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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-18

Daily briefing: The brain builds a sentence neuron by neuron

Authors:
Jacob Smith↗

Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals. Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals.

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

Prototyping an AI-powered Tool for Energy Efficiency in New Zealand Homes

Authors:
Abdollah Baghaei Daemei↗

arXiv:2509.05364v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Residential buildings contribute significantly to energy use, health outcomes, and carbon emissions. In New Zealand, housing quality has historically been poor, with inadequate insulation and inefficient heating contributing to widespread energy hardship. Recent reforms, including the Warmer Kiwi Homes program, Healthy Homes Standards, and H1 Building Code upgrades, have delivered health and comfort improvements, yet challenges persist. Many retrofits remain partial, data on household performance are limited, and decision-making support for homeowners is fragmented. This study presents the design and evaluation of an AI-powered decision-support tool for residential energy efficiency in New Zealand. The prototype, developed using Python and Streamlit, integrates data ingestion, anomaly detection, baseline modeling, and scenario simulation (e.g., LED retrofits, insulation upgrades) into a modular dashboard. Fifteen domain experts, including building scientists, consultants, and policy practitioners, tested the tool through semi-structured interviews. Results show strong usability (M = 4.3), high value of scenario outputs (M = 4.5), and positive perceptions of its potential to complement subsidy programs and regulatory frameworks. The tool demonstrates how AI can translate national policies into personalized, household-level guidance, bridging the gap between funding, standards, and practical decision-making. Its significance lies in offering a replicable framework for reducing energy hardship, improving health outcomes, and supporting climate goals. Future development should focus on carbon metrics, tariff modeling, integration with national datasets, and longitudinal trials to assess real-world adoption.

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

S2D2: Fast Decoding for Diffusion LLMs via Training-Free Self-Speculation

Authors:
Ligong Han↗Hao Wang↗Han Gao↗Kai Xu↗Akash Srivastava↗

Block-diffusion language models offer a promising path toward faster-than-autoregressive generation by combining block-wise autoregressive decoding with within-block parallel denoising. However, in the few-step regime needed for practical acceleration, standard confidence-thresholded decoding is often brittle: aggressive thresholds hurt quality, while conservative thresholds require unnecessary denoising steps. Existing approaches that address this issue either require additional training or incur extra test-time compute. We present S2D2, a training-free self-speculative decoding framework for block-diffusion language models. Our key observation is that a block-diffusion model becomes autoregressive when the block size is reduced to one, allowing the same pretrained model to act as both drafter and verifier. S2D2 inserts a speculative verification step into standard block-diffusion decoding and uses lightweight routing policies to decide when verification is worth its cost. This yields a hybrid decoding trajectory in which diffusion proposes tokens in parallel, while the autoregressive mode acts as a local sequence-level critic. Across three mainstream block-diffusion families, S2D2 consistently improves the accuracy-speed tradeoff over strong confidence-thresholding baselines. On SDAR, we observe up to $4.7\times$ speedup over autoregressive decoding, and up to $1.57\times$ over a tuned dynamic decoding baseline while improving accuracy by up to $4.5$ points. On LLaDA2.1-Mini, S2D2 remains complementary to built-in self-correction, including a conservative setting where it is $4.4\times$ faster than the static baseline with slightly higher accuracy.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Be My Tutor: On-Policy Co-Distillation for Mutual LLM Improvement via Peer Feedback

Authors:
Woohyeon Byeon↗Jiwon Jeon↗Jeonghye Kim↗Youngchul Sung↗

We study multi-domain LLM training in which two models, each stronger in a different domain, co-evolve by tutoring each other through on-policy feedback. Unlike one-way distillation or single-model fine-tuning, our goal is mutual Pareto improvement: each model improves across domains without losing its original strength. To this end, we propose On-Policy Co-Distillation (OPCoD), where each student's self-distillation is conditioned on its own correct rollout and feedback from its peer. To make feedback exchange effective, OPCoD uses cognizance-based gating to decide when to give feedback and feedback anchoring to ground feedback in the problem. On Science Q\&A tasks, OPCoD consistently outperforms baselines and achieves Pareto improvement across all evaluated domain pairs and students.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

CoVar: Confidence-Variance-Guided Pseudo-Label Selection for Semi-Supervised Learning

Authors:
Jinshi Liu↗Lei He↗Pan Liu↗

arXiv:2601.11670v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pseudo-label selection in semi-supervised learning is commonly driven by maximum-confidence thresholds, yet confidence alone can be unreliable under model overconfidence and class imbalance. We propose CoVar, a confidence–variance framework that assesses pseudo-label reliability by jointly modeling Maximum Confidence (MC) and Residual-Class Variance (RCV). Starting from entropy minimization, we derive a second-order cross-entropy approximation showing that low-loss pseudo-labels are favored when MC is high and RCV is low, with a confidence-dependent penalty that becomes stronger for near-certain predictions. Based on this criterion, CoVar embeds predictions into a two-dimensional confidence–variance space and uses SVD-based spectral relaxation to separate reliable and unreliable predictions without hand-tuned confidence thresholds. Cluster-wise Gaussian weighting then converts this separation into per-sample training weights. The resulting weights can be integrated into existing semi-supervised segmentation and classification pipelines during training and introduce no inference-time overhead. Experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012, Cityscapes, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and STL-10 show clear gains on VOC and Cityscapes under matched backbones, as well as competitive or improved error rates on standard classification benchmarks. These results indicate that residual-class dispersion provides a useful signal complementary to confidence for robust pseudo-label selection.

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

Neural Additive and Basis Models with Feature Selection and Interactions

Authors:
Yasutoshi Kishimoto↗Kota Yamanishi↗Takuya Matsuda↗Shinichi Shirakawa↗

arXiv:2606.19850v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit attractive performance in various fields but often suffer from low interpretability. The neural additive model (NAM) and its variant called the neural basis model (NBM) use neural networks (NNs) as nonlinear shape functions in generalized additive models (GAMs). Both models are highly interpretable and exhibit good performance and flexibility for NN training. NAM and NBM can provide and visualize the contribution of each feature to the prediction owing to GAM-based architectures. However, when using two-input NNs to consider feature interactions or when applying them to high-dimensional datasets, training NAM and NBM becomes intractable due to the increase in the computational resources required. This paper proposes incorporating the feature selection mechanism into NAM and NBM to resolve computational bottlenecks. We introduce the feature selection layer in both models and update the selection weights during training. Our method is simple and can reduce computational costs and model sizes compared to vanilla NAM and NBM. In addition, it enables us to use two-input NNs even in high-dimensional datasets and capture feature interactions. We demonstrate that the proposed models are computationally efficient compared to vanilla NAM and NBM, and they exhibit better or comparable performance with state-of-the-art GAMs.

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07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Brain age gap correlates with DTI-derived microstructural abnormalities in multiple sclerosis.

Authors:
Lea↗Al-Ledani↗Bardell↗Maltby↗Ramadan↗R. A↗Lechner-Scott↗

Background: Brain age gap (BAG) is increased in multiple sclerosis (MS), but whether it reflects microstructural pathology beyond conventional atrophy remains unclear. Objective: To test whether BAG is elevated in MS and correlates with conventional and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) abnormalities relative to healthy controls. Methods: A case-control study of 43 people with MS and 18 healthy controls was performed. BAG was estimated from T1-weighted MRI using brainageR. Controls were used as MRI reference distributions. MRI values were expressed as deviation z-scores and correlated with BAG within MS. Conventional MRI and DTI domains were analysed using age/sex-adjusted partial correlations with domain-wise Benjamini-Hochberg FDR correction, where appropriate. Results: BAG was higher in MS than controls (4.79 vs -2.58 years; p

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

How Reliable are Fairness Audits with Unreliable Data?

Authors:
Yash Vardhan Tomar↗

arXiv:2506.23033v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fairness audits are a key component of responsible machine-learning deployment. Yet, audit-recommendation reliability under incomplete protected-label access is still poorly understood. In this work, we focused on protected-label missingness in fairness mitigation audits. We introduced a seed-calibrated stress test to separate missingness effects from seed-to-seed movement already present under complete labels. Across ACS/Folktables tasks, missingness settings that retain some protected labels usually do not move selected mitigation methods beyond a complete-label seed-to-seed baseline. At $0%$ protected-label access, candidates collapse to an empirical-risk-minimization baseline and deterministic tie-breaking rather than revealing a broad missingness effect. We also found that threshold optimization can turn fairness gains on a single protected axis into intersectional harm above a seed baseline, and this threshold-optimizer finding persists under random-forest validation. Overall, our results highlight that protected-label missingness should be reported with seed-null calibration, candidate-set context, and intersectional consequences before it is treated as evidence of audit fragility.

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

From Reasoning Traces to Reusable Modules: Understanding Compositional Generalization in Language Model Reasoning

Authors:
Lingjing Kong↗Xin Liu↗Guangyi Chen↗Martin Q. Ma↗Xiangchen Song↗Yuekai Sun↗Mikhail Yurochkin↗Taylor W. Killian↗Ruslan Salakhutdinov↗Kun Zhang↗Eric P. Xing↗Zhengzhong Liu↗…

arXiv:2606.18089v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training pipelines that combine supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (RL) have emerged as the key recipe for transforming large language models (LLMs) into robust reasoners. We argue that this combined success is driven by compositional generalization, which we formalize through a hierarchical latent selection model. In this framework, reasoning traces are generated by a cascade of discrete latent selection variables corresponding to reusable atomic modules, including both skills (local operations) and routing mechanisms (how intermediate information is selected, reused, and composed). Within this model, we theoretically show that SFT and RL play asymmetric, complementary roles: SFT supplies the raw module materials in compositional traces, and RL decomposes those traces to identify the latent atomic modules and enable compositional generalization. We design controlled experiments to validate this theory. Our results demonstrate that RL can extract atomic modules from compound traces supplied by SFT and recombine them to solve new configurations. Moreover, we find that training on compound traces yields stronger generalization than training on isolated atomic modules. Finally, we investigate the relationship between SFT and RL data and identify an effective protocol in which SFT ensures coverage of all atomic modules through compositional traces, while RL focuses on novel compositions outside the SFT support to drive exploration.

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10.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-10

Brain Health for Economic Resilience: a data-driven framework for the brain-positive economic transition

Authors:
Harris A. Eyre↗

Announced in this Comment and in collaboration with Nature Medicine is the convening of the Brain Health for Economic Resilience Commission, a global, transdisciplinary effort to define, measure and operationalize brain health and cognitive capacity as foundational drivers of economic resilience.

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11.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-10

Dual-target gene therapy in Parkinson’s disease: a multicenter phase 1 trial

Authors:
Mengyue Niu↗

Restoring striatal dopamine synthesis is a promising gene therapy strategy for Parkinson’s disease. Previous adeno-associated virus-mediated aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase (AADC) monotherapies remain dependent on exogenous levodopa, whereas multigene delivery is constrained by strict adeno-associated virus packaging limits. A ‘dual approach’ targeting the two rate-limiting enzymes, tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) and AADC, offers the potential for autonomous dopamine synthesis. We report the 12-month primary safety and tolerability outcomes of a multicenter, open-label, dose-escalation, phase 1 trial evaluating BBM-P002, a new adeno-associated virus vector—AAVT42—codelivering constitutively active TH and AADC. Ten participants with moderate-to-advanced Parkinson’s disease were enrolled and received bilateral intraputaminal infusions across doses of 4.0 × 1011 vg (Cohort 1; n = 1), 6.0 × 1011 vg (Cohort 2; n = 2), 1.0 × 1012 vg (Cohort 3; n = 2) and 1.2 × 1012 vg (Cohort 4; n = 5). The trial achieved its primary outcome, as BBM-P002 demonstrated a favorable safety and tolerability profile within 12 months post-treatment. No dose-limiting toxicities or drug-related serious adverse events occurred. A total of 23 adverse events were reported, all judged unrelated to BBM-P002 and primarily mild and transient. Systemic toxicity and clinically meaningful immunogenicity were absent. In conclusion, intraputaminal delivery of BBM-P002 was safe and well tolerated in this phase 1 trial, supporting continued clinical development. ClinicalTrials.gov registration: NCT05822739 . Phase 1 results reveal that BBM-P002, a dual-target gene therapy co-delivering TH and DDC, is safe and well tolerated in Parkinson’s disease, with 12-month motor improvements signaling therapeutic potential.

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Dissociative recombination and ion-pair formation in $\mathrm{HeH^+}$ isotopologues: A time-dependent wave-packet study including rotational coupling

Authors:
Sifiso Musa Nkambule↗Malibongwe Tsabedze↗Oscar N. Mabuza↗Mbuso K. Matfunjwa↗

arXiv:2606.11352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a comprehensive theoretical investigation of dissociative recombination (DR) and resonant ion-pair (RIP) formation in $\mathrm{HeH^+}$ isotopologues using time-dependent wave-packet propagation methods. Nuclear dynamics are treated on a set of 23 coupled electronic states, including $^2\Sigma$, $^2\Pi$, and $^2\Delta$ symmetries, in both adiabatic and strictly diabatic representations, with rotational couplings explicitly included. Reaction cross sections are computed over collision energies ranging from 0 to 50 eV. The results reveal that inclusion of a large manifold of resonant states and rotational couplings significantly enhances the DR cross section relative to earlier theoretical studies. In the diabatic representation, $^2\Sigma$ states dominate the recombination dynamics, while in the adiabatic representation, $^2\Pi$ and $^2\Delta$ states contribute significantly at low collision energies. For RIP formation, two different diabatization schemes yield systematically larger cross sections than previous models, highlighting the sensitivity of ion-pair production to electronic coupling structure. Isotopic effects are examined, showing a clear inverse dependence of cross section magnitude on reduced mass. The present results underscore the importance of multi-state coupling and nonadiabatic effects in accurately describing electron-molecule collision processes in primordial and astrophysical plasmas.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

A Quantum Algorithm for Random Number Generation

Authors:
Aastha Kataria↗Devansh Desai↗Ashwini Dalvi↗Sagar Korde↗Abhijeet Pasi↗Irfan N A Siddavatam↗Sudhir Ranjan Jain↗

arXiv:2606.13034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a quantum algorithm for random number generation that achieves a provable quadratic speedup over classical Markov chain mixing, building on the Diaconis-Shahshahani Fourier analysis of the top-to-random card shuffle. The algorithm integrates three quantum primitives into a unified mixing circuit: the Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT), which diagonalizes the Markov transition operator; controlled phase rotations, which encode the shuffle eigenvalue spectrum; and the Grover diffusion operator, which acts as a quantum analogue of the Aldous-Diaconis strong uniform stopping time by reflecting amplitudes about their mean at each iteration. For an n-qubit register, the mixing time is O(\sqrt{n \log n}) iterations. Extending to m qudits of local dimension d reduces this to O(\sqrt{\log_d N}) iterations, where N = d^m, compared to the classical O(n \log n) bound. The qudit formulation further reduces QFT circuit depth from O(\log^2 N) to O(\log_d^2 N) gates per layer by encoding the same N-state space using m = \log_d N subsystems instead of \log_2 N qubits. We validate both variants on IBM superconducting hardware.

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

Physics-informed generative AI for semiconductor manufacturing: Enforcing hard physical constraints in generative models by construction

Authors:
Yaser Mike Banad↗Sarah Sharif↗

arXiv:2606.11247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative models are increasingly used to propose designs, data, and control actions for physical systems, yet many such systems are governed by hard physical constraints rather than by perceptual plausibility. Semiconductor manufacturing provides a demanding test case: generated masks, layouts, synthetic defect data, and process recipes must obey lithography, transport, reaction, and device-physics constraints, because physically invalid samples are not merely low quality but unusable. This Perspective argues that semiconductor manufacturing exposes a broader computational-science challenge, namely that generative AI for constrained physical domains must be physics-informed by construction, not corrected only through post-hoc filtering. We survey the emerging architectural toolkit, including physics-informed diffusion, PDE-constrained variational models, neural-operator priors, and conservation-law-respecting generative networks, and show how it connects to differentiable lithography, TCAD, process simulation, and autonomous experimentation. We identify four integration patterns between generative models and physics-based simulators, and we propose a research agenda centered on physics-fidelity benchmarks, differentiable simulator infrastructure, and multimodal foundation models for physical design and manufacturing. The central claim is analytical rather than rhetorical: where physical validity is the binding criterion of success, architectures that enforce it by construction should be expected to outperform those that filter for it after the fact, and the fab is the setting where this distinction is sharpest.

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

Beyond Problem Solving: UOJ-Bench for Evaluating Code Generation, Hacking, and Repair in Competitive Programming

Authors:
Tingqiang Xu↗Hangrui Zhou↗Tianle Cai↗Alex Gu↗Kaifeng Lyu↗

arXiv:2606.12864v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite strong performance in competitive programming, the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in supporting human learning in the same setting remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce UOJ-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate not only the problem-solving ability of LLMs, but also their ability to identify errors in human-written code – a crucial educational activity traditionally supported by running test cases over online judge systems. UOJ-Bench consists of three distinct tasks: code generation, code hacking, and code repair, all constructed from real-world code submissions on the Universal Online Judge (UOJ) and evaluated through UOJ's native judging infrastructure. Our results show that under one-shot evaluation, even the strongest models fail to identify errors in more than 50% of a set of submissions that have been found to be incorrect by UOJ users. While test-time scaling improves success rates to above 90%, the substantial computational costs incurred from model inference limit its practicality for large-scale deployment. Despite these limitations, we find that the best-performing models under test-time scaling can uncover errors in over 5% of full-score submissions across roughly 30 problems, suggesting that frontier LLMs can already provide complementary signals beyond standard judging systems.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

All-Mem: Agentic Lifelong Memory via Dynamic Topology Evolution

Authors:
Can Lv↗Heng Chang↗Shengyu Tao↗Mingju Chen↗Zhaoxin Fan↗Ziwei Zhang↗Yuchen Guo↗Shiji Zhou↗

Lifelong interactive agents are expected to assist users over months or years, which requires continually writing long term memories while retrieving the right evidence for each new query under fixed context and latency budgets. Existing memory systems often degrade as histories grow, yielding redundant, outdated, or noisy retrieved contexts. We present All-Mem, an online/offline lifelong memory framework that maintains a topology structured memory bank via explicit, non destructive consolidation, avoiding the irreversible information loss typical of summarization based compression. In online operation, it anchors retrieval on a bounded visible surface to keep coarse search cost bounded. Periodically offline, an LLM diagnoser proposes confidence scored topology edits executed with gating using three operators: Split, Merge, and Update, while preserving immutable evidence for traceability. At query time, typed links enable hop bounded, budgeted expansion from active anchors to archived evidence when needed. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval-s show improved retrieval and QA over representative baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/LvCan926/All-Mem.

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

SPICE: Synergy and Partial Information Based Curriculum Evolution

Authors:
Ankush Pratap Singh↗Houwei Cao↗Yong Liu↗

arXiv:2606.16639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal learning exploits complementary information across heterogeneous modalities. The informativeness of each modality can vary widely across samples and training stages. Existing multimodal curriculum learning strategies often assume that the relative complexity of samples remains unchanged throughout training and therefore cannot adapt to model evolution. We propose SPICE (Synergy and Partial Information based Curriculum Evolution), a novel progressive curriculum framework for multimodal interaction learning. Guided by Partial Information Decomposition (PID) theory, our approach decomposes multimodal interactions into redundant, unique, and synergistic information components, enabling an interpretable and dynamic characterization of sample complexity. Building on this decomposition, we design a progressive curriculum that evolves throughout training, allowing the model to transition from learning shared cross-modal cues to modality-specific patterns and, finally, to complex synergistic interactions. Adapting to model evolution, sample ordering is refined in real-time using PID information estimates derived from unimodal and multimodal predictions. Experiments across multiple multimodal benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over conventional training and state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of PID information decomposition and adaptive sample ordering for multimodal curriculum learning.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

CountZES: Counting via Zero-Shot Exemplar Selection

Authors:
Muhammad Ibraheem Siddiqui↗Muhammad Haris Khan↗

Object counting in complex scenes is particularly challenging in the zero-shot (ZS) setting, where instances of unseen categories are counted using only a class name. Existing ZS counting methods that infer exemplars from text often rely on off-the-shelf open-vocabulary detectors (OVDs), which in dense scenes suffer from semantic noise, appearance variability, and multi-instance proposals. Alternatively, random image-patch sampling is employed, which fails to accurately delineate object instances. Since counting is sensitive to exemplar quality, such selection strategies often yield poorly representative exemplars, leading to inaccurate count estimation. To address these issues, we propose CountZES, an inference-only approach for object counting via ZS exemplar selection. CountZES discovers diverse exemplars through three synergistic stages: Detection-Anchored Exemplar (DAE), Density-Guided Exemplar (DGE), and Feature-Consensus Exemplar (FCE). DAE refines OVD detections to isolate precise single-instance exemplars. DGE introduces a density-driven, self-supervised paradigm to identify statistically consistent and semantically compact exemplars, while FCE reinforces visual coherence through feature-space clustering. Together, these stages yield a complementary exemplar set that balances textual grounding, count consistency, and feature representativeness. Experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate CountZES superior performance among ZOC methods while generalizing effectively across domains.

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

IHBench: Evaluating Post-Interruption Recovery in Voice Agents with Structured Workflows

Authors:
Ahmad Salimi↗Wentao Ma↗Yuzhi Tang↗Dongming Shen↗Mu Li↗Alex Smola↗

arXiv:2606.19595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice agents deployed in structured workflows (customer service, healthcare scheduling, account management) must handle frequent user interruptions while maintaining progress through multi-step procedures. Existing benchmarks for speech-capable models focus on the timing of interruptions: barge-in detection, endpointing, and turn-taking dynamics. They leave unmeasured what happens after the interruption: does the agent resume the workflow at the correct step? Does it address the user's interjection? Does it avoid re-delivering content the user already heard? We introduce IHBench (Interruption Handling Benchmark), a benchmark that evaluates post-interruption recovery in voice agents executing state-machine-driven workflows across 10 enterprise domains. Six interruption types are injected at controlled points mid-utterance, with per-interruption evaluation rubrics generated alongside the data. Each interruption is scored on two axes: task fulfillment and recovery quality. We evaluate 27 audio-language model configurations from OpenAI, Google, and the open-weight community. Models vary widely, and recovery quality depends strongly on the interruption type. Across our experiments, closed-weight models are consistently more robust to interruptions than open-weight ones: they win far more often on task fulfillment, degrade roughly 3.3x more slowly as conversations grow longer, and show no audio-versus-text modality gap, whereas the open-weight models lose ground on all three. A human study validates the LLM judge against human annotators, and a cross-benchmark analysis against AudioMultiChallenge indicates that recovery quality is a largely distinct capability axis.

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21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Simulation-based Bayesian deep learning enables uncertainty-aware tumor fraction estimation in cell-free DNA

Authors:
Volkov↗Raitses-Gurevich↗Grad↗Shlayem↗Danilevsky↗Rubinek↗Gorfine↗Shomron↗

Background: Estimating tumor fraction from whole-genome cell-free DNA sequencing is critical for liquid biopsy, but is hampered by weak signals and baseline noise at low tumor fractions. Existing computational methods often require matched controls or large labeled datasets for training and lack uncertainty quantification. To address these gaps, we developed purNPE, a Bayesian deep-learning framework trained without labeled cancer cell-free DNA samples. Specifically, purNPE leverages a two-part generative model: one component simulates diverse tumor copy-number profiles based on evolutionary genealogies, while a second, data-driven component learns and replicates realistic sequencing background patterns from cancer-free cell-free DNA. By training a Neural Posterior Estimator on synthetic tumor profiles augmented with learned noise, purNPE performs amortized inference in milliseconds without needing a reference sample set at inference. Results: In a real-world pan-cancer cohort, purNPE achieved comparable performance with existing methods against orthogonal mutant-allele-fraction validation (MAE = 0.066). In silico and semi-synthetic experiments suggested analytical sensitivity around 1% tumor fraction under the evaluated conditions and showed strong classification accuracy in low tumor fractions (AUC = 0.98 for TF [≤] 3% versus controls). Conclusions: This work provides a framework for using simulation-based inference to derive calibrated, uncertainty-aware TF estimates, offering a potential alternative to traditional data-dependent methods.

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22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Artificial Intelligence-informed mobile behavioural interventions to support adolescents mental health in schools: protocol for a randomised controlled trial using the MindCraft app

Authors:
Freccero↗Elkes↗Kadirvelu↗Versi↗Faisal↗Dewa↗L. H↗Di Simplicio↗Nicholls↗

Background: Children and young people (CYP) are particularly affected by mental health problems. Mobile apps provide a scalable and accessible approach to adolescent mental health support, and schools are well-positioned to address multiple risk factors and deliver large-scale interventions. By combining active (self-reported) and passive (sensor-derived) data, mobile apps can model mental states and deliver context-aware support. Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables adaptive, context-aware recommendations tailored to each user. However, there is limited research on AI-based mental health interventions in community CYP. MindCraft is a mobile app designed to monitor adolescents mental health using active and passive data and provide AI-informed recommendations ("nudges"). This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of personalised AI nudges delivered through MindCraft on improving mental health outcomes among adolescents in schools in the United Kingdom. Methods: The study is a three-arm RCT using a prospective cohort of secondary school students aged 14-19. Following informed consent, participants complete a baseline online assessment at school and download MindCraft. The primary outcome is the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire global and subscale scores. Secondary outcomes include the Eating Disorders Diagnostic Scale, the Sleep Condition Indicator Questionnaire, the Self-Injurious Thoughts and Behaviours Interview, the Self-Efficacy Questionnaire for Children and the World Health Organisation-Five Well-Being Index. Participants are randomised to: (1) an AI-informed intervention group receiving personalised nudges, (2) an active control receiving non-personalised nudges, or (3) a control group with self-monitoring only. Participants use the app for four weeks, with follow-up at one month. Repeated-measures analyses will assess changes across time points. Discussion: We hypothesise that AI nudges will have a greater positive effect on mental health outcomes at one month than general nudges and self-monitoring. Our findings will provide key evidence on the effectiveness of personalised mobile AI recommendations for adolescents mental health and inform school-based mental health prevention and early intervention. This study will contribute evidence on the ethical, acceptable, and scalable integration of AI-enabled digital mental health tools within public health and educational systems, with implications for the design of future digital public health interventions and policies supporting their safe integration in schools.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Capacity-Constrained Online Convex Optimization with Delayed Feedback

Authors:
Alexander Ryabchenko↗Idan Attias↗Daniel M. Roy↗

arXiv:2606.11711v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online learning with delayed feedback typically assumes that the learner can track all pending rounds until their feedback arrives. In practice, tracking resources are finite, and feedback from untracked rounds is permanently lost. In this paper, we study delayed online convex optimization (OCO) under a hard capacity constraint, where at most $C$ pending rounds can be tracked at any time. To model delay information, we introduce a semi-clairvoyant model that refines the clairvoyant assumption from prior work: rather than requiring delays to be known at prediction time, the learner observes delay expirations online, consistent with the classical unconstrained delayed setting. Our approach proceeds via a reduction to a novel ``delayed and weighted'' OCO problem, using a scheduler that randomizes tracking decisions and importance-weights the resulting observations. For this base problem, we propose and analyze Delayed-Weighted FTRL and its bandit analogue, establishing regret bounds that explicitly characterize the interaction between time-varying weights and delayed feedback. Combining these base learners with our schedulers yields the first regret guarantees for capacity-constrained OCO under convex and strongly convex losses, for both first-order and bandit feedback. For first-order feedback, capacity $C = \Omega(\log T)$ suffices to recover standard delayed OCO rates up to logarithmic factors. For bandit feedback, the regret rates are modulated by powers of $(1 + \sigma_{max}/C)$, where $\sigma_{max}$ is the maximum number of pending observations at any time. This allows the regret bound to degrade gracefully when $C < \sigma_{max}$, while remaining sublinear.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

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

Authors:
Alan Cooney↗David Africa↗Geoffrey Irving↗

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.

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