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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

A Multifaceted Analysis of Social Biases in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly become indispensable tools for acquiring information and supporting human decision-making. However, ensuring that these models uphold fairness across varied contexts is critical to their safe and responsible deployment. In this study, we undertake a comprehensive examination of four widely adopted LLMs, probing their underlying biases and inclinations across the dimensions of politics, ideology, alliance, language, and gender. Through a series of carefully designed experiments, we investigate their political neutrality using news summarization, ideological biases through news stance classification, tendencies toward specific geopolitical alliances via United Nations voting patterns, language bias in the context of multilingual story completion, and gender-related affinities as revealed by responses to the World Values Survey. Results indicate that while the LLMs are aligned to be neutral and impartial, they still show biases and affinities of different types.

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

PhoneHarness: Harnessing Phone-Use Agents through Mixed GUI, CLI, and Tool Actions

Phone agents are increasingly expected to complete real mobile workflows rather than merely predict the next screen action. However, much of the current mobile-agent literature still evaluates agents primarily as GUI controllers that observe a screen, emit taps and swipes, and are scored by target app state. Real phone-use tasks are broader: they require deciding when to use app GUIs, device-side commands, or structured tools, while leaving evidence that the intended side effect actually occurred. We introduce PhoneHarness, a mixed-action benchmark and execution harness for studying phone-use agents on verifiable mobile workflows. PhoneHarness runs a device-side agent loop over GUI, CLI, and host-side tool actions, combining deterministic action routing with bounded GUI delegation and auditable execution traces. Its benchmark, PhoneHarness Bench, evaluates whether agents complete tasks with observable side effects, not only whether they produce plausible final answers. On the annotated evaluation split, PhoneHarness reaches a 75.0% pass rate, outperforming the strongest non-PhoneHarness settings by 12.9 percentage points. PhoneHarness and PhoneHarness Bench therefore play distinct but mutually dependent roles: the harness makes mixed phone workflows executable, while the benchmark measures whether agents can use that harness reliably and safely. Our findings suggest that reliable phone automation depends on action-surface routing and verifiable execution, not only visual GUI control.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Room-Specialized Mixture-of-Experts for In-Home ADL Recognition with Ambient Sensors

Monitoring activities of daily living (ADLs) in the home is a promising approach for tracking dementia progression in older adults. While ambient sensor-based ADL systems are well-studied, most existing ADL recognition systems rely on globally trained models that ignore the spatial organization of in-home activities. In real deployments, where training data are sparse and highly home-specific, global transformer models may fail to capture room-dependent behavioral structure. We propose a deterministic Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture for in-home ADL recognition, in which each expert is a compact transformer specialized to one room of the home (bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, living area). Input segments are routed using a deterministic gating strategy based on room-level motion activity and time-of-day priors for sleep-related behaviors. Unlike learned routing networks, the proposed gate encodes domain knowledge about where ADLs are likely to occur, reducing model complexity under limited per-home training data. By decomposing ADL recognition into room-specific activity spaces, the proposed architecture reduces competition between dominant and low-frequency activities under highly imbalanced residential data. We evaluated the system on data collected via low-cost ambient sensors (motion, light, temperature, humidity) and Raspberry Pi edge devices across five homes, with ground-truth ADL labels provided by participants and caregivers. Across the five homes, the proposed MoE consistently outperformed global transformer, 1D CNN, and Random Forest baselines, achieving macro-F1 scores ranging from 0.60 to 0.88, highlighting the importance of home-specific modeling in real-world deployments. These findings suggest that room-aware expert specialization may provide a practical and interpretable strategy for low-data ADL recognition in real-world residential environments.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Robust semi-supervised scRNA-seq integration from virtual adversarial learning

Single-cell RNA sequencing integration methods that rely solely on transcriptomic data often struggle to preserve fine-grained distinctions between closely related cell subtypes. As a result, cell populations that are separable in the raw data may become over-mixed after integration, reducing biological resolution and interpretability. Incorporating marker gene information can potentially address these issues; however, the variability and complexity of available marker sets limit their effective application. To address this, we introduce scCRAFT+, a semi-supervised integration model that innovatively incorporates marker gene information through Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT). By jointly optimizing marker-derived supervision and transcriptome-wide representations, VAT enforces local prediction smoothness among transcriptionally similar cells, improving robustness to noisy marker annotations while enhancing both integration quality and cell type auto-annotation. This targeted approach significantly enhances annotation accuracy and robustness, particularly when faced with incomplete or incorrect marker gene sets. Benchmarking shows that scCRAFT+ achieves consistently stronger performance than current unsupervised and supervised integration approaches, resulting in improved integration quality and biologically meaningful sub-cell type auto-annotations.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Business as Rulesual: A Benchmark and Framework for Business Rule Flow Modeling with LLMs

Extracting structured procedural knowledge from unstructured business documents is a critical yet unresolved bottleneck in process automation. While prior work has focused on extracting linear action flows from instructional texts, such as recipes, it has insufficiently addressed the complex logical structures, including conditional branching and parallel execution, that are pervasive in real-world regulatory and administrative documents. Furthermore, existing benchmarks are limited by simplistic schemas and shallow logical dependencies, restricting progress toward logic-aware large language models.To bridge this Logic Gap, we introduce BREX, a carefully curated benchmark comprising 409 real-world business documents and 2,855 expert-annotated rules. Unlike prior datasets centered on narrow service scenarios, BREX spans over 30 vertical domains, covering scientific, industrial, administrative, and financial regulations. We further propose ExIde, a structure-aware reasoning framework that investigates five distinct prompting strategies, ranging from implicit semantic alignment to executable grounding via pseudo-code generation. This enables explicit modeling of rule dependencies and provides an out-of-the-box framework for different business customers without finetuning their own large language models. We benchmark ExIde using 13 state-of-the-art large language models. Our extensive evaluation reveals that executable grounding serves as a superior inductive bias, significantly outperforming standard prompts in rule extraction. In addition, reasoning-optimized models demonstrate a distinct advantage in tracing long-range and non-linear rule dependencies compared to standard instruction-tuned models.

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

Dynamic Link Prediction with Temporally Enhanced Signed Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.26290v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Temporal signed networks (TSNs) model the time evolution of cooperative and adversarial relationships that arise in applications such as social media analysis, trust and reputation systems, and financial transaction networks. While graph neural networks (GNNs) perform well for static or unsigned link prediction, effective learning in temporal signed graphs remains challenging due to the interaction of signed relations, evolving structure, and balance-theoretic constraints. To address this gap, we propose a modular temporal enhancement framework for signed GNNs that integrates historical context into otherwise static architectures. The framework introduces a Historical Context Integration Module (HCIM) that combines learnable recency-aware temporal weighting, LSTM-based embedding trajectory modeling, and multi-head temporal attention to capture both short- and long-term signed interaction dynamics. Historical information is fused with current node representations using either global or node-adaptive weighting, allowing the architecture-agnostic framework to accommodate heterogeneous temporal behaviors. We instantiate the approach on the Self-Explainable Signed Graph Transformer (SE-SGformer), preserving interpretability while extending it with temporal awareness. Experiments on real-world and synthetic TSNs, including Bitcoin OTC, Bitcoin Alpha, Reddit, and small-world network models, demonstrate consistent and statistically significant improvements over the static baseline.

07.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-24

Variable selection-combined causal mediation analysis for continuous treatments with application to large-dimensional biomedical data

Authors:

by Yajing Zhou, Kecheng Wei, Yahang Liu, Zhaoyang Li, Chen Huang, Guoyou Qin, Yongfu Yu Substantial progress has been made in the area of causal inference utilizing large-scale data, among which the estimation of causal mediation effects has attracted a lot of attention. However, existing large-dimensional causal inference primarily focuses on total effects or typical causal mediation effects under binary variable settings, placing less emphasis on large-scale covariate selection with continuous treatment and mediator. To address this, we propose a weighted semiparametric estimation framework that integrates the generalized outcome-adaptive LASSO method into generalized propensity score modeling to achieve estimation of causal mediation effects under continuous variable settings. Simulation results show that our proposed method outperforms other regularization-based methods in selection accuracy and estimation efficiency, which is achieved by incorporating outcome-related key variables and excluding noise covariates. From the perspective of achieving a stable balance between efficiency and bias, as well as high-dimensional information filtering, our method may serve as a compelling alternative that balances estimation efficiency with model interpretability and inferential robustness. We further conduct a real-world application based on the UK Biobank database, quantifying the causal mediation effects of apolipoprotein B levels within the association between potential diabetes risk and cancer incidence using large-scale healthcare and medical data.

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

Iterating Toward Better Search: A Two-Agent Simulation Framework for Evaluating Agentic Search Architectures in E-Commerce

arXiv:2606.12924v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a modular two-agent simulation framework for evaluating conversational shopping assistant architectures. An independent buyer agent, configured with personas, missions, and patience levels, is paired with an interchangeable responder that integrates with a real e-commerce search API. Holding the buyer constant across experiments enables controlled comparison of responder designs on identical scenarios. Using 2011 conversations across 14 persona buckets, we establish four empirical findings. First, rolling-window memory outperforms intent-extraction memory on all quality metrics while being 35% faster per query. Second, illustrating rapid evidence-driven iteration, a systematic failure analysis of a responder version enables targeted fixes that reduce failure and near-failure rates by 62% across the full dataset. Third, swapping the responder LLM backbone from Gemini~2.5 to Llama~3.3~70B costs 0.16–0.45 points despite identical architecture. Finally, we document systematic philosophical disagreement between frontier LLM judges: Gemini rewards process correctness while Claude demands concrete outcomes, despite using the same evaluation prompt.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

MRMU: A New Paradigm for Mendelian Randomization by Accounting for Measured Covariates and Unmeasured Confounders

Mendelian randomization (MR) is a powerful approach for causal inference, however, its reliability is frequently compromised by unadjusted covariates and unmeasured confounders, such as unmeasured pleiotropy and sample structure. To address these challenges, we introduce MRMU, a novel paradigm for the MR framework. Unlike traditional single-variable or multivariable MR methods, MRMU selects instrumental variables only from the exposure of interest and estimates one exposure effect at a time, while jointly accounting for measured covariates and unmeasured confounders. This design improves the reliability of MR analyses. In simulations and real data, MRMU achieved better type I error control, higher statistical power, and more accurate effect estimation than existing MR methods. Applying to coronary artery disease (CAD), MRMU identified robust cardiometabolic risk factors, including LDL-C, APOB, systolic blood pressure, body mass index, and smoking initiation, with consistent evidence across multiple CAD datasets. In contrast, traits such as HDL-C, height, and educational attainment, which were found to be significant by existing MR methods, were no longer supported by MRMU. MRMU further supported blood pressure-related traits, rather than lipid traits, as the more relevant pathway linking urate to CAD. Finally, by integrating large-scale plasma proteomics data, MRMU identified candidate CAD drug targets beyond established HMGCR- and PCSK9-related pathways, highlighting its utility for therapeutic target prioritization.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

A new class of degenerate solutions to the massless Dirac equation and their potential applications in optical memories

arXiv:2606.14256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this article, we present a novel class of degenerate solutions to the massless Dirac equation, corresponding to a wide variety of electromagnetic 4-potentials and fields, including both zero field and circularly polarized electromagnetic waves. An interesting property of these solutions is that the spin of the particles rotates in synchronization with the electric and magnetic fields of the electromagnetic waves. These results could be utilized for the development of optical memories based on materials supporting massless Dirac fermions, such as graphene.

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

NoiseTilt: Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernels for Diffusion Reward Alignment

arXiv:2606.18066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernel (NTRK), a reward-guided diffusion sampler that injects reward gradients through the noise term, leaving the pretrained reverse kernel unchanged and requiring only a single sample per step. Reward-guided sampling at inference time has greatly expanded the versatility of pretrained diffusion models. Yet existing methods face a trade-off. Gradient-based guidance shifts the reverse mean, steering generation but pushing intermediate states outside the region that the model was trained on and degrading quality. Search-based methods preserve quality but gain no gradient signal. No prior method achieves both. NTRK resolves this by keeping the reverse mean fixed and biasing the noise term toward high reward. We introduce a whitening operator, the central mechanism behind NTRK, that makes the reward gradient safe to inject as noise without losing its guiding signal. Across various reward alignment tasks, NTRK outperforms recent state-of-the-art baselines without losing sample quality. Remarkably, on aesthetic generation, NTRK surpasses the reward of the best baseline at 500 NFEs using only 25 NFEs, a 20$\times$ reduction in compute.

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

PolicyGuard: Towards Test-time and Step-level Adversary Defense for Reinforcement Learning Agent

arXiv:2606.12896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are becoming increasingly popular, the security of RL systems deserve more attention and exploration. In particular, recent work has revealed that RL agents are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where a victim agent behaves normally under standard conditions but executes malicious actions when a specific trigger is activated. Existing backdoor defenses for RL either require access to the agent's internal parameters, operate only at the model or trajectory level, or are limited to specific attack types. To ensure the security of RL agents, we propose \texttt{PolicyGuard}, a test-time step-level backdoor defense which leverages Gaussian Process (GP) posterior variance and adapts pseudo trajectories to enable uncertainty computation for individual time step. Besides, we also provide theoretical foundations to explain the efficacy of GP posterior variance. Extensive experiments across seven RL games demonstrate that PolicyGuard achieves state-of-the-art detection performance in most cases, with average AUROC of 0.856 for perturbation-based attacks and 0.859 for adversary-agent attacks.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Dimension-Free Convergence of Discrete Diffusion Models: Adjoint Equations Induce the Right Space

arXiv:2605.17232v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Discrete diffusion has become a leading framework for generative modeling in various applications including language, vision, and biology. Existing convergence theory, however, exhibits fundamental limitations. KL-based analyses diverge under singular priors such as the masked distribution, while bounds in total variation (TV) depend on the state space size $S$ and become vacuous for modern language tasks, where vocabularies contain hundreds of thousands of tokens. We develop a unified adjoint-equation-based framework that establishes dimension-free convergence guarantees in any integral probability metric (IPM). To the best of our knowledge, our bounds are the first to be entirely free of $S$ and applicable to both masked and uniform priors. Importantly, our theory relies only on a single standard rate-matrix regularity assumption and applies to general priors. Five novel techniques drive our improvements: working in the space of observables via adjoint equations rather than directly with probability measures, a regularity analysis that yields bounds on any IPM, a coupling argument that removes $S$-dependence under uniform transitions, and score-marginal cancellation and exit-routing techniques that remove $S$-dependence under masked transitions. Our framework thus sharply departs from prior analyses and avoids the shortcomings of pathspace-KL and existing TV-based approaches. Beyond convergence bounds, our framework provides a versatile toolkit for further theoretical study of discrete diffusion models, including principled choices of loss functions and dimension-free step complexity.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Constitutional On-Policy Safe Distillation

arXiv:2606.03089v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has emerged as an efficient post-training paradigm by using a teacher conditioned on privileged information to provide dense token-level supervision. Prior work has shown that OPSD can collapse in verifiable reasoning tasks, but safety alignment differs in that it is guided by high-level constitutions rather than explicit target answers, making it a natural setting to revisit dense distillation. However, our pilot study show that safety OPSD still suffers from severe collapse: constitutional conditioning contracts the teacher distribution toward short and overly conservative responses, and Reverse KL further amplifies this contraction into reduced expressiveness. We formalize this effect as geometric leakage under safety boundaries in a non-orthogonal semantic space, where safety pressure transfers into the expressiveness dimension. Based on this analysis, we propose Constitutional On-Policy Safe Distillation (COPSD), which first calibrates the teacher through a Cross-SFT cold-start and then performs constitution-conditioned on-policy distillation. Experiments on 12 benchmarks show that COPSD achieves a consistently stronger safety–helpfulness trade-off than baselines while substantially reducing the safety tax on general reasoning ability.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Understanding Deep Representation Learning via Layerwise Feature Compression and Discrimination

Over the past decade, deep learning has proven to be a highly effective tool for learning meaningful features from raw data. However, it remains an open question how deep networks perform hierarchical feature learning across layers. In this work, we attempt to unveil this mystery by investigating the structures of intermediate features. Motivated by our empirical findings that linear layers mimic the roles of deep layers in nonlinear networks for feature learning, we explore how deep linear networks transform input data into output by investigating the output (i.e., features) of each layer after training in the context of multi-class classification problems. Toward this goal, we first define metrics to measure within-class compression and between-class discrimination of intermediate features, respectively. Through theoretical analysis of these two metrics, we show that the evolution of features follows a simple and quantitative pattern from shallow to deep layers when the input data is nearly orthogonal and the network weights are minimum-norm, balanced, and approximate low-rank: Each layer of the linear network progressively compresses within-class features at a geometric rate and discriminates between-class features at a linear rate with respect to the number of layers that data have passed through. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first quantitative characterization of feature evolution in hierarchical representations of deep linear networks. Empirically, our extensive experiments not only validate our theoretical results numerically but also reveal a similar pattern in deep nonlinear networks which aligns well with recent empirical studies. Moreover, we demonstrate the practical implications of our results in transfer learning. Our code is available at https://github.com/Heimine/PNC_DLN.

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

E-MRL: Cross-view Aligned Evidence-driven Multimodal Reinforcement Learning for Reliable 3D Tumor Analysis

arXiv:2606.23888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show great promise in volumetric medical report generation, they frequently suffer from visual hallucinations and a lack of grounding in 3D CT data. Current Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) strategies typically optimize text fidelity alone, essentially rewarding correct diagnoses derived from language priors rather than genuine visual perception. To address this, we propose cross-view aligned Evidence-driven Multimodal Reinforcement Learning (Evidence-MRL, noted as E-MRL), a reliable RL reasoning framework that formulates the generation process as a Markov Decision Process of "diagnosis-localization-verification". Unlike standard approaches, our model is explicitly trained to identify a "key evidence slice" alongside the global diagnostic report, grounding its findings in verifiable visual evidence. Crucially, we introduce a novel cross-view consistency reward, which validates the semantic alignment between the golden-standard report and a local visual re-query of the selected key slice, providing additional rewards for correctly-localized reasoning. Experiments on large-scale 3D CT tumor datasets demonstrate that E-MRL significantly reduces hallucinations and improves diagnostic accuracy compared to SFT and RL baselines, offering a clinically interpretable solution for visually-grounded and tumor analysis.

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

ResEdit: Residual embeddings for precise generative image editing

Conditional diffusion image generators can be repurposed for editing through inversion, without the need for large-scale paired fine-tuning data. However, producing high-quality, targeted edits while maintaining image identity and global consistency remains challenging, as weakly conditioned inversion often embeds conflicting image features into the noise. We demonstrate that incorporating a residual image encoding as additional conditioning enables both improved identity preservation and better editability. We optimize this residual encoding to provide a strong conditioning signal for reconstruction, thereby reducing the reliance on inversion and susceptibility to its aforementioned pitfalls. To ensure this residual does not interfere with desired edits, we incorporate a gradient reversal-based optimization strategy that disentangles the residual from the edited condition. We illustrate our method's ability to produce high-fidelity results across precise intrinsic-based editing and relighting, and show proof-of-concept text-guided manipulation.

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

Stabilizing Physics-Informed Consistency Models via Structure-Preserving Training

arXiv:2602.09303v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a physics-informed consistency modeling framework for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) via fast, few-step generative inference. We identify a key stability challenge in physics-constrained consistency training, where PDE residuals can drive the model toward trivial or degenerate solutions, degrading the learned data distribution. To address this, we introduce a structure-preserving two-stage training strategy that decouples distribution learning from physics enforcement by freezing the coefficient decoder during physics-informed fine-tuning. We further propose a two-step residual objective that enforces physical consistency on refined, structurally valid generative trajectories rather than noisy single-step predictions. The resulting framework enables stable, high-fidelity inference for both unconditional generation and forward problems. We demonstrate that forward solutions can be obtained via a projection-based zero-shot inpainting procedure, achieving consistent accuracy of diffusion baselines with orders of magnitude reduction in computational cost.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Jolia: Concept-Level Vision-Language Alignment for 3D CT Contrastive Learning

Vision-language contrastive pretraining has become the dominant recipe for 3D medical foundation models, leveraging the large volumes of paired scans and reports produced in clinical practice. However, medical images usually span dozens of organs, and radiological reports are much longer than typical natural image captions and are composed of multiple structured sections. CLIP-style pretraining compresses this structure by encoding each modality into a single global token, at the risk of losing important details. We introduce ConQuer (Concept Queries), an image-text pretraining method that augments CLIP's global alignment with a set of localized alignments, one per concept. ConQuer splits the report into concept-specific sections and learns cross-attention queries that pool the matching image features without using any segmentation mask or spatial supervision. Contrastive learning is then applied independently for each concept. Concepts can be any unit of semantic localization; here, they are anatomical regions, one query per organ or gross body region. As a byproduct, each query learns attention maps focused on its concept, providing built-in spatial interpretability. We use ConQuer to train Jolia, a 3D CT foundation model on chest and abdominal CT. Jolia consistently outperforms a CLIP baseline on findings classification, report generation, and cross-center transfer, and sets a new state of the art across multiple public benchmarks. Jolia's weights will be released upon acceptance.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ReFree: Towards Realistic Co-Speech Video Generation via Reward-Free RL and Multilevel Speech Guidance

Speech-driven talking character animation seeks to generate life-like portrait videos that convey natural conversation behavior, aligning facial motion with spoken audio. Although recent advances in video generation have substantially improved realism in video-based animation, achieving both accurate lip articulation and expressive behavior remains challenging. Existing approaches typically trade off precise phoneme-to-lip synchronization against dynamic facial expressions and head motion, yielding animations that are either accurate yet rigid, or expressive but poorly synchronized. We address this challenge by proposing ReFree-S2V, a flow-matching speech-to-portrait animation framework that builds upon a pretrained video generation model to achieve fine-grained speech articulation and high-level expressive cues in speech-driven portrait animation. This model introduces a multi-level speech representation capturing phonetic and prosodic information at both local and global granularities. These representations are selectively injected into transformer blocks via learnable level selectors, enabling both accurate lip synchronization and natural expressive motion. To achieve natural head movements, we further introduce a novel reward-free reinforcement learning scheme into flow-matching training to discourage perceptually implausible motion without relying on handcrafted synchronization metrics or reward models, or the high cost of human preference annotation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReFree-S2V achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing methods in both quantitative lip-sync accuracy and qualitative human evaluations of naturalness and expressivity.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Predictive Analytics in E-Commerce for CustomerBehavior Forecasting using hybrid Ret-DNN withXGBoost Model

arXiv:2606.17931v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, electronic (E) commerce services have rapidly increased in the daily lives of people, which helpsthem to purchase products online. However, retail platforms have struggled to understand customer behavior and make it difficult to predict their future purchases. To overcome these challenges, this study proposes a hybrid Retail Deep NeuralNetwork (Ret-DNN) with an Extreme Gradient Boosting(XGBoost) model for capturing temporal features and tabular dynamics of retail data. First, data were sourced from a UnitedKingdom (UK)-based online retailer that contains transactions with almost 500,000 records. Then, the collected data were pre-processed using a series of techniques, such as data cleaning, outlier handling, temporal feature extraction, feature encoding, and z-score normalization, to ensure that the data were ready for model training and testing. Subsequently, the preprocessed data were fed into the Ret-DNN model, which acts as a feature extractor to understand the complete context of customer transactions. Further, the extracted data were fed as input into the XGBoost model, which predicted the final output as the purchase probability of customers. Finally, the proposed Ret-DNN XGBoost model achieved better results by attaining aMean Absolute Error (MAE) 0.2193 when compared to the existing Ret-DNN model. Keywords: Customer behavior forecasting, extreme gradientboosting, electronic commerce, predictive analytic, retail deepneural networks.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp connectivity bounds for the vacant set of random interlacements

arXiv:2504.02777v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider percolation of the vacant set of random interlacements at intensity $u$ in dimensions three and higher, and derive lower bounds on the truncated two-point function for all values of $u>0$. These bounds are sharp up to principal exponential order for all $u$ in dimension three and all $u \neq u_\ast$ in higher dimensions, where $u_*$ refers to the critical parameter of the model, and they match the upper bounds derived in the article arXiv:2503.14497. In dimension three, our results further imply that the truncated two-point function grows at large distances $x$ at a rate that depends on $x$ only through its Euclidean norm, which offers a glimpse of the expected (Euclidean) invariance of the scaling limit at criticality. The rate function is atypical, it incurs a logarithmic correction and comes with an explicit pre-factor that converges to $0$ as the parameter $u$ approaches the critical point $u_*$ from either side. A particular challenge stems from the combined effects of lack of monotonicity due to the truncation in the super-critical phase, and the precise (rotationally invariant) controls we seek, that measure the effects of a certain "harmonic humpback" function. Among others, their derivation relies on rather fine estimates for hitting probabilities of the random walk in arbitrary direction $e$, which witness this invariance at the discrete level, and preclude straightforward applications of projection arguments.

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

Augmenting Dysarthric Speech Severity Assessment with MOS Supervision

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.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

"That's AI Slop, You Bot!" Studying Accusations, Evidence, and Credibility in Online Discourse Towards LLM-Generated Comments

arXiv:2606.12073v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI has made fluent prose cheap to produce, breaking the old promise to readers that good writing meant real thinking. How have readers responded, and what can this tell us about changing anti-AI attitudes? We analyzed 25 million comments from Hacker News and Reddit (2023-2026), combining LLM judgment on 7,500 sampled accusations of AI use, sentiment trajectories, speech-act coding of 300 confirmed accusations of AI use, and a matched-control test of accused versus non-accused parent comments. We found that the pejorative-label share of accusations rose more than tenfold on both platforms while a placebo vocabulary of pre-2022 inauthenticity terms (shill, astroturf) did not. This shift reflected a fast-growing trend of branding any suspicious or seemingly inauthentic prose as "AI slop". The slop frame now constitutes 94 percent of pejorative mentions, with the dominant comments shifting in tone from mockery toward gatekeeping and structural protest. The key surprise comes from a matched-control test which found that prose features that statistically distinguish AI from human text do not predict which human text gets accused as AI. The new accusations work as social gatekeeping of perceived authenticity without actually screening for AI. This research extends signaling theory by showing that substitute signals used socially can grow even when inaccurate if the underlying detection problem cannot be solved at the non-expert level. It shows that AI's effects on writing from the reader side are distinct from those on the production (writer) side. Detection technology cannot resolve this dynamic because the social function of accusations is increasingly to perform social gatekeeping and in-group signaling as opposed to identifying AI-generated writing.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Low-power analogue neural networks with trainable nonlinear connections for continuous control

arXiv:2606.23742v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical neural networks promise low-power machine learning by computing directly with analogue device physics, but most architectures force nonlinear device responses to act as scalar weights. Inspired by Kolmogorov-Arnold networks, we place trainable nonlinear functions on the connections, making each physical connection a learnable computational element. Realising these functions as analogue band-pass filters on field-programmable analogue arrays, we find that the benefit is task-dependent and follows from the smoothness of the physical basis: the networks represent smooth, continuously valued targets, including robotic kinematics, continuous control, and photovoltaic maximum-power-point tracking, with far fewer nodes and connections than multilayer perceptrons, but offer no parameter-efficiency advantage on classification-like decision boundaries. Trained networks transfer to hardware across approximately 35,000 connections with quantified fidelity, and a dedicated CMOS implementation is projected to operate at approximately 30 microwatts. A memristive realisation reproduces the same behaviour in simulation, indicating that the advantage comes from placing trainable nonlinearity on connections, rather than from a particular device.