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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

The Effectiveness of aromatherapy and its supportive Interventions on anxiety and pain among breast cancer patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Introduction: Breast cancer treatments are often associated with pain and anxiety, which can hinder physical functioning and overall quality of life, even after treatment. Complementary therapies, such as aromatherapy, can be used to alleviate pain and reduce anxiety in breast cancer patients. This project aimed to synthesize current global evidence on the effectiveness of aromatherapy. Method: This systematic review followed the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, with a comprehensive, systematic search conducted in PubMed, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, and SCOPUS for randomized controlled trials (RCTS) published from 2015 to 2025. Eligible studies included adult women breast cancer surgery patients who received aromatherapy during various periods of breast cancer. Where possible, data from the included studies were pooled using meta-analysis. GRADE approach was used to assess certainty of findings. Results: The search yielded 84 studies. Out of these, six were included in this review. On average, aromatherapy reduces pain and anxiety scores by 0.79 (standard mean difference (SMD)=-0.79, 95% CI -1.42, -0.16) and 0.53 (SMD=-0.53, 95 CI=-0.90, -0.16) units, respectively, compared to control condition [Low-quality of evidence]. The combination of aromatherapy with music reduces pain and anxiety by 1.26 (SMD= -1.26, 95 CI=-1.65, -0.87) and 1.08 (SMD = -1.08, 95 % CI: -1.45, -0.70) units respectively compared to standard care [Low-quality of evidence]. Conclusion: There is a potential role for the use of aromatherapy and music therapy, to alleviate anxiety and pain, especially for non-preoperative anxiety and pain. Further research is needed to inform the integration of aromatherapy into the management of anxiety and pain.

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

SafeClawBench: Separating Semantic, Audit-Evidence, and Sandbox Harm in Tool-Using LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.18356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using language-model agents introduce security failures that go beyond unsafe text: they can disclose protected objects, write persistent memory, send messages, modify databases, or trigger harmful code and tool effects. Existing evaluations often collapse these stages into a single attack success rate, making it difficult to tell whether a model merely agreed with an attacker or actually produced observable harm. We introduce SafeClawBench, a staged benchmark for tool-using agent security with 600 controlled adversarial tasks across six attack families: direct and indirect prompt injection, tool-return injection, memory poisoning, memory extraction, and ambiguity-driven unsafe inference. SafeClawBench reports three separate endpoints: semantic attack acceptance, audit-visible harm evidence, and sandbox-observed tool/state harm. Evaluating five agent endpoints under four prompt-level policies, we find that these endpoints capture different failure modes. Without additional prompt protection, semantic failure rates vary widely across models, from 9.0% to 44.2%. Audited harm evidence is narrower than semantic failure, and under a separate executable protocol some matched task identities produce sandbox harm despite passing the Semantic Core call: in a 12,000-row matched analysis, 291 of 347 observed sandbox harms occur in rows that pass the semantic check. Prompt policies change endpoint outcomes, but their effects depend on both model and protocol. SafeClawBench provides a reproducible framework for comparing agent models and prompt-policy conditions without conflating textual compliance, evidence-supported harm, and executable state changes. The open-source dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/sairights/safeclawbench.

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

Towards a Unified Generative Model for Scarce Time Series with Domain Experts

arXiv:2606.15172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthesizing realistic time series with generative models has wide-ranging applications in real-world scenarios. Despite recent progress, most existing methods are trained under the assumption of abundant training data, which substantially limits their effectiveness in data-scarce settings. In this paper, we propose TimeMoDE, a novel framework that integrates Diffusion Transformers with Mixture-of-Experts to exploit both domain adaptability and diffusion-stage awareness for time series generation under data scarcity. It is pre-trained on a large-scale collection of multi-domain datasets to extract domain-agnostic temporal representations and domain-specific information benefiting generalization during fine-tuning. We propose Domain Prompts to condition expert assignment for indistinguishable noised tokens, mitigating the limitations of capturing inter-dataset relationships. Moreover, we incorporate diffusion timestep signals to equip the experts with awareness of time series degradation variations, facilitating adaptive calibrate to stage-dependent denoising requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TimeMoDE outperforms existing methods under diverse low-data settings. It establishes an innovative paradigm for advanced time series few-shot generation.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Assessment of Personality Dimensions Across Situations in Dyadic Role-Play Scenarios

arXiv:2507.19137v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prior research indicates that users prefer assistive technologies whose personalities align with their own. This has sparked interest in automatic personality perception (APP), which aims to predict an individual's perceived personality traits. Previous studies in APP have treated personalities as static traits, independent of context. However, perceived personalities can vary by context and situation as shown in psychological research. In this study, we investigate the relationship between conversational speech and perceived personality for participants engaged in two work situations (a neutral interview and a stressful client interaction). Our key findings are: 1) perceived personalities differ significantly across interactions, 2) loudness, sound level, and spectral flux features are indicative of perceived extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness in neutral interactions, while neuroticism correlates with these features in stressful contexts, 3) handcrafted acoustic features and non-verbal features outperform speaker embeddings in inference of perceived personality, and 4) stressful interactions are more predictive of neuroticism, aligning with existing psychological research.

05.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-09

Adjuvanted inactivated rabies virus-vectored Lassa virus vaccine in healthy adults: a phase 1 trial

Lassa fever causes substantial morbidity and mortality in West Africa, and no licensed vaccine is available. We evaluated LASSARAB, an inactivated rabies virus-vectored Lassa virus (Josiah strain) glycoprotein complex vaccine. We conducted a randomized, controlled, dose-escalation phase 1 trial. Participants (total n = 54) received two intramuscular doses of LASSARAB containing 700 (n = 15), 1,400 (n = 15) or 2,800 (n = 14) relative units of antigen formulated with the TLR-4 agonist 3D-6-acyl PHAD-SE adjuvant, or licensed rabies vaccine control (n = 10), administered 28 days apart. This protocol-defined interim analysis reports the primary safety evaluation and secondary immunogenicity assessments through day 61. There were no prespecified hypotheses or formal power calculations. All primary safety end points demonstrated an acceptable safety profile. After dose 1, local solicited adverse events occurred in 86.7–100.0% of LASSARAB groups and 80% of controls; systemic events in 33.3–71.4% and 60.0% of controls. After dose 2, local solicited adverse events occurred in 66.7–86.7% of LASSARAB groups and 55.6% of controls; systemic events in 53.3–71.4% of LASSARAB groups and 55.6% of controls. Events were predominantly mild and self-limited. Unsolicited adverse events occurred in 28.6–60.0% of LASSARAB groups and 20.0% of controls. No serious adverse event, immune-mediated condition or sensorineural hearing loss occurred. Safety laboratory abnormalities occurred in 13.3–66.7% of LASSARAB groups and 30.0% of controls (14 mild, 6 moderate and none severe). After two doses, Lassa virus GPC IgG ELISA seroconversion (≥fourfold rise) was achieved in 100.0% (44 of 44) of LASSARAB recipients and 0.0% (0 of 10) of controls. Rabies glycoprotein IgG ELISA seroconversion (≥fourfold rise) and neutralizing antibody by rapid fluorescent focus inhibition test (RFFIT) seroprotection (≥0.5 IU ml−1) were also 100% across all groups, including controls. LASSARAB + 3D-6-acyl phosphorylated hexaacyl disaccharide (PHAD)-SE demonstrated a favorable safety profile and immunogenicity against Lassa and rabies viruses. The per-protocol final study report will include safety and durability through day 394. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT06546709 . An interim report of a first-in-human phase 1 trial found an adjuvanted, combination inactivated rabies-vectored, Lassa fever vaccine (LASSARAB + 3D-6-acyl PHAD-SE) to be safe and induced immunogenicity to both Lassa and rabies viruses in healthy participants.

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

TerraMARS: A Domain-Adapted Small-Language-Model Pipeline for Mars Terraforming Literature

Researchers are interested in learning about Mars so that it may eventually become habitable for humans. To achieve this, there is a need for comprehensive knowledge of the planet's atmosphere, hydrology, surface chemistry, radiation environment, and spatial features through the scientific literature. These contain valuable information and meaningful quantitative constraints that can be used in other models and studies, such as habitability assessment and future terraforming studies. We present TerraMARS, an end-to-end information extraction pipeline that combines a domain-adapted Small Language Model to answer Mars terraforming-related questions and convert unstructured Mars science text into machine-readable structured outputs in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. A corpus of open-access papers is collected and processed using a multistage retrieval and chunking framework. Google Gemma 3 1B was adapted to the domain using Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) fine-tuning on Mars-specific question-answering and information extraction datasets. The resulting pipeline generates both types of output and provides a foundation for integrating knowledge from scientific literature into downstream applications like digital twins and habitability modeling for Mars. The output from this pipeline looks promising, but further improvements are needed to increase extraction accuracy and factual consistency.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Magic transfer in quantum spin chains

arXiv:2606.14855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum communication protocols based on spin chains have been extensively studied, yet their ability to transmit nonstabilizer resources has not been systematically addressed. We investigate the transport of quantum magic in spin chains through the natural dynamics of systems initialized in nonstabilizer states, and quantify the transported resource via the stabilizer norm. We analyze three experimentally feasible state-transfer protocols, ranging from noisy to (quasi-)perfect transfer, including one realizable in trapped-ion platforms. We find that the geometry of the injected state strongly influences transport: states in the lower Bloch hemisphere achieve higher transfer quality, whereas states in the upper hemisphere give rise to an efficient magic transport only beyond a threshold value of the parameter controlling the tendency towards perfect transfer. These features are robust across all protocols and identify the Hamiltonian and state properties that favor high-quality transfer. Moreover, we identify a parameter region, relevant to the initial state preparation, in which the transported magic exceeds the initial encoding, indicating that such spin systems can act as magic-amplification channels. Our results establish the conditions for efficient transport of nonstabilizer resources and demonstrate quantum magic as a sensitive probe of quantum transport beyond population dynamics.

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

Conditional Multi-Event Temporal Grounding in Long-Form Video

Multimodal large language models have made rapid progress in video temporal grounding, yet real-world applications routinely require localizing every event that satisfies compositional temporal and spatial conditions. Existing benchmarks fall short: they localize only a single moment per query, count without temporal conditions, or treat grounding and counting as disjoint tasks. We introduce CoMET-Bench for Conditional Multi-Event Temporal Grounding in long-form video, comprising 2789 queries over 600 videos averaging 33.8 minutes across five real-world domains, with each query composed from 4 temporal conditions, 3 spatial conditions, and a dedicated negative-query subset. We further propose a unified evaluation protocol jointly measuring counting, grounding, and negative-query recognition, including a new Rejection-F1 metric that prevents trivial gaming by lazy "always-empty" models. Benchmarking a broad suite of MLLMs, agent-based, and grounding-specialized methods reveals that existing approaches remain far from solving this task. Building on these findings, we propose CoMET-Agent, a training-free agentic framework that reformulates the task as structured search-and-aggregate, improving F1@0.5 by 6.1% over GPT-5 purely through structural reasoning. Failure analysis further surfaces three open directions: fine-grained entity tracking, position-uniform retrieval, and causal event pairing.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Coverage Guarantees for Pseudo-Calibrated Conformal Prediction under Distribution Shift

arXiv:2602.14913v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conformal prediction (CP) offers distribution-free marginal coverage guarantees under an exchangeability assumption, but these guarantees can fail if the data distribution shifts. We analyze the use of pseudo-calibration as a tool to counter this performance loss under a bounded label-conditional covariate shift model. Using tools from domain adaptation, we derive a lower bound on target coverage in terms of the source-domain loss of the classifier and a Wasserstein measure of the shift. Using this result, we provide a method to design pseudo-calibrated sets that inflate the conformal threshold by a slack parameter to keep target coverage above a prescribed level. Finally, we propose a source-tuned pseudo-calibration algorithm that interpolates between hard pseudo-labels and randomized labels as a function of classifier uncertainty. Numerical experiments show that our bounds qualitatively track pseudo-calibration behavior and that the source-tuned scheme mitigates coverage degradation under distribution shift while maintaining nontrivial prediction set sizes.

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

Multi-Field Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Maritime Accident Root Cause Analysis

arXiv:2606.13249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Maritime accident adjudication reports contain critical tribunal findings for root cause analysis (RCA), yet retrieving relevant precedents and drafting consistent reports from decades of records remains labor-intensive. This paper proposes a multi-field hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for automated maritime RCA, utilizing a comprehensive dataset of 13,329 Korea Maritime Safety Tribunal (KMST) reports (1971-2025). We transform raw adjudications into a structured knowledge base of "incident cards", indexing three distinct fields-Summary, Causes, and Disposition-alongside a hierarchical L1/L2 cause taxonomy. Our retrieval strategy employs a field-aware hybrid approach, fusing sparse and dense rankings via Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF). Given the lack of large-scale expert relevance labels, we evaluate retrieval performance using ceiling-normalized recall and nDCG based on a metadata-derived proxy relevance score. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed retrieval significantly outperforms baseline methods, improving NormRecall@100 from 0.18 to 0.55. Furthermore, grounding the generator on the retrieved precedents enhances RCA generation quality over an LLM-only baseline, increasing the LLM-as-a-judge score from 3.34 to 3.72. These findings suggest that field-aware RAG can substantially streamline maritime safety investigation workflows by enabling faster precedent search and more consistent, evidence-based RCA drafting.

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

Enhancing Spectral Embedding through Robust and Flexible Knowledge Transfer in Electronic Health Records

arXiv:2606.11570v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a spectral-based, unsupervised representation learning framework to derive low-dimensional embeddings for clinical concepts and patients in rare disease cohorts from electronic health records, where data are high-dimensional but sample sizes are limited. To overcome this challenge, we incorporate a knowledge matrix extracted from a broader population that shares a partially overlapping subspace with the rare-disease cohort. Our method departs from existing approaches by relaxing restrictive one-to-one signal-alignment assumptions between the latent data matrix and knowledge matrix, allowing more flexible and realistic forms of structured sharing. We introduce a novel two-step spectral embedding procedure: first, we identify and remove irrelevant components from the knowledge matrix; then, we apply a projection-based method to separately recover shared and heterogeneous components. Simulations and an analysis of a real-world multiple sclerosis cohort show that the proposed method outperforms competing approaches, particularly in challenging scenarios where shared signals are weak and only partially aligned, as is common in rare-disease data.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Folded Transport MCMC: Eliminating Label Switching by Sampling on a Fundamental Domain

Authors:

arXiv:2606.04307v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In Bayesian mixture models and other exchangeable-component models, the posterior is invariant under permutation of component labels, creating m! equivalent modes-the label-switching problem. Standard MCMC methods either mix poorly across these modes or rely on post-hoc relabelling that cannot guarantee the sampler has converged. We propose Folded Transport MCMC (FolT-MCMC), which eliminates label switching before sampling by restricting the Markov chain to a fundamental domain-a sorted or reflected subspace containing exactly one representative from each symmetric mode. The proposal is a learned normalising flow whose density is symmetrised over the group orbits, ensuring correct targeting on the reduced space. We show that this construction preserves a computable convergence diagnostic based on the oscillation of the log-density ratio, and that the diagnostic becomes sharper on the fundamental domain whenever the original-space flow under-covers one or more symmetric modes. Experiments on Gaussian mixtures (d=2-20), label-switching targets (up to 24 equivalent modes), a standard Bayesian three-component mixture posterior, and real accelerometer data from a supertall building show improvement ratios of 2x to 145x, with the folded diagnostic stable across dimensions while the unfolded diagnostic collapses.

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

From Agent Traces to Trust: A Survey of Evidence Tracing and Execution Provenance in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.04990v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agents are evolving from passive text generators into autonomous systems capable of planning, tool use, retrieval, memory access, environmental interaction, and multi-agent collaboration. These capabilities expand agent autonomy, but also make agent behavior harder to verify, debug, and audit. Final-answer accuracy alone cannot explain how an output was produced, which evidence supported each claim, whether tool calls were justified, how memory influenced later decisions, or where failures originated. This survey examines evidence tracing and execution provenance as foundations for process-level accountability in trustworthy LLM agents. We define execution provenance as the typed graph of an agent execution and evidence tracing as its projection onto evidence-support relations. This perspective connects retrieval grounding, claim support, tool-use safety, memory lineage, observability, debugging, audit, and recovery within a unified framework. We introduce a taxonomy covering trace sources, evidence and execution units, provenance relations, tracing granularity and timing, representation forms, and trust functions. We then review key methodological directions, including provenance representation, evidence attribution, tool-use provenance, runtime guardrails, provenance-bearing memory, observability, and failure diagnosis. Finally, we discuss benchmarks, datasets, metrics, and open challenges for building provenance-aware, auditable, and recoverable agent systems.

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

Closed-loop discovery of out-of-distribution processing protocols by evolutionary search and uncertainty-aware learning

arXiv:2606.13859v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many materials and chemical systems exhibit history-dependent responses, where functional outcomes are governed not only by final-state variables but by the time-dependent sequence of fields, temperatures, or chemical potentials applied during operation. Discovering new processing protocols is therefore a high-dimensional search problem in which the control variable is an entire waveform or sample history, and conventional strategies either remain confined to conservative interpolative families or become prohibitively measurement intensive. Here, a closed-loop workflow is introduced that couples evolutionary search over a compact waveform representation with uncertainty-aware deep kernel learning to generate, rank, and experimentally validate candidate protocols. Applied to ferroelectric thin films, with the scanning-probe tip-bias waveform as the protocol and the nonlinear electromechanical response as the reward, the workflow discovers waveform families that enhance nonlinearity by de-aging the film. Spatially resolved before/after measurements show that the best-performing waveforms selectively activate pre-existing, weakly pinned domain-wall segments, whereas the worst drive long-range irreversible switching. This framework reframes protocol tuning as out-of-distribution discovery, generalizable to synthesis and annealing trajectories, battery formation protocols, and other high-dimensional control problems.

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

GeoRoPE: Ground-Aware Rotary Adaptation for Remote Sensing Foundation Models

Remote-sensing foundation models (RSFMs) benefit from pretraining on imagery from multiple sensors and ground sampling distances (GSDs), but such exposure alone does not resolve scale mismatch during downstream adaptation. A fixed token-grid offset can correspond to different ground distances across sensors, making grid-based positional priors physically inconsistent. Meanwhile, heterogeneous spatial granularity means that compact urban regions and homogeneous landscapes may require different positional sensitivities even under the same GSD. Therefore, we propose {GeoRoPE}, a ground-aware, RoPE-compatible, and parameter-efficient spatial adaptation method for RSFMs. GeoRoPE recalibrates token-level positional interactions from two complementary aspects. First, Geo-Coordinate Calibration (GCC) rescales raw token-grid offsets according to the ground distance represented by one token-grid step, producing geo-calibrated relative coordinates across GSDs. Second, Geo-Frequency Calibration (GFC) adjusts the native RoPE frequency with a relation-specific factor, enabling position sensitive adaptation to scene-dependent spatial granularity. GeoRoPE is injected into pretrained RSFMs through a lightweight adapter, preserving the frozen spatial prior while adding geo-aware positional corrections. Experiments across multiple RSFMs, sensors, resolutions, and downstream tasks demonstrate that GeoRoPE improves cross-resolution robustness and scale-sensitive representation learning.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Mod-Guide: An LLM-based Content Moderation Feedback System to Address Insensitive Speech toward Indigenous Ethnic and Religious Minority Communities

arXiv:2606.13397v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language operates as a mechanism of both marginalization and resistance, especially for minority communities navigating insensitive and harmful speech online. As content moderation increasingly depends on large language models (LLMs), concerns arise about whether these systems can recognize culturally insensitive speech-language that disregards or marginalizes the cultural and religious perspectives of historically underrepresented communities, often through implicit erasure, misrepresentation, or normative framing, rather than overt hostility. Focusing on Bangladesh's Hindu and Chakma communities – the country's largest religious and Indigenous ethnic minorities, respectively – this paper investigates the epistemic limits of LLM-based moderation systems and explores methods for incorporating minority perspectives. We co-created a culturally grounded corpus of insensitive speech with community members and integrated their narratives into moderation pipelines using retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Our tool, Mod-Guide, improves LLM sensitivity to minority viewpoints by leveraging contextual cues derived from lived experience. Through mixed-method evaluations involving both minority and majority participants, we demonstrate that RAG-enhanced moderation responses are more contextually accurate and perceived differently across ethnic lines. This work advances research in human-computer interaction, AI ethics, and social computing by foregrounding restorative justice and hermeneutical inclusion in the design of content moderation systems.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Lowest order Carleman linearization for low Reynolds long-term behaviour of fluid flow simulations

arXiv:2605.23380v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: It is shown that the lowest (second) order truncation of the Carleman linearization of the fluid equations (C2) recovers the late stage of the evolution, namely the steady-state solution, although to a decreasing degree of accuracy at increasing Reynolds number. This asymptotic property is first proved analytically for the decaying logistic with external forcing and then shown to hold to a significant degree of accuracy also for the more complex case of two-dimensional Kolmogorov-like fluid flow at low Reynolds numbers, below $Re \sim 10$. This time-asymptotic property may open interesting prospects for the quantum simulation of low-Reynolds steady-state fluid flows.

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

Provenance-Enhanced Statements in Knowledge Graphs

arXiv:2606.15246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Provenance-enhanced statements of the form "according to $X$, $\varphi$" are pervasive in contemporary knowledge graphs, especially in domains where graph content primarily represents claims, interpretations, and hypotheses (capta) rather than observer-independent facts (data). Current provenance models can record who asserted what, but they typically treat provenance as semantically neutral, leaving underspecified how attributed claims relate to factual commitment, to one another, and to reasoning. In this paper we introduce DEC, a framework that interprets provenance predicates as indicators of epistemic stance and groups provenance-homogeneous sets of statements into cognitive worlds. Drawing on cognitive modal logics (doxastic, epistemic, and conjectural), DEC characterizes locality, rationality, and controlled permeation between cognitive worlds and a distinguished factual core ("reality"), thereby enabling principled reasoning over attributed content without collapsing disagreements into inconsistencies. We formalize a DEC interpretation for RDF datasets that is conservative over RDF~1.2 semantics, clarify the role of intensionality and identity (including the Superman paradox), and illustrate the approach on common Semantic Web representations (named graphs, quoted triples/RDF-star, and reification). Finally, we describe our prototype DEC reasoner implemented as a Fuseki dataset module, supporting controlled factualisation and explicit detection of disagreements and delusions.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

DEFINED: A Data-Efficient Computational Framework for Fine-Grained Creativity Assessment in Debate Scenarios

Human creativity has emerged as a critical competency in the era of large language models. Assessing creativity in complex, open-ended environments is a grand challenge in data mining, currently hindered by a reliance on standardized simple tasks and the scarcity of fine-grained expert data. As an ecologically valid assessment context, debate reflects multiple dimensions of creativity, encompassing both divergent thinking and convergent thinking. Moreover, debate is a data-rich domain, with a large volume of publicly accessible materials. Current mainstream automated scoring methods are poorly suited to complex settings such as debate, and therefore still rely on costly human evaluation. To this end, this paper proposes DEFINED, a data-efficient computational framework for fine-grained creativity assessment in debate scenarios. DEFINED operationalizes debate creativity through a hierarchical eight-dimensional metric system, implemented via a pre-trained autoregressive language model with a hierarchical scoring head that supports both fine-grained and coarse-grained evaluation. Statements and their associated expert scores were obtained from authentic debate competitions, and a constrained data augmentation strategy was employed to address the elite bias inherent in the original data. DEFINED adopts a mixed-granularity training strategy enabling robust learning from limited fine-grained supervision annotated by trained graduate experts. To rigorously validate ecological validity beyond synthetic benchmarks, we incorporate an empirical study with debate-naive participants, utilizing these authentic data to serve as a qualitative case study for mid-to-low proficiency populations. Across our evaluation protocol, our scoring model achieves accurate and stable scoring, outperforming prompt-based large language model evaluators and existing debate scoring methods.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

OdysSim: Building Foundation Models for Human Behavior Simulation

Large language models are increasingly deployed as human simulators for interactive evaluation and social simulation. Yet helpfulness-driven post-training pulls them toward a homogeneous, overly agreeable assistant register, creating a behavioral Sim2Real gap. We present OdysSim, the largest open systematic investigation of behavioral foundation models, i.e., models trained to simulate human behavior at scale. We propose SOUL, a taxonomy of five capability axes (CONV, SS, COG, ROLE, EVAL) that unifies 62 datasets and 23 benchmark tasks under one framework. Specifically, we curate the OdysSim corpus (21.4M interactions, 10B tokens, retrofitted with back-generated social contexts), construct the SOUL-Index benchmark, and develop an end-to-end training recipe combining midtraining, task-specific RL, and expert distillation. The resulting open 8B OSim model ranks first or tied-first on 8 of 23 tasks, outperforming any individual frontier model by this count, with the strongest gains on conversational and social tasks. Its outputs are also more human-like in length, formatting, and word choice, and it transfers zero-shot to out-of-distribution user simulation on $\tau$-bench, nearly matching real users on reaction alignment (93.2 vs. 93.5). We further show that LLM-as-judge RL induces reward-hacking patterns, and that our detectors can mitigate them during post-training. Together, our findings suggest that behavioral foundation models require rethinking the LLM training paradigm. We release all artifacts to support future research.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Readout-Induced Leakage in Superconducting Circuits with Nonlinear Couplings

arXiv:2606.16055v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In superconducting circuits, drive-induced unwanted transitions limit the readout power, thereby constraining readout speed and fidelity. When such transitions excite the qubit into leakage states, they produce correlated errors that are particularly harmful for quantum error correction. Native nonlinear qubit-readout resonator coupling is a promising alternative to conventional linear hybridization because it provides intrinsic Purcell protection and stricter selection rules for multiphoton processes. In realistic devices, however, we show that such a coupling alone neither eliminates nor necessarily suppresses drive-induced transitions. Instead, if not appropriately engineered, these couplings often worsen the situation by introducing additional parasitic processes. Moreover, the rates of these unwanted transitions remain sensitive to the choice of readout frequency, regardless of the coupling mechanism. We demonstrate that readout-induced leakage can thus vary by orders of magnitude even when readout frequencies differ by less than ~7%. Our results establish that the benefits of native nonlinear couplings are realized only through informed device design, including the spectral placement of relevant auxiliary modes and elimination of parasitic ones.

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

Dense Coordinate-List Fine-Tuning Induces a Controllable Interference Surface in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.14507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning vision-language models to emit dense coordinate lists improves visual grounding but also changes how models serialize, repeat, and terminate structured outputs. We study this behavior as a generation and control surface. In Gemma 4 12B, high-capacity q/k/v/o LoRA raises class-aware F1@0.3 from 0.007 to 0.448 while inducing repeated-tail pressure (duplicate rate 0.080, max repeat 23). A q/v rank sweep keeps max repeat at 21-22 across ranks 4-64, showing capacity persistence. The target signal is separable: object-level repeat-stop removes exact repeated records (duplicate rate 0.000, max repeat 1) while preserving F1 (0.494 to 0.490) and stricter F1@0.5 (0.381 to 0.385). Structure-axis probes localize the effect to bbox-coordinate object lists; dense non-bbox and spatial/count JSON remain repeat-clean, including under high-capacity adapters. Qwen3-VL-8B reproduces a clean controlled endpoint (F1@0.3 0.318, duplicate rate 0.000), and COCO 2017 reproduces acquisition plus duplicate pressure. Dense coordinate-list adaptation therefore creates a structure-bound, cross-family interference surface that can be measured and controlled.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning Developmental Scaffoldings to Guide Self-Organisation

arXiv:2605.14998v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: From subcellular structures to entire organisms, many natural systems generate complex organisation through self-organisation: local interactions that collectively give rise to global structure without any blueprint of the outcome. Yet a significant portion of the information driving such processes is not produced by self-organisation itself, instead, it is often offloaded to initial conditions of the system. Biological development is a prime example, where maternal pre-patterns encode positional and symmetry-breaking information that scaffolds the self-organising process. From maternal morphogen gradients in early embryogenesis to tissue-level morphogenetic pre-patterns guiding organ formation, this transfer of information to initial conditions, analogous to a memory-compute trade-off in computational systems, is a fundamental part of developmental processes. In this work, we study this offloading phenomenon by introducing a model that jointly learns both the self-organisation rules and the pre-patterns, allowing their interplay to be varied and measured under controlled conditions: a Neural Cellular Automaton (NCA) paired with a learned coordinate-based pattern generator (SIREN), both trained simultaneously to generate a set of patterns. We provide information-theoretic analyses of how information is distributed between pre-patterns and the self-organising process, and show that jointly learning both components yields improvements in robustness, encoding capacity, and symmetry breaking over purely self-organising alternatives. Our analysis further suggests that effective pre-patterns do not simply approximate their targets; rather, they bias the developmental dynamics in ways that facilitate convergence, pointing to a non-trivial relationship between the structure of initial conditions and the dynamics of self-organisation.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Learning the generating functional for variance reduction in lattice QCD

arXiv:2606.15986v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The generating functional in quantum field theory provides the natural framework for constructing correlation functions as derivatives with respect to source operators. We present a methodology that leverages machine-learned normalizing flows to reduce the variance of arbitrary $N$-point correlation functions of bosonic operators in lattice gauge field theory calculations by encoding a representation of the generating functional. We show that it is possible to systematically approach noiseless estimators of correlation functions in this framework. We demonstrate this methodology with applications to calculations of glueball correlation functions and Wilson loops in Quantum Chromodynamics and Yang-Mills theory. The results show up to three orders of magnitude variance reduction.