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

PorTEXTO: A European Portuguese Benchmark for Visual Text Extraction

European Portuguese (pt-PT) is largely absent from OCR benchmarks, which skew toward high-resource languages. The few benchmarks that cover pt-PT focus on historical artifacts and literature. This work addresses modern OCR applications, introducing PorTEXTO, the first benchmark for contemporary and culturally relevant pt-PT visual text extraction. To ascertain quality, we employ an annotation pipeline combining transcriptions from a frontier LVLM with exhaustive review by native speakers. We observe a sharp performance drop from synthetic to real world samples in most models, and find that, currently, specialized multilingual data is a better driver for pt-PT performance than model size or resolution budget, motivating the release of open pt-PT OCR resources.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

"Did you lie?" Evaluating Lie Detectors across Model Scale and Belief-Verified Model Organisms

arXiv:2606.12618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust lie detectors for language models could enable powerful techniques for auditing, monitoring, and post-hoc investigation of model behaviour, but evaluating them requires testbeds where models verifiably believe the opposite of what they say. We show that existing trained model organisms often fail this requirement, leaving prior positive and negative detection results difficult to interpret. We address this with 13 reasoning model organisms whose hidden beliefs are verified in chain-of-thought and shown to generalise to held-out tasks, alongside Varied Deception, a prompted-lying testbed covering a broad range of lie-inducing motivations. On these testbeds we evaluate four detectors: a chain-of-thought judge, a logprob classifier, and two activation probes, including Did-You-Lie (DYL), a new method for training follow-up probes. On prompted lying, across 31 open-weight models spanning 2B to 1T parameters, all four detectors show positive scaling with model capability. However, every activation- and logprob-based detector drops sharply on our trained model organisms, with DYL retaining the most signal; only the chain-of-thought judge remains strong, with 0.82 balanced accuracy, partly as an artefact of our verification process favouring CoT-readable beliefs. Current lie detectors therefore cannot support high-confidence claims about model beliefs, and we suggest research directions that may address some of their current limitations. We release our datasets, model organisms, and trained detectors.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Disentangling Linguistic Relatedness from Task Alignment in Cross-Lingual Transfer

We study cross-lingual transfer by fine-tuning seven large language models (4B–671B parameters) on Arabic and evaluating zero-shot reading comprehension on Semitic languages and non-Semitic controls. Across dense and Mixture-of-Experts architectures, we find no evidence of Semitic-specific transfer: models with weak baselines improve dramatically across all languages, while strong-baseline models show only marginal gains regardless of language family. A chain-of-thought ablation reinforces this finding – the same models that benefit most from fine-tuning benefit equally from inference-time reasoning, suggesting both mechanisms address task-format alignment rather than cross-lingual knowledge transfer.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

When the Next Step Is Not One Step: Distribution-Aware Execution Modeling for Concurrent Go Programs

arXiv:2606.17508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training a model to predict the next step in a concurrent program is harder than it looks: two runs of the same program from the same trace prefix can produce different next events, both valid, because the scheduler is nondeterministic. A model trained against a single label is learning to guess one outcome of a random process. We turn this around and use the nondeterminism as a training signal. We run each program many times, aggregate the observed next events into an empirical distribution, and fine-tune a 7B model to match that distribution with a KL objective. On 798 held-out predictions drawn from real production Go bugs (CockroachDB, Kubernetes, gRPC, etcd), fine-tuning on fewer than a thousand traces reaches 36.2% accuracy, ahead of Gemini 3.5 Flash used zero-shot (34.8%) and the same model without fine-tuning (28.6%). Distribution training matches cross-entropy on accuracy (35.8% vs. 36.2%) while reducing Expected Calibration Error from 0.205 to 0.169. We also derive a formal goroutine-leak signature for a class of select-blocked goroutines where P(GoUnblock)=0 holds by scheduler semantics, not by learning. We release the dataset, trained adapters, and all tooling.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Retrocausal capacity of a quantum channel: Communicating through noisy closed timelike curves

arXiv:2509.08965v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the capacity of a quantum channel for retrocausal communication, where messages are transmitted backward in time, from a sender in the future to a receiver in the past, through a noisy postselected closed timelike curve mathematically represented by the channel. We completely characterize the one-shot retrocausal quantum and classical capacities, and we show that the corresponding asymptotic capacities are equal to the average and sum, respectively, of the channel's max-information and its regularized Doeblin information. This endows these information measures with a novel operational interpretation. Furthermore, our characterization can be generalized beyond quantum channels to all completely positive maps. This imposes information-theoretic limits on transmitting messages via postselected-teleportation-like mechanisms with arbitrary initial- and final-state boundary conditions, including those considered in various black-hole final-state models.

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

Interactive Pareto navigation for deep multi-task learning

arXiv:2606.19521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In multi-task learning, handling an increasing number of objectives can quickly become challenging, both in terms of the computational resources and the decision maker's capacity to choose appropriate trade-offs. A widely used approach is thus to aggregate the individual losses in a single loss function by a weighted sum. This often fails to capture either the decision maker's preferences as a result of the shape of the Pareto front, or requires multiple adjustments and computations which becomes prohibitively expensive in deep learning applications. To address these issues, we introduce a novel framework, Preference Pareto Exploration (PPE), which enforces the decision maker's preferences while accounting for the geometry of the Pareto set in an interactive exploration process. PPE is based on a predictor-corrector method that performs predictor steps tangential to the manifold of Pareto-optimal solutions, following the decision maker's preference. The subsequent corrector step results in a new trade-off reflecting this preference. To avoid explicit Hessian computations when characterizing the tangent space of the manifold, we employ a Krylov subspace method that relies solely on matrix-vector products. These products can be efficiently obtained via automatic differentiation, ensuring both efficiency and robustness throughout the optimization process. The method's functionality and performance are demonstrated using both toy problems and examples from deep learning.

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

PaLMR: Towards Faithful Visual Reasoning via Multimodal Process Alignment

Reinforcement learning has recently improved the reasoning ability of Large Language Models and Multimodal LLMs, yet prevailing reward designs emphasise final-answer correctness and consequently tolerate process hallucinations–cases where models reach the right answer while misperceiving visual evidence. We address this process-level misalignment with PaLMR, a framework that aligns not only outcomes but also the reasoning process itself. PaLMR comprises two complementary components: a perception-aligned data layer that constructs process-aware reasoning data with structured pseudo-ground-truths and verifiable visual facts, and a process-aligned optimisation layer that constructs a hierarchical reward fusion scheme with a process-aware scoring function to encourage visually faithful chains-of-thought and improve training stability. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B show that our approach substantially reduces reasoning hallucinations and improves visual reasoning fidelity, achieving state-of-the-art results on HallusionBench while maintaining strong performance on MMMU, MathVista, and MathVerse. These findings indicate that PaLMR offers a principled and practical route to process-aligned multimodal reasoning, advancing the reliability and interpretability of MLLMs.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ERN-Net : Evolving Reason Node-Net for Document Binarization

This paper presents ERN-Net, an Evolving Reason Node-Net for efficient document image binarization. ERN-Net enhances degradation-sensitive regions, such as faint strokes, broken characters, and noisy backgrounds, through evolving reason nodes and multi-scale reasoning. We further compare ResNet-101, ConvNeXt-Tiny, and ConvNeXt-Base, and find that ConvNeXt-Tiny provides the best practical trade-off between accuracy and memory usage. In addition, DIBCO-based pretraining improves binarization performance without increasing model memory consumption, requiring only about 1.5 additional training hours. Experiments on DIBCO-style benchmarks show that ERN-Net is effective under low-data and low-memory settings.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Rethinking Cross-lingual Gaps from a Statistical Viewpoint

Any piece of knowledge is usually expressed in one or a handful of natural languages on the web or in any large corpus. Large Language Models (LLMs) act as a bridge by acquiring knowledge from a source language and making it accessible when queried using target languages. A cross-lingual gap is a drop in accuracy incurred when querying knowledge in a target language rather than the source language. Existing research focused on modeling or training failures leading to cross-lingual gaps. In this work, we take an alternative view to characterize the nature of cross-lingual error, and hypothesize that the variance of responses in the target language is a key cause of this gap. For the first time, we formalize the cross-lingual gap in terms of biased and unbiased errors. We empirically validate our hypothesis through multiple inference-time interventions that control variance and reduce the cross-lingual gap. We demonstrate a few test-time ensemble methods that reduce response variance, and thereby improve source-target transfer scores by up to 12 absolute points yielding relative gains of 8% to over 50% across various LLMs.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Towards Physically Realizable Adversarial Attenuation Patch against SAR Object Detection

Deep neural networks have demonstrated excellent performance in SAR target detection tasks but remain susceptible to adversarial attacks. Existing SAR-specific attack methods can effectively deceive detectors; however, they often introduce noticeable perturbations and are largely confined to digital domain, neglecting physical implementation constrains for attacking SAR systems. In this paper, a novel Adversarial Attenuation Patch (AAP) method is proposed that employs energy-constrained optimization strategy coupled with an attenuation-based deployment framework to achieve a seamless balance between attack effectiveness and stealthiness. More importantly, AAP exhibits strong potential for physical realization by aligning with signal-level electronic jamming mechanisms. Experimental results show that AAP effectively degrades detection performance while preserving high imperceptibility, and shows favorable transferability across different models. This study provides a physical grounded perspective for adversarial attacks on SAR target detection systems and facilitates the design of more covert and practically deployable attack strategies. The source code is made available at https://github.com/boremycin/SAAP.

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

Gaming-Resistant Insurance Contracts for Autonomous AI Agents: Strategy-Proof Toll Mechanism Design

arXiv:2606.16326v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Paper A defines a time-consistent actuarial runtime that prices each side-effect-bearing action against a contractually fixed safe default and gates execution against a reserve budget. It treats the operator as passive. This paper makes the operator strategic. We characterise a five-attack space for autonomous AI-agent insurance contracts and prove when the actuarial runtime is gaming-resistant. Two attack surfaces – post-toll safe-default selection and within-boundary action splitting – are closed by Paper A's minimal-authority and no-splitting clauses. The remaining three require new contract clauses. First, common-control aggregation prevents cross-boundary re-routing from reducing toll below the boundary potential applied to total exposure. Second, interface failures such as invalid JSON are contract-relevant events, not safety wins: treating them as zero-toll safe defaults can reward unreliable models, while escalation fees reverse the incentive. We validate this interface-compliance theorem on committed cross-model traces from the companion empirical paper. Third, a model-identity menu with a componentwise-minimum penalty schedule makes truthful reporting of the deployed model weakly dominant. We then compose these clauses with Paper A's runtime guarantees to obtain joint incentive compatibility over the five-attack space. Finally, a two-parameter premium family discharges operator individual rationality and weak budget balance at the truthful equilibrium. The result is an incentive-compatibility layer for actuarial control of autonomous-agent side effects.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

How Do Instructions Shape Speech? Cross-Attention Attribution for Style-Captioned Text-to-Speech

arXiv:2606.20532v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Style-captioned text-to-speech systems use natural language to control voice characteristics, but how individual words influence acoustic output remains unclear. Understanding this is critical for diagnosing failure modes and improving controllability in expressive TTS. We propose cross-attention attribution for speech diffusion models, adapting the DAAM framework to the speech domain for the first time, and apply it to CapSpeech-TTS. Our method extracts per-token heatmaps across 25 layers and 24 ODE steps. We analyze 3,600 (style caption, text transcript) combinations comprising 120 style captions conditioning the generation of 30 text transcripts each, revealing how caption tokens shape waveforms. Results show: (1) style tokens have lower temporal variance than content/function tokens, confirming global conditioning; (2) style attention correlates with F0 and energy; (3) style conditioning peaks in early steps and deep layers; (4) attention entropy reaches its minimum at layer 17, co-occurring with the style importance peak, indicating maximal network selectivity at the most style-critical stage. This is the first study of how natural language influences cross-attention in speech diffusion models

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Plasma proteomics reveals clinical and mechanistic heterogeneity among individuals who develop coronary artery disease

BACKGROUND: Individuals who develop coronary artery disease (CAD) are clinically and mechanistically heterogeneous, and understanding this variation is crucial for precise risk stratification and tailored interventions. However, the molecular mechanisms that connect these two kinds of heterogeneity remain unclear, limiting progress toward biologically grounded risk stratification and targeted interventions. Here, we investigated the heterogeneity of individuals who develop CAD by leveraging plasma proteomic signatures, placed individuals along continuous metabolic gradients and revealed the molecular programs underlying these patterns, thereby linking mechanistic variation to clinical heterogeneity. METHODS AND RESULTS: From 42,803 UK Biobank participants, including 3,713 individuals who developed CAD within 10 years (incident CAD), we first identified a 320-protein panel from 2,923 baseline proteins that improved prediction of incident CAD beyond clinical risk scores. Using reverse graph embedding, we reduced the proteomic data to two dimensions and mapped each incident case onto the resulting two-dimensional latent proteomic space. These proteomic dimensions show significant associations with cardiometabolic and kidney-related clinical markers. The patterns were replicated in the EPIC-Norfolk study. Phenome-wide Cox regression analyses further linked these proteomic dimensions to 10-year incidence rates for various diseases, including type 2 diabetes, obesity, and chronic kidney disease (CKD). Furthermore, adding the proteomic dimensions to clinical variable-based Cox regression model improved prediction of 10-year incidence of CKD and other diseases, demonstrating the value of proteomic dimensions beyond conventional clinical risk factors. Moreover, individuals with prevalent CAD (diagnosed before proteomic sampling) exhibited high, metabolically adverse dimension values, indicating that these axes capture cumulative metabolic burden. Pathway enrichment analyses implicated altered extracellular matrix organization and immune programs among the proteins contributing to the proteomic dimensions. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings demonstrate that plasma proteomic signatures can dissect the heterogeneity of individuals who develop CAD in continuous phenotypic gradients, improve prediction of CAD and comorbidities, and map underlying biological mechanisms.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Fine-Tuning SAM2 for Coronary Artery Segmentation in X-Ray Fluoroscopy

Authors:

SAM2 (Meta, 2024) provides a strong starting point for segmentation, but given the unique challenges in medical imaging (noise from patient movement, the projection-based nature of X-ray fluoroscopy, and low contrast between vessels and background), direct application is difficult. We fine-tune MedSAM2 on annotated coronary angiograms and apply it to video data for point-of-care use. On the ARCADE validation set (200 images), the fine-tuned model achieves Dice 0.767 compared to 0.033 zero-shot. On 10 fluoroscopic video studies from CoronaryDominance, it tracks vessels coherently and avoids falsely segmenting ribs, stents, and bypass grafts in 9 of 10 studies. Code is available at https://github.com/elakiyasivakumar/SAM2-Coronary-Angiography-VA and the fine-tuned checkpoint at https://huggingface.co/Elakiya17/CA-SAM2.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Synthetic Homes: A Multimodal Generative AI Pipeline for Residential Building Data Generation under Data Scarcity

arXiv:2509.09794v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Computational models have emerged as powerful tools for multi-scale energy modeling research at the building and urban scale, supporting data-driven analysis across building and urban energy systems. However, these models require large amounts of building parameter data that is often inaccessible, expensive to collect, or subject to privacy constraints. We introduce a modular, multimodal generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) framework that integrates image, tabular, and simulation-based components and produces synthetic residential building datasets from publicly available county records and images, and present an end-to-end pipeline instantiating this framework. To reduce typical Large Language Model (LLM) challenges, we evaluate our model's components using occlusion-based visual focus analysis. Our analysis demonstrates that our selected vision-language model achieves greater visual focus than a GPT-based alternative for building image processing. We also assess realism of our results against a national reference dataset, finding that our synthetic data overlaps more than 95% for three of the four selected variables. This work reduces dependence on costly or restricted data sources, lowering barriers to building-scale energy research and Machine Learning (ML)-driven urban energy modeling, and therefore enabling scalable downstream tasks such as energy modeling, retrofit analysis, and urban-scale simulation under data scarcity.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Machine Unlearning for the XGBoost Model with Network Intrusion Datasets

arXiv:2606.19220v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine Unlearning (MU) has emerged as an important technique for removing specific data points from trained models without requiring full retraining. However, most existing MU research focuses on deep learning and image data, leaving a gap in the domain of network intrusion detection, which relies heavily on tabular data. This work introduces XGBoost-Forget, an unlearning approach for the XGBoost model, to address this gap. The approach is evaluated on two tabular Network Intrusion (NI) datasets, IoT-23 and GeNIS, using multiple metrics to assess model performance, unlearning efficiency, and forgetting quality. The results show that XGBoost-Forget maintains predictive performance close to the original model while providing significantly faster unlearning, demonstrating its potential for MU in tabular NI settings.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Tight Bounds for Quantum Phase Estimation and Related Problems

arXiv:2305.04908v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Phase estimation, due to Kitaev [arXiv'95], is one of the most fundamental subroutines in quantum computing. In the basic scenario, one is given black-box access to a unitary $U$, and an eigenstate $\lvert \psi \rangle$ of $U$ with unknown eigenvalue $e^{i\theta}$, and the task is to estimate the eigenphase $\theta$ within $\pm\delta$, with high probability. The cost of an algorithm for us is the number of applications of $U$ and $U^{-1}$. We tightly characterize the cost of several variants of phase estimation where we are no longer given an eigenstate, but are required to estimate the maximum eigenphase of $U$, aided by advice in the form of states (or a unitary preparing those states) which are promised to have at least a certain overlap $\gamma$ with the top eigenspace. We give algorithms and nearly matching lower bounds for all ranges of parameters. We show that a small number of copies of the advice state (or of an advice-preparing unitary) are not significantly better than having no advice at all. We also show that having lots of advice (applications of the advice-preparing unitary) does not significantly reduce cost, and neither does knowledge of the eigenbasis of $U$. We immediately obtain a lower bound on the complexity of the Unitary recurrence time problem, resolving an open question of She and Yuen~[ITCS'23]. Lastly, we study how efficiently one can reduce the error probability in the basic phase-estimation scenario. We show that a phase-estimation algorithm with precision $\delta$ and error probability $\epsilon$ has cost $\Omega\left(\frac{1}{\delta}\log\frac{1}{\epsilon}\right)$, matching an easy upper bound. This contrasts with some other scenarios in quantum computing (e.g., search) where error-probability reduction costs only a factor $O(\sqrt{\log(1/\epsilon)})$. Our lower bound uses a variant of the polynomial method with trigonometric polynomials.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

PanRes: A database of latent and acquired antimicrobial resistance allowing 3D-based protein homology search

Antimicrobial resistance databases are central to genomic surveillance, but resistance determinants remain distributed across resources with different scopes, structures, and annotations. We developed PanRes, a curated resistance database of 11,717 genes integrating acquired and latent determinants of antibiotic, biocide, and metal resistance within a unified ontology. We predicted representative protein structures and clustered them by structural similarity, grouping proteins into 598 structurally conserved clusters coherent despite sequence divergence. Their structure-guided alignments were used to build Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for remote homology search. In wastewater metagenomes from seven European cities, PanRes 3D-based HMMs expanded detection beyond high-confidence BLAST, with 35.2% of retained hits identified only by the HMMs and generally showing greater divergence from known proteins. For beta-lactamases, several proteins retained beta-lactamase-like folds and catalytic geometry despite weak sequence similarity. PanRes is available through an interactive web platform (https://panres.rambio.dk/), a structure-informed resource for exploring the whole resistome.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Midlife Measures of General Cognitive Performance in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health)

Objective: The Add Health Cognitive Assessment, Physical, and Sensory Function Protocol (Add CAPS) was developed to assess cognitive, physical, and sensory function in early midlife in a nationally representative sample in the United States. Using Add CAPS, we developed two general cognitive performance measures. Methods: The sample included 2,525 participants from Add Health Wave VI who completed an in- home assessment of cognitive performance. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to derive two general cognitive performance (GCP) scores: (1) a five-domain score based on originally designed cognitive domains (Add CAPS GCP), and (2) a modified score aligned with the Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol (HCAP) framework (Add CAPS GCP-H). We evaluated model fit using Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA), Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR), and Comparative Fit Index (CFI) and tested factor scores for criterion validity. Results: Both models showed good fit (Add CAPS GCP: RMSEA = 0.025, SRMR = 0.031, CFI = 0.968; Add CAPS GCP-H: RMSEA = 0.027, SRMR = 0.033, CFI = 0.962), indicating that they adequately represent the underlying GCP construct. Discussion: The Add CAPS cognitive battery captures a robust, hierarchical structure of GCP across alternative domain specifications. The derived factor scores provide a valuable method for characterizing a person's cognitive baseline during midlife. Importantly, the Add CAPS GCP-H enhances comparability with the HCAP network, supporting cross-cohort analyses of cognitive aging.

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

QueryGaussian: Scalable and Training-Free Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Retrieval

arXiv:2606.19733v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiently retrieving specific 3D instances from large-scale scenes via natural language prompts remains a formidable challenge in multimedia analysis. Existing approaches predominantly follow a "scene-level embedding" paradigm, which requires distilling high-dimensional semantic features into every 3D primitive. This strategy suffers from a fundamental architectural bottleneck: memory and computational costs scale linearly with scene complexity, inevitably triggering out-of-memory (OOM) failures in city-scale environments. To address this barrier, we propose QueryGaussian, a training-free framework for expeditious and scalable open-vocabulary 3D instance retrieval. Unlike holistic semantic distillation, QueryGaussian employs an instance-level query mechanism that decouples semantic understanding from geometric representation. Specifically, we leverage pre-trained 2D vision models to interpret user prompts and lift segmentation masks into 3D via a concurrent maximum-weight association strategy, ensuring semantic-visual consistency. To mitigate projection ambiguity, we introduce a temporal fusion module with multi-stage adaptive density clustering. Experimental results demonstrate that QueryGaussian not only matches the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods but also delivers a decisive efficiency leap, reducing GPU memory usage by over 70% and accelerating inference by 180x. Crucially, QueryGaussian enables expeditious instance retrieval on city-scale scenes containing tens of millions of Gaussians using consumer-grade hardware.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Shopping Reasoning Bench: An Expert-Authored Benchmark for Multi-Turn Conversational Shopping Assistants

Conversational shopping assistants now serve hundreds of millions of customers, yet no existing benchmark jointly evaluates the open-ended multi-turn reasoning, domain expertise, and criterion-level quality that real shopping conversations demand. Shopping reasoning is unique among language model applications. Unlike factual question answering or verifiable code generation, it requires balancing subjective preferences, budget constraints, and cross-product trade-offs across multi-turn dialogue, capabilities absent from previous e-commerce and general-purpose benchmarks. We introduce the Shopping Reasoning Bench, an expert-authored benchmark of 525 missions (232 single-turn, 293 multi-turn) with 10863 importance-weighted binary rubrics authored by retail domain experts. These criteria are organized under a taxonomy of five reasoning categories and fifteen subcategories covering diverse demands such as preference refinement, trade-off analysis, and compatibility assessment. An evaluation of nine models across three families (GPT, Claude, Gemini) shows that pass rates reach only 57–77% overall. On multi-turn missions, all models score 13–29 points lower on optional above-and-beyond criteria than on required ones, and performance degrades 4–18 points as conversations progress. These gaps show that current models handle basic shopping assistance but fall short of expert-level advice, making Shopping Reasoning Bench a challenging testbed for future shopping assistant development.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

"We don't complain; it's just part of being a woman": frequency, knowledge, and sociocultural beliefs about dysmenorrhoea in a South African university cohort

Introduction Dysmenorrhoea is highly prevalent globally and interferes with engagement in education, work, social participation, and quality of life. Although evidence suggests that sociocultural beliefs influence how menstrual pain is understood and managed, relatively little research has explored dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge and beliefs within South Africa. This study aimed to (1) determine the frequency of dysmenorrhoea, (2) assess dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge and compare knowledge between menstruating and non-menstruating individuals, and (3) explore commonly held generational, cultural, and religious beliefs related to dysmenorrhoea in a South African university cohort. Methods We analysed data collected as part of a cross-sectional survey conducted among staff and students at a South African university. Participants completed demographic questions, items assessing dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge, and an adapted Working Ability, Location, Intensity, Days of Pain, Dysmenorrhoea (WaLIDD) questionnaire. Participants were also invited to provide free-text responses describing generational, cultural, and religious beliefs about dysmenorrhoea. Quantitative data were analysed descriptively and compared between menstruating and non-menstruating participants. Free-text responses were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results A total of 863 participants completed the survey, including 578 current or past menstruators. The frequency (95%CI) of dysmenorrhoea was 75.4% (71.7-78.9). Most participants were classified as having moderate (53%) or severe (31%) dysmenorrhoea on the WaLIDD scale. Awareness of dysmenorrhoea was higher among participants who had menstruated than among those who had never menstruated (80.4% vs 55.3%, p

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

Position: AI Must Become Planet-Centered, Not Just Human-Centered

arXiv:2606.13704v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This position paper argues that contemporary AI paradigms are insufficient for supporting complex global goals and introduces Planet-Centered AI (PCAI) as a design philosophy and research agenda that reorients AI toward planetary-scale socio-ecological systems and their long-term trajectories. A planet-centered approach is grounded in systems thinking, treating Earth as an interconnected whole of which humans are part. We diagnose recurring limitations across AI frameworks, many of which remain human-centered, and show why these become especially consequential under current planetary conditions characterized by systemic risk, non-stationarity, and deep uncertainty. We then articulate how PCAI reshapes the AI lifecycle, from problem formulation and model design to evaluation and deployment, by emphasizing alignment with global agendas, developing system-aware AI foundations, trajectory-oriented evaluation, and monitorability. Finally, we advance a falsifiable claim: AI systems optimized without explicit consideration of systemic consequences are more likely to exacerbate systemic instability than to mitigate it.