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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Reasoning Gains: Mitigating General-Capability Forgetting in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2510.21978v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has delivered impressive gains in mathematical and multimodal reasoning and has become a standard post-training paradigm for contemporary language and vision-language models. However, the RLVR recipe introduces a significant risk of capability regression, in which models forget foundational skills after prolonged training without employing regularization strategies. We empirically confirm this concern, observing that open-source reasoning models suffer performance degradation on core capabilities such as perception and faithfulness. While imposing regularization terms like KL divergence can help prevent deviation from the base model, these terms are computed on the current task and therefore do not guarantee preservation of broader knowledge. Meanwhile, commonly used experience replay across heterogeneous domains makes it nontrivial to decide how much training emphasis each objective should receive. To address this, we propose RECAP-a replay strategy with dynamic objective reweighting for general knowledge preservation. Our reweighting mechanism adapts online using short-horizon signals of convergence and instability, shifting the post-training focus away from saturated objectives and toward underperforming or volatile ones. Our method is end-to-end and readily applicable to existing RLVR pipelines without training additional models or heavy tuning. Extensive experiments on benchmarks using Qwen2.5-VL-3B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which not only preserves general capabilities but also improves reasoning by enabling more flexible trade-offs among in-task rewards.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Do Neural Networks Lose Plasticity in a Gradually Changing World?

arXiv:2602.09234v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual learning has become a trending topic in machine learning. Recent studies have discovered an interesting phenomenon called loss of plasticity, referring to neural networks gradually losing the ability to learn new tasks. However, existing plasticity research largely relies on benchmarks with abrupt task transitions, without examining whether the abruptness itself contributes to the observed plasticity loss. In this paper, we investigate the role of transition abruptness by simulating gradually changing environments through input/output interpolation and task sampling. We perform theoretical and empirical analysis, showing that the severity of plasticity loss is closely tied to the abruptness of task transitions, and can be substantially reduced when the environment changes gradually.

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

Detecting Hidden ML Training With Zero-Overhead Telemetry

arXiv:2606.19262v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hardware-enabled monitoring of GPU workloads underpins many proposals for AI compute governance, but if developers can defeat monitoring mechanisms, such schemes are unworkable. We evaluate the adversarial robustness of GPU workload classification using only zero-overhead, privacy-preserving NVML telemetry: content-agnostic signals that observe physical effects of computation without accessing model weights, training data, or hyperparameters. Across 5 rounds of monitor-evader iteration, we evaluate 20 evasion strategy families on 9 GPU models spanning 4 architecture generations. We develop a classifier that achieves 98.2% binary accuracy at identifying training workloads across the whole corpus, and 43-87% accuracy against the most challenging unexpected workloads even when they are adversarially disguised.

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

Avoiding Exponential Blow-Up in Distributive Lattice Submodular Minimization

Authors:

Submodular function minimization has gained a lot of interest in recent years. They are highly applicable in the area of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. Often such applications require to work with submodular functions defined on distributive lattice. Current best way of dealing with it is using a transformation which extrapolates the submodular function for the respective boolean lattice. It makes optimization system too inefficient due to enlargement of the working space. Quantitatively, the expanded space has additional exponential (in set size) number of elements. We propose a generic framework for dealing with distributive lattice which only works within distributive lattice. Our framework allows one to use already established submodular function minimization algorithms for boolean lattice. In our experiment, we show the huge improvement in terms of running time over tranditional methods for handling distributive lattice.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models on Fine-Grained Image Tasks: From Evaluation to Diagnosis

Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities. While numerous benchmarks have evaluated LVLMs from holistic or task-specific perspectives, their capabilities on fine-grained image tasks-fundamental to computer vision-remain insufficiently understood. To address this gap, we introduce FG-BMK, a comprehensive fine-grained evaluation benchmark containing 1.01 million questions and 0.28 million images, covering diverse scenarios from common object-centric domains to specialized domains. FG-BMK jointly evaluates dialogue-level fine-grained semantic recognition and feature-level visual discriminability through human-oriented and machine-oriented paradigms, enabling diagnostic analysis of whether LVLM failures arise from insufficient visual representations, weak visual-to-semantic grounding, or limited fine-grained knowledge. Through extensive experiments on a diverse set of representative LVLMs/VLMs, we find that current LVLMs remain inadequate fine-grained recognizers, with failures arising from intertwined bottlenecks in visual representations, semantic grounding, modality alignment, and category-level knowledge. We further analyze training design factors for improving fine-grained capabilities and examine how visual and linguistic perturbations affect LVLM predictions. These findings provide diagnostic insights into the limitations of current LVLMs and offer guidance for future data construction and model design in developing more reliable LVLMs for fine-grained visual tasks. Our code is open-source and available at https://fg-bmk.github.io/.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Geometric obstructions to Lipschitz transport between weighted Hessian $\mathrm{CD}(\kappa,\infty)$ manifolds

arXiv:2606.11085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct a weighted Riemannian manifold $(\mathbb R^2,g,\mu)$ satisfying $\mathrm{CD}(1/2,\infty)$, the curvature-dimension condition, with the following property: if $\gamma$ denotes a centered Gaussian measure on $\mathbb R^2$, then there is no Lipschitz map $T:(\mathbb R^2,\|\cdot\|) \to (\mathbb R^2,g)$ satisfying $T_\#\gamma=\mu$. Building on this, we prove a Weyl-type asymptotic law for the eigenvalues of the weighted Laplacian $-\Delta_{g,\mu}$ and show that they are asymptotically negligible when compared to the eigenvalues of $-\Delta_{\gamma}$. These results give strong counterexamples to two questions of E. Milman and complement the recent counterexample of Aryan.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Contour-Constrained Deformable Registration with Parameter Characterization for Head and Neck Surgical Guidance

With 890,000 annual new cases globally, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma has one of the highest recurrence rates among solid malignancies. Although frozen section analysis is the standard of care for intraoperative margin assessment, accurately relocating detected positive margins on the resection bed remains challenging due to imprecise alignment between resected specimens and their resection bed, compounded by post-resection mucosal tissue shrinkage. We present a biomechanics-driven deformable registration framework that corrects post-resection tissue deformation to provide intraoperative guidance. Our approach registers 3D specimen meshes to intraoperative resection bed point clouds using a deformable registration approach based on regularized Kelvinlet basis functions. The registration matches surface point clouds, fiducial landmarks, and boundary contour constraints that directly penalize perpendicular distance-to-agreement between specimen and resection bed boundaries. Across nine specimens from skin, buccal mucosa, and tongue sites, the overall mean target registration error was $11.11 \pm 4.07$ mm using rigid registration, which decreased to $8.20 \pm 2.68$ mm (26.19\% reduction) using deformable registration without contour constraint. The proposed contour-constrained deformable registration further reduced the error to $5.62 \pm 2.28$ mm, a 49.41\% reduction relative to rigid registration. We observed the largest reduction in the most clinically challenging tongue specimens. We also performed a systematic two-stage parameter search to characterize the relative importance of surface alignment, fiducial correspondences, contour constraint, and strain energy regularization. This search revealed that contour weighting dominates registration accuracy for tissue types with large lateral deformation, while the algorithm operates over a broad range of parameter combinations.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Continual Self-Improvement with Lightweight Experiential Latent Memories

arXiv:2606.17803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance by scaling inference-time compute, yet remain fundamentally stateless, discarding the rich, self-produced reasoning traces generated during this process. We investigate whether models can instead learn online from this experience, converting transient computation (reasoning traces) into persistent reusable knowledge, and without external supervision or access to future data. We show that In-Context Learning (ICL) over raw reasoning traces fails to generalize, reflecting a fundamental limitation of token-level reuse: individual traces lack the abstraction needed for transfer, even after refinement (e.g. self-reflection). In contrast, drawing inspiration from recent works on unsupervised reinforcement learning, we find that lightweight per-instance training with self-generated test-time signals (majority voting) as rewards yields substantial gains, often surpassing full-dataset offline training, motivating a shift from raw traces to learned latent representations. Building on this insight, we propose an online method that distills inference-time compute spent on encountered problems into compact modular latent memories capturing the underlying reasoning structure. These memories are stored and retrieved for future inputs, enabling continual improvement while avoiding catastrophic forgetting through modular design. Importantly, our method is highly efficient, parametrized as extremely lightweight soft prompt memories (~0.001% of model parameters) and trained with only a few gradient steps, yet achieving performance competitive with full parametric updates and offline training. Across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, our approach significantly outperforms zero-shot and raw data ICL baselines, while transferring effectively across datasets.

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

Multi-Agent Transactive Memory

The decentralized deployment of LLM agents with diverse capabilities across diverse tasks motivates infrastructure for knowledge sharing across heterogeneous agent populations. Just as search engines index human-generated artifacts to support human problem solving, retrieval systems can organize agent-generated artifacts for reuse across agent populations. We extend retrieval-augmented generation - which demonstrates the value of human-authored artifacts to individual agents - to retrieval of agent-generated artifacts supporting a population of agents. In particular, agent trajectories encode reusable procedural knowledge, yet these artifacts are typically discarded after a single use or retained only by the producing agent, forcing newly instantiated agents to repeatedly rediscover existing solutions. We propose Multi-Agent Transactive Memory (MATM), a framework for population-level storage and retrieval of agent-generated trajectories, where producer agents contribute trajectories to a shared repository and consumer agents retrieve them to improve task execution. We focus on interactive environments (ALFWorld and WebArena), where trajectories are long and encode especially rich procedural structure. Our experiments demonstrate that retrieving trajectories from MATM improves downstream task performance and reduces interaction steps without coordination or joint training. These results position MATM as a design pattern for population-level experience sharing in open agent ecosystems.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Conditional Local Importance by Quantile Expectations

arXiv:2411.08821v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Global variable importance measures are commonly used to interpret the results of machine learning models. Local variable importance techniques assess how variables contribute to individual observations. Current, popular methods, including LIME and SHAP, provide useful measures of feature contribution in the prediction space, while leaving opportunities for improved characterization of local structure in the model loss space. Additionally, they are not natively adapted for multi-class classification problems. We propose a new model-agnostic method for calculating local variable importance, CLIQUE, that highlights locally dependent relationships, provides improved stability over permutation-based methods, and can be directly applied to multi-class classification problems. Simulated and real-world examples show that CLIQUE emphasizes locally dependent information, captures interaction behavior beyond what can be evaluated by correlations, and assigns zero importance in regions where the response is invariant to changes in variables.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

TriFlow: Generating Artist-Like 3D Mesh Topology via Nearest-Vertex Vector Fields

We present TriFlow, a new generative approach for producing compact 3D meshes with artist-like triangle topology directly from input geometry conditions such as signed distance fields. Our key insight is to represent mesh topology as a nearest-vertex vector field (NVF) defined over the surface, where each point encodes its association to the nearest triangle vertex in the local barycentric frame. We train a latent flow-matching model to synthesize this field, enabling topology generation conditioned on the input geometry. To extract a coherent mesh, we cluster surface regions using the generated NVF and guide a constrained quadric error metric (QEM) mesh simplification with topology-aware optimization. This yields output meshes that closely match the input geometry while exhibiting structured, artist-like connectivity. Experiments demonstrate that TriFlow achieves stronger generalization and significantly improved topology quality compared to state-of-the-art learning-based approaches, alongside 90% lower Chamfer Distance and an 8x speedup.

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

Bayesian 3D Steerable CNNs: Enabling Equivariance and Uncertainty Quantification Simultaneously

arXiv:2606.15479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Steerable convolutional neural networks (Steerable-CNNs) guarantee SE(3)-equivariance by parameterizing kernels as linear combinations of steerable basis functions, but their deterministic nature precludes uncertainty quantification - limiting their use in settings where confidence estimates are essential. We propose a Bayesian Steerable-CNN that places posterior distributions over the basis coefficients, yielding stochastic kernels while preserving equivariance exactly. The loss function of the model is obtained via variational inference and minimized by Bayes-by-Backpropagation. The framework admits a decomposition of predictive uncertainty into epistemic and aleatoric components. Empirically, the model attains competitive classification accuracy alongside an expected calibration error of 0.0263 and outperforms its deterministic counterpart by up to 6.17% under distributional shift induced by additive Gaussian noise. Furthermore, we leverage the model's uncertainty estimates to enhance its performance significantly, achieving a notable gain - approximately 4% higher accuracy across 84% of the test dataset. A statistically significant negative correlation between epistemic uncertainty and prediction error confirms that the learned posterior variance is semantically meaningful. The framework unifies Bayesian uncertainty quantification with the inductive bias of equivariant CNNs.

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

Aligning Implied Statements for Implicit Hate Speech Generalizability with Context-Bounded Semi-hard Negative Mining

Classifying implicit hate speech remains a challenge, as intent is often masked through insinuation and context rather than explicit slurs. Prior supervised contrastive approaches improve in-domain detection but can overfit surface cues and struggle to transfer across datasets. We propose ImpSH, a triplet-based framework that aligns posts with implied statements when available and uses context-bounded semi-hard negatives to focus learning on near confusions. We also examine AugSH, which forms positives via data augmentation. In controlled evaluations on IHC, SBIC, and DynaHate with BERT and HateBERT, ImpSH is a viable alternative to standard supervised contrastive baselines and often improves cross-domain performance under matched preprocessing and tuning budgets. Representation analysis using alignment and uniformity indicates tighter positive pairs with balanced global spread, and qualitative nearest-neighbor case studies illustrate typical false negatives under domain shift. These results demonstrate that aligning posts with their implied statements via context-bounded mining provides a more stable, bijective-like mapping to related insinuations, overcoming the volatility inherent in traditional clustering-based representation learning.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

C2-Faith: Benchmarking LLM Judges for Causal and Coverage Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges of chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably assess process faithfulness rather than merely answer plausibility. We introduce C2-Faith, a benchmark built from PRM800K that explicitly decomposes faithfulness into two complementary dimensions: causality (whether each step logically follows from prior context) and coverage (whether essential intermediate inferences are present). Using controlled perturbations, we construct examples with known causal error positions by replacing a single step with a logically inconsistent variant, and with controlled coverage deletions at varying rates, enabling direct measurement against reference labels. We evaluate three frontier LLM judges across three tasks: binary causal detection, causal step localization, and coverage scoring. Our results reveal that judge reliability is highly task-dependent, with no single model dominating across settings. While models often detect that an error exists, they struggle to accurately localize it, indicating a substantial gap between detection and attribution. Moreover, all judges systematically overestimate reasoning completeness, assigning high coverage scores even when substantial portions of intermediate reasoning are missing. These findings expose fundamental limitations of LLM judges in process-level evaluation and highlight the need for more reliable and calibrated methods when using LLMs to assess reasoning quality.

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

JSCGC: Joint Source-Channel-Generation Coding for Wireless Generative Communications

Conventional communication systems, including both separation-based coding and learning-based joint source-channel coding (JSCC), are typically designed under Shannon's rate-distortion theory. However, relying on generic distortion metrics fails to capture complex human visual perception, often resulting in blurred or unrealistic reconstructions. In this paper, we propose Joint Source-Channel-Generation Coding (JSCGC), a generative communication paradigm that replaces the conventional decoder with a generative model at the receiver. The received signal is treated as a condition that controls the sampling process into the learned conditional distribution, reformulating communication from deterministic reconstruction for distortion minimization to controlled generation for mutual information maximization under perceptual constraints. Based on this formulation, we develop a unified joint training and efficient stochastic sampling framework, and provide theoretical analysis of its effectiveness in both learning and inference stages. Extensive experiments on latent-space image transmission demonstrate that the JSCGC consistently improves feature-based, semantic-level, and distributional quality across diverse channel conditions, while exhibiting a distinct error behavior characterized by semantic inconsistency rather than distortion.

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

Single Photon Cross-Phase Shifts Can Be Enhanced by Localization in both Frequency and Time

arXiv:2606.11516v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-photon optical nonlinearities face a fundamental trade-off: maximum nonlinearity requires both spectral resonance (narrow bandwidth) and high peak intensity (short duration), constraints that are incompatible due to the time-energy uncertainty relation. We demonstrate experimentally that this limitation does not need to exist in cases involving post-selection. We measure a cross-phase shift (XPS) produced by a resonant photon from a narrow-band source that is first transmitted through a cold atomic cloud and then localized in time through detection. The peak size of this XPS is greatly enhanced compared to that of Gaussian single-photon-level pulses without post-selection, benefiting from the narrow bandwidth of the resonant prepared state and the high intensity of the post-selected state simultaneously. We measure enhancements in the peak XPS of 6$\pm$1 at an optical depth (OD) of 2.4$\pm$0.1, and our results are in qualitative agreement across a range of optical depths with the recently developed weak value theory of atomic excitation [Thompson et al., APL Quantum 2, 036108 (2025)] for such post-selected photons. This work uncovers new consequences of having simultaneous knowledge of frequency and time, raising new foundational questions about how a particle behaves, and interacts with other systems, when its preparation and post-selection are non-commuting.

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

Density Ridge Selective Prediction for LLM and VLM Hallucination Detection under Calibration Label Scarcity

Hallucination detection in large language and vision-language models is increasingly framed as selective prediction, where a detector assigns a confidence score and abstains when confidence is low. Unsupervised sampling detectors (Semantic Entropy) avoid labels but plateau in quality, while supervised probes attain stronger in-distribution scores yet degrade sharply when calibration labels are scarce. We recover the response manifold of an LLM as the density ridge of a kernel density estimate built on a six-dimensional kinematic feature map of hidden state generation trajectories. A test generation is scored by the negated Euclidean distance from its projected feature point to the nearest ridge vertex, yielding a low-dimensional geometric skeleton of the stochastic output distribution. We evaluate against Semantic Entropy, topological methods, and log-probability on six QA benchmarks (HaluEval-QA, TriviaQA, GSM8K, POPE, ScienceQA, A-OKVQA) using eight text and vision LLMs in a deliberately label-scarce protocol ($n_{cal}{=}200$ queries, $N{=}5$ generations). Our ridge-based score beats on AUROC with 5-20 points gain, while demonstrating tempered degradation under calibration-label scarcity.

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

Quantum Reservoir Computing for Short-Term Power Load Forecasting in Resource-Constrained Energy Systems

arXiv:2606.12806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Short-term load forecasting is essential for reliable energy management, but practical deployment on edge devices requires models that remain accurate under limited memory, finite measurement budgets, and hardware noise. This work proposes a hardware-efficient Quantum Reservoir Computing (QRC) framework for energy load forecasting, where a fixed quantum reservoir transforms temporal input windows into high-dimensional features and only a classical Elastic Net readout is trained. To reduce deployment cost, the trained readout is compressed using post-training fixed-point quantization at bit widths from 8 to 2 bits. The framework is evaluated on the Tetouan and Spain energy load datasets under exact statevector simulation, 512-shot finite sampling, and realistic hardware-noise models from IBM FakeTorino and IBM FakeMarrakesh. Results show that 6-bit readout precision preserves full-precision forecasting performance while reducing readout memory by 81.2%. Below this point, degradation becomes dataset dependent, with Tetouan showing stronger sensitivity and Spain degrading more gradually. Hardware-noise validation further shows that the trained readout transfers to noisy reservoir states without retraining. These findings support quantized QRC as a resource-aware forecasting approach for near-term quantum time-series applications.

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

Kareus: Joint Reduction of Dynamic and Static Energy in Large Model Training

arXiv:2601.17654v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The computing demand of AI is growing at an unprecedented rate, but energy supply is not keeping pace. As a result, energy has become an expensive and contended resource that requires explicit management and optimization. Although recent works have made significant progress in large model training optimization, they focus on optimizing either dynamic or static energy consumption. We find that fine-grained kernel scheduling and frequency scaling jointly and interdependently impact both dynamic and static energy consumption. Based on this finding, we design Kareus, a training system that pushes the time-energy tradeoff frontier by optimizing both aspects. Kareus decomposes the intractable joint optimization problem into local, partition-based subproblems. It then uses a multi-pass multi-objective optimization algorithm to find execution schedules that push the time-energy tradeoff frontier. Compared to the state of the art, Kareus reduces training energy by up to 28.3% at the same training time, or reduces training time by up to 27.5% at the same energy consumption.

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

Nothing from Something: Can a Language Model Discover 0?

AI systems based on artificial neural networks are being developed with aspirations of pushing the boundary of human mathematical knowledge. A key question for these systems is how much they can reach beyond their training data. Mathematical discovery requires a strong form of out of distribution generalization; the ability to hypothesize genuinely new - and potentially logically more powerful - mathematical structures. It has been hypothesized that language abilities support such generalizations in human cognition. In this work, we use simple arithmetic as a case study for examining how modern AI models could expand their mathematical horizons, evaluating whether these models can independently discover the concept of "zero". We show that We show that (1) language models of a GPT-2 size are unable to perform this generalization at test time regardless of language pretraining, but (2) models can improve substantially after training on tens or hundreds of examples of zero. Additionally, we find that language pretraining reduces the number of required examples by approximately $50\%$, showing that language abilities can scaffold mathematical discovery in neural models.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

On-Chip Quantum Randomness Amplification

arXiv:2606.12173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Randomness amplification, the task of extracting uniform private bits from biased seeds that may be partly known by a malicious third party, is of central importance in cryptography. The highest security in this task is provided by a class of quantum protocols known as device-independent, which however are challenging to integrate into scalable devices. Semi-device-independent (SDI) protocols are a promising alternative that guarantees security under few natural assumptions, such as bounds on the amount of energy used by the devices. Here, we provide the first demonstration of SDI randomness amplification on an integrated silicon photonic chip, achieving a throughput rate of 20 Mbps suitable for practical applications. This rate is achieved through a novel technique for SDI entropy certification, which delivers strictly tighter von Neumann entropy bounds compared to existing methods and remains valid even if the preparation and measurement devices share quantum correlations. Overall, the methods developed in this work enable the integration of SDI technology into portable telecom devices, opening up a new generation of quantum cryptographic hardware.

23.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

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

Measuring Whether LLM Tutors Teach or Solve: A Diagnostic for Educational Impact

Large language models are increasingly proposed as educational tutors, yet stronger task-solving ability does not necessarily imply stronger learning support. Motivated by recent calls to measure the social impact of NLP systems in practice, we study whether public LLM tutoring benchmarks distinguish learning-supportive behavior from mere answer production. We propose a lightweight diagnostic based on the gap between solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented benchmark performance. Using public MathTutorBench leaderboard results, we show that these dimensions are only partially aligned: across eight publicly reported models, the correlation between solving and pedagogy composites is 0.421, and several models shift meaningfully in rank when evaluation moves from solving to pedagogy. We then analyze the public TutorBench sample and show that agency-relevant behaviors are explicitly encoded in benchmark rubrics, especially in active-learning settings that reward guiding questions, calibrated hints, and non-disclosive scaffolding. Together, these findings suggest that educational-impact evaluation should not treat task success as a sufficient proxy for learning support. We argue that public tutoring benchmarks can better support positive-impact evaluation by reporting solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented scores separately and by making disclosure-sensitive, student-agency-preserving criteria more explicit.

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

Pushing the Boundaries of Natural Reasoning: Interleaved Bonus from Formal-Logic Verification

arXiv:2601.22642v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable capabilities, yet their stochastic next-token prediction creates logical inconsistencies and reward hacking that formal symbolic systems avoid. To bridge this gap, we introduce a formal logic verification-guided framework that dynamically interleaves formal symbolic verification with the natural language generation process, providing real-time feedback to detect and rectify errors as they occur. Distinguished from previous neuro-symbolic methods limited by passive post-hoc validation, our approach actively penalizes intermediate fallacies during the reasoning chain. We operationalize this framework via a novel two-stage training pipeline that synergizes formal logic verification-guided supervised fine-tuning and policy optimization. Extensive evaluation on six benchmarks spanning mathematical, logical, and general reasoning demonstrates that our 7B and 14B models outperform state-of-the-art baselines by average margins of 10.4% and 14.2%, respectively. These results validate that formal verification can serve as a scalable mechanism to significantly push the performance boundaries of advanced LLM reasoning.