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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Human-like autonomy emerges from self-play and a pinch of human data

Authors:
Daphne Cornelisse↗Julian Hunt↗Zixu Zhang↗Wa\"el Doulazmi↗Kevin Joseph↗Jaime Fern\'andez Fisac↗Eugene Vinitsky↗

arXiv:2606.19370v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-play reinforcement learning has recently emerged as a way to train driving policies without any human data. It uses cheap, large-scale simulations to substitute expensive, large-scale human driving demonstrations. A key limitation of this approach is that policies trained through pure self-play can learn effective but alien driving conventions incompatible with people. Previous works attempt to mitigate such behavioral misalignments through extensive reward engineering and domain randomization, which are brittle and labor-intensive. Instead of completely discarding human demonstrations, our method treats them as a regularization objective on top of a minimal safe goal-reaching reward. Like the spice in a good stew, we find that a little human data goes a long way: our method uses only 30 minutes of human demonstrations, 2500x fewer than comparable imitation learning approaches. Resulting policies coordinate with held-out human trajectories and complete training in 15 hours on a single consumer-grade GPU. Videos and full source code are available at https://spiced-self-play.com/.

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02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Self-administered computerized cognitive training for cognitive deficits in individuals with metabolic syndrome: a randomized controlled trial

Authors:
Koutsonida↗Markozannes↗Kanellopoulou↗Tsiaras↗Varella↗Zilidou↗Romanopoulou↗Hyphantis↗Ntzani↗Aretouli↗Tsilidis↗

Background: Metabolic syndrome (MetS) has been associated with cognitive decline. Considering its increasing prevalence worldwide, the goal of this study was to evaluate the feasibility and efficacy of a short-term, self-administered computerized cognitive training programme in individuals with metabolic syndrome and low cognitive performances. Methods: Thirty six participants, aged 40-72 years (mean age: 57.8 years), were randomly assigned to the cognitive training or the passive control group. The cognitive training component of Long Lasting Memories (LLM) Care was used as an interactive software to enhance participants' cognitive functions. Up to 24 sessions, each lasting 45 minutes, were self-administered at home twice per week for 3 months. Thorough cognitive assessments with were performed at baseline (randomization), at the end of intervention, and 12 months after baseline. The primary outcome was performance at nine neuropsychological tests, and the secondary outcome was a self-reported questionnaire assessing everyday functional abilities. Primary analyses were performed employing mixed-effect models using the intention-to-treat principle. Results: Low adherence was observed in the study, as only 9 participants (50%) completed at least 8 sessions of the cognitive training programme (range 9-24 sessions, median 15 sessions). No statistically significant effect of the cognitive training programme on performance in neuropsychological tests or everyday functioning was found. At the end of the 3-month intervention programme, effect for visual memory enhancement in immediate ({beta} = 1.58, 95% CI = -1.84 to 4.99, Cohen's d = 0.39) and delayed recall ({beta} = 2.17, 95% CI = -1.68 to 6.01, Cohen's d = 0.45) was moderate in favour of the intervention group, and at 12-month follow-up, semantic verbal fluency gains for the intervention group were detected ({beta} = 2.78, 95% CI = -0.92 to 6.49, Cohen's d = 0.70), though with wide confidence intervals. Conclusions: Despite some small effects observed in memory and verbal fluency, cognitive training did not yield statistically significant improvements. The observed low adherence and limited benefits on mild cognitive deficits in mostly middle-aged individuals with MetS are likely associated with the self-administered and short-term nature of the computerized intervention. This highlights the need for more intensive and clinician-delivered approaches to enhance engagement. Registry: ClinicalTrials.gov, TRN: NCT05658354, Registration date: 08 December 2022. Keywords: Metabolic syndrome, cognitive deficits, cognitive training, computerized, adults

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning optimal policies from event logs through reinforcement learning: a comparison of deep and MDP-based approaches

Authors:
Stefano Branchi↗Andrei Buliga↗Chiara Di Francescomarino↗Chiara Ghidini↗Riccardo Graziosi↗Francesca Meneghello↗Massimiliano Ronzani↗

arXiv:2303.09209v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prescriptive Process Monitoring is an emerging area within Process Mining that focuses on recommending actions to optimize business outcomes. Most existing works prescribe pre-defined interventions, i.e., sets of actions applied to ongoing process executions to achieve a specific objective or Key Performance Indicator (KPI). In contrast, only a few approaches have explored learning and evaluating optimal behavioral policies, i.e., general strategies that determine the best sequence of actions to maximize a desired KPI. In this paper, we address the problem of learning optimal behavioral policies by proposing an AI-based approach that learns an optimal policy directly from historical process executions using Reinforcement Learning (RL) to recommend the best actions for optimizing a KPI. To this end, we employ two RL techniques. The first is a classical model-based approach that extends previous work by the authors through the construction of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) capturing process behavior. The second is a model-free technique based on offline Deep RL. Unlike state-of-the-art work, we aim to minimize the use of domain knowledge and learn optimal policies directly from historical event data. This allows us to learn when to apply interventions and discover effective ones directly from data. Moreover, we target complex scenarios involving external actors, where the process owner controls only part of the activities. We adopt a data-driven Business Process Simulation (BPS) environment to evaluate the learned policies. Results show that both methods improve the targeted KPI with similar effectiveness, while the model-based approach outperforms offline Deep RL in computational efficiency.

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04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Sharp Favard length of random Cantor sets

Authors:
Alan Chang↗Pablo Shmerkin↗Ville Suomala↗

arXiv:2512.17753v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We show that for a large class of planar $1$-dimensional random fractals $S$, the Favard length $\operatorname{Fav}(S(r))$ of the neighborhood $S(r)$ is comparable to $\log^{-1}(1/r)$, matching a universal lower bound; up to now, this was only known in expectation for a few concrete models. In particular, we show that there exist $1$-Ahlfors regular sets with the fastest possible Favard length decay. For a wide class of planar one-dimensional "grid random fractals", including fractal percolation and its Ahlfors-regular variants, we further show that $\operatorname{Fav}(S(r))/\log(1/r)$ converges almost surely, and we identify the limit explicitly. Furthermore, we prove that for some $1$-dimensional Ahlfors-regular random fractals $S$, the Favard length of $S(r)$ decays instead like $\log\log(1/r)/\log(1/r)$, showing that the $1/\log(1/r)$ decay is not universal among random fractals, as might be expected from previous results.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

HOLMES: Evaluating Higher-Order Logical Reasoning in LLMs

Authors:
Yucheng Wu↗Jundong Xu↗Mingzhen Ju↗Yue Yu↗Chenpeng Wang↗Haoxuan Li↗Liangming Pan↗

arXiv:2606.23238v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Logical reasoning is essential for reliable AI, yet existing benchmarks are largely first-order-logic-centric, focusing on object-level deduction over fixed predicates. This misses many realistic scenarios where models must reason over rules, predicates, functions, constraints, and decision procedures themselves. We introduce HOLMES (Higher-Order Logic Meets real-world Explainable Symbolic reasoning), the first real-world benchmark for higher-order symbolic reasoning in LLMs, containing 1379 instances. Built on higher-order logic, HOLMES pairs natural-language problems with HOL formalizations, ground-truth answers, verifiable reasoning traces, and fine-grained controllable reasoning factors across law and finance. Experiments show that current LLMs still struggle on HOLMES, with an average accuracy of only 50.64% and the best model reaching 59.54%. Our analyses further reveal that high final-answer accuracy can mask shortcut reasoning in conflict-resolution settings, while performance drops sharply under scope-conditioned and compositional reasoning. These findings identify higher-order symbolic reasoning as a key bottleneck for building reliable and verifiable LLMs. The project code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/wuyucheng2002/HOLMES.

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06.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Closing the Reflection Gap: A Free Calibration Bonus for Agentic RL

Authors:
Yinglun Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.14211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs are increasingly deployed as agents that interact with external environments and observe feedback such as execution results, error messages, and tool outputs. A well-functioning agent should be able to leverage this feedback to accurately assess its own performance. Yet we find a persistent reflection gap: LLM agents tend to mis-assess their own outputs after observing concrete environment feedback – even for questions they correctly answered – and standard RL barely helps due to a credit-assignment mismatch. To close this gap, we propose RefGRPO, a simple yet effective fix that augments standard RL algorithms with two key ingredients: a free calibration bonus computed by contrasting the agent's own reflection with the actual outcome (requiring no additional reward model, LLM judge, or external annotation), and a dynamic schedule on its coefficient. Compared to standard RL baselines, our method simultaneously improves reflection calibration (e.g., reduces underconfidence rate $44.4\% \to 7.7\%$) and task accuracy (e.g., $75.1\% \to 76.5\%$) on text-to-SQL across five benchmarks. The resulting calibrated reflection turns the agent into its own verifier grounded in environment feedback, which further enables (i) better self-improvement that uses reflections as pseudo-rewards without outcome supervision, and (ii) more effective test-time selective prediction by committing only to rollouts flagged as correct.

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

UniIntervene: Agentic Intervention for Efficient Real-World Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Haoyuan Deng↗Yitong Gao↗Yudong Lin↗Haichao Liu↗Zhenyu Wu↗Ziwei Wang↗

arXiv:2606.12372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (HiL-RL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for real-world robotic manipulation, enabling online policy improvement with human guidance. However, current HiL-RL frameworks remain intervention-intensive, relying on frequent human corrections to redirect the policy out of unproductive exploration, which incurs high labor cost and limits real-world scalability. To address this, we propose UniIntervene, an agentic intervention model that detects unproductive exploration and autonomously recovers the policy toward high-value states, taking over the bulk of interventions from human operators. Specifically, UniIntervene first performs future-conditioned action-value estimation, predicting the latent consequence of the current action and evaluating its induced value, which provides a more stable progress signal. Building on this, a temporal value-risk critic aggregates recent value dynamics and triggers intervention when the estimated value exhibits sustained stagnation or degradation. When intervention is required, UniIntervene retrieves a high-value recovery target from a memory of past intervention episodes and produces executable corrective actions through a goal-conditioned recovery policy. In this way, UniIntervene turns intervention from passive human correction into a value-aware recovery process for efficient real-world RL. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that UniIntervene improves the average success rate by 8.6% while reducing human interventions by 57% relative to state-of-the-art HiL-RL baselines.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Polaris: A Godel Agent Framework for Small Language Models through Experience-Abstracted Policy Repair

Authors:
Aditya Kakade↗Vivek Srivastava↗Shirish Karande↗

arXiv:2603.23129v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Gödel agent realize recursive self-improvement: an agent inspects its own policy and traces and then modifies that policy in a tested loop. We introduce Polaris, a Gödel agent for compact models that performs policy repair via experience abstraction, turning failures into policy updates through a structured cycle of analysis, strategy formation, abstraction, and minimal code pat ch repair with conservative checks. Unlike response level self correction or parameter tuning, Polaris makes policy level changes with small, auditable patches that persist in the policy and are reused on unseen instances within each benchmark. As part of the loop, the agent engages in meta reasoning: it explains its errors, proposes concrete revisions to its own policy, and then updates the policy. To enable cumulative policy refinement, we introduce experience abstraction, which distills failures into compact, reusable strategies that transfer to unseen instances. On MGSM, DROP, GPQA, and LitBench (covering arithmetic reasoning, compositional inference, graduate-level problem solving, and creative writing evaluation), a 7-billion-parameter model equipped with Polaris achieves consistent gains over the base policy and competitive baselines.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum turbulence in the many-body regime

Authors:
Sayak Bhattacharjee↗Mahendra K. Verma↗Alexander V. Balatsky↗Srinivas Raghu↗

arXiv:2606.23822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We discuss phenomenology associated with turbulent hydrodynamics in quantum fluids from a condensed-matter perspective. We begin with weakly-interacting superfluids, often modeled by a mean-field theory governed by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Considering the effect of quantum fluctuations beyond the mean-field approximation, we propose a study of many-body quantum effects in turbulent hydrodynamics, especially near zero temperature. We motivate examples of quantum many-body systems where such effects may be uncovered. These include bosons confined in a periodic potential in low spatial dimensions (one and two), and the associated quantum critical point of the superfluid-insulator transition, realized in present-day ultracold-atom and quantum computing platforms. We conclude by listing a set of (open) questions that may be answered using modern quantum many-body techniques. This article is part of the theme issue 'Frontiers of turbulence and statistical physics'.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Triangular Consistency as a Universal Constraint for Learning Optical Flow

Authors:
Yi Xiao↗Carlos Rodriguez Coronel↗Jing Zhan↗Haniyeh Ehsani Oskouie↗Alex Wong↗Dong Lao↗

arXiv:2606.19938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose triangular consistency as a first-principled constraint for optical flow, which is agnostic to network architecture, supervision type, and dataset, and applies to both image-pair and multi-frame settings. This simple but powerful constraint is to compose two flows to induce a third flow and enforce consistency among the three. The composed flows may arise from (i) image pairs, yielding cycle consistency; (ii) multiple video frames, producing longer-range motion through temporal chaining; or (iii) image pairs combined with controlled synthetic transformations, which becomes data augmentation. This triangular consistency introduces negligible computational overhead and requires no additional annotations. Since it is derived directly from the geometry of optical flow, it does not rely on model-specific assumptions and serves as a ``universal'' plug-and-play component for optical flow training. Experiments show consistent improvement across supervised, unsupervised, and transfer learning settings.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Robust Spoofed Speech Detection via Temporal Pyramid Modeling

Authors:
Mahtab Masoudi Nezhad↗Nima Karimian↗

Spoofed speech detection is increasingly challenged by realistic synthesis, voice conversion, and replay attacks, with cross-dataset generalization remaining a major limitation. This work we propose a Temporal Pyramid Adapter that utilize parallel temporal convolutions with varying receptive fields to capture multi-scale spoofing cues, ranging from local artifacts to global prosodic irregularities. We also integrated self-supervised XLS-R representations combined with front-end adapters, including Mel, Sinc, and a Temporal Pyramid design for multi-scale temporal modeling. The proposed model is evaluated cross multiple benchmark including ASVspoof 2017, ASVspoof 2021 (DF/LA), PartialSpoof, DiffSSD, and multilingual HQ-MPSD datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that Temporal Pyramid model obtained AUC of 99.24% and a EER of 3.87% on the PartialSpoof database, which is significantly outperforming the base model and several SOTA baseline such as LCNN-BLSTM (9.87% EER) and TRACE (8.08% EER). Additionally, multilingual evaluations confirm that while spoofing artifact are independent from language. While self-supervised representations improve robustness, performance degrades under domain and language shifts, highlighting the need for better adaptation and calibration strategies.

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12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Closed Quantum Boltzmann Bridges: Coherent Revivals, Hidden Microstates, and the Emergence of Classical Two-Time Entropy Conditioning

Authors:
Sina Kazemian↗Ghazal Farhani↗Younes Javanmard↗

arXiv:2606.25260v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The classical Boltzmann Bridge describes entropy histories conditioned on both an initial low-entropy macrostate and a later macrostate. Unlike the usual past-only formulation of the thermodynamic arrow, this two-time conditioning can produce entropy profiles that rise above the final entropy and then decrease toward the imposed endpoint. In this work, we formulate closed quantum analogues of the Boltzmann Bridge using macro-subspace projectors, unitary time evolution, and Boltzmann entropy defined by the dimension of coarse-grained macroscopic sectors. We first study a minimal coherent chamber-qubit model, in which each particle has only a two-state chamber degree of freedom. Although this model is the most direct quantization of the classical two-box system, its bridge entropy profile is dominated by coherent oscillations and revivals rather than classical relaxation. We then introduce a hidden-microstate bridge, in which each chamber sector contains unresolved internal degrees of freedom while the full dynamics remain unitary. Numerical experiments show that increasing the internal Hilbert-space dimension suppresses sample-dependent revival behavior and produces bridge entropy profiles whose sign structure and coarse-grained shape increasingly agree with the classical Boltzmann Bridge. We further use a Random Forest classifier to explore the parameter regime separating revival-dominated quantum behavior from classical-like coarse-grained bridge behavior. These results suggest that classical two-time-conditioned entropy behavior is not recovered by quantizing the chamber variable alone, but can emerge statistically from closed quantum.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

ConsistencyPlanner: Real-time Planning with Fast-Sampling Consistency Models

Authors:
Qichao Zhang↗Xing Fang↗Jiaqi Fang↗Zhenwen Cai↗Jie Ling↗Qiankun Yu↗Dongbin Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.11569v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Closed-loop planning in complex, real-world driving scenarios presents a critical challenge for autonomous driving systems. While traditional rule-based methods are interpretable, their predefined heuristics lack the adaptability for dynamic traffic environments. Learning-based approaches have shown considerable promise. Conversely, learning-based approaches, despite their promise, struggle to balance the modeling diverse and multimodal driving behaviors and real-time planning, often leading to indecisive or unsafe actions. To address this limitation, we propose Consistency Planner, a real-time planning framework with fast-sampling consistency models. Our approach is built upon two key technical contributions. Efficient Multimodal Sampling: We employ fast-sampling consistency models to generate a diverse set of plausible future trajectories. This enables efficient, real-time exploration of multimodal actions, overcoming the computational bottlenecks of previous iterative generative methods. Heterogeneous Feature Fusion: We introduce an attention-enhanced decoder that dynamically integrates heterogeneous input features (including scene feature and action token) into a cohesive representation for robust planning. Extensive evaluation in the Waymax simulator demonstrates superior performance in safety metrics compared to existing methods, with particularly strong results in challenging dynamic scenarios.

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14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Waning protection of long-acting RSV monoclonal antibodies in infants: a Bayesian analysis of clesrovimab and nirsevimab trial data

Authors:
Gong↗Flasche↗Hodgson↗

Clesrovimab and nirsevimab are long-acting monoclonal antibodies used to prevent respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) disease in infants, but waning protection in the first year of life is incompletely characterised. We applied a published Bayesian inference framework to clesrovimab and pooled nirsevimab trial data to estimate time-varying efficacy against medically attended RSV lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) and RSV-associated hospitalisation, accounting for differences in placebo-arm event timing between trials. Estimated clesrovimab efficacy declined from 60.7% (95% CrI: 46.3-72.6) shortly after dosing to 38.3% (8.6-52.9) at six months against medically attended RSV LRTI, and from 87.1% (71.2-96.2) to 49.6% (10.4-70.7) against RSV-associated hospitalisation. For nirsevimab, corresponding estimates declined from 86.9% (75.4-95.0) to 53.8% (27.4-69.7) against LRTI, and from 77.5% (52.6-91.8) to 49.7% (15.7-68.3) against hospitalisation. After accounting for differences in RSV exposure timing and LRTI endpoint definitions between trials, we found no evidence of a difference in efficacy or waning between clesrovimab and nirsevimab.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

On-Manifold Variational Learning with Heat-Kernel Priors

Authors:
Jiarui Xing↗Tal Zeevi↗Nian Wu↗Jian Wang↗

Learning unsupervised representations of medical imaging cohorts can reveal clinically meaningful prototypes without expert labels, which are often noisy and fail to capture true pathological heterogeneity. However, existing deep latent-variable models estimate Gaussian mixture priors via Euclidean averaging, producing prototypes that drift off the curved data manifold and degenerate as the number of sub-populations grows. We propose a manifold-anchored variational framework built on a geometry-aware Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, whose M-step selects each sub-population prototype as the graph medoid with the highest diffusion centrality on a heat-kernel-weighted latent graph, ensuring that every prototype remains on-manifold. A Dirichlet energy regularizer enforces geometric smoothness of the latent space, and a per-sub-population uncertainty score enables label-free quality assessment. \rev{The manifold-anchored EM is a general-purpose geometric tool that extends standard EM and applies readily to other latent-variable models beyond this setting.} On cardiac scar and brain MRI benchmarks, our framework attains the highest accuracy among all compared methods, produces the sharpest prototypes reported to date, and remains stable at large sub-population counts where all baselines degenerate.

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16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Using wastewater surveillance to explore community-level dietary intake in sewered and non-sewered sanitation systems in Malawi, Africa

Authors:
Holm↗R. H↗Chigwechokha↗Kaponda↗Stephens↗Limbong↗Ercumen↗Hart↗Workman↗C. L↗de los Reyes↗F. L↗…

Wastewater can be used to measure biomarkers that reflect population-level dietary intake and diversity; however, how this approach may apply in a low-income country remains a knowledge gap. This study aims to evaluate whether select dietary-related metabolites can be detected in wastewater and environmental surveillance (WES) samples from both sewered and non-sewered sanitation systems in Malawi, Africa. Fourteen WES samples were collected and analyzed from two university campuses in Mzuzu and Thyolo, Malawi. Four targets were analyzed: N-methyl-2-pyridone-5-carboxamide (2PY; a biomarker of vitamin B3), 4-pyridoxic acid (4-PA; a biomarker of vitamin B6), as well as enterodiol and enterolactone (biomarkers of dietary fiber and polyphenol consumption). An 18-question survey, paired spatiotemporally with the WES measurements, assessed self-reported daily dietary intake, food insecurity, and nutrient deficiency symptoms among 500 respondents. Among the 14 WES samples, 2PY, 4-PA, and enterolactone were detected, while enterodiol was not detected above the method limit (

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

Haiku to Opus in Just 10 bits: LLMs Unlock Large Compression Gains

Authors:
Roy Rinberg↗Annabelle Michael Carrell↗Simon Henniger↗Nicholas Carlini↗Keri Warr↗

arXiv:2604.02343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the compression of LLM-generated text across lossless and lossy regimes, characterizing a compression-compute frontier where more compression is possible at the cost of more compute. For lossless compression, domain-adapted LoRA adapters can improve LLM-based arithmetic coding by 2x over compression with the base LLM alone. For lossy compression, prompting a model for a succinct rewrite then applying arithmetic coding can achieve compression ratios of approximately 0.03, a 2x improvement over compressing the original response. We further introduce Question-Asking compression (QA), an interactive lossy protocol inspired by the game 'Twenty Questions'. A small model iteratively refines its response by asking yes/no questions to a stronger model, transferring exactly one bit per answer. On 8 benchmarks spanning math, science, and code, 10 binary questions recover 23% to 72% of the capability gap between a small and large model on standard benchmarks and 7% to 38% on harder benchmarks, achieving compression ratios of 0.0006 to 0.004. This is over 100x smaller than prior LLM-based compression (Deletang et al., 2024), suggesting that interactive protocols can transfer knowledge far more efficiently than transmitting full responses.

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19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Sex-Specific Hemostatic Responses and Diagnostic Potential of Platelet Distribution Width (PDW) and D-Dimer in Mild COVID-19, Malaria, and Co-Infection in a Tropical Setting: A Case-Control Study in Port Harcourt, Nigeria

Authors:
Ekprikpo↗E. S↗Jeremiah↗Z. A↗Ken-Ezihuo↗S. U↗

Background: In malaria-endemic tropical regions, the overlapping coagulopathy in COVID-19 and malaria poses diagnostic and prognostic challenges, particularly with potential sex differences. This study evaluated sex-specific variations in platelet indices and fibrinolytic markers and assessed the utility of Platelet Distribution Width (PDW) and D-dimer in mild/asymptomatic cases. Methods: A case-control study was conducted with 220 participants (55 each in healthy controls, malaria-positive, COVID-19-positive, and COVID-19+malaria co-infected groups), aged 20-65 years, in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Platelet indices were analysed using Sysmex XP-300 haematology analyser, while D-dimer and fibrinogen were measured by ELISA. Data were analysed using SAS 9.4 with ANOVA, Tukey's HSD, Pearson correlation, and sex-stratified comparisons. Results: PDW was significantly elevated in all infected groups compared to controls (malaria: 15.21 +/- 0.22 fL; COVID-19: 15.21 +/- 0.22 fL; co-infection: 15.61 +/- 0.21 fL vs. control: 13.26 +/- 0.17 fL; F=25.850, p < 0.001). D-dimer levels were highest in the co-infected group (553.42 +/- 59.74 ng/ml, F=2.816, p = 0.040). No significant changes were observed in other platelet indices or fibrinogen across groups. No significant correlation existed between platelet indices and the fibrinolytic markers. Males exhibited significantly higher D-dimer levels across all infected groups (p < 0.05) and higher fibrinogen in COVID-19 subjects (p = 0.036). Sex exerted a stronger influence on parameters than age. Conclusion: Males show heightened fibrinolytic activation in COVID-19 and malaria co-infection. PDW and D-dimer are promising, cost-effective biomarkers for screening mild infections in resource-limited tropical settings.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Towards Deep Learning Surrogate for the Forward Problem in Electrocardiology: A Scalable Alternative to Physics-Based Models

Authors:
Shaheim Ogbomo-Harmitt↗Cesare Magnetti↗Chiara Spota↗Jakub Grzelak↗Oleg Aslanidi↗

arXiv:2512.13765v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The forward problem in electrocardiology, computing body surface potentials from cardiac electrical activity, is traditionally solved using physics-based models such as the bidomain or monodomain equations. While accurate, these approaches are computationally expensive, limiting their use in real-time and large-scale clinical applications. We propose a proof-of-concept deep learning (DL) framework as an efficient surrogate for forward solvers. The model adopts a time-dependent, attention-based sequence-to-sequence architecture to predict electrocardiogram (ECG) signals from cardiac voltage propagation maps. A hybrid loss combining Huber loss with a spectral entropy term was introduced to preserve both temporal and frequency-domain fidelity. Using 2D tissue simulations incorporating healthy, fibrotic, and gap junction-remodelled conditions, the model achieved high accuracy (mean $R^2 = 0.99 \pm 0.01$). Ablation studies confirmed the contributions of convolutional encoders, time-aware attention, and spectral entropy loss. These findings highlight DL as a scalable, cost-effective alternative to physics-based solvers, with potential for clinical and digital twin applications.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

M4FC: a Multimodal, Multilingual, Multicultural, Multitask Real-World Fact-Checking Dataset

Authors:
Jiahui Geng↗Jonathan Tonglet↗Iryna Gurevych↗

Existing real-world datasets for multimodal fact-checking have multiple limitations: they contain few instances, cover on only one or two languages, focus only on one task, or rely on external news article sets for sourcing true claims. To address these shortcomings, we introduce M4FC, a new real-world dataset comprising 4,982 images paired with 6,980 claims. The images, verified by professional fact-checkers from 22 organizations, represent a diverse range of cultural and geographic contexts. Each claim is available in one or two out of ten languages. M4FC spans six multimodal fact-checking tasks: visual claim extraction, claimant intent prediction, fake image detection, image contextualization, location verification, and verdict prediction. We provide baseline results for all tasks and analyze how combining intermediate tasks affects verdict prediction performance. We make our dataset and code publicly available.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

EnvRL: Learn from Environment Dynamics in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Zhitong Wang↗Songze Li↗Hao Peng↗Shuzheng Si↗Yi Wang↗Maosong Sun↗Juanzi Li↗

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents. However, conventional RL methods for long-horizon agentic tasks often struggle with sparse outcome rewards. Intuitively, this overlooks the rich environment dynamics information contained in rollout interaction trajectories. We argue that the interaction experience inherently serves as an implicit supervision signal, reveals the underlying transition mechanisms of the environment, and enables the agent to construct a more accurate internal model of the environment.. Therefore, in this work, we investigate how to leverage this additional signal to improve policy learning. Specifically, we propose EnvRL, a framework that incorporates environment dynamics learning into agentic RL via two auxiliary objectives: state prediction and inverse dynamics. By jointly optimizing with the primary RL objective, we encourage the agent to internalize environment dynamics from its own interaction experience. Extensive experiments on two long-horizon agentic benchmarks demonstrate that EnvRL achieves significant improvements on success-rates over RL-only baselines, e.g., when trained with GRPO, lifting Qwen-2.5-1.5B-Instruct from 72.8% to 77.4% on ALFWorld, and from 56.8% to 67.0% on WebShop.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Pareto LoRA: Mitigating Modality Imbalance in Unified Multimodal Models via Pareto-Optimal Gradient Integration

Authors:
Xiwen Wei↗Mark Nutter↗Madhusudhanan Srinivasan↗Radu Marculescu↗

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for integrating multimodal understanding and generation within a single autoregressive transformer. However, during multimodal instruction tuning, these models often exhibit pronounced modality imbalance: language gradients dominate optimization, thus leading to lower image generation quality, especially under parameter-efficient fine-tuning such as LoRA. In this work, we systematically analyze modality imbalance in LoRA-based fine-tuning of UMMs for interleaved text-image generation. We show that vision modality performance degrades substantially more than text modality performance when compared to unimodal counterparts, and that modality-specific gradients can differ by orders of magnitude across various tasks and layers. Motivated by this observation, we reformulate the multimodal instruction tuning as a bi-objective optimization problem and propose Pareto LoRA, a Pareto-optimal gradient integration strategy that balances the text and image objectives by modulating the gradient direction and strength. Experiments on the CoMM benchmark with Emu2 demonstrate that Pareto LoRA consistently improves multimodal generation balance, achieving up to 44.9% gains in perceptual image quality over vanilla LoRA while maintaining comparable text performance.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Measuring Whether LLM Tutors Teach or Solve: A Diagnostic for Educational Impact

Authors:
Junyi Yao↗Zihao Zheng↗Baichuan Li↗

Large language models are increasingly proposed as educational tutors, yet stronger task-solving ability does not necessarily imply stronger learning support. Motivated by recent calls to measure the social impact of NLP systems in practice, we study whether public LLM tutoring benchmarks distinguish learning-supportive behavior from mere answer production. We propose a lightweight diagnostic based on the gap between solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented benchmark performance. Using public MathTutorBench leaderboard results, we show that these dimensions are only partially aligned: across eight publicly reported models, the correlation between solving and pedagogy composites is 0.421, and several models shift meaningfully in rank when evaluation moves from solving to pedagogy. We then analyze the public TutorBench sample and show that agency-relevant behaviors are explicitly encoded in benchmark rubrics, especially in active-learning settings that reward guiding questions, calibrated hints, and non-disclosive scaffolding. Together, these findings suggest that educational-impact evaluation should not treat task success as a sufficient proxy for learning support. We argue that public tutoring benchmarks can better support positive-impact evaluation by reporting solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented scores separately and by making disclosure-sensitive, student-agency-preserving criteria more explicit.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Generative AI for Managerial Decision-Making under Ambiguity and Sycophancy

Authors:
Sule Ozturk Birim↗Fabrizio Marozzo↗Yigit Kazancoglu↗

arXiv:2603.03970v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly being integrated into complex business workflows, fundamentally shifting the boundaries of managerial decision-making. However, the reliability of its strategic advice in ambiguous business contexts remains a critical knowledge gap. To address this gap, this study compares multiple GenAI models in their ability to detect ambiguity, examines whether a systematic ambiguity-resolution process improves response quality, and investigates their susceptibility to sycophantic behavior when confronted with flawed managerial directives. Using a novel four-dimensional business ambiguity taxonomy, we conducted a human-in-the-loop experiment across strategic, tactical, and operational scenarios. The resulting decisions were assessed through a human-validated automated evaluation framework based on agreement, actionability, justification quality, and constraint adherence. The results show that our approach not only distinguishes different types of ambiguity, but also reveals how ambiguity resolution systematically changes model behavior. In particular, resolving ambiguities improved decision quality across all managerial levels, with the strongest gains observed in constraint adherence. The analysis further showed that sycophantic behavior is not uniform across models: some models challenged flawed assumptions, whereas others tended to comply with them. This study contributes to the bounded rationality literature by positioning GenAI as a cognitive scaffold that can detect and resolve ambiguities managers might overlook, while demonstrating that its artificial limitations require human oversight to ensure its reliability as a strategic partner.

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