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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-11

Connected or chained by social media? Child and adolescent mental health in a digital era

Authors:
Silja Kosola↗

by Silja Kosola Social media has evolved from connection to compulsion, disproportionately harming children and adolescents. Addictive designs together with developmental vulnerability fuel mental health risks and highlight the urgent need for stricter age limits and stronger protections. In this Perspective, Silja Kosola outlines how social media disproportionately harms child and adolescent mental health, and argues that while recent policy changes aimed at protecting youth from social media are welcome, stricter age limits and greater accountability of social media companies are needed.

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

Stringalign: Moving beyond summary statistics with a transparent Unicode-aware tool for evaluating automatic transcription models

Authors:
Yngve Mardal Moe↗Marie Roald↗

Comparing text strings is crucial when evaluating and understanding the performance of various text processing tasks such as document recognition and audio transcription. With an increasingly complex landscape of AI-based handwritten text recognition (HTR), optical character recognition (OCR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, there is a need for tools that facilitate evaluation in a flexible and reproducible way. This paper presents Stringalign, a Python library designed to simplify the evaluation process for automatic transcription projects and facilitate transparent evaluation. Stringalign's tools to examine and visualise both the rate of errors and the types of errors a model makes, give insights into possible improvements and help inform model selection for a particular task. Widely used string comparison metrics, such as the character and word error rates (CER and WER), although useful, can be ambiguous due to varying definitions of what constitutes a character and a word. Stringalign addresses this challenge by ensuring all preprocessing (i.e. normalisation and tokenisation) is transparent and easily replicable, and by providing tools to move beyond summary statistics and analyse common model errors. Moreover, Stringalign adheres to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles for research software while staying lightweight and easy to adapt into researchers existing workflows. In this paper, we discuss challenges with character and word level string comparisons and show through examples that where existing tools can yield opaque and sometimes confusing results, Stringalign provides an easy-to-use and unambiguous alternative.

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03.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Adhesion and polarity-driven morphogenesis: Mechanisms and constraints in tissue formation

Authors:
Yoshiyuki T. Nakamura↗

by Yoshiyuki T. Nakamura, Chikara Furusawa, Kunihiko Kaneko Embryonic development in multicellular organisms exhibits diverse morphogenetic patterns, which can generally be categorized into fundamental types such as monolayer and multilayer spheres, as well as cell masses. Furthermore, we identify two distinct processes for the formation of spherical structures. These basic patterns are thought to be governed by the microscopic properties of intercellular adhesion. However, the specific mechanisms linking the microscopic factors to the emergence of distinct macroscopic morphogenetic patterns remain poorly understood. In this study, we explore how different morphogenetic patterns arise by employing a computational model that incorporates intercellular adhesion and polarity. Our results demonstrate that all fundamental morphogenetic patterns can be generated through the interplay of two key parameters: the polarity strength of the cell and the regulation of polarity via mechanical signals. Furthermore, analytical considerations reveal key mechanisms underlying the formation of these patterns. These findings highlight the critical role of physical constraints in morphogenesis and suggest potential applications to the design of artificial tissues and organoids.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SPRI: SVD-Partitioned Residual Initialization for Data-Constrained MoE Upcycling

Authors:
Weiqiao Shan↗Ruixiang Mao↗Yuang Li↗Yuhao Zhang↗Yingfeng Luo↗Tong Zheng↗Chen Xu↗Yucheng Qiao↗Chunxiang Jin↗Yi Yuan↗Jingdong Chen↗Tong Xiao↗…

arXiv:2606.16456v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enable efficient scaling, but training them from scratch remains prohibitively expensive. MoE upcycling mitigates this cost by converting pretrained dense models into sparse MoE models. However, existing upcycling methods typically rely on large-scale continued training and often perform poorly under data-constrained supervised adaptation, due to either homogeneous experts or overly disruptive perturbations to pretrained parameters. In this setting, effective upcycling must leverage pretrained weight structure while introducing sufficient diversity among routed experts. To this end, we propose SVD-Partitioned Residual Initialization (SPRI), which distributes SVD-partitioned residuals derived from pretrained feed-forward network (FFN) weights across routed experts, introducing controlled expert diversity grounded in pretrained spectral structure. We further introduce a two-stage training strategy to improve adaptation stability. We evaluate SPRI on multilingual speech-to-text translation, where limited supervised data challenges MoE upcycling and multiple target languages provide natural routing heterogeneity. On CoVoST2 across 15 En-to-XX directions, SPRI improves average BLEU and COMET over fully fine-tuned dense models by 2.58 and 3.32 points, respectively, and outperforms the prior best MoE upcycling baseline by 3.39 BLEU and 4.34 COMET points.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

The Long Delay to Arithmetic Generalization: When Learned Representations Outrun Behavior

Authors:
Laura Gomezjurado Gonzalez↗

arXiv:2604.13082v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Grokking in transformers trained on algorithmic tasks is characterized by a long delay between training-set fit and abrupt generalization, but the source of that delay remains poorly understood. In encoder-decoder arithmetic models, we argue that this delay reflects limited access to already learned structure rather than failure to acquire that structure in the first place. We study one-step Collatz prediction and find that the encoder organizes parity and residue structure within the first few thousand training steps, while output accuracy remains near chance for tens of thousands more. Causal interventions support the decoder bottleneck hypothesis. Transplanting a trained encoder into a fresh model accelerates grokking by 2.75 times, while transplanting a trained decoder actively hurts. Freezing a converged encoder and retraining only the decoder eliminates the plateau entirely and yields 97.6% accuracy, compared to 86.1% for joint training. What makes the decoder's job harder or easier depends on numeral representation. Across 15 bases, those whose factorization aligns with the Collatz map's arithmetic (e.g., base 24) reach 99.8% accuracy, while binary fails completely because its representations collapse and never recover. The choice of base acts as an inductive bias that controls how much local digit structure the decoder can exploit, producing large differences in learnability from the same underlying task.

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06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Local correlations in long-range dual-unitary kicked Hamiltonian chains

Authors:
Vladimir Al. Osipov↗Marc Cedric Spyra↗Jana Carolina Schumann↗Thomas Guhr↗Boris Gutkin↗

arXiv:2606.13857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many-body Floquet models with exact space–time symmetry, such as the kicked Ising spin chain (KIC), provide natural examples of systems with dual-unitary dynamics. The requirement of exact space–time symmetry is, however, highly restrictive, as it permits only nearest-neighbor interactions. Based on a pair of Hadamard matrices, we construct a wide family of dual-unitary kicked spin chains with long-range interactions. We show that local two-point correlations in such models propagate along the light-cone edges \( |n| = r|t| \), where \(r\) is the interaction range, and can be derived analytically for operators with local support. This approach is illustrated using the example of a kicked Ising spin chain with next-to-next-neighbor interactions.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Freeing the Law with LOCUS: A Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States

Authors:
Denis Peskoff↗Joe Barrow↗Christopher Vu↗Diag Davenport↗

Progress in legal AI increasingly depends on access to authoritative legal text at scale. Yet one of the most consequential layers of American law remains largely absent from existing machine-readable corpora: local ordinances. Local codes govern zoning, housing, business licensing, public health, noise, animal control, and many other domains of everyday regulation, but they are fragmented across vendor platforms designed for human browsing rather than bulk research access. We introduce LOCUS - the Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States - a comprehensive corpus and county-harmonized access layer for U.S. municipal and county ordinance codes. The raw corpus, available for release to researchers, represents nearly all publicly available municipal and county ordinance codes. The resulting raw corpus contains codes from 9,239 cities and counties. A smaller county-harmonized LOCUS access layer provides coverage for the largest 2,309 of 3,144 U.S. counties, accounting for a majority of the population. We use OCR to handle the myriad of document formats that have kept the law from being a public resource. We release the corpus with coverage metadata to support reproducibility, downstream legal AI research, and the incremental expansion of machine-readable access to local law. We train a collection of ModernBERT-based classifiers and scorers to facilitate analyzing U.S. local law among several dimensions, such as opacity and paternalism, that have not previously been studied at this scale. LOCUS-v1 and its derivative models are available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/LocalLaws/LOCUS-v1

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08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Correct Yourself, Keep My Trust: How Self-Correction and Social Connection Shape Credibility in Social Chatbots

Authors:
Biswadeep Sen↗Yi-Chieh Lee↗

arXiv:2606.19286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When social chatbots make mistakes, and they do, how they recover determines whether users trust them again. Social chatbots are increasingly integrated into everyday life, yet they remain prone to generating convincing but inaccurate information. The social connection they build with users makes such errors particularly consequential. We conducted a between-subjects experiment (N=120) comparing three error correction strategies: a webpage retraction, self-correction by the same social chatbot, and correction by an expert chatbot. Our results reveal two key findings. First, all three strategies corrected the error equally well, but only self-correction did so without damaging the chatbot's credibility: participants rated self-correcting chatbots significantly higher in both trustworthiness and perceived expertise than chatbots whose errors were corrected by external sources. Second, the strength of the user's social connection with the chatbot, measured through social attraction and self-disclosure, significantly predicted the magnitude of belief change, but only when the chatbot corrected itself. Outsourcing corrections to an external source severed this link entirely. These findings suggest that social chatbots should correct their own mistakes rather than outsource corrections, and that investing in social connection is a functional mechanism that amplifies correction effectiveness, not merely a design feature. We discuss implications for designing chatbots that maintain long-term credibility while effectively addressing their own errors.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Bounding Box Label Propagation for Re-Annotation of Document Layout Analysis Datasets

Authors:
Nick Jochum↗Tobias Alt-Veit↗Christian Sch\"on↗Alexander L\"uck↗Ren\'e Schuster↗Didier Stricker↗

Datasets in practical document processing scenarios typically grow over time, and their class annotations undergo continuous refinement. This creates significant re-annotation efforts, which are time-consuming and costly. A promising remedy is to re-annotate only a small subset of available documents manually and apply semi-supervised learning techniques that leverage both labelled and unlabelled data. Although there are numerous approaches to tackle this problem for classification, there exists no adaptation for the problem of re-classifying object detection instances, e.g. for document layout analysis. To this end, we propose Bounding Box Label Propagation (BBLP), a pseudo-labelling framework for object detection. An object encoder integrates visual, textual, and positional embeddings from object detection samples to come up with a joint embedding that can be used for Label Propagation on partially annotated datasets in a plug-and-play fashion. Evaluation results indicate that the proposed approach produces high-quality class annotations of bounding boxes. In the D4LA layout analysis dataset, it achieves a mAP of 54.0%, corresponding to 81.6% of fully supervised performance, while using only 10% labelled data. Our work demonstrates the potential of Label Propagation for object detection and lays the groundwork for reducing manual annotation efforts in real-world document processing applications.

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10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Long-term mortality and cause-specific death after non-cardiac chest pain: a multicentre cohort study of 160,245 patients in China

Authors:
You↗Hu↗Yin↗Sang↗Yu↗Hong↗Liu↗Su↗Jiang↗Tang↗Zhang↗Pan↗…

Abstract Background Non-cardiac chest pain (NCCP) is commonly regarded as a low-risk condition. However, long-term mortality, cause-specific death, and high-risk subgroup characteristics remain poorly defined. Methods In this multicentre registry-linked cohort study, we linked the Chest Pain Center Registry from 101 hospitals in Hunan, China, with the Mortality and Cause of Death Registry. Adults diagnosed with NCCP from Jan 1, 2017, to Dec 31, 2021, were included. We assessed 3-year all-cause, cardiovascular, and non-cardiovascular mortality using Cox, restricted cubic spline, and Fine-Gray models. Findings Among 160,245 patients, 4674 deaths occurred within 3 years (2.9%). Mortality increased sharply after 60.5 years. Age [≥] 60.5 years (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR] 7.49 [95% CI 6.89-8.14]), rural residence (time-varying aHR 1.46 [1.35-1.57] in year 1 and 1.66 [1.46-1.89] in years 1-3), and male sex (aHR 1.47 [1.38-1.57]) independently predicted death. Three-year mortality ranged from 0.3% in younger urban women to 8.4% in older rural men. Cardiovascular diseases accounted for 56.4% of deaths among older patients, whereas other non-cardiovascular causes (22.8%) and malignancy (20.8%) were the largest categories among younger decedents. Interpretation NCCP is not uniformly benign. Age, rural residence, and sex identify patients who could benefit from risk-stratified follow-up, with cardiovascular prevention prioritised for older rural men and broader non-cardiovascular assessment considered for younger patients.

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11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Novel loci and multi-omics risk models for rheumatoid arthritis through a million-participant genome-wide association meta-analysis

Authors:
Velazquez Silva↗G. L↗Dzigurski↗Vosa↗Taba↗Märtson↗Tootsi↗Ulst↗Müller↗Estonian Biobank Research Team↗Org↗Laisk↗…

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) remains incompletely understood, limiting targeted prevention. In this work, genome-wide association study meta-analyses were performed for RA and seropositive RA, comprising approximately one million participants of European ancestry. Eight and six novel genomic risk loci were defined for RA and seropositive RA, and candidate causal genes were identified, highlighting relevant biological pathways, including established immune pathways and estrogen metabolism. Novel disease-specific polygenic risk scores (PRSs) were constructed, enhancing predictive performance over clinical risk factors (incremental C-statistics of 2.7 and 5.1 for RA and seropositive RA, respectively). In parallel, integrating metabolomic data into high-dimensional models enhanced risk stratification over models based on clinical risk factors and genomics, particularly for seropositive RA, where the hazard ratio of the highest decile increased from 4.869 to 5.697. These findings expand the understanding of genetic factors underlying RA and support the value of including PRSs in risk assessment, while suggesting metabolomic integration may further enhance risk stratification, particularly for seropositive RA.

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12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Rethinking the Role of Efficient Attention in Hybrid Architectures

Authors:
Ziqing Qiao↗Yinuo Xu↗Chaojun Xiao↗Zhou Su↗Zihan Zhou↗Yingfa Chen↗Xiaoyue Xu↗Xu Han↗Zhiyuan Liu↗

Modern language models increasingly adopt hybrid architectures that combine full attention with efficient attention modules, such as sliding-window attention (SWA) and recurrent sequence mixers. However, how these efficient modules shape model capabilities remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic analysis across hybrid architectures from three perspectives: scaling behavior, mechanism analysis, and architecture design. First, from a scaling perspective, we find that efficient-attention design primarily affects how fast long-context capability emerges, while different hybrids eventually converge to comparable long-context performance under sufficient training. Second, mechanistically, we show that long-range retrieval is mainly carried by full attention, whereas efficient attention shapes its optimization trajectory. This explains a counter-intuitive phenomenon we call Large-Window Laziness: larger SWA windows can delay the formation of retrieval heads in full-attention layers. Third, guided by this mechanism, we show that applying NoPE to only the full-attention layers of a small-window SWA hybrid substantially improves long-context performance with negligible impact on short-context performance.

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Random Local Stabilizer Codes in Three Dimensions without String or Self-Similar Fractal Logical Operators

Authors:
Han Yan↗

arXiv:2606.19873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error-correcting codes (QECs) are essential components quantum computation and have deep connections to quantum phases of matter. A key obstruction to passive self-correcting QECs is the presence of string logical operators, which can generate logical errors through constant-energy-barrier processes. Haah's Codes (fracton codes) showed that three-dimensional stabilizer codes can forbid such string logical operators, but their translation-invariant structure supports self-similar fractal logical operators with a logarithmic energy barrier. We introduce the qutrit random cubic codes, a family of local qutrit Calderbank-Shor-Steane stabilizer Hamiltonians with similar cube-check structure as Haah's Code 1 but built from spatially varying stabilizers. We prove that these models retain the no-string property and numerically observe that they have properties distinct from translation-invariant fracton codes: the smallest ground-state degeneracy exponent is $k=2$ for odd $L$ and $k=4$ for even $L$; noncontractible plane-logical operators span the entire logical space; and charge-push diagnostics show that the self-similar fractal operators are absent. These results demonstrate that constrained randomness can fundamentally change the nature of stabilizer codes and improve their self-correction properties. They further point to broader families of quantum error-correcting codes and quantum phases beyond canonical topological and fracton orders.

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14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

‘Hidden hero’ peptides guard crops against sudden cold

Authors: Unknown Author

A protein signal remains silent under normal conditions but is activated under cold stress to protect developing pollen. This ‘on-demand’ resilience mechanism could enable the development of ‘climate smart’ crops that maintain high yields in good years and food security under climate stress. A peptide signal ensures that, in cold conditions, developing pollen receives nutrients at the right time.

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15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A Unified Approach to Beta Moments, Combinatorial Identities, and Random Walks

Authors:
Puja Pandey↗Palaniappan Vellaisamy↗

arXiv:2605.05420v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The study of random walks has increasingly been popular across diverse disciplines such as statistics, mathematics, quantum physics, where they are used to model paths consisting of successive random steps in a mathematical space. A fundamental quantity of interest is the probability that a simple symmetric random walk returns to the origin after 2n steps. In this paper, we develop a unified probabilistic approach that connects the return probabilities in arbitrary dimensions with moment representations. Using this framework, we provide probabilistic proofs of several combinatorial identities involving beta and gamma functions, and derive new combinatorial identities in general dimensions.

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

When and How Severely: Scenario-Specific Safety Envelopes for Driving VLAs

Authors:
Abhinaw Priyadershi↗Jelena Frtunikj↗

arXiv:2606.14238v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety certification of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) driving planners under ISO 21448 (SOTIF) rests on an Operational Design Domain (ODD) specification that answers two complementary questions: when does the planner start to fail, and how severely does it fail once it does? We evaluate Alpamayo R1, a 10B-parameter open-weight driving VLA, on 15,968 (clip, attack) pairs. We find a conservative-aggregate gap: an aggregate safe threshold of $\sigma \leq 50$ under a 15% average displacement error (ADE) budget masks well-sampled scenarios that tolerate the top of the tested grid ($\sigma = 70$). A Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) on the changed-explanation subset identifies six discrete severity bands (BIC-optimal $k{=}6$), so two perturbation conditions with the same mean error can differ materially in their share of high-severity (C4/C5) failures. Joining the two analyses on the same corpus surfaces a finding neither yields in isolation: the scenarios with the loosest noise thresholds are not those with the lowest high-severity rate: STOP_SIGNAL concentrates roughly $4\times$ the C4/C5 share of LANE_KEEPING despite tolerating a larger $\sigma$. A deployable SOTIF ODD specification for driving VLAs therefore requires a two-dimensional safety envelope, not a single aggregate value per hazard.

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17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Maximal rigidity of random measure and uniqueness pairs: stealthy processes, quasicrystals and periodicity

Authors:
Rapha\"el Lachi\`eze-Rey↗

arXiv:2512.10686v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This article investigates the phenomenon of maximal rigidity in spatial processes, where perfect interpolation of the process is possible from partial information, specifically, from its restriction to a strict subdomain, often resulting in a trivial tail $\sigma$algebra. A classical example known since the 1930's is that a time series is fully determined by its values on the negative integers if its spectrum has a gap, or at least a sufficiently deep zero. We extend such results to higher dimensions and continuous settings by establishing a connection with the concept of uniqueness pairs, rooted in the uncertainty principle of harmonic analysis. We present several other manifestations of this principle, unify and strengthen seemingly unrelated results across different models: quasicrystals and stealthy processes are shown to be maximally rigid on cones, and discrete integer-valued processes are necessarily periodic when they have a simply connected spectrum. Finally, we identify a surprising class of continuous fields with seemingly standard behavior, such as linear variance and finite dependency range, that undergo a phase transition: they are perfectly interpolable on B(0, $\rho$) for $\rho$ ___ 2 $\pi$ but exhibit no rigidity for $\rho$ > 2.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Can LLMs Accurately Score Medical Diagnoses and Clinical Reasoning?

Authors:
Amy Rouillard↗Sitwala Mundia↗Linda Camara↗Ziyaad Dangor↗Michael Cameron Gramanie↗Ismail Kalla↗Shabir A. Madhi↗Kajal Morar↗Marlvin T. Ncube↗Haroon Saloojee↗Bruce A. Bassett↗

arXiv:2604.14892v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating medical AI systems using expert clinician panels is costly and slow, motivating the use of large language models (LLMs) as alternative adjudicators. Here, we evaluate an LLM Jury, composed of three frontier AI models, for scoring 3334 diagnoses on 300 real-world low- and middle-income country (LMIC) hospital cases. Both LLM- and clinician-generated diagnoses are scored against expert panel diagnoses across four dimensions: diagnosis, differential diagnosis, clinical reasoning, and negative treatment risk. The LLM Jury scores are compared with expert and independent re-scoring panel scores to assess error metrics, inter-rater agreement, severe-risk errors, and the effect of post hoc calibration using isotonic regression. In our data, we find that: (i) the uncalibrated LLM Jury scores preserve ordinal agreement with the expert clinician panel scores, but are systematically lower; (ii) the probability of severe-risk errors is lower for the LLM Jury than the human expert re-score panels; (iii) the LLM Jury combined with LLM diagnoses can be used to identify diagnoses at high risk of error, enabling targeted expert review and improved panel efficiency; (iv) the calibrated LLM Jury scores and rankings of diagnosing agents show excellent agreement with those of the primary expert panels; (v) LLM Jury models show no self-preference bias, they did not score diagnoses generated by their own underlying model or models from the same vendor more (or less) favourably than those generated by other models. Together, these results provide evidence that a calibrated LLM Jury is a trustworthy and reliable proxy for expert clinician evaluation in medical AI benchmarking. Confirming these findings in other clinical settings is an important direction for future work.

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

A Causal Model of Theory of Mind in Conflict for Artificial Intelligence

Authors:
Nikolos Gurney↗

arXiv:2606.16944v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to ascribe mental states to others and use those ascriptions for prediction and inference, is widely assumed to be essential for effective human-machine integration. Existing AI-ToM models address how to mentalize, but leave the question of when largely unaddressed. The central question is: under what situational and agent-level conditions is ToM engagement causally warranted in conflict? This paper presents a structural causal model formalized as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), treating ToM as a mechanism activated by situational and agent-level conditions rather than as an always-on capacity. The model specifies four exogenous variables capturing situational and agent-level conditions, five endogenous mediators, and a mechanistic ToM node producing engagement states through three distinct causal pathways: a tractability pathway, a reasoning-depth pathway, and an enabling-cause pathway. The primary outcome is epistemic accuracy, which decouples social reasoning from behavioral policy and generalizes across social phenomena beyond conflict. The framework gives AI systems a principled, resource-rational decision procedure for mentalizing, with implications for efficiency, trust, and the development of robust artificial social intelligence. Simulation validation, empirical human-machine teaming studies, and ethical considerations arising from conflict-optimized mentalizing are discussed.

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20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Gendered pathways to adolescent mental health: An empirical assessment of a new conceptual framework

Authors:
Alaze↗Hagen↗Schamberger↗Razum↗Miani↗

Introduction Gender norms and roles are important determinants of physical and mental health in the key period of adolescence. Yet, the gendered pathways to mental health in adolescents are not fully understood. Using a conceptual framework for global adolescent mental health that we developed based on a Delphi process, we empirically investigated the associations between six gender-related constructs and adolescent mental health. Methods We used cross-sectional Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) data from Ethiopia (2020) to explore the associations between sex, gender norms, psychological competencies, gender attitudes, gender roles, with the latter two also serving as mediators, and psychological distress (GHQ-12), using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). Results The SEM model contained measurements from 1,584 adolescents, including 843 girls and 741 boys, with a median age of 13 years. Out of 14 pathways tested, we found statistically significant associations between psychological competencies and psychological distress; sex and gender attitudes; and between gender norms and psychological competencies, gender attitudes, and gender roles. Hence, the gender-related constructs were mostly associated with each other, rather than with psychological distress. Conclusion The gender-related constructs are strongly interrelated, thereby attenuating their individual effects on psychological distress. The interplay of gender-related constructs should be considered when developing interventions to promote mental health in adolescents.

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

EquiDexFlow: Contact-Grounded SE(3)-Equivariant Dexterous Grasp Generative Flows

Authors:
Clinton Enwerem↗John S. Baras↗Calin Belta↗

Most learned dexterous grasp generators relegate contact forces to a downstream verification step, so a kinematically-plausible pose can still violate the conditions for a stable physical grasp. We address this with EquiDexFlow, an SE(3)-equivariant flow-matching model that jointly predicts wrist pose, joint angles, fingertip contacts, surface normals, and contact forces from an object point cloud. Our architecture projects contacts onto the object surface and forces into the Coulomb friction cone by construction, so placement and friction compliance hold without loss penalties. We prove end-to-end SE(3) equivariance and verify it empirically over 200 rotations, with wrist residuals below $0.04^\circ$ and exactly zero joint deviation. Trained on 8,100 force-closure grasps across 81 objects for the 16-DoF Allegro Hand, our model achieves zero friction violations, the best composite score, and the lowest wrench residual among all ablation variants. We retarget decoded fingertip contacts to a 16-DoF LEAP Hand via per-finger inverse kinematics, and our hardware-feasible refinement places every joint at least 5% inside its actuator envelope while preserving wrench balance. On the physical robot, retargeted EquiDexFlow-decoded grasps complete open-loop pick-and-hold trials on all six test objects, with every asymmetric object succeeding at both the canonical pose and a $120^\circ$ co-rotation. Videos, code, and checkpoints are available at https://equidexflow.github.io.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Wisdom of Committee: Diverse Distillation from Large Foundation Models and Domain Experts

Authors:
Zichang Liu↗Qingyun Liu↗Yuening Li↗Liang Liu↗Anshumali Shrivastava↗Shuchao Bi↗Lichan Hong↗Ed H. Chi↗Zhe Zhao↗

arXiv:2402.14035v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation from foundation models to compact domain models is challenging due to substantial gaps in capacity, architecture, and modality. For example, in our experiments, distilling from a 76M-parameter language model to a 2M-parameter recommender closes less than 40% of the performance gap between the undistilled student and the teacher. We show that introducing domain-specific experts – which share the student's architectural characteristics – alongside the foundation model as a diverse teacher committee significantly improves transfer. However, standard multi-teacher methods fail to exploit this diversity: naively combining heterogeneous teachers can degrade performance below single-teacher distillation. To address this, we propose DiverseDistill, an interactive distillation framework that employs a learnable Question-Answer mechanism to generate teacher-conditioned queries and align heterogeneous teacher outputs into the student's representation space. Unlike methods requiring gradient-based co-optimization or architectural modification of teachers, DiverseDistill operates with frozen teachers using only forward-pass inference through their intermediate layers: no parameter updates, no co-training, and no architectural surgery. A dynamic teacher importance mechanism further reduces training cost by filtering low-relevance teachers per sample (e.g., ~30% fewer forward passes with no quality loss for recommendation tasks), while the entire Distillation Module is discarded after training, adding zero inference overhead. Evaluations on recommendation (38x compression) and vision (3.6x compression) tasks demonstrate that DiverseDistill recovers 73-114% of the teacher-student performance gap, consistently outperforming all single- and multi-teacher baselines.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Everywhere Valid Bounds on False Discovery Proportions in Conformal Inference

Authors:
Ziang Song↗Ying Jin↗Emmanuel J. Cand\`es↗

arXiv:2605.20726v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern applications of conformal inference to multiple testing problems, such as outlier detection and candidate selection, often involve selecting test samples whose conformal p-values fall below a threshold. The quality of such methods is often measured by the false discovery proportion (FDP), defined as the fraction of incorrect selections. Existing approaches typically control the expected value of the FDP, using methods such as the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure. This approach fails to provide high-probability bounds on the realized false discovery proportion and invalidates statistical guarantees if the rejection threshold is selected after inspecting the data. This paper establishes finite-sample, distribution-free upper bounds on the FDP that hold simultaneously over all possible rejection thresholds, enabling arbitrary post hoc selection of the threshold. Simultaneous validity is achieved by constructing a high-probability envelope for the empirical distribution function of null conformal p-values by sampling from their joint distribution. Furthermore, our framework allows practitioners to modulate the envelope's shape, thereby producing tight bounds in rejection regions of primary interest. We use this flexible approach to derive simultaneous FDP upper bounds for both outlier detection and conformal selection. We demonstrate through synthetic and real-data experiments that the resulting bounds are both valid and substantially less conservative than those derived from existing approaches.

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

DiffAttn: Diffusion-Based Drivers' Visual Attention Prediction with LLM-Enhanced Semantic Reasoning

Authors:
Weimin Liu↗Qingkun Li↗Jiyuan Qiu↗Wenjun Wang↗Joshua H. Meng↗

Drivers' visual attention provides critical cues for anticipating latent hazards and directly shapes decision-making and control maneuvers, where its absence can compromise traffic safety. To emulate drivers' perception patterns and advance visual attention prediction for intelligent vehicles, we propose DiffAttn, a diffusion-based framework that formulates this task as a conditional diffusion-denoising process, enabling more accurate modeling of drivers' attention. To capture both local and global scene features, we adopt Swin Transformer as encoder and design a decoder that combines a Feature Fusion Pyramid for cross-layer interaction with dense, multi-scale conditional diffusion to jointly enhance denoising learning and model fine-grained local and global scene contexts. Additionally, a large language model (LLM) layer is incorporated to enhance top-down semantic reasoning and improve sensitivity to safety-critical cues. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that DiffAttn achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance, surpassing most video-based, top-down-feature-driven, and LLM-enhanced baselines. Our framework further supports interpretable driver-centric scene understanding and has the potential to improve in-cabin human-machine interaction, risk perception, and drivers' state measurement in intelligent vehicles.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

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

Authors:
Kaviru Hapuarachchi↗

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.

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