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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Impact of the disposable vape ban in Great Britain: a representative interrupted time-series study 2022-2026

Objective: To examine changes in vaping and smoking trends following the announcement and implementation of the disposable vape ban in Great Britain. Design: Interrupted time-series analysis of representative monthly cross-sectional data from the Smoking Toolkit Study. Setting: Great Britain. Participants: 118,946 adults ([≥]16y), including 12,042 young adults (16-24y), surveyed between Jan-2022 and Feb-2026. Main outcome measures: Changes in trends in disposable vape use among vapers, and current vaping and smoking prevalence, using seasonally-adjusted generalised additive models with comparisons against a no-ban counterfactual in which pre-announcement trends continued unchanged. Results: The proportion of vapers mainly using disposable devices began to decline following the announcement of the ban in Jan-2024, with the fall accelerating after implementation in June-2025. By Feb-2026, 5.6% (95%CI 4.6-6.9) of adult vapers and 7.1% (5.1-10.1) of young adult vapers mainly used disposables, compared with 62.0% (53.6-71.8) and 63.6% (52.7-76.7), respectively, under a no-ban counterfactual. Increases in vaping prevalence slowed post-announcement and plateaued post-implementation; by Feb-2026, prevalence was lower than the no-ban counterfactual in adults (13.6% v 18.8%; difference -5.2 percentage points, 95%CI -7.1 to -3.3) and young adults (27.8% v 39.1%; -11.3, -18.6 to -4.1). Declines in smoking prevalence stalled among adults and reversed among young adults post-announcement, before shifting downward again post-implementation; by Feb-2026, smoking prevalence was similar to the no-ban counterfactual in adults (difference +0.9 percentage points, -0.5 to +2.2) but possibly higher in young adults (+3.3, -0.5 to +7.1). Conclusions: The disposable vape ban in Great Britain was associated with substantial changes after both announcement and implementation, including a marked reduction in disposable vape use and a slowing then plateauing of growth in overall vaping prevalence. However, declines in smoking also temporarily slowed–and among young adults, reversed–after the announcement, before downward trends resumed after implementation.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Compact graphs and quantum automorphisms

arXiv:2606.13928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compact graphs are graphs for which the fractional automorphism polytope has no genuinely fractional vertices. This paper proposes a quantum analogue of this idea by evaluating the fundamental magic unitary of the quantum automorphism group on states, which we show to produce a closed convex set of doubly stochastic matrices sitting between the classical automorphism polytope and the full fractional automorphism polytope. Our main result is that the natural quantum analogue of compactness is classical, that is, a quantum compact graph is classically compact. We also relate this set to the quantum orbital algebra and obtain a hierarchy of classical and quantum compactness pseudo notions. The framework recovers familiar consequences of compactness through commutants and suggests quantum analogues of generous transitivity and distance-transitivity. We also isolate examples and open problems indicating where quantum symmetries may strictly refine the classical compactness theory.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Explicit Quantum Circuit Simulation of Nonlinear 1-Dimensional Fluid with Carleman-linearized Boltzmann Method

arXiv:2606.12770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum computation of fluid dynamics has attracted growing attention as a key application of fault-tolerant quantum computers anticipated in the coming decade, with lattice Boltzmann methods emerging as a particularly promising approach. Explicit and efficient elementary-gate-level circuit simulations, however, have so far been demonstrated only in the linear case. Here we include the leading nonlinearity through second-order Carleman linearization of the one-dimensional Boltzmann equation, and demonstrate, via explicit quantum-circuit simulation, the preparation of the final-time state using a Taylor-expansion-based ODE solver based on the quantum singular value transformation. With this construction, we analyze the gate and qubit complexities, which scale logarithmically with the grid size, the nonlinearity captured by the higher-order Carleman linearization, and the practical utility of higher-order expansions in the Taylor ODE solver. The construction provides a concrete baseline for computational cost reduction and further developments such as extensions to higher dimensions, complex geometries, and the extraction of physical quantities, towards industrially useful quantum CFD.

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

Enhancing Precision Agriculture with a Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Multi-Class Plant Disease Classification and Interpretability

This study proposes an overall deep learning architecture for multi-class classification of plant diseases from high-resolution leaf imagery, with a particular interest in investigating the behavior of ResNet-50 and a hybrid ResNet + Vision Transformer (ViT) design. A specially gathered image database with 15,200 training images and 3,800 validation images spanning 38 classes across multiple crops, including tomato, apple, grape etc. were subjected to preprocessing steps such as resizing, normalization, and data augmentation to enhance model robustness. Multiple architectures, including ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNet-B0, were trained and compared with the hybrid ResNet + ViT model. All models were fine-tuned using the AdamW optimizer and cross-entropy loss, with early stopping applied to prevent overfitting and ensure generalization. Furthermore, interpretability techniques such as Grad-CAM and saliency maps were implemented to indicate disease-relevant regions, while segmentation-based analysis was performed to identify the affected parts of a leaf. For every one of the considered architectures, ResNet-50 led to the highest accuracy of 98.74%, whereas the hybrid ResNet + ViT model achieved a competitive accuracy of 98.58%, showing that the hybrid architectures were effective in capturing both local and overall information. The experimental results showcase the promise of transformer-based models to achieve highly accurate, interpretable, and computationally efficient computer-based multi-class multi-disease classification systems, providing helpful assistance for cultivation management practices as well as for precision farming.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Gaming-Resistant Insurance Contracts for Autonomous AI Agents: Strategy-Proof Toll Mechanism Design

arXiv:2606.16326v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Paper A defines a time-consistent actuarial runtime that prices each side-effect-bearing action against a contractually fixed safe default and gates execution against a reserve budget. It treats the operator as passive. This paper makes the operator strategic. We characterise a five-attack space for autonomous AI-agent insurance contracts and prove when the actuarial runtime is gaming-resistant. Two attack surfaces – post-toll safe-default selection and within-boundary action splitting – are closed by Paper A's minimal-authority and no-splitting clauses. The remaining three require new contract clauses. First, common-control aggregation prevents cross-boundary re-routing from reducing toll below the boundary potential applied to total exposure. Second, interface failures such as invalid JSON are contract-relevant events, not safety wins: treating them as zero-toll safe defaults can reward unreliable models, while escalation fees reverse the incentive. We validate this interface-compliance theorem on committed cross-model traces from the companion empirical paper. Third, a model-identity menu with a componentwise-minimum penalty schedule makes truthful reporting of the deployed model weakly dominant. We then compose these clauses with Paper A's runtime guarantees to obtain joint incentive compatibility over the five-attack space. Finally, a two-parameter premium family discharges operator individual rationality and weak budget balance at the truthful equilibrium. The result is an incentive-compatibility layer for actuarial control of autonomous-agent side effects.

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

STREAM: Multi-Tier LLM Inference Middleware with Dual-Channel HPC Token Streaming

arXiv:2606.13968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Researchers and practitioners working with large language models face a fragmented landscape: local models are free and private but hardware limits the model size and context windows a researcher can use; institutional HPC centers offer powerful GPU resources at no marginal cost and keep data within institutional boundaries, but operate behind firewalls and are designed for batch jobs rather than interactive use; commercial cloud APIs provide frontier-model quality on demand but impose significant cost and data retention policies unsuitable for sensitive research data. No existing system unifies all three. STREAM (Smart Tiered Routing Engine for AI Models) addresses this gap with four contributions: (1) a three-tier routing architecture combining local, HPC, and cloud inference with a local LLM-based complexity judge; (2) a dual-channel HPC streaming architecture that separates the Globus Compute control plane (authentication and job dispatch) from a WebSocket relay data plane (token delivery), enabling sub-second TTFT (0.54 s median, 21.1x over batch mode's 11.40 s) through institutional firewalls without VPN or firewall rule changes, with end-to-end AES-256-GCM encryption ensuring the relay operator cannot read token payloads; (3) tier-aware context summarization that prevents long conversations from forcing simple queries onto expensive tiers; and (4) an HPC-as-API proxy mode that exposes HPC inference as an OpenAI-compatible endpoint callable from any standard client with no HPC expertise, a deployment pattern made practical only by the sub-second TTFT of contribution (2). Llama 3.2 3B achieves 85.1% free-tier retention on a 1,200-query benchmark spanning ten domains. Measured TTFT: 0.26 s local, 0.54 s HPC (relay), 1.68 s cloud.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Delta-Based Target Reformulation for Short-Term Electricity Load Forecasting Using LSTM and Transformer Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate short-term electricity load forecasting is critical for the reliable and economic operation of modern power systems, under non-stationarity arising from weather variability, calendar effects, and evolving consumption patterns. While deep learning models such as LSTMs and Transformers show promising performance, most existing studies focus on direct absolute load prediction without explicitly addressing target non-stationarity. Motivated by classical time-series differencing techniques in ARIMA models, this paper investigates a delta-based target reformulation for short-term electricity load forecasting using deep learning. Instead of directly predicting absolute load values, the proposed formulation trains models to predict the change in load between consecutive time steps, with final forecasts reconstructed using the last observed load. This aims to stabilize the learning target and reduce forecasting difficulty. Using multi-year, hourly real-world electricity load data from India, augmented with meteorological variables from the NASA POWER project and calendar features, this study evaluates LSTM and Transformer models under both formulations, benchmarking them against LightGBM. Experiments are conducted for hour-ahead and day-ahead horizons, assessing performance via Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). Results show that delta-based reformulation consistently improves forecasting accuracy for hour-ahead prediction across all evaluated models, yielding MAPE reductions of over 50% compared to absolute formulations. For day-ahead forecasting, delta targets specifically benefit deep sequence models (LSTM and Transformer), while LightGBM remains competitive under the absolute formulation. These findings indicate that while delta reformulation is a powerful inductive bias for neural networks, its efficacy is model- and horizon-dependent.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MUSE: Agentic 3D Scene Authoring via Memory-Grounded Incremental Requirement Satisfaction

Text-driven 3D scene generation is a promising technique for digital content creation, embodied AI simulation, and interactive design, yet practical workflows often require refining, extending, or correcting existing scenes while preserving non-target content. Existing methods can produce realistic and structurally plausible scenes, but they generally lack editability with requirement-level state tracking, so part-level failures often lead to full-scene regeneration or manual intervention. To tackle this challenge, we formulate controllable 3D scene authoring as incremental requirement satisfaction, unifying construction and editing. In this paper, we present MUSE, a memory-grounded multi-agent framework in which an Architect compiles instructions into structured requirements, a Sculptor executes local scene operations, and an Inspector verifies each step while updating Working, Scene, and Skill Memory. To evaluate requirement-level controllability and preservation-aware editing, we introduce AuthorBench, offering 145 constrained construction cases and a 1,584-case preservation-aware editing pool paired with external structured checks. On full construction cases, MUSE improves All-Goal success from 37.9 to 80.7 and surface-constraint fulfillment from 35.0 to 92.6 over the strongest baseline. On a stratified 240-case editing test split, MUSE achieves 49.6 All-Goal success, 99.9 preservation rate, and only 0.6 unintended change rate. Beyond automated metrics, human evaluations on compared local-editing baselines support stronger alignment with user intent, and downstream navigation-proxy tests indicate stronger spatial stability. Combined with ablations validating our memory designs, these results establish MUSE as an effective framework for controllable 3D scene authoring.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Full-Self Diagnostics (FSD): Physics-Grounded Visual Biomarker Inference from Smartphone Video via Inverse Problems and Operator Learning

arXiv:2606.19372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Full-Self Diagnostics (FSD), a unified mathematical framework for recovering latent physiological states from unconstrained 9-second facial videos captured by consumer smartphones. The approach integrates five mutually reinforcing components: (1) a physics-based forward model derived from the radiative transfer equation and chromophore absorption that maps camera observables to biomarker concentrations; (2) an information-theoretic observability theory proving that multi-channel visual signals (spectral, pulse, respiratory, micro-expression, and oculomotor) contain strictly increasing mutual information with physiological state; (3) a stable, Tikhonov-regularized inverse problem with domain-uniform identifiability guarantees; (4) an operator-learning formulation that enables generalization across devices, resolutions, and populations; and (5) a supervised learning procedure, interpretable as stochastic variational inference, that continuously refines the model from paired biosensor ground truth with performance improving proportionally to one over the square root of the number of paired observations. Empirical validation on 38812 real-world paired scans across 59 subjects demonstrates practical performance. Self-collected data from the lead author (glucose range 35-550 mg/dL) yields MARD of 29.86 percent with 97.57 percent of predictions in Clarke Error Grid Zones A+B and only 0.27 percent in the dangerous Zone E. A well-managed diabetic participant achieves MARD of 17 percent in the narrower 70-180 mg/dL band. These results confirm that consumer-grade facial video encodes sufficient structured information for clinically relevant, non-invasive biomarker inference under fully unconstrained conditions, with performance scaling predictably as more paired data becomes available.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantifying Entanglement via Quantum Wasserstein Distances

arXiv:2606.04969v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a bipartite entanglement measure defined as the minimal order-1 quantum Wasserstein distance from a state to the set of separable states. Owing to the universal data-processing inequality of the Wasserstein metric, the measure satisfies all fundamental axioms within a single geometric framework. A Lipschitz dual formulation yields explicit lower bounds for pure and mixed states, a sharp constant for two-qubit systems, and an expected value for Haar-random pure states. We further establish a quantitative connection to entanglement witnesses: any negative witness expectation value certifies a lower bound, and the dual variational bound is exactly the maximal violation achievable by a Lipschitz-1 witness. The approach naturally provides subadditivity, trace-distance estimates, and bounds on local observables, while pointing toward large-deviation conjectures. This work introduces a framework at the interface of entanglement theory, optimal transport, and experimental entanglement detection.

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

LLM Judges Have Dark Current: A Psychometric Datasheet for LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation

LLM-as-a-judge systems are now routinely used for open-ended model evaluation, where human preference annotation is costly, slow, and difficult to reproduce. Yet these judges are often reported as scalar accuracy, win-rate, or agreement devices. We argue that a judge should instead be reported as a measurement instrument. We introduce a Judge Datasheet protocol that measures dark current under true-vacuum inputs, stable cross-sensitivity to same-quality surface variation, positional false preference, target sensitivity on a controlled quality ladder, and the criterion or operating point induced by tie instructions. The direction-stability decomposition reveals that apparent Delta0 preference can be stable surface response or disguised position bias. In a three-judge open-weight case study, Llama-3.1-8B shows high dark current and presentation-conflicted Delta0 behavior, Qwen2.5-14B is vacuum-clean and target-sensitive but mixes stable and positional over-discrimination, and Qwen2.5-32B is vacuum-clean with low stable cross-sensitivity and low positional false preference. A strict tie criterion eliminates Qwen32B Delta0 false preference but absorbs marginal Delta1 target signals into ties while preserving Delta5 sensitivity. The results show that prompting moves the criterion, not the resolution. We do not claim that the downstream mechanism hypothesis that motivated this work is confirmed; the contribution is a metrological protocol for measuring the measuring device before downstream claims are made.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MB-Loc: Multi-planar Bird's-eye-view Localization in outdoor LiDAR scenes

Global LiDAR localization is a fundamental task for autonomous navigation systems. Recent methods perform Scene Coordinate Regression (SCR) and achieve superior accuracy over Absolute Pose Regression (APR) solutions by predicting dense 3D world coordinates. However, SCR approaches introduce two major bottlenecks: severe computational inefficiency from processing raw 3D geometries and significant performance degradation under varying sensor viewpoints. To address these limitations, we present MB-Loc, a lightweight and viewpoint-robust SCR framework. Instead of relying on heavy 3D convolutions, we project the input LiDAR scan into a 2.5D Multi-planar Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation. By slicing the point-cloud along the Z-axis and mapping signed depths into discrete 2D planes, MB-Loc retains essential 3D geometric structures while exploiting the computational tractability of standard 2D CNNs. To handle the inherent sparsity of outdoor LiDAR, we introduce a KL-regularized latent bottleneck that explicitly models spatial uncertainty without injecting stochastic noise. Finally, to ensure rotation robustness, we apply 3D spatial augmentations prior to planar projection, forcing the network to implicitly learn viewpoint-invariant features. We perform extensive experiments on the publicly available NCLT dataset and demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art. Operating at real-time inference speeds, MB-Loc significantly outperforms traditional 3D-SCR architectures in computational efficiency.

13.
Science (Express) 2026-06-18

Indium-free perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells with tin oxide recombination layer and electrodes | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Indium-based transparent conductive oxides are widely used as electrodes and recombination layers in perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells, yet their scalability is constrained by indium scarcity and sputtering-induced damage. Here we report high efficiency and stable indium-free perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells enabled by reactive plasma deposited tin oxide (RPD-SnO x ). For RPD-SnO x as the recombination layer, a certified efficiency of 33.6% is achieved. Fully indium-free tandems that used RPD-SnO x as both recombination layer and electrodes delivering a champion PCE of 33.2% (1 cm 2 ) and a mini-module with a certified efficiency of 31.0% (207.9 cm 2 ). Dense and uniform self-assembled monolayer anchoring enabled by RPD-SnO x suppressed non-radiative recombination and reduced halide migration. Indium-free mini-modules exhibited high thermal, damp-heat, and outdoor operational stability and retained 65% of their maximum initial efficiency after 105 days of outdoor operation.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

UI2Code^N: UI-to-Code Generation as Interactive Visual Optimization

UI-to-code aims to translate UI screenshots into executable front-end code. Despite progress with vision-language models (VLMs), most existing methods formulate UI-to-code as a single-pass generation, which mismatches real-world UI development that is inherently iterative and feedback-driven. We reformulate UI-to-code as an interactive visual optimization problem, where code generation is embedded in a closed-loop process of execution, visual inspection, and iterative refinement driven by rendered visual feedback. To address the non-differentiability of visual objectives and the noise of absolute visual evaluators, we propose Relative Visual Policy Optimization (RVPO), a preference-based reinforcement learning method that optimizes relative visual rankings among rendered candidates under execution feedback. We instantiate this paradigm in UI2Code^N, an open-source 9B model trained via continual pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on UI drafting, UI polishing, and UI editing benchmarks, even outperforming larger models, with performance consistently improving through iterative visual optimization. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/zai-org/UI2Code_N.

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

Circuit Synchronization Precedes Generalization: Causal Evidence from Fourier Structure in Grokking Transformers

arXiv:2606.12966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Grokking – where a transformer on modular arithmetic suddenly transitions from near-chance to near-perfect validation accuracy – is attributed to a Fourier circuit, but its timing, causal structure, and controllability remain poorly understood. We introduce the Frequency Synchronization Degree (FSD), a normalised, permutation-tested metric for Fourier circuit synchronisation requiring no prior circuit knowledge. Across nine modular addition configurations (primes p in {53, 71, 97, 113, 131}, three seeds), FSD synchronises 500-3,000 steps before grokking (mean lead +1,722 steps; all nine positive, sign-test p~0.004), and precedes a restricted-logit loss baseline (Nanda et al.'s excluded loss) in all nine cases, making it the earliest available predictor. We provide direct causal evidence that the inter-phase gap is a regularisation phenomenon: forking training at the FSD-ceiling step and varying weight decay lambda produces strictly monotone earlier grokking, with Delta_t proportional to 1/lambda. This law replicates across three primes (p in {53,97,131}; R^2=1.00 and R^2=0.99 for two clean cases), captured as Delta_t ~ C/lambda, consistent with (1/lambda)*log(||W_mem||/tau). Architecture ablations show an attention-only model groks with a strong FSD precursor; an MLP-only model never groks; a single-layer model's FSD lags, confirming the precursor is a multi-block circuit property.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Surrogate Benchmarks for Model Merging Optimization

arXiv:2509.02555v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Model merging techniques aim to integrate the abilities of multiple models into a single model. Most model merging techniques have hyperparameters, and their setting affects the performance of the merged model. Because several existing works show that tuning hyperparameters in model merging can enhance the merging outcome, developing hyperparameter optimization algorithms for model merging is a promising direction. However, its optimization process is computationally expensive, particularly in merging LLMs. In this work, we develop surrogate benchmarks for optimization of the merging hyperparameters to realize algorithm development and performance comparison at low cost. We define two search spaces and collect data samples to construct surrogate models to predict the performance of a merged model from a hyperparameter. We demonstrate that our benchmarks can predict the performance of merged models well and simulate optimization algorithm behaviors.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Robust Conditional Diffusion with Noisy Templates for Antibody Sequence-Structure Design

Antibodies specifically recognize antigens and play a central role in therapeutic discovery. Designing antibodies for a given antigen remains challenging because antigen-antibody complex data are limited, whereas the sequence and conformational spaces of complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) are large. Retrieved CDR templates from databases or candidate libraries can narrow the design space and improve controllability, but retrieval for novel antigens is often sparse and imperfect; treating retrieved templates as hard conditions can bias the denoising process and cause negative transfer. To address this problem, we propose Robust Conditional Diffusion with Noisy Templates for antibody sequence-structure design (NT-ABDiff), a joint diffusion framework that treats candidate CDR-only templates as optional and potentially unreliable conditions. NT-ABDiff uses reliability-aware template modulation to estimate the context-conditioned usefulness of each candidate and to adaptively reweight and fuse multiple templates during conditioning. We further train the model with mixed-quality and corrupted templates as conditional perturbation regularization, encouraging the denoiser to exploit informative templates while remaining stable when templates are uninformative. Experiments under controlled template shifts and a train-set retrieval evaluation show that NT-ABDiff improves CDR-H3 sequence recovery and structural accuracy over strong baselines, while retaining robustness to missing, mismatched, and corrupted templates. Under a stringent random-template CDR-H3 evaluation, NT-ABDiff improves amino-acid recovery (AAR) from 30.03% to 39.47% and reduces RMSD from 3.160 to 2.915A; with train-set retrieval candidates, it achieves 39.50% AAR and 2.76 {ring} A RMSD. Code, processed splits, {ring} configuration files, and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/ShiDeng7rz/NT-ABDiff.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

STaR-DRO: Stateful Tsallis Reweighting for Group-Robust Structured Prediction

arXiv:2604.09737v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Structured prediction with large language models requires outputs that are label-accurate, ontology-constrained, structurally valid, and evidence-grounded under label imbalance and heterogeneous group difficulty. We present a unified framework for ontology-constrained generation. First, we introduce a modular prompt-engineering architecture combining XML-style structure, expert disambiguation rules, chain-of-thought reasoning, metadata-aware decision logic, schema contracts, and a self-validation gate. It targets recurrent in-context failures, including format drift, label ambiguity, evidence hallucination, and metadata-conditioned confusion. Second, we propose STaR-DRO, combining Tsallis mirror ascent, sparse entmax-style primal mapback, EMA-smoothed group-loss tracking, rescaled ascent signals, and bounded excess-only multipliers. Unlike conventional DRO, which relies on dense Shannon-entropy exponentiated-gradient updates, can introduce high-variance stochastic reweighting, assigns positive adversarial mass to groups that are not persistently hard, and incurs costs through simplex competition, STaR-DRO upweights only persistently hard groups without suppressing easier ones. We evaluate the framework on EPPC Miner, a clinically grounded high-stakes structured-prediction task requiring hierarchical label prediction and evidence-span extraction from patient-provider secure messages. Across 1B-70B Llama models, prompt engineering improves zero-shot extraction, yielding an average label F1 gain of +14.46 and a Span F1 gain of +17.40. Building on supervised fine-tuning, STaR-DRO further improves accuracy and robustness, increasing average label F1 by +1.08 and +2.20 while reducing mean groupwise validation cross-entropy by 21.3% and 14.8% relative to SFT and standard DRO, respectively. These results advance reliable automated communication mining for patient-centered clinical care analysis.

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

Learning Patterns and Abstractions from Perceptual Sequences

Authors:

arXiv:2503.10973v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cognition swiftly breaks high-dimensional sensory streams into familiar parts and uncovers their relations. Why do structures emerge, and how do they enable learning, generalization, and prediction? What computational principles underlie this core aspect of perception and intelligence? A sensory stream, simplified, is a one-dimensional sequence. In learning such sequences, we naturally segment them into parts – a process known as chunking. In the first project, I investigated factors influencing chunking in a serial reaction time task and showed that humans adapt to underlying chunks while balancing speed and accuracy. Building on this, I developed models that learn chunks and parse sequences chunk by chunk. Normatively, I proposed chunking as a rational strategy for discovering recurring patterns and nested hierarchies, enabling efficient sequence factorization. Learned chunks serve as reusable primitives for transfer, composition, and mental simulation – letting the model compose the new from the known. I demonstrated this model's ability to learn hierarchies in single and multi-dimensional sequences and highlighted its utility for unsupervised pattern discovery. The second part moves from concrete to abstract sequences. I taxonomized abstract motifs and examined their role in sequence memory. Behavioral evidence suggests that humans exploit pattern redundancies for compression and transfer. I proposed a non-parametric hierarchical variable model that learns both chunks and abstract variables, uncovering invariant symbolic patterns. I showed its similarity to human learning and compared it to large language models. Taken together, this thesis suggests that chunking and abstraction as simple computational principles enable structured knowledge acquisition in hierarchically organized sequences, from simple to complex, concrete to abstract.

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

Divination by Prompt: LLM-Mediated Xuanxue on Chinese Social Media

arXiv:2606.12418v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has produced a striking cultural practice: using conversational AI for divination. This paper offers one of the first systematic studies of LLM-mediated divination in the context of Xuanxue, an internet-native umbrella term for mystical and spiritual practices on Chinese social media. Using a mixed-methods design, we analyze 23000+ posts and comments from Xiaohongshu and conduct 32 semi-structured interviews with users and professional diviners. Users primarily consult LLMs about pragmatic concerns - romantic relationships, careers, exams, and in-game gacha draws - via two intersecting pathways: trend-driven curiosity enabled by viral visibility and zero-cost access, and event-driven anxiety under conditions of uncertainty. A defining feature is collaborative prompt refinement, which turns users into active prompt engineers. Among commenters expressing a clear stance, perceived efficacy skews positive, with "accuracy" often justified through biographical fit and retrospective confirmation, consistent with Barnum and confirmation bias. Users also develop verification practices such as repeated trials and cross-model comparison. Professional diviners, by contrast, portray LLMs as lacking the "spiritual power" required for genuine divination, reflecting both ontological commitments and economic boundary-work. We also show how participants navigate tensions between scientific and metaphysical frames when interpreting AI-generated readings. Situating these findings in anthropological and cognitive-evolutionary theories of divination, we argue that LLM divination preserves core functions of traditional practice while introducing scalability, repeatability, and prompt-driven co-production that reshape how divinatory authority is constructed and evaluated.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Triangular Consistency as a Universal Constraint for Learning Optical Flow

arXiv:2606.19938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose triangular consistency as a first-principled constraint for optical flow, which is agnostic to network architecture, supervision type, and dataset, and applies to both image-pair and multi-frame settings. This simple but powerful constraint is to compose two flows to induce a third flow and enforce consistency among the three. The composed flows may arise from (i) image pairs, yielding cycle consistency; (ii) multiple video frames, producing longer-range motion through temporal chaining; or (iii) image pairs combined with controlled synthetic transformations, which becomes data augmentation. This triangular consistency introduces negligible computational overhead and requires no additional annotations. Since it is derived directly from the geometry of optical flow, it does not rely on model-specific assumptions and serves as a ``universal'' plug-and-play component for optical flow training. Experiments show consistent improvement across supervised, unsupervised, and transfer learning settings.

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

Formalize Once, Edit the Rest: Efficient Lean-Based Answer Selection for Math Reasoning

With large language models (LLMs) increasingly applied to mathematical reasoning, formal proof assistants such as Lean can be leveraged to verify reasoning outputs with machine-checkable rigor, enabling use cases such as answer selection in test-time scaling with K sampled candidate answers. However, employing Lean requires that LLM outputs, originally in natural language, first be formalized. Existing Lean-based answer-selection work uses an autoformalization model to generate a formal statement in Lean for each candidate answer independently, incurring a significant computational cost. We propose BASE, a base-and-edit pipeline that formalizes a single base candidate per problem and derives the remaining K-1 statements by editing the answer expression in place. To facilitate this, we train a rewriter model LEANSCRIBE to localize the answer in the base formalization and generate a reusable edit function for the other K-1 candidates. BASE simultaneously improves selection accuracy and reduces formalization cost - a Pareto improvement that holds on all 12 (dataset, solver) configurations across four benchmarks and three solvers, cutting autoformalizer calls by about 5x at K=8, with the reduction expected to become larger as K grows. Code is available at https://github.com/ucr-rai/base-and-edit.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Programmable Gauge-Field Textures with Ultracold Atoms in Momentum Space

arXiv:2606.15124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic gauge fields with ultracold atoms offer a route to quantum matter in which electromagnetic environments can be designed rather than merely imposed. While the Harper-Hofstadter model has been realized in several cold-atom systems, existing implementations are largely limited to spatially uniform magnetic fluxes. Here we experimentally realize a highly programmable two-dimensional momentum-state lattice of ultracold atoms with local control over the Peierls phase pattern, enabling direct implementation of Harper-Hofstadter Hamiltonians with tunable and spatially structured synthetic gauge fields. We observe a crossover from ballistic to strongly flux-modified bulk dynamics with suppressed transport. By introducing a synthetic electric field through site-dependent energy gradients, we further demonstrate Hall-type transverse drift arising from the interplay between electric and magnetic fields. In addition, we engineer a synthetic flux domain wall separating regions with opposite magnetic fluxes and observe anisotropic propagation guided along the interface. These results move cold-atom gauge-field engineering from uniform magnetic backgrounds toward designer gauge textures, providing an experimental setting for transport across programmable topological interfaces.

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

DataMagic: Transforming Tabular Data into Data Insight Video

arXiv:2606.20388v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data videos integrate dynamic charts, voice narration, and synchronized animations to communicate data insights as temporal narratives, making them an effective medium for improving data consumption efficiency in the data management lifecycle. However, producing high-quality data videos requires expertise spanning data analysis, narrative design, and video production. Existing approaches fall short: static visualization tools (e.g., BI dashboards) lack narrative logic and animation; authoring tools require users to pre-prepare visualizations rather than working from raw data; pixel-level video generation models cannot guarantee data fidelity or provenance. We demonstrate DataMagic, an end-to-end interactive system that transforms raw tabular data and natural language queries into narrative data-insight videos. To ensure data fidelity, DataMagic introduces the declarative specification DVSpec, which binds visual and animation elements to underlying data fields through data-driven semantic references. To address the combinatorial explosion of the design space, DataMagic adopts a Generate-then-Orchestrate multi-agent architecture that generates candidate scenes in parallel and then optimizes narrative coherence through global orchestration. Leveraging DVSpec's decoupling of logic and rendering, the system further supports three interaction modes and structured provenance-based data Q&A, transforming one-way videos into explorable interactive data interfaces. Evaluation on 109 real-world samples validates the effectiveness of the DataMagic. Homepage: https://datamagic-home.github.io/