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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Dialogue SWE-Bench: A Benchmark for Dialogue-Driven Coding Agents

Authors:
Brendan King↗Jeffrey Flanigan↗

AI coding agents have rapidly transformed software engineering, powering widely used interactive coding assistants. Despite their interactive real-world use, existing benchmarks evaluate them as fully-autonomous systems. In this work, we introduce Dialogue SWE-Bench, an automatic benchmark dataset for evaluating the ability of coding agents to resolve real-world software engineering problems through dialogue with a user. We design a novel, persona-grounded user simulator to support our task evaluation, and augment our task evaluation with automatic evaluations of dialogue quality. We also propose a new schema-guided agent, aimed at improving the dialogue capabilities of off-the-shelf coding agents, which improves over strong baselines by 3-14%. Our results indicate that better coding models do not always correspond to better dialogue models, suggesting that dialogue capability is a distinct and currently understudied dimension of coding agent performance.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

m2sv: A Scalable Benchmark for Map-to-Street-View Spatial Reasoning

Authors:
Yosub Shin↗Michael Buriek↗Igor Molybog↗

Vision–language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on many multimodal benchmarks but remain brittle on spatial reasoning tasks that require aligning abstract overhead representations with egocentric views. We introduce m2sv, a scalable benchmark for map-to-street-view spatial reasoning that asks models to infer camera viewing direction by aligning a north-up overhead map with a Street View image captured at the same real-world intersection. We release m2sv-20k, a geographically diverse benchmark with controlled ambiguity, along with m2sv-sft-11k, a curated set of structured reasoning traces for supervised fine-tuning. Despite strong performance on existing multimodal benchmarks, the best evaluated VLM achieves only 65.2% accuracy on m2sv, below human annotators who reach 72.0% on average (and 95% for an expert) with strong inter-annotator agreement ($\kappa$ up to 0.76). While supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning yield consistent gains, cross-benchmark evaluations reveal limited transfer. Beyond aggregate accuracy, we systematically analyze difficulty in map-to-street-view reasoning using both structural signals and human effort, and conduct an extensive failure analysis of adapted open models. Our findings highlight persistent gaps in geometric alignment, evidence aggregation, and reasoning consistency, motivating future work on grounded spatial reasoning across viewpoints.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Fourier Multi-Component and Multi-Layer Neural Networks: Unlocking High-Frequency Potential

Authors:
Shijun Zhang↗Hongkai Zhao↗Yimin Zhong↗Haomin Zhou↗

arXiv:2502.18959v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The architecture of a neural network and the choice of its activation function are both fundamental to its performance. Equally important is ensuring that these two elements are well matched, as their alignment is key to effective representation and learning. In this paper, we introduce the Fourier Multi-Component and Multi-Layer Neural Network (FMMNN), a model that combines sine-type activations with the multi-component and multi-layer structure of MMNNs. In an FMMNN, each component is represented as a trainable linear combination of fixed random sine-type basis functions, while multi-layer composition generates more complex and adaptive high-frequency features. We establish that FMMNNs retain exponential expressive power for function approximation even under a low-rank architectural structure. We also analyze the optimization landscape of FMMNNs and find it to be substantially more favorable than that of standard fully connected neural networks, especially for high-frequency targets. In addition, we propose a scaled random initialization method for the first-layer weights in FMMNNs, which accelerates training and improves final performance when sufficient samples are available. Extensive numerical experiments support our theoretical insights, showing that FMMNNs achieve strong accuracy and favorable convergence behavior on oscillatory function-approximation benchmarks.

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

Decoupling Semantics from Distortions: Multi-Scale Two-Stream Vision-Language Alignment for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment

Authors:
Zijie Meng↗

Existing vision-language model (VLM)-based AI-generated image quality assessment (AIGIQA) methods suffer from a fundamental semantic-distortion dimensional conflict: monolithic representations optimized for semantic discrimination inherently entangle compositional understanding with low-level perceptual sensitivity, rendering them blind to fine-grained quality degradations. We introduce MST-CLIPIQA, a multi-scale two-stream framework that achieves hierarchical vision-language alignment through explicit representational decoupling. Our architecture leverages dual CLIP encoders with complementary patch granularities: coarse-grained streams capture global semantic coherence while fine-grained streams preserve textural signatures and artifact patterns. An information bottleneck-inspired gated fusion mechanism performs adaptive cross-scale distillation, with optional cross-attention enabling prompt-anchored correspondence evaluation when generation prompts are available. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks establish new state-of-the-art results, achieving average improvements of 1.11 percent SRCC on quality and 2.35 percent SRCC on text-image correspondence prediction, while maintaining efficiency with only 0.8M trainable parameters. Our project is available at https://github.com/YMlinfeng/MST-CLIPIQA.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Geometry-Aware Post-Hoc Uncertainty Quantification in Operator Learning

Authors:
Oriol Vendrell-Gallart↗Nima Negarandeh↗Ramin Bostanabad↗

arXiv:2606.17513v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural operators provide fast surrogates for PDEs but their deterministic predictions limit their use in tasks requiring uncertainty quantification (UQ), especially under geometric variability. Existing approaches primarily model uncertainty in network parameters, largely overlooking the geometry-aware representations learned by the operator itself. We propose REEF-GP (Residual on Embedded Features Gaussian Process), a post-hoc UQ framework that fits a GP to the residuals of a frozen neural operator whose internal embeddings define the kernel feature space. Rather than learning a separate feature map, REEF-GP adapts the operator's intrinsic coordinate-feature representations to construct geometry-aware uncertainties. To ensure stability and scalability on unstructured domains, REEF-GP incorporates spectral-normalized projections, heteroscedastic geometry-aware noise, and efficient subset-based training that avoids restrictive low-rank approximations. Across five PDE benchmarks with varying geometries, REEF-GP preserves predictive accuracy while achieving calibrated uncertainty estimates competitive with deep ensembles but at a fraction of their cost. Our approach remains robust under geometric distribution shift, with uncertainty concentrating in physically meaningful regions (e.g., shock fronts). Our results demonstrate that accurate and scalable post-hoc UQ for neural operators can be achieved directly in their learned feature space, offering a practical alternative to parameter-centric approaches.

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

LineageMark: Multi-user White-box Watermarking for Contribution Tracing in Model Derivation Chains

Authors:
Bingxue Zhang↗Xiaofeng Xu↗Feida Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.17123v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In open large language model (LLM) ecosystems, models are frequently adapted across multiple domains and applications, forming multi-stage derivation chains. Consequently, tracking and verifying historical contributions is essential for model provenance and intellectual property protection. However, existing watermarking methods are mainly designed for single-user, one-time embeddings, often fail under repeated model derivation and incremental updates. To address this problem, we propose LineageMark, a multi-user white-box watermarking framework for model derivation chains. The framework encodes watermarks in model parameters using a projection-based approach. Stable carriers are first selected to reduce sensitivity to model changes, each watermark bit is then represented as a projection statistic over these carriers. Additional watermark insertions introduce only bounded perturbations in the projection space, and margin constraints are used to maintain signal integrity. We evaluate the effectiveness of LineageMark in multi-stage model derivation chains. Experimental results show that LineageMark preserves contributor watermarks across multi-stage derivation and supports incremental multi-user watermark insertion. Furthermore, it exhibits robustness against perturbations such as re-watermarking, fine-tuning, quantization, and pruning.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PhononBench:A Large-Scale Phonon-Based Benchmark for Dynamical Stability in Crystal Generation

Authors:
Xiao-Qi Han↗Ze-Feng Gao↗Wen-Kao Li↗Peng-Jie Guo↗Zhong-Yi Lu↗

arXiv:2512.21227v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In recent years, generative artificial intelligence has made significant advances in the design of crystalline materials, giving rise to approaches based on graph neural networks, diffusion models, and large language models. Existing evaluations commonly follow the stability-uniqueness-novelty (S.U.N.) framework, where stability is primarily assessed using thermodynamic criteria, which do not fully capture the dynamical stability essential for a material's practical existence. Dynamical stability is a key determinant of whether a material can be synthesized and persist, with phonon spectrum calculations serving as the standard for its evaluation. However, the high computational cost of such calculations has prevented large-scale assessment of dynamical stability in generated crystals. In this work, we introduce PhononBench, the first large-scale benchmark for dynamical stability in AI-generated crystals. Leveraging the recently developed MatterSim interatomic potential, which achieves density-functional-theory (DFT)-level accuracy in phonon predictions across more than 10,000 materials, PhononBench enables efficient phonon calculations and dynamical-stability analysis for 133,838 crystal structures generated by 7 leading crystal generation models. PhononBench reveals a widespread limitation of current generative models: unless otherwise specified, all reported dynamical-stability metrics are evaluated at a phonon-frequency threshold of -0.1 THz, with the average dynamical-stability rate across all generated structures being only 32.15%, and the top-performing model, MatterGen, reaching just 45.05%.In addition, we identify 32,995 crystal structures that are phonon-stable across the entire Brillouin zone under a strict threshold of -0.001 THz. In addition, a web-based service is accessible at http://phononbench.cn/, enabling minute-level ultra-fast phonon predictions.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Open Materials Generation with Inference-Time Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Philipp Hoellmer↗Stefano Martiniani↗

arXiv:2602.00424v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continuous-time generative models for crystalline materials enable inverse materials design by learning to predict stable crystal structures, but incorporating explicit target properties into the generative process remains challenging. Policy-gradient reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled mechanism for aligning generative models with downstream objectives but typically requires access to the score, which has prevented its application to flow-based models that learn only velocity fields. We introduce Open Materials Generation with Inference-time Reinforcement Learning (OMatG-IRL), a policy-gradient RL framework that operates directly on the learned velocity fields and eliminates the need for the explicit computation of the score. OMatG-IRL leverages stochastic perturbations of the underlying generation dynamics preserving the baseline performance of the pretrained generative model while enabling exploration and policy-gradient estimation at inference time. Using OMatG-IRL, we present the first application of RL to crystal structure prediction (CSP). Our method enables effective reinforcement of an energy-based objective while preserving diversity through composition conditioning, and it achieves performance competitive with score-based RL approaches. Finally, we show that OMatG-IRL can learn time-dependent velocity-annealing schedules, enabling accurate CSP with order-of-magnitude improvements in sampling efficiency and, correspondingly, reduction in generation time. The OMatG-IRL code is included in a new release of the Open Materials Generation (OMatG) framework available at https://github.com/FERMat-ML/OMatG.

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09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A Dynamical Systems Perspective on the Analysis of Neural Networks

Authors:
Dennis Chemnitz↗Maximilian Engel↗Christian Kuehn↗Sara-Viola Kuntz↗

arXiv:2507.05164v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this chapter, we utilize dynamical systems to analyze several aspects of machine learning algorithms. As an expository contribution we demonstrate how to re-formulate a wide variety of challenges from deep neural networks, (stochastic) gradient descent, and related topics into dynamical statements. We also tackle three concrete challenges. First, we consider the process of information propagation through a neural network, i.e., we study the input-output map for different architectures. We explain the universal embedding property for augmented neural ODEs representing arbitrary functions of given regularity, the classification of multilayer perceptrons and neural ODEs in terms of suitable function classes, and the memory-dependence in neural delay equations. Second, we consider the training aspect of neural networks dynamically. We describe a dynamical systems perspective on gradient descent and study stability for overdetermined problems. We then extend this analysis to the overparameterized setting and describe the edge of stability phenomenon, also in the context of possible explanations for implicit bias. For stochastic gradient descent, we present stability results for the overparameterized setting via Lyapunov exponents of interpolation solutions. Third, we explain several results regarding mean-field limits of neural networks. We describe a result that extends existing techniques to heterogeneous neural networks involving graph limits via digraph measures. This shows how large classes of neural networks naturally fall within the framework of Kuramoto-type models on graphs and their large-graph limits. Finally, we point out that similar strategies to use dynamics to study explainable and reliable AI can also be applied to settings such as generative models or fundamental issues in gradient training methods, such as backpropagation or vanishing/exploding gradients.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning from Delayed Marketplace Feedback for Objective-Weight Adaptation in Three-Sided Dispatch

Authors:
Haochen Wu↗Yi Hou↗Shiguang Xie↗

arXiv:2606.13604v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dispatch in three-sided marketplaces provides a natural setting for reinforcement learning from world feedback: decisions are evaluated by delayed operational outcomes such as delivery speed, courier utilization, and merchant congestion. We present a deployed reinforcement learning system at DoorDash that adapts dispatch objective weights in a large-scale food-delivery marketplace using delayed signals. Rather than replacing the combinatorial assignment optimizer, a store-level policy learned from logged marketplace data selects a discrete multiplier that shifts the dispatch optimizer's tradeoff between delivery quality and batching efficiency. This interface enables offline policy learning under noisy, delayed, and coupled feedback while preserving production feasibility constraints and operational safeguards. We train a shared value function using centralized offline data and decentralized store-level execution, with Double Q-learning targets and a conservative regularizer to reduce out-of-distribution value overestimation. In a production switchback experiment, the offline-trained policy increases batching and reduces courier-side time costs without degrading customer-facing delivery quality. Results illustrate how world feedback from a live economic and logistics system can be used to safely adapt decision policies online.

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

Optimizing Health Coverage in Ethiopia: A Learning-augmented Approach and Persistent Proportionality Under an Online Budget

Authors:
Davin Choo↗Yohai Trabelsi↗Fentabil Getnet↗Samson Warkaye Lamma↗Wondesen Nigatu↗Kasahun Sime↗Lisa Matay↗Milind Tambe↗St\'ephane Verguet↗

arXiv:2509.00135v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As part of nationwide efforts aligned with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 3 on Universal Health Coverage, Ethiopia's Ministry of Health is strengthening health posts to expand access to essential healthcare services. However, only a fraction of this health system strengthening effort can be implemented each year due to limited budgets and other competing priorities, thus the need for an optimization framework to guide prioritization across the regions of Ethiopia. In this paper, we develop a tool, Health Access Resource Planner (HARP), based on a principled decision-support optimization framework for sequential facility planning that aims to maximize population coverage under budget uncertainty while satisfying region-specific proportionality targets at every time step. We then propose two algorithms: (i) a learning-augmented approach that improves upon expert recommendations at any single-step; and (ii) a greedy algorithm for multi-step planning, both with strong worst-case approximation estimation. In collaboration with the Ethiopian Public Health Institute and Ministry of Health, we demonstrated the empirical efficacy of our method on three regions across various planning scenarios.

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

When Multiple Scripts Matter: Evaluating ASR in Clinical Settings

Authors:
Jean Seo↗Minkyu Kim↗Jeonguk Lee↗Jisoo Jung↗Wooseok Han↗Eunho Yang↗

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) in non-English clinical settings is challenged by multiscript variability, where the same term may appear in multiple valid orthographic forms. Conventional string-matching evaluation metrics often underestimate ASR performance by treating orthographic variants as errors. To address this issue, we introduce MultiClin, a clinical ASR benchmark designed to evaluate robustness to multiscript variability. Experiments across diverse ASR models show that multiscript-aware evaluation provides a fairer assessment of recognition quality than conventional single-reference evaluation. We further investigate the impact of script consistency during training and find that inconsistent script mappings increase orthographic uncertainty and hinder model convergence, with a balanced 50% mapping ratio producing the highest entropy. In contrast, script unification consistently yields the best ASR performance. Our dataset and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/aitrics-ronaldo/Interspeech_MultiClin.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

World Tracing: Generative Pixel-Aligned Geometry Beyond the Visible

Authors:
Hao Zhang↗Mohamed El Banani↗Jen-Hao Cheng↗Paul Zhang↗Yi Hua↗Ben Mildenhall↗Christoph Lassner↗Narendra Ahuja↗Gengshan Yang↗

Image-to-3D methods often trade off faithfulness and completeness: depth estimators are anchored to input pixels but stop at the visible surface, while image-to-3D models generate complete shapes that are often misaligned with the input. We introduce World Tracing, a generative pixel-aligned geometry representation that predicts 3D points aligned with observed pixels while completing geometry beyond the visible surface. For each input pixel, World Tracing predicts an ordered stack of camera-space 3D points, where the first layer represents the visible surface and subsequent layers represent front-to-back intersections with occluded surfaces. We instantiate this representation with a world-tracing diffusion transformer, WT-DiT, which treats multiple geometry layers as separate denoising tokens coupled through factorized and global attention. WT-DiT is trained with pixel-space flow matching and a mixed noise schedule that balances visible-surface reconstruction with occluded-geometry generation. World Tracing achieves strong performance on visible-surface reconstruction and complete geometry generation across object, scene, and dynamic benchmarks, outperforming both depth predictors and image-to-3D generators. It also preserves 2D-to-3D correspondence, enabling text-driven 3D scene editing, geometry-conditioned novel-view video synthesis, and training-free integration with textured-mesh generators.

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14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A 5.3-million-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone

Authors:
Xiaotong Peng↗

Whale falls are biodiversity oases at seabeds1–6, yet their record from the oceans has remained sparse and fragmentary6,7. Here we report the discovery of a vast whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone (4,616- to 7,001-m depth), extending about 1,200 km along the sea floor of the southeastern Indian Ocean. This area has a deep and extensive accumulation comprising five modern natural whale-fall communities and 476 fossil cetaceans recorded. We show that carcasses host specialized communities dominated by brittle stars, bone-boring worms and chemosynthesis-based bivalves and that the fossil record in this area comprises both extant and extinct deep-diving beaked whales. Isotopic dating shows that whale falls in this region have occurred since at least 5.3 million years ago. These findings reshape the understanding of the limits and biogeography of whale-fall ecosystems and establish some deep sea floors as a fossil archive for tracing cetacean evolution over geological time. Researchers uncovered an enormous deep-sea accumulation of whale remains in the southeastern Indian Ocean, showing long-term, specialized ecosystems and an extensive fossil record that offers new insight into deep-ocean biodiversity and whale evolutionary history.

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

Beyond Text-to-SQL: An Agentic LLM System for Governed Enterprise Analytics APIs

Authors:
Gundeep Singh↗Parsa Kavehzadeh↗Jing Xia↗Xue-Yong Fu↗Julien Bouvier Tremblay↗Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar↗Vincent Lum↗Shashi Bhushan TN↗

Enterprise analytics aims to make organizational data accessible for decision-making, yet non-technical users still face barriers when using traditional business intelligence tools or Text-to-SQL systems. While recent Text-to-SQL approaches based on Large Language Models (LLMs) promise natural language access to structured data, they fall short in enterprise settings where analytics pipelines rely on governed APIs rather than raw databases. In practice, these APIs encapsulate complex business logic to ensure consistency, auditability, and security. However, delegating mathematical or aggregation logic to an LLM introduces reliability and compliance risks. To this end, we present Analytic Agent, an LLM-based agentic system that translates natural language intents into secure interactions with enterprise analytics APIs. Evaluated on 90 real enterprise use cases constructed by domain experts, it reliably interprets user goals, validates permissions, executes governed queries, and generates compliant visualizations through multi-step reasoning and policy-aware orchestration.

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

See-and-Reach: Precise Vision-Language Navigation for UAVs within the Field of View

Authors:
Fanfu Xue↗En Yu↗Yantian Shen↗Zhikun Hu↗Hongjun Wang↗Yang Yang↗Xindi Wang↗Jiande Sun↗

arXiv:2606.20045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: UAV Vision-Language Navigation (UAV-VLN) is typically formulated as a holistic search-and-reach problem, where long-range target discovery and final target approach are optimized and evaluated jointly. This formulation makes it difficult to assess a critical capability of aerial embodied agents, namely whether a UAV can accurately ground a visible target and translate vision-language evidence into precise 3D motion once the target enters its field of view. To address this limitation, we introduce UAV-VLN-FOV, a target-visible navigation task that isolates the see-and-reach stage and enables a more diagnostic evaluation of terminal reaching ability. We further propose 3DG-VLN, a vision-language waypoint prediction framework guided by dynamic 3D direction cues to enhance fine-grained visual grounding and spatial direction alignment for precise target reaching. Specifically, 3DG-VLN adaptively processes high-resolution front-view and downward-view observations to preserve fine-grained visual and geometric details for target grounding. It also updates the target-relative direction online during closed-loop navigation, allowing the agent to maintain spatial alignment with the target and reduce accumulated direction drift. To support this task, we construct a dedicated high-resolution benchmark which contains 2,717 trajectories with target-oriented high-level instructions, high-resolution front-view and downward-view egocentric observations, and continuous 3D waypoint annotations. Experiments show that 3DG-VLN outperforms competitive UAV-VLN baselines, achieving a 13.82\% improvement in success rate. Real-world trials further demonstrate the potential of 3DG-VLN for practical see-and-reach navigation. The source code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/xuefanfu/3DG-VLN.

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17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Time-Frequency Grid States for Reconstruction and Correction of Channel-Induced Distortion in Entangled Photons

Authors:
Siang-Yun Liu↗Bo-Ren Huang↗Zhi-Xuan Zen↗Yen-Hung Chen↗Pin-Ju Tsai↗

arXiv:2606.12216v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Characterization of time-frequency (TF) quantum states requires reliable reconstruction of their TF distributions. However, imperfect transmission or measurement channels can distort reconstructed joint spectral intensities (JSIs), especially when the underlying perturbation mechanism is unknown. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a reconstruction and correction framework that uses a TF grid state as an intrinsic frequency-domain reference. By analyzing the displacement of the grid points, a Gaussian process regression model is employed to reconstruct a correction mapping for the nonlinear coordinate deformation without assuming a prior physical model of the distortion. The learned mapping reduces the residual coordinate deviation of the TF grid state by approximately a factor of 11 and, when applied to an independent frequency-entangled test state, improves the Gaussian-shape fidelity from 76.2\% to 90.0\%. These results establish TF grid states as practical metrological resources for diagnosing and correcting distortions in TF quantum systems, providing a pathway toward distortion-resilient quantum communication and high-dimensional quantum information processing.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Systematic Evaluation of Black-Box Uncertainty Estimation Methods for Large Language Models

Authors:
Jiayi Wang↗Xu-Yao Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.19868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks, their outputs often remain unreliable and may contain hallucinations, making uncertainty estimation (UE) essential for building trustworthy LLMs. In practice, many mainstream LLMs are only accessible through restricted APIs, where internal signals such as logits and hidden states are unavailable, making black-box UE especially important. However, existing work on black-box UE for LLMs remains fragmented in methodology and lacks a unified empirical comparison. To address this gap, we present a systematic review of black-box UE methods and organize them into five categories: verbalization-based, sampling-based, explanation-based, multi-agent, and hybrid methods. We further build a unified evaluation framework and benchmark 24 representative methods across 4 models and 4 dataset settings. Our results show that no single method consistently dominates across all settings. Nevertheless, methods that reason over and compare candidates in the answer space are generally effective, and hybrid methods that combine multiple uncertainty signals perform well under most conditions. By releasing the benchmark data and a unified evaluation framework, we aim to facilitate reproducible comparisons and support future research, while our empirical findings provide practical guidance for developing future black-box UE methods for LLMs.

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19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Light-induced quantum friction of carbon nanotubes in water

Authors:
Tanuja Kistwal↗

Friction slows down moving objects at both macroscopic and microscopic scales1. At the electronic level, quantum friction describes direct transfer of momentum between a liquid and the electrons of a solid2. Owing to its microscopic nature, this phenomenon remains experimentally challenging to capture3. Here we show that near-infrared fluorescent single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) exhibit light-induced quantum friction in water. It is measured by observing an excitation-power-dependent linear decrease of around 50% in the diffusion constants of functionalized SWCNTs in aqueous solution. This effect disappears when excitons are localized, as in the case of SWCNTs with quantum defects. We further show that the chemical manipulation of exciton concentration by molecules that increase or decrease SWCNT fluorescence also modulates the diffusion constant by up to a factor of 2. Optical pump terahertz (THz) probe spectroscopy shows an instantaneous response (around 30 cm−1) that we assign to direct exciton–water coupling in the range of water Debye modes. It is followed by an increasing (>100 ps) response in the range of intermolecular translational modes of the hydrogen bond network of water (>100 cm−1), resembling heating. Classical molecular dynamics simulations further support a mechanism in which the fluctuating dipole moments of excitons create frictional forces. These findings establish light-induced quantum friction between excitons in SWCNTs and water and show that electronic excitations can be used to control nanoscale motion and fluid properties. Near-infrared fluorescent carbon nanotubes exhibit light-induced quantum friction in water, in which exciton interactions slow nanoscale motion and enable optical control of diffusion and fluid dynamics.

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20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Candidate overtone shear horizontal SAW resonators in thin-film lithium niobate for intermodal acousto-optic modulation

Authors:
Wenbing Jiang↗Xuankai Xu↗Yu Guo↗Boyu Zhang↗Lihui Jin↗Xiao Chen↗Tao Wu↗Libing Zhou↗

arXiv:2606.12853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The merits of thin-film surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices are pivotal to develop the high-performance intermodal acousto-optic modulators. In this work, we have proposed shear-horizontal (SH) SAW resonators for anticipated intermodal acousto-optic modulation on the thin-film lithium niobate platform. Through optimization of the cut angle of LN films, the SAW wavelength, and the thickness of interdigital transducer (IDT) electrodes, the calculated acousto-optic overlap factors utilizing SH0 modes are improved by more than an order of magnitude compared with those of Rayleigh modes. Furthermore, we have fabricated and characterized three kinds of proof-of-principle SH0 mode devices without/with grating reflectors. The electromechanical coupling coefficients (keff^2) and quality factors (Q) in the overtone resonators with grating reflectors are systematically evaluated, featuring the highest Q of 843 with the compromised keff^2 of 0.96%-4.72%. The results reveal that the temperature coefficients of frequency (TCF) of Rayleigh modes vary across various overtones, whereas the SH0 modes exhibit TCFs in the range of 32.3-68.9 ppm/C. Our fabricated SH0-mode overtone resonators demonstrate the capability of operating at power levels up to 29 dBm without electrode damage, offering a promising paradigm for robust and high-efficiency intermodal acousto-optic modulators with potential applications in integrated optical signal processing, microwave photonics,and quantum information technologies.

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

NeuroSymbolic AI for Legal AI-TRISM: Trustworthy, Reliable, Interpretable, Safe Models

Authors:
Deepa Tilwani↗Yash Saxena↗Ankur Padia↗Srinivasan Parthasarathy↗Manas Gaur↗

arXiv:2606.15646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, but their lack of interpretable reasoning and tendency to hallucinate pose significant challenges for legal applications. While LLMs show promise for legal text analysis and generation, they struggle with accurate citation attribution and precedent verification. For example, in legal contexts, a single incorrect precedent can jeopardize a case. Current approaches to improve LLM reliability in legal domains suffer from two key limitations: inadequate integration of structured legal knowledge during training or fine-tuning, and insufficient verification mechanisms for generated legal content. To address these challenges, we propose the TRISM (Trustworthy, Reliable, Interpretable, Safe Models) framework, which integrates NeuroSymbolic AI principles with LLMs to leverage both neural learning capabilities and symbolic reasoning over structured legal knowledge. The TRISM approach addresses the above limitations while maintaining interpretable decision pathways. Our framework formalizes the extraction of symbolic knowledge from legal textual documents and incorporates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) as a core component for grounding LLM outputs in verified legal sources. In this position paper, we make the following contributions: (1) An analysis of the limitations of AI in law; (2) Introduce RASOR RAG which creates foundations for neurosymbolic RAG by generating explicit interpretable rationales that could be formalized into symbolic representations; (3) A formalized methodology for creating symbolic legal knowledge bases that support both interpretable reasoning and output verification in LLMs; and (4) The TRISM framework for integrating symbolic legal knowledge with LLMs.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Calibrated Sampling-Free Uncertainty Estimation in Bayesian Deep Learning

Authors:
Tobias Jan Wieczorek↗Leon de Andrade↗Thomas M\"ollenhoff↗Marcus Rohrbach↗

arXiv:2606.16214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep learning models remain notoriously prone to overconfidence, limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications. Bayesian methods aim to counter this by learning a distribution over model parameters, and recent advances now make this feasible for large-scale architectures at costs comparable to AdamW. However, a challenge remains at test time: predictions must be averaged across many forward passes with weights sampled from the posterior, which is prohibitively expensive. Variance propagation offers an efficient alternative, computing layer-wise analytical approximations of uncertainty in a single forward pass. While such techniques are effective for MLPs, their extension to modern architectures remains challenging, due to increased depth and diversity of layer types. To fill this gap, we propose Calibrated Variance Propagation (CVP), which introduces a new propagation method for normalization layers, combines it with recent techniques for handling activation functions, and absorbs residual error through a light calibration step. CVP yields comparably accurate uncertainty estimates to MC sampling across transformers and CNNs, at a fraction of the cost. Against prior variance propagation work, CVP improves coverage at $0.5\%$ risk from $8.2\%$ to $14.6\%$ with BEiT-3 on Visual Reasoning (NLVR2) and from $2.6\%$ to $10.8\%$ with ViLT on VQAv2, with gains extending to convolutional architectures.

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23.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Prescribed hormonal contraceptive use trends in the Estonian Biobank: A longitudinal observational study

Authors:
Jelisaveta Džigurski↗

by Jelisaveta Džigurski, Märt Möls, Kristi Läll, Hannah Currant, Mall Eltermaa, Estonian Biobank Research Team , Reedik Mägi, Lili Milani, Triin Laisk Background Hormonal contraceptives (HCs) are widely used and have well-documented population-level statistics. Previous studies with short follow-ups have focussed on individual HC use and side effects. However, the same aspects over longer periods, HC formulation switching, and the impact of genetic factors on HC side effects remain understudied due to the limited availability of suitable datasets. We investigated whether the Estonian Biobank (EstBB) is suitable for studying genetic risk for HC side effects. Methods and findings This is a longitudinal descriptive study combining prescribed HC purchase data collected from 2004 to 2022 with genetic and health data from 73,071 female EstBB HC users aged 15–55 at the time of purchase. HC usage was defined by the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) codes G02B, G03A, and G03HB01. Methods included calculating age-stratified annual user prevalence, inferring usage periods from purchases, assessing formulation switching, identifying the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10)-based side effect-related diagnoses and thromboembolism risk factors, and assessing carrier status for Factor V Leiden (FVL, rs6025) and prothrombin G20210A (PTM, rs1799963) genetic variants as proof-of-concept. Over 19 years, 20 HC formulations with five administration routes (oral pills, transdermal patches, vaginal rings, subdermal implants, intrauterine devices) were used. In the EstBB, combined HCs were the most commonly used among users aged 15–29, while progestin-only HC use increased with age and over time, comparable to the Estonian population. Overall, 64.2% (n = 46,920) of users switched formulations at least once, with 17.7% (n = 12,929) being rapid switchers. Side effect-related diagnoses were observed in 23.1% (n = 2,982) of rapid switchers, with excessive/irregular menstrual bleeding being the most common. Genetic analysis revealed that 5.3% (n = 3,886) of users carried at least one variant previously associated with increased thrombosis risk (3.5% (n = 2,556) carried FVL only, 1.8% (n = 1,276) PTM only, and 0.07% (n = 54) both). Carriers of thrombosis-associated variants had a significantly higher percentage of thrombosis (6.5%) than non-carriers (4.2%; OR = 1.61, 95% CI [1.40, 1.84], p 

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

TimeVista: Exploring and Exploiting Vision-Language Models as Judges for Time Series Forecasting

Authors:
Zhi Chen↗Yuxuan Wang↗Jialong Wu↗Yong Liu↗Haoran Zhang↗Xingjian Su↗Jianmin Wang↗Mingsheng Long↗

arXiv:2606.16173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality time series forecasting is pivotal for real-world decision-making. However, traditional point-wise metrics often fail to reveal complex temporal patterns and align poorly with human intuitive preferences. While the ''LLM-as-a-Judge'' paradigm has revolutionized text evaluation by providing flexible, human-aligned judgment, its application to time series remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as judges for time series forecasting, harnessing their ability to comprehend time series plots grounded in textual information. Specifically, we propose a novel framework integrating micro- and macro-level judgments informed by contextual information to evaluate time series forecasting. To this end, we introduce TimeVista, a comprehensive VLM-as-a-Judge benchmark comprising 5563 time series samples paired with detailed evaluation rubrics. Extensive meta-evaluations demonstrate that VLMs are highly reliable judges, achieving significantly higher consistency with human preferences than conventional metrics. Building upon our benchmark, we comprehensively assess recent Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) under the VLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. Our results demonstrate that VLMs serve as robust and interpretable judges, providing a comprehensive, human-aligned standard for evaluating time series models.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Two Wrongs, No Right: Auditing Social-Desirability Bias in LLM Annotators for Computational Social Science

Authors:
Varun Kotte↗

LLM annotators are increasingly used in computational social science (CSS), but it is unclear whether their alignment-shaped errors preserve the empirical conclusions a researcher would report. We audit three open-source 7B instruction-tuned models (Zephyr, Mistral-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Instruct) across six TweetEval tasks under four prompt conditions (72 cells) and find that social-desirability failures do not run in a single direction. Zephyr exhibits leniency bias, systematically under-applying harmful labels (offensive language: false benign rate 0.729, false alarm rate 0.031). Mistral and Qwen exhibit overcorrection, over-applying the same labels (Mistral hate-speech FAR = 0.604). All three models exhibit neutrality bias on abortion stance, underestimating opposition prevalence by 24 to 40 percentage points and inflating the neutral label. None of the four prompting interventions we test (neutral, safety framing, depersonalized, chain-of-thought) corrects these failures across models; safety framing can worsen stance distortion. Strikingly, Zephyr's hate-speech prevalence estimate matches the gold rate exactly while its class-conditional errors are large in both directions, an accidental cancellation that misleads aggregate validation. We translate these patterns into a three-part taxonomy with diagnostic FBR/FAR signatures and a lightweight gold-sample validation protocol. The headline for trustworthy CSS: a model that looks calibrated on aggregate metrics can still flip the substantive empirical conclusion a researcher would report.

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