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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

AI Receptivity or AI Adoption Breadth? A Tool-Specific Reanalysis of the Lower-Literacy/Higher-Usage Link

arXiv:2606.13734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent evidence reported by Tully, Longoni, and Appel (2025) suggests that lower artificial intelligence (AI) literacy predicts greater receptivity toward AI. We revisit this claim using the public data from Study 3 of that article, which measures past usage of five AI tool categories on a five-point frequency scale. We first reproduce the negative association between AI literacy and aggregate AI usage using OLS on participant-level averages, binary logit, ordered logit, and multinomial logit specifications. We then show that the aggregate relationship masks substantial heterogeneity by tool type. In our demographic-adjusted primary specification, AI literacy does not significantly predict text AI usage (ordered-logit $\beta$ = -0.090, p = .387), whereas it remains a strong predictor of non-text AI adoption ($\beta$ = -0.377, p < .001). The non-text effect is also robust under Tully et al.'s original Study 3 control specification ($\beta$ = -0.502, p < .001). Binary, ordered-logit, and multinomial specifications suggest that the non-text relationship is primarily an adoption/non-adoption pattern rather than evidence of intensive use: the demographic-adjusted odds ratio of ever having used a non-text AI tool is 0.68. Thus, in the study that measures self-reported past usage rather than stated preferences, the evidence does not support a simple claim that lower AI literacy predicts greater receptivity to AI in general. It points instead to a narrower pattern of broader adoption across lower-penetration, non-text AI tools.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

SCAN: Enhance Time Series Anomaly Detection via Multi-Scale Neighborhood-Centered Clustering

arXiv:2606.19255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series anomaly detection plays a crucial role in a wide range of real-world applications. Reconstruction-based methods have become the mainstream paradigm, but they suffer from over-generalization and under-generalization problems, which are challenging to balance. To address this, we introduce multi-scale clustering to enhance reconstruction-based methods. At the representation level, we integrate the cluster center representations of normal patterns to constrain the model to target representative normal patterns for reconstruction, preventing dominance of powerful capacity and representation capability. At the anomaly criterion level, we derive anomaly confidence score based on cluster membership probability and combine it with reconstruction error, providing dual criteria for detection. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the cluster center representations and anomaly confidence score depends on the clustering performance. Accordingly, we extract neighborhood-centered representations for multi-view clustering to improve clustering performance. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets from diverse application domains demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of SCAN.

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Fifty years since a simple equation described the chaos of biology

An exploration of chaos theory in population dynamics showed that unpredictable systems can often be modelled using surprisingly simple mathematics. An exploration of chaos theory in population dynamics showed that unpredictable systems can often be modelled using surprisingly simple mathematics.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Dissociating Decodability and Causal Use in Bracket-Sequence Transformers

When trained on tasks requiring an understanding of hierarchical structure, transformers have been found to represent this hierarchy in distinct ways: in the geometry of the residual stream, and in stack-like attention patterns maintaining a last-in, first-out ordering. However, it remains unclear whether these representations are causally used or merely decodable. We examine this gap in transformers trained on the Dyck language (a formal language of balanced bracket sequences), where the hierarchical ground truth is explicit. By probing and intervening on the residual stream and attention patterns, we find that depth, distance, and top-of-stack signals are all decodable, yet their causal roles diverge. Specifically, masking attention to the true top-of-stack position causes a sharp drop in long-distance accuracy, while ablating low-dimensional residual stream subspaces has comparatively little effect. These results, which extend to a templated natural language setting, suggest that even in a controlled setting where the relevant hierarchical variables are known, decodability alone does not imply causal use.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Optimizing Lithium Production Decisions under Geological, Demand, and Pricing Uncertainties: A POMDP Framework for Multi-Objective Decision Making

arXiv:2606.18598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision making in lithium production is challenging, whether from an investor's perspective or a strategic production standpoint. Determining which mines to open and when to open them involves not only geological and price uncertainties, but also complexities around the choice of extraction method, from direct lithium extraction to hard rock mining. Prior work explored models of this problem and different methods to optimize mining decisions; these models did not account for uncertainty in pricing, uncertainty in demand, or different mining technologies to extract lithium. Incorporating different pricing models and extraction technology into these models enables more robust strategies for determining not only when and where to open a mine, but also which method of production to pursue. We frame the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and solve using belief state planning methods to get optimal decision making. In our study, we show that POMDP solvers outperform human inspired heuristics by dynamically adapting to shifting lithium price regimes (static, linear, exponential, and stochastic) through belief state planning and explicit uncertainty management. By optimally sequencing exploration, production, and technology choice, the framework achieves higher demand fulfillment and more balanced economic environmental outcomes over the projects lifetime in all different pricing and deposit scenarios.

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

The Shrinking Lifespan of LLMs in Science

arXiv:2604.07530v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling laws describe how language model capabilities grow with compute and data, but say nothing about how long a model matters once released. We introduce time-to-peak and lifespan as measures of model obsolescence and use them to characterize the scientific adoption trajectories of 62 LLMs across more than 108k citing papers (2019-2025), separating active adoption from background citation to recover per-model trajectories that citation counts cannot resolve. We find that a model's longevity is shaped more by when it was released than by its characteristics: release year predicts time-to-peak and lifespan more strongly than architecture, openness, or scale. LLM adoption follows an inverted-U curve (rising after release, peaking, and then declining), but this pattern is rapidly compressing. Each successive release year is associated with a 27% shorter time-to-peak and a 23% shorter lifespan ($p < 0.001$), robust to minimum-age thresholds and controls for model size. These adoption-side dynamics are invisible to scaling laws and suggest that specialization on any single model may be a depreciating investment, with costs falling on reproducibility and migration.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation: Post-Training Without Rubric Verifiers

arXiv:2606.12507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rubrics have emerged as an alternative to RLVR in open-ended domains where a single ground-truth final answer is not available. Existing rubric-based training methods rely on an LLM verifier that scores each rollout against rubrics. This introduces substantial training-time overhead, exposes optimization to verifier-specific biases, and reduces rubric feedback to a sparse end-of-trajectory signal. We propose Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation (RGSD), a verifier-free training method in which the base policy, conditioned on the rubric, serves as the teacher for the unconditioned student. RGSD distills the rubric-conditioned teacher distribution into the student token-by-token, replacing sparse trajectory-level rewards with dense per-token learning signals and removing the LLM judge from the training loop entirely. Across Qwen-2.5 (3B, 7B) and Qwen3-Thinking (4B, 8B) models on medical and science domains, RGSD achieves rubric satisfaction comparable to judge-based GRPO while using one on-policy rollout per prompt and no training-time verifier calls. Ablations show that raw rubrics provide a stronger teacher enrichment signal than self-generated reference responses, while a stronger GRPO judge can outperform RGSD in some settings, positioning RGSD as a complementary verifier-free alternative when verifier cost or reliability is the bottleneck.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

OmniPlan: An Adaptive Framework for Timely and Near-Optimal Network Planning Optimization

arXiv:2606.18105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Network planning optimization is a fundamental problem across diverse domains, including transportation systems, communication networks, and power grids. It requires simultaneous optimization of multiple competing objectives under complex constraints. Existing network planning optimization frameworks rely on mixed integer programming (MIP) solvers, heuristics, and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) models to compute planning decisions. However, they lack effective adaptability to diverse and dynamic user intents, thus leading to the trade-off between execution time and optimality. In this paper, we propose OmniPlan, an adaptive framework that achieves both timeliness and near-optimality in network planning optimization. To achieve the adaptability lacking in existing solutions, OmniPlan employs a large language model (LLM)-based interpreter to convert heterogeneous natural-language intents into a unified and quantifiable user-preference vector. Then it employs a mixture-of-experts architecture that integrates MIP solvers, heuristics, and DRL models as specialized experts, where OmniPlan adapts to diverse intents by dynamically selecting timely and near-optimal experts. Finally, it incorporates a DRL-based expert configuration module that fine-tunes optimization objective weights to align planning decisions with user-specific preferences. We evaluate OmniPlan with a representative real-world workload, i.e., distributed machine learning (ML), where we leverage OmniPlan to offload a wide spectrum of ML inference tasks, e.g., decision trees, SVM, naive Bayes, XGBoost, and random forests, onto a network of hardware devices. Our experiments on a real-world testbed indicate that OmniPlan achieves near-optimal and low-execution-time offloading for real-world ML inference tasks, reducing latency by up to 97.8\% and network device resource consumption by up to 11.5\%.

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

Quantum Entanglement Halves the Oblivious Update Bandwidth

Authors:

arXiv:2605.19248v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider $(n,k)$ MDS-coded distributed storage over $\mathbb{F}_q$ with per-node storage $\alpha$ symbols. For the oblivious update problem, where a single message symbol changes and neither helpers nor the stale node know which, the classical lower bound is $\alpha k \log_2 q$ bits. We prove that when the $k$ contacted helpers share prior quantum entanglement, the update bandwidth is $\lceil \alpha/2 \rceil \cdot k \log_2 q$ bits-equivalent, a factor approaching 2 reduction. For $\alpha = 2$, a $[[k, k-2]]_q$ CSS code achieves bandwidth $k \log_2 q$ with one qudit per helper. For general $\alpha$, a $[[\lceil \alpha/2 \rceil k, \lceil \alpha/2 \rceil k - \alpha]]_q$ CSS code achieves the bound with $\lceil \alpha/2 \rceil$ qudits per helper. The matching converse uses the superdense coding bound: the stale node holds all transmitted qudits and hence the entangled partners, so each helper's channel supports at most $D^2$ distinguishable signals for dimension $D$. The result holds for all $(n,k)$ pairs with sufficiently large prime $q$.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

StarOR: Synergizing Tree Search and Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for Optimization Modeling

arXiv:2606.15197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimization modeling is inherently hierarchical, requiring a precise sequence of symbolic commitments. Traditional learning-based automated optimization modeling methods improve modeling policies through large-scale annotated or curated training data, but are costly to adapt to new problem distributions. Meanwhile, one-shot generation remains brittle in hierarchical modeling, where early symbolic errors can propagate into invalid formulations. Test-time scaling offers a promising alternative by enabling structural exploration with additional instance-level computation; however, existing search-based methods typically rely on a fixed policy, causing repeated rollouts to inherit similar modeling biases and providing limited credit assignment for intermediate decisions. To address these limitations, we propose StarOR, a synergistic search-and-adaptation framework that couples MCTS with Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for optimization modeling. StarOR decomposes the modeling process into four stages and updates a transient LoRA adapter via GRPO at each non-terminal node. By using MCTS-generated siblings as local comparison sets, StarOR transforms search-time exploration into instance-specific policy refinement. Moreover, an unsupervised multi-faceted reward system provides fine-grained feedback for intermediate formulation decisions without ground-truth labels. Experiments across five optimization benchmarks show that StarOR achieves state-of-the-art performance even with a 4B backbone, outperforming existing methods and the frontier LLMs.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Discovering Functionally Selective Brain Regions with a Deep Topographic Multimodal Model

arXiv:2606.09770v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Nearby neurons in cortex share similar response profiles, producing systematic spatial organization across sensory and cognitive systems. Recent topographic models reproduce aspects of this structure but remain unimodal and spatially constrain each layer separately, yielding fragmented maps that capture neither the contiguity of cortical processing streams nor their integration across modalities. We introduce Topo-Omni, a topographic multimodal model in which visual, auditory, and language/cognitive processing share a single contiguous in-silico sheet. Built by fine-tuning a pretrained foundation model with a spatial smoothness objective, this architecture develops clusters across modalities that are consistent with human neuroimaging, from sensory to cognitive systems. Driving or suppressing a cluster selectively biases or impairs perception, paralleling human intervention studies. Finally, we use our model to screen for novel clusters in-silico and discover new natural landscape and animal networks which we validate in human data. A single spatial principle thus organizes representations across modalities and processing stages, yielding testable hypotheses about cortical organization.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

When Top-1 Fails: Calibrating LoRA Monitors for Masked Diffusion LMs

Discrete diffusion language model (DLM) fine-tuning inherits inexpensive diagnostics from denoising-time confidence monitors, but their PEFT-training meaning is untested. We test top-1 argmax concentration as a collapse warning. Across 816 LoRA/PEFT configurations from three DLM families, the warning fires for every configuration while logs record 0/816 actual collapses at the 200 step horizon, giving zero precision. The cause is pre-equilibrium saturation: top-1 concentration is already high before optimization and quickly becomes insensitive to final training stability. We then evaluate max LoRA gradient norm, a parameter-side signal that samples gradient routing rather than token concentration. On a pooled held-out LLaDA-family split, a train-optimized threshold identifies top-decile final-loss configurations with precision 0.68 and F1=0.79, above the all-positive top-1 baseline even at the lower split-bootstrap confidence bound. Autoregressive controls and cross-family threshold failures bound the result to short-horizon DLM-LoRA inspection rather than a universal collapse detector. Workflow: drop top-1 as a PEFT alarm, log max-gradient early in training, and calibrate thresholds per DLM family before routing runs for inspection.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

SignNet-1M: Large-Scale Multilingual Sign Language Video Dataset with Downstream Benchmarks

Sign language models are typically trained on datasets captured under constrained conditions, with limited viewpoint, background, and signer-identity diversity, leading to poor robustness under real-world distribution shifts. We introduce SignNet-1M, a large-scale augmented dataset spanning ASL, CSL, and German Sign Language (DGS). SignNet-1M synthesizes realistic variations along three axes: (i) novel-view rendering (rotation and zoom) via 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), (ii) scene/identity editing via diffusion models for background replacement and signer substitution while preserving sign motion and linguistic content, and (iii) post-rendering augmentations that emulate capture and compression artifacts (e.g., pose/temporal perturbations and video-level corruptions) to better match in-the-wild recordings. Beyond data release, we provide a unified benchmark suite across downstream tasks (e.g., translation and recognition) and ablations that isolate each augmentation component. Experiments across backbones show that training with SignNet-1M consistently improves generalization under cross-view, cross-background, cross-identity, and post-rendering shifts, while maintaining strong in-distribution performance. The dataset, full augmentation pipeline, and benchmark are available at https://signnet.chatsign.ai/.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Biological meaning in protein embedding space is resolution-dependent

Protein language model embeddings are increasingly used to organise biological sequences, yet how biological meaning is encoded within embedding neighbourhoods remains poorly understood. Using two independent hierarchical enzyme systems, carbohydrate-active enzymes and peptidases, we investigated how biological interpretation changes across embedding organisations aligned to different levels of biological hierarchy. Different embedding organisations give rise to distinct neighbourhood semantics. When aligned to membership-boundary resolution, embeddings robustly separated artefacts and unrelated proteins from members of the target category. However, embeddings aligned to functional-grouping resolution maintained compositional neighbourhood structure for multi-domain proteins spanning more than one functional or catalytic group. Finally, embeddings aligned to local-family resolution recovered compact family-like neighbourhoods, including families withheld from training, while weakening broader membership-boundary and functional-grouping relationships. Moreover, embeddings optimised toward the same level of biological organisation retain different biological relationships depending on optimisation trajectory employed. Together, our results show that proximity in protein embedding space has no fixed biological interpretation. Instead, biological meaning emerges across embedding resolutions through selective preservation of different forms of biological organisation.

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

Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer for Spacecraft 6D Pose Estimation

Vision sensors provide a lightweight solution for spacecraft proximity operations, but monocular spacecraft 6D pose estimation remains difficult under illumination variation, specular reflection, shadowing, weak texture, and background interference. These factors make local visual evidence spatially unreliable and can destabilize pose regression. This article proposes a Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer (PAID-ViT) for robust spacecraft pose estimation.The proposed model separates pose-relevant structure tokens from illumination-sensitive appearance tokens, estimates patch reliability before pose aggregation, and uses foreground mask supervision to preserve silhouette cues. A parameter-free geometric recovery module converts normalized crop coordinates, log-depth, and a continuous 6D rotation representation into camera-frame rotation and translation. Experiments on SPEED+ V2, the SPEED+ validation/lightbox/sunlamp evaluation configuration used in this study, suggest that PAID-ViT reduces translation error and improves robustness in the challenging sunlamp domain, while ablation studies support the complementary roles of illumination disentanglement, reliability-aware token aggregation, mask supervision, and training-side regularization.

16.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-01

Prenatal exposure to asthma medications and risk of neurodevelopmental disorders and educational difficulties: A systematic review and meta-analysis

by Lama A. Shakhshir, Alexia Karain, Jill P. Pell, Claire E. Hastie, Scott M. Nelson, Michael Fleming Background Since asthma exacerbations during pregnancy risk maternal and fetal health, continued medication is important. However, some studies have reported adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes following prenatal exposure to asthma medication. Therefore, this systematic review aimed to collate the existing evidence on the associations between prenatal exposure to asthma medication and neurodevelopmental and educational outcomes. Methods and findings A systematic review was conducted in accordance with PRISMA guidelines and the PECO framework. PubMed, Medline and Embase databases were searched for studies investigating prenatal exposure to one or more asthma medication and neurodevelopmental or educational outcomes published, in English, between January 2003 and September 2024, and updated in November 2025. Studies of asthma medication used for other indications were excluded. Study quality was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale. Random-effects meta-analyses were conducted where appropriate and heterogeneity was evaluated using Cochran’s Q and I2 tests.Of 16,824 studies identified by the initial search, seven were eligible for inclusion. All investigated beta-2-adrenergic agonists (B2AA), with one including B2AA as mono- and polytherapy—and one study also investigated inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) exposure. Two reported associations with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and one with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). An updated search identified one additional eligible study, which examined both ADHD and ASD, as well as other neurodevelopmental disorders. The included eight studies (n = 3,867,170 participants) comprised cohort (n = 5) and case-control (n = 3) designs and reported inconsistent results. Meta-analysis of three studies (n = 1,380,871) indicated significant associations with ASD for exposure to B2AA both preconception (aOR 1.34, 95% CI [1.19,1.52]) and during pregnancy (aOR 1.29, 95% CI [1.16,1.42]). Heterogeneity was low, with no evidence of significant publication bias. Limitations of the included studies comprised residual confounding and exposure misclassification. Additionally, studies included in the meta-analysis were few in number and did not adequately distinguish between medication effects and underlying maternal asthma. Conclusion Meta-analysis suggested an association between prenatal exposure to B2AA and ASD. An association with ADHD, reported in a single study, requires corroboration. To date, based on our search strategy, no association has been reported with communication skills, motor skills, problem-solving and personal-social skills, or cerebral palsy.

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

Lect\=uraAgents: A Multi-Agent Framework for Adaptive Personalized AI-Assisted Learning and Embodied Teaching

Effective personalized AI-assisted learning demands systems that can not only generate accurate learner-specific educational materials, but also dynamically adapt their instruction to diverse learners. However, existing educational agents have primarily focused on lecture content automation and simulations, which often fall short of modelling multimodal and embodied instructional methods tailored for the individual learner. To this end, we propose Lect\=uraAgents - a multi-agent framework that enables personalized learning through end-to-end adaptive embodied teaching. At its core, Lect\=uraAgents mirrors a professor-student relationship, in which a ProfessorAgent leads a collaborative team of specialized subordinate agents through research, planning, review, and embodied delivery of lecture contents that adapt to a learner's needs. The framework offers three main contributions: (1) a hierarchical multi-agent architecture for end-to-end personalized learning; (2) an adaptive embodied teaching mechanism, wherein the ProfessorAgent executes visible and pedagogically motivated teaching actions (e.g., handwrite, highlight, underline, etc.) over contents in a teaching environment; and (3) a Teaching Action-Speech Alignment (TASA) algorithm that employs salience-based heuristics and temporal semantic segmentation to generate coherent teaching action sequences aligned with learner profiles. We evaluate Lect\=uraAgents on diverse courses at high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels using sample-specific rubric-based analysis; with generated lecture materials and teaching actions assessed and validated by expert educators. Experimental results show consistent gains in lecture content quality, embodied teaching quality, assessment, and personalization over existing approaches, positioning Lect\=uraAgents as a pedagogically well-grounded framework for personalized learning at scale.

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

EMORSION: Examining the Impact of Audio Parameters on Emotional Responses and Immersion in Film

arXiv:2606.18266v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: EMORSION is an exploratory proof-of-concept study examining how film audio design shapes audience emotion and immersion in acinema setting. Four film scenes were selected across the horror (2) and drama (2) genres, balanced between mainstream and independent productions. For each scene, multiple alternative audio mixes were created by systematically manipulating three core aspects of audio design, frequency (pitch), dynamics (loudness), and directionality (spatial placement). Three audience groups viewed the scenes, with each group exposed to one manipulated mix alongside a control mix for each scene. Audience responses were assessed through a triangulated multimodal framework combining self-reported emotion and immersion via a questionnaire, physiological measures including heart rate monitoring, and video-based motion tracking. The protocol successfully captured measurable, interpretable differences across audio conditions, indicating that even subtle changes in audio design can shape emotional perception and immersion. Unconventional mixes tended to produce greater variability in audience interpretation, while conventional immersive mixes were associated with stronger cross-audience agreement. These findings establish the feasibility of the EMORSION protocol and motivate larger-scale studies to characterise the role of specific audio parameters in shaping audience experience.

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

ViCoStream: Streaming VideoLLMs Can Run Beyond 100 FPS with Stage-Wise Coordinated Inference

Streaming VideoLLMs must continuously process incoming video while maintaining low query latency, making both video-ingestion throughput and query-time responsiveness critical for real-time deployment. Existing methods largely focus on accelerating individual modules, such as visual encoding, token pruning, or KV-cache compression, but provide limited insight into whether the resulting system can sustain real-time streaming performance. We formulate streaming VideoLLM inference as a coordinated pipeline spanning visual preprocessing, visual encoding, token dropping, and LLM prefilling/decoding. Building on this formulation, we propose ViCoStream (Video Coordinated Streaming), a stage-wise coordinated streaming framework that combines chunk-wise execution, CUDA-stream overlap, visual token control, bounded visual attention, and query-side retrieval to bound per-chunk computation and memory costs. We further provide a systematic study of bottleneck migration, revealing how chunk size, token retention, attention locality, and retrieval scope shape the throughput-accuracy trade-off. Experiments with Qwen2.5-VL-3B/7B-Instruct across multiple streaming benchmarks show that ViCoStream achieves 134 FPS video throughput and less than 50 ms TTFT on a single A100 GPU while maintaining accuracy close to full-history baselines.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Otters++: A Time-to-first-spike Based Energy Efficient Optical Spiking Transformer

arXiv:2606.13016v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising for energy-efficient inference, and time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding is especially attractive because each neuron fires at most once. In practice, however, this benefit is often reduced by the cost of computing a temporal decay term and multiplying it by the synaptic weight. We address this issue by turning a physical hardware "bug," the natural signal decay in optoelectronic devices, into the main computation of TTFS, named Otters++. Specifically, we use the measured decay of a custom In$_2$O$_3$ optoelectronic synapse to directly realize the TTFS temporal term, removing the need for explicit digital decay computation. To scale this idea to Transformer models, we establish a layer-wise functional equivalence between the Otters++ and a quantized neural network (QNN), and develop a hybrid training method that uses device-faithful SNN computation in the forward pass and QNN straight-through gradients through the equivalent QNN path in the backward pass, together with model distillation. This avoids differentiation through discrete first-spike events and reduces the over-sparsity problem in direct TTFS-SNN training. We further make training aware of measured device noise by sampling run-to-run variation, and refine the system-level energy model by accounting for device sharing and multi-hop communication. On GLUE dataset, Otters++ improves the average score to 84.17\% while maintaining a clear energy advantage over prior spiking Transformer baselines. These results show that physically grounded TTFS computing can be efficient, trainable, and robust under realistic hardware effects.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Poisson approximation by coupling

arXiv:2605.01894v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: It is well known that a binomial $(n,p)$ can be approximated by a Poisson distribution with parameter $np$. The typical approach in undergraduate probability texts is to show a convergence result for the distribution of the binomial as $n$ goes to infinity and $np$ converges to some $\lambda$. In this note we use instead the coupling technique to show a much more general result. Moreover, we only use elementary results from probability.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Using AI in engineering education: a balancing act, driven by clear purpose

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Based on a questionnaire of 100 higher-education students, predominantly from engineering-related fields, and a critical review of recent literature, this chapter examines how students use and perceive Large Language Models (LLMs) in engineering education. Students primarily value LLMs for writing support, conceptual clarification, coding assistance, and brainstorming, while simultaneously expressing concerns about inaccuracies, bias, overreliance, academic integrity, and the burden of verification. Through an analysis of two dominant metaphors, namely LLMs as an "oracle" and as a "tutor," the chapter shows how these systems cultivate expectations of authority, expertise, and personalized learning that often exceed their actual capabilities. The chapter further argues that students' attachment to the promises of efficiency and personalized support reflects a form of "cruel optimism," where the perceived benefits of LLMs often depend on the very skills, vigilance, and expertise that students are still developing. Overall, the chapter argues for a purpose-driven and context-sensitive approach to AI integration in engineering education, emphasizing critical AI literacy, reflective assessment design, pedagogical caution, and consideration of broader ethical and environmental impacts.

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

Coping in Crisis: Computational Modeling of Coping Styles in Digital Crisis Discourse During the 2023 Turkiye Earthquake

How do people cope when disaster strikes and can we detect it at scale, in real time, from what they write? This study addresses that question using over one million Turkish-language tweets posted in the aftermath of the February 6, 2023 earthquake in Turkiye, which unfolded in a deeply polarized political context just months before a national election. Drawing on Lazarus and Folkman's (1984) coping theory, we develop a multi-label BERTurk classifier to detect three coping styles (problem-focused, emotion-focused, and meaning-making) across four theoretically motivated crisis phases. BERTurk achieves a macro F1 of 0.693, substantially outperforming a zero-shot mDeBERTa baseline (macro F1 = 0.324). Applied to the full corpus, the classifier reveals a clear temporal trajectory: problem-focused coping dominates the urgency phase and declines sharply, emotion-focused coping rises and stabilizes, and meaning-making increases monotonically. Anger correlates most strongly with meaning-making (Spearman r = 0.387), suggesting it functions as a mobilizing force toward blame attribution rather than practical action. These findings demonstrate that coping theory can be reliably operationalized in real-world digital crisis data and that doing so can help humanitarian organizations tailor their responses to where a population actually is.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Integral Formulation of QENDy for Robust Nonlinear System Identification

arXiv:2606.11629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This manuscript proposes an integral formulation of the newly defined quadratic embedding method for identifying nonlinear systems (QENDy). In the original algorithm, trajectory data points along with their time derivatives are used. Methods for calculating time derivatives make the algorithm sensitive to noise. Our integral formulation does not use the time derivatives. This results in a more robust method to learn the dynamics.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

LaQual: An Automated Framework for LLM App Quality Evaluation

arXiv:2508.18636v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Representing a new paradigm in software distribution, LLM app stores are rapidly emerging, offering users diverse choices for content generation, coding assistance, education, and more. However, current ranking and recommendation mechanisms in LLM app stores predominantly rely on static metrics, such as user interactions and favorites, making it challenging for users to efficiently identify high-quality apps. At the same time, current academic research focuses on specific vertical fields and lacks a general, automated evaluation framework applicable to the diverse LLM app ecosystem. To address the above challenges, we present LaQual, an automated framework for LLM app quality evaluation. LaQual integrates three key stages: (1) LLM app labeling and hierarchical classification for precise scenario mapping; (2) static indicator evaluation using time-weighted user engagement and functional capability indicators to filter low-quality apps; and (3) dynamic scenario-adapted evaluation, where an LLM generates scenario-specific evaluation metrics, scoring criteria, and tasks for comprehensive quality evaluation. Experiments on a mainstream LLM app store demonstrate the effectiveness of LaQual. Its automated scores show high consistency with human judgments. Through effective screening, LaQual can reduce the candidate LLM app pool by 66.7% to 81.3%. User studies further validate its significant outperformance over baseline systems, particularly in comparison efficiency (mean 5.45 vs. 3.30) and value of explanatory information (4.75 vs. 2.25). These results demonstrate that LaQual provides a scalable, objective, and user-centric solution for high-quality discovery and recommendation of LLM apps in real-world scenarios.