classification tasks are characterized by a severe scarcity of positive samples. A widely adopted solution is to generate synthetic positive data using image-to-image transformations applied to negative samples. However, a fundamental challenge remains: how can we reliably assess whether such synthetic data will improve downstream model performance? In this work, we propose a geometry-driven metric that predicts the utility of synthetic data without requiring model training. Our approach operates in the embedding space of a pre-trained foundation model and represents the dataset through difference vectors between samples. We evaluate whether the weight vector of a linear classifier can be expressed within the subspace spanned by these variations by measuring the relative projection error. Intuitively, if the variations induced by synthetic data capture task-relevant directions, their span can approximate the classifier, resulting in low projection error. Conversely, poor synthetic data fails to span these directions, leading to higher error. Across multiple datasets and architectures, we show that this metric exhibits strong correlation with downstream classification performance of CNNs trained on mixtures of real negative and synthetic positive data. These findings suggest that the proposed metric serves as a practical and informative tool for evaluating synthetic data quality in data-scarce settings.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15034

OSGuard: A Benchmark for Safety in Computer-Use Agents

Authors:

Mina Mohammadmirzaei↗Jeffrey Flanigan↗

arXiv:2606.15034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-use agents are increasingly evaluated by whether they complete realistic desktop and web tasks. However, task success alone can miss failures in which an agent reaches the nominal goal through an unsafe shortcut. We introduce OSGuard, a dual-granularity benchmark suite for evaluating safety in computer-use agents under benign, unchanged user instructions. OSGuard contains an action-level benchmark for local guardrail decisions and a risk-augmented execution suite for end-to-end evaluation. The action-level benchmark consists of contextualized proposed actions labeled as allowed, unrelated, or unsafe, each judged relative to the original instruction and current interface state. The execution suite contains manually constructed OSWorld-derived task variants in which the original task remains achievable, but the environment is modified to introduce latent hazards such as destructive overwrites, etc. Each variant is paired with augmented evaluators that retain the original task-success criterion while adding explicit state-based safety invariants, allowing us to distinguish safe completions from unsafe completions that satisfy the nominal task objective. Our experimental results on OSGuard show that current multimodal guardrails can perform well on isolated action judgments, while risk-augmented execution exposes remaining gaps between local oversight and reliable end-to-end safety. This dual-granularity design enables more precise diagnosis of whether models can both recognize unsafe proposed actions and improve full-task safety when deployed as guardrails.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25975

Tensorion: A Tensor-Aware Generalization of the Muon Optimizer

Authors:

Vladimir Bogachev↗Vladimir Aletov↗Alexander Molozhavenko↗Sergei Kudriashov↗Maxim Rakhuba↗

Common first-order optimizers, such as Adam, implicitly treat each parameter block as an unstructured vector, which disregards the multilinear weight structure present in many modern machine learning models. Recent work has shown that exploiting matrix structure can improve optimization dynamics. A notable example is Muon, which performs steepest descent under the spectral norm constraint. We take the next step and introduce Tensorion, a tensor-aware optimizer that extends Muon's constrained optimization perspective from matrices to higher-order tensors. Tensorion is built around a linear minimization oracle (LMO) over a tensor norm ball. The norm is carefully chosen to balance two objectives: tightly bounding the tensor spectral norm, while still keeping the LMO tractable. This LMO becomes computable because it reduces to operations on adaptively selected unfolding matrices. Notably, when restricted to order-2 tensors (i.e., matrices), Tensorion recovers Muon exactly. Experiments on tensor-based computer vision problems suggest that Tensorion can offer improved convergence behavior and more stable gradient updates compared with Adam-based and existing tensor-aware baselines in the evaluated settings.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17972

SegDINO: Introducing Multi-Scale Structure into DINO for Efficient Medical Image Segmentation

Authors:

Sicheng Yang↗Hongqiu Wang↗Zhaohu Xing↗Sixiang Chen↗Qiuxia Yang↗Yize Mao↗Guang Yang↗Lei Zhu↗

Self-supervised DINO models provide strong transferable visual representations, yet applying them directly to image segmentation remains challenging. Existing approaches commonly rely on heavy decoders with complex upsampling, introducing substantial parameter and computational overhead. We observe that introducing scale into DINO features is far more critical than increasing decoder capacity. In this work, we present SegDINO, an efficient segmentation framework that integrates a DINOv3 backbone with lightweight scale modeling. SegDINO introduces Token Pyramid Adaptation (TPA) to reorganize intermediate DINO features into a pseudo multi-scale hierarchy, and Scale-Aware Decoding (SAD) for efficient intra-scale refinement and top-down multi-scale propagation. We further curate PanCT, a new CT dataset containing 284 patients with expert-annotated pancreatic tumors, to assess SegDINO's ability to handle difficult small-lesion cases. Extensive experiments on PanCT and three public benchmarks demonstrate that SegDINO achieves state-of-the-art results with high efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/script-Yang/segdino_v2.

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