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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Electrical Noise Produced by Micron-Sized Particles above a Surface Paul Trap

arXiv:2606.19585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electric field noise produced by the surface of ion trap electrodes reduces the fidelity of quantum computing operations. Despite decades of investigation its microscopic origins remain unclear. Here, we measure electric field noise at trapping locations along the symmetry axis of a linear surface Paul trap. We find that noise levels vary by three orders-of-magnitude in one 600$\,\mu$m section of the trap. Optical and scanning electron microscope images show micron-sized particles close to the trapping locations with the highest noise levels. We find that modeling the particles as a lossy dielectric with a effective loss tangent $\tan\theta=0.33(0.06)$ describes the magnitude of the noise, as well as its spatial and frequency dependence. Our observations may explain the large variation of reported noise levels in literature.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

LedgerAgent: Structured State for Policy-Adherent Tool-Calling Agents

Policy-adherent tool-calling agents in customer-service domains must maintain task states across turns while calling tools and obeying domain policies. Task states consist of relevant facts, identifiers, constraints, and conditions observed through user interaction and tool calls. In standard agents, task states are not represented separately. Observations, tool returns, and policy instructions are placed in the prompt, leaving agents to reconstruct the relevant states from the prompt each time they decide what to do next. This design makes state management implicit, creating two common failure modes. An agent may retrieve the right facts but later ground its decision in stale, missing, or incorrect information; and a syntactically valid tool call may still violate a domain policy that depends on the current task state. We introduce \textsc{LedgerAgent}, an inference-time method for tool-calling agents that maintains observed task states in a separate ledger and renders the states into the prompt. The ledger is also used to check state-dependent policy constraints before environment-changing tool calls are executed, blocking policy violations. Across four customer-service domains and a mixed panel of open- and closed-weight models, \textsc{LedgerAgent} improves average pass\textasciicircum{}k over a standard prompt-based tool-calling approach, with the largest gains under stricter multi-trial consistency metrics.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Interactive Pareto navigation for deep multi-task learning

arXiv:2606.19521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In multi-task learning, handling an increasing number of objectives can quickly become challenging, both in terms of the computational resources and the decision maker's capacity to choose appropriate trade-offs. A widely used approach is thus to aggregate the individual losses in a single loss function by a weighted sum. This often fails to capture either the decision maker's preferences as a result of the shape of the Pareto front, or requires multiple adjustments and computations which becomes prohibitively expensive in deep learning applications. To address these issues, we introduce a novel framework, Preference Pareto Exploration (PPE), which enforces the decision maker's preferences while accounting for the geometry of the Pareto set in an interactive exploration process. PPE is based on a predictor-corrector method that performs predictor steps tangential to the manifold of Pareto-optimal solutions, following the decision maker's preference. The subsequent corrector step results in a new trade-off reflecting this preference. To avoid explicit Hessian computations when characterizing the tangent space of the manifold, we employ a Krylov subspace method that relies solely on matrix-vector products. These products can be efficiently obtained via automatic differentiation, ensuring both efficiency and robustness throughout the optimization process. The method's functionality and performance are demonstrated using both toy problems and examples from deep learning.

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

Machine learning enables roughness-driven inverse design of milling processes

arXiv:2606.16032v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interest in applying data-driven approaches in manufacturing has grown significantly, particularly for mapping complex, high-dimensional relationships. The milling process is one area where predictive models can link influential parameters to surface roughness metrics prior to in situ operations. While this approach offers clear advantages, it faces challenges due to limited datasets and robustness issues in inverse design paradigms. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a machine learning (ML)-based framework for the inverse design of the surface milling process, with a focus on surface roughness as the design objective. The framework employs forward training of two ML models, a deep neural network (DNN) and a random forest (RF) ensemble, both developed using a high-fidelity synthetic dataset generated from a computational simulation framework. These trained models are integrated into a Bayesian optimization (BO) procedure to overcome the multiplicity problem arising from the many-to-one mapping inherent in the dataset. The approach identifies top-performing milling process configurations, considering both process and tool parameters, and presents them from the full solution space. The models achieve average relative errors below 5% when compared to reference results, thereby demonstrating the robustness and reliability of the proposed methodology.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Effective Dimension Governs Generalization in Quantum Kernel Vision Models

arXiv:2606.20183v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent quantum vision models-quantum vision transformers and quantum convolutional networks-report two striking but unexplained empirical phenomena: (i) ansatze with more, or more uniformly distributed, entanglement generalize better, and (ii) injecting quantum noise can improve test accuracy rather than degrade it. These observations are currently treated as curiosities, discovered by grid search and explained, if at all, by hand. We show that both are manifestations of a single, measurable quantity: the effective dimension $d_eff$ of the (noise-shaped) quantum feature kernel. Working primarily with quantum-kernel vision models-a quantum feature map read out by a kernel classifier-we give a spectral account in which entanglement structure and quantum noise are two knobs that move $d_eff$; in an overfitting regime, contracting $d_eff$ acts as ridge-like regularization. We analyze the mechanism: an exact decomposition of the depolarized kernel $K_p=(1-p)^2K+\tfrac{p(2-p)}{D}\mathbf{1}\mathbf{1}^\top$ with $d_eff(K_p)\to1$, a contraction result (and its boundary) for amplitude damping, a kernel-machine capacity bound, and a capacity/alignment risk decomposition; the monotone contraction operative in our entangled experiments is verified empirically, not proven in general. Along the one-parameter depolarizing family the collapse is instead exact by construction; we use it only to confirm the kernel decomposition to machine precision and at up to $12$ qubits, not as evidence for $d_eff$. Amplitude damping contracts $d_eff$ and lifts test accuracy by up to $+13\%$ along an inverted-U sweet spot; the effect's sign flips between the over- and under-fitting regimes; noise injection matches an explicit spectral-filtering frontier. Our results organize two reported anecdotes into a single measurable principle for designing quantum-vision models.

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

Towards Efficient Large Language Reasoning Models via Extreme-Ratio Chain-of-Thought Compression

arXiv:2602.08324v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning successfully enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it incurs substantial computational overhead for inference. Existing CoT compression methods often suffer from a critical loss of logical fidelity at high compression ratios, resulting in significant performance degradation. To achieve high-fidelity, fast reasoning, we propose a novel EXTreme-RAtio Chain-of-Thought Compression framework, termed Extra-CoT, which aggressively reduces the token budget while preserving answer accuracy. To generate reliable, high-fidelity supervision, we first train a dedicated semantically-preserved compressor on mathematical CoT data with fine-grained annotations. An LLM is then fine-tuned on these compressed pairs via a mixed-ratio supervised fine-tuning (SFT), teaching it to follow a spectrum of compression budgets and providing a stable initialization for reinforcement learning (RL). We further propose Constrained and Hierarchical Ratio Policy Optimization (CHRPO) to explicitly incentivize question-solving ability under lower budgets by a hierarchical reward. Experiments on three mathematical reasoning benchmarks show the superiority of Extra-CoT. For example, on MATH-500 using Qwen3-1.7B, Extra-CoT achieves over 73\% token reduction with an accuracy improvement of 0.6\%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Our source codes have been released at https://github.com/Mwie1024/Extra-CoT.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

LLM-Based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for Assessing the Explainability of Facial Skin Disease Classification Models

Authors:

This study proposes a domain-specific LLM-based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for assessing Grad-CAM explanations in facial skin disease diagnosis models. While previous studies have primarily focused on improving classification performance through data augmentation techniques, relatively few studies have systematically examined whether model explanations are grounded in clinically relevant lesion regions. In this study, geometric augmentation, color-based augmentation, and mixed augmentation strategies were applied to facial skin disease classification models based on EfficientNet-B0, MobileNetV3, and ResNet18. Grad-CAM was employed to generate visual explanations representing the models' decision-making processes. Furthermore, an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation framework was designed using GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, and Claude Sonnet 4.6 to assess Grad-CAM explanations from the perspectives of lesion localization and explanation trustworthiness. To improve evaluation consistency and clinical grounding, a progressive prompt engineering strategy was introduced, incorporating evaluation rubrics, clinical knowledge, penalty rules, and structured output formats.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Neuromorphic Reinforcement Learning Framework for Efficient Pathfinding in Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems

arXiv:2606.20031v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic environmental changes, confined workspaces, and stringent real-time constraints make pathfinding in Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems (RMFS) a challenging problem for conventional search- and rule-based methods, which typically suffer from high computational complexity and long decision latency. While reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful alternative, deploying learned policies with extreme energy efficiency on resource-constrained hardware remains an open challenge. We present SDQN-RMFS, an end-to-end framework that achieves high-fidelity deployment of an RL-trained policy from a full-precision artificial neural network (ANN) through to a neuromorphic chip. By computing only when triggered by sparse events, this framework unlocks ultra-low-power RMFS pathfinding. Our full-stack pipeline operates as follows: an ANN policy is first efficiently trained via a collision-allowing strategy to densify informative trajectories, and then converted into a spiking neural network (SNN) via a hard-label knowledge distillation approach. This effectively addresses the output distribution mismatch, preserving policy capability across the ANN-to-SNN pipeline while substantially reducing inference latency. Hardware experiments demonstrate up to 11,281$\times$ energy savings and a nearly two-fold reduction in latency compared to a high-performance GPU baseline, while maintaining decision quality on par with the original trained policy. These results establish physical neuromorphic inference as a practical and energy-sustainable pathway for large-scale RMFS operations.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Identifiability Without Gaussianity: Symbolic World Models and Near-Infinite Temporal Consistency

Klindt, LeCun, and Balestriero (arXiv:2605.26379) proved that Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) achieve linear identifiability, the linear recovery of the world's true latent variables, if and only if the world's latent dynamics follow a Gaussian, stationary process. This Gaussian boundary implies a fundamental limit on temporal consistency: for any non-Gaussian physical system, the representation error of a statistical World Model grows monotonically with time. We prove that this limit is an artifact of the statistical alignment mechanism, not a property of World Models in general. We introduce the Physics-Grounded Symbolic Architecture (PGSA) and prove three results: (1) a PGSA achieves exact linear identifiability for all physical regimes, regardless of the latent distribution; (2) the per-step error of a PGSA is bounded by numerical precision alone; and (3) as a direct consequence, a PGSA maintains temporal consistency for an unbounded number of transitions, a property we term near-infinite temporal consistency. We further prove that statistical World Models cannot achieve this property for any non-Gaussian system, regardless of model capacity or the volume of training data. The algebraic cores of four of the theorems are formalized in Lean 4 with Mathlib4 v4.31.0 (zero sorry placeholders); the Klindt et al. converse is taken as an external premise. The contrast establishes that symbolic grounding in the causal generator of the world's dynamics is the sufficient condition and, in non-Gaussian regimes, the only condition for near-infinite temporal consistency.

10.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-11

Clinical Profile and Genomic Characterization of the 2026 Bundibugyo Virus Index Case in Uganda

Bundibugyo virus disease (BVD) remains a high-consequence threat in Eastern and Central Africa, where cross-border mobility, nonspecific early symptoms, and delayed recognition can obscure transmission. In this case report, we describe Uganda’s 2026 BVD index case: a male patient who traveled from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Uganda and was admitted to a private hospital in Kampala on 11 May 2026 after more than two weeks of vomiting and diarrhea, with epigastric pain, weakness, and hiccups. He deteriorated rapidly, developing acute kidney injury, pulmonary edema, hepatic dysfunction, hypoxemia, delirium, atrial flutter, possible disseminated intravascular coagulation, and multiorgan failure, and died on 14 May. A posthumous EDTA whole-blood specimen tested at the Central Emergency Response and Surveillance Laboratory was positive for orthoebolavirus RNA and confirmed as Bundibugyo virus (BDBV) by RT-qPCR. Sequencing achieved 99% genome coverage at ≥100× depth. The 2026 BDBV genome formed a distinct lineage approximately equidistant from the 2007–2008 Butalya and 2012 Isiro variants, differing by 216–227 nucleotides (~1.2% sequence divergence). Here, we demonstrate the value of fatality surveillance, private-sector surveillance, diagnostic optimization through national specimen referral, and rapid molecular-genomic diagnostics for early detection, transmission chain interruption, and public health response coordination.

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

CAPRA: Scaling Feedback on Software Architecture Deliverables with a Multi-Agent LLM System

arXiv:2606.18976v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated assessment in software engineering education has advanced significantly for code grading and essay scoring. However, reviewing software architecture deliverables, which requires analyzing structural completeness and requirements traceability, has not yet been fully automated. Applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to this task requires robust architectures to ensure technical feedback is accurate and reliable for students. This paper presents CAPRA (Configurable Architecture Proficiency Report Assessment), a multi-agent LLM system that analyzes software architecture deliverables to generate personalized, template-compliant LaTeX feedback. As a core design choice, CAPRA coordinates multiple specialized agents and employs a Python-based microservice for multi-modal document extraction, utilizing PyMuPDF and vision-enabled LLMs (specifically gpt-4o) to parse text and UML diagrams. To ensure educational reliability and mitigate hallucinations, CAPRA introduces a deterministic Evidence Anchoring step using fuzzy matching via normalized Levenshtein distance, along with a ConsistencyManager agent that cross-verifies, deduplicates, and merges findings. System performance is assessed using a structured eight-criterion binary evaluation taxonomy covering: (i) extraction completeness, (ii) feature validation, (iii) issue grounding and severity detection, (iv) recommendation specificity and traceability, and (v) template and tone compliance. A preliminary empirical evaluation on 10 student reports shows that CAPRA satisfied 88.8% of the evaluated criteria under a strict two-rater aggregation rule, achieved moderate inter-rater agreement with human evaluators (kappa = 0.582), and processed each report in slightly over 4 minutes. While these results support the viability of LLM-supported architectural feedback, human oversight remains essential for subjective assessment dimensions.

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

A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination

Global illumination (GI) is essential for realistic rendering but remains computationally expensive due to the complexity of simulating indirect light transport. Recent neural methods have mainly relied on per-scene optimization, sometimes extended to handle changes in camera or geometry. Efforts toward cross-scene generalization have largely stayed in 2D screen space, such as neural denoising or G-buffer based GI prediction, which often suffer from view inconsistency and limited spatial understanding. We propose a generalizable 3D light transport embedding that approximates global illumination directly from 3D scene configurations, without using rasterized or path-traced cues. Each scene is represented as a point cloud with geometric and material features. A scalable transformer models global point-to-point interactions to encode these features into neural primitives. At render time, each query point retrieves nearby primitives via nearest-neighbor search and aggregates their latent features through cross-attention to predict the desired rendering quantity. We demonstrate results on diffuse global illumination prediction across diverse indoor scenes with varying layouts, geometry, and materials. The embedding trained for irradiance estimation can be quickly adapted to new rendering tasks with limited fine-tuning. We also present preliminary results for spatial-directional radiance field estimation for glossy materials and show how the normalized field can accelerate unbiased path guiding. This approach highlights a path toward integrating learned priors into rendering pipelines without explicit ray-traced illumination cues.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

PiDR: Physics-Informed Inertial Dead Reckoning for Autonomous Platforms

arXiv:2601.03040v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A fundamental requirement for full autonomy is the ability to sustain accurate navigation in the absence of external data, such as GNSS signals or visual information. In these challenging environments, the platform must rely exclusively on inertial sensors, leading to pure inertial navigation. However, the inherent noise and other error terms of the inertial sensors in such real-world scenarios will cause the navigation solution to drift over time. Although conventional deep-learning models have emerged as a possible approach to inertial navigation, they are inherently black-box in nature. Furthermore, they struggle to learn effectively with limited supervised sensor data and often fail to preserve physical principles. To address these limitations, we propose PiDR, a physics-informed inertial dead-reckoning framework for autonomous platforms in situations of pure inertial navigation. PiDR offers transparency by explicitly integrating inertial navigation principles into the network training process through the physics-informed residual component. PiDR plays a crucial role in mitigating abrupt trajectory deviations even under limited or sparse supervision. We evaluated PiDR on real-world datasets collected by a mobile robot and an autonomous underwater vehicle. We obtained more than 29% positioning improvement in both datasets, demonstrating the ability of PiDR to generalize different platforms operating in various environments and dynamics. Thus, PiDR offers a robust, lightweight, yet effective architecture and can be deployed on resource-constrained platforms, enabling real-time pure inertial navigation in adverse scenarios.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Connecting Speech to Words through Images

How can we learn the mapping between written words and their spoken counterparts in the absence of explicit textual supervision? We present a visually grounded method for building a vocabulary of spoken words using only images and their spoken descriptions. First, image captioning systems are used to build a vocabulary of written words representing salient visual concepts in the images. For each word, we then find utterances whose image captions contain that word. Then we use an unsupervised word discovery technique to align these utterances to locate instances of the target word. The result is spoken word segments that are linked to written words – all accomplished without any text supervision. In spoken word retrieval and keyword spotting experiments, the proposed approach outperforms a strong neural baseline while being more interpretable. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in English and motivate future work on low-resource languages without transcripts.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Human-centred design approaches to health facility design: Evidence from perinatal care settings in Ethiopia and Bangladesh

While significant progress has been made in perinatal outcomes over recent decades in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), maternal and newborn quality improvement initiatives often fail to account for the spatial conditions in which they are implemented. Health systems are increasingly deploying evidence-based care models into built environments that are not optimally structured to meet the needs of its patient population. As the principal users, patients and health care workers can offer pragmatic insights about improving these structural designs. Our objective was to gather insights from patients, providers, and companions about how the physical design of their health facilities influenced their experience receiving or delivering perinatal care. We conducted a prospective observational study using a human-centred design (HCD) approach to analyse perceptions of the quality of perinatal care across two low resource settings: Ethiopia and Bangladesh. Using engagement and assessment tools, we conducted interviews, focus groups, facility walk-throughs, co-design workshops, and infrastructural assessments with patients, companions, providers, and Ministry of Health representatives. Descriptive statistics and thematic analysis were used to identify key learnings and develop recommendations. Across both countries, participants identified the need for facility layouts that better support privacy, mobility during labour, alternative birth positions, companion involvement, cultural and religious practices, sanitation, and provider visibility. Based on these insights, we developed six recommendations to better align health facility infrastructure with maternal and newborn care delivery needs. Our findings suggest that investments in health facility infrastructure may improve care experiences and help enable respectful, safe, and evidence-based maternal and newborn care. Alongside targeted spatial improvements, government authorities responsible for health facility planning should incorporate participatory design processes to ensure infrastructure reflects the needs of patients, companions, and providers and supports high-quality care delivery.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

MemRerank: Preference Memory for Personalized Product Reranking

LLM-based shopping agents increasingly rely on long purchase histories and multi-turn interactions for personalization, yet naively appending raw history to prompts is often ineffective due to noise, length, and relevance mismatch. We propose MemRerank, a preference memory framework that distills user purchase history into concise, query-independent signals for personalized product reranking. To study this problem, we build an end-to-end benchmark and evaluation framework centered on an LLM-based 1-in-5 selection task, which measures both memory quality and downstream reranking utility. We further train the memory extractor with reinforcement learning (RL), using downstream reranking performance as supervision. Experiments with two LLM-based rerankers show that MemRerank consistently outperforms no-memory, raw-history, and off-the-shelf memory baselines, yielding up to +10.61 absolute points in 1-in-5 accuracy. These results suggest that explicit preference memory is a practical and effective building block for personalization in agentic e-commerce systems.

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

The Silent Cost of Artificial Intelligence Assistance: A Theory of Autonomy Surrender, the Recovery Mechanism, and the Restoration of Human Agency

arXiv:2606.13962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The integration of artificial intelligence into human decision-making environments has introduced a previously undertheorized cost: the gradual surrender of human autonomy in exchange for access to information and computational assistance. Building on the Human Identity and Autonomy Gap (HIAG) framework, this paper advances a theoretical model of autonomy surrender as a measurable, cumulative process driven by cognitive bandwidth depletion. The model proposes three interacting mechanisms: the silent cost of AI assistance, in which autonomy is transferred incrementally and without awareness; the surrender threshold, beyond which reclaiming autonomous function becomes cognitively and psychologically difficult; and the recovery mechanism, which establishes the design obligation and the ethical responsibility accompanying deliberate human re-assumption of control. The paper argues that human re-entry into the decision loop is not a passive option but an active cognitive event requiring intentional bandwidth restoration. The design of AI systems must incorporate structured re-entry pathways, here termed recovery mechanisms, that preserve human agency while appropriately distributing responsibility. The model further predicts a terminal state, here termed preference inversion, in which functional dependence on AI assistance is experienced not as a deficit but as a preference, transforming the restoration of autonomy from a design problem into a cultural and political one. Implications are drawn for AI system design, governance frameworks, and human factors research.

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

EventVLA: Event-Driven Visual Evidence Memory for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Policies

Memory remains a critical bottleneck for long-horizon robotic manipulation, as standard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies often fail when task-relevant cues become occluded or unobservable over time. While existing memory-augmented methods utilize historical context, they either suffer from severe information bottlenecks, incur high latency via decoupled dual systems, or rely on unselective buffers that accumulate massive visual redundancies. To address these limitations, we introduce EventVLA, an end-to-end framework founded on the concept of sparse visual evidence memory that comprises two core components: foundational visual anchors to retain initial and short-term contexts, and a dynamic Keyframe Evidence Memory (KEM) module. Specifically, KEM directly predicts future keyframe probabilities from the VLA's latent embeddings to autonomously capture and store sparse, task-critical visual events. This foresight-driven mechanism empowers the policy to dynamically evaluate the future causal utility of current observations, preserving transient visual evidence before it becomes unobservable. Furthermore, we propose RoboTwin-MeM, a diagnostic benchmark specifically designed to evaluate non-Markovian manipulation tasks with interactive visual evidence. Extensive evaluations show that across 17 memory-requiring simulation tasks and 4 real-world bimanual tasks, EventVLA achieves an average success rate improvement of +40% over state-of-the-art memory-augmented VLAs.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

New Identity for Cayley's First Hyperdeterminant with Applications to Symmetric Tensors and Entanglement

Authors:

arXiv:2512.03093v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this article, a new formula for computing Cayley's first hyperdeterminant in terms of the Levi-Civita symbol is given. It is then shown that this formula can be used to compute the hyperdeterminant of symmetric tensors in polynomial time with respect to their order (assuming fixed side length). Applications to quantifying the entanglement of states of bosonic quantum systems are then discussed. Additionally, in order to obtain the fast calculation of the hyperdeterminant on symmetric tensors, generalized elimination and duplication matrices are defined and their explicit formulas are derived.

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

SpeechDx: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Clinical Speech AI

Speech offers a uniquely informative window into health by simultaneously engaging neurological, motor, respiratory, and vocal systems. Current clinical speech AI methods have largely progressed through isolated condition-specific studies, making results difficult to compare and generalization difficult to assess. We introduce SpeechDx, a large-scale benchmark for clinical speech AI spanning 12 datasets and 27 tasks across diverse health conditions. To enable evaluation across shared clinical mechanisms, SpeechDx structures tasks by the stage of speech production they disrupt: conceptualization, formulation, and articulation. The benchmark tests generalization by including tasks with limited labeled data and evaluating the same health condition across multiple datasets, distinguishing clinically meaningful patterns from dataset artefacts. We systematically evaluate 12 state-of-the-art audio encoders across all tasks and under zero-shot cross-condition transfer. Results show that large-scale speech models represent the strongest overall baselines, domain-specific models improve performance only on closely matched tasks, and no current representation generalizes reliably across the clinical speech landscape. SpeechDx establishes a shared evaluation framework for tracking progress toward general-purpose clinical speech representations

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

EmbodiTTA: Resource-Efficient Test-Time Adaptation for Embodied Visual Systems

Continual Test-time adaptation (CTTA) continuously adapts the deployed model on every incoming batch of data. While achieving optimal accuracy, existing CTTA approaches present poor real-world applicability on resource-constrained edge devices, due to the substantial memory overhead and energy consumption. In this work, we first introduce a novel paradigm – on-demand TTA – which triggers adaptation only when a significant domain shift is detected. Then, we present OD-TTA, an on-demand TTA framework for accurate and efficient adaptation on edge devices. OD-TTA comprises three innovative techniques: 1) a lightweight domain shift detection mechanism to activate TTA only when it is needed, drastically reducing the overall computation overhead, 2) a source domain selection module that chooses an appropriate source model for adaptation, ensuring high and robust accuracy, 3) a decoupled Batch Normalization (BN) update scheme to enable memory-efficient adaptation with small batch sizes. Extensive experiments show that OD-TTA achieves comparable and even better performance while reducing the energy and computation overhead remarkably, making TTA a practical reality.

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

No One Knows the State of the Art in Geospatial Foundation Models

Geospatial foundation models (GFMs) have been proposed as generalizable backbones for disaster response, land-cover mapping, food-security monitoring, and other high-stakes Earth-observation tasks. Yet the published work about these models does not give reviewers or users enough information to tell which model fits a given task. We argue that nobody knows what the current state of the art is in geospatial foundation models. The methods may be useful, but the GFM literature does not standardize evaluations, training and testing protocols, released weights, or pretraining controls well enough for anyone to compare or rank them. In a 152-paper audit, we find 46 cross-paper disagreements of at least 10 points for the same model, benchmark, and protocol; 94/126 papers with extractable pretraining data use a configuration no other paper uses; and 39% of GFM papers release no model weights. This lack of community standards can be solved. We propose six concrete expectations: named-license weight release, shared core evaluations, copied-versus-rerun baseline annotations, variance reporting, one shared evaluation harness, and data-vs-architecture-vs-algorithm controls. These gaps are a coordination failure, not a fault of any individual lab; the authors of this paper, like many others in the GFM community, have contributed to them. Rather than just critiquing the community, we aim to provide concrete steps toward a shared understanding of how to innovate GFMs.

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

Retell, Reward, Repeat: Reinforcement Learning for Narrative Theory-Informed Story Retelling

Counterfactual story retelling exposes LLM shortcomings in constrained narrative solution spaces where they can no longer rely on recalling memorised training data. Ground-truth-based post-training, such as SFT, fails to teach LLMs how to generate logical and rational narrative events. In this paper, we introduce Retell, Reward, Repeat (RRR), an RL-based pipeline synthesising Structuralist Narratology with scalar narrativity to teach storytelling structure. We extend the TimeTravel dataset with human-annotated stages of narrative equilibrium to evaluate reward models. By using d-RLAIF, RRR derives training signals from the narrativity of textual features without the need for reference outputs. Evaluations demonstrate that RRR-trained LLMs outperform few-shot and SFT baselines in logic, rationality, and completeness, with output quality additionally validated by blind human preference. Relying on a small, query-only dataset, RRR provides a linguistically grounded, cost-effective post-training mechanism for storytelling–a domain currently lacking effective post-training methods. RRR highlights the continued relevance of integrating established linguistic theories into contemporary NLP.

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

Send a SCOUT First: Pre-hoc Reasoning for Adaptive Detector Allocation in Prompt-Injection Defense

arXiv:2605.30837v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prompt-injection detectors are heterogeneous: each is strong on a different slice of attacks, and none is always reliable. Yet existing systems still treat detection as a fixed single-detector pipeline, committing every request to one detector's blind spots. We reframe defense as detector allocation: given a heterogeneous pool, decide per request which detectors to run and whether to escalate to an LLM judge. Our framework SCOUT (Scalable and Controllable Outcome-prediction for Uncertainty-aware Triage) makes this decision dynamic by predicting each detector's per-sample reliability and latency from how it behaved on similar past inputs, and exposes a single safety-utility threshold to the operator (where utility bundles benign-pass rate and wall-clock). To evaluate this setting, we build SCOUT-450, a benchmark that captures the structurally complex, agent-facing injections that older prompt-injection sets under-represent. On SCOUT-450, a safety-oriented operating point reduces attack-success rate by 46% and total wall-clock by 40% relative to an always-on GPT-4o judge, at a 5.1-point benign-utility drop. SCOUT also transfers to three external benchmarks (BIPIA, IPI, and IHEval), improving the safety-utility frontier.