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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Soft-Prompt Tuning for Fair and Efficient LLM Benchmark Evaluation

Authors:
Selen Erkan↗Bastian Boll↗Kristian Kersting↗Bj\"orn Deiseroth↗Letitia Parcalabescu↗

Benchmark scores often misrepresent a large language model's (LLM's) knowledge, because they rely, e.g., on the model's ability to follow specific formatting requirements. This especially penalizes base models that may know the correct answers but lack the ability – typically introduced in post-training – to structure them as instructed. To overcome this, we propose soft-prompt tuning, an efficient, fair, and architecture-agnostic model evaluation. By optimizing only 10 soft-prompt vectors (roughly 0.0006% parameters for a 7B model) over a short tuning period, we adapt models to specific benchmark formats, closing gaps in format-following and ensuring that underlying knowledge is accurately reflected in benchmark scores. This allows one to fairly compare different base models – trained with various pre-training recipes – on benchmarks without the need for full post-training. We evaluated soft-prompt tuning across 7 models and 7 datasets. The results show that (a) soft-prompt tuning saturates format-following within 80 steps (~640 samples) making it highly efficient, (b) soft-prompt tuning significantly outperforms zero- and few-shot prompting, surfacing base model knowledge that standard prompting misses, that (c) even post-trained models can benefit from soft-prompts to maximize format compliance, and that (d) soft-prompted base model performance predicts post-trained model rankings more reliably than zero- and few-shot baselines, offering a low-cost proxy for downstream model quality. Our contributions include (1) metrics which disentangle format-following and knowledge accuracy, (2) a fairer benchmarking protocol of LLM knowledge, and (3) a cost- and memory-effective recipe to identify optimal pre-training strategies early in LLM development.

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Can LLMs Be CEOs? Benchmarking Strategic Resource Reallocation with Multi-Role Agent Simulation

Authors:
Yuyang Dai↗Xueqing Peng↗Lingfei Qian↗Zhuohan Xie↗

arXiv:2606.17459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the decision-making capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is a growing research priority, yet existing benchmarks focus on isolated cognitive tasks such as reasoning, knowledge retrieval, and economic rationality in stylized settings. These evaluations overlook the defining challenge of real executive decision-making: integrating conflicting recommendations from specialized stakeholders under information asymmetry, organizational constraints, and temporal dependencies. We introduce \textsc{CEO-Bench}, a multi-agent benchmark that evaluates LLMs on CEO-level strategic resource reallocation – the process of redirecting capital across business units in a multi-round, constraint-rich organizational environment. In \textsc{CEO-Bench}, LLM agents receive conflicting advice from four role-conditioned C-suite advisors (CFO, CTO, COO, CMO), each with private signals and distinct priorities, and must synthesize these into a concrete allocation plan evaluated along four dimensions: role integration, conditional boldness, history-sensitive judgment, and plan validity. Experiments across five frontier models on 13 scenarios reveal that all models achieve high structural validity but diverge sharply on strategic calibration – the hardest capability layer. We identify systematic failure modes including single-advisor capture, conservative default under ambiguity, and historical amnesia, and uncover a structural integration-boldness tradeoff: models that engage more deeply with conflicting perspectives tend to produce less decisive action. These findings delineate the current capability boundary of LLMs as organizational decision-makers and inform the design of future AI-assisted executive systems.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Depth-Width tradeoffs in Algorithmic Reasoning of Graph Tasks with Transformers

Authors:
Gilad Yehudai↗Clayton Sanford↗Maya Bechler-Speicher↗Orr Fischer↗Ran Gilad-Bachrach↗Amir Globerson↗

Transformers have revolutionized the field of machine learning. In particular, they can be used to solve complex algorithmic problems, including graph-based tasks. In such algorithmic tasks a key question is what is the minimal size of a transformer that can implement the task. Recent work has begun to explore this problem for graph-based tasks, showing that for sub-linear embedding dimension (i.e., model width) logarithmic depth suffices. However, an open question, which we address here, is what happens if width is allowed to grow linearly, while depth is kept fixed. Here we analyze this setting, and provide the surprising result that with linear width, constant depth suffices for solving a host of graph-based problems. This suggests that a moderate increase in width can allow much shallower models, which are advantageous in terms of inference and train time. For other problems, we show that quadratic width is required. Our results demonstrate the complex and intriguing landscape of transformer implementations of graph-based algorithms. We empirically investigate these trade-offs between the relative powers of depth and width and find tasks where wider models have the same accuracy as deep models, while having much faster train and inference time due to parallelizable hardware.

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05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Development and validation of a risk prediction algorithm to estimate all-cause mortality among community-dwelling Canadians: the Mortality Population Risk Tool (MPoRT)

Authors:
Manuel↗Bader Eddeen↗Fines↗Bennett↗Fisher↗Jessri↗Perez↗Tuna↗Sanmartin↗Sequeira↗Li↗Rosella↗…

BACKGROUND: The risk of all-cause mortality can inform decision-making for chronic disease prevention. We developed a predictive algorithm to estimate the 5-year risk of death among community-dwelling adults. METHODS: We derived and validated the Mortality Population Risk Tool (MPoRT) using data from population health surveys in Canada (the Canadian Community Health Survey) and the United States (the National Health Interview Survey), survey years 2001 to 2011, linked to vital statistics. The outcome was death within five years of the survey response. The algorithm was developed using data from Ontario respondents using a Cox proportional hazards model, then modified and re-estimated to allow cross-national assessment in Canada and the United States. Twenty-three prespecified predictors were assessed: seven sociodemographic, six behavioural, and ten general health and chronic disease. RESULTS: 527,369 respondents aged 20 to 105 years were included in the Canadian and United States development and validation cohorts, with 43,758 deaths during 3.68 million person-years follow-up. The final sex-specific MPoRT algorithms each contained 21 variables, showing strong discrimination (C-statistic: females 0.874 [0.871–0.877]; males 0.867 [0.865–0.871]) and good calibration overall and in 246 of 247 subgroups. Discrimination was modestly attenuated (0.01 decrease in C-statistic) in cross-national validation between Canada and the United States, with good calibration across all 71 subgroups. INTERPRETATION: MPoRT accurately discriminated all-cause mortality using only self-reported data, enabling broad application without clinical measures. While validation outside North America is needed to confirm broader applicability, MPoRT is designed for straightforward recalibration using routinely available national mortality data. This supports targeted chronic disease prevention strategies at both the population and individual levels, though the limitations inherent to self-reported predictors should be considered when interpreting predictions.

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06.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Quantifying Consistency in LLM Logical Reasoning via Structural Uncertainty

Authors:
Baishali Chaudhury↗Mengdie Flora Wang↗Hyunji Hayley Park↗Rahul Ghosh↗Sungmin Hong↗Jae Oh Woo↗

arXiv:2606.17312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can arrive at the same answer through reasoning paths that are unstable, contradictory, or difficult to rank consistently – a failure mode especially prevalent in multi-step deductive reasoning. Existing methods assess reliability primarily through output dispersion – measuring how much sampled answers differ – but this discards a complementary signal: whether the model can consistently rank competing reasoning candidates. We propose structural uncertainty, a consistency-aware framework derived from the stability of self-preference-induced rankings over sampled reasoning solutions. Given a query, we generate multiple candidate solutions and ask the model to judge pairwise preferences among its own outputs. We aggregate self-preferences into ranking distributions via Bradley-Terry modeling with PageRank, and decompose the signal into two entropy-based components: across-trial ranking instability and within-trial candidate ambiguity. Across five LLMs and eight benchmarks, structural signals provide information complementary to answer dispersion: on logical and mathematical reasoning tasks, the combination improves identification of unreliable instances, while on factual retrieval the structural signal collapses toward uniformity, diagnosing a regime boundary where reasoning-level consistency evaluation is uninformative. The two components relate differently to accuracy: within-trial ambiguity correlates positively with correctness – consistent with settings where multiple plausible solution paths remain competitive – while across-trial instability correlates negatively, signaling unreliable reasoning. Structural uncertainty is best understood not as a universal confidence estimator, but as a regime-sensitive evaluator of logical reasoning consistency.

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07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Phase controlled spectral topology, dynamic stability and sensitivity in Non-Hermitian Cavity Magnonics

Authors:
Sachin Singh Bargahi↗Rajeev Singh↗Biswanath Bhoi↗

arXiv:2606.16522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We theoretically investigate a non-Hermitian cavity-magnon platform in which coherent photonmagnon interactions and reservoir-mediated dissipative coupling interfere through a single externally tunable phase. We show that this interference phase provides a universal control parameter that continuously rotates the effective coupling between Hermitian and anti-Hermitian regimes, enabling dynamic transitions between level repulsion and level attraction without modifying intrinsic system parameters. The resulting phase-controlled non-Hermitian topology gives rise to exceptional points, linewidth engineering, and zero-damping conditions. Owing to the propagation-direction dependence of the dissipative interaction, the system further exhibits strong nonreciprocal transport and phase-tunable isolation arising from asymmetric hybridization of the cavity and magnon modes. Beyond its spectral and transport properties, we establish a direct connection between nonHermitian spectral topology and nonequilibrium population dynamics. The interference phase governs the stability of the hybrid modes, driving transitions between stable relaxation, critical slowing down near exceptional points, oscillatory energy exchange, and exponentially amplified dynamics. We further demonstrate that the same phase-controlled exceptional topology can be exploited for enhanced sensing, where the eigenvalue response exhibits the characteristic square-root scaling associated with exceptional-point physics. Our results provide a unified framework linking spectral topology, directional transport, dynamical stability, and sensing functionality through reservoirengineered interference in cavity magnonic systems.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SACE: Concept Erasure at the Semantic Singularity in Visual Autoregressive Models

Authors:
Siya Yang↗Nanxiang Jiang↗Zhaoxin Fan↗Yunfeng Diao↗

The rapid progress of visual autoregressive (VAR) models has unlocked a transformative frontier for high-fidelity text-to-image synthesis, while heightening concerns over the safety alignment of generated content. Naive application of existing erasure techniques to VAR models causes catastrophic semantic collapse and visual artifacts, since they are predominantly designed for the homogeneous denoising steps of diffusion models. To address this foundational challenge, we first propose the Semantic Singularity Axiom, which posits that any target semantic concept embedded within a prompt is definitively locked at Scale-0. Then rigorously validate this axiom through our proposed Incremental Semantic Saliency Analysis (ISSA),which also enable the community to transparently inspect the coarse-to-fine semantic injection process. Guided by this insight, we introduce the first scale-aware concept erasure framework (SACE) for VAR models. By strictly confining interventions to the first scale, our approach couples an Entropy-Regularized Erasure Objective to prevent high-entropy sampling degeneration, alongside a restorative preservation loss to safely anchor the integrity of entangled benign priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves surgical concept erasure performance across various domains with minimal training overhead, timely and elegently resolute the critical safety vulnerabilities inherent in emerging VAR architectures. Code is available at: https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE}{https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE.

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09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

Expanding the GUSome: Structure-guided identification and characterization of gut microbial β-glucuronidases

Authors:
Singhal↗Badgujar↗C. V↗Bihani↗S. C↗

The gut microbiome-encoded {beta}-glucuronidase (GUS) enzymes have a significant effect on human physiology through their deglucuronidation activity on endogenous and exogenous glucuronides. GUS activity also significantly influences the pharmacokinetics, efficacy and toxicity of various drugs including chemotherapeutic drugs. Given their crucial role in drug metabolism, GUS enzymes have emerged as promising targets for therapeutic intervention. Here, we have identified and characterized 79 unique GUS enzymes through a structure-guided approach. Structural modelling of these GUS enzymes revealed a conserved core and active-site residues with significant variations in the number and nature of the C-terminal domains. A new classification system based on the number and type of additional C-terminal domains is presented for the GUS proteins. Further, GUS enzymes have been categorized into different loop categories linked to their substrate preferences. The relationship between domain architecture and loop-type is explored by sequence similarity network analysis. We could successfully express, purify and validate GUS processing capability of a panel of identified GUS proteins. The nature of oligomer organization has been deciphered by SEC and DLS studies. Further, we have identified additional GUS enzymes capable of processing SN-38G, glucuronidated form of anticancer drug, irinotecan. These newly identified GUS enzymes will offer valuable insights into gut microbial GUS diversity and their role in understanding the population-specific drug-induced adverse effects on human health.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Structure-Semantic Co-optimized Latent Diffusion Model for Fast Visual Anagram Synthesis

Authors:
Xiang Gao↗Yunpeng Jia↗

Visual anagram is an intriguing form of art creation wherein a single image presents different conceptual interpretations under transformations such as flipping or rotation. Recent work has achieved visual anagram synthesis by leveraging pretrained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, yet still suffers from several key limitations including computational inefficiency, suboptimal aesthetic quality, and weak semantic fidelity and expressiveness. This work focuses on generating visual anagrams with substantially improved visual quality at minimal computational cost, thereby advancing intelligent creation of illusionary digital art. To increase image resolution while reducing time overhead, we adapt the cutting-edge parallel denoising algorithm from pixel-based T2I model to the adversarially distilled latent-based one, and accordingly propose a structure-semantic co-optimization (S2CO) framework to counteract the consequent visual degradation. As the core of our approach, S2CO framework comprises three key innovations: (\romannumeral1) null-text structure alignment optimization; (\romannumeral2) semantic enhancement optimization; (\romannumeral3) attention-guided noise fusion. Building upon these components, our method dubbed S2CO-Anagram is able to generate higher-resolution anagram images with noticeably superior visual harmony and semantic faithfulness than related SOTA approaches, all while achieving substantially faster inference speed. Code will be publicly available.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Do We Still Need Humans in the Loop? Comparing Human and LLM Annotation in Active Learning for Hostility Detection

Authors:
Ahmad Dawar Hakimi↗Lea Hirlimann↗Isabelle Augenstein↗Hinrich Sch\"utze↗

Instruction-tuned LLMs can annotate thousands of instances at low cost. This raises two questions for active learning (AL): can LLM labels replace human labels within the AL loop, and does AL remain necessary when entire corpora can be cheaply labeled? We investigate both on a new dataset of 277,902 German political TikTok comments (25,974 LLM-labeled, 5,000 human-annotated), comparing LLM and human annotation across seven conditions, four encoders, and 10 random seeds. Under a two-question interface that mirrors the human annotation task, LLM annotation at scale outperforms human-supervised classifiers at roughly one-tenth the cost (\$28 for GPT-5.2 Batch API vs. \$316 for Prolific). The advantage holds for both a closed-source (GPT-5.2) and an open-weight (Qwen3.5-122B-10B) LLM, is robust under soft-label evaluation, and is unlocked specifically by the two-question decomposition; a holistic single-prompt baseline only ties with human supervision. AL provides no reliable advantage over random sampling under either LLM annotator. However, error structure varies sharply: only GPT-5.2 under the two-question interface produces classifiers with near-human FP/FN balance, while other LLM variants over-flag border-control and economic competition discourse. We release the dataset and code.

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

Contagion Networks: Evaluator Bias Propagation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Authors:
Zewen Liu↗

arXiv:2606.20493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When large language models serve as evaluators in multi-agent systems, their systematic evaluation biases propagate through the agent network. We introduce Contagion Networks, a formal framework for measuring how evaluator biases spread across interacting LLM agents. In a controlled 3-agent experiment using DeepSeek-chat with three distinct evaluator bias profiles (structured, balanced, evidence-based), we measure the Cross-Agent Contagion Matrix Gamma_3 and find that evaluator biases consistently propagate between agents (gamma in [0.157, 0.352]), even within the same underlying model. We identify three propagation regimes governed by the spectral radius rho(Gamma_N), and demonstrate that homogeneous-model agents produce contagion coefficients 3-5x weaker than cross-model coefficients observed in prior work (MM-EPC: gamma approx 0.85-1.3), placing them in the suppression regime. We show that increasing evaluator committee size from k=1 to k=3 reduces effective contagion by 72.4%, providing an actionable mitigation strategy. We release the open-source Contagion Network experimental framework.

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13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Predictability as a Fine-Grained Measure for Privacy

Authors:
Linda Lu↗Karthik Sridharan↗

arXiv:2606.20546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) ensures rigorous individual-level privacy guarantees against even the most knowledgeable attackers, but its worst-case nature can impose a costly privacy-accuracy tradeoff. We introduce privacy via predictability, a fine-grained framework that explicitly incorporates the attacker's core knowledge, a compromised portion of the dataset generated by a stochastic process, and a specified family of queries. Predictability measures privacy leakage as the incremental gain in an attacker's ability to predict sensitive information about unknown individuals after observing the algorithm's output, beyond what can already be inferred from the compromised data. We show that predictability and DP are generally incomparable: each can be small while the other is large. However, in the worst-case regime where all but one individual is compromised, and all binary queries are considered sensitive, predictability implies mutual-information DP. More generally, predictability provides a finer-grained privacy metric tailored to specific sensitive information and specific attacker models. We introduce a general framework, using the generalized method of moments (GMM), to analyze asymptotic predictability when the compromised data is generated by a stationary, ergodic, mixing process. Using this analysis, we derive a predictability-calibrated output perturbation scheme for ERM. Our approach is complementary to DP and can be used alongside DP to provide fine-grained privacy control.

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Understanding Key Features of Time Series Foundation Models from Epidemic Forecasting

Authors:
Alireza Jafari↗Judy Fox↗Geoffrey C. Fox↗Madhav Marathe↗Aniruddha Adiga↗

arXiv:2606.19560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Seasonal influenza infects millions of people and causes substantial morbidity and mortality in the United States each year, making accurate short-term forecasting a core public-health need. Reliable forecasts of epidemic time series can inform vaccination timing, hospital staffing, and resource allocation, yet the comparative behavior of modern forecasting architectures on infectious-disease surveillance data remains insufficiently characterized. We address this gap through a systematic evaluation of regional influenza forecasting using influenza-like illness surveillance and influenza-associated hospitalization time series under both temporal and spatial generalization settings for 1-4-week-ahead prediction. We compare classical neural network architectures, numerical transformer-based models, pretrained time series foundation models, and LLM-based forecasting approaches. Across tasks, we demonstrate that a mixture-of-experts model that fuses multiple pretrained forecasters achieves the strongest overall performance, indicating that heterogeneous pretrained representations provide complementary predictive information. Our results further show that numerical transformer-based models produce reliable forecasts, while pretraining provides the largest gains at longer horizons, particularly when the pretraining domain is mechanistically aligned with influenza dynamics. In contrast, LLM-based time series methods underperform relative to numerical forecasters in this setting. Finally, we examine hospitalization information as both an auxiliary covariate and a pretraining source. Hospitalization signals provide complementary improvements in selected settings and clarify when additional surveillance streams enhance the robustness of multi-horizon forecasting. These findings provide actionable guidance on model selection, pretraining strategy, and auxiliary-signal use for influenza preparedness.

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

APEX: Adaptive Principle EXtraction A Three-Layer Self-Evolution Framework for Production AI Agents

Authors:
Ya-Chuan Chen↗Tien-Jen Lai↗Hsiang-Wei Hu↗

arXiv:2606.15363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-improvement in AI agents has emerged as a key research frontier: systems that modify their own prompts, workflows, and decision rules based on accumulated operational experience. The state-of-the-art Self-Harness framework [1] achieves 14–21% improvement on Terminal-Bench-2.0 by mining failure clusters and patching the agent harness. However, Self-Harness optimises only one dimension – the prompt harness – leaving behavioural principles and workflow topology unchanged. We propose APEX (Adaptive Principle EXtraction), a three-layer co-evolution framework that simultaneously evolves: (L1) the harness via failure-mode patching, (L2) behavioural principles via success-trace distillation [2], and (L3) the agent workflow topology via structural fitness-based selection [6]. We implement APEX on Joe [13], a production-grade super AI Agent built on NVIDIA Nemotron and designed as an Edge AI Agent Factory for the NVIDIA Agent Challenge 2026, managing a 15-node compute fleet using 114 real task traces collected over 18 days. APEX achieves an APEX Health Score of 0.570 (+90% vs. baseline 0.300) in a single evolutionary run, distilling 6 novel reusable principles and selecting a research-first workflow topology scoring 0.900 (+20%). Our results demonstrate that multi-dimensional co-evolution substantially outperforms single-axis harness optimisation, at a cost of only 4 LLM calls (~270 s) on a local qwen2.5-coder:32b instance.

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

IGLU: The Integrated Gaussian Linear Unit Activation Function

Authors:
Mingi Kang↗Zai Yang↗Jeova Farias Sales Rocha Neto↗

Activation functions are fundamental to deep neural networks, governing gradient flow, optimization stability, and representational capacity. Within historic deep architectures, while ReLU has been the dominant choice for the activation function, modern transformer-based models increasingly are adopting smoother alternatives such as GELU and other self-gated alternatives. Despite their empirical success, the mathematical relationships among these functions and the principles underlying their effectiveness remains only partially understood. We introduce IGLU, a parametric activation function derived as a scale mixture of GELU gates under a half-normal mixing distribution. This derivation yields a closed-form expression whose gating component is exactly the Cauchy CDF, providing a principled one-parameter family that continuously interpolates between identity-like and ReLU-like behavior via a single sharpness parameter $\sigma$. Unlike GELU's Gaussian gate, IGLU's heavy-tailed Cauchy gate decays polynomially in the negative tail, guaranteeing non-zero gradients for all finite inputs and offering greater robustness to vanishing gradients. We further introduce IGLU-Approx, a computationally efficient rational approximation of IGLU expressed entirely in terms of ReLU operations that eliminates transcendental function evaluation. Through evaluations on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and WikiText-103 across ResNet-20, ViT-Tiny, and GPT-2 Small, IGLU achieves competitive or superior performance on both vision and language datasets against ReLU and GELU baselines, with IGLU-Approx recovering this performance at substantially reduced computational cost. In particular, we show that employing a heavy-tailed gate leads to considerable performance gains in heavily imbalanced classification datasets.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Time-Series Foundation Model Embeddings for Remaining Useful Life Estimation

Authors:
Amir El-Ghoussani↗Michele De Vita↗Ronald Naumann↗Valiseios Belagiannis↗

arXiv:2606.11990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction is essential for industrial predictive maintenance, yet many learning-based approaches rely on extensive feature engineering or large labeled datasets to train task-specific sequence models. In this work, we introduce a lightweight learning approach, in which we leverage a frozen pretrained time-series foundation model (TSFM) and combine it with a small regression head for RUL estimation from multivariate sensor streams. More specifically, we use Chronos-2 as a frozen backbone to extract context window features and train a lightweight regression neural network for RUL prediction. Experiments on real-world industrial sensor data from two device types show that Chronos-2 features consistently improve over recurrent, convolutional, Transformer-based, and gradient-boosting baselines under the same preprocessing and evaluation protocol. We further analyze the impact of context length and find that performance improves significantly with longer histories, indicating that TSFM representation offer a practical and data-efficient alternative for RUL estimation in industrial settings.

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19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Vascular Phenotyping in Parkinson's Disease: Diabetes Mellitus Operationalizes a Microvascular Metabolic Syndrome Cluster Across PPMI Diagnostic Cohorts

Authors:
Belnavis↗Chiu↗Chen↗Thorpe↗Ofori↗

Background: Diabetes mellitus elevates Parkinson's disease (PD) risk, via hypothesized cerebrovascular mediation. Whether the diabetes/prediabetes vascular-risk phenotype concentrates in cardiometabolic risk or macrovascular events across prodromal and clinically diagnosed PD remains unresolved. Objectives: To quantify the vascular-risk burden associated with diabetes/prediabetes across the PPMI diagnostic cohorts to test whether this association differs by cohort. Methods: Cross-sectional analysis of 413 PPMI participants (76 healthy controls, 145 prodromal PD, 192 clinically diagnosed PD) examined diabetes/prediabetes (n = 73) and seven vascular risk factors. The Vascular Burden Score (0 to 7) was a priori partitioned into microvascular and macrovascular sub-scores. Modified Poisson regression estimated adjusted prevalence ratios (aPR), adjusted for age, sex, and body mass index. A cohort-by-diabetes interaction tested cross-cohort consistency. Sensitivity analyses incorporated nigral diffusion tensor imaging (PD-risk biomarker) and FreeSurfer white matter hypointensity volume (cerebrovascular marker). Results: Diabetes/prediabetes elevated Vascular Burden Score ({beta} = 0.53, 95% CI 0.29 to 0.77, p < 0.001) versus non-diabetic participants, with a non-significant cohort-by-diabetes interaction (F = 0.29, p = 0.747). Three microvascular factors survived false discovery rate correction: obesity (aPR 2.28), hypertension (aPR 1.60), and hyperlipidemia (aPR 1.45). Macrovascular events showed no diabetic amplification ({beta} = -0.06, p = 0.25). In the imaging-phenotyped subset, Vascular Burden Score components contributed classifier variance distinct from nigral microstructure. Conclusions: Diabetes/prediabetes operationalize a microvascular cluster stable across prodromal and idiopathic PD. Cardiometabolic phenotyping may complement established PD-risk biomarkers (dopamine transporter SPECT, nigral diffusion), pending longitudinal validation linking vascular phenotype to dopaminergic markers.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Automating Geometry-Intensive Compliance Checking in BIM: Graph-Based Semantic Reasoning Framework

Authors:
Zixuan Xiao↗Pei Troh Koh↗Jun Ma↗Jack C. P. Cheng↗

arXiv:2606.12065v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automating compliance check for geometry-intensive regulations remains a significant technical bottleneck in Building Information Modeling (BIM), primarily due to the semantic disparity between high-level regulatory logic and structured IFC data. Existing methods, often reliant on static rule templates, struggle to traverse multi-hop reasoning chains or resolve latent spatial dependencies across multiple building entities. To address these challenges, a Spatial-Geometric Reasoning System for Building Information Modeling (SGR-BIM) is proposed as an integrative graph-driven reasoning framework. SGR-BIM dynamically constructs a cross-modal knowledge graph that aligns user intent, regulatory semantics, and BIM geometry, enabling interpretable reasoning without rigid hard-coding. Validated on 679 expert-verified queries from fire safety codes, the framework achieves 84.3% accuracy, representing an 8.6% improvement over enhanced-tool single-agent baselines. This research provides a graph-based semantic reasoning paradigm, enhancing the transparency and flexibility of automated geometric compliance check workflows in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Oops, Wait: Discourse Tokens Matter in Reasoning Model

Authors:
Jaehui Hwang↗Byeongho Heo↗Sangdoo Yun↗Dongyoon Han↗

Recent studies suggest that even data-efficient training with ($\simeq$1K) reasoning trajectories can induce non-trivial reasoning capabilities in large language models through post-training. Such training corpora often contain iconic tokens such as "wait", "so", and "alternatively", which frequently appear in reasoning trajectories and may play a role in this process. This paper focuses on characterizing observable token-level patterns in post-training and a case study of how data-efficient supervised fine-tuning (SFT) differs from, and falls short of, large-scale post-training. To this end, we first identify tokens that correlate with correct answers along reasoning trajectories across models and training setups. We then focus on the distribution and (functional) roles of the "wait" token to primarily study the model trained in a data-efficient manner compared with the counterpart. Our study finds that discourse tokens are associated with correctness and a reasoning accuracy jump, even in data-efficient SFT. This suggests data-efficient SFT can partially reproduce discourse-token patterns to mimic meaningful reasoning behavior, but the patterns are less aligned with high-confidence answer transitions than those from large-scale post-training.

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22.
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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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Multi-Turn Reflective Masking Elicits Reasoning in Mask Diffusion Models

Authors:
Yanming Zhang↗Yihan Bian↗Jingyuan Qi↗Yuguang Yao↗Lifu Huang↗Tianyi Zhou↗

While reasoning on autoregressive (AR) models is often performed by chain-of-thought reasoning and reflection, their refinement of previous outputs still relies on fully sequential generation, even when only local edits are needed. In contrast, the masking mechanism in Mask Diffusion Models (MDMs) naturally supports explicit local edits on previous outputs, allowing selective refinement without discarding previous answers and generating another from scratch. While this property more closely aligns with how humans correct mistakes by iterative local refinement, existing MDMs do not support multi-turn masking and denoising. We propose Reflective Masking (RM), which elicits such an intrinsic reasoning capability in MDMs via lightweight post-training. RM provides a native test-time scaling, where an MDM iteratively revisits and revises its prior outputs based on evolving context. To exploit insights from previous turns like AR reasoning, we further introduce History Reference, a parameter-free mechanism that leverages intermediate denoising states during revision. Our approach requires no architectural changes and is easily applicable to existing MDMs. Across diverse tasks and modalities, including text generation, Sudoku, and image editing, Reflective Masking consistently outperforms standard masking-based baselines and demonstrates strong generality, positioning RM as a fundamental primitive for reasoning on MDMs.

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24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Hierarchical Advantage Weighting for Online RL Fine-Tuning of VLAs from Sparse Episode Outcomes

Authors:
Tongyan Fang↗Siyuan Huang↗Naiyu Fang↗Ganlong Zhao↗Zhongjin Luo↗Jianbo Liu↗Xiaogang Wang↗Ying Dong↗Hongsheng Li↗

arXiv:2606.17043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When pretrained VLA policies are fine-tuned through online RL, each rollout episode produces only a single binary outcome (success or failure), yet the actor update requires per-transition supervision. Existing approaches commonly reduce this sparse outcome to a single scalar reward or advantage signal, which conflates distinct forms of transition-level feedback and provides limited guidance once basic task success becomes achievable. First, a single scalar signal conflates the two objectives of viability and efficiency; once basic success is achieved, the binary label provides no gradient to distinguish efficient completions from slow ones. Second, real-world rollouts mix autonomous and intervention segments; naively assigning episode outcomes across these boundaries introduces incorrect credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Advantage-Weighted Behavior Cloning (HABC), which trains separate critic heads for these two objectives on different data subsets and combines their outputs with a state-adaptive balance. A state-adaptive gate $g_t$ merges their one-step advantages, prioritizing viability when success is uncertain and shifting to efficiency only when viability is high, and converts the result into per-transition weights on the actor loss. Intervention-aware credit assignment further restricts outcome labels to segments executed by the current policy, preventing supervision from leaking across intervention boundaries. In real-robot experiments on three contact-rich bimanual tasks, HABC raises success from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines of 36%, 44%, and 12% to 92%, 88%, and 38%.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Separable Neural Architectures as Physical World Models: from Mathematical Theory to Applications

Authors:
Reza T Batley↗Andrew Kichline↗Sourav Saha↗

arXiv:2606.14934v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work introduces the Separable Neural Architecture (SNA), a function representational class combining neural approximation with tensor decomposition. The SNA decouples localized coordinate functions (atoms) from global interactions governed by a sparse, low-rank interaction object. This architecture possesses a compact and smooth inductive bias well-suited for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). When viewed as a Galerkin trial space under the variational SNA (VSNA) framework, the formulation satisfies classical variational guarantees under Lax-Milgram: well-posedness, quasi-optimality, convergence, and stability. In high-dimensional spatiotemporal–parametric PDEs, the VSNA mitigates the curse of dimensionality by scaling algebraically rather than exponentially. Exploiting an entirely factorized, tensor-native alternating least squares (ALS) optimization framework reduces this cost to linear in dimension. The VSNA is validated across elliptic, hyperbolic, and parabolic systems, demonstrating close alignment with predicted algebraic and spectral scaling rates. We showcase the SNA as a "solve once, query anywhere" physical world model via two engineering case studies: a 7D parametric manufacturing simulation and an experimental thermal-to-property inversion pipeline for Inconel 718. The VSNA executes a 1,000,000-query Monte Carlo sweep in 102s on a standard laptop CPU, yielding a 150,000x speedup over a full-grid finite element baseline hosted on an NVIDIA A100 GPU. It further enables real-time generative inverse-mode reconstructions under 100ms. These results demonstrate that the SNA serves as a compact mathematical substrate for continuous parameter manifolds to enable real-time inversion, optimization loops, and rapid uncertainty propagation.

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