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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

TINNs: Time-Induced Neural Networks for Solving Time-Dependent PDEs

arXiv:2601.20361v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) solve time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) by learning a mesh-free, differentiable solution that can be evaluated anywhere in space and time. However, standard space-time PINNs take time as an input but reuse a single network with shared weights across all times, forcing the same features to represent markedly different dynamics. This coupling degrades error performance and can destabilize training when enforcing PDE, boundary, and initial constraints jointly. We propose Time-Induced Neural Networks (TINNs), a novel architecture that parameterizes the network weights as a learned function of time, allowing the effective spatial representation to evolve over time while maintaining shared structure. The resulting formulation naturally yields a nonlinear least-squares problem, which we optimize efficiently using a Levenberg-Marquardt method. Experiments on various time-dependent PDEs show up to 4 times improved relative error and 10 times faster convergence compared to PINNs and strong baselines.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Differentiable Thermodynamic Phase-Equilibria for Machine Learning

arXiv:2603.11249v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate prediction of phase equilibria remains a central challenge in chemical engineering. Physics-consistent machine learning methods that incorporate thermodynamic structure into neural networks have recently shown strong performance for activity-coefficient modeling. However, extending such approaches to equilibrium data arising from an extremum principle, such as liquid-liquid equilibria, remains difficult. Here we present DISCOMAX, a differentiable algorithm for phase-equilibrium calculation that guarantees thermodynamic consistency at both training and inference, only subject to a user-specified discretization. The method combines discrete enumeration of feasible phase states with masked softmax aggregation in the backward pass, with the propagation of the true equilibrium state in the forward pass, using a straight-through gradient estimator to enable physics-consistent end-to-end learning of neural \gls{gE}-models. We show that this approach bears analogy to statistical thermodynamics, and we evaluate it on binary liquid-liquid equilibrium data where it outperforms existing surrogate-based methods, while offering a general framework for learning from different kinds of equilibrium data.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Rethinking Multimodal Fusion for Time Series: Text Modalities Need Constrained Fusion

arXiv:2603.22372v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal learning have motivated the integration of auxiliary modalities such as text or vision into time series (TS) forecasting. However, most existing methods provide limited gains, often improving performance only in specific datasets or relying on architecture-specific designs that limit generalization. In this paper, we show that multimodal models with naive fusion strategies (e.g., simple addition or concatenation) often underperform unimodal TS models, which we attribute to the uncontrolled integration of auxiliary modalities which may introduce irrelevant information. Motivated by this observation, we explore various constrained fusion methods designed to control such integration and find that they consistently outperform naive fusion methods. Furthermore, we propose Controlled Fusion Adapter (CFA), a simple plug-in method that enables controlled cross-modal interactions without modifying the TS backbone, integrating only relevant textual information aligned with TS dynamics. CFA employs low rank adapters to filter irrelevant textual information before fusing it into temporal representations. We conduct over 20K experiments across various datasets and TS/text models, demonstrating the effectiveness of the constrained fusion methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/seunghan96/cfa.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Care Delivery Gap framework: a proof-of-concept patient-reported measure of guideline-referenced care-process omissions in sickle cell disease

Abstract Background:Sickle cell disease (SCD) is concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, where delivery of guideline-referenced care remains challenging. Current evaluation approaches rely largely on access indicators and clinical outcomes, which do not directly measure care delivery. We developed the Care Delivery Gap (CDG) framework, a patient-reported approach for identifying care-process omissions, and conducted a proof-of-concept study to assess feasibility and explore variation across income strata. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional framework-development study involving a proof-of-concept sample of 52 individuals with SCD or caregivers recruited through clinics and moderated SCD communities across Africa, North America, and Europe between June 2025 and March 2026. The CDG framework assessed patient-reported omissions in specialist involvement, follow-up continuity, cardiovascular screening, and biochemical surveillance. Analyses were descriptive. Results: Substantial multi-domain care-process omissions were identified despite high reported healthcare engagement. Across geographic income strata, cardiovascular screening was reported by 4/35 (11%) LMIC versus 16/17 (94%) HIC participants, and regular follow-up within the preceding 12 months by 14/35 (40%) versus 16/17 (94%), respectively. High CDG scores, representing 1 omissions across three or four domains, occurred in 20/35 (57%) LMIC compared with 1/17 (6%) HIC participants. Similar disparities were observed across specialist review and vitamin B12 surveillance domains. Conclusion: A structured patient-reported framework identified multi-domain omissions in guideline-referenced SCD care, including among individuals reporting healthcare access. The divergence between access indicators and reported care delivery suggests that service contact alone may not reflect care quality. The framework provides a feasible foundation for future process-level quality measurement in high-burden settings.

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

Study of the triangular-lattice Hubbard model with constrained-path quantum Monte Carlo

arXiv:2603.14808v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We benchmark constrained-path Monte Carlo (CPMC) on the triangular-lattice Hubbard model for several fillings and $U$ values and show that symmetry-adapted trial wave functions substantially improve quantitative accuracy. Away from half-filling, simple free-electron-based trials that preserve the ground state symmetry yield energy deviations $\lesssim 1\%$ from exact diagonalization and density matrix renormalization group results. At half-filling, strong frustration in the intermediate to large $U$ regimes necessitates symmetry-projected trials to reach comparable accuracy, where both free-electron and symmetry-broken Hartree-Fock trials incur substantial constraint bias. Since the computational cost of CPMC with symmetry projection scales polynomially with system size, our results motivate its use as a practical route for studying competing ground states in strongly correlated, frustrated systems.

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

Litespark Inference For CPUs: Ultra-Fast SIMD Framework for Ternary (1.58-bit) Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed artificial intelligence, but their computational requirements remain prohibitive for most users. Standard inference demands expensive datacenter GPUs or cloud API access, leaving over one billion personal computers underutilized for AI workloads. Ternary models offer a path forward: their weights are constrained to {-1, 0, +1}, theoretically eliminating the need for floating-point multiplication. However, existing frameworks fail to exploit this structure, treating ternary models as dense floating-point networks. We address this gap with custom SIMD kernels that replace matrix multiplication with simple addition and subtraction operations, targeting the integer dot product instructions available on modern CPUs. Our implementation, Litespark-Inference, is pip-installable and integrates directly with Hugging-Face, achieving 18.15x higher throughput, 7.15x faster time-to-first-token and 6.03x memory reduction compared to standard PyTorch inference on Apple Silicon, with comparable or higher throughput speedups up to 95.81x on Intel and AMD processors.

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

Predicting Immune Biomarkers with MultiModal Mixture-of-Expert Pathology Foundation Models Empowers Precision Oncology

Predicting immune biomarkers associated with the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) is critical for advancing precision oncology, yet existing approaches are largely limited to single image modalities and suffer from insufficient resolution and incomplete utilization of complementary clinical and biological information. Here we introduce MixTIME, a multimodal foundation model that leverages a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to integrate pathology foundation models trained across distinct modalities: image only (UNIv2), image text (CONCHv1.5), and image transcriptomic (STPath) representations for pixel-level and slide-level prediction of multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) protein expression from hematoxylin and eosin (HE) whole-slide images. MixTIME employs a learnable router to dynamically weight expert contributions and is trained with a distribution- and tendency-aware loss function. Benchmarked on two datasets of different scales, MixTIME achieves state-of-the-art performance across 17 protein markers as measured by correlation metrics. The predicted mIF profiles substantially enhance downstream tasks, including spatial domain identification, survival prediction, and AI-assisted pathology report generation validated by expert pathologists from multiple institutes across the world. Furthermore, MixTIME enables longitudinal tracking of protein expression dynamics across clinical time points and reveals protein gene interaction patterns linked to drug resistance and immune suppression in tumor microenvironments. Collectively, MixTIME provides a scalable framework for multimodal biomarker discovery and clinical translation in computational pathology.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On multidimensional infinite dihedral group extensions of Gibbs Markov maps

arXiv:2601.08961v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We obtain a local central limit theorem for cocycles associated with a class of non abelian and non compact group extensions of Gibbs Markov maps. This class consists of multidimensional infinite dihedral groups. Unlike in the set up of the random walks on groups, we cannot use the convolution of measures on the group and instead we resort to an approach based on irreducible representations. Depending on the dimension of the group, we obtain either mixing, and thus ergodicity, or dissipativity. Also, we obtain the asymptotics of the first return time of the group extension to the origin.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Grounding Multi-Hop Reasoning in Structural Causal Models via Group Relative Policy Optimization

arXiv:2605.01482v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-Hop Fact Verification requires complex reasoning across disparate evidence, posing significant challenges for Large Language Models , which may suffer from hallucinations and fractured logical chains. Existing methods, while improving transparency via Chain-of-Thought , often lack explicit modeling of the structural dependencies between evidence and claims. In this work, we introduce an SCM-inspired framework that grounds reasoning in explicit directed dependency graphs, treating verification as a constructive structural reasoning process rather than full causal inference with interventions or counterfactual semantics. We empirically identify an "inverted U-shaped" correlation between reasoning-chain length and accuracy, revealing that excessive structural complexity can degrade performance. To address this, we propose a rule-based reinforcement learning strategy using Group Relative Policy Optimization. This approach dynamically optimizes the trade-off between structural depth and conciseness. Extensive experiments on HoVer and EX-FEVER demonstrate that our SCM-GRPO framework outperforms strong baselines while producing more traceable reasoning structures for complex fact verification.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Toward Vibe Medicine: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Framework for Clinical Decision Support

arXiv:2606.15504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, the advances of large language models and autonomous agents have revolutionized the healthcare field, facilitating diagnosis and improving treatment results. However, most existing AI systems rely on pre-trained knowledge and predefined pipelines, which struggle to learn dynamically from the interactive chat session history that contains patient outcomes and past failures. To address this limitation, we propose VIBEMed, a multi-agent framework with a built-in self-evolution mechanism and architecture-level safety sandbox for robust clinical decision support. The system integrates three specialized agents, including a Clinical Diagnostic Agent (CDA) for hypothesis generation, a Therapeutic Execution Agent (TEA) for treatment planning, and a Clinical Evolution Manager Agent (CEMA) that distills longitudinal clinical feedback into reusable knowledge, transforming multimodal patient information into personalized medical decisions. Through self-evolution mechanism, the framework enables iterative updates across memory, model behavior, and decision strategies, allowing the system to improve over time. Experimental results show that VIBEMed demonstrates superior performance through its evolving mechanism in complex clinical cases, particularly in tasks that require integrated decision-making and longitudinal planning. The framework also supports reliable end-to-end decisions in challenging scenarios such as oncology treatment planning, highlighting its feasibility in real-world clinical contexts. Overall, VIBEMed provides a practical path beyond static AI systems toward adaptive, experience-driven clinical decision support, demonstrating the value of combining multi-agent collaboration with continuous evolution for advancing precision medicine.

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

ModTGCN: Modularity-aware Graph Neural Networks for Text Classification

Graph-based text classification models typically rely on local neighborhood aggregation and overlook global community structure, despite semantic document graphs exhibiting strong class-consistent clustering. Ignoring this can blur class boundaries and lead to over-smoothing. We propose ModTGCN, a modularity-aware graph neural network for text classification that jointly optimizes cross-entropy and a modularity-based auxiliary objective to promote class-coherent document communities while preserving discriminative representations. The modularity term is computed on a document-document similarity graph derived from transformer embeddings (pretrained or fine-tuned). To improve scalability, we decouple the original heterogeneous TextGCN graph into separate document-word and word-word components, achieving 2x-10x faster training. We further study graph construction strategies, label-aware edge reweighting, and supervision choices for modularity optimization. Experiments on five benchmarks show consistent gains, with larger improvements on complex, low homophily datasets such as Ohsumed and 20NG.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Grading the Grader: Lessons from Evaluating an Agentic Data Analysis System

arXiv:2606.24839v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic data analysis systems produce rich outputs, including code, numerical results, and verbal diagnostics. This makes them more challenging to evaluate than single-turn LLM responses. It is therefore necessary to distinguish genuine disagreement between an agent's output and a ground-truth answer from grading artifacts. We investigate how reliably automated graders assess such a system and what strategies improve grading quality by applying LAMBDA, a multi-agent data-analysis system, on 153 numerical QRData tasks from DSGym. We develop and evaluate a three-layer human-AI grading cascade: strict regex matching, LLM-based lenient grading, and snippet-based human inspection, which combines non-GenAI and GenAI strategies with different failure profiles. Both automated graders achieve 100% observed precision (0/70 false positives). The lenient grader's recall is 97% against human labels. A keyword-anchored extraction pipeline raises the strict grader's recall by 60 percentage points over a last-number heuristic; the lenient grader is architecturally parser-independent. An iterative nudge mechanism raises grading run success from 36% to 97% and lenient-pass rates from 16% to 46%; comparing nudging with and without original-question re-injection shows that re-injection offers no benefit, confirming the nudge as an answer template cue. We further observe in this case study that variable type is the task metadata field most consistently associated with grading pipeline dynamics and observed outcome grades.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Investigating naming error patterns after non-invasive brain stimulation and language treatment in persons with aphasia

Abstract Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) paired with behavioral language therapy can improve naming in persons with aphasia (PWA), yet naming errors persist. Little is known about how naming error patterns change after non-invasive brain stimulation is combined with language treatment. Aims: To examine whether right cerebellar tDCS plus computerized aphasia therapy changes the types of naming errors in people with chronic aphasia across timepoints, and to determine whether effects differ by cerebellar tDCS polarity (anode vs. cathode). Methods and Procedures: In a randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled, within-subject crossover study, we retrospectively analyzed behavioral data from 24 individuals with post-stroke aphasia. Each participant completed two 15-session intervention periods (3-5 sessions/week) with active cerebellar tDCS + computerized aphasia therapy and sham + computerized aphasia therapy, separated by a two-month washout. General linear models (GLMs) assessed longitudinal changes in six error types (semantic, phonological real word, phonological nonword, no response, mixed, unrelated) on an untrained picture naming task (Philadelphia Naming Test; PNT) and a trained task (Naming 80; N80). Additional GLMs evaluated polarity effects with 2 (Group: anode vs. cathode) x 2 (Treatment) interactions, and treatment-order effects with 2 (Group: tDCS-first vs. sham-first) x 2 (Treatment) interactions. Outcomes and Results: Active cerebellar tDCS did not significantly change error types for trained items (N80). For untrained items (PNT), active tDCS reduced several error types relative to sham, with the clearest and most durable reduction in phonological nonword errors; more moderate reductions occurred for phonological real word and unrelated errors. Mixed errors showed a marginally opposite pattern, tending to increase after tDCS and decrease after sham. Polarity analyses indicated broadly similar effects across anodal and cathodal stimulation overall, but only the anode group showed a reliable treatment effect for phonological nonword errors on the PNT. Treatment-order analyses revealed no significant order effects. Conclusions: Our results indicate a shift in naming error types, particularly after tDCS treatment for the untrained naming task (PNT). These findings may help guide the course of treatment approaches of those with aphasia and what error naming pattern types may show changes post stroke when combining non-invasive brain stimulation and computerized aphasia therapy. Clinical Trial Registration: Cerebellar Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and Aphasia Treatment [NCT02901574] Keywords: aphasia, naming errors, non-invasive brain stimulation, cerebellar tDCS, computerized aphasia treatment

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

No-Free-Fairness: Fundamental Limits and Trade-offs in Learning Systems

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we establish a set of theoretical impossibility results, termed the No-Free-Fairness theorems, that identify three fundamental sources of disparity in learning systems. First, we show that when a task exhibits irreducible cost on a subgroup, any decision rule must trade off overall performance with disparity, yielding an inherent fairness–cost frontier. Second, we prove that even in ideal, noise-free settings where a perfectly fair and accurate solution exists, finite-sample learning alone induces nontrivial subgroup disparity, ruling out distribution-free fairness guarantees. More seriously, enforcing strict relative fairness creates a statistical bottleneck: achieving low cost may require exponentially many samples. Third, we show that limitations of the model class can independently induce disparity: if the model cannot represent accurate solutions for a subgroup, fairness remains unattainable regardless of data or training procedure. Overall, these results demonstrate that unfairness is not solely a consequence of biased data or suboptimal optimization, but arises from the intrinsic structure of decision problems, the constraints of finite data, and the expressivity of models. Our framework applies broadly beyond standard supervised learning, and suggests that achieving fairness requires explicit trade-offs and should be treated as a core design consideration.

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

MedBench v5: A Dynamic, Process-Oriented, and Hallucination-Aware Benchmark for Clinical Multimodal Models

Existing medical AI benchmarks lack process visibility, atomic skill evaluation, and integrated hallucination detection. We introduce MedBench v5, a redesigned benchmark for clinical multimodal models (language, vision-language, and agent systems) that moves from static QA to dynamic, process-oriented evaluation. MedBench v5 features: (1) a dual-dimensional framework combining Clinical Cognitive Responsiveness (14 sub-dimensions) and Medical Atomic Skills (4 agent environments), covering 63 tasks; (2) three switchable information-flow stressors (omission, contradiction, evidence delay) for factorized degradation analysis; (3) a dynamic process audit protocol with five reasoning nodes that produces model-specific failure fingerprints; (4) hallucination propagation monitoring across initiation, propagation, anchoring, and contradiction interaction-capturing silent hallucination. Experiments on frontier models show that strong overall task performance does not guarantee process stability: stressors mainly disrupt contradiction detection, diagnosis updating, hallucination propagation, and contradiction-based self-correction, while final evidence grounding can remain superficially stable. MedBench v5 provides a unified infrastructure for capability profiling, controllable stress testing, process auditing, and hallucination trajectory analysis in clinical AI evaluation.

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

Evaluating Bias in Phoneme-Based Automatic Speech Recognition Systems: An Analysis of IPA Transcription Models

The popularization of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems has increased exploration of the demographic biases related to race, age, gender, and accent, often formed from imbalanced training data. Most of these studies focused on standard grapheme-based ASR systems with comparatively little emphasis on phoneme-based systems, such as models that produce International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) representations. As ASR systems shift toward multilingual support and low-resource language modeling, IPA-based layers serve as a critical, language-agnostic foundation. In this study, we evaluate the performance of two state-of-the-art open-source ASR systems, WhisperIPA and ZIPA, that generate IPA transcriptions across diverse accents and language sources. Our evaluation includes existing multilingual speech corpora and demographically annotated English-language corpora. We measure model performance by comparing model-generated IPA transcriptions against grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) systems using both standard phoneme error rate (PER) and a proposed Soft PER metric that tolerates linguistically similar phoneme substitutions. Our analysis examines how performance varies across languages and demographic groups such as gender, accent, ethnicity, and age, revealing persistent disparities even after accounting for acceptable phonemic variation. These findings provide insight into potential sources of bias and inform the development of more inclusive and linguistically robust phoneme-based ASR systems. Our code and data will be made publicly available to the community.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

AdaSR: Adaptive Streaming Reasoning with Hierarchical Relative Policy Optimization

Large reasoning models typically follow a read-then-think paradigm: they observe the complete input, reason over a static context, and then produce the answer. Yet many real-world scenarios are inherently dynamic, such as audio and video stream, where information arrives as a continuous stream and models must reason, update, and respond under partial observations. Recent streaming reasoning methods allow models to think while reading, but they largely rely on supervised imitation of pre-constructed trajectories, which limits their flexibility. In this paper, we propose AdaSR, an adaptive streaming reasoning framework that enables models to reason during input streaming and perform final deliberation once the stream is complete, learning when to think, and how much computation to allocate across different stages. To optimize this hierarchical reasoning process, we introduce Hierarchical Relative Policy Optimization (HRPO), which decomposes policy optimization into streaming reasoning and deep reasoning phases, providing more fine-grained advantage assignment instead of uniformly distributing a single sequence-level advantage over all tokens. HRPO integrates format, accuracy, and adaptive thinking rewards to enforce valid reasoning protocols, preserve final task performance, and encourage latency-aware computation allocation. Experiments show that AdaSR achieves a better balance among reasoning accuracy, computational efficiency, and streaming latency compared with supervised fine-tuning baseline. We release our code at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/StreamingLLM/tree/main/AdaSR.

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

Learning to Trigger: Reinforcement Learning at the Large Hadron Collider

arXiv:2606.23993v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-throughput scientific facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider depend on real-time event filtering (triggering) under tight constraints on bandwidth, latency, and storage. In practice, trigger menus are largely static and hand-tuned and can become suboptimal as detector conditions, pileup, and background composition drift over time. We cast online threshold tuning as a sequential decision-making problem: a reinforcement learning agent ingests streaming summaries of recent rates and signal-sensitive features and updates trigger thresholds to maximize signal efficiency while tracking a target background rate within a tolerance band. We adapt Group-Filtered Policy Optimization (GFPO) to streaming control and introduce two variants (GFPO-F, GFPO-FR) that enforce background rate feasibility during training. On a benchmark that emulates realistic collider operation, we study two representative triggers: a total transverse energy ($H_{T}$) trigger sensitive to pileup variation, and an anomaly-detection (AD) trigger based on reconstruction loss for rare or non-standard signatures. On Monte Carlo streams, our agent increases the fraction of in-tolerance time intervals by 48\% ($H_T$) and 28\% (AD), with a cumulative gain of up to 2\% in signal efficiency on those in-tolerance intervals. Transferring from simulation to real collision data (CMS Run 283408), the same agent, without fine-tuning, achieves a 56\% ($H_T$) and 28\% (AD) in-tolerance improvement over baselines, with further signal-efficiency gain on both triggers. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of RL-based trigger control on real Large Hadron Collider collision data. Code is available at https://github.com/Zixind/GFPO\_LHC.

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

TRIDENT: Breaking the Hybrid-Safety-Physics Coupling for Provably Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18308v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safe coordination in networked cyber-physical systems forces learning algorithms to simultaneously handle hybrid discrete-continuous actions, hard training-time safety constraints, and physics-governed dynamics. We show that these three features form a directed cycle of biases that defeats any naive composition of off-the-shelf modules, and formalize this as a three-way coupling lemma. We then introduce TRIDENT, the first MARL framework whose three components are co-designed to cancel each leak: a Richardson-Romberg gradient correction reducing Gumbel-Softmax bias from O(tau) to O(tau^2), a Lyapunov-constrained sequential trust-region update enforcing per-iterate feasibility, and a physics-informed residual critic that decomposes value rather than reward. We prove an O~(1/sqrt(K)) convergence rate to a constrained Nash equilibrium and an O(sqrt(K)) cumulative-violation bound. On multi-UAV mobile-edge computing, autonomous intersection management, and a hybrid SMAC variant, TRIDENT cuts training-time violations by 95.5% over MADDPG and 76.3% over MACPO, while improving reward by 13.5% over the strongest unconstrained baseline.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Towards an Agent-First Web: Redesigning the Web for AI Agents

arXiv:2606.19116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The World Wide Web was built on an assumption held for three decades: the primary consumer of web content is a human being. This permeates every layer; its access model presumes human visitors, its economics rest on human attention, and its content targets human perception. The rapid emergence of AI agents as intermediaries between humans and web content invalidates this assumption. Yet the web resists agents through blanket blocking, CAPTCHA-based exclusion, and economic models that treat agent access as extraction rather than legitimate interaction. This paper proposes a principled redesign across three layers. At the access layer, agents acting for humans should inherit equivalent access rights, governed by rate limiting and agent identification metadata in HTTP requests, analogous to browser headers, alongside a dual-layer architecture serving human-readable and agent-optimized content from the same domain. At the economic layer, we propose an intent-based tier framework grounded in the agent-as-human-proxy principle: an agent's economic obligation mirrors that of the human it represents. A token-based subscription model meters content in tokens rather than pageviews, alongside a commissioned content economy anchoring AI content production in human intentionality. At the content layer, we identify epistemic recursion, the self-referential loop in which AI-generated content is consumed by agents to produce further content, progressively detaching web knowledge from human ground truth. We propose the Agent Text Markup Language (ATML), a four-level human supervision tier model, and a cryptographic provenance chain to counter this threat. Together these constitute ten design principles for an agent-first internet, one in which agents are first-class citizens whose integration requires renegotiating the web's foundational social contract across access, economics, and content.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Digital exclusion and mental health in UK Armed Forces veterans: findings from the Veterans Digital Needs Study

Background: Public services are increasingly delivered through digital platforms. Although digital health may improve access and scalability, they may also widen inequalities for people who lack reliable access, confidence, skills, affordability or trust. Objective: This study examined the prevalence of self-reported digital exclusion among UK veterans and assessed its association with depression, anxiety and loneliness. Methods: A cross-sectional online survey was conducted between July 2025 and March 2026. Participants were UK Armed Forces veterans and resident in the UK. The survey collected sociodemographic, military service, digital access and health data. Self-reported digital exclusion was defined as reporting feeling excluded or disadvantaged due to lack of digital access or skills. Probable depression, anxiety and loneliness were assessed using the PHQ-2, GAD-2 and three-item UCLA Loneliness Scale, respectively. Associations between digital exclusion and each outcome were examined using adjusted multivariable logistic regression. Results: Of 1,911 responses received, 1,607 were included after data quality exclusions. Among participants with valid responses to the primary digital exclusion item, 553 (41.7%) reported digital exclusion. Digital exclusion was more common among females, younger veterans and those with lower household income. Probable depression, anxiety and loneliness were more prevalent among digitally excluded participants than among non-excluded participants. In adjusted models, self-reported digital exclusion was associated with higher odds of probable depression (AOR 1.38; 95% CI 1.04 to 1.83; p=0.028), probable anxiety (AOR 1.63, 95% CI 1.23 to 2.16; p

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

DTT-BSR+: A Generative-Regression Cascade for Music Source Restoration

arXiv:2606.24127v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Music source restoration (MSR) requires jointly addressing source unmixing and the inversion of non-linear production effects. Current methods struggle to achieve accurate target signal reconstruction while maintaining semantic consistency. To address this limitation, we propose DTT-BSR+, a two-stage cascade MSR system that decouples distribution fitting from signal reconstruction into separate stages. A generative DTT-BSR separator in the first stage produces stems matching the prior of clean sources, and a modified Demucs network in the second stage enhances the first stage output using time-domain and multi-resolution spectral losses. DTT-BSR+ improves multi-mel signal-to-noise ratio (MMSNR) over the single-stage DTT-BSR across all stems, and surpasses the state-of-the-art X-LANCE MSR system on five stems. We also reveal through Fréchet Audio Distance (FAD) decomposition an implicit trade-off between signal reconstruction accuracy and semantic distribution fitting across stems.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Language fMRI lateralization success and head motion in pediatric epilepsy patients with ADHD, and improvements based on fMRI task training

Introduction Language functional MRI (fMRI) is a valuable tool for presurgical planning in epilepsy. Functional MRI can be challenging in children, and head motion can compromise its utility. The candidacy of patients with ADHD for fMRI is sometimes queried regarding concerns about possible head motion. In 2020, we implemented an fMRI task training program, via telehealth and/or mock MRI. We aimed to determine whether training increased language lateralisation success and/or reduced head motion in all patients, and in those with ADHD. We also aimed to determine whether patients with ADHD exhibited more head motion during fMRI than those without ADHD. Methods We retrospectively identified 223 epilepsy (85%) and other neurosurgery patients, (241 scans including repeats) with language fMRI at Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, Australia, 2016-2024. There were 24 individuals with ADHD listed in the Electronic Medical Record, five of whom had diagnoses of both ADHD and autism; and nine with autism. Language lateralisation success was determined by clinician description recorded as left/right/bilateral in the medical record. 99 patients were provided the training including fMRI task practise. Head motion was quantified by maximum Framewise Displacement (FDmax; mm). Results ADHD was associated with lower language lateralisation success. Training was associated with greater language lateralisation success, across all patients, and in those with ADHD. Regarding ADHD and head motion, outliers in FDmax were seen in 5 young patients with ADHD. Data were trimmed to allow separate investigation of FDmax for the sample with and without extremes of head motion. In untrimmed data, FDmax was significantly higher in patients with ADHD than in those without. In trimmed data, FDmax was on average lower in patients with ADHD than those without, however this was not statistically supported. Regarding training and head motion, across all patients, FDmax was significantly lower for scans with training than without. In patients with ADHD, FDmax was on average lower for scans with training, however training was not associated with FDmax. Conclusions Language fMRI training was associated with higher language lateralization success, particularly in patients with ADHD. Training was associated with reduced head motion across all patients. Although some young patients with ADHD had substantial head motion, most in our sample did not move more than those without ADHD. We conclude that the training program increases success of language fMRI, and that an ADHD diagnosis should not be a contraindication to language fMRI.

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

TerraMARS: A Domain-Adapted Small-Language-Model Pipeline for Mars Terraforming Literature

Researchers are interested in learning about Mars so that it may eventually become habitable for humans. To achieve this, there is a need for comprehensive knowledge of the planet's atmosphere, hydrology, surface chemistry, radiation environment, and spatial features through the scientific literature. These contain valuable information and meaningful quantitative constraints that can be used in other models and studies, such as habitability assessment and future terraforming studies. We present TerraMARS, an end-to-end information extraction pipeline that combines a domain-adapted Small Language Model to answer Mars terraforming-related questions and convert unstructured Mars science text into machine-readable structured outputs in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. A corpus of open-access papers is collected and processed using a multistage retrieval and chunking framework. Google Gemma 3 1B was adapted to the domain using Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) fine-tuning on Mars-specific question-answering and information extraction datasets. The resulting pipeline generates both types of output and provides a foundation for integrating knowledge from scientific literature into downstream applications like digital twins and habitability modeling for Mars. The output from this pipeline looks promising, but further improvements are needed to increase extraction accuracy and factual consistency.

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

Density estimation for Hellinger via minimum-distance estimators: mixtures of Gaussians, log-concave, and more

arXiv:2606.11469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the task of density estimation, where we hope to accurately estimate a probability density from $n$ samples. A textbook method for density estimation in total variation distance is the minimum-distance estimator approach, where we conclude both the algorithm and the analysis merely from bounding the VC dimension of a particular concept class (the so-called Yatracos class). While this technique has originally yielded sharp guarantees primarily for total variation distance, in this work we extend the minimum-distance estimator approach for learning within Hellinger distance. Our main observation is that we may produce an analogous recipe for Hellinger (where we only require bounding the VC dimension of a related concept class) by drawing connections to recent results yielding reverse data processing inequalities. This recipe is flexible enough to accommodate fast algorithms originally designed for total variation distance; by modifying the approach of Acharya et al. (2017) we conclude the first near-linear time algorithm for learning classes including univariate mixtures of log-concave densities and mixtures of Gaussians (with arbitrary variances), with near-optimal sample complexity.