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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-16

Mathematicians are developing rules for AI use — other fields should follow

Authors: Unknown Author

The mathematics community is right to call for transparency, integrity and fairness to be protected when AI tools are used. Researchers in other disciplines could learn from this approach. The mathematics community is right to call for transparency, integrity and fairness to be protected when AI tools are used. Researchers in other disciplines could learn from this approach.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

LVLMs and Humans Ground Differently in Referential Communication

Authors:
Peter Zeng↗Weiling Li↗Amie Paige↗Zhengxiang Wang↗Panagiotis Kaliosis↗Dimitris Samaras↗Gregory Zelinsky↗Susan Brennan↗Owen Rambow↗

For generative AI agents to partner effectively with human users, the ability to accurately predict human intent is critical. But this ability to collaborate remains limited by a critical deficit: an inability to model common ground. We present a referential communication experiment with a factorial design involving director-matcher pairs (human-human, human-AI, AI-human, and AI-AI) that interact with multiple turns in repeated rounds to match pictures of objects not associated with any obvious lexicalized labels. We show that LVLMs cannot interactively generate and resolve referring expressions in a way that enables smooth communication, a crucial skill that underlies human language use. We release our corpus of 356 dialogues (89 pairs over 4 rounds each) along with the online pipeline for data collection and the tools for analyzing accuracy, efficiency, and lexical overlap.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Spatially Grounded Concept Bottleneck Models via Part-Factorized Attention

Authors:
Dhanesh Ramachandram↗

Concept bottleneck models (CBMs) predict a layer of human-named attributes before predicting a class, which makes their decisions auditable. On fine-grained recognition tasks the concept heads are usually free to attend anywhere in the image, so a head named for one body region can be satisfied by evidence on another. This work studies a part-factorized CBM that removes that freedom by construction. The method has three components built on a frozen DINOv3 vision transformer. A learned foreground gate, trained on DINOv3 patch features, suppresses background patches inside the part attention. A set of part queries cross-attends to patch features and each of the 312 CUB attributes is routed, through a fixed concept-to-part map, to read only from the part token its name implies. A learnable two-dimensional Gaussian prior, injected additively in log space into the attention logits, breaks the permutation symmetry among part queries; its means are initialized from the dataset-average keypoint location of each part, which requires no per-image keypoint supervision at training or test time. On CUB-200-2011 the spatial-prior model matches a fully supervised baseline (88.85% versus 88.95% top-1) while raising pointing accuracy by 16 points (52.6% versus 36.4%). Replacing bounding-box supervision with a PCA foreground target and combining it with the Gaussian prior removes all per-image supervision and reaches 88.6% top-1 at about 70% pointing accuracy. A keypoint-fraction sweep shows that 0.5% of the training set (about 27 images) suffices to initialize the prior with no measurable loss. Removing part identity entirely is the harder case: without any spatial prior, pointing accuracy collapses to $2.9\%$.

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04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Bath memory as a precision resource in quantum transport

Authors:
Jos\'e Molina↗Sheikh Parvez Mandal↗Mahasweta Pandit↗Javier Prior↗

arXiv:2606.17026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structured baths can reshape transport fluctuations in mesoscopic quantum devices, yet a predictive criterion for when this enhances precision has been lacking. We propose a route towards such precision advantages by utilizing bath memory in coherent fermionic transport through a noninteracting quantum-dot chain. Using the Landauer-Büttiker formalism, we derive a dual impedance-matching condition that synchronizes the conductor mode splitting, boundary dissipation, and bath bandwidth, and sustains constructive multimode interference across the transmission window. The analytical predictions for the optimal bath bandwidths show excellent agreement with exact nonequilibrium Green's function calculations of the transport for Lorentzian, Gaussian, and Newns spectral densities. The prescription yields an optimal bath bandwidth at which the current Fano factor is minimized and the thermodynamic and kinetic precision coefficients are simultaneously enhanced beyond their Markovian limits. The alignment of the optimal precision regime with the experimentally accessible current Fano factor minimum thus provides a practical strategy for designing precision-enhanced transport in mesoscopic platforms such as semiconductor quantum-dot arrays and ultracold fermionic channels.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks

Authors:
Xiangyi Li↗Yimin Liu↗Wenbo Chen↗Bingran You↗Zonglin Di↗Yifeng He↗Shenghan Zheng↗Kyoung Whan Choe↗Jiankai Sun↗Shuyi Wang↗Chujun Tao↗Binxu Li↗…

arXiv:2602.12670v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment large language model (LLM) agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark whose current inventory contains 87 tasks across 8 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Our latest aggregate evaluation runs the 87-task benchmark under matched no-Skills and curated-Skills conditions for 18 model-harness configurations. Curated Skills raise the average pass rate from 33.9% to 50.5% (+16.6 percentage points; 25.5% normalized gain), with configuration-level gains ranging from +4.1 to +25.7 pp. Focused Skills with at most three modules outperform larger or exhaustive bundles, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them. SkillsBench establishes paired evaluation as the foundation for rigorous measurement of Skill efficacy on agentic, expertise-heavy work.

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

On estimating Schatten norm and power distances between quantum states

Authors:
Yupan Liu↗Qisheng Wang↗

arXiv:2505.00457v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the computational complexity of estimating the quantum Schatten $\alpha$-norm distance $T_\alpha(\rho_0,\rho_1)$, given $poly(n)$-size state-preparation circuits of $n$-qubit quantum states $\rho_0$ and $\rho_1$. This quantity serves as a lower bound on the trace distance and, for $\alpha > 1$, is interchangeable with its powered version $\Lambda_\alpha(\rho_0,\rho_1)$. For any constant $\alpha > 1$, we develop an efficient rank-independent quantum estimator for $T_\alpha(\rho_0,\rho_1)$ with time complexity $poly(n)$, achieving an exponential speedup over the prior best results of $\exp(n)$ due to Wang, Guan, Liu, Zhang, and Ying (TIT 2024). When $01$, QSD$_{\alpha}$ is $\sf BQP$-complete. 2. For any $1 \leq \alpha(n) \leq 1+negl(n)$, QSD$_\alpha$ is $\sf QSZK$-complete, implying that no efficient quantum estimator for $T_\alpha(\rho_0,\rho_1)$ exists unless ${\sf BQP}={\sf QSZK}$. This $\sf QSZK$-hardness result also extends to the promise problem defined by $\Lambda_\alpha(\rho_0,\rho_1)$ for constant $0

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

ReCal: Reward Calibration for RL-based LLM Routing

Authors:
Qihang Yu↗Hanwen Tong↗Zhengqi Zhang↗Bo Zheng↗Feng Wei↗Shengyu Zhang↗Zemin Liu↗Fei Wu↗

arXiv:2606.12479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) routing has emerged as an effective paradigm for leveraging the complementary strengths of multiple LLMs through dynamic model and reasoning-strategy selection. Recent reinforcement learning (RL)-based routing methods further improve routing quality by optimizing routing policies from interaction feedback. However, they still struggle to provide informative and comparable learning signals under heterogeneous tasks with varying difficulty. In practice, multiple objectives (e.g., correctness, format behavior) are aggregated into a single scalar reward, leading to ambiguous credit assignment and conflicting optimization signals. Moreover, reward signals exhibit significant variability across instances, where some instances produce higher or more variable rewards, introducing optimization bias that favors trivial samples over informative ones. To address these issues, we propose ReCal, a \underline{Re}ward \underline{Cal}ibration framework for RL-based LLM routing. We first introduce a hierarchical reward decomposition mechanism with component-wise advantage estimation. We further propose a distribution-aware optimization strategy that calibrates optimization variability through variance-aware reweighting and per-dataset normalization. Experiments on seven datasets demonstrate that ReCal consistently improves routing performance, and training stability over baselines. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ReCal.

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08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Allostatic Load in Endometrial Cancer Disparities

Authors:
Bey↗G. S↗Bowen↗M. B↗Wu↗Boykin↗Bernard↗Zhang↗Melendez↗Celestino↗Batsis↗J. A↗…

Background: Endometrial cancer incidence and mortality are increasing, particularly among Black women and for aggressive subtypes. Allostatic load (AL), a composite measure of physiologic dysregulation across metabolic, cardiovascular, and immune systems, varies by racial category and tumor subtype in other cancers. Endometrial cancer is strongly associated with obesity, and it is unknown whether AL scores maintain sufficient heterogeneity to evaluate differences across subgroups or with clinical outcomes. Objective: To describe the performance of AL scoring in endometrial cancer patients and examine associations with tumor characteristics (grade/histology) and survival outcomes. Methods: We evaluated AL among 398 participants newly diagnosed with endometrial cancer. AL score was calculated by assigning 1 point for each ''high-risk'' value (by clinical reference range or distribution-based) for 15 biologic variables for vital signs, anthropometrics, blood-based biomarkers, and medical comorbidities. Results: Distribution-based thresholds for variables were used to preserve heterogeneity in this obesity-dominant context. Overall, 68.7% of Black women had high AL compared to White (56.7%), Hispanic (56.7%), and other race (32.3%) women. Decision tree analyses revealed grade-dependent associations between AL and survival. For women with low-grade tumors, higher AL was associated with poorer overall survival. For high-grade tumors, intermediate AL ([≥]4,

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

RAMS: Resource-Adaptive and Detection-Conditioned Model Switching for Embedded Edge Perception

Authors:
Kushal Khemani↗Evan Leri↗George Xu↗Amit Hod↗

Edge object detection on embedded hardware requires balancing inference latency and detection quality under changing resource pressure. We present RAMS, a lightweight runtime controller that monitors device pressure, calibrates switching thresholds from idle behavior, and dynamically selects among three resident YOLOv8 tiers (NANO/SMALL/MEDIUM at 320/416/640 px) without model-reload latency. RAMS defines five switching policies, including two detection-conditioned variants that prevent aggressive downgrades after recent vulnerable-road-user (VRU) detections. We further introduce the VRU-Weighted Accuracy Score (SWAS), a scalar metric for offline policy comparison without ground-truth annotations, together with an oracle-bounded variant that separates detector circularity from genuine tier-retention benefit. Across Raspberry Pi 5, x86 laptops, and Jetson Orin ONNX/TensorRT deployments, the same controller equations operate over a 37x latency range. On Jetson Orin TensorRT under heavy load, the safety2 policy achieves 3.41 ms mean latency, 5.6x faster than fixed-MEDIUM inference, while retaining 74% of its proxy accuracy through near-NANO operation with selective SMALL and MEDIUM locks during VRU-positive windows. Detection-conditioned switching improves SWAS by 25.4% under oracle scoring and 47.3% under detector-derived scoring relative to threshold-only policies under heavy load. Live KITTI evaluation reports per-tier VRU recall of 24.2%, 41.2%, and 59.0%, showing that reactive overrides are fundamentally limited by baseline detector recall.

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

From Affect Prediction to Affect Forecasting: Evidence for Distinct Information Sources in Longitudinal Text

Authors:
Sadia Noor↗Seemab Latif↗Raja Khurram Shahzad↗Mehwish Fatima↗

Modeling dimensional affect in longitudinal text requires distinguishing current affect estimation from future affective change forecasting. Existing approaches often treat each text as an independent observation and apply similar assumptions to both tasks, without testing whether they rely on different information sources. This paper investigates that distinction using longitudinal self-reported ecological essays and feeling-word entries. We propose the Trait–State Affective Prediction (TSAP) framework and its temporal extension E-TSAP for per-text valence and arousal prediction, evaluated on a held-out prediction test set of 1,737 entries from 91 users. We further propose the Affective Change Forecaster Hybrid (ACF-Hybrid) for next-step affective change forecasting, evaluated on a held-out forecasting test set of 46 users. For prediction, E-TSAP achieves composite Pearson correlations of 0.670 for valence and 0.449 for arousal. For forecasting, textual representations perform worse than compact numeric trajectory baselines: the text-inclusive model achieves only r=0.316 for valence and r=0.284 for arousal, whereas a simple prior-state baseline reaches r=0.615 and r=0.670, respectively. ACF-Hybrid, using dimension-specific numeric trajectory features, achieves r=0.659 for valence and $r=0.658$ for arousal. These results show that textual semantics support current affect prediction, whereas future affective change is better captured through prior numeric trajectory dynamics.

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

Estimating Tail Risks in Language Model Output Distributions

Authors:
Rico Angell↗Raghav Singhal↗Zachary Horvitz↗Zhou Yu↗Rajesh Ranganath↗Kathleen McKeown↗He He↗

arXiv:2604.22167v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language models are increasingly capable and are being rapidly deployed on a population-level scale. As a result, the safety of these models is increasingly high-stakes. Fortunately, advances in alignment have significantly reduced the likelihood of harmful model outputs. However, when models are queried billions of times in a day, even rare worst-case behaviors will occur. Current safety evaluations focus on capturing the distribution of inputs that yield harmful outputs. These evaluations disregard the probabilistic nature of models and their tail output behavior. To measure this tail risk, we propose a method to efficiently estimate the probability of harmful outputs for any input query. Instead of naive brute-force sampling from the target model, where harmful outputs could be rare, we operationalize importance sampling by creating unsafe versions of the target model. These unsafe versions enable sample-efficient estimation by making harmful outputs more probable. On benchmarks measuring misuse and misalignment, these estimates match brute-force Monte Carlo estimates using 10-20x fewer samples. For example, we can estimate probability of harmful outputs on the order of 10^-4 with just 500 samples. Additionally, we find that these harmfulness estimates can reveal the sensitivity of models to perturbations in model input and predict deployment risks. Our work demonstrates that accurate rare-event estimation is both critical and feasible for safety evaluations. Code is available at https://github.com/rangell/LMTailRisk

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

CoAgent: Concurrency Control for Multi-Agent Systems

Authors:
Hongtao Lyu↗Dingyan Zhang↗Mingyu Wu↗Xingda Wei↗Haibo Chen↗

arXiv:2606.15376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems – coding agents, devops agents, document agents – now routinely run several agents in parallel against the same git tree, Kubernetes cluster, or document. As soon as two of them mutate shared state, they enter the regime classical concurrency control has studied for decades, but classical mechanisms fit LLM agents poorly. A single agent transaction spans minutes of inference, read sets are broad and opaque rather than statically inferable, and the live state agents act on admits neither fork nor buffer, so writes take effect the moment they execute. Locks block long inference intervals; OCC abort-and-retry discards minutes of work on every conflict. This paper builds concurrency control on a capability classical transactions lack: the LLM inside each agent can judge whether a conflicting write invalidates its plan, and can repair exactly the operations that depended on it. Control therefore turns advisory: the runtime informs, the agent repairs. Our protocol, MTPO (Monotonic Trajectory Pre-Order), fixes a serialization order at launch, serves each read the order-filtered value, and applies writes speculatively in place; a one-way notification asks an affected reader to re-judge and patch its plan, while the framework mechanically undoes and reorders misplaced writes through the saga-style inverse each tool registers in advance. At quiescence the run is serializable in the pre-decided order. We realize MTPO as CoAgent, toolcall middleware whose privileged ToolSmith grows footprint-declared, undoable tools online. On ten contended workloads, CoAgent stays within 5\% of serial correctness at a $1.4\times$ speedup and near-serial token cost, where 2PL and OCC surrender nearly all concurrency gains; on a bash-only target system, it grows a 25-tool library online and lifts the task pass rate from 45/71 to 63/71 at $0.80\times$ the time and $0.86\times$ the cost.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Mirage Probes: How Vision Models Fake Visual Understanding

Authors:
Daniel Ben-Levi↗Judah Goldfeder↗Weiliang Zhao↗Raz Lapid↗Amit LeVi↗Allen G. Roush↗Ravid Shwartz-Ziv↗Hod Lipson↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer image-based questions confidently, and often correctly, even when no image is provided. This mirage behavior inflates benchmark scores without reflecting visual grounding. Prior work treats this as a single failure mode. We argue it is two. Using Mirage Probes, a contrastive probing framework that pairs paraphrased question variants with matched mirage and non-mirage labels on the same image, we show that mirage behavior is linearly decodable from internal activations across residual stream, MLP, post-attention, and attention-head sites in two open-source VLMs. We demonstrate that a Naive Bayes text baseline cannot recover this signal, ruling out surface lexical confounds. Cross-benchmark separability patterns, together with a novel Prior Harnessing Index (PHI) measuring how much a model can answer from text alone, expose two distinct regimes: textual biases, where the model answers from language priors without engaging visual representations, and spurious images, where it constructs false visual content in latent space and answers as if grounded. The distinction has direct mitigation consequences: text-distribution cleaning can address the first regime but cannot reach the second, since spurious-image mirages live in the model's visual representations rather than its text. Faithful visual grounding will require interventions at the representational level.

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15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Agentic Discovery of Non-Canonical Antimicrobial Peptides with AMPGAN v3

Authors:
Jay Jung↗Xiaohan Zhang↗Shenghan Song↗Mahmoud Sayedahmed↗Chijian Xiang↗Yunong Xu↗Ahmed AbdelKhalek↗Severin T. Schneebeli↗Matthew J. Wargo↗Jianing Li↗Safwan Wshah↗

arXiv:2606.17127v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Antimicrobial resistance causes to over a million deaths annually. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are a promising solution, but generative AMP models are not yet ready to design peptides with non-natural amino acids and/or chemical modifications, which are essential for real-world peptide drugs. We present AMPGAN v3, a multi-objective conditional GAN that expands the generative vocabulary to D-amino acids and N/C-terminus modifications such as amidation. By separating adversarial and activity-aware supervision across two specialized discriminators, AMPGAN v3 substantially improves training stability and outperforms prior generative AMP models on external classifiers. We validated five candidates spanning three structural classes in vitro; two showed activity against Gram-positive strains, with the best candidate reaching MIC 8 {\mu}g/mL against B. subtilis. To support downstream curation, we further present PepCraft, a multi-agent framework for end-to-end AMP discovery in which a Planning Agent orchestrates specialized executors for generation, filtering, and verification. Its prioritization recommendations align with our in vitro outcomes. Together, these contributions let us examine, on a small but real scale, how generative and agentic AI compose in therapeutic peptide discovery. Code: https://github.com/marszzibros/AMPGANv3

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

TVIR: Building Deep Research Agents Towards Text-Visual Interleaved Report Generation

Authors:
Xinkai Ma↗Zhiqi Bai↗Dingling Zhang↗Pei Liu↗Yishuo Yuan↗He Zhu↗Jiakai Wang↗Qianqian Xie↗Yifan Zhao↗Xinlong Yang↗Hao Cong↗Zhiheng Yao↗…

Deep Research Agents have shown strong capability in multi-step information retrieval, reasoning, and long-form report generation, but existing benchmarks and systems remain predominantly text-centric, with limited evaluation of whether visual elements are factually reliable and well aligned with the surrounding analysis. To address this gap, we introduce TVIR (Text-Visual Interleaved Report Generation), which includes TVIR-Bench, a benchmark of 100 expert-curated multimodal deep research tasks that require visual elements to serve specific analytical sub-goals, and TVIR-Agent, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that serves as a strong baseline for constructing outlines, retrieving images, generating charts with traceable sources, and composing reports through context-aware sequential writing. We further develop a dual-path evaluation framework that combines Textual Assessment and Visual Assessment. Experiments across nine deep research systems show that TVIR-Agent achieves strong overall performance, underscoring the importance of explicit multimodal design and evaluation for evidence-driven report generation.

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

Insulin4RL: Real-Time Insulin Management in the Intensive Care Unit for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Thomas Frost↗Steve Harris↗

arXiv:2606.19481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (ORL) offers the potential to improve the quality of clinical decision-making using historical electronic health record (EHR) data. Current training and evaluative practices in this field rely heavily on EHR datasets that have been temporally discretised into fixed, regular time intervals. Discretisation creates fictional representations of complex clinical scenarios and compromises the generalisability of retrospective model evaluations. In this paper, we introduce Insulin4RL, a healthcare ORL dataset featuring naturally irregular inputs and actions from real clinical trajectories. Derived from MIMIC-IV, Insulin4RL comprises over 375,000 labelled decisions across 12,209 patients requiring insulin infusion titration in the Intensive Care Unit. The dataset can thus be used for research into ORL model performance under realistic clinical sampling assumptions. We provide a description of the dataset's structure and characteristics, baseline performance metrics using model-free offline reinforcement learning, and a standardised evaluation protocol using fitted Q-evaluation. We conclude with suggested areas for future research that could be addressed using this resource.

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18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Confined migration induces non-lethal DNA damage in developing neurons

Authors:
Zhejing Zhang↗

Migratory cells tend to have soft nuclei that deform and penetrate narrow spaces1,2. Extensive nuclear deformation during migration can cause nuclear-envelope rupture and DNA damage in cancer cells, which may contribute to malignant transformation during tumour progression3–6. However, the importance of DNA damage in physiological migration is less well understood. Here we demonstrate that the migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-stranded breaks (DSBs) due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces. In contrast to many other migratory cells, these DSBs occur without detectable nuclear envelope rupture. Confined migration increases topoisomerase-IIβ covalently bound DSBs, and these lesions are repaired through non-homologous end-joining during brain development without causing cell death. Genome sequencing revealed that DSBs tend to occur at transcriptionally inactive regions. The deletion of ligase IV at the onset of neuronal migration leads to persistent DSB accumulation in cerebellar neurons with moderate transcriptional changes in genes related to synaptic function, neuronal development and stress and immune responses. The mutant mouse develops mild motor deficits in later life, suggesting that the DNA damage generated during normal brain development poses a potential disease risk if left unrepaired. The migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-strand breaks due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces.

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

Software Delegation Contracts: Measuring Reviewability in AI Coding-Agent Work

Authors:
Vincent Schmalbach↗

arXiv:2606.17099v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding agents increasingly accept assigned software tasks, modify repositories under bounded authority, and return work packages for review. Prior work proposed the software delegation contract, covering the task, authority, returned work package, and acceptance context, as the unit of analysis for delegated coding work, but did not measure its effects. This paper reports a controlled pilot study of explicit delegation contracts for coding agents. We built a dependency-free TypeScript API task environment with seeded defects and documentation gaps, authored ten tasks across five families, and ran 64 agent executions across two model tiers under three conditions: a realistic issue-style prompt, an explicit delegation contract, and a contract with a required evidence bundle. Each run was scored with hidden acceptance tests, mutation checks, and scope analysis, then reviewed by three independent condition-blinded model-based reviewers using a fixed rubric, for 192 reviews. Explicit contracts did not improve objective task outcomes: all 64 runs passed hidden acceptance checks, with zero scope violations. They did improve reviewability. Evidence sufficiency improved in 22 of 30 paired comparisons and worsened in none (+0.83 on a 5-point scale, p < 0.0001, Cliff's delta = 0.66); reviewer ambiguity decreased (p = 0.035); changed-file lists, known-limitations sections, residual-risk sections, and reviewer checklists appeared mostly or only when demanded by the contract. Contracts cost +13% agent tokens and +38% wall-clock time, with larger effects for the weaker model tier. On these small tasks, delegation contracts bought reviewability rather than correctness.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Multi-agent imitation learning with function approximation: Linear Markov games and beyond

Authors:
Luca Viano↗Till Freihaut↗Emanuele Nevali↗Volkan Cevher↗Matthieu Geist↗Giorgia Ramponi↗

arXiv:2602.22810v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we present the first theoretical analysis of multi-agent imitation learning (MAIL) in linear Markov games where both the transition dynamics and each agent's reward function are linear in some given features. We demonstrate that by leveraging this structure, it is possible to replace the state-action level "all policy deviation concentrability coefficient" (Freihaut et al., arXiv:2510.09325) with a concentrability coefficient defined at the feature level which can be much smaller than the state-action analog when the features are informative about states' similarity. Furthermore, to circumvent the need for any concentrability coefficient, we turn to the interactive setting. We provide the first, computationally efficient, interactive MAIL algorithm for linear Markov games and show that its sample complexity depends only on the dimension of the feature map $d$. Building on these theoretical findings, we propose a deep MAIL interactive algorithm which clearly outperforms BC on games such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Connect4.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Light-weight Pronunciation Assessment via Discrete Speech Token Surprisal

Authors:
Syeda Faiza Ahmed Sara↗Shammur Absar Chowdhury↗

Training automated pronunciation assessment often relies on labeled learner errors or non-native corpora that are costly to collect. We propose a lightweight framework trained only on native speech resources, operating unsupervised or lightly calibrated with a small set of scored utterances. At inference, learner speech is discretized with an SSL encoder and a K-means codebook. A token language model trained on native sequences computes surprisal where higher surprisal indicates phonotactic deviation. We add a transcript-guided Text2DUnit–DTW module that predicts native token sequences from reference text and aligns them to acoustic tokens to derive error-sensitive features. Surprisal and alignment features are fused via simple regression. On SpeechOcean762, PCC improves from 0.60 to 0.66 with transcript guidance, near supervised baselines. Cross-dataset evaluation on L2-ARCTIC shows consistent gains.

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

The BD-LSC Dataset: Facilitating the Benchmarking of Models for Lexical Semantic Change Detection in Slang and Standard Usage

Authors:
Afnan Aloraini↗Viktor Schlegel↗Goran Nenadic↗Riza Batista-Navarro↗

Automatic semantic change detection aims to identify how word meanings shift over time, offering insights into both linguistic and societal change. Despite recent progress in computational lexical semantic change (LSC), existing benchmarks and methods struggle to capture bi-directional semantic change, particularly cases where words simultaneously gain and lose senses. This problem is especially challenging for words that have both slang and standard meanings. To address these gaps, we introduce two complementary benchmark datasets. The Bi-Directional Lexical Semantic Change (BD-LSC) dataset captures sense gain, sense loss, and stability across three time periods, enabling the study of complex semantic trajectories. The SlangTrack Word Sense Disambiguation (ST-WSD) dataset provides fine-grained, instance-level sense annotations for words combining slang and standard usages, supporting systematic benchmarking of WSD and semantic change detection models. Using these benchmarks, we systematically evaluate models across different methodological families: unsupervised clustering using contextualised embeddings, supervised machine learning, transformer-based models, and state-of-the-art large language models. Among the evaluated systems, the few-shot GPT-4o model achieved the strongest aggregate performance on Exact Sense Match (ESM) and multi-label accuracy; however, Macro-F1 scores near 0.5 across all systems show that rare slang senses remain difficult, which we identify as the central open challenge.

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

AURA: Adaptive Uncertainty-aware Refinement for LLM-as-a-Judge Auditing

Authors:
Zilong Zhang↗Yi-Ting Hung↗Weiyi He↗Junxi Zhang↗Lei Ding↗Chi-Kuang Yeh↗

arXiv:2606.19714v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges for open-ended generation, as large-scale human evaluation is often expensive and difficult to scale, yet their preferences remain imperfect proxies for human judgment. Existing auditing pipelines often assume that a reliable subset of examples or clean supervision signals are available beforehand, for example from human annotation, heuristic filtering, or the outputs of strong judges. In LLM evaluation, this assumption is fragile: the initial split may inherit judge bias, while human verification is typically too scarce to define stable groups at scale. We propose AURA, an adaptive uncertainty–aware refinement framework for auditing pairwise LLM–as–a–judge decisions under selected human verification. AURA iteratively learns a human-consistency signal, propagates reliable evidence, and prioritizes uncertain comparisons for human review. The key idea is to treat trust in a judge as a latent quantity that is progressively refined as evidence accumulates. We provide a compact formulation, a stable refinement procedure, and a comprehensive evaluation on both synthetic and real pairwise LLM-answer data.

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

Beyond Uniform Token-Level Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Renjie Mao↗Xiangxin Zhou↗Lvfang Tao↗Yixin Ding↗Yu Shi↗Yongguang Lin↗Yuheng Wu↗Honglin Zhu↗Qian Qiu↗Wenxi Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.10968v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become standard for improving LLM reasoning. However, existing PPO-style trust-region mechanisms remain position-agnostic by enforcing uniform thresholds across all tokens independently. This pointwise treatment conflicts with autoregressive generation in two critical ways. First, uniform thresholds ignore autoregressive asymmetry. Early-stage deviations produce compounding sequence-level drift, causing static thresholds to under-regulate early divergence and excessively constrain late-stage exploration. Second, evaluating token-level divergence in isolation overlooks cumulative prefix drift, granting the same divergence allowance regardless of how far the conditioning history has already deviated from the rollout policy. To address this limitation, we propose CPPO (Cumulative Prefix-divergence Policy Optimization), a token-level masking rule that aligns updates with a finite-horizon policy-improvement bound via two coupled mechanisms. First, a position-weighted threshold imposes stricter limits at early positions whose effects persist longer, relaxing constraints for late-stage tokens. Second, a cumulative prefix budget tracks historical deviations, dynamically restricting further token-level deviation to prevent compounding errors along the prefix. Empirically, CPPO enhances training stability and significantly improves reasoning accuracy across various model scales.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Optimal Spatio-Temporal Decoupling for Bayesian Conformal Prediction

Authors:
Yu-Hsueh Fang↗Chia-Yen Lee↗

arXiv:2605.00432v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online conformal prediction must balance fast adaptation to distribution shift against stable coverage: feedback-driven methods react quickly but become volatile, while strongly discounted Bayesian methods lag and inflate intervals at tight coverage. We introduce State-Adaptive Bayesian Conformal Prediction (SA-BCP), which forms the predictive quantile as a gated convex combination of long-term temporal inertia and local spatial evidence from a kernel density estimate, controlled by a single interpretable evidence threshold $K$. We establish three results: (i) asymptotic marginal validity of the resulting intervals; (ii) a closed-form expression for the MSE-optimal threshold, $K^*_{\mathrm{MSE}}=\alpha(1-\alpha)/M^{\mathcal{T}}$, trading the coverage-indicator (Bernoulli) variance against the temporal structural bias $M^{\mathcal{T}}$; and (iii) a rolling-origin procedure for selecting $K$ online – consistent under stationarity, with $O(\sqrt{T\log N})$ regret against the best fixed $K$ and, for a segmented variant, a sublinear dynamic-regret bound under bounded drift. Across four financial-volatility and weather datasets, three target coverage levels, and eight baselines (including the strongest recent conditional-quantile methods, SPCI and KOWCPI), SA-BCP attains at-or-above-nominal coverage in most settings while producing substantially sharper intervals – up to roughly $3\times$ lower Winkler score than discounted Bayesian CP at the tightest coverage – and a coverage-matched audit confirms these efficiency gains are not an artifact of under-coverage. We disclose one principal limitation: a volatility-specialized conformal-GARCH competitor remains more efficient on its home volatility-base series, though it does not transfer across domains.

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