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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Anomalous topological superradiant phases

Authors:
You-Qi Lu↗Yu-Yu Zhang↗Zi-Xiang Hu↗

arXiv:2606.25635v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a novel set of light-matter topology realized by implementing a finite-component quantum Rabi array with a photonic analog of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) configuration. We demonstrate how complex light-matter couplings with species-dependent phases lead to the closure of superradiance-induced band gap in a manner that differs from that in the SSH model. We uncover an topological superradiant phase transition from a normal phase to a topological superradiant electromagnet phase, which is characterized both by a local order parameter and a global topological invariant. Novel superradiance-enhanced edge states emerge with significantly amplified excitations superior to those in topological normal phase. Strikingly, tuning light-atom coupling induces novel topological superradiant electric and magnetic phases, exhibiting chiral edge-mode excitation at opposite boundaries. Our proposed setup offers a tunable platform for topological quantum optics, advancing applications in topological superradiant lasers.

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

Fast-dLLM++: Fr\'{e}chet Profile Decoding for Faster Diffusion LLM Inference

Authors:
Siva Rajesh Kasa↗Yasong Dai↗Sumit Negi↗Hongdong Li↗

Diffusion large language models promise parallel token generation, yet inference remains bottlenecked by deciding which masked tokens can be safely committed together. Fast-dLLM addressed this with KV caching and confidence-guided parallel decoding, but its decoding theory uses a homogeneous high-confidence assumption that effectively reduces each candidate set to its weakest selected token. We argue that this leaves speed on the table because real decoding steps exhibit heterogeneous confidence profiles. We propose Fast-dLLM++, a training-free extension that introduces Fr\'{echet profile decoding}: selecting parallel commit sets from the full sorted confidence profile rather than a single worst-case confidence. The resulting rule is a heterogeneous-confidence generalization of Fast-dLLM's factor selector and it recovers the previous rule exactly in the equal-confidence case and adds a provable heterogeneity bonus when the selected tokens have uneven confidences. Fast-dLLM++ leaves the model, diffusion process, and cache implementation entirely unchanged, making it a drop-in replacement for existing Fast-dLLM decoding. Experiments on GSM8K, MATH, HumanEval, and MBPP with the LLaDA-8B model show that the theoretical improvement translates directly into empirical gains: profile-aware selection improves the accuracy–throughput frontier by exploiting safe parallelism that weakest-token rules miss, achieving up to 37\% higher throughput at comparable accuracy. Our code release is at https://github.com/Ringo-Star/FastdLLM_plusplus.

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

Safety-Contract Graph Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Network Security Response

Authors:
Jose Luis Lima de Jesus Silva↗

arXiv:2606.13832v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous network-security response systems promise to reduce Security Operations Centre (SOC) reaction latency, but reward-only multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) can improve security reward while remaining non-deployable. We present a safety-contract graph MARL framework and instantiate it as ACD$^3$-GAT (Adaptive Constrained Counterfactual Decisioning with a Graph Attention Network encoder), an architecture that separates simulator observations from reusable operational budgets, constrained optimization, graph state encoding, and counterfactual action screening. We evaluate the method in CAGE Challenge 4, where agents operate under budgets for Mean Time to Recover (MTTR), false-positive response, and firewall change-management disruption. Across the benchmark, every unconstrained method violates the SOC downtime budget in 100% of evaluated episodes, with mean downtime proxy costs of 311-430 against a budget of 50. This complements prior CAGE Challenge 4 findings by showing that reward-only learning lacks operational discipline. Constrained MAPPO-GAT (C-MAPPO-GAT) isolates Lagrangian operational-cost control and budget-aware screening, while ACD$^3$-GAT adds budget context, CVaR tail-risk estimation, opponent-belief state, and Graph Counterfactual Risk Propagation (G-CRP). The replicated comparison includes three 200-episode seeds for IPPO, MAPPO-GAT, C-MAPPO-GAT, and ACD$^3$-GAT. C-MAPPO-GAT reduces downtime violation from 100% to 0.3% and mean downtime cost from 355.4 to 15.5 relative to MAPPO-GAT. ACD$^3$-GAT reduces mean downtime cost to 48.2 with a 13.8% violation rate, placing it on the safety-contract frontier rather than at the most conservative compliance point. Topology-seed and coupled adaptive Red-process stress tests preserve this contrast and show lower worst adaptive degradation for safety-constrained policies than reward-only MAPPO-GAT.

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04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Typical geometry of self-repelling polymers in a constant force field

Authors:
Kamil Khettabi↗Yvan Velenik↗

arXiv:2606.24352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study a general class of self-repelling polymers on $\mathbb Z^2$, including the simple random walk, the self-avoiding walk and the repulsive Domb-Joyce model, in the presence of a constant force field acting on each monomer. Conditioning the polymer to have fixed length and fixed endpoints, we identify the limiting free energy and prove that typical trajectories concentrate exponentially near a deterministic macroscopic shape. This shape is characterized as the unique minimizer of a variational problem and can be interpreted as a geodesic of a height-dependent Finsler metric. We also analyze two limiting regimes with universal features: for small field strength, in the symmetric case, the geodesic is close to a classical catenary, while for large field strength it converges to a universal polygonal shape governed by the nearest-neighbor lattice constraint.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

SSD: Spatially Speculative Decoding Accelerates Autoregressive Image Generation

Authors:
Shilong Xiang↗Zirui Zhang↗Lijun Yu↗Chengzhi Mao↗

Autoregressive models excel in visual generation by treating images as 1D sequences of discrete tokens, mirroring language modeling. However, this flattening discards the intrinsic 2D spatial locality of visual signals, creating severe computational bottlenecks during inference. We introduce Spatially Speculative Decoding (SSD), a framework that aligns the predictive objective with the natural geometry of images. Rather than predicting only the immediate next token in a 1D sequence, our model simultaneously predicts the adjacent horizontal token and the token directly below it. By capitalizing on this 2D spatial correlation, spatially speculative decoding overcomes the memory wall in visual inference. Our approach accelerates autoregressive image generation by up to 13.3x while maintaining high fidelity on DPG-Bench and GenEval. Our results suggest that respecting the underlying geometry of vision unlocks massive computational efficiencies, paving the way for real-time, high-resolution autoregressive generative models.

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

AME: A Multi-Type Contributor Attribution Framework in Generative AI Markets

Authors:
Yang Shi↗Songwen Pei↗Yang Gao↗Bingxue Zhang↗

Generative AI enables value creation through multi-stage collaboration among heterogeneous contributors, including training data, base models, fine-tuning behaviors, and prompts. However, how to fairly allocate the data value remains largely unexplored. This paper formulates multi-stage generative AI value allocation as a new research problem and identifies three core challenges: heterogeneous data contribution valuation, data rights mapping, and trustworthy execution. We propose AME (Attribution-Mapping-Execution) framework, a unified framework that integrates data contribution valuation, data rights mapping, and trustworthy execution into a single workflow. Experimental results demonstrate that AME framework achieves data value allocation outcomes more consistent with human reference judgments while maintaining low-cost trustworthy execution. Our work provides an initial foundation for value assessment and revenue allocation in generative AI data markets.

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07.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Fast formation to reinforce lithium-rich cathodes

Authors:
Mengjian Fan↗

Formation in lithium-ion battery manufacturing typically involves low-rate charge–discharge cycles to establish stable electrode–electrolyte interfaces—a time-consuming process1–4. Here, our findings on lithium-rich layered oxide cathodes challenge the necessity of conventional formation, which can even shorten battery lifespan. Fast formation, on the other hand, reduces production cost and enhances capacity and stability. Multiscale synchrotron-based techniques show that residual lithium ions after the initial charge are critical for subsequent structural evolution and cycling performance. Deep lithium de-intercalation causes severe structural degradation and capacity loss due to the inherently fragile lithium-deficient matrix. By contrast, the residual lithium ions from fast formation enhance reversibility through a self-pinning effect, preventing pernicious lattice deformation and reinforcing the ion-storage framework. Adjusting the initial charge current density from 0.2 C to 2 C improves reversible capacity by 20% and extends cycle life by more than 36%. This approach can also be extended to other electrode systems, providing insights for more-efficient battery production. Fast formation in lithium-ion batteries outperforms conventional slow formation, lowering costs and improving battery capacity, stability and cycle life, offering broader application to electrode systems.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Spatially Stratified Distillation for Heterogeneous Radar Place Recognition

Authors:
Sagun Singh Shrestha↗Samuel Harding↗Abdelwahed Khamis↗Saimunur Rahman↗Peyman Moghadam↗

Scalable, all-weather place recognition increasingly relies on heterogeneous radar place recognition to bridge diverse hardware platforms. A notable application is matching queries from cost-effective 4D automotive radars against high-fidelity reference maps built by dense spinning radars. This process is fundamentally limited by the extreme sparsity (and narrow field-of-view) of the 4D sensor, which captures only a fraction of the structural density present in the spinning radar database. Prior efforts address this issue by unifying different radar signals. That is, projecting both signals into a common representational space. Yet, they suffer performance degradation in multi-session environments. In this paper, we propose spatially-stratified distillation (SSD); a strategy that replaces standard uniform distillation with an asymmetric spatial alignment derived directly from physical radar returns. In regions where both radars exhibit overlapping returns, SSD enforces strong feature alignment. Crucially, in sparse regions where the 4D student lacks returns but the teacher contains valid structure within the shared field of view, SSD applies heavily discounted distillation weights. Extensive evaluations of the recent HeRCULES dataset demonstrate that SSD significantly outperforms prior place recognition methods, achieving state-of-the-art results on its challenging dynamic sequences.

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09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

AFFORDABILITY OF INTOXICATION FROM CHEAP ETHANOL: EVIDENCE FROM RETAIL ALCOHOL MARKETS IN UGANDA

Authors:
Muhamudu↗Niwagaba↗Rwakahangi↗S. P↗Kwagala↗Miller↗T. R↗Zyambo↗Rizzo↗Achoki↗

Background: Alcohol affordability is a determinant of consumption and alcohol-related harm. In many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), informal production, variable alcohol strength, and non-standard packaging complicate conventional affordability measures, limiting evidence on the economic accessibility of alcohol and the cost of intoxication. Objective: To assess the affordability of intoxication in Uganda by estimating the cost of obtaining ethanol to reach intoxication across alcohol products, packaging types, and retail contexts. Methods: Data were collected on 824 alcoholic beverages from urban, rural, and urban-slum retail markets. Ethanol-standardized pricing (price per gram of alcohol) was calculated, and the cost of consuming 60 g of ethanol was estimated. Multivariate regression identified determinants of ethanol affordability. Results: Affordability varied by product type and packaging. Opaque beers and illicit spirits provided the cheapest pathways to intoxication, with median costs of UGX 1,200-1,500 per 60 g of ethanol. Plastic packaging was associated with lower ethanol costs than glass packaging. Ethanol prices differed across formal and informal markets (p < 0.01), while rural areas and urban informal settlements had 20-25% lower costs than urban areas. Regulatory status alone did not predict affordability. Conclusions: In Ugandas diverse alcohol market, affordability is driven by access to ethanol rather than beverage price alone. Low-cost, high-strength alcohol sold through informal channels enables intoxication at minimal expense, among disadvantaged populations. Implications: Alcohol policies should target ethanol content through minimum unit pricing, alcohol-content-based taxation, and regulation of informal markets and packaging practices to reduce harmful consumption and inequities.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Nonlinear Dynamics of Coherent Parametric Amplification in Multipartite two-level System under Intrinsic Decoherence

Authors:
Muhammad Ibrahim↗

arXiv:2606.25860v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we study the dynamics of global quantum discord and quantum Fisher information in a multipartite system of two-level atoms interacting with a coherent field. The model includes parametric amplification, Kerr-type nonlinearity, and intrinsic decoherence to examine how these effects control quantum correlations and parameter-estimation sensitivity. The results show that, without intrinsic decoherence, both quantities exhibit rapid oscillations with clear collapse and revival behavior. Strong Kerr nonlinearity and strong parametric amplification enhance global quantum discord, while quantum Fisher information becomes maximum under a suitable balance of Kerr nonlinearity and amplification strength. Increasing the number of atoms generally strengthens global quantum discord but does not always improve quantum Fisher information. Intrinsic decoherence damps the oscillations and drives the system toward steady-state behavior.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

ReSum: Synergizing LLM Reasoning and Summarization with Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Xucong Wang↗Ziyu Ma↗Yong Wang↗Shidong Yang↗Hailang Huang↗Renda Li↗Pengkun Wang↗Xiangxiang Chu↗

arXiv:2606.13316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a central technique for improving long-horizon reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing RLVR methods often encourage unnecessarily long reasoning rollouts, which can degrade reasoning coherence and exhaust the available context budget. Existing approaches to long-context organization often depend on external mechanisms to organize rollouts, rather than enabling the model to manage its own reasoning trajectory. To address this limitation, we propose ReSum, a novel RLVR framework that enables LLMs to compress and organize their reasoning trajectories through self-summarization. Our pilot studies show that self-summarization stabilizes generation by lowering token-level entropy, and that introducing a ``summarization'' phrase can substantially mitigate errors propagated from an incorrect rollout prefix. Motivated by these findings, ReSum adopts a summarization-aware adaptive rollout mechanism that contrastively evaluates whether self-summarization benefits the ongoing reasoning process. Specifically, when the model spontaneously triggers self-summarization, ReSum masks the summarization phrase to create a contrastive branch; for non-summarization positions, it instead randomly injects the phrase to create a matched branch. We further design a summarization-aware advantage to enable finer-grained comparison between contrastive rollout trajectories. Extensive experiments show that ReSum improves performance at an average of 4\% while reducing rollout length by 18.6\%.

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12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Time-Conditioned and Multi-Time Survival Prediction from 2D PET/CT Projections in Lung Cancer

Authors:
Ashish Chauhan↗Sambit Tarai↗Elin Lundstr\"om↗Johan \"Ofverstedt↗H{\aa}kan Ahlstr\"om↗Joel Kullberg↗

Accurate prediction of overall survival (OS) from positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) can support personalized treatment and follow-up strategies in oncology. However, the impact of temporal modeling on imaging-based survival prediction remains insufficiently explored. We investigate how different temporal formulations influence survival prediction by developing two complementary approaches: Attention-guided Time-Conditioned Survival (ATCS) and Multi-Time Survival (MTS). We retrospectively analyzed pre-treatment PET/CT images from 848 patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), including 556 for model development and 292 for held-out testing. A previously proposed Time-Conditioned Survival (TCS) model was used as a baseline. Models were trained using 5-fold cross-validation and evaluated on the test set using time-dependent area under the curve (AUC) at 6-month intervals from 0.5 to 5 years. Both ATCS and MTS outperformed the baseline TCS model, achieving mean AUCs of 0.794 and 0.793, respectively, compared to 0.767. ATCS performed better at earlier time points (0.5-3 years), whereas MTS performed better at later intervals (3.5-5 years). Combining tumor-specific and tissue-wise PET/CT features improved performance over either input alone. Finer temporal discretization improved short-term prediction, while coarser intervals provided more stable long-term estimates. These findings demonstrate that temporal modeling and input design influence PET/CT-based survival prediction. The proposed approaches enable time-specific survival estimation from pre-treatment imaging and may support improved risk stratification and clinical decision-making.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Efficiency-Performance Trade-offs in Neural Speaker Diarization via Structured Pruning and Low-Bit Quantization

Authors:
Rishit Chatterjee↗Tahiya Chowdhury↗

Streaming speaker diarization is crucial for time-critical medical dispatch, but deploying it on resource-constrained hardware requires smaller, faster models. Using SIMSAMU, a dataset of simulated medical-dispatch conversations, we evaluate streaming behavior before compressing the segmentation model with pruning and low-bit quantization. We characterize performance across a range of streaming latency budgets and find that additional buffering is not consistently beneficial, while very low-latency operating points can substantially degrade performance. Our study shows that model compression trades performance for memory footprint, and we highlight an operating point where FP16 reduces model size by half with essentially unchanged real-time factor, at a cost of a 40\% relative DER increase against the baseline. This work characterizes the trade-offs for real-time deployment and contributes to speech technology that can enable reliable human communication in time-critical contexts.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SAAS: Self-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Over-Search Mitigation in Agentic Search

Authors:
Yunbo Tang↗Chengyi Yang↗Shiyu Liu↗Zhishang Xiang↗Zerui Chen↗Qinggang Zhang↗Jinsong Su↗

Agentic search enables LLMs to solve complex multi-hop questions through iterative reasoning and external search. Despite the effectiveness, these systems often suffer from a critical limitation in practice: agents fail to recognize their own knowledge boundaries, blindly triggering searches when internal knowledge suffices and failing to terminate search even when adequate evidence has been collected. The lack of self-awareness leads to severe over-search, incurring substantial inference latency and prohibitive computational cost. To this end, we propose SAAS, a novel RL framework designed to cultivate dynamic self-awareness that precisely regulates search behavior without compromising accuracy. SAAS introduces three key components: (i) a search boundary modeling mechanism, which identifies the search boundary under the evolving policy by contrasting search-disabled and search-enabled rollouts; (ii) a boundary-aware reward module, which translates this boundary awareness into trajectory-level penalties, suppressing unnecessary and redundant searches; and (iii) a stage-wise optimization strategy, which leverages a sequential curriculum to prioritize reasoning over search regularization, thereby avoiding reward hacking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAAS substantially reduces over-search, while maintaining accuracy. Our code and implementation details are released at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/SAAS.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

EmoZone-Talker: Regional Semantic Control of Audio-Driven 3DGS Talking Heads via Facial Action Units

Authors:
Tingting Chen↗Shaojun Wang↗Huaye Zhang↗Diqiong Jiang↗Chenglizhao Chen↗

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown strong potential for high-fidelity talking head synthesis. However, enabling fine-grained, interpretable, and editable facial expression control remains fundamentally challenging due to intrinsic conflicts between speech-driven facial dynamics and explicit expression signals. Existing methods rely on implicit multimodal fusion, leading to spatial entanglement and temporal instability. We present EmoZone-Talker, a novel framework that reformulates audio-driven facial animation as a structured spatial-temporal coordination problem under cross-modal conflicts. Our approach introduces an explicit spatial disentanglement and temporal dynamics modeling of facial motion. Specifically, we propose Synergy Zones with Prioritized Attention Bias (SZ-PAB) to explicitly decouple modality contributions via region-wise constraints guided by anatomical priors, and a Channel-Independent Temporal AU Encoder (CIT-AE) to model temporally coherent AU dynamics. By integrating these representations into 3D Gaussian deformation, EmoZone-Talker enables precise and interpretable control over facial expressions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves expression controllability and realism, with notable gains in upper-face accuracy and temporal coherence, while preserving high rendering quality and accurate lip synchronization. Code will be publicly released to facilitate reproducibility and further research.

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

An Ethical eValuation Agent (EeVA): Results of a Proof-of-Concept Test on a Prototype Agentic-like Workflow to Assist Ethical Deliberations

Authors:
Stephen Milford↗B. Zara Malgir↗Miguel Vazquez↗

arXiv:2606.11218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ethical deliberation is often misunderstood as a search for single right or wrong answers, creating difficulties for non-ethically trained personnel who must address ethically laden challenges. We developed EeVA, an agentic-like LLM-based workflow designed to support comparative ethical reflection rather than deliver definitive ethical answers. EeVA was programmed in n8n using three interconnected workflows: starter, worker, and emitter. It evaluated uploaded use cases against 10 ethical frameworks through evaluator and synthesis prompts. Proof-of-concept testing used three published cases from urban mobility, peer-to-peer energy trading, and social-service resource allocation. Across all cases, EeVA produced consistently structured framework-specific evaluations and integrated syntheses. Outputs differentiated between frameworks, identified convergences and divergences, recommended modifications to increase alignment, and highlighted persistent ethical tensions. Syntheses were readable for non-specialists and shifted attention away from simplistic answers toward design conditions, safeguards, and areas where full cross-framework agreement was unlikely. The findings suggest that LLMs can be organised into usable workflows that preserve ethical plurality while helping bridge the communicative gap between ethicists and non-ethically trained personnel. EeVA's value lies not in replacing ethicists or resolving moral disagreement, but in scaffolding structured ethical deliberation. EeVA offers a promising proof of concept for supporting ethical reflection where access to ethics expertise is limited. Further work is needed on reproducibility, human evaluation, user testing, and efficiency before it can be considered a mature tool.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Characterizing Narrative Content in Web-scale LLM Pretraining Data

Authors:
Teagan Johnson↗Elliott Ash↗Andrew Piper↗Maria Antoniak↗

The narrative composition of web-scale LLM pretraining corpora remains largely unexplored even though narrative is a fundamental mode of human communication. We present the first fine-grained study of narrative features in Dolma, a 3-trillion-token open pretraining corpus. Drawing on narrative theory, we design a framework spanning three core narrative elements (agency, setting, and events) operationalized as 11 interpretable dimensions. After sampling and annotating a diverse set of 400 passages, we finetune and validate NarraBERT, a RoBERTa-based model for fine-grained narrative prediction. We apply NarraBERT to 3M passages, resulting in a new dataset, NarraDolma. We find (i) narrative structure is measurable at scale across extremely heterogeneous data, (ii) we uncover a continuous, multidimensional narrative structure underlying web text, and (iii) narrative qualities are unequally distributed across pretraining sources and topics in ways that current curation practices neither measure nor account for. Our framework, dataset, and analyses provide a foundation for understanding how narrative qualities are distributed in LLM pretraining data and for studying how data composition affects narrative reasoning tasks. We publicly release NarraDolma and NarraBERT.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Quantifying Aleatoric Uncertainty of In-Context Learning for Robust Measure of LLM Prediction Confidence

Authors:
Jinseok Chung↗Minkyoung Song↗Hyunji Jung↗Namhoon Lee↗

In-Context Learning (ICL) allows LLMs to adapt to new tasks from a few demonstrations, but its reliability remains a concern: predictions are highly sensitive to both prompt design and the model's ability to understand the context, obscuring whether failures arise from data properties or model limitations. Uncertainty decomposition-separating aleatoric from epistemic sources-is particularly crucial in this setting, yet existing methods, designed for standard generation tasks, fail to capture the unique dynamics of ICL. To address this, we introduce a concept of self-function vectors, built upon Bayesian views and the mechanistic interpretability of ICL. These vectors leverage internal model representations to model the latent concept learned during in-context prompting, thereby enabling a direct estimation of aleatoric uncertainty within a Bayesian framework and circumventing the reliance on brittle input or decoding manipulations. Given the lack of established benchmarks and suitable evaluation protocols, we also propose the first and rigorous evaluation protocol, in which data is manipulated in controlled ways so as to quantify aleatoric uncertainty precisely and separately from epistemic uncertainty. With this new evaluation framework, initially grounded in synthetic tasks for conceptual development and subsequently extended to real-world datasets, we show that our proposed methodology can measure uncertainty of LLM predictions made under ICL more reliably than existing alternative methods. Moreover, we show it can be used as a practical tool for trustworthy-related applications, such as hallucination detection. Our findings pave a new direction for connecting the quantitative view of uncertainty with the mechanistic understanding of model behavior.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Cognitive Trajectory Modeling: Quantifying Human-AI Co-Creation through Cognitively Grounded Interaction Trajectories

Authors:
Nicholas Davis↗

arXiv:2606.15358v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Co-creative AI research increasingly seeks methods capable of representing how interaction dynamics evolve through time. While many existing approaches focus on observable interaction characteristics, interaction metrics, behavioral coding schemes, or activity traces, these methods often struggle to capture higher-order interaction dynamics, including how collaborative processes reorganize, stabilize, regulate, and evolve through time. This paper introduces Cognitive Trajectory Modeling (CTM) as a cognitive theory of interaction dynamics that conceptualizes cognition, interaction, and creative processes as temporally organized trajectories unfolding across cognitively meaningful attractor landscapes. CTM builds upon the theoretical foundations of the Enactive Model of Creativity and Creative Sense-Making (CSM), revisiting the role of sense-making curves and cognitive trajectories in representing co-creative interaction dynamics. We formalize this perspective through the Cognitive Trajectory Principle, which states that temporal representations are only theoretically interpretable as cognitive trajectories when their underlying states possess directional cognitive meaning. Building on this principle, CTM generalizes the notion of cognitive trajectories beyond any particular coding scheme and provides a broader framework for modeling interaction dynamics through trajectories unfolding across meaningful attractor landscapes. We further distinguish cognitive trajectories from interaction traces and situate CTM within a broader hierarchy of cognitive, interaction, and domain dynamics. More broadly, we argue that understanding co-creative systems requires methods capable of modeling how cognition and interaction dynamics unfold through time. CTM provides a foundation for studying interaction dynamics across co-creative AI and human-AI interaction.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Time Series Causal Discovery via Context-Conditioned and Causality-Augmented Pretraining

Authors:
Biao Ouyang↗Tengxue Zhang↗Zhihao Zhuang↗Yang Shu↗Chenjuan Guo↗Bin Yang↗

arXiv:2605.26759v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Causal discovery from time series is critical for many real-world applications, such as tracing the root causes of anomalies. Existing approaches typically rely on dataset-specific optimization, making it difficult to transfer their causal discovery capabilities to new time series governed by diverse causal mechanisms. In this paper, we propose PTCD, a novel Pretraining framework for Time-series Causal Discovery, which improves cross-task generalization through context-conditioned modeling and transferable causal augmentation. To model complex temporal causal dependencies, PTCD employs a dual-scale iterative attention mechanism to capture window-level causal relationships, and a Gaussian mixture with a context-level routing mechanism to handle heterogeneous exogenous distributions. To further address distribution shifts across causal graphs, PTCD adopts a pretraining paradigm on synthetic datasets that integrates intervention-based learning and a causal mixup strategy, promoting stable causal discovery and stronger generalization. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets demonstrate that PTCD excels in both causal discovery and root cause identification.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

From Imitation to Alignment: Human-Preference Flow Policies for Long-Horizon Sidewalk Navigation

Authors:
Honglin He↗Zhizheng Liu↗Yukai Ma↗Bolei Zhou↗

arXiv:2606.12603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous long-horizon sidewalk navigation is essential for micro-mobility applications such as robotic food delivery and assistive electronic wheelchairs. Unlike autonomous driving on the road, long-horizon sidewalk navigation requires precise maneuvering through unpredictable sidewalk terrains and pedestrians, with a lightweight perception stack as minimal as a single monocular RGB camera. While imitation learning (IL) from demonstrations offers a practical solution, the resulting autopilot policy often suffers from compounding errors, a lack of social compliance on sidewalks, and deficiencies in counterfactual reasoning to handle complex situations. To address these challenges, we introduce FlowPilot, a mapless navigation policy that achieves robust and efficient long-horizon navigation performance using only a monocular RGB camera. We first propose to use anchored flow matching as an action representation for policy pre-training on large-scale robot fleet data and to capture the diverse, complex, multimodal distribution of sidewalk navigation behaviors. To bridge the gap between imitation and alignment, we further design a human-in-the-loop preference learning scheme to tune the policy on a small amount of human intervention data. It strengthens the model's counterfactual reasoning and social compliance on sidewalks. We evaluate FlowPilot through extensive simulation and real-world experiments in diverse sidewalk environments. FlowPilot achieves 42% success rate and 66% route completion in simulation, while FlowPilot-HP further improves real-world robustness and social compliance, reducing IR by 40.0% and NIR by 52.1% relative to the base model.

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23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Fanconi Anemia as a Window into Premalignant Field Cancerization of the Oral Mucosa

Authors:
Berger↗Donovan↗F. X↗Lin↗Y.-C↗Soma↗May↗Bhadresha↗Krieg↗Giri↗McReynolds↗L. J↗…

Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) evolves through stepwise clonal expansion within genetically altered mucosa fields, yet actionable biomarkers remain undefined. Leveraging Fanconi anemia (FA), a cancer predisposition syndrome with extreme HNSCC risk due to defective DNA interstrand crosslink repair, we profiled premalignant changes in the oral cavity using noninvasive brush biopsies. Consistent with our prior demonstration of genomic instability in FA-associated SCCs, we detected pathogenic TP53 variants in 26% and copy number alterations in 60.5% in clinically normal-appearing oral mucosa of individuals with FA. These subclinical clonal expansions define candidate biomarkers of early clonal evolution amenable to serial sampling for risk stratification and prevention studies. Since FA-associated SCCs share genomic features with sporadic HNSCC, these findings may extend to the broader population. We also identify somatic reversion of a pathogenic FANCB variant, providing evidence of genomic self-correction and suggesting a potential avenue for gene-based cancer prevention in FA.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

MemTrace: Probing What Final Accuracy Misses in Long-Term Memory

Authors:
Xianxuan Long↗Zhikai Chen↗Shenglai Zeng↗Shouren Wang↗Kai Guo↗Jiliang Tang↗

arXiv:2606.17328v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly maintain long-term memory of user facts across sessions. Yet such memory is usually evaluated by aggregating accuracy over question rows or episodes. Because this approach scores question rows independently, even when several questions probe the same fact, it cannot show how that fact behaves as conditions change. We introduce MemTrace, a benchmark whose unit of measurement is the knowledge point: a single typed fact about the user, rather than an individual question. MemTrace probes each fact along three controlled dimensions: memory age, defined by how many sessions ago the fact appeared in the history; question type, covering current state, earlier state, and trajectory of change; and evidence condition, covering present, missing, and contradicted-by-false-premise settings. Evaluating 13 memory-system configurations across four paradigms, we find that similar pooled accuracy hides different failures: recovering a fact's current and earlier states does not imply tracking how it changed, and safe abstention does not imply correcting a false premise. The dominant bottleneck is evidence use, not retrieval: when systems fail, the evidence was retrievable 10 times more often than it was missing. These results suggest that improving long-term memory requires better use of reachable evidence, not simply more storage or retrieval.

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

BoRAD: Bootstrap your Own Representations for Multi-class Anomaly Detection

Authors:
Duy Hoang Khuong↗Tri Nguyen Minh↗Ngu Huynh Cong Viet↗

Reconstruction-based anomaly detection is attractive for industrial inspection, but scaling it from category-specific training to a one-for-all setting is challenging. A single model must reconstruct diverse normal appearances without copying abnormal details, which exposes two coupled failure modes: identical shortcut, where anomalies pass through the reconstruction path, and mis-reconstruction, where normal categories are confused with one another. We propose BoRAD, a label-free training framework that treats this as a representation-capacity allocation problem. BoRAD uses a shared learnable prototype bank to impose two complementary regularizers: spatial prototype alignment contracts local within-prototype variation to suppress anomaly copying, while prototype-relative global alignment preserves between-prototype structure and improves sensitivity to abnormal angular deviations. The prototype bank and prediction heads are used only during training; inference remains a standard teacher-student feature discrepancy pass, with no class labels, negative pairs, memory retrieval, or prototype lookup. BoRAD achieves competitive one-for-all anomaly detection performance, including 86.2\% mAD on MVTec AD, 80.7\% mAD on VisA and 73.1\% mAD on Real-IAD. Diagnostic analyses further show reduced anomaly leakage, improved normal-category separability, and stronger anomaly-normal score separation.

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