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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Three non-Hermitian random matrix universality classes of complex edge statistics: Spacing ratios and distributions

arXiv:2603.28457v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The conjectured three generic local bulk statistics amongst all non-Hermitian random matrix symmetry classes have recently been extended to three generic local edge statistics. We study analytically and numerically complex spacing ratios and nearest-neighbour (NN) spacing distributions that characterise such local statistics. We choose the three simplest representatives of these universality classes, given by the Gaussian ensembles of complex Ginibre, complex symmetric and complex self-dual matrices, denoted by class A, AI$^\dag$ and AII$^\dag$. In the first part, we analytically study the complex spacing ratio in class A, at finite matrix size $N$. Introducing a conditional point process, we simplify existing expressions and show why an uncontrolled approximation introduced earlier converges well in the large-$N$ limit in the bulk. When specifying to the elliptic Ginibre ensemble, we present a parameter-dependent $N=3$ surmise for the complex spacing ratio, interpolating to that of the Gaussian unitary ensemble (GUE), where such a surmise is very accurate. In the second numerical part, we compare complex spacing ratios, its moments, and NN spacing distributions for all three ensembles with that of uncorrelated points, the two-dimensional (2D) Poisson process, both in the bulk and at the edge. The varying degree of repulsion within these different edge universality classes can be well understood in terms of an effective 2D Coulomb gas description, at different values of inverse temperature $\beta$. We find indications that the complex spacing ratio does not fully unfold the local statistics at the edge. Finally we verify that for small argument, in all three symmetry classes the NN spacing distributions in the bulk and at the edge are consistent with the universal cubic repulsion.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Cross-Modal Benchmarking for Robotic Perception in Natural Environments

Natural environments present a complex challenge to robotics perception systems. Current models, particularly vision foundation models, are largely trained on structured, urban environments leading to weaknesses in their perception for field robotics tasks. We showcase the limitations of current models using our recently released WildCross benchmark, a new cross-modal benchmark for place recognition and metric depth estimation in large-scale natural environments. WildCross comprises over 476K sequential RGB frames with semi-dense depth and surface normal annotations, each aligned with accurate 6DoF pose and synchronized dense lidar submaps. In this work, we provide an expanded analysis of the benchmark results from the recent WildCross benchmark, with particular emphasis on expanded metric depth estimation experiments. Access to the code repository and dataset for this work can be found at https://csiro-robotics.github.io/WildCross.

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

Bounding Box Label Propagation for Re-Annotation of Document Layout Analysis Datasets

Datasets in practical document processing scenarios typically grow over time, and their class annotations undergo continuous refinement. This creates significant re-annotation efforts, which are time-consuming and costly. A promising remedy is to re-annotate only a small subset of available documents manually and apply semi-supervised learning techniques that leverage both labelled and unlabelled data. Although there are numerous approaches to tackle this problem for classification, there exists no adaptation for the problem of re-classifying object detection instances, e.g. for document layout analysis. To this end, we propose Bounding Box Label Propagation (BBLP), a pseudo-labelling framework for object detection. An object encoder integrates visual, textual, and positional embeddings from object detection samples to come up with a joint embedding that can be used for Label Propagation on partially annotated datasets in a plug-and-play fashion. Evaluation results indicate that the proposed approach produces high-quality class annotations of bounding boxes. In the D4LA layout analysis dataset, it achieves a mAP of 54.0%, corresponding to 81.6% of fully supervised performance, while using only 10% labelled data. Our work demonstrates the potential of Label Propagation for object detection and lays the groundwork for reducing manual annotation efforts in real-world document processing applications.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

OmniLoc: A Geometry-Aware Foundation Model for Anchor-Free UE Localization Across Diverse Indoor Environments

arXiv:2606.11490v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Indoor localization from wireless measurements remains challenging in large-scale deployments due to substantial variation in building geometry, the set of detectable access points (APs), and the heterogeneity of received signals. Existing learning-based methods often perform well only in limited settings and degrade under environmental shifts, making robust anchor-free localization across diverse indoor environments notoriously difficult. In this paper, we present OmniLoc, an environment-interactive foundation model for anchor-free user equipment localization across diverse indoor environments. To the best of our knowledge, OmniLoc is the first foundation-model-based approach built directly on wireless measurements for this task. OmniLoc is built on three key designs. First, a unified input tokenization module converts heterogeneous wireless measurements into a common representation that is more amenable to learning. Second, a geometry-aware Transformer performs AP-aware feature extraction by emphasizing dominant APs while aggregating complementary evidence from supporting APs. Third, a geometry-aware location estimation module conditions regression on geometric embeddings to produce geometrically consistent location predictions. We evaluate OmniLoc on both a large-scale in-house dataset and a public benchmark dataset. Results show that OmniLoc significantly outperforms existing methods, consistently improves existing backbones when its design components are integrated, and demonstrates strong generalization in cross-environment evaluations.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Stationary measures for higher spin vertex models on a strip

Authors:

arXiv:2309.04897v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a higher spin vertex model on a strip with fused vertex weights. This model can be regarded as a generalization of both the unfused six-vertex model on a strip arXiv:2212.09111 and an 'integrable two-step Floquet dynamics' model introduced in arXiv:1711.08884. We solve for the stationary measure using a fused version of the matrix product ansatz and then characterize it in terms of the Askey-Wilson process. Using this characterization, we obtain the limits of the mean density along an arbitrary down-right path. It turns out that all these models share a common phase diagram, which, after an appropriate mapping, matches the phase diagram of open ASEP. This provides evidence for the universality of this phase diagram.

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

Challenges in Barren Plateau Mitigation with Dynamic Parameterized Quantum Circuits

arXiv:2606.23751v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) are a promising paradigm for quantum advantage, yet their trainability is severely hampered by barren plateaus (BPs). Several works have proposed using dynamic parameterized quantum circuits (DPQCs) which intersperse unitary layers with parameterized CPTP maps (e.g. engineered dissipation, feedforward gadgets, or periodic resets), as a potential route around BPs. We unite this class of circuits into a formalization for DPQCs. We identify constraints on the nature and the structure of DPQCs if they are to prevent a significant number of parameters from becoming untrainable. We further show via purification and Pauli path analysis, a mechanism with which cost function anti-concentrates in DPQCs while still suffering from untrainability of a significant number of parameters. Our analysis reveals ways to design DPQCs that do not have an exponentially concentrated cost function, and our results suggest that BP mitigation via DPQCs is at least as hard as designing BP-free unitaries.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum iterative approach to the Traveling Salesman Problem

arXiv:2606.11843v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a classical NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, where determining the shortest route among a set of cities becomes computationally prohibitive as the problem size increases. This work explores quantum computing as an alternative approach to address this complexity. Unlike existing methods that primarily rely on quantum annealing, we propose a quantum iterative framework integrating Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) and Grover's search algorithm. Route costs are encoded as quantum phases, enabling QPE to efficiently evaluate them, while Amplitude Amplification, implemented via the Grover-Long algorithm, iteratively refines the solution space toward the optimal route. A proof-of-concept case study on a small-scale TSP instance demonstrates the feasibility of this approach and its potential for scaling to larger optimization problems. Furthermore, under an expectation-based analysis, the algorithm exhibits an expected computational complexity of $O(\frac{m^2\log_2(m)\log_2(1/\epsilon)}{\sqrt{\epsilon}})$ which depends on the error tolerance parameter $\epsilon$. This estimation omits the initialization term, which we expect future refinements to render subdominant to Phase Estimation.

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

SkillMoV: Mixture-of-View Routing with Prototype-Conditioned Gating for Unified Multi-View Proficiency Estimation

Estimating human proficiency from video is a key challenge for automated skill assessment, with applications in sports coaching, music pedagogy, surgical training, and workplace learning. Existing approaches often focus on individual scenarios or rely on shared multi-view aggregation, limiting their ability to adapt to heterogeneous camera viewpoints and activity domains. We introduce SkillMoV, a unified, parameter-efficient framework for multi-scenario proficiency estimation from synchronized multi-view video. At its core, SkillMoV introduces a Mixture-of-View Projector (MoVP), which adapts the mixture-of-experts paradigm to camera-specific view features. MoVP is composed of four stages: (i) a Mixture-of-View soft router with twelve expert MLPs that learns view-dependent expert preferences without camera-identity supervision; (ii) cross-view attention to align synchronized cameras; (iii) learnable prototype anchoring to condition the representation on class-level reference vectors; and (iv) a prototype-conditioned gated projection that produces the final skill embedding. We evaluate SkillMoV on EgoExo4D across six skill domains and three separately trained view configurations: Ego, Exos, and Ego+Exos. SkillMoV reaches 50.17% overall accuracy in the Exos setting with a single model trained jointly across all scenarios, surpassing the strongest reported Exos result among the compared methods by 3.57 percentage points. In Ego+Exos, SkillMoV remains close to the best reported result in that setting (47.63% versus 48.20%). Ablations on the selected Exos configuration validate each component: MoV routing contributes +6.61 pp over attentive aggregation, cross-view attention +4.92 pp, prototype anchoring +4.07 pp, and stochastic view dropout +3.90 pp. Through LoRA adaptation, SkillMoV trains only 23.32% of its parameters and adds limited measured overhead relative to a LoRA-only baseline.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Mapping abstraction and metacognition onto distinct transdiagnostic symptom profiles

Transdiagnostic psychiatric research on reward-guided learning has largely focused on simple associative processes, leaving it unclear whether or how higher-level processes are disrupted. Here, we studied how abstraction, the ability to extract relevant features from complex information, and metacognition, the ability to monitor and evaluate one's own mental processes, map onto specific transdiagnostic dimensions. Using an online sample (N = 249), we examined associations between these processes and three cross-culturally robust transdiagnostic dimensions derived from a large existing dataset (N = 19,505): Compulsive hypersensitivity, Social withdrawal, and Addictive behaviours. Computational modelling of an abstract representation learning task with confidence judgments revealed that Compulsive hypersensitivity was negatively associated with both abstraction ability (pboot = 0.003) and metacognitive sensitivity (pboot = 0.005), while Social withdrawal was positively associated with metacognitive sensitivity alone (pboot = 0.002). Moreover, transdiagnostic dimensions revealed more coherent associations with higher-order cognition than symptom-level analyses, highlighting the added value of examining psychopathology at the factor rather than the symptom level. These findings portray a hierarchical view of cognitive dysfunctions in psychopathology and point to representational and metacognitive processes as potential targets for transdiagnostic intervention.

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

EMS: Multi-Agent Voting via Efficient Majority-then-Stopping

arXiv:2604.02863v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Majority voting is the standard for aggregating multi-agent responses into a final decision. However, traditional methods typically require all agents to complete their reasoning before aggregation begins, leading to significant computational overhead, as many responses become redundant once a majority consensus is achieved. In this work, we formulate efficient multi-agent voting as a reliability-aware agent scheduling problem and propose Efficient Majority-then-Stopping (EMS) to improve reasoning efficiency. EMS first estimates a Task-Conditioned Reliability Ordering (TCRO) for each agent by retrieving its historical consensus evidence on semantically similar queries, and then invoking agents in descending reliability order. Next, Adaptive Incremental Voting (AIV) terminates the process once the current leading answer cannot be overturned by any possible votes from the remaining agents, and returns this answer. Finally, Reliability History Updating (RHU) updates only the invoked agents according to their consensus with the final decision. Extensive evaluations across five benchmarks show that EMS preserves the accuracy of Majority Voting while reducing the average number of invoked agents by 35% and token consumption by 44%, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/fuyu66/EMS.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Crystalline Spectral Form Factors

arXiv:2512.11054v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate crystalline-like behavior of the spectral form factor in unitary quantum systems with extremely strong eigenvalue repulsion. Using a low-temperature Coulomb gas as a model of repulsive eigenvalues, we derive the Debye-Waller factor suppressing periodic oscillations of the spectral form factor and estimate the order of its singularities at multiples of the Heisenberg time. We also reproduce this crystalline-like behavior using perturbed permutation circuits and random matrix ensembles associated with Lax matrices. Our results lay a foundation for future studies of quantum systems that exhibit intermediate level statistics between standard random matrix ensembles and permutation circuits.

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

COGNITION: From Evaluation to Defense against Multimodal LLM CAPTCHA Solvers

arXiv:2512.02318v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) undermine the security guarantees of visual CAPTCHA. We identify the attack surface where an adversary can cheaply automate CAPTCHA solving using off-the-shelf models. We evaluate 7 representative MLLMs on 18 real-world CAPTCHA task types, measuring single-shot accuracy, success under limited retries, end-to-end latency, and per-solve cost. We further validate our findings through a supplemental external dataset and an adaptive-attacker setting with session memory, while also analyzing the impact of task-specific prompt engineering and few-shot demonstrations on solver effectiveness. We reveal that MLLMs can reliably solve recognition-oriented and low-interaction CAPTCHA tasks at human-like cost and latency, whereas tasks requiring fine-grained localization, multi-step spatial reasoning, or cross-frame consistency remain significantly harder for current models. By examining the reasoning traces of such MLLMs, we investigate the underlying mechanisms of why models succeed/fail on specific CAPTCHA puzzles and use these insights to derive defense-oriented guidelines for selecting and strengthening CAPTCHA tasks. To validate these principles, we present a proof-of-concept by hardening a vulnerable CAPTCHA type using our guidelines. We demonstrate that incorporating fine-grained localization and implicit counting reduces the success rate of state-of-the-art MLLMs from over 95\% to 0\%, confirming that structural changes can effectively mitigate the threat. We conclude by emphasizing the urgent need for CAPTCHA redesign as MLLM capabilities increasingly threaten existing defenses. Code Availability (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20406852).

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

Protein-Based Fish Species Identification: Dataset, Models, and Insights from Native Bangladeshi Fish

arXiv:2606.18302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Correct identification of fish species is highly significant for food security, economic development, and climate resilience in Bangladesh. Protein sequences directly reflect functional and evolutionary constraints which are important for species authentication and biodiversity monitoring. Yet there exists no benchmark for native Bangladeshi fish species identification from protein sequence. In this study, we addressed this gap by introducing the first curated dataset for nine native Bangladeshi fish species of 2845 high quality protein sequences. We also established the first protein sequence classification baseline for this domain through a systematic benchmarking of seven architectural paradigms. Moreover, we propose a realistic deployable novel hybrid architecture of MotifCNN and Transformer with Terminal-Aware Positional-Encoding (MotifCNN-Transformer+TA-PE). Our novel architecture achieves 79.80% accuracy with macro-F1 of 0.80. The highest 83.04% accuracy is achieved by finetuned protein language model ProtBERT that has 420M parameters and requires dual 16GB GPUs for inference. According to McNemar's test, ProtBERT's 3.24% accuracy gain over our MotifCNN-Transformer+TA-PE is statistically insignificant (p = 0.1120). Our novel architecture beats it among six of the nine classes in per class identification. Also our MotifCNN-Transformer+TA-PE is approximately 5x faster, 42x smaller, and supports 16x larger batch size than ProtBERT and has GPU free inference, making it more practical for deployment in resources constrained areas such as rural Bangladesh. Beyond this, our foundational work shows effects of phylogenetic relationships on sequence similarity and establishes pathways for fisheries management, food authentication and biodiversity conservation in South Asia's protein dependent economy.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Rethinking Robust Adversarial Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models

Concept erasure aims to selectively unlearning undesirable content in diffusion models (DMs) to reduce the risk of sensitive content generation. As a novel paradigm in concept erasure, most existing methods employ adversarial training to identify and suppress target concepts, thus reducing the likelihood of sensitive outputs. However, these methods often neglect the specificity of adversarial training in DMs, resulting in only partial mitigation. In this work, we investigate and quantify this specificity from the perspective of concept space, i.e., can adversarial samples truly fit the target concept space? We observe that existing methods neglect the role of conceptual semantics when generating adversarial samples, resulting in ineffective fitting of concept spaces. This oversight leads to the following issues: 1) when there are few adversarial samples, they fail to comprehensively cover the object concept; 2) conversely, they will disrupt other target concept spaces. Motivated by the analysis of these findings, we introduce S-GRACE (Semantics-Guided Robust Adversarial Concept Erasure), which grace leveraging semantic guidance within the concept space to generate adversarial samples and perform erasure training. Experiments conducted with seven state-of-the-art methods and three adversarial prompt generation strategies across various DM unlearning scenarios demonstrate that S-GRACE significantly improves erasure performance 26%, better preserves non-target concepts, and reduces training time by 90%. Our code is available at https://github.com/Qhong-522/S-GRACE.

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

Selective Capability Unlearning in End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding

Modern spoken language understanding (SLU) systems are increasingly deployed in real-world settings, where specific functionalities may need to be removed due to policy or safety constraints. In SLU, a functionality corresponds to an intent and its associated slot-generation behavior. However, in autoregressive models, suppressing a target intent does not eliminate the conditional mapping that generates slots conditioned on that intent. When the intent prefix is externally supplied, the model can reconstruct the original intent-slot structure. We identify this structural failure as capability persistence. We propose \underline{Binding \underline{S}ubspace (BSU)}, a representation-level framework that isolates and attenuates intent-conditioned directions underlying this mapping. Across SLU benchmarks, BSU substantially reduces forced-prefix recoverability while preserving retained performance.

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

CoCoGEC: Counterfactual Generation for Robust Grammatical Error Correction

Grammatical error correction (GEC) systems are usually trained and evaluated on GEC benchmarks, but their performance often drops sharply once the surrounding context is slightly perturbed or extended. This indicates that the existing GEC models usually fail to understand the error patterns in the varying contexts. In this paper, we thoroughly investigate the counterfactuals for GEC tasks, where the subtle changes to the contexts could lead to the label flipping issue. We propose CoCoGEC, a counterfactual generation framework that creates copies of training instances with error-irrelevant contexts altered. Our framework systematically generates counterfactuals by (1) generating intra- and inter-sentence counterfactuals that maintain the error patterns as well as syntax of the original instances by altering the word-level and sentence-level contexts; (2) revising the generated counterfactuals by selecting the instances with flipped labels and high GEC Mutual Information (MI) coefficient. Extensive experiments show that our method substantially improves the stability of GEC models, outperforming a set of data augmentation baselines. Particularly, it could achieve absolute F0.5 gains of +9.9, +11.3, and +20.8 points on the perturbed BEA-19*,CoNLL-14*, and TEM-8* data set.Our code is released at https://github.com/Quinnok/CoCoGEC

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

DLTPose: 6DoF Pose Estimation From Accurate Dense Surface Point Estimates

We propose DLTPose, a novel method for 6DoF object pose estimation from RGBD images that combines the accuracy of sparse keypoint methods with the robustness of dense pixel-wise predictions. DLTPose predicts per-pixel radial distances to a set of minimally four keypoints, which are then fed into our novel Direct Linear Transform (DLT) formulation to produce accurate 3D object frame surface estimates, leading to better 6DoF pose estimation. Additionally, we introduce a novel symmetry-aware keypoint ordering approach, designed to handle object symmetries that otherwise cause inconsistencies in keypoint assignments. Previous keypoint-based methods relied on fixed keypoint orderings, which failed to account for the multiple valid configurations exhibited by symmetric objects, which our ordering approach exploits to enhance the model's ability to learn stable keypoint representations. Extensive experiments on the benchmark LINEMOD, Occlusion LINEMOD and YCB-Video datasets show that DLTPose outperforms existing methods, especially for symmetric and occluded objects. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DLTPose_/ .

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Agentic Artificial Intelligence for Hospital Readmission Review: A Single-Center Blinded Evaluation and Exploratory Qualitative Analysis

Background: Manual review of 30-day hospital readmissions can identify actionable quality and safety problems, but it is labor-intensive. We developed and evaluated an agentic AI workflow for evidence-grounded readmission review. Materials and methods: We studied adult patients with unplanned 30-day readmission after discharge from a medicine hospitalist service at a single academic health system. An AI agent using a large language model queried a database containing notes, encounters, procedures, laboratory results, and other clinical data, and completed the same structured readmission-review rubric used by physicians. In the primary comparative evaluation, 20 randomly selected readmissions from 2025 were each reviewed by two physicians and the AI system. Blinded physician evaluators rated review quality. After rubric refinement, the AI workflow was applied to 100 recent readmissions in an exploratory expanded-cohort analysis of recurring improvement opportunities. Results: In the primary comparative evaluation, the AI classified 9/20 readmissions (45%) as preventable, compared with 19/40 physician reviews (47.5%). Blinded overall quality ratings were similar for AI and physician reviews (4.35 vs. 4.20 on a 1-5 scale; mean difference 0.15, 95% CI -0.20 to 0.48; p=0.49), as were factuality/support and usefulness/actionability ratings. No AI hallucinations were identified during factuality review. Agreement on preventability and primary readmission category was low for both AI-human and human-human comparisons. The AI system cost $0.23 per chart; physician reviewers took a median of 15 minutes, corresponding to an estimated $42.43 per chart. In the exploratory expanded-cohort analysis, AI-assisted review identified recurring vulnerabilities in post-discharge follow-up plans, incomplete inpatient workups, medication-safety transitions, and indwelling-device transitions. Conclusions: Agentic AI produced readmission reviews with similar blinded quality ratings to physician reviews in this small single-center primary comparative evaluation and supported identification of recurring quality-improvement themes in the exploratory expanded-cohort analysis. Preventability judgments remained variable among both AI and physicians, underscoring the need for human oversight and prospective evaluation before operational use.

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

A Conservation Law for Equilibrium Propagation and Coupled Learning

arXiv:2606.15444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper we show that the physical learning methods known as coupled learning (CL) and equilibrium propagation (EP) conserve a mass-like quantity in the trainable parameters in the continuous-time, small-nudging limit. We prove that this conservation holds in a broad range of physically relevant settings. We then show that the conservation law constrains the training dynamics in a way that makes convergence reliable in important settings for linear circuits. We conclude by discussing some practical implications of this conservation law.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Decentralized SGD with Controlled Disagreement Finds Flatter Minima

arXiv:2602.02899v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decentralized training is often regarded as inferior to centralized training because the consensus errors between workers are thought to undermine convergence and generalization. This work challenges this view by introducing decentralized SGD with Adaptive Consensus (DSGD-AC), which uses a time-dependent scaling mechanism to maintain consensus errors throughout the training. We show that adaptive consensus changes the stationary variance of disagreement modes by balancing two effects: it preserves consensus-error magnitude through weaker graph damping while still allowing curvature-dependent damping to shape the disagreement directions. This balance can produce a stronger Hessian-weighted loss-envelope penalty around the deployed model, even when normalized Hessian alignment is weaker than in standard DSGD. Empirical results on image classification show that DSGD-AC reaches flatter solutions and higher test accuracy than standard DSGD and even centralized SGD. Together, these results support consensus errors as a useful implicit regularizer and open a new perspective on the design of decentralized learning algorithms.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

trAIt: Species-by-Trait Data Retrieval using Large Language Models

Biological research often requires information about species' traits. Manual literature collation can be time-consuming and miss parts of the literature. To address this gap, we developed trAIt, a publicly available software for the retrieval of characteristics of species from scientific literature catalogued in the Europe PubMed Central (PubMed) database. trAIt provides a graphical user interface in which users specify species and characteristics of interest. Leveraging a large language model (LLM), trAIt retrieves relevant papers, combines their content through a consensus-based summarization model, and outputs a species-by-characteristic table. For a case study involving frog species, trAIt recovered 47.1% of trait-species combinations in 2.75 hours, while an expert curator independently recovered 62.4% over months. The consensus-based summarization substantially aids accuracy compared to single-source extraction. Across three case studies of vertebrate taxa, an expert confirmed the accuracy of 70.9% of trait-species entries recovered by trAIt. We observed considerable variation across taxa in trAIt's accuracy, which is possibly due to heterogeneity in open-access literature availability and inconsistencies in species and trait terminology. In sum, our analysis suggests that LLM-based tools can accelerate biological data synthesis but should be used to support domain experts' research, rather than replace their judgment.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Possible or Definite? A Benchmark for Evaluating Diagnostic Uncertainty Preservation in Clinical Text

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for clinical text tasks such as summarization and revision. While most studies evaluate the fluency and coherence of LLM-generated text, whether LLMs correctly preserve diagnostic uncertainty remains underexplored. In clinical practice, phrases such as ``possible pneumonia'' communicate the strength of available evidence and directly guide decisions about follow-up testing and treatment. Altering these uncertainty expressions can change the clinical meaning entirely. In this paper, we systematically evaluated this problem in two steps. First, we constructed a benchmark of 1,200 clinical documents with 9,184 uncertainty annotations across five levels. Second, we evaluated three LLMs on this benchmark. Our results show that (1) LLMs preserve the original uncertainty cues poorly, often less than half the time; (2) LLMs struggle with nuanced distinctions between adjacent levels. This work reveals a failure mode not captured by standard evaluation metrics and provides implications for the safe deployment of LLMs in clinical workflows.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

An Introduction to Causal Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.24160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal inference provides a set of principles and tools that allow one to combine data and knowledge about an environment to reason with questions of counterfactual nature, i.e., what would have happened had reality been different, even when no data of this unrealized reality is currently available. Reinforcement learning provides methods to learn a policy that optimizes a specific measure (e.g., reward, regret) when the agent is deployed in an environment and pursues an exploratory, trial-and-error approach. These two disciplines have evolved independently and with virtually no interaction between them. We note that they operate over different aspects of the same building block, counterfactual relations, which makes them umbilically connected. Based on these observations, novel learning opportunities arise when this connection is explicitly acknowledged and mathematized. To realize this potential, we note that any environment where the RL agent is deployed can be decomposed as a collection of autonomous mechanisms with different causal invariances, parsimoniously modeled as a structural causal model; any standard RL setting implicitly encodes such a model. This formalization allows us to put under a unifying treatment different modes of learning, including online, off-policy, and causal calculus learning, which appear unrelated in the literature. However, these modalities are not exhaustive: we introduce several natural and pervasive classes of learning settings that entail novel dimensions of analysis. Specifically, we introduce and discuss through causal lenses generalized policy learning, where to intervene, imitation learning, and counterfactual learning. These tasks lead to a broader view of counterfactual learning and suggest great potential for studying causal inference and reinforcement learning side by side, which we call causal reinforcement learning (CRL).

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Maximal global device-independent randomness from projective measurements in every dimension

arXiv:2606.21369v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Device-independent random number generation (DIQRNG) is the most secure form of generating private randomness using quantum physical processes. Its strength lies in producing numbers that are impossible to predict by any eavesdropper restricted by the laws of quantum theory. Moreover, security is proven solely from observed measurement statistics, without the need to characterise or trust the devices used in random number generation. Implementing DIQRNG is, however, costly, as it requires high-quality entangled systems. It is therefore important to make the best use of available resources. In this work, we show that using projective measurements – which are most readily implementable experimentally – one can certify $2\log(d)$ bits of device-independent randomness from a bipartite system of local dimension $d$ for every $d \ge 2$, thus reaching the theoretically maximum possible rate of DIQRNG. We provide explicit protocols reaching $2\log(d)$ bits based on mutually unbiased bases. Furthermore, we compute numerical bounds on the rate for the case of imperfect implementations, showing that our protocols are robust to experimental noise.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

DivRL: Disentangled Self-Similarity Rewards for Diverse Subject-Driven Generation

Subject-driven image generation faces an "Identity-Diversity Paradox", where strong identity preservation often leads to rigid and low-diversity outputs. We propose a post-training framework called DivRL that jointly optimizes identity consistency and structural diversity simultaneously by leveraging disentangled visual features from a robust similarity model. Specifically, we introduce a Negative Self-Similarity Measure (nSSM) to quantify structural diversity, and Visual Semantic Matching (VSM) to evaluate identity consistency. We propose an "Explore-and-Suppress" strategy that treats VSM as a gated constraint: the model freely explores structurally diverse configurations, and only samples that violate the identity threshold are penalized via a quadratic hinge loss. This converts identity preservation from a competing objective into a feasibility constraint, allowing nSSM and VSM to improve jointly. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively pushes the model to generate both consistent and diverse images and improves structural diversity while maintaining comparable identity consistency through a gated optimization formulation.