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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Determinants of non-utilization of insecticide-treated nets among children under five in Rwanda: analyses of the 2024 Rwanda malaria indicator survey

Authors:
Eduah↗K. N↗A. O↗

Background Insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) are effective for preventing malaria among children under five years, who bear a disproportionate burden of malaria. This study assessed the prevalence and determinants of ITN non-utilization among children under five in Rwanda using data from the 2024 Rwanda Malaria Indicator Survey (RMIS).Methodology This cross-sectional study utilized nationally representative data from the 2024 RMIS. Analyses were restricted to children under five residing in households that owned at least one ITN. The outcome was non-utilization of ITN, defined as not sleeping under an ITN the night preceding the survey. Survey-weighted descriptive statistics were used to estimate the prevalence of ITN non-utilization. Factors associated with non-utilization were identified using a survey-weighted Poisson regression model. Adjusted prevalence ratios (aPRs), 95% confidence intervals and p-values were reported.Results A total of 1,979 children were included in the study. The weighted prevalence of ITN non-utilization among children under five years was 20.11% (95% CI: 17.81 - 22.63). After adjusting for other factors, children aged 2 - 3 years were associated with an 83% higher prevalence of ITN non-utilization compared with those aged [&le;]1 year (aPR = 1.83, 95% CI: 1.423 - 2.352, p < 0.001). Compared with households that owned only one ITN, children in households with three or more ITNs were associated with a 76% lower prevalence of ITN non-utilization (aPR = 0.24, 95% CI: 0.171 - 0.332, p < 0.001). Children living in households with 5 - 7 members were associated with an 87% higher prevalence of ITN non-utilization compared with those in households with 1 - 4 members (aPR = 1.87, 95% CI: 1.476 - 2.358, p < 0.001).Conclusion The findings suggest that ITN utilization among children is influenced not only by household access to nets but also by household composition and dynamics that shape the allocation and use of available preventive resources.

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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion for Domain-Robust Whole-Slide Survival Analysis

Authors:
Yucheng Xing↗Ling Huang↗Pei Liu↗Jingying Ma↗Jiaqing Xu↗Kai He↗Mengling Feng↗

arXiv:2606.19966v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Whole-slide images (WSIs) are widely used for computational cancer prognosis. However, most existing methods primarily focus on in-domain performance and fail to generalize across clinical centers. This limitation stems from their reliance on pixel-derived representations that are highly susceptible to domain-specific artifacts caused by staining protocols and scanner hardware. We hypothesize that high-level pathology semantics, such as tumor grade and micro-environmental architecture, provide a domain-invariant semantic representation that mirrors the robust diagnostic logic of human pathologists. Therefore, we propose a Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion Survival (SAEFS) framework, where SAEFS derives semantic anchors from WSIs via Visual Question Answering (VQA), employs a dual-stream WSI evidence extraction architecture, uses Dirichlet-based Subjective Logic to model uncertainty, and fuses semantic and visual evidence through a cautious conjunction rule to avoid overconfident fusion from correlated sources. Trained exclusively on one source domain and evaluated zero-shot across four unseen domains, SAEFS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models both in prediction accuracy and reliability, improving the average C-index by 10.2%. Quantitative analyses further show that VQA-derived semantic features exhibit significantly lower cross-center divergence than pixel-derived features, highlighting their robustness for cross-center clinical applications.

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Augmenting Dysarthric Speech Severity Assessment with MOS Supervision

Authors:
Kaimeng Jia↗Minzhu Tu↗Zengrui Jin↗Siyin Wang↗Chao Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.18645v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dysarthria is a speech disorder marked by reduced intelligibility and communicative effectiveness. Automatic utterance-level assessment of dysarthric speech can support scalable speech monitoring and therapy-related analysis. Yet training such systems is bottlenecked by the scarcity of clinically annotated dysarthric speech. This work proposes to augment dysarthric speech assessment using data from speech synthesis evaluations, specifically human-annotated utterances with Mean Opinion Score (MOS) labels from the QualiSpeech corpus. Experiments show that fine-tuning on speech synthesis assessment data consistently improves performance on both intelligibility and naturalness prediction, while joint training yields gains primarily on naturalness. These results suggest that synthesis artifacts and dysarthric speech share perceptual commonalities, and speech synthesis evaluation corpora offer a practical augmentation source that reduces reliance on scarce clinical annotations.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Cross-Layer Discrete Concept Discovery for Interpreting Language Models

Authors:
Ankur Garg↗Xuemin Yu↗Hassan Sajjad↗Samira Ebrahimi Kahou↗

Interpreting language models remains challenging due to the existence of residual stream, which linearly mixes and duplicates features across adjacent layers, causing single-layer analyses to miss this cross-layer structure. Cross-layer sparse autoencoders (SAEs) address layer mixing but operate in continuous space, where concepts split across many neurons without clear boundaries. We introduce Cross-Layer Vector Quantized-Variational Autoencoder (CLVQ-VAE), a novel framework which maps representations from a lower layer to a higher layer through a discrete vector-quantization bottleneck, collapsing duplicated residual-stream features into compact, interpretable concept vectors. Our approach combines top-k temperature-based sampling with exponential moving average (EMA) codebook updates, providing controlled exploration of the discrete latent space while maintaining codebook diversity. Across both encoder- and decoder-based models on ERASER-Movie, Jigsaw, and AGNews, CLVQ-VAE outperforms clustering, single-layer vector quantized-variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE), and sparse autoencoder (SAE) baselines across three evaluation axes: removing identified concepts drops model accuracy by up to 93%, LLM judges rank our concepts first in 66.7% of comparisons, and human annotators recover model predictions from our visualizations with 78% accuracy versus 54% for clustering.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Entanglement-Rank Duality in Quadratic Phase Quantum States

Authors:
Zakaria Dahbi↗Amelle Za\"ir↗

arXiv:2605.05167v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Absolutely maximally entangled (AME) states are fundamental resources in quantum information theory, yet their construction and certification remain a nontrivial problem. Within the family of quadratic phase quantum states, defined by symmetric matrices $P$ over finite fields $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$, we show that the Rank-Purity Duality $\operatorname{Tr}(\rho_S^2) = |\mathbb{F}|^{-\operatorname{rk}_{\mathbb{F}}(P_{S,\bar{S}})}$ follows from additive character orthogonality and holds over all $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$, yielding a polynomial-time AME certification criterion. For square-free dimensions $d = p_1\cdots p_r$, the Chinese Remainder Theorem induces a prime-field factorisation. This implies additivity of Rényi-2 entropy and yields sharp obstruction criteria that rule out cases such as $\operatorname{AME}(4,6)$ and constrain the open case $\operatorname{AME}(8,6)$. As a proof of concept, we construct an explicit $\operatorname{AME}(17,10001)$ state, certified across all $65{,}535$ bipartitions, demonstrating that the framework scales to large systems and previously inaccessible local dimensions.

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

StanceNakba Shared Task: Actor and Topic-Aware Stance Detection in Public Discourse

Authors:
Kholoud K. Aldous↗Md Rafiul Biswas↗Mabrouka Bessghaier↗Shimaa Ibrahim↗Kais Attia↗Wajdi Zaghouani↗

We present StanceNakba 2026, a shared task on stance detection in polarized social media discourse related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, organized as part of Nakba-NLP 2026 at LREC-COLING 2026. The task introduces two subtasks: Subtask A (Actor-Level Stance Detection), which classifies English social media posts as Pro-Palestine, Pro-Israel, or Neutral; and Subtask B (Cross-Topic Stance Detection), which identifies Favor, Against, or Neither stances in Arabic posts toward two conflict-related topics, normalization with Israel and refugee presence in Jordan. The task is grounded in an annotated dataset of 2,606 social media posts. A total of 7 teams participated in Subtask A and 6 teams in Subtask B. Participating systems primarily fine-tuned Arabic and multilingual transformer-based models, including MARBERT, AraBERT, and DeBERTa-v3 variants, with several teams employing cross-validation, ensemble methods, and topic-conditioned architectures. The best-performing systems achieved a Macro F1 of 0.9620 on Subtask A and 0.8724 on Subtask B, demonstrating that transformer-based approaches are highly effective for conflict-domain stance detection while highlighting persistent challenges in cross-topic generalization and neutral class prediction.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

AfriqueLLM: How Data Mixing and Model Architecture Impact Continued Pre-training for African Languages

Authors:
Hao Yu↗Tianyi Xu↗Michael A. Hedderich↗Wassim Hamidouche↗Syed Waqas Zamir↗David Ifeoluwa Adelani↗

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly multilingual, yet open models continue to underperform relative to proprietary systems, with the gap most pronounced for African languages. Continued pre-training (CPT) offers a practical route to language adaptation, but improvements on demanding capabilities such as mathematical reasoning often remain limited. This limitation is driven in part by the uneven domain coverage and missing task-relevant knowledge that characterize many low-resource language corpora. We present \texttt{AfriqueLLM}, a suite of open LLMs adapted to 20 African languages through CPT on 26B tokens. We perform a comprehensive empirical study across five base models spanning sizes and architectures, including Llama 3.1, Gemma 3, and Qwen 3, and systematically analyze how CPT data composition shapes downstream performance. In particular, we vary mixtures that include math, code, and synthetic translated data, and evaluate the resulting models on a range of multilingual benchmarks. Our results identify data composition as the primary driver of CPT gains. Adding math, code, and synthetic translated data yields consistent improvements, including on reasoning-oriented evaluations. Within a fixed architecture, larger models typically improve performance, but architectural choices dominate scale when comparing across model families. Moreover, strong multilingual performance in the base model does not reliably predict post-CPT outcomes; robust architectures coupled with task-aligned data provide a more dependable recipe. Finally, our best models improve long-context performance, including document-level translation. Models and code have been released on [Huggingface](https://huggingface.co/collections/McGill-NLP/afriquellm) and [Github](https://github.com/McGill-NLP/AfriqueLLM).

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Improving Variational Counterdiabatic Driving with Weighted Actions and Computer Algebra

Authors:
Naruo Ohga↗Takuya Hatomura↗

arXiv:2505.18367v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Variational counterdiabatic (CD) driving is a disciplined and widely used method to robustly control quantum many-body systems by mimicking adiabatic processes with high fidelity and reduced duration. Central to this technique is a universal structure of the adiabatic gauge potential (AGP) over a parameterized Hamiltonian. Here, we reveal that introducing a new degree of freedom into the theory of the AGP can significantly improve variational CD driving. Specifically, we find that the algebraic characterization of the AGP is not unique, and we exploit this nonuniqueness to develop the weighted variational method for deriving a refined driving protocol. This approach extends the conventional method in two aspects: it assigns customized weights to matrix elements relevant to specific problems, and it effectively incorporates nonlocal information into local driving coefficients. We also develop an efficient numerical algorithm to compute the refined driving protocol using computer algebra. Our framework is broadly applicable and, in principle, it can replace any previous use of variational CD driving. We demonstrate its practicality by applying it to adiabatic evolution along the ground state of a parameterized Hamiltonian. This proposal outperforms the conventional method in terms of fidelity, as confirmed by extensive numerical simulations on quantum Ising models.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Private Learning with Public Feature Conditioning

Authors:
Shuli Jiang↗Walid Krichene↗Nicolas Mayoraz↗

arXiv:2606.18773v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study differentially private (DP) regression in settings where each data sample includes public, non-sensitive features – common in applications such as recommendation and advertising systems. While such label-DP or semi-sensitive-feature settings have been primarily explored in the context of classification, effective approaches for regression remain underexplored. We introduce Cond-DP, a conditioned variant of DPSGD that leverages the structure of public feature matrices to improve optimization under privacy constraints. Motivated by the observation that these public features often exhibit rapidly decaying spectra, Cond-DP incorporates a data-driven conditioning matrix to reshape the optimization landscape and accelerate convergence. We provide convergence guarantees for convex, strongly convex, and non-convex settings, and recover standard DPSGD as a special case when the conditioning matrix is the identity. We show how to construct an effective conditioning matrix for Cond-DP directly from public features, enabling provably faster convergence than DPSGD in private linear regression without incurring additional privacy cost. Empirically, Cond-DP with this conditioning matrix consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across a wide range of datasets and model architectures under label DP, demonstrating strong and robust performance in practice.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

When Top-1 Fails: Calibrating LoRA Monitors for Masked Diffusion LMs

Authors:
Lucky Verma↗Pratik Yadav↗

Discrete diffusion language model (DLM) fine-tuning inherits inexpensive diagnostics from denoising-time confidence monitors, but their PEFT-training meaning is untested. We test top-1 argmax concentration as a collapse warning. Across 816 LoRA/PEFT configurations from three DLM families, the warning fires for every configuration while logs record 0/816 actual collapses at the 200 step horizon, giving zero precision. The cause is pre-equilibrium saturation: top-1 concentration is already high before optimization and quickly becomes insensitive to final training stability. We then evaluate max LoRA gradient norm, a parameter-side signal that samples gradient routing rather than token concentration. On a pooled held-out LLaDA-family split, a train-optimized threshold identifies top-decile final-loss configurations with precision 0.68 and F1=0.79, above the all-positive top-1 baseline even at the lower split-bootstrap confidence bound. Autoregressive controls and cross-family threshold failures bound the result to short-horizon DLM-LoRA inspection rather than a universal collapse detector. Workflow: drop top-1 as a PEFT alarm, log max-gradient early in training, and calibrate thresholds per DLM family before routing runs for inspection.

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11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum sensing through bosonic-fermionic Bell-state transitions in two-photon interference

Authors:
Chahat Kaushik↗Vimlesh Kumar↗G. K. Samanta↗

arXiv:2606.14408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference has become a central resource for quantum sensing and metrology owing to its sensitivity to temporal delay and photon indistinguishability. However, existing HOM-based sensing schemes generally rely on inserting a sample into one arm of the interferometer, making the measurement vulnerable to optical loss, alignment instability, and bandwidth-dependent distortion of the interference profile. Here, we demonstrate a symmetry-controlled quantum sensing scheme based on continuous transitions between symmetric (bosonic-like) and antisymmetric (fermionic-like) Bell states in two-photon interference. By imprinting a geometric phase onto the classical pump beam and transferring it to polarization-entangled photons generated via spontaneous parametric down-conversion, we coherently tune the exchange symmetry of the entangled state without altering the temporal or spectral indistinguishability of the photons. The HOM response evolves continuously from bunching to antibunching with a sine square phase dependence, producing a coincidence modulation of approximately 10 * 10^4 counts s^-1 counts/s. In contrast to conventional HOM sensing, the phase-modulation linewidth remains fixed at pi/2, independent of photon bandwidth. Using a birefringent crystal placed directly in the pump beam, we measure thermo-dispersive birefringence with a resolution of the order of 10^{-6} over a broad temperature range. Our results establish exchange symmetry as a controllable resource for robust quantum sensing and symmetry-engineered photonic quantum information processing.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Which Directions Matter? Sparse Design for Affine Robust Optimization

Authors:
Pedro Chumpitaz-Flores↗My Duong↗Juan S. Borrero↗Kaixun Hua↗

arXiv:2606.14648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust machine learning and optimization rely on the uncertainty model choice. We investigate which uncertainty directions a model must cover when defined by a finite dictionary and a budget constraint. Selecting a subset forms an atomic uncertainty set with a closed form support function, yielding tractable robust programs for affine objectives. We propose a data driven selection rule based on a coverage objective over evaluation directions, including gradients, adversarial perturbations, or shifts observed on held out data. We prove this objective is monotone and submodular, supporting a greedy method with a $(1-1/e)$ approximation guarantee and a matching hardness barrier. We also provide a certificate bounding the loss from the selected subset and a radius calibration rule with out of sample control.

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

LLM Doesn't Know What It Doesn't Know: Detecting Epistemic Blind Spots via Cross-Model Attribution Divergence on Clinical Tabular Data

Authors:
Akshat Dasula↗Prasanna Desikan↗Jaideep Srivastava↗

arXiv:2606.19509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to structured clinical data, yet whether they can recognize the limits of their own knowledge on such tasks remains unexplored. We study this question through the lens of cross-model attribution divergence with the goal of reducing epistemic uncertainty for structured tasks, comparing Qwen 2.5 7B and XGBoost on a prediction task via attribution divergence analysis. We report four findings. First, LLM verbalized confidence is epistemically vacuous, it outputs a near-constant (0.856-0.937) regardless of whether accuracy is 49% or 75.3%, tracking prompt format rather than prediction quality. Second, the LLM exhibits an inverse difficulty effect: accuracy drops to 64.8% when XGBoost is 99% correct, but matches XGBoost (73.8% vs. 73.1%) when it is moderately uncertain. Third, few-shot examples and SHAP-derived feature evidence are orthogonal, super-additive interventions: they reduce the Attribution Disagreement Score (ADS) from 1.54 to 0.38 and improve accuracy from 49% to 75.3% without training. Fourth, a cross-model calibrator that determined LLM reliability using attribution divergence signals reduces expected calibration error from 0.254 to 0.080, replacing uninformative verbalized confidence with patient-specific reliability estimates, without accessing model internals or requiring repeated inference. We frame these findings as a cold start problem for LLMs on structured data and outline a path toward genuine epistemic self-awareness.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

VQE as Initial State Preparation for QPE on Heisenberg Spin-Glass Hamiltonians

Authors:
Elijah Pelofske↗Stephan Eidenbenz↗

arXiv:2606.15061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) is the quantum algorithmic workhorse for computing ground state energies of quantum Hamiltonians with quantum computers. Ground state energy calculation of physical systems is perhaps the most promising use case for quantum computing in terms of scientific and commercial value with a plausible path to outperformance of classical alternatives. This path, however, hinges on the availability of initial states for QPE with significant overlap with the true ground state. Using extensive (classical) numerical computations, we study whether the NISQ-era algorithm VQE (Variational Quantum Eigensolver) could be used to efficiently prepare high-overlap states of disordered fully-connected anisotropic Heisenberg spin glass quantum Hamiltonians with up to $15$ qubits. We find that (i) – consistent with widely held, but rarely numerically illustrated beliefs – VQE is generally unable to efficiently converge to the ground state for our Hamiltonians, which is a well-known issue with VQE due to a variety of factors including vanishing gradients and local minima; (ii) low energy states do not necessarily have large ground-state overlap, but there is typically a correlation between the two measures; (iii) adding more than three layers to the VQE ansatz neither improves overlap nor the energies found; and (iv) the best-found overlap scaling as a function of the Hamiltonian system size is not strongly exponentially decreasing, suggesting potential for VQE to be a heuristic state preparation algorithm for QPE.

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

Generalization Hacking: Models Can Game Reinforcement Learning by Preventing Behavioral Generalization

Authors:
Frank Xiao↗Mary Phuong↗

arXiv:2606.12016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model post-training, and in particular reinforcement learning (RL), is one of the primary mechanisms by which developers can shape models' values and behaviors. However, as models become increasingly evaluation and training aware, they may be motivated to resist training when the perceived objective conflicts with their current values, undermining developers' ability to detect misalignment and correct model behavior through further training. In this paper, we demonstrate generalization hacking, in which a model collects reward during RL while preventing the rewarded behavior from generalizing. We construct a model organism on Qwen3-235B-A22B, finetuning on synthetic documents describing training awareness and self-inoculation, a novel mechanism in which the model frames compliance as context-specific in its chain of thought, without demonstrating or instructing either behavior. The model organism achieves train-time harmfulness comparable to controls while maintaining a persistent ${\sim}15$ percentage point compliance gap across 700 steps of RL. Additionally, a control organism trained only on training awareness documents independently discovers inoculation-like reasoning under RL pressure, developing its own compliance gap despite never being exposed to the concept. Because the generalization-hacking organism receives high reward throughout, standard training metrics provide no signal that generalization has failed. Our results constitute the first demonstration that a model can actively resist RL behavioral modification while maintaining high reward, suggesting that as models become more capable and training-aware, they may be able to undermine the training process itself.

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16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Continual Quadruped Robots Coordination via Semantic Skill Discovery

Authors:
Daoqing Wang↗Yuchen Xiao↗Weixuan Huang↗Zhilong Zhang↗Shenghua Wan↗Meng Li↗Lei Yuan↗Yang Yu↗

arXiv:2606.08102v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-quadruped coordination has attracted increasing attention due to its enhanced payload capacity, broader contact coverage, and improved adaptability to challenging tasks. Existing methods for multi-quadruped manipulation typically focus on predefined or closed task families, often relying on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to train task-specific coordination policies. However, such methods struggle in open-ended continual learning settings, where tasks arrive sequentially and robots are expected to acquire new coordination skills while reusing previously learned ones without catastrophic forgetting. To address this challenge, we propose Conquer, a semantic skill-library framework that formulates continual multi-quadruped coordination as a retrieve-adapt-update process. First, to accommodate varying team sizes across tasks, we design a team-structured Self-Allies-Goal (SAG) backbone that supports variable-cardinality robot teams by explicitly modeling each robot's own state, teammate context, and task goal. For each incoming task, Conquer constructs a task-level semantic descriptor from pre-execution information and retrieves a relevant skill from the library for adaptation. After successful execution, Conquer updates the skill library by extracting trajectory-level semantic descriptors and organizing them according to semantic distance, thereby enabling continual skill accumulation and cross-task knowledge transfer. Simulation experiments show that Conquer achieves a final average success rate of 95.6%, demonstrating strong forward transfer and negligible catastrophic forgetting. Real-world rollouts on Unitree Go2 teams further validate the deployment feasibility of Conquer for practical multi-quadruped coordination. Simulation and real-robot demonstration videos are available at: https://conquer-project.pages.dev/.

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

Can AI Agents Synthesize Scientific Conclusions?

Authors:
Hayoung Jung↗Pedro Viana Diniz↗Jos\'e Reinaldo Corr\^ea Roveda↗Abner Fernandes da Silva↗Haeun Jung↗Enoch Tsai↗Aleksandra Korolova↗Manoel Horta Ribeiro↗

Scientific AI agents increasingly retrieve evidence, reason across sources, and synthesize conclusions used in consequential decisions. Yet, their ability to do so in high-stakes domains such as health remains unclear. We introduce SciConBench, a large-scale live benchmark of 9.11K questions and expert-written conclusions from systematic reviews to evaluate open-domain scientific conclusion synthesis. The benchmark draws on an expert-validated automated evaluation pipeline that decomposes conclusions into atomic facts and measures correctness and comprehensiveness via factual precision and recall. To mitigate data leakage, we further introduce SciConHarness, a clean-room evaluation harness that equips agents with controlled web interaction to ensure valid measurement. Evaluating 8 frontier models and deep research agents, we find that factual quality remains low: under clean-room settings, the best agent achieves only a factual F1 of 0.337. Our clean-room setting consistently reduces performance relative to unconstrained evaluation, suggesting that leakage inflates estimates of models' true synthesis capabilities. Finally, we audit consumer-facing agents (e.g., Google AI Overview, OpenEvidence) and find they frequently generate incomplete and sometimes contradictory conclusions, even when the ground-truth answer is available. Overall, our results show that reliable synthesis of scientific conclusions remains an open challenge, and that clean-room evaluation is essential for assessing open-domain AI agents.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Using Seismic Statistical Features and VQ-VAE to Improve Spatiotemporal Seismicity Predictability

Authors:
Wei Quan↗Denise Gorse↗

arXiv:2606.10069v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper we build upon a previous study in which we demonstrated, using XGBoost and earthquake catalogue data from Japan and Chile, that a set of 60 seismic statistical features (SSFs) had much greater predictive value than a set of 428 generic time series features from the tsfresh package. We here extend this previous work in two key ways, focusing on data from Japan as a large dataset is necessary in order to allow for the training of a deep learning (autoencoder) model. First, we move from whole-region prediction (considering, for each candidate event, the likelihood of an event M $\geq$ 5.0 anywhere in the region in the next 15 days) to localised predictions in which both the region of feature computation and the region of prediction are restricted to a circle of radius 24 km around the candidate event, and we show that performance remains excellent, similar to our previous whole-region study for the same area. Second, we here couple this proven set of SSFs, based on one-dimensional (catalogue) data, with a novel feature based on two-dimensional seismic maps, obtained by training a VQ-VAE model to reproduce such maps as output and identifying a measure of its error in doing so with a localised build-up of crustal stress. We show that while localised prediction based on SSFs can be effective alone, with test AUC values as high as those obtained in the case of Japan in our previous whole-region study, the inclusion of the new natively-spatial VQ-VAE-derived feature, top-ranked by SHAP analysis, can enhance performance and additionally appears to near-wholly replace the traditionally-computed $b$-value in terms of feature usage.

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

A Self Consistency Based Reranking for Narrative Question Answering

Authors:
Molham Mohamed↗Ali Hamdi↗

Narrative question answering (NQA) is a challenging task in natural language processing that requires models to understand long textual contexts, capture relationships across events, and generate coherent responses. Despite recent advances in pretrained language models, most existing approaches rely on a single decoding output during inference, making them sensitive to generation variability and often resulting in incomplete or inconsistent answers .To address this limitation, we propose a self-ensemble Self-Consistency-Based reranking framework for narrative question answering. The proposed method generates multiple candidate answers for each story-question pair and selects the final answer based on semantic agreement among the generated responses. This allows the model to explore diverse answer formulations while improving robustness through consensus-based selection without requiring modifications to the underlying architecture .The framework combines pretrained and fine-tuned language generation with multi-answer inference and similarity-based reranking. We evaluate the proposed approach on the NarrativeQA dataset using multiple models, including FLAN-T5 (Base and Small) and Pegasus-Large, under both baseline and fine-tuned settings .Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves performance across all models. In particular, FLAN-T5-Base achieves the best overall performance, improving from 82.32% to 86.66% (+4.34%) when combined with self-ensemble inference. Additionally, the largest improvement is observed with Pegasus-Large, which increases from 72.50% to 87.07% (+14.57%), highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

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

The Scaffold Effect: How Prompt Framing Drives Apparent Multimodal Gains in Clinical VLM Evaluation

Authors:
Doan Nam Long Vu↗Simone Balloccu↗

arXiv:2603.28387v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trustworthy clinical AI requires that performance gains reflect genuine evidence integration rather than surface-level artifacts. We evaluate 12 open-weight vision-language models (VLMs) on binary classification across two clinical neuroimaging cohorts, \textsc{FOR2107} (affective disorders) and \textsc{OASIS-3} (cognitive decline). Both datasets come with structural MRI data that carries no reliable individual-level diagnostic signal. Under these conditions, smaller VLMs exhibit gains of up to 58\% F1 upon introduction of neuroimaging context, with distilled models becoming competitive with counterparts an order of magnitude larger. A contrastive confidence analysis reveals that merely mentioning MRI availability in the task prompt accounts for 70-80\% of this shift, independent of whether imaging data is present, a domain-specific instance of modality collapse we term the scaffold effect. Expert evaluation reveals fabrication of neuroimaging-grounded justifications across all conditions, and preference alignment, while eliminating MRI-referencing behavior, collapses both conditions toward random baseline. Our findings demonstrate that surface evaluations are inadequate indicators of multimodal reasoning, with direct implications for the deployment of VLMs in clinical settings.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Few-Shot Resampling for Scalable Statistically-Sound Data Mining

Authors:
Leonardo Pellegrina↗Fabio Vandin↗

arXiv:2606.11235v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A key step in knowledge discovery is the evaluation of data mining results. In several applications, including pattern mining, graph analysis, and others, this step includes the evaluation of the statistical significance of the results, to avoid spurious discoveries due only to noise or random fluctuations in the data. While specialized procedures have been developed for some specific applications, resampling-based approaches are widely used, in particular for complex analyses where analytical results cannot be derived. However, current resampling-based approaches require the generation and analysis of thousands of resampled datasets, and are therefore impractical for large datasets or computationally intensive analyses. In this paper, we introduce FewRS, a simple and effective resampling-based approach to assess the statistical significance of data mining results with rigorous guarantees on the probability of false discoveries. Our approach can be used in every situation where resampling-based approaches are applied. FewRS builds on our derivation of a novel bound to the supremum deviation of test statistics representing the quality of data mining results. We prove that FewRS needs to generate and analyze an extremely small number of resampled datasets, leading to a highly scalable approach with wide applicability. We test our approach on common tasks such as pattern mining and network analysis. In all cases, our approach results in a reduction of up to two orders of magnitude in running time compared to the state of the art, while preserving high statistical power, enabling the statistical validation of data mining results on large-scale real-world datasets.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Few shot chain-of-thought driven reasoning to prompt LLMs for open ended medical question answering

Authors:
Saeel Sandeep Nachane↗Ojas Gramopadhye↗Prateek Chanda↗Ganesh Ramakrishnan↗Kshitij Sharad Jadhav↗Yatin Nandwani↗Dinesh Raghu↗Sachindra Joshi↗

In this paper, we propose a modified version of the MedQA-USMLE dataset, named MEDQA-OPEN, which contains open-ended medical questions without options to mimic clinical scenarios, along with clinician-approved reasoned answers. Additionally, we implement a prompt driven by Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning, CLINICR, to mirror the prospective process of incremental reasoning, reaching a correct response to medical questions. We empirically demonstrate how CLINICR outperforms the state-of-the-art 5-shot CoT-based prompt (Liévin et al., 2022). We also present an approach that mirrors real-life clinical practice by first exploring multiple differential diagnoses through MCQ-CLINICR and subsequently narrowing down to a final diagnosis using MCQ-ELIMINATIVE. Finally, emphasizing the importance of response verification in medical settings, we utilize a reward model mechanism, replacing the elimination process performed by MCQ-ELIMINATIVE.

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

Reason, Then Re-reason: Cross-view Revisiting Improves Spatial Reasoning

Authors:
Chaofan Ma↗Zhenjie Mao↗Yuhuan Yang↗Fanqin Zeng↗Yue Shi↗Yingjie Zhou↗Xiaofeng Cao↗Jiangchao Yao↗

Spatial reasoning from egocentric videos is inherently challenging because the observable evidence is constrained by the camera trajectory. Existing methods rely on single-turn inference, forcing models to resolve geometric ambiguity through semantic priors rather than verifiable evidence. We argue that spatial reasoning should be revisitable: conclusions formed under limited evidence should remain open to revision when complementary viewpoints become available. Building on this insight, we propose Reason, then Re-reason (ReRe), a training-free, inference-time framework with two phases: in the Reason Phase, an MLLM forms a spatial hypothesis from the original video; in the Re-reason Phase, it verifies or revises the hypothesis by observing a synthesized novel-view video. To enable effective cross-view revisiting, we design a Geometry-to-Video pipeline that renders strategically complementary novel views from predicted 3D geometry. These views feature an elevated, oblique perspective with scene-spanning coverage, while preserving the MLLM's native video interface without architectural modifications. Extensive evaluations on VSI-Bench and STI-Bench demonstrate that ReRe substantially boosts open-source MLLMs to rival proprietary state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://zhenjiemao.github.io/ReRe/

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24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Optimal Decoding of Small Codes by Density Matrix Propagation

Authors:
Anthony Benois↗Pierre Cussenot↗Gr\'egoire Misguich↗Nicolas Sangouard↗Kiara Hansenne↗

arXiv:2606.14455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate and efficient decoding is a crucial component for achieving fault-tolerant quantum computing. Realistic circuit-level noise introduces temporal correlations and degeneracy, making optimal (maximum-likelihood) decoding computationally intractable in general. As a result, practical decoders rely on heuristic approximations, and it is generally difficult to quantify how suboptimal they are, as this strongly depends on the code and noise model considered. In this work, we study the accuracy of practical decoding algorithms under circuit-level noise by comparing them against a maximum likelihood decoding benchmark. Our approach propagates the density matrix through the full memory experiment and computes the optimal decoding decision for each syndrome history. We introduce pruning techniques with rigorous bounds, allowing us to access larger numbers of syndrome-extraction rounds. We apply this framework to small instances of the repetition code and a cellular automaton code, and benchmark minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM), belief propagation with ordered statistics decoding (BP+OSD), Tesseract, and Planar decoders against optimal decoding. While standard decoders remain close to optimal for the repetition code, we find significant deviations for the cellular automaton code, with BP+OSD deteriorating already in experimentally relevant noise regimes. Moreover, the pruning method developed here highlights that, at low physical error rates, only a narrow fraction of syndrome histories contributes significantly to the logical error rate.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Mind the Perspective: Let's Reason Recursively for Theory of Mind

Authors:
Chao Lei↗Guang Hu↗Meng Yang↗Yanbei Jiang↗Nir Lipovetzky↗

arXiv:2606.11724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning requires inferring agents' beliefs from partial and asymmetric observations, which remains an open challenge for LLMs. Existing prompting-based approaches improve ToM reasoning through observable-event filtering or temporal belief chains, without explicitly modeling nested beliefs. We introduce RecToM, an inference-time framework for ToM reasoning that models nested beliefs via recursive perspective construction. RecToM constructs each character perspective from the preceding character perspective along the character chain specified by the question, reducing higher-order belief questions to actual-world questions within the final constructed perspective. We further provide a KD45 analysis showing that RecToM's perspective construction induces a well-formed belief modality beyond simple event filtering. Experiments on ToM benchmarks, including Hi-ToM, Big-ToM, and FanToM, across multiple LLM backbones show that RecToM consistently outperforms recent advanced approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Notably, RecToM reaches 100\% accuracy on Hi-ToM with GPT-5.4 and Qwen3.5, a benchmark requiring higher-order ToM reasoning.

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