Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15485

The Perils of Agency: How Developers Perceive, Prioritize, and Address Risks in Agentic AI Products

Authors:

Hao-Ping Lee↗Jessica He↗David Piorkowski↗Thomas Serban von Davier↗Jodi Forlizzi↗Sauvik Das↗

arXiv:2606.15485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems act autonomously, use tools, adapt to context, and operate in complex real-world environments. However, these same characteristics can create or exacerbate product risks. We studied how industry developers (n=35) perceive, prioritize, and address the risks in their agentic AI products. We found that developers' perceptions of risk were closely tied to the qualities that made the product agentic, such as autonomy, tool use, and usage in a real-world context. Developers prioritized product and business risks before considering downstream societal risks like job displacement and end-user privacy. This prioritization also impacted developers' ability and motivation to mitigate agentic risks. Finally, developers lacked mature controls for containing agentic risks, often relying on constraining the same characteristics that make agents useful: e.g., autonomy and goal complexity. These findings reveal a capability vs. risk control tension in agentic AI development: developers need to address risks that emerge from agentic capabilities, yet they currently have limited support for doing so without constraining agentic functionality.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12400

Doc-to-Atom: Learning to Compile and Compose Memory Atoms

Authors:

Xingjian Diao↗Wenbo Li↗Yashas Malur Saidutta↗Avinash Amballa↗Lazar Valkov↗Srinivas Chappidi↗

Long input sequences are central to document understanding and multi-step reasoning in Large Language Models, yet the quadratic cost of attention makes inference both memory-intensive and slow. Context distillation mitigates this by compressing contextual information into model parameters, and recent work such as Doc-to-LoRA amortizes context distillation into a single forward pass that generates one LoRA adapter per document. However, producing a single monolithic adapter for all queries leads to irrelevant-query interference, limited compositional recall, and poor scalability to long-document reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose Doc-to-Atom (Doc2Atom), a compositional parametric memory framework that decomposes each document into semantically typed knowledge atoms. Each atom is compiled into an independent micro-LoRA adapter and a provenance retrieval key. At inference time, a lightweight query router selects and assembles only the relevant atoms into a query-specific adapter, which is then injected into a frozen base model. The entire system is trained end-to-end through a multi-objective distillation framework. Experiments on six diverse QA benchmarks demonstrate that Doc2Atom outperforms Doc-to-LoRA baselines while reducing the memory cost of document internalization.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2510.17816

Cross-Domain Multi-Person Human Activity Recognition via Near-Field Wi-Fi Sensing

Authors:

Xin Li↗Jingzhi Hu↗Yinghui He↗Hongbo Wang↗Jin Gan↗Jun Luo↗

Wi-Fi-based human activity recognition (HAR) provides substantial convenience and has emerged as a thriving research field, yet the coarse spatial resolution inherent to Wi-Fi significantly hinders its ability to distinguish multiple subjects. By exploiting the near-field domination effect, establishing a dedicated sensing link for each subject through their personal Wi-Fi device offers a promising solution for multi-person HAR under native traffic. However, due to the subject-specific characteristics and irregular patterns of near-field signals, HAR neural network models require fine-tuning (FT) for cross-domain adaptation, which becomes particularly challenging with certain categories unavailable. In this paper, we propose WiAnchor, a novel training framework for efficient cross-domain adaptation in the presence of incomplete activity categories. This framework processes Wi-Fi signals embedded with irregular time information in three steps: during pre-training, we enlarge inter-class feature margins to enhance the separability of activities; in the FT stage, we innovate an anchor matching mechanism for cross-domain adaptation, filtering subject-specific interference informed by incomplete activity categories, rather than attempting to extract complete features from them; finally, the recognition of input samples is further improved based on their feature-level similarity with anchors. We construct a comprehensive dataset to thoroughly evaluate WiAnchor, achieving over 90% cross-domain accuracy with absent activity categories.

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04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2602.05367

RaBiT: Residual-Aware Binarization Training for Accurate and Efficient LLMs

Authors:

Youngcheon You↗Banseok Lee↗Minseop Choi↗Seonyoung Kim↗Hyochan Chong↗Changdong Kim↗Youngmin Kim↗Dongkyu Kim↗

arXiv:2602.05367v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient deployment of large language models (LLMs) requires extreme quantization, forcing a critical trade-off between low-bit efficiency and performance. Residual binarization enables hardware-friendly, matmul-free inference by stacking binary ($\pm$1) layers, but is plagued by pathological feature co-adaptation. We identify a key failure mode, which we term inter-path adaptation: during quantization-aware training (QAT), parallel residual binary paths learn redundant features, degrading the error-compensation structure and limiting the expressive capacity of the model. While prior work relies on heuristic workarounds (e.g., path freezing) that constrain the solution space, we propose RaBiT, a novel quantization framework that resolves co-adaptation by algorithmically enforcing a residual hierarchy. Its core mechanism sequentially derives each binary path from a single shared full-precision weight, which ensures that every path corrects the error of the preceding one. This process is stabilized by a robust initialization that prioritizes functional preservation over mere weight approximation. RaBiT redefines the 2-bit accuracy-efficiency frontier: it achieves state-of-the-art performance, rivals even hardware-intensive Vector Quantization (VQ) methods, and delivers a $4.49\times$ inference speed-up over full-precision models on an RTX 4090. Code is available at https://github.com/SamsungLabs/RaBiT.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.10135

BiWM: Advancing Open-Source Interactive Video World Models with Bidirectional Autoregression

Authors:

Shaohao Rui↗Xiaofeng Mao↗Zhanyu Zhang↗Peijia Lin↗Yansong Zhu↗Yibo Zhang↗Haibin Wan↗Weijie Ma↗

Transitioning bidirectional video diffusion models into an autoregressive paradigm improves the interactivity of video world models, but existing causal pipelines need many stages (control fine-tuning, autoregressive training, causal initialization, few-step distillation) and still trail bidirectional models in quality due to error accumulation. Recent world models such as Yume-1.5 and Matrix-Game-3.0 instead adopt a bidirectional autoregressive approach, gaining fidelity and stable long-horizon rollout from self-correcting error propagation, yet open-source frameworks (e.g., minWM) support only causal models. We present BiWM, the first full-stack framework for interactive video world models under the bidirectional autoregressive paradigm, jointly optimizing generation quality and inference speed. From a pretrained video backbone, BiWM injects camera control by fine-tuning, then runs a few-step Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) stage that turns the backbone into an action/camera-controllable world model: just two training stages instead of four in minWM, converging in a few hundred steps on 8xH200 GPUs. A single recipe spans Wan2.1-1.3B, Wan2.2-5B, HunyuanVideo-1.5-8B, and LTX-2.3-22B, and also supports secondary fine-tuning of existing bidirectional models. BiWM enables real-world camera control where minWM loses controllability, integrates pluggable history compression (FramePack-style and PackForcing-style) for long rollouts, and offers an optional NVFP4 4-bit training/inference pipeline. To counter DMD's mode-seeking degradation, we add GAN and mass-covering forward-KL objectives that preserve scene dynamics. We open-source BiWM for resource-constrained research and high-fidelity environment simulation.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15714

Beyond English: Uncovering the Multilingual Gap in Vision-Language-Action Models

Authors:

Hanyang Chen↗Hongliang Li↗Jiarui Cao↗Yang Li↗Yang Jiang↗Haonan Wen↗Kaiyu Huang↗Shengnan Guo↗Huaiyu Wan↗

Vision-Language-Action models have recently demonstrated promising capabilities in learning generalist robot policies from large-scale multimodal data. However, most existing VLA systems are trained and evaluated primarily with English instructions, leaving their ability to understand and execute instructions in other languages largely unexplored. While the underlying large language models often possess multilingual capabilities, it remains unclear whether these multilingual capabilities transfer to VLAs during training. In this work, we present the first systematic study of multilingual instruction following in VLA models. We first construct multilingual instructions by extending existing benchmarks with translations of their instructions. Using these instructions, we evaluate several representative VLA models across a range of tasks in simulation settings. Our experiments reveal a significant multilingual gap: models trained primarily on English instructions exhibit substantial performance degradation when evaluated on other languages, even when the underlying language backbone is multilingual. We provide several findings and analyses to understand the multilingual gap. Cross-lingual transfer behavior analysis shows that performance drops correlate with both instruction understanding and action execution. Representation analyses suggest that multilingual instruction-caused representation shifts may contribute to the multilingual gap. Motivated by these findings, we further explore strategies to improve multilingual performance in VLAs. We propose a simple yet effective multilingual fine-tuning approach, Multilingual Principal Component Alignment, which leverages Principal Component Analysis to get the principal component subspace and align projected multilingual representations, effectively reducing the multilingual performance gap.

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07.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:87b356df08848d08b388a086615a88ae

A systematic imputation framework for sparse, multimodal space biology datasets: application to retinal imaging and omics from the RR9 mission

Authors:

Nagesh↗Sanders↗Costes↗S. V↗Avci↗Sigit↗Agarwal↗Haghighi↗Batool↗Karouia↗Chander↗A. M↗…

Space biology experiments are expensive, logistically complex, and inherently limited in sample size, resulting in datasets that are frequently incomplete and highly heterogeneous (2). Missing data is a fundamental barrier to building reliable computational models of how the human body responds to spaceflight. This work introduces a systematic framework for addressing missing data through imputation. We developed a validated four-stage framework for imputation specifically designed to preserve biological signal needed for digital twin development, while quantifying trade-offs in downstream analyses. Using retinal imaging and omics data from the NASA RR9 mission as a case study (9), we demonstrate how to diagnose why data is missing(10), select and optimize appropriate imputation strategies (5,10), and rigorously evaluate whether imputed data remains biologically meaningful. A key finding of this work is that while imputation substantially improves the performance of predictive models, it can simultaneously obscure subtle biological patterns; a critical trade-off that researchers must understand before applying these methods (11). This framework provides practical, actionable guidance for space biologists and data scientists working with sparse, multimodal datasets in space biology, and represents a foundational step toward more complete and reliable data-driven models of human physiology in extreme environments.

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08.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:5d04178a2a73f8cad4dc53d0b32fa659

When Less Is Not More: DICEPro Mitigates the Impact of Incomplete Reference Matrices on Cellular Frequency Deconvolution.

Authors:

BA↗Thiebaut↗Hinaut↗Hejblum↗B. P↗

Cellular deconvolution aims to estimate the frequencies of different cell populations from gene expression measurements in a biological sample. Supervised approaches, such as CIBERSORTx and DISSECT, critically depend on the reference signature matrix, which encodes the gene expression profiles of cell-types based on prior knowledge. Despite numerous deconvolution methods, the impact of missing cell populations in the reference matrix remains understudied. Here, we evaluate the robustness of state-of-the-art deconvolution approaches using simulations based on real dataset examples combined with statistical modeling, validated against published data, and multiple real benchmark datasets. Results show that deconvolution performance remains stable when the reference matrix includes most cell-types, but declines sharply as the matrix becomes incomplete, especially for abundant cell populations. To address the limitations of incomplete reference matrices, we introduce DICEPro, an optimization-based framework designed to enhance existing deconvolution methods. By systematically adjusting the reference signatures, DICEPro better accounts for missing or underrepresented cell populations, leading to improved precision and robustness. We show that DICEPro consistently boosts deconvolution performance across both simulated datasets, derived from real data examples, and multiple real biological datasets, offering a practical solution when standard methods are hindered by incomplete references.

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09.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2603.20483

Convergence Analysis of the Random Bisection Method

Authors:

Ludovick Bouthat↗Philippe-Andr\'e Luneau↗Philippe Petitclerc↗

arXiv:2603.20483v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a generalized version of the bisection method where the cutting point between the two subintervals is chosen at random following an arbitrary distribution. We compute expected convergence rates with respect to any arbitrary a priori distribution for the position of the root in the initial interval and proved that it depends only on the the expectation $\mathbb{E}[c(1-c)]$ of the cut $c$. We also provide a generalization of the method for $K$ random cuts and study its convergence properties. Most probabilistic derivations are kept fairly simple for the ease of understanding of a larger audience. Our theoretical results are then validated numerically using statistical simulation.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2604.13326

Right Regions, Wrong Labels: Semantic Label Flips in Segmentation under Correlation Shift

Authors:

Akshit Achara↗Yovin Yahathugoda↗Nick Byrne↗Michela Antonelli↗Esther Puyol Anton↗Alexander Hammers↗Andrew P. King↗

The robustness of machine learning models can be compromised by spurious correlations between non-causal features in the input data and target labels. A common way to test for such correlations is to train on data where the label is strongly tied to some non-causal cue, then evaluate on examples where that tie no longer holds. This idea is well established for classification tasks, but for semantic segmentation the specific failure modes are not well understood. We show that a model may achieve reasonable overlap while assigning the wrong semantic label, swapping one plausible foreground class for another, even when object boundaries are largely correct. We focus on this semantic label-flip behaviour and quantify it with a simple diagnostic (Flip) that counts how often ground truth foreground pixels are assigned the wrong foreground identity while remaining predicted as foreground. In a setting where category and scene are correlated during training, increasing the correlation consistently widens the gap between common and rare test conditions and increases these within-object label swaps on counterfactual groups. Overall, our results motivate assessing segmentation robustness under distribution shift beyond overlap by decomposing foreground errors into correct pixels, flipped-identity pixels, and missed-to-background pixels. We also propose an entropy-based, ground truth label-free `flip-risk' score, which is computed from foreground identity uncertainty, and show that it can flag flip-prone cases at inference time. Code is available at https://github.com/acharaakshit/label-flips.

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11.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2605.29128

Apertus LLM Family Expansion via Distillation and Quantization

Authors:

Andrei Panferov↗Davit Melikidze↗Martin Jaggi↗Dan Alistarh↗

arXiv:2605.29128v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The wide adoption of LLMs has led to their use in great variety of applications and scenarios, such as chatbot assistants and data annotation, creating the need for the models to satisfy certain budget and hardware constraints. This has led to the trend of LLMs being released in batches consisting of similar models of various sizes for the family of models to adhere to as wide of a range of constraints as possible. In this paper, we validate distillation and quantization as a cost-effective way to expand model families to new sizes and hardware formats. Based on the open-recipe Apertus 8B LLM, we produce Apertus-v1.1 - a distilled family of models with up to 4B parameters trained on 1.7T permissive license tokens. We demonstrate cost-efficiency and strong accuracy performance of our approach for covering large ranges of hardware and systems requirements.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2602.00887

EffGen: Enabling Small Language Models as Capable Autonomous Agents

Authors:

Gaurav Srivastava↗Aafiya Hussain↗Chi Wang↗Yingyan Celine Lin↗Xuan Wang↗

Most existing language model agentic systems today are built and optimized for large language models (e.g., GPT, Claude, Gemini) via API calls; while powerful, this approach faces several limitations including high token costs and privacy concerns for sensitive applications. We introduce EffGen, an open-source agentic framework optimized for small language models (SLMs) that enables effective, efficient, and secure local deployment. EffGen makes four major contributions: (1) Enhanced tool-calling with prompt optimization that compresses input prompts by up to 70-80% (and 57% on average across our benchmarks) while preserving task semantics, (2) Intelligent task decomposition that breaks complex queries into parallel or sequential subtasks based on dependencies, (3) Complexity-based routing using five factors to make smart pre-execution decisions, and (4) Unified memory system combining short-term, long-term, and vector-based storage. Additionally, EffGen unifies multiple agent protocols (MCP, A2A, ACP) for cross-protocol communication. Results on 13 benchmarks show EffGen outperforms LangChain, AutoGen, and Smolagents with higher success rates, faster execution, and lower memory. Our results reveal that prompt optimization and complexity routing have complementary scaling behavior: optimization benefits SLMs more (11.2% gain at 1.5B vs 2.4% at 32B), while routing benefits large models more (3.6% at 1.5B vs 7.9% at 32B), providing consistent gains across all scales when combined. EffGen is released under the Apache 2.0 License, ensuring broad accessibility for research and commercial use, with the code available at https://github.com/ctrl-gaurav/effGen, the Python package at https://pypi.org/project/effgen/ (pip install effgen), and the project website and documentation at https://effgen.org/ and https://docs.effgen.org/.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23885

Mind the Heads: Topological Representation Alignment for Multimodal LLMs

Authors:

Davide Caffagni↗Alberto Compagnoni↗Federico Melis↗Sara Sarto↗Pier Luigi Dovesi↗Mark Granroth-Wilding↗Marcella Cornia↗Lorenzo Baraldi↗

Representation alignment has emerged as an effective approach to improve Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) by regularizing their internal representations toward those of an external vision encoder. However, existing methods typically align a fixed layer of the language backbone, overlooking the fine-grained structure of Transformer models. In this work, we propose Head-Wise Representation Alignment (HeRA), a method that enforces cross-modal alignment at the level of individual attention heads. Our approach is grounded in the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, focusing on preserving the topological structure of representations (i.e., their local neighborhood relationships) across modalities. Following the Mutual K-Nearest Neighbor (MKNN) alignment metric, we introduce a contrastive objective that acts as a differentiable proxy for matching local structures. HeRA applies this objective during multimodal training to specific attention heads in the LLM, selected by their alignment score according to the MKNN metric. Counterintuitively, we find that aligning the least aligned heads yields the largest gains. Extensive evaluations across multiple MLLMs and 18 benchmarks demonstrate that HeRA consistently improves performance on challenging vision-centric tasks and serves as an effective regularizer against visual hallucinations by naturally curbing the over-reliance on linguistic priors. Our code is publicly released.

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14.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11843

Quantum iterative approach to the Traveling Salesman Problem

Authors:

Arturo Rodr\'iguez-Almaz\'an↗Guillermo Rivas↗Ricardo S. Alonso↗Daniela Falc\'o↗Mir Amir Hosseini↗

arXiv:2606.11843v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a classical NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, where determining the shortest route among a set of cities becomes computationally prohibitive as the problem size increases. This work explores quantum computing as an alternative approach to address this complexity. Unlike existing methods that primarily rely on quantum annealing, we propose a quantum iterative framework integrating Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) and Grover's search algorithm. Route costs are encoded as quantum phases, enabling QPE to efficiently evaluate them, while Amplitude Amplification, implemented via the Grover-Long algorithm, iteratively refines the solution space toward the optimal route. A proof-of-concept case study on a small-scale TSP instance demonstrates the feasibility of this approach and its potential for scaling to larger optimization problems. Furthermore, under an expectation-based analysis, the algorithm exhibits an expected computational complexity of $O(\frac{m^2\log_2(m)\log_2(1/\epsilon)}{\sqrt{\epsilon}})$ which depends on the error tolerance parameter $\epsilon$. This estimation omits the initialization term, which we expect future refinements to render subdominant to Phase Estimation.

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15.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17899

Quantum Chip Paradigm Framework

Authors:

Cai↗Ling Qiao↗Bin Yang↗Fumin Luo↗WeiGui Guo↗GuoRong Zhang↗XueFei Liu↗Fan Xu↗Qinglang Guo↗Bin Wu↗

arXiv:2606.17899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum Electronic Design Automation (Q-EDA) is emerging as quantum chips move from laboratory prototypes to scalable engineering systems. This paper argues that superconducting quantum chip design is approaching a "SPICE moment" similar to early classical EDA, where growing qubit scale, control complexity, frequency planning, packaging, process variation, and cryogenic measurement feedback require a shift from experience-based design to model-driven engineering. We propose a Quantum Chip Paradigm Framework that treats Q-EDA not only as software, but as part of the quantum chip development paradigm. Unlike classical HDL-first design, quantum chip design must begin with physical structures such as Josephson junctions, resonators, couplers, readout elements, control lines, and packaging environments. The framework emphasizes PCell-based modeling, SPICE-Q simulation, Quantum PDKs, and design-technology-measurement co-optimization. We further outline a hierarchical Q-EDA system spanning physical structures, qubit PCells, logical qubits, quantum arithmetic, functional quantum IP, and Quantum SoC systems. The key goal is to turn physical models, layout rules, simulation results, fabrication data, and measurement feedback into reusable and auditable engineering objects for large-scale quantum processors and fault-tolerant quantum computing.

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16.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2510.00831

Controlled Comparison of Machine Learning Models for Fault Classification and Localization in Power System Protection

Authors:

Julian Oelhaf↗Georg Kordowich↗Changhun Kim↗Paula Andrea P\'erez-Toro↗Christian Bergler↗Andreas Maier↗Johann J\"ager↗Siming Bayer↗

arXiv:2510.00831v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The increasing complexity of modern power systems, driven by the integration of inverter-based and distributed energy resources, challenges the reliability of conventional protection schemes and motivates the use of machine learning for protection tasks. However, published results are often difficult to compare because datasets, sensing assumptions, and decision horizons vary across studies. This paper presents a controlled comparison of machine learning models for fault classification (FC) and fault localization (FL) under identical sensing, timing, and validation conditions on a common electromagnetic transient dataset, using decision windows of 10-50 ms to reflect protection-relevant time scales. For FC, the best-performing nonlinear models achieve F1 scores above 0.98 already at 10 ms, while lower-capacity models degrade at shorter horizons but improve with longer windows, indicating that relevant fault-type information is already present in the earliest transient. For FL, the top-performing models reach a stable localization error of about 10 % of normalized line length across all evaluated horizons, while weaker models form a clearly separated second performance tier. Line-resolved analysis shows that localization accuracy varies across grid segments, indicating topology-dependent difficulty rather than insufficient temporal context alone. These findings provide a controlled reference for comparing machine learning models across two protection tasks with fundamentally different information requirements.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19544

Reliability without Validity: A Systematic, Large-Scale Evaluation of LLM-as-a-Judge Models Across Agreement, Consistency, and Bias

Authors:

Justin D. Norman↗Michael U. Rivera↗D. Alex Hughes↗

LLM-as-a-Judge has become the dominant evaluation paradigm for language models, but judge validation in practice relies on exact-match agreement, a metric that does not correct for chance and systematically overstates discriminative ability. We present the largest systematic evaluation of LLM-as-a-Judge to date: 21 judges from nine providers across MT-Bench, JudgeBench, and RewardBench, evaluated under three protocols (agreement, consistency, bias audit) over 118 runs and approximately 541,000 individual judgments. Four findings emerge, consistent across the full cohort, including the April 2026 frontier: kappa deflation between exact match and Cohen's kappa is universal (33–41 pp on MT-Bench), judge rankings shift by up to 14 positions across benchmarks, high test–retest reliability (>0.95) coexists with severe position bias (>0.10) in two production-deployed judges (instantiating a consistency–bias paradox), and verbosity bias is small (

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18.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14 DOI: HASH:92aacd3ee3b53628f781ce995bb67381

Virtual phenotypic screening discovers novel scaffolds inhibiting the PI3K/mTOR pathway

Authors:

Wu↗A. P↗Yao↗Hoeckendorf↗Gaskins↗Kosaisawe↗Lu↗Hanslovsky↗Mayba↗Skelton↗Scalia↗Moffat↗…

Phenotypic drug discovery has yielded many first-in-class small-molecule drugs by discovering modulators of disease phenotypes in physiologically relevant cellular systems. However, high-content phenotypic assays lack the ultra-high-throughput scalability of target-based screens. Recent advances in virtual screening present an opportunity to address this bottleneck, but have been limited to simple phenotypes like viability, restricted to small repurposing libraries, or lack in-depth biological validation. Here, we present PhenoCompass, a multimodal co-embedding model that aligns compound structures and high-content phenotypic imaging to enable virtual phenotypic screening over billion-compound libraries. Following training on the Joint Undertaking in Morphology dataset with more than 100,000 Cell Painting compound profiles, retrospective validation with historical biochemical high-throughput screening data demonstrates that PhenoCompass ranks compounds according to their biochemical target engagement. Leveraging PhenoCompass, we performed a prospective screen of 3.8 billion Enamine REAL compounds for inhibitors of PI3K/mTOR pathway, a critical signaling cascade whose aberrant activation is a common tumor driver. This search identified 11 novel compounds with pathway-consistent Cell Painting readout and diverse scaffolds, a 54-fold enrichment over the training set. Orthogonal validation experiments using a FOXO3A reporter assay and direct kinase inhibition confirmed seven structurally novel inhibitors with distinct mechanisms of action. These results highlight the convergence of diverse molecular target profiles onto a shared morphological pathway signature and establish PhenoCompass as a robust framework for high-content phenotypic virtual screening.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13861

Temporal Backtracking Search for Test-time Generative Video Reasoning

Authors:

Sejoon Jun↗Zheng Ding↗Huangyuan Su↗Weirui Ye↗Yilun Du↗

While test-time scaling has revolutionized reasoning in large language models, generative video reasoning remains bottlenecked by a single-shot paradigm. We demonstrate that searching over denoising steps cannot rescue logically flawed rollouts because spatial trajectories commit early in the diffusion process. Root-level Best-of-N (BoN) sampling is similarly inefficient: reasoning errors cluster early in the temporal axis, and resampling blindly discards verified upstream progress. To unlock effective test-time scaling for video models, we introduce Temporal Backtracking Search (TBS), which shifts the search space to the temporal axis. TBS transforms video generation into an iterative generate-verify-restart loop via three core mechanisms: (1) variable-K conditioning to resume generation from arbitrary clean prefixes; (2) temporal process verification to localize failures and extract valid restart anchors; and (3) prefix-based search to reallocate compute toward extending correct trajectories rather than root resampling. Across algorithmic, navigation, and robotics domains, TBS Pareto-dominates matched-budget BoN. In a strict out-of-distribution setting where one-shot generation collapses (0.7% for BoN), TBS achieves 22.7%, with every solved episode stemming from a restarted branch. Ultimately, TBS reveals that the local reasoning competence of video models far exceeds what single-shot rollouts indicate, providing a scalable test-time framework to unlock it.

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20.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2602.18575

Power Partitions and Hayman Functions

Authors:

Jos\'e L. Fern\'andez↗V\'ictor J. Maci\'a↗

arXiv:2602.18575v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove, within the probabilistic framework of Khinchin families, that the generating function $P_k$ of partitions into $k$-th powers is strongly Gaussian in the sense of Báez-Duarte, and even further that it is a Hayman function. Thus the Hardy–Ramanujan asymptotic formula for the number $p_k(n)$ of partitions of $n$ into $k$-th powers which reads \[ p_k(n) \sim \frac{\alpha_k}{n^{(3k+1)/(2k+2)}} \exp\!\Big(\beta_k\, n^{1/(k+1)}\Big), \qquad n\to\infty, \] where $\alpha_k$ and~$\beta_k$ are explicit constants depending only on $k$, follows directly from Hayman's asymptotic formula for strongly Gaussian power series. The proof of strong Gaussianity of $P_k$ combines a Gaussianity criterion for Khinchin families with certain bounds of Tenenbaum, Wu and Li on the generating function; the asymptotic formula is recovered by computing asymptotic approximations of the mean and variance of the associated family. Analogous results are presented for the generating function $Q_k$ of partitions into distinct $k$-th powers.

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21.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18584

Speech-Driven End-to-End Language Discrimination towards Chinese Dialects

Authors:

Fan Xu↗Jian Luo↗MingWen Wang↗GuoDong Zhou↗

Language discrimination among similar languages, varieties, and dialects is a challenging natural language processing task. The traditional text-driven focus leads to poor results. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of speech-driven features towards language discrimination among Chinese dialects. First, we systematically explore the appropriateness of speech-driven MFCC features towards CNN-based language discrimination. Then, we design an end-to-end speech recognition model based on HMM-DNN to predict Chinese dialect words. We adopt attention to extract the discriminative words related to different Chinese dialects. Finally, through a CNN, we combine the word-level embedding and the MFCC-based features. Evaluation of two benchmark Chinese dialect corpora shows the appropriateness and effectiveness of the proposed speech-driven approach to fine-grained Chinese dialect discrimination compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.09073

A Unifying Lens on Reward Uncertainty in RLHF

Authors:

Ely Hahami↗Yoel Zimmermann↗Ray Zhou↗Jack Benarroch Jedlicki↗

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is bottlenecked by reward hacking, where the policy exploits errors in a proxy reward model (RM) and produces high RM scores without genuine quality gains. A natural mitigation is pessimism: lowering rewards in regions where the RM is uncertain. However, standard scalar RMs provide no principled notion of uncertainty. We argue that the right object is a distributional reward model $p(r\mid x,y)$. Under either a Bayesian inference or a KL-distributionally robust optimization (KL-DRO) lens, the KL-regularized RLHF objective admits a closed-form effective reward $\tilde r(x,y) = \pm\beta\log\mathbb{E}_p[e^{\pm r/\beta}]$. The pessimistic branch unifies the prior heuristics for RM ensemble aggregation: mean aggregation, worst-case optimization (WCO), and uncertainty-weighted optimization (UWO) all emerge as limits or truncations of this single expression. This also clarifies the implicit assumptions of each existing rule.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2303.09209

Learning optimal policies from event logs through reinforcement learning: a comparison of deep and MDP-based approaches

Authors:

Stefano Branchi↗Andrei Buliga↗Chiara Di Francescomarino↗Chiara Ghidini↗Riccardo Graziosi↗Francesca Meneghello↗Massimiliano Ronzani↗

arXiv:2303.09209v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prescriptive Process Monitoring is an emerging area within Process Mining that focuses on recommending actions to optimize business outcomes. Most existing works prescribe pre-defined interventions, i.e., sets of actions applied to ongoing process executions to achieve a specific objective or Key Performance Indicator (KPI). In contrast, only a few approaches have explored learning and evaluating optimal behavioral policies, i.e., general strategies that determine the best sequence of actions to maximize a desired KPI. In this paper, we address the problem of learning optimal behavioral policies by proposing an AI-based approach that learns an optimal policy directly from historical process executions using Reinforcement Learning (RL) to recommend the best actions for optimizing a KPI. To this end, we employ two RL techniques. The first is a classical model-based approach that extends previous work by the authors through the construction of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) capturing process behavior. The second is a model-free technique based on offline Deep RL. Unlike state-of-the-art work, we aim to minimize the use of domain knowledge and learn optimal policies directly from historical event data. This allows us to learn when to apply interventions and discover effective ones directly from data. Moreover, we target complex scenarios involving external actors, where the process owner controls only part of the activities. We adopt a data-driven Business Process Simulation (BPS) environment to evaluate the learned policies. Results show that both methods improve the targeted KPI with similar effectiveness, while the model-based approach outperforms offline Deep RL in computational efficiency.

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24.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2402.08060

Information gain and measurement disturbance for quantum agents

Authors:

Arthur O. T. Pang↗Noah Lupu-Gladstein↗Y. Batuhan Yilmaz↗C. Pria Dobney↗Rui Jie Tang↗Aharon Brodutch↗Aephraim M. Steinberg↗

arXiv:2402.08060v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The traditional formalism of quantum measurement (hereafter ``TQM'') describes processes where some properties of quantum states are extracted and stored as classical information. While TQM is a natural and appropriate description of how humans interact with quantum systems, it is silent on the question of how a more general, quantum, agent would do so. How do we describe the observation of a system by an observer with the ability to store not only classical information but quantum states in its memory? In this paper, we extend the idea of measurement to a more general class of sensors for quantum agents which interact with a system in such a way that the agent's memory stores information (classical or quantum) about the system under study. For appropriate sensory interactions, the quantum agent may ``learn'' more about the system than would be possible under any set of classical measurements – but as we show, this comes at the cost of additional measurement disturbance. We experimentally demonstrate such a system and characterize the tradeoffs by considering the channel capacity required to erase the effect of a measurement.

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25.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2508.09134

Instrument-based quantum resources: quantification, hierarchies and towards constructing resource theories

Authors:

Jatin Ghai↗Arindam Mitra↗

arXiv:2508.09134v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum resources are certain features of the quantum world that provide advantages in certain information-theoretic, thermodynamic, or other useful operational tasks that are outside the realm of what classical theories can achieve. Quantum resource theories provide us with an elegant framework for studying these resources quantitatively and rigorously. While numerous state-based quantum resource theories have already been investigated, and to some extent, measurement-based resource theories have also been explored, instrument-based resource theories remain largely unexplored, with only a few notable exceptions. As quantum instruments are devices that provide both the classical outcomes of induced measurements and the post-measurement quantum states, they are quite important, especially for scenarios where multiple parties sequentially act on a quantum system. In this work, we study several instrument-based resource theories, namely (1) the resource theory of information preservability, (2) the resource theory of (strong) entanglement preservability, (3) the resource theory of (strong) incompatibility preservability, (4) the resource theory of traditional incompatibility, and (5) the resource theory of parallel incompatibility. Furthermore, we outline the hierarchies of these instrument-based resources and provide measures to quantify them. We then also established a relationship between our resource measure and the advantage in an information-theoretic task. In short, we provide a detailed framework for a wide variety of instrument-based quantum resource theories.

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