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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Compressed Qubit Noise Spectroscopy: Piecewise-Linear Modeling and Rademacher Measurements

arXiv:2601.02516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Random pulse sequences are a powerful method for qubit noise spectroscopy, enabling efficient reconstruction of sparse noise spectra. Here, we advance this method in two complementary directions. First, we extend the method using a regularizer based on the total generalized variation (TGV) norm, in order to reconstruct a larger class of noise spectra, namely piecewise-linear noise spectra, which more realistically model many physical systems. We show through numerical simulations that the new method resolves finer spectral features, while maintaining an order-of-magnitude speedup over conventional approaches to noise spectroscopy. Second, we simplify the experimental implementation of the method, by introducing Rademacher measurements for reconstructing sparse noise spectra. These measurements use pseudorandom pulse sequences that can be generated in real time from a short random seed, reducing experimental complexity without compromising reconstruction accuracy. Together, these developments broaden the reach of random pulse sequences for accurate and efficient noise characterization in realistic quantum systems.

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

Hierarchical Multi-Modal Retrieval for Knowledge-Grounded News Image Captioning

Traditional image captioning methods often struggle to generate comprehensive, context-rich descriptions, especially for details not directly observable from visual cues. To overcome this, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented image captioning framework that generates captions with deeper insights, such as object attributes, event context, and underlying significance, by leveraging external knowledge. Our approach features a hierarchical multi-modal article retrieval mechanism that moves beyond monolithic text entities. This retrieval considers article structure-aware features, including weighted textual components (e.g., headlines, body sections) and visual placement patterns, alongside multi-faceted similarity computations (content–visual, visual–visual, and discourse positioning). A subsequent contextual relevance refinement stage further enhances the retrieved information. The retrieved articles then serve as the knowledge base for caption generation: first, a VLM generates a concise image description; second, we segment relevant information from the retrieved articles based on this description; and finally, an LLM utilizes both the description and extracted knowledge to generate a comprehensive, contextually detailed caption. We participated in the ACM Multimedia EVENTA 2025 Challenge and achieved 5th place with an overall score of 0.2824 on the private test set of the OpenEvent-V1 dataset. Source code is publicly released at https://github.com/mf0212/EVENTA-Challange.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Priority-Aware Shapley Value

arXiv:2602.09326v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Shapley values are widely used for model-agnostic data valuation and feature attribution, yet they implicitly assume contributors are interchangeable. This can be problematic when contributors are dependent (e.g., reused/augmented data or causal feature orderings) or when contributions should be adjusted by factors such as trust or risk. We propose Priority-Aware Shapley Value (PASV), which incorporates both hard precedence constraints and soft, contributor-specific priority weights. PASV is applicable to general precedence structures, recovers precedence-only and weight-only Shapley variants as special cases, and is uniquely characterized by natural axioms. We develop an efficient adjacent-swap Metropolis-Hastings sampler for scalable Monte Carlo estimation and analyze limiting regimes induced by extreme priority weights. Experiments on data valuation (MNIST/CIFAR10) and feature attribution (Census Income) demonstrate more structure-faithful allocations and a practical sensitivity analysis via our proposed "priority sweeping".

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Universal Speed Limit in a Far-from-Equilibrium Bose Gas: Symmetry and Dynamical Decoherence

arXiv:2605.11895v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting universal transport coefficients in far-from-equilibrium quantum systems remains a fundamental challenge. A paradigmatic example is the non-thermal fixed point (NTFP) of isolated Bose gases, where coherence spreads as $\ell^2(t) = C\hbar t/m$ with a universal constant $C$. While the scaling exponent $z=2$ is well established, the amplitude $C$ has remained elusive because the underlying particle cascade $n(k)\sim k^{-4}$ leads to a divergent kinetic energy, threatening the very existence of a constant speed limit. Here we resolve this paradox and present the first analytical, parameter-free prediction of a universal amplitude $C$. A deep interplay between symmetry and dissipation is uncovered. The emergent weak U(1) symmetry at the NTFP enforces a conserved total current, forcing the low-energy phase dynamics to obey a diffusive Langevin equation with noise entering as the divergence of a stochastic current. This structure, combined with dynamical decoherence of high-momentum modes, yields a universal power-law momentum distribution $\tilde{f}(v)\sim(1+v^2)^{-3}$ (with $v=k\ell$) that naturally regularizes the ultraviolet divergence. From this, a parameter-free geometric baseline $C=3$ is obtained, independent of microscopic details. The experimental value $C=3.4(3)$ [Martirosyan et al., Nature 647, 608 (2025)] is then shown to be quantitatively consistent with universal logarithmic corrections arising from a marginally irrelevant coupling at the fixed point. A new paradigm is thus established for predicting transport coefficients in strongly correlated non-equilibrium systems: symmetry constraints determine the low-energy effective theory, dynamical decoherence provides a natural ultraviolet completion, and scaling analysis delivers testable predictions moving beyond scaling exponents to quantitative amplitude prediction.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Where Computation Lives Inside TabPFN: Causal Localisation of Attention Head Function

arXiv:2606.12917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the first causal mechanistic analysis of a tabular foundation model, investigating how TabPFN 2.5's feature wise attention heads distribute computation across layers. Using activation patching, ablation, and attention entropy across two synthetic regression datasets, we find clear temporal specialisation: one head's causal necessity dominates that of the others by 2 to 5 times at peak layer, with its dominant layer shifting across tasks of different complexity, while the remaining heads exhibit symmetric late layer profiles. Attention entropy and patching provide convergent evidence for the computationally active layers of the dominant head. We additionally investigate inference time steerability via contrastive activation steering, which fails to transfer across samples. We attribute this result to TabPFN's in context learning mechanism, which encodes task structure through context dependent attention rather than the stable parametric directions that make steering tractable in language models.

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

Intelligence as Managed Autonomy: Failure, Escalation, and Governance for Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2605.27628v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As autonomous and agentic AI systems scale in robotic and human-machine environments, managing hallucination and persistent but unjustified action remains an open challenge. Rather than attributing these failures solely to model or alignment limitations, this paper explores the architectural vulnerability of unbounded autonomy - the presumption that an agent should continue operating regardless of rising uncertainty. It introduces a theory of managed autonomy that defines intelligent behavior through the formal capacity to detect epistemic drift, suspend reasoning, attempt recovery, and ultimately surrender control when reliability diminishes. We instantiate this theory via the SMARt (Self-Managing Multi-tier Autonomous Reasoning with Regulated/Revoked transitions) model, a four-layer framework featuring Stable, Meta-cognitive, Assisted, and Regulated states. By developing a timed, guarded Petri net formulation, we establish theoretically bounded properties for the system, demonstrating how architecture can formally mandate escalation, constrain invalid outputs, and ensure governance reachability under specified conditions. We further analyze how incorporating domain-specific trigger sets across varied operational settings (e.g., healthcare, robotics, etc.) can systematically preserve safety, assuming completeness and soundness criteria are met. Because these triggers are designed to be adaptive, the SMARt model accommodates the safe, controlled expansion of an agent's operational scope over time. We conclude that formalizing failure management within the autonomy lifecycle is a crucial step toward realizing reliable and governed artificial intelligence.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Steady-Forcing: Balancing Spatial Persistence and Motion Continuity in Long-Horizon Nature Video Diffusion

Autoregressive video diffusion models enable streaming generation but often degrade over long rollouts: static scene layouts drift, while mechanisms that improve spatial stability tend to suppress motion, causing natural flows such as water, fire, or smoke to stagnate. We study this stability-motion trade-off in fixed-camera long-horizon nature video generation, where the two failure modes can be more clearly separated than in moving-camera settings. We propose Steady-Forcing, a memory and training framework combining a persistent visual anchor (V-Sink), an exponential moving-average motion memory (EMA-Sink), block-relative temporal encoding, periodic cache purification, and distillation from a Wan2.1-14B teacher with motion-rewarded priors under task-focused configurations. Together, these components are designed to preserve background identity while sustaining visually plausible fluid dynamics over multi-minute autoregressive rollouts. Evaluations across seven baselines show that Steady-Forcing improves long horizon background consistency and imaging quality, while a blind user study indicates stronger perceived stability and motion continuity. The benchmark evaluation further suggest that generic VBench aggregate scores under-penalize fixed-camera artifacts as well as rewarding drift-induced optical flow as Dynamic Degree while not directly penalizing texture hardening or flow stagnation - motivating future task-specific benchmarks for static-camera nature-flow evaluation. Project page: https://minar09.github.io/steadyforcing/

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

Teaching Values to Machines: Simulating Human-Like Behavior in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate a remarkable capacity to adopt different personas and roles; however, it remains unclear whether they can manifest behavior that adheres to a coherent, human-like value structure. In this work, we draw on established psychological value theory to induce human-like values in LLMs and assess their alignment with patterns observed in human studies. Using validated psychological questionnaires, we conduct large-scale experiments – over 5 million questions – to evaluate value structures and value-behavior relationships in leading LLMs and compare them to humans. Our findings reveal strong agreement between value-prompted LLMs and humans across both dimensions. Moreover, incorporating human value distributions enhances population-level simulations with value-induced LLMs. These findings highlight the potential of value-induced LLMs as effective, psychologically grounded tools for simulating human behavior.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

DYNA : Dynamic Episodic Memory Networks for Augmenting Large Language Models with Temporal Knowledge Graphs in Continuous Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to incorporate new knowledge without forgetting or costly retraining. We propose DYNA, a lightweight framework that augments a frozen LLM with a temporal knowledge graph where events are nodes and temporal relations are directed, timestamped edges. The graph serves as an external, updatable memory. At query time, DYNA retrieves relevant nodes via random walks and centrality measures, then augments the LLM's response. Evaluated on three temporal recall tasks, DYNA reduces catastrophic forgetting by ~7% compared to fine-tuning and improves temporal ordering by ~5% over standard RAG. Higher graph clustering coefficients correlate with better retrieval, showing that graph structure matters. Contributions: (1) episodic memory as temporal KG, (2) retraining-free LLM augmentation, (3) graph properties as predictors of retrieval performance.

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

DP-Hype: Federated Differentially Private Hyperparameter Search

arXiv:2510.04902v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tuning hyperparameters in federated machine learning can substantially impact model performance. When hyperparameters are tuned on sensitive data, privacy becomes an important challenge and to this end, differential privacy has emerged as the de facto standard for provable privacy. A standard setting in federated learning is that clients agree on a shared setup, i.e., find a compromise from a set of hyperparameters, like a model's learning rate. Yet, prior work on privacy-preserving hyperparameter tuning is tailored to specific learning tasks, does not account for the privacy leakage of aggregated results, or offers a sub-optimal privacy-utility trade-off. In this work, we present our algorithm DP-Hype, which performs a federated and privacy-preserving hyperparameter search by conducting a federated voting based on local hyperparameter evaluations of clients. In this way, DP-Hype selects hyperparameters that lead to a compromise supported by a majority of clients, while maintaining scalability and independence from specific learning tasks. We prove that DP-Hype preserves the strong notion of differential privacy called client-level differential privacy and, importantly, show that its privacy guarantees do not depend on the number of hyperparameters. We also provide bounds on its utility guarantees, that is, the probability of finding good hyperparameters, and implement DP-Hype as a submodule in the popular Flower framework for federated machine learning. In addition, we evaluate performance on multiple benchmark data sets in iid as well as multiple non-iid settings and demonstrate high utility of DP-Hype even under small privacy budgets.

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

SPEAR: A System for Post-Quantization Error-Adaptive Recovery Enabling Efficient Low-Bit LLM Serving

arXiv:2606.11244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficient large language model (LLM) serving is increasingly constrained by deployment cost. Quantization is a key technique for reducing serving cost, yet even state-of-the-art 4-bit quantizers exhibit a noticeable quality gap from FP16, particularly for smaller models where low-bit serving is most beneficial. We identify a fundamental cause of this gap: quantization error is highly input-dependent and varies substantially across tokens, while existing post-quantization compensation methods are static and apply identical corrections to all inputs. As a result, easy tokens are over-corrected while hard tokens remain under-corrected. We present SPEAR, a system for post-quantization error-adaptive recovery that improves low-bit LLM serving. SPEAR introduces lightweight Error Compensators (ECs) modulated by per-token gates and places them only at the most error-sensitive layers identified through a CKA-guided entropy-aware diagnostic. This focuses a small parameter budget where it is most effective. Efficient deployment of ECs presents several systems challenges, including additional computation, tensor-parallel synchronization caused by input-dependent gating, and latency instability across configurations. SPEAR addresses these issues through adaptive kernel-fusion dispatch, combining an epilogue-integrated peer-reduction kernel with P2P dual-write to fuse the post-EC computation into low-bit GEMMs, and an SLO-constrained EC-aware scheduler for predictable serving performance. Across challenging per-channel quantization settings, SPEAR recovers 56-75% of the perplexity gap between W4 and FP16 while adding less than 1% model memory overhead and maintaining latency comparable to a widely used 4-bit serving deployment.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

On the Smoluchowski-Kramers approximation for the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model and its mean-field limit

arXiv:2606.15214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model, i.e. a system of $N$ interacting stochastic damped nonlinear wave equations (SdNLW) with coupled cubic nonlinearities, posed on the two-dimensional torus and indexed by a parameter $\varepsilon > 0$. We show that as $\varepsilon$ goes to zero (Smoluchowski-Kramers approximation) and $N$ goes to infinity (mean-field limit), each component of the solution to the SdNLW system converges to the solution to the stochastic nonlinear heat equation (SNLH) with a mean-field nonlinearity. We prove such convergence via two regimes: first with $\varepsilon$ going to zero to obtain the parabolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model, i.e. a system of $N$ coupled SNLH, and then with $N$ going to infinity; or first with $N$ going to infinity for each component to obtain the mean-field SdNLW and then with $\eps$ going to zero. As a result, we obtain a commutative diagram regarding the convergence from the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model to the mean-field SNLH.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SkillWiki: A Living Knowledge Infrastructure for Agent Skills

While knowledge is managed through Wikipedia and software through GitHub, agent skills still lack an infrastructure for large-scale production, governance, and evolution. SkillWiki is a living knowledge infrastructure that supports the organization, grounding, and continuous evolution of agent skills by transforming heterogeneous knowledge into reusable skill assets linked to their originating evidence. Our demonstration presents the complete skill lifecycle, from knowledge ingestion and skill production to provenance-aware exploration, governance, and execution-driven evolution. SkillWiki highlights a future in which knowledge, skills, and execution experience co-evolve within a shared infrastructure. The live demonstration and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/Huangdingcheng/SkillWiki.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

VERITAS: Verifier-Guided Proof Search for Zero-Shot Formal Theorem Proving

arXiv:2606.19399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based formal provers often collapse rich verifier signals (syntax errors, type mismatches, partial goal progress) into a binary pass/fail bit. We present VERITAS, a zero-shot framework that routes every verifier signal back into proof search through a two-phase protocol: Best-of-N sampling first, then a critic-guided MCTS pass that ingests Phase 1 failures as explicit negative examples. The protocol preserves every theorem solved by its own Phase 1 sweep, so Phase 2's additional solves are attributable to feedback-driven exploration. VERITAS reaches 40.6% on miniF2F (vs. an independently run Best-of-5 at 36.9%, Portfolio 26.2%) and 7.3% on VERITAS-CombiBench, a 55-theorem combinatorics benchmark we release on which Best-of-5 (1.8%) falls below Portfolio (3.6%), exposing that unguided sampling hurts when correct lemma names must be recovered iteratively from verifier feedback. Artifacts are available on GitHub.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Quantitative Experimental Repeated Measures Study of Training Dynamics in a Small Llama Style Language Model Under a Compute-Aware Token Budget

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13370v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study examines training dynamics in a small Llama-style language model trained under a fixed, compute-constrained token budget. Rather than evaluating efficiency solely through endpoint performance, the study uses a quantitative experimental repeated measures design to analyze how validation loss, validation perplexity, rolling volatility, backslide behavior, spike behavior, and between-seed variability change across token-based training intervals. Six independent training runs were conducted on a 4.26-million-parameter model using the TinyStories corpus, CPU-based full-precision training, and a target budget of approximately 20 million cumulative training tokens. Metrics were collected across 21 intervals, producing 126 seed-by-interval observations. Repeated measures ANOVA showed statistically significant interval effects for validation loss, validation perplexity, and rolling volatility. Descriptive trajectories revealed rapid early improvement followed by non-monotonic degradation during later training intervals. Mean validation loss decreased from 8.3552 at initialization to 2.7996 near 4 million tokens, but increased to 3.9010 by the final checkpoint. Validation perplexity followed the same pattern, falling sharply early in training before rising later. Derived telemetry further showed recurrent validation-loss backslides and no interval-summary evidence of a stable phase under the predefined criteria. These findings suggest that compute-aware language model evaluation should examine training trajectories rather than endpoint metrics alone. In constrained compute settings, additional token exposure may increase computational cost without producing proportional generalization gains, and interval-level telemetry can reveal instability, regression, and diminishing returns that final metrics may obscure.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Cutoff for asymmetric shelf shuffle

arXiv:2606.18039v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A mechanical shuffler consists of $m$ shelves. A deck of $n$ cards, arranged in increasing order, is dealt from the bottom sequentially. Each card is assigned a shelf uniformly at random and placed on the top (bottom) of the existing pile with probability $p$ ($1-p$) independently. We refer to this as asymmetric shelf-shuffle. We find the law $\nu_{n, m}^{(p)}$ of the permutation induced by the asymmetric shelf-shuffle and show that the pair consisting of the number of descents and the number of valleys is a sufficient statistic. This generalizes a result of Diaconis, Fulman, and Holmes (Ann. Appl. Prob., 2013) corresponding to the case $p=1/2$. For $p=1/2$, Chen and Ottolini (ECP, 2025) established the cutoff in the total variation distance near $\lfloor n^{5/4}\rfloor$. We establish the cutoff for the asymmetric shelf shuffle. Let $\nu_n$ be the uniform measure on the set of all permutations $S_n$ of $\{1, \ldots, n\}$. For a fixed $p\neq 1/2$ and $c>0$, we show that \[\operatorname{TV}\left(\nu_{n, \lfloor cn^{3/2}\rfloor }^{(p)}, \nu_n\right)=1-2\Phi\left(-\frac{|2p-1|}{4\sqrt{3}c}\right)+O_{c, p}(n^{-1/2})\;.\] We also establish the cutoff in the separation distance near $m\approx n^{2}$ and in the relative entropy near $m=n^{3/2}$. In both cases, we also obtain the cutoff profile explicitly.

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

Retrofitters, pragmatists and activists: Public interest litigation for accountable automated decision-making

arXiv:2511.03211v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper examines the role of public interest litigation in promoting accountability for AI and automated decision-making (ADM) in Australia. Since ADM regulation faces political and geopolitical headwinds, effective governance will have to rely on the enforcement of existing laws. Drawing on interviews with Australian public interest litigators, technology policy activists, and technology law scholars, the paper positions public interest litigation as part of a larger ecosystem for transparency, accountability and justice with respect to ADM. The paper explores the tactics and strategies of what one participant described as 'retrofitting' old laws to ADM. These go beyond creative legal argumentation, to encompass practices of community-building, collaboration on theories of change, canny selection of clients and causes of action, and the alignment of the interests of stakeholders in litigation. Naturally, the paper also contends with the limits of these strategies, and of the Australian legal system. Where limits are, however, capable of being overcome, the paper presents findings on urgent needs: the enabling institutional arrangements without which effective litigation and accountability will falter. The paper is relevant to law and technology scholars; individuals and groups harmed by ADM; public interest litigators and technology lawyers; civil society and advocacy organisations; and policymakers.

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

From Specification to Execution: AI Assisted Scientific Workflow Management

arXiv:2606.18425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific workflow management systems (WMS) support scalable and reproducible execution of complex pipelines, but workflow design, implementation, and debugging remain largely manual and require significant expertise. Recent approaches using large language models (LLMs) show promise for workflow generation from natural language, but often rely on direct code synthesis, which limits transparency, reproducibility, and integration with workflow systems. We present an AI-assisted approach to scientific workflow management that combines specification-driven workflow generation, automated debugging, and distributed execution. The method introduces a structured specification phase that separates workflow intent, design, and implementation, allowing validation prior to code generation. We also develop an LLM-based debugging agent that diagnoses and resolves failures across multiple system layers. To support distributed execution and user interaction, we integrate Pegasus, a widely used WMS, with a Model Context Protocol (MCP) layer, providing a unified interface for workflow submission, monitoring, and control. We evaluate the approach using a federated learning workflow for medical imaging, chosen for its parallel, iterative, and dependency-intensive structure. The system generated and executed large-scale workflows with thousands of jobs, reduced debugging effort, and allowed non-expert users to construct workflows with expert-level design patterns. These results indicate that end-to-end AI-assisted workflow generation and execution is feasible, and point toward AI-driven platforms for managing the scientific workflow lifecycle.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Estimating COVID-19 Cumulative Incidence from Seroprevalence Surveys accounting for Time-Varying Seroreversion: A Fully Bayesian Methodology

Seroprevalence surveys reveal the extent of humoral immunity against pathogens such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and under some circumstances represent cumulative incidence of prior infection. However, antibody waning - or seroreversion - biases these estimates by reducing assay sensitivity in a time-varying manner. Because assay sensitivity decays over time, naively using serosurveys can substantially bias estimates of SARS-CoV-2 cumulative incidence and fatality rates. The Bayesian assay-specific, time-varying sensitivity adjustment developed in this paper can reliably correct for this bias and account for the delay between infection and serosurvey. In seroprevalence studies conducted in the United States in 2020, adjusting for time-varying sensitivity increased cumulative incidence by up to 1.4-fold, with an adjustment of 1.08 for a national study. Our estimates contrast with a previously published 2-fold adjustment that did not account for assay design. This suggests that previous analyses overestimated cumulative incidence by applying seroreversion corrections that did not account for assay-specific effects, or underestimated cumulative incidence by not applying seroreversion corrections. These biases imply fatality rate underestimation and overestimation, respectively. Our model provides a framework for design-specific time-varying sensitivity corrections in seroprevalence surveys for other pathogens.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

PsyScore: A Psychometrically-Aware Framework for Trait-Adaptive Essay Scoring and ZPD-Scaffolded Feedback

Effective Automated Essay Scoring (AES) are expected to support both reliable assessment and actionable instructional feedback. However, existing approaches often treat scoring and feedback as separate components: neural scoring models provide limited interpretability, while Large Language Model (LLM)-based feedback is typically insensitive to learners proficiency levels. To address this fragmentation, this work proposes PsyScore, a psychometrically-aware framework that integrates diagnostic assessment with instructional scaffolding through a shared latent ability representation. PsyScore comprises three key modules: a Trait-Adaptive Neural IRT Scorer that incorporates the Graded Partial Credit Model (GPCM) into a neural architecture, enabling the precise estimation of student ability while maintaining psychometric interpretability, a ZPD-Scaffolded Feedback Generator, which conditions multi-agent feedback strategies on the diagnosed ability parameter to adapt instructional focus across different proficiency levels, and a Multi-Perspective Feedback Evaluation Strategy that assesses feedback quality via pairwise preference judgements and student revision simulations. Experiments on the ASAP++ dataset demonstrate that PsyScore achieves competitive scoring performance while providing more pedagogically aligned feedback.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Vorticity Induced by Non-frontal Collisions of Quantum Droplets

arXiv:2606.17498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rotational dynamics induced by the non-frontal binary collisions of quantum droplets composed of ultracold alkali atoms are analyzed. A theoretical study is presented within the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation framework, using experimentally feasible conditions. Numerical experiments elucidate a rich landscape of possible topological excitations in the system that are robust towards measurements. The collision of heteronuclear quantum droplets composed of $^{41}$K and $^{87}$Rb atoms in the incompressible regime, gives rise to dynamical instabilities that spontaneously generate topological defects: vortex rings, dislocation lines, and vortices in one species. Their presence depends on the Weber number and the impact parameter. An experimental proposal for vortex detection in both real and Fourier space using interaction ramps is described.

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

Learning a Sampling-Free Variational DNN Plugin from Tiny Training Sets to Refine OOD Segmentation With Uncertainty Estimation

Deep neural networks (DNNs) frequently fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) medical images because of variations in scanners and acquisition protocols. Retraining DNN models to address these distribution shifts is often impractical due to the high cost of acquiring and annotating new medical datasets. To address this, we introduce VarDeepPCA, a novel lightweight variational DNN framework designed to restore/refine degraded segmentation maps by leveraging intrinsic geometric priors. Unlike existing approaches that require target-domain data or extensive pre-training, our VarDeepPCA explicitly learns a distribution of valid anatomical geometries using only small in-distribution (ID) datasets. Theoretically, our novel variational learning framework leverages a reinterpretation of the softmax mapping to implicitly perform exact distribution modeling, thereby enabling computationally efficient, sampling-free learning and inference. This also enables VarDeepPCA to provide uncertainty estimates associated with its restored segmentation maps. We empirically validate our framework across 4 distinct clinical applications, using 14 publicly available datasets, involving segmentation of the myocardium, neuroretinal rim, prostate, and fetal head. Comparisons against 15 existing methods demonstrate that VarDeepPCA consistently restores segmentation maps produced by the existing methods on OOD data to (i) significantly improve anatomical plausibility of geometries and clinical utility of the segmentations, and (ii) significantly reduce errors, without needing any more training data than that used by existing methods.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

AI Coding Agents Can Reproduce Social Science Findings

Recent anecdotal evidence suggests that AI coding agents can reproduce published findings when provided with original data and code; yet systematic evaluation across social sciences remains limited. Existing evaluation benchmarks are insufficient, either small or conflate agent performance with problems in the reproduction materials themselves, such as code that fails to execute correctly. Here we introduce SocSci-Repro-Bench, a benchmark of 221 tasks spanning four disciplines and 13 substantive domains, constructed from studies whose results are either fully reproducible with available materials or demonstrably non-reproducible due to missing data, allowing us to isolate agents' reproduction capacity. Evaluating two frontier coding agents, Claude Code and Codex, we find that both can reproduce a large share of social science findings, with Claude Code substantially outperforming Codex. These reproduction rates considerably exceed those previously reported for general-purpose LLM-based agents on comparable reproducibility benchmarks. Both agents also perform strongly on a reasoning task requiring identification of underlying research questions, and additional analyses suggest that results are not primarily driven by memorization. Providing the original paper PDF alongside replication materials modestly improves performance but introduces bias on tasks where reproduction is impossible. We also show that agents can be nudged toward confirmatory specification search through subtle prompt framing. Together, these findings suggest that at least some frontier coding agents can serve as reliable executors of computational workflows while underscoring the need for careful benchmarking and prompt design as AI systems assume larger roles in scientific production.

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

HERO: Hindsight-Enhanced Reflection from Environment Observations for Agentic Self-Distillation

arXiv:2606.11559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning typically improves multi-turn agent capabilities through the terminal outcome of the trajectories, which makes it difficult to determine credit assignments for each intermediate turns. Recent on-policy self-distillation methods offer a promising alternative by converting privileged feedback into dense token-level supervision through a self-teacher. Our study is motivated by the unexpected performance degradation observed when naively extending this paradigm to multi-turn settings, which we attribute to a lack of alignment between privileged feedback, such as successful trajectories or terminal outcomes, and the student's current decision context. We introduce HERO, a hindsight-enhanced self-distillation framework that uses next environment observations as locally aligned feedback. After each rollout, HERO reflects on the completed interaction to convert each observation into a compact turn-level diagnosis, that captures actionable feedback about the original action such as its necessity, validity or failure cause. On TauBench and WebShop, HERO improves task success and reduces unnecessary turns over environment-feedback-only self-distillation and GRPO. It is especially effective under limited training turn budgets, where successful rollouts are rare and GRPO provides weak reward-contrast signals.

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

Density Ridge Selective Prediction for LLM and VLM Hallucination Detection under Calibration Label Scarcity

Hallucination detection in large language and vision-language models is increasingly framed as selective prediction, where a detector assigns a confidence score and abstains when confidence is low. Unsupervised sampling detectors (Semantic Entropy) avoid labels but plateau in quality, while supervised probes attain stronger in-distribution scores yet degrade sharply when calibration labels are scarce. We recover the response manifold of an LLM as the density ridge of a kernel density estimate built on a six-dimensional kinematic feature map of hidden state generation trajectories. A test generation is scored by the negated Euclidean distance from its projected feature point to the nearest ridge vertex, yielding a low-dimensional geometric skeleton of the stochastic output distribution. We evaluate against Semantic Entropy, topological methods, and log-probability on six QA benchmarks (HaluEval-QA, TriviaQA, GSM8K, POPE, ScienceQA, A-OKVQA) using eight text and vision LLMs in a deliberately label-scarce protocol ($n_{cal}{=}200$ queries, $N{=}5$ generations). Our ridge-based score beats on AUROC with 5-20 points gain, while demonstrating tempered degradation under calibration-label scarcity.