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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Tractable Reasoning and Conjunctive Query Answering for Defeasible DL-Lite under Rational Closure

arXiv:2606.24279v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In Description Logics (DLs), reasoning under Rational Closure (RC) is a well-known and widely accepted non-monotonic formalism to handle defeasible knowledge. In this paper, we study the application of RC to the core and horn variants of the DL-Lite family of lightweight description logics. We analyze both entitlement (instance checking) and Conjunctive Query (CQ) answering under RC. Our main contribution is providing a plug-in architecture that builds upon existing standard classical reasoners, establishing that reasoning and CQ answering under RC for DL-Lite can be done efficiently with minimal computational overhead.

02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-16

Daily briefing: How many elementary particles are there?

Authors:

Estimates range from 17 to 995.5. Plus, one man with paralysis is using a brain–computer interface at home and GLP-1 obesity drugs appear to boost testosterone and sperm quality. Estimates range from 17 to 995.5. Plus, one man with paralysis is using a brain–computer interface at home and GLP-1 obesity drugs appear to boost testosterone and sperm quality.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Coupled-Mode Equations with Arbitrary Mode Combinations for Kinetic-Inductance Superconducting Traveling-Wave Parametric Devices: Theory and Experimental Validation

arXiv:2606.17264v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The coupled-mode equations (CMEs) have proven very successful in describing parametric processes in nonlinear optics. More recently, the same formulation has been used to model microwave superconducting parametric amplifiers and frequency multipliers. However, when applied to the microwave regime, not all assumptions remain valid and losses play a more dramatic role. Here, we revisit the CMEs applied to traveling-wave superconducting amplifiers to include losses and provide a formulation that enables their systematic derivation for any combination of traveling waves. As examples, we discuss the impact of unwanted harmonics and intermodulation products on parametric amplification, as well as harmonic generation. We verify that, if not properly accounted for, device performance can deviate considerably from the ideal case. Furthermore, using a superconducting CPW-based artificial transmission line and combining an independent experimental determination of its nonlinear parameter $I'_*$ with simulations of its linear properties, we obtain a parameter-free validation of this formulation. The nonlinear parameter was determined to be $I'_* \approx 27$ mA which, surprisingly, scales with the theoretical depairing current and not with the much smaller critical current of the device. For the validation, we measured multiple-harmonic generation and found excellent agreement between theory and experiment. The fact that $I'_* \gg I_C$ has direct implications for device design.

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

HAFMat: Hybrid Priors Guided Adaptive Fusion for Single-Image Human Material Estimation

Physically based rendering (PBR) material estimation is a fundamental appearance decomposition task with broad applications in virtual content creation, relighting, and digital human rendering. However, estimating PBR materials from a single human image remains highly ill-posed, since illumination, geometry, and reflectance are heavily entangled in the observed appearance. To mitigate this ambiguity, we propose HAFMat, a hybrid-prior-guided framework for single-image human material estimation. Our method introduces guidance maps that encode complementary cues, including appearance, body geometry, structure, and prior material predictions from pre-trained models. A key observation is that these guidance cues are heterogeneous: some cues mainly provide texture-level constraints, while others convey higher-level semantic information. To exploit this property, we design a Multi-layer Adaptive Feature Fusion Mechanism, which adaptively fuses guidance features with decoder features at different stages. This design enables texture-dominant and semantic-dominant cues to guide material decoding at appropriate levels, leading to more accurate and physically plausible material estimation. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real data demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in material estimation and downstream relighting.

05.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-10

A mean-field model of neural networks with PV and SOM interneurons reveals connectivity-based mechanisms of gamma oscillations

by Farzin Tahvili, Martin Vinck, Matteo Di Volo Classic theoretical models of cortical oscillations are based on the interactions between two populations of excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Nevertheless, experimental studies and network simulations suggest that interneuron subclasses such as parvalbumin (PV) and somatostatin (SOM) exert distinct control over oscillatory dynamics. Yet, we lack a theoretical understanding of the mechanisms underlying oscillations in E-PV-SOM circuits and of the differences with respect to the classical mechanisms for oscillations in simpler E–I networks. Here, we derive a biologically realistic mean-field model of a canonical three-population E-PV-SOM circuit. This model robustly generates oscillations whose features are consistent with experimental observations, including the relative timing of PV and SOM activity and the effects of optogenetic perturbations. By reducing the model to a linear analytical form, we demonstrate that gamma oscillations emerge directly from the cell-specific connectivity of the three-population circuit. This connectivity motif alone accounts for experimentally observed phase relationships, with PV activity consistently leading that of SOM neurons. Together, this mean field model identifies a distinct structural mechanism giving rise to oscillations in canonical E–PV–SOM circuits and provides theoretical primitives for constructing large-scale, cell-type-specific models of cortical dynamics.

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

Performance and Interpretability of Convolutional, Transformer, and Hybrid Deep Learning Models in Colorectal Histology Classification

Deep learning has become an important tool in computational pathology, enabling automated analysis of histopathological images. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have traditionally dominated this field, transformer-based and hybrid architectures have recently demonstrated promising performance. However, comprehensive comparisons of these approaches for colorectal histopathology remain limited. This study evaluated twelve ImageNet-pretrained CNN, transformer, and hybrid architectures using the Kather colorectal histopathology dataset containing 5,000 image tiles from eight tissue classes. All models were trained using a standardized transfer-learning and fine-tuning protocol and assessed using multiple performance metrics, including accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, ROC-AUC, Cohen's kappa, and Matthews correlation coefficient. All evaluated models achieved high classification performance, with accuracies ranging from 93.2% to 97.1%. EVA-02 achieved the highest overall performance (97.1% accuracy, 97.0% F1-score), closely followed by ViT-B/16. Among CNNs, ResNet34 and ConvNeXt-Tiny demonstrated highly competitive performance, achieving accuracies of 96.4% and 96.3%, respectively. Transformer architectures generally produced the strongest results across evaluation metrics, although the performance gap between the best transformer and CNN models was relatively small. Per-class analysis showed consistently strong classification performance across all tissue categories, with Complex Stroma representing the most challenging class. Overall, transformer-based architectures achieved the highest predictive performance, whereas modern CNNs provided a favorable balance between accuracy and model complexity. These findings provide a comprehensive benchmark of major deep learning paradigms for colorectal histopathology classification.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Universal features of high-energy scattering of Laguerre-Gaussian states

arXiv:2604.00575v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vortex states of photons, electrons, and other particles are wave packets that carry intrinsic orbital angular momentum (OAM) and exhibit other features unavailable for plane waves. Collisions of high-energy vortex states can become a promising tool for nuclear and particle physics, once experimental challenges are overcome. An extensive literature exists on scattering processes involving vortex states; however, most works rely on assumptions that will be challenging to achieve in experiment. In this work, we initiate a systematic re-analysis of vortex-state scattering processes using paraxial Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) wave packets colliding at a non-zero impact parameter $b$. Since the total final transverse momentum $P_\perp$ is no longer fixed, we focus on how the differential cross section depends on $P_\perp$. We emphasize that non-trivial $P_\perp$-dependent features can originate either from the shape of the LG wave packets or from the dynamics of the scattering process under interest. Here, we focus on the former source and explore in detail these universal kinematic features, while the study of process-specific modifications, along with the novel insights they may bring, is delegated to a future work. Interestingly, the non-zero impact parameter $b$ plays a key role in many $P_\perp$-dependent effects, making it a useful probe of vortex states, not a nuisance factor as often assumed.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The MAMA-MIA Challenge: Advancing Generalizability and Fairness in Breast MRI Tumor Segmentation and Treatment Response Prediction

arXiv:2603.01250v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed malignancy among women worldwide and a leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging plays a central role in tumor characterization and treatment monitoring, particularly in patients receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy. However, existing artificial intelligence models for breast magnetic resonance imaging are typically developed and evaluated using heterogeneous datasets, study populations, and assessment protocols, making direct comparison difficult and limiting understanding of model robustness across institutions and clinically relevant patient subgroups. The MAMA-MIA Challenge was designed to address these challenges by providing a standardized benchmark for the joint evaluation of primary tumor segmentation and prediction of pathologic complete response using pre-treatment magnetic resonance imaging only. The training cohort comprised 1,506 patients from multiple institutions in the United States, while evaluation was conducted on an external test set of 574 patients from three independent European centers to assess cross-continental and cross-institutional generalization. A unified scoring framework combined predictive performance with subgroup consistency across age, menopausal status, and breast density. Twenty-six international teams participated in the final evaluation phase. Results demonstrate substantial performance variability under a common external evaluation framework and reveal trade-offs between overall accuracy and subgroup fairness. The challenge provides standardized datasets, evaluation protocols, and public resources to promote the development of robust and equitable artificial intelligence systems for breast cancer imaging.

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

Evaluation of Alternative-Based Information Systems for Deliberative Polling using an Agentic Simulator

arXiv:2606.11692v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deliberative polling promises to improve collective decision-making by exposing shareholders to a broad range of arguments before they vote. Yet ensuring that every voter encounters a representative sample of the reason space, the coverage problem, remains an open challenge, particularly at scale and in adversarial or strategically motivated electorates. This paper introduces a way of evaluating solutions using the LLM-based Agentic Bipolar Argumentation Simulator, grounded in a framework which formalises a poll as a six-tuple of endorsing and opposing justifications, attack and enhance relations, and shareholder- and relation-weights. ABAS simulates N autonomous shareholder agents, each assigned a latent opinion according to desired distributions in [-1, 1], who sequentially vote, choose or author justifications, and optionally submit argumentation-graph links. The simulator implements recommendations that rank existing justifications by their observable endorsement mass. It evaluates the mechanism's success by coverage, namely the fraction of the corpus reason-tag set represented in the K recommendations presented to each shareholder, as a solution to the NP-hard Subsuming Justification Problem. Reported experiments characterise how creativity rate (pown), recommendation size (K), argumentation density (plinks), and population size (N) affect coverage and corpus diversity. In an authenticated electorate where Sybil attacks are impossible and only the relation graph is gameable, we stress-test the scoring with coordinated strategic voting attacks: a tag-flood attack collapses coverage, while author-count relation weighting through a reversed-PageRank rule resists the flood markedly better than uniform weights.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Genealogical processes of sequential Monte Carlo methods and other non-neutral population models under rapid mutation

arXiv:2406.16465v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We show that genealogical trees arising from a broad class of non-neutral models of population evolution converge to the Kingman coalescent under a suitable rescaling of time. As well as non-neutral biological evolution, our results apply to genetic algorithms encompassing the prominent class of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods. The time rescaling we need differs slightly from that used in classical results for convergence to the Kingman coalescent, which has implications for the performance of different resampling schemes in SMC algorithms. In addition, our work substantially simplifies earlier proofs of convergence to the Kingman coalescent, and corrects an error common to several earlier results.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Development and External Validation of a Machine Learning Model for 10-Year Ischemic Stroke Risk Prediction in Diverse Populations

Importance: Machine-learning models for ischemic stroke risk prediction are rarely validated across ancestrally distinct cohorts, and the contributions of polygenic risk scores (PRS) and self-reported race in such models remain unclear. Objective: To develop and externally validate a 10-year ischemic stroke risk model and quantify the incremental contributions of laboratory trajectories, PRS, and self-reported race and ethnicity across populations. Design, Setting, and Participants: Retrospective cohort study with model development in the All of Us (AoU) Research Program (n = 34,987; 1,920 incident strokes) and external validation in the BioMe Biobank at Mount Sinai (n = 10,693; 107 incident strokes). Adults aged 45 years or older with at least 1 year of pre-baseline electronic health record data were anchored to a January 2010 baseline with 10-year follow-up. Exposures: Three XGBoost model tiers added laboratory feature trajectories (M2) and 20 PRS (M3) to clinical baseline features (M1); evaluated under race-blind and race-aware specifications. Main Outcomes and Measures: First inpatient ischemic stroke within 10 years; discrimination (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [AUROC]) and calibration (observed-to-expected [O/E] ratio). Results: In the AoU test partition (n = 6,998; 384 cases), M3 achieved an AUROC of 0.813 (95% CI, 0.788-0.837), outperforming the Revised Framingham Stroke Risk Profile (AUROC difference, 0.164) and Pooled Cohort Equations (AUROC difference, 0.181; both P < 0.001). Discrimination transferred to BioMe (AUROC, 0.745), but predictions were systematically high (aggregate O/E ratio, 0.12 vs 1.00 in AoU), consistent with intercept-shift miscalibration; BioMe-fitted intercept recalibration restored calibration in African American and Hispanic participants but not European American participants. The PRS contribution was significant only among Hispanic participants in BioMe (AUROC difference, 0.042; P = 0.003), with no significant within-stratum gain in the other 5 cohort-by-race combinations. Adding self-reported race produced small gains when combined with PRS (BioMe AUROC difference, 0.022; P = 0.034; AoU AUROC difference, 0.006; P = 0.052) but not when added without PRS. Conclusions and Relevance: A machine-learning ensemble combining clinical, laboratory, and polygenic features outperformed traditional risk scores by 0.16 to 0.18 AUROC and retained discriminative validity in an ancestrally distinct external cohort but required site-specific recalibration of absolute risk. The marginal contribution of self-reported race overlapped with polygenic signal, supporting per-ancestry calibration over universal race-aware model deployment.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Is level-1 blob reconstruction under the network multispecies coalescent easy?

Authors:

Hybridization is an important evolutionary process, commonly modeled by the network multispecies coalescent. Reconstructing evolutionary histories under this model is notoriously costly, even for level-1 networks where hybridization events are isolated from each other. The widely used methods that combine speed with statistical guarantees rely on quartet concordance factors computed for all subsets of four species, resulting in an o(n^4k) bottleneck that severely limits scalability to large numbers of species (n) and genes (k). Among quartet-based methods, NANUQ+ is notable because it decomposes the problem into two steps: first reconstructing a tree of blobs, which compresses each non-treelike part of the network, called a blob, into a single vertex, and second reconstructing the internal structure of each level-1 blob, specifically its circular order and hybrid vertex. Here, we investigate whether level-1 blob reconstruction is difficult once the tree of blobs is known. We present a fast and statistically consistent algorithm, called NetCS, based on two simple primitives: majority voting and merge sort, circumventing the bottleneck of computing all quartet concordance factors. In simulations, NetCS achieved comparable accuracy to NANUQ+ and was dramatically faster, enabling analyses of 200 taxa and 1000 genes in only a few minutes. Both methods attained near-perfect accuracy when given the true tree of blobs; however, their performance degraded in end-to-end pipelines due to errors in tree of blobs reconstruction. Strikingly, even methods that reconstruct level-1 networks directly struggled to accurately predict hybrid ancestry. Our results suggest that reconstructing level-1 blobs is unexpectedly easy once the tree of blobs is known, and that a major challenge for phylogenetic network inference lies in accurate tree of blobs reconstruction.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning High Coverage Discriminative Parsimonious Rulesets

arXiv:2606.14156v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning systems based on IF-THEN rule representations readily offer interpretability, making them a crucial focus in contemporary AI research. A key objective for such rule sets is to achieve both high discriminative power and interpretability. While existing state-of-the-art algorithms implicitly prioritize predictive accuracy, they often fall short on one or more quality metrics that ensure interpretability, such as coverage and parsimony of rule sets. Motivated by this, this paper propose the development of CDPR, which aims to create highly accurate and interpretable rule sets for classification problems. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first attempt to establish such an approach. In this study, we introduce two algorithms rooted in submodular maximization, which not only provide provable guarantees on coverage but also yield rule sets that are both discriminative and parsimonious. We empirically demonstrate that rule sets learned through our approaches achieve higher accuracy and interpretability and has more than a 2.5-fold improvement in average coverage rates when compared to the next best algorithm.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Estimating COVID-19 Cumulative Incidence from Seroprevalence Surveys accounting for Time-Varying Seroreversion: A Fully Bayesian Methodology

Seroprevalence surveys reveal the extent of humoral immunity against pathogens such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and under some circumstances represent cumulative incidence of prior infection. However, antibody waning - or seroreversion - biases these estimates by reducing assay sensitivity in a time-varying manner. Because assay sensitivity decays over time, naively using serosurveys can substantially bias estimates of SARS-CoV-2 cumulative incidence and fatality rates. The Bayesian assay-specific, time-varying sensitivity adjustment developed in this paper can reliably correct for this bias and account for the delay between infection and serosurvey. In seroprevalence studies conducted in the United States in 2020, adjusting for time-varying sensitivity increased cumulative incidence by up to 1.4-fold, with an adjustment of 1.08 for a national study. Our estimates contrast with a previously published 2-fold adjustment that did not account for assay design. This suggests that previous analyses overestimated cumulative incidence by applying seroreversion corrections that did not account for assay-specific effects, or underestimated cumulative incidence by not applying seroreversion corrections. These biases imply fatality rate underestimation and overestimation, respectively. Our model provides a framework for design-specific time-varying sensitivity corrections in seroprevalence surveys for other pathogens.

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

Phase-Aware Guidance Injection for Recurrent MAPPO in Assembly-Line Disruption Recovery

arXiv:2606.16330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Disruption recovery in industrial assembly lines requires timely decisions under machine faults, worker absence, and emergency orders. Existing methods either rely on rigid handcrafted recovery logic or learn adaptive policies that do not readily exploit heterogeneous external recovery knowledge at decision time to reduce abnormal recovery time (ART) and preserve on-time delivery (OTD). To address this gap, we propose a phase-aware guidance injection framework that augments a trained recurrent MAPPO (RMAPPO) scheduling policy through logit-level action bias during evaluation. The framework provides a unified decision-time interface for rule-based, replay-based, and online LLM-based guidance, while activating intervention only during abnormal and recovery phases. Experiments on a custom AssemblyLineEnv show that high-quality rule guidance yields the strongest gains, replay-based guidance degrades smoothly under imperfect availability, and online LLM guidance still provides useful intermediate improvements. These results show that decision-time guidance injection can exploit heterogeneous recovery hints without redesigning the actor.

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

Adaptive generative moment matching networks for improved learning of dependence structures

arXiv:2508.21531v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An adaptive bandwidth selection procedure for the mixture kernel in the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) for fitting generative moment matching networks (GMMNs) is introduced, and improved learning of copula random number generators is demonstrated. Based on the relative error of the training loss, the number of kernels is increased during training; additionally, the relative error of the validation loss is used as an early stopping criterion. While training time remains similar, adaptively training GMMNs (AGMMNs) significantly increases training performance, which is shown based on validation MMD trajectories, samples and validation MMD values. Superiority of AGMMNs over GMMNs and parametric copula models is also demonstrated in terms of three applications. First, convergence rates of estimators based on quasi-random versus pseudo-random samples from copulas are investigated in dimensions as large as 100 for the first time. Second, replicated validation MMDs, as well as Monte Carlo and quasi-Monte Carlo applications demonstrate the improved training of AGMMNs for a copula model implied by the 50 constituents of the S&P 500 index after deGARCHing. Last, both the latter dataset and 50 constituents of the FTSE 100 are used to demonstrate that the improved training of AGMMNs indeed translates to an improved model prediction.

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

BOUTEF: A Multilingual Corpus for FakeNews in North Africa – Language as a Weapon

The rapid spread of fake news on social media has become a major challenge, particularly in multilingual and under-resourced contexts such as North Africa. In this paper, we introduce BOUTEF, a large-scale multilingual corpus designed to study the propagation, characteristics, and impact of fake news in Algeria and Tunisia. The corpus integrates three complementary components: fake narratives, genuine narratives, and associated user-generated comments, along with verified debunking information. It covers a wide range of languages and linguistic varieties, including MSA, Algerian and Tunisian dialects, Arabizi, French, English, and code-switched language. Building on this resource, we conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. We examine thematic distributions, linguistic and rhetorical strategies, sentiment patterns, and social engagement dynamics. Statistical analyses reveal significant associations between thematic categories and message veracity, as well as strong correlations between user engagement and the visibility of fake content. Our findings show that fake news relies heavily on emotionally charged narratives, sensational framing, and hybrid linguistic practices that enhance virality and audience engagement. In contrast, debunking content adopts a more factual and verification-oriented style. Furthermore, a comparative analysis between Algeria and Tunisia highlights both shared dynamics and country-specific characteristics shaped by sociopolitical contexts. The results emphasize the role of informal language practices in the diffusion and reception of misinformation. By providing a rich, annotated, and publicly available dataset, this work contributes to advancing research on fake news detection, low-resource language processing, and the understanding of information disorders in complex linguistic environments.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

String dynamics of a (2+1)D U(1) quantum link model on a digital quantum computer

arXiv:2606.19601v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The (2+1)D U(1) pure gauge theory always exists in the confining phase, with strings of non-zero string tension giving a characteristic linear potential between static charges. This makes it a useful testing ground for quantum computing methods designed to study string dynamics of confining gauge theories. Here we implement a minimal U(1) quantum link model on a quantum computer with qubit degrees of freedom representing the dual height variables of the model. This facilitates an efficient realization of plaquette interactions and enables effective calculations of real-time dynamics that are inaccessible to traditional quantum Monte Carlo. A specifically tailored lattice geometry is chosen to match the heavy-hexagonal geometry of the IBM quantum hardware used here, minimizing non-adjacent qubit interactions. By performing quantum quenches from a simple initial string state, we probe the transverse quantum fluctuations of the string before it thermalizes. Our experimental results from digital quantum simulations, with up to 112 qubits, show good agreement with reference tensor-network calculations at short times and with thermal averages at long times. Near the phase transition, the quench dynamics exhibit large fluctuations of the initial string that extend across both spatial dimensions of the lattice. Nonetheless, our error-mitigated estimators from the quantum hardware also give accurate predictions in that regime, with noise-induced violations of local gauge symmetries comparable to finite-bond-dimension tensor-network results.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Robustness assessment of large audio language models in multiple-choice evaluation

Recent advances in large audio language models (LALMs) have primarily been assessed using a multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) framework. However, subtle changes, such as shifting the order of choices, result in substantially different results. Existing MCQA frameworks do not account for this variability and report a single accuracy number per benchmark or category. We dive into the MCQA evaluation framework and conduct a systematic study spanning three benchmarks (MMAU, MMAR and MMSU) and four models: Audio Flamingo 2, Audio Flamingo 3, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B-Instruct, and Kimi-Audio-7B-Instruct. Our findings indicate that models are sensitive not only to the ordering of choices, but also to the paraphrasing of the question and the choices. Finally, we propose a simpler evaluation protocol and metric that account for subtle variations and provide a more detailed evaluation report of LALMs within the MCQA framework.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Optimality Condition for the Petz Map

arXiv:2410.23622v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In quantum error correction, the Petz map serves as a perfect recovery map when the Knill-Laflamme conditions are satisfied. Notably, while perfect recovery is generally infeasible for most quantum channels of finite dimension, the Petz map remains a versatile tool with near-optimal performance in recovering quantum states. This work introduces and proves, for the first time, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimality of the Petz map in terms of entanglement fidelity. In some special cases, the violation of this condition can be easily characterized by a simple commutator that can be efficiently computed. We provide multiple examples that substantiate our new findings.

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

Toward Instructions-as-Code: Understanding the Impact of Instruction Files on Agentic Pull Requests

arXiv:2606.13449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-agents (e.g., GitHub Copilot) collaborate as teammates in different software engineering tasks, including code generation proposed through pull requests (Agentic-PRs). For better agent efficiency, developers create instruction files that guide the AI-agents, including how to navigate the project, locate the right components, run tests, respect best practices, and more. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the creation of these instructions and the performance of AI-agents in creating better pull requests, which have a higher chance of success (i.e., the merge rate), address more complex tasks (e.g., code churn), and require less effort to be merged (e.g., time to merge). To this end, we analyze 15,549 agentic PRs from 148 projects in the AIDev dataset. Using the three dimensions, we compare each project before and after the creation of the instruction files. We find that specifying instructions for AI-agents does not necessarily lead to better results. With the instruction files, 27.7\% of the projects increased their merge rate by at least 20\%, while 26.35\% decreased it. The same observation is seen with the amount of changes (e.g., code churn, number of modified files) and with the efforts to merge an agentic PR (e.g., merge time and number of comments). From a first exploration, we find that projects that managed to increase their merge rate have substantially longer instruction files, which are also well structured into a higher number of sections and sub-sections. Our results motivate the need for research to assist practitioners in framing the development of instruction files as a software engineering activity (aka, Instructions-as-Code).

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

AutoRelAnnotator: Calibrated Model Cascades for Cost-Efficient Relevance Evaluation in Sponsored Search

arXiv:2606.25871v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How can we generate high-quality relevance annotations at scale without the cost and delays of human labeling? Relevance annotations are the backbone of search ranking systems which is needed for training data preparation, NDCG evaluation, and root cause analysis. However, human annotation is slow and off-the-shelf LLMs suffer from accuracy on domain-specific tasks. We propose a calibrated model cascade, a systematic approach for cost-efficient offline relevance annotation by routing queries through progressively larger fine-tuned classifiers. Our central insight is that accuracy and cost are orthogonal optimizations: domain-specific fine-tuning drives accuracy, cascading drives cost, and per-class isotonic calibration adds a small but reliable gain on top. Our contribution is threefold: (a) we decompose the gains and show that fine-tuning contributes 20 accuracy points while cascading is approximately accuracy-neutral but halves compute cost, (b) we introduce per-class isotonic calibration as one component of the cascade, contributing a small but statistically significant gain (+0.6 points over the strongest calibration baseline), and (c) we validate the system in production across six offline use cases, processing 150M+ annotations and enabling faster experimentation cycles. Our work is a building block for scalable, high-quality offline annotation pipelines in search and advertising systems.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

AdversaBench: Automated LLM Red-Teaming with Multi-Judge Confirmation and Cross-Model Transferability

Scaling adversarial evaluation of large language models requires both a method for generating hard inputs and a reliable way to confirm that resulting failures are real. We present AdversaBench, an end-to-end red-teaming pipeline that mutates seed prompts with five structured operators, queries a target model, and confirms failures through a three-judge panel with a meta-judge tiebreaker. We report experiments on 45 seeds across three categories: reasoning, instruction-following, and tool use. Every seed produced a confirmed failure. Four findings stand out. First, operator effectiveness varies sharply by category: inject_distractor scores 0.00 mean reward on instruction-following seeds but 0.80-0.83 on reasoning and tool-use. Second, binary failure rate hides difficulty: instruction-following seeds required 2.4 attacker iterations on average versus 1.1 for other categories, a gap visible in survival curves. Third, pairwise judge agreement of 80-87% coexists with near-zero Cohen's kappa due to label skew; category-level disagreement rates are more informative. Fourth, adversarial prompts generated against Llama 3.1 8B transfer zero-shot to Llama 3.3 70B, suggesting the mutations exploit general behavioral patterns rather than model-specific weaknesses. Code, dataset, and analysis scripts are available at https://github.com/khanak0509/AdversaBench .

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Beyond Scalar Scores: Exploring LLM-based Metrics for Clinical Significance Evaluation in Radiology Reports

Reliable evaluation of generated radiology reports requires strict clinical accuracy, as omitted critical findings or mischaracterized radiographic observations can directly affect patient care. Existing metrics obscure this requirement by reducing report quality to a medically ungrounded scalar. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) possess rich medical knowledge, they likewise struggle to draw a reliable boundary between clinically significant errors and harmless variation. We study this boundary using ReEvalMed benchmark as testbed and evaluate metric-level clinical significance from detecting true clinical errors ("Discrimination") and tolerating insignificant variations ("Robustness"). Across 8 LLM evaluators under one-pass and two-pass settings, we identify a widespread discrimination bias: models effectively detect errors but also over-penalize harmless rephrasings. To mitigate this, we synthesize 4k report pairs and train lightweight interpretable metrics on Qwen3-8B and MedGemma-4B. Our trained metric sharpens the clinical significance boundary, surpassing 32B-scale medical LLMs and remaining competitive with proprietary models. Crucially, the more costly two-pass setting fails to consistently improve overall performance and mainly trades discrimination for robustness. These findings suggest one-pass trained metrics as the practical choice for cost-sensitive deployment, with two-pass inference reserved for settings where D-R balance is critical. We will release the dataset and metric.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

When the Tool Decides: LLM Agents Defer Blindly to Graph Neural Network Tools, and Stronger Backbones Defer More

arXiv:2606.14476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A growing line of work equips large language model (LLM) agents with graph neural networks (GNNs) as callable tools, assuming the agent exercises judgment over when and how much to rely on such a tool. We test this directly. We expose a frozen GNN to a ReAct-style LLM agent as an explicit tool and measure, on node classification over a text-attributed graph (ogbn-arxiv, replicated on WikiCS), whether the agent uses the tool or merely obeys it. We find the agent does not exercise judgment: its predictions agree with the raw GNN's 97.6-99.2% of the time (5 seeds), collapsing into a GNN parrot that adopts the tool's output wholesale and bypasses its own reasoning. Sweeping backbone capability (Qwen2.5 0.5B-7B), the deference is not a weak-model artifact: among models able to invoke the tool, agreement rises with capability (0.60 to 0.98 from 1.5B to 7B). Crucially, the cost of deference does not shrink as capability grows and grows where alternatives emerge: a per-node oracle over the available actions beats the parrot by 0.09-0.18 at 3B and 0.12-0.22 at 7B, roughly doubling at high homophily, because the parrot is pinned to the frozen GNN while the agent's alternatives improve; at 7B a simple neighbour-label tool overtakes the GNN at high homophily (0.81 vs 0.71) yet the agent still defers. A simple selective-invocation gate recovers about half of that high-homophily gap (0.71 to 0.83) but yields no net global gain, and held-out estimates bound the best achievable gate over standard test-time features to at most a third of the oracle headroom: reliable selective invocation looks limited by available information, not merely router design. Our results are a cautionary measurement: evaluations of agent+tool systems cannot assume the agent adds judgment on top of the tool, and selective invocation must be designed in rather than expected to emerge from scale.