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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines

arXiv:2606.19134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines (PQLRM), a multi-objective reinforcement learning algorithm for tasks whose reward structure is specified by a set of reward machines (RMs). PQLRM combines Pareto Q-Learning (PQL), which maintains sets of vector-valued Q-estimates to approximate the Pareto front, with enhancements from Q-Learning with Reward Machines (QRM), which exploits the factored automaton structure of the reward signal. This yields a multi-policy algorithm that remains sample-efficient under non-Markovian, RM-encoded rewards. Experimental trials show that PQLRM converges faster than a naive PQL baseline applied to the cross-product MDP and can synthesize Pareto-optimal policies that QRM cannot.

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

SPARK: Spatial Policy-driven Adaptive Reinforcement learning for Knowledge distillation

Low-bit quantization enables deployment of image restoration (IR) networks on resource-constrained devices, but introduces rounding noise that disproportionately degrades high-frequency regions such as edges and fine textures. Existing knowledge distillation (KD) methods apply distillation signals uniformly across all spatial locations, overlooking the varying reconstruction difficulty across image regions. To address this, we propose SPARK (Spatial Policy-driven Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Distillation), a framework that adaptively allocates distillation effort using a lightweight reinforcement learning (RL) policy network. At each training step, a difficulty feature extractor computes four signals, namely Laplacian variance, pixel variance, student reconstruction error, and teacher-student knowledge gap, which are fed into a compact policy CNN that produces a stochastic spatial weight map to modulate the KD loss during quantization-aware training (QAT). SPARK is IR task-agnostic, adds no inference cost, and integrates into any existing QAT pipeline without architectural changes. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SPARK consistently outperforms PTQ, QAT, and state-of-the-art (SOTA) KD approaches across multiple student architectures, achieving reconstruction quality closest to the full-precision teacher under significant computational constraints.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Physically Motivated Ansatz for Open Fermionic Systems on Quantum Computer

arXiv:2606.16823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Determining non-equilibrium steady states (NESS) of open fermionic systems is a fundamental problem akin to finding ground states of closed systems. To address this, variational quantum algorithms can be used to solve the Lindblad master equation, much like the Schrödinger equation, yet ansatz design for NESS remains challenging. Existing approaches rely mostly on hardware-efficient ansätze (HEA), which suffer from the barren plateau problem. Here, we introduce a physically motivated ansatz named NE-UCC. Numerical simulations demonstrate that NE-UCC reliably converges to the steady state even in strongly correlated regimes far from equilibrium, reducing the infidelity by up to ten orders of magnitude compared to HEA. Furthermore, NE-UCC facilitates the exploration of excited eigenmodes with specific symmetries.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Interaction-Centered Intelligence: Toward an Interaction-Based Theory of Human-AI Co-Creation

arXiv:2606.00807v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Traditional artificial intelligence has largely conceptualized intelligence as isolated computation occurring within bounded agents. Across classical AI, machine learning, and many generative systems, the dominant unit of analysis remains the individual model or autonomous system evaluated through outputs, benchmarks, prediction accuracy, or optimization performance. While these approaches have produced major advances, they often under-theorize the role of interaction in the emergence of intelligence, creativity, meaning, and adaptive behavior. This paper proposes interaction as the primary unit of analysis for co-creative AI and interaction-centered intelligence more broadly. Drawing from distributed cognition, embodied cognition, enaction, participatory sense-making, human-computer interaction, and computational creativity, the paper traces a historical progression toward increasingly relational accounts of intelligence. Building upon prior work in Creative Sense-Making, quantified co-creation, and co-creative systems such as the Drawing Apprentice and AI Drawing Partner, it argues that intelligence emerges through evolving interaction dynamics among agents, environments, and socio-technical systems rather than solely through internal computation. The paper introduces Interaction-Centered Intelligence as a framework for understanding human-AI co-creation, collaborative emergence, adaptive participation, and interactional dynamics. Rather than evaluating intelligence solely through generated outputs, the framework emphasizes interaction trajectories, coordination patterns, participatory engagement, adaptive regulation, and interactional drift unfolding through time. Implications for explainable co-creative AI, hybrid intelligence, enactive AI, and future human-AI systems are discussed.

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

Order Is Not Control

AI alignment, interpretability, steering, and neural perturbation studies identify order-inducing objects. We argue that order is not control. Control requires a receiver-gated response law: a denominator-indexed operator mapping material state, action/drive, bath, and receiver state to response displacement, sinks, effort, and basin projection. We identify it across biological, LLM, adapter, and stochastic-operator panels. The laws are local: an intervention can be admitted, saturated, sign-changing, leaky, or overdriven depending on medium, bath, receiver state, action port, and comparator. Control is assigned when finite effort moves a target or outcome-readout class under the same denominator while damage, null/evasive, invalid format, overdrive, and unnecessary effort stay bounded. Mouse ALM, C. elegans, and zebrafish panels provide physical response-operator evidence while excluding coordinate identity and controller conclusions. LLM panels show generated-output response laws: across four material conditions, response vectors are predictable at 72.8-73.7% component-sign accuracy, rising to 84.3-84.8% on nonzero components; held-out observers predict system-effect and target/oracle families at 93.6% and 91.7% accuracy. Constitution-conditioned adapters reshape susceptibility as prepared media, and stochastic-operator panels separate measured opportunity from deployable action policies. This gives a driven-dissipative response-system account at the mesoscopic control level: drives act through prepared media, baths, and receivers, producing admitted movement, impedance, sinks, or overdrive. The evidence supports local admitted control and measurable stochastic response operators, while leaving deployable pre-generation control, hidden/logit causal sufficiency, biological-to-LLM coordinate identity, and literal thermodynamic quantities outside scope.

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

Test-Time Compute Scaling for ASR with Depth-Conditioned Looped Transformers

arXiv:2606.04678v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: End-to-end ASR systems typically use fixed-depth acoustic encoders at inference, making it difficult to trade additional test-time computation for improved recognition without training a larger model. A natural approach is to reuse a shared Transformer block recurrently, but we find that naive looping does not fully exploit additional recurrent compute. We introduce LARM, a depth-conditioned looped Transformer that turns recurrent encoder depth into a controllable test-time compute axis. LARM combines sparse CTC checkpoints, supervision-clock embeddings, FiLM depth conditioning, and delayed soft-posterior feedback. These components structure the loop into recognition checkpoints separated by latent refinement phases and allow shared weights to specialize across recurrent steps. On LibriSpeech, LARM improves WER as the number of inference loops increases and achieves performance competitive with deeper unshared-parameter baselines. Our results show that test-time compute scaling can extend beyond autoregressive language-model reasoning to continuous non-autoregressive speech recognition.

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

MVEB: Massive Video Embedding Benchmark

We introduce the Massive Video Embedding Benchmark (MVEB), a 23-task benchmark for video embeddings spanning classification, zero-shot classification, clustering, pair classification, retrieval, and video-centric question answering. We evaluate 33 models and find that no single model dominates: MLLM-based embeddings lead on classification, clustering, pair classification, and QA; multimodal binding leads on retrieval and zero-shot classification; generative MLLMs without contrastive adaptation collapse on cross-modal tasks. Paired video-only vs. audio+video evaluations show that audio's contribution depends on dataset annotation provenance: audio helps when labels were produced from both modalities and hurts when they were produced from visuals alone, a six-point gap consistent across model families. MVEB is derived from MVEB+, a 184-task pool, and is designed to maintain task diversity while reducing evaluation cost. It integrates into the MTEB ecosystem for unified evaluation across text, image, audio, and video. We release MVEB and all 184 tasks along with code and a leaderboard at https://github.com/embeddings-benchmark/mteb.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimising Entanglement Distillation Policies

arXiv:2606.14908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement distillation is a fundamental operation in quantum information processing used to obtain higher-fidelity entangled pairs from a supply of less entangled quantum states using local operations aided by classical communication (LOCC). In a physically relevant setting, where states with an initial fidelity of $f_0$, probabilistically generated over multiple, $m$, memory pairs distributed between two parties, Alice and Bob, are pairwise distilled, the optimal policy identifies the system-configuration dependent sequence of entanglement generation and distillation operations that need to be performed in order to minimize the expected time to reach some target fidelity $f_T>f_0$. Here, we formulate and systematically analyze this task as a Markov decision problem and using a value iteration algorithm, obtain optimal deterministic policies that minimize the expected waiting time required to reach a target fidelity. Our results show that the expected waiting time under the optimal policy decreases with increasing generation probability $p$ and number of quantum memories $m$ - as expected. In contrast, it exhibits non-monotonic behavior with respect to $f_0$ for a fixed fidelity gap, $(\Delta f = f_T-f_0)$. While the optimal policy consistently outperforms baseline policies such as the greedy, nested and entanglement pumping policies, its relative advantage is regime-dependent, being determined by the system parameters ($p,f_0,f_T,m$), and exhibits a nontrivial dependence on the fidelity gap $\Delta f$. Our results highlight the value of formulating entanglement distillation as a Markov decision problem, enabling the systematic design of policies that achieve target fidelity thresholds for quantum information tasks in realistic resource-constrained settings.

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

DYNA-PRUNER: Input-Adaptive Data-Model Co-Pruning for Efficient and Scalable Spatio-Temporal Media Prediction

Spatio-temporal prediction supports radar/satellite nowcasting and city-scale traffic monitoring, but modern models are often too expensive for real-time deployment. This stems from a mismatch between dense computation and strong input-dependent redundancy (e.g., calm seas or clear skies). To enable automated, resource-aware architecture optimization in scalable media analysis, we propose Dyna-Pruner, an end-to-end framework for input-dependent co-pruning of data and model structure. A shared-importance synchronization mechanism generates coupled masks that prune redundant regions and their corresponding computational units (e.g., convolutional filters), yielding per-sample sparse sub-networks at inference time. Experiments on WeatherBench, SEVIR, and TaxiBJ show seamless integration with CNN, RNN, and Transformer backbones, reducing FLOPs by up to $70\%$ and achieving a $2.5\times$ speedup on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin with negligible accuracy loss ($

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Partitioned Iterative Quantum Scheduling of Satellites for Urgent Disaster Response: Case study of Wildfire

arXiv:2606.12310v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The standard in Earth-observation tasks today is having near real-time access to surface images in response to changing conditions. For instance, as urban environments interface more with wildlands and wildfires become less predictable, their tracking with satellite resources becomes essential. This requires the coordination of increasingly large constellations of satellites, giving rise to challenging computational problems. With wildfire detection and tracking as a backdrop, we investigate the power of special purpose and novel computing paradigms to tackle the ensuing satellite scheduling problems, making a compelling case for quantum algorithms. We bring quantum scheduling algorithms closer to implementation by examining both the emerging iterative quantum algorithm framework, which comes with analytic guarantees compared to some classical algorithms, and distributed quantum computing methods whose relevance is on the rise as utility-scale problems begin to get solved with quantum computers. Drawing strength from several computing fronts, we develop a distributed/parallelization scheme in conjunction with the quantum algorithm design and apply these techniques to real-world datasets for wildfire detection. While our quantum subprocesses are currently too small to see significant quantum advantage, our results validate the utility of these techniques, and continue forging the path toward distributed quantum computing.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Towards Conversational AI for Disease Management

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in diagnostic dialogue1, their capabilities for effective management reasoning—including disease progression, therapeutic response, and safe medication prescription—remain under-explored. We advance the previously demonstrated diagnostic capabilities of the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE)1−3 through a new LLM-based agentic system optimized for multi-visit clinical management and dialogue. To ground its reasoning in authoritative clinical knowledge, AMIE leverages Gemini’s long-context capabilities4, combining in-context retrieval with structured reasoning to align its output with up-to-date clinical practice guidelines and drug formularies. In a randomized, blinded virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) study, AMIE was compared to 21 primary care physicians (PCPs) across 100 multi-visit case scenarios designed to reflect UK NICE Guidance and BMJ Best Practice guidelines. AMIE was non-inferior to PCPs in management reasoning as assessed by specialists and scored better in both preciseness of treatments and investigations, and in its alignment with and grounding in clinical guidelines. To benchmark medication reasoning, we developed RxQA, a multiple-choice question benchmark derived from two national drug formularies (US, UK) and validated by board-certified pharmacists. Though AMIE and PCPs both benefited from the ability to access external drug information, AMIE outperformed PCPs on higher difficulty questions. While further research would be needed before real-world translation, AMIE’s strong performance across evaluations marks a significant step towards conversational AI as a tool in disease management.

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

Promise and challenges of heart chamber segmentation from non-contrast CT scans using contrastive unpaired image translation: a feasibility study

arXiv:2606.23879v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Purpose: To evaluate the feasibility and challenges of heart chamber segmentation from non-contrast CT scans using contrastive unpaired image translation and deep learning-based segmentation. Approach: We developed ChameleonNet, a framework utilizing the Contrastive Unpaired Translation (CUT) network with decoupled contrastive learning (DCL) loss to synthesize non-contrast CT from contrast CT scans. Using annotations of four heart chambers (left atrium (LA), left ventricle (LV), right atrium (RA), and right ventricle (RV)) from contrast scans, we trained a Hausdorff distance loss-enhanced nnU-Net on synthesized non-contrast images. The translation model was trained with 35,538 contrast-enhanced and 37,197 non-contrast CT slices. The segmentation model was trained with 292 synthesized non-contrast scans. Performance was evaluated using Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and 95th Hausdorff distance (HD95) on 36 synthesized non-contrast scans, and volume agreement on 36 real non-contrast CT scans was assessed using Pearson correlation, mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and mean percentage error (MPE). Results: The segmentation model achieved DSC of 0.94 (0.01), 0.91 (0.04), 0.92 (0.03), 0.93 (0.02), and HD95 of 3.63 (1.49), 5.74 (4.08), 5.18 (1.77), 5.51 (3.21) mm on synthesized non-contrast images for LA, LV, RA, and RV, respectively. On real non-contrast CT scans, Pearson correlations were 0.93, 0.82, 0.87, and 0.89 (all p

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

Smoothing Dark Areas in Molecular Latent Diffusion

arXiv:2606.13955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent diffusion is a promising framework for scalable 3D molecular generation, but it requires a latent space that remains smooth, valid, and navigable beyond posterior samples. Existing molecular VAEs, however, are typically learned through reconstruction-based objectives, which do not guarantee such a latent space. We show that this leads to dark areas: regions of latent space that are reachable during diffusion sampling but decode to disconnected or chemically invalid molecules. Unlike in image generation, molecular decoding requires strict structural and chemical precision, so even small latent perturbations can produce catastrophic failures. We therefore propose TopVAE, a topology-optimized VAE that reduces dark areas by making the decoder internalize structural and chemical constraints during training, eliminating the need for test-time chemical correction. TopVAE greatly improves off-posterior robustness, and when paired with a standard DiT, achieves $77\%$ lower FCD-3D on QM9, the highest V&C, $52\%$ lower FCD-3D on GEOM-Drugs, and $1.29{\times}$ more stable and connected molecules on zero-shot scaffold inpainting.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Asymptotic analysis of the normal inverse Gaussian cumulative distribution

Authors:

arXiv:2509.05664v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Using a recently derived integral in terms of elementary functions, we derive new asymptotic expansions of the normal inverse Gaussian cumulative distribution function. One of the asymptotic representations is in terms of the normal Gaussian distribution or complementary error function.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Maternal-Fetal immune networks and viral signatures in the healthy amniotic cavity

The intrauterine environment has traditionally been viewed as a privileged site protected by the placental barrier. However, emerging evidence suggests that early in utero microbial exposure may prime the developing fetal immune system. Here, using target-enriched metagenomics and high-dimensional proteomics, we characterized the intra-amniotic viral landscape and immune networks in 114 healthy pregnancies including both normal and anomalous fetuses. We identify a sparse yet heterogeneous human viral signature in 26% of samples, predominantly composed of Herpesviridae, Polyomaviridae, and Picornaviridae. Although viral reads abundance was associated with fetal abnormalities, viral detection generally did not induce overt inflammatory activation, supporting a state of immune homeostasis within the amniotic cavity. Instead, viral presence was associated with subtle and selective immune modulation, including altered inducible antimicrobial peptide expression (HBD-2 and HBD-3), coupled with an attenuation of regulatory cytokines. Our results further reveal that the amniotic immune environment is primarily governed by gestational age, transitioning from a Th1-predominant "alert" phase to innate-readiness preceding parturition. These findings suggest that fragments of viral genetic material within the amniotic cavity may contribute to fetal immune instruction without triggering overt inflammation, providing a foundational framework for understanding how "silent" viral-exposure during gestation influences the developmental origins of neonatal immunity.

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

SAGE: Scalable AI Governance & Evaluation

arXiv:2602.07840v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating relevance in large-scale search systems is fundamentally constrained by the governance gap between nuanced, resource-constrained human oversight and the high-throughput requirements of production systems. While traditional approaches rely on engagement proxies or sparse manual review, these methods often fail to capture the full scope of high-impact relevance failures. We present SAGE (Scalable AI Governance \& Evaluation), a framework that operationalizes high-quality human product judgment as a scalable evaluation signal. At the core of SAGE is a bidirectional calibration loop where natural-language Policy, curated Precedent, and an LLM Surrogate Judge co-evolve. SAGE systematically resolves semantic ambiguities and misalignments, transforming subjective relevance judgment into an executable, multi-dimensional rubric with near human-level agreement. To bridge the gap between frontier model reasoning and industrial-scale inference, we apply teacher-student distillation to transfer high-fidelity judgments into compact student surrogates at 92$\times$ lower cost. Deployed within LinkedIn Search ecosystems, SAGE guided model iteration through simulation-driven development, distilling policy-aligned models for online serving and enabling rapid offline evaluation. In production, it powered policy oversight that measured ramped model variants and detected regressions invisible to engagement metrics. Collectively, these drove a 0.25\% lift in LinkedIn daily active users.

17.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-17

Why large-scale randomized trials of live-attenuated shingles vaccination for dementia prevention are urgently needed

In my view, we have never had as robust a body of evidence from observational data on an intervention for dementia as we do for live-attenuated shingles vaccination. Both a recent US National Institutes of Health expert workshop and an international expert consensus on Alzheimer’s disease drug repurposing identified large-scale randomized trials of shingles vaccination for dementia prevention as the crucial next step for the field.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Generalised simultaneous transmission of arbitrary quantum states and classical information

arXiv:2606.03181v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a protocol which allows for arbitrary optical quantum states to simultaneously carry and transmit classical data, without sacrificing the integrity of either the quantum or classical information. Our scheme encodes classical information via displacements in the phase space prior to transmission and retrieves each classical symbol via a Gaussian continuous-variable teleportation. The original quantum state is then restored by guessing the the original displacement and performing the appropriate inverse operation. In the limit of sufficiently high classical signal and high squeezing, we show that our scheme is capable of perfectly reconstructing both the input classical signal and the input quantum state without loss of coherence. An example is given in terms of the transmission of a dual-rail Bell state.

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

Do Safety Monitors Stay Reliable After an Update? Benchmarking and Predicting Activation-Monitor Staleness

Authors:

Activation monitors-lightweight probes trained on a language model's internal representations-are an increasingly common layer in deployment safety stacks. Deployed models however are rarely static: they are quantized, fine-tuned, adapted with LoRA, or served with merged adapters while the monitor remains frozen. We present the first systematic test of whether this implicit contract holds: whether activation monitors trained on a base model remain reliable after these routine model updates. Across multiple safety-relevant monitors, model depths, update families, and open-weight models, we find a sharp split: quantization-style updates largely preserve frozen probe performance, while fine-tuning-style updates frequently make probes stale. Fragility is highly monitor-dependent, with privacy/PII probes most affected and refusal-compliance probes comparatively stable, showing that retraining a behavior need not stale its corresponding monitor. QLoRA is especially damaging despite NF4 quantization alone being relatively benign, suggesting that quantization becomes riskier when combined with adaptation. We further show that degradation is predictable from pre-deployment features, enabling revalidation budgets to be triaged toward the monitors most likely to fail. These results suggest that fine-tuning should trigger activation-monitor revalidation by default, while prediction can help prioritize which monitors to check first.

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

Augmenting Game AI with Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.20210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Immersion in video games depends not only on graphics, audio, and game mechanics, but also on the quality of in-game characters. Producing believable characters, or game AI, remains a significant challenge as behavioral complexity is hard to capture with hand-coded systems. Game AI is a source of immersion and engagement; however, the limitations stemming from the challenges of creating game AI often lead to frustration and the breaking of the illusion of realism within the game. The introduction of machine learning models opens the door to creating more believable, authentic, and relatable characters in games. The promise is that they either learn from interacting with the game, or from player data, to develop true human-like behavior. In this paper, we envision more applications of reinforcement learning for game AI in the future. For this to materialize, current research limitations are prohibitive to broad deployment across game genres. Therefore, we propose a framework for training reinforcement learning models with a set of requirements in mind that are suited towards game AI and game development. We present examples of games with reinforcement learning-augmented game AI and describe the practicalities of deploying player-facing machine learning agents in modern games. Furthermore, we identify bottlenecks and hard problems in these areas, which we believe offer promising research directions to accelerate the adoption of machine learning in game AI for the video game industry.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

DesignMaster: A Multi-Conditional Diffusion Framework for Rational PROTAC Design

Motivation: Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) enable targeted protein degradation through ternary complex formation with E3 ubiquitin ligase. However, the rational design of PROTACs remains highly challenging due to limited structure-activity relationship data and the vast conformational diversity of linkers. Existing computational approaches can be broadly divided into structure-based ternary modelling methods and fragment-based linker generation models. Although these approaches have advanced PROTAC design, they typically neglect key physicochemical constraints and linker-length control during the generation process, causing the generated PROTACs to lack balanced structural properties required for effective ternary complex formation with drug-like characteristics. Results: To address these limitations, we propose DesignMaster, a diffusion-based generative framework that explicitly incorporates linker length and physicochemical properties as controllable conditioning signals. DesignMaster employs an E(3)-equivariant graph Transformer with a gated multi-condition fusion module to inject linker length and physicochemical constraints throughout the diffusion process, enabling fine-grained and constraint-aware molecular generation. Experiments on PROTAC-DB 2.0 and 3.0 demonstrate that DesignMaster outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with a 3.2% improvement in validity and a 34.4% improvement in recovery. The Case study shows DesignMaster achieves a 51.78% reduction in RMSD when predicting the linker of PROTAC BCPyr targeting 6W7O, highlighting its potential for practical structure-guided PROTAC design. Availability: The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/ABILiLab/DesignMaster.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Rule Taxonomy and Evolution in AI IDEs: A Mining and Survey Study

arXiv:2606.12231v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The adoption of AI-powered Integrated Development Environments (AI IDEs) has introduced "Rules" as a novel software artifact, allowing developers to persistently inject project-specific constraints and architectural guidelines into the context of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite their role in aligning AI behavior with developer intent, the taxonomy, evolution, and practical impact of these rules remain largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we conducted a mixed-methods empirical study on AI IDE rules. By mining 83 open-source projects and extracting 7,310 rules, we established a comprehensive taxonomy comprising 5 primary and 25 secondary categories. We then triangulated these artifacts with survey responses from 99 practitioners. Our analysis identified a contrast between developer priorities and actual configurations: while practitioners rate architectural constraints as highly important, rule files in repositories primarily consist of low-level workflow and code formatting constraints. Furthermore, our analysis of 1,540 rule evolution events revealed that rules are updated frequently. Repository data further indicate that rule evolution is primarily driven by constructive context expansions (29.17%) and enrichments (26.59%). In contrast, surveyed developers reported modifying rules primarily to correct AI errors (77.78%), typically by adding new negative constraints rather than editing existing ones. Finally, an artifact compliance assessment of 160 rule evolution events revealed that updating rules significantly improves the adherence of software artifacts, with the average artifact compliance rate increasing by 22.99% (from 49.14% to 72.13%) following an update. Our study provides empirical insights that can help developers optimize prompting strategies and guide tool builders in designing automated conflict-detection and context-management mechanisms for AI IDEs.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Superhuman Safe and Agile Racing through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605.22748v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous systems have achieved superhuman performance in isolation or simulation, yet they remain brittle in shared, dynamic real-world spaces. This failure stems from the dominant single-agent paradigm for physical applications, where other actors are ignored or treated as environmental noise, preventing effective coordination. Here we show that multi-agent reinforcement learning provides the essential safety scaffolding required for real-world interaction. Using high-speed quadrotor racing as a high-stakes testbed, we train agents to navigate complex aerodynamic interactions and strategic maneuvering with a variable number of racers. Through league-based self-play, agents evolve sophisticated anticipatory behaviors, including proactive collision avoidance, overtaking, and handling multi-agent physical interactions, including aerodynamic downwash. Our agents outperform a champion-level human pilot in multi-player races at speeds exceeding 22 m/s, while simultaneously reducing collision rates by 50 % compared to state-of-the-art single-agent baselines. Crucially, training with diverse artificial agents enables zero-shot generalization to safer human interaction. These results suggest that the path to robust robotic co-existence lies not in isolated safety constraints, but in the rigorous demands of multi-agent interaction. Multimedia materials are available at: https://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/marl

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

Mental Health AI Safety Claims Must Preserve Temporal Evidence

arXiv:2605.08827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The safety of mental health AI is often judged at the wrong temporal scale. Current evaluations typically score isolated responses, endpoint outcomes, or aggregate dialogue quality, while clinically consequential failures may arise from the order and accumulation of interactions themselves, including delayed escalation, repeated reinforcement, dependency formation, failed repair, and gradual deterioration across turns. This paper argues that this mismatch is not merely a limitation of evaluation coverage but a source of invalid safety conclusions. We introduce Temporal Safety Non-Identifiability, a formal account of why safety properties that depend on sequence, timing, accumulation, or recovery cannot be certified by protocols that discard those features. From this formalization, we develop SCOPE (Safety Claims Over Preserved Evidence) as a general principle for aligning safety claims with the evidence an evaluation actually retains, and instantiate it as SCOPE-MH, a mental-health instantiation of this reporting standard. We operationalize SCOPE-MH through a proof-of-concept on the AnnoMI dataset of expert-annotated motivational interviewing conversations, which reveals mechanisms of failure that per-turn behavior scoring does not represent. We propose SCOPE-MH as a diagnostic complement to existing evaluation infrastructure and argue that evaluation preserving temporal evidence is necessary, not optional, for safety-critical mental health AI deployment.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Development of a symptom-based severity score anchored to health-related quality of life post-COVID-19 within the population-based EPILOC cohorts

Purpose Because simple symptom counts treat all symptoms as equally important and may not adequately capture the HRQoL impact of heterogeneous post-COVID-19 symptoms, we aimed to develop an HRQoL-anchored symptom severity score providing an interpretable measure of post-COVID-19 disease burden. Methods Baseline data from the population-based EPILOC and EPILOC Omicron surveys (adults aged 18-65 years) were used to develop a symptom-based severity score anchored to physical and mental HRQoL assessed with the SF-12. A two-stage modelling approach was applied to identify HRQoL-relevant symptoms and to derive symptom-specific weights for physical and mental component scores, incorporating 30 ordinal symptom severity variables. Symptom-specific weights were extracted to compute physical, mental, and composite severity scores. Score interpretation was examined using external reference measures, including EPILOC case status, self-reported health recovery, and functional consequences. Results A total of 19,004 participants (mean age 44.3 years, 59.6% female) were included. Sixteen symptoms contributed to the physical and eleven to the mental HRQoL score, with a limited subset accounting for most of the HRQoL loss. Severity scores were heavily right-skewed, with 50.6% of participants showing no measurable HRQoL impairment. Higher scores correlated with lower self-reported recovery, and increased probability of rehabilitation use and health-related changes in working time, supporting convergent and criterion-related validity. Conclusions This study introduces a transparent, HRQoL-anchored symptom severity score that measures graded post-COVID-19 burden beyond simple symptom counts. The score may be particularly suited for longitudinal assessment of recovery trajectories.