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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Associations of Chemical Exposures with Psychological Distress and Depression Diagnosis among Waste Pickers in Brasilia, Brazil: A Cross-Sectional Study

Authors:
King Stone↗K. L↗Maia Pelagalli↗Melanson↗Steelman↗Cruvinel↗V. R. N↗Pintas↗C. P↗Macena↗Thygerson↗Thacker↗…

Introduction: Waste pickers face chemical exposures. We evaluated whether chemical exposure is associated with psychological distress and depression. Methods: A 2017 cross-sectional survey included 1,141 waste pickers working in the Estrutural open dump in Brasilia, Brazil. Participants self-reported occupational exposure to 11 chemical categories, 17 psychological distress symptoms, and depression diagnoses. Associations of chemical exposure with mean psychological distress scores and depression prevalence were assessed, adjusted for age, sex, marital status, and income. Results: Mean psychological distress score was higher among those exposed to any chemical (mean of 8.1 vs 6.1; adjusted mean difference [aMD]: 1.8 [0.9, 2.7]) and higher among those exposed to each of 11 chemical categories, for example, smoke (aMD: 1.2 [0.6, 1.7]), batteries (aMD: 1.5 [1.0, 1.9], and oils (aMD: 1.3 [0.9, 1.8]). Depression was more prevalent among those exposed to oils (16.6% vs 10.6%; adjusted prevalence difference [aPD]: 6.3% [95% CI: 2.3, 10.2]), cleaning products (aPD: 5.4% [1.2, 9.5]), medications (aPD: 4.7% [0.6, 8.8]), and aerosols (aPD: 5.3% [1.3, 9.3]) but, not smoke, batteries, greases, insecticides, solvents, paints, chemical containers, or any chemical. Conclusion: These associations highlight the need to consider policy level protections for waste pickers to reduce chemical exposure and guard against psychological distress. Further research is necessary to explore which specific chemicals, within broad chemical categories, are associated with psychological distress and depression.

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02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum speedup from nonclassical polarization

Authors:
Tim A{\ss}brock↗Jan Sperling↗Laura Ares↗

arXiv:2603.23124v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a framework for identifying nonclassical speedups in systems with polarization, likewise spin degrees of freedom. By confining the dynamics to the manifold of angular momentum coherent states, which act as the classical reference in this case, we compute the speed limit that bounds the rate of change of the state achievable without generating quantum coherence. A comparison with the unrestricted quantum speed limit enables the quantitative identification of speedups arising from polarization nonclassicality. We apply this framework to the cross-Kerr interaction, demonstrating a persistent speedup scaling as $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{N})$ with the photon number $N$ with a parity effect in favour of even photon numbers. The results establish polarization nonclassicality as a genuine dynamical resource, linking quantum coherence to quantum-enhanced evolution speeds in nonlinear photonic systems.

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

DailyReport: An Open-ended Benchmark for Evaluating Search Agents on Daily Search Tasks

Authors:
Jingxuan Han↗Wei Liu↗Mingyang Zhu↗Youpeng Wang↗Ziwen Wang↗Lin Qiu↗Xuezhi Cao↗Xunliang Cai↗Zheren Fu↗Licheng Zhang↗Zhendong Mao↗

arXiv:2606.12871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search Agents (SAs) typically leverage large language models (LLMs) to support complex information-seeking tasks by autonomously exploring web sources and synthesizing information into comprehensive responses. For SAs evaluation, prior benchmarks mainly focus on specialized tasks that are unlikely to arise in real-world user scenarios. Moreover, their reliance on coarse task-level rubrics often limits evaluation interpretability. To bridge this gap, we introduce DailyReport, an open-ended benchmark to evaluate SA capabilities on daily search tasks. It contains 150 open-ended tasks with 3,546 associated rubrics, capturing widely discussed and timely information demands of real-world users. Each task is decomposed into subtasks and evaluated with cascade rubrics across disentangled dimensions. Through cascade performance attribution and user-centric aggregation, we derive highly interpretable scores for each dimension, along with a user preference score. Our results on 17 agentic systems show that current systems still fall short of users' expectations. To facilitate future research, our dataset and code are made publicly available at https://github.com/AGI-Eval-Official/DailyReport.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Entropy-Gradient Inversion: Moving Toward Internal Mechanism of Large Reasoning Models

Authors:
Junyao Yang↗Chen Qian↗Kun Wang↗Linfeng Zhang↗Quanshi Zhang↗Yong Liu↗Dongrui Liu↗

The advancement of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift from reactive ``fast thinking'' text generation to systematic, step-by-step ``slow thinking'' reasoning, unlocking state-of-the-art performance in complex mathematical and logical tasks. However, the field faces the fundamental gap between token-level behavioral analysis and internal reasoning mechanisms, and the instability of reinforcement learning (RL) for reasoning optimization relying on costly external verifiers. We identify and formally define Entropy-Gradient Inversion, a robust negative correlation between token entropy and logit gradients that acts as a definitive geometric fingerprint for LRM reasoning capability. Building on this, we propose Correlation-Regularized Group Policy Optimization (CorR-PO), which embeds this inversion signature into RL reward regularization. Extensive experiments on various reasoning benchmarks across multiple model scales show CorR-PO consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, confirming that stronger inversion directly correlates with superior reasoning performance.

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05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Why drinking episodes escalate differently: Event-level pathways linking hazardous alcohol consumption and sexual risk

Authors:
Ngo↗T. P↗Dunham↗A. E↗Santos↗G.-M↗

Background: Alcohol-involved drinking episodes vary in whether they involve hazardous alcohol consumption alone, near-miss sexual risk, or sexual risk behavior, but the within-event mechanisms underlying this variability remain unclear. Methods: Guided by syndemic theory, we conducted a qualitative event-level analysis using modified grounded theory among adults in the San Francisco Bay Area who reported hazardous alcohol consumption, defined as an Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test score [≥]16. In-depth interviews elicited narratives of recent heavy drinking episodes and yielded 64 discrete drinking events across 22 participants. We focused on 35 events with evidence of within-event interaction between biopsychosocial and contextual factors. Using constant comparison, we identified escalation pathways, characterized interruption, and examined how events diverge into three outcomes: hazardous alcohol consumption only, hazardous alcohol consumption with near-miss sexual risk (when risk was plausible but not enacted), and hazardous alcohol consumption with sexual risk behavior. Results: Two primary escalation pathways emerged. Dose-driven escalation involved cumulative alcohol or substance exposure that progressively impaired awareness and self-regulation. Meaning-driven escalation involved prioritizing connection, intimacy, or belonging despite awareness of risk. Time-driven continuation extended exposure across contexts and amplified both pathways. Hazardous alcohol consumption-only events more often followed dose-driven pathways, whereas events involving sexual risk behavior more often followed meaning-driven pathways. Near-miss events occurred across both pathways and illustrated how interruption before the escalation constraint point, when the capacity to modify behavior became reduced, could redirect escalation before sexual risk behavior occurred. Across events with similar levels of intoxication narratives, outcomes diverged according to when the interruption occurred and whether it altered escalation. Conclusion: Hazardous drinking episodes diverge into different outcomes based on escalation pathways and the timing and effectiveness of interruption. Early and effective interruption before the escalation constraint point may represent a key target for harm-reduction strategies to prevent progression to sexual risk behavior.

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

MARIC: Multi-Agent Reasoning for Image Classification

Authors:
Wonduk Seo↗Minhyeong Yu↗Hyunjin An↗Seunghyun Lee↗

Image classification has traditionally relied on parameter-intensive model training, requiring large-scale annotated datasets and extensive fine tuning to achieve competitive performance. While recent vision language models (VLMs) alleviate some of these constraints, they remain limited by their reliance on single pass representations, often failing to capture complementary aspects of visual content. In this paper, we introduce Multi Agent based Reasoning for Image Classification (MARIC), a multi agent framework that reformulates image classification as a collaborative reasoning process. MARIC first utilizes an Outliner Agent to analyze the global theme of the image and generate targeted prompts. Based on these prompts, three Aspect Agents extract fine grained descriptions along distinct visual dimensions. Finally, a Reasoning Agent synthesizes these complementary outputs through integrated reflection step, producing a unified representation for classification. By explicitly decomposing the task into multiple perspectives and encouraging reflective synthesis, MARIC mitigates the shortcomings of both parameter-heavy training and monolithic VLM reasoning. Experiments on 4 diverse image classification benchmark datasets demonstrate that MARIC significantly outperforms baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of multi-agent visual reasoning for robust and interpretable image classification.

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Consistent Zero-Shot Imitation with Contrastive Goal Inference

Authors:
Kathryn Wantlin↗Chongyi Zheng↗Benjamin Eysenbach↗

arXiv:2510.17059v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Zero-shot imitation learning requires an agent to reproduce expert behavior from a single demonstration without additional environment interaction or gradient updates at test time. We introduce Contrastive Inverse Reinforcement Learning (CIRL), a self-supervised framework for pre-training zero-shot imitation agents. Our methods rests on a key observation that many useful tasks can be summarized by a single goal state. We can thus convert the multi-task inverse RL problem into a more tractable goal-inference problem, and utilize state-of-the-art goal-conditioned RL methods to recover a policy that reaches the goal. During pre-training, CIRL jointly employs three components to learn without any rewards or demonstrations: (1) a variant of contrastive RL designed to learn maximum-entropy goal-conditioned policies, (2) an automatic goal proposal mechanism (GoalKDE) that drives exploration, and (3) a mean-field variational model that performs amortized goal inference from trajectories. We prove that this procedure consistently recovers the demonstrator's intent by accounting for the relative difficulty of reaching different states and show how structurally similar prior work may otherwise fail to infer the correct reward. Experiments on goal-conditioned and standard reward-maximizing control tasks show that CIRL outperforms prior zero-shot imitation methods, supporting the expressiveness of goals as a compact summary of behavior.

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

Layer-Isolated Evaluation: Gating the Deterministic Scaffold of a Production LLM Agent with a No-LLM, Regression-Locked Test Harness

Authors:
Sawyer Zhang↗Alexander Wang↗Sophie Lei↗

End-to-end task-success is the dominant way to evaluate LLM agents, but one aggregate number tells you that an agent regressed, not where. We present layer-isolated evaluation: a deployed ordering agent is decomposed into a fixed taxonomy of layers (ontology, intent, routing, decomposition, escalation, safety, memory, and cross-cutting envelope/defense), each exercised by its own assertion slice in a deterministic, no-LLM "pure" mode. The pure suite (238 cases across 23 slices; 225 run in 2.39 s, ~10 ms/case) runs in CI on every change against a locked per-slice baseline. We validate by controlled regression injection, degrading one layer at a time across seven non-safety layers. The effect we did not design in is masking: the aggregate pass-rate barely moves (-1.7 to -5.9 pp for six local regressions), while the matching slice craters (-25 to -91 pp). A layer's slice reacting to its own fault is partly by construction; the measured results are (i) the aggregate masking and (ii) that damage stays off the other slices: the injected layer's slice is the single worst-hit in 5 of 7 cases and top-3 in 7 of 7 (mean rank 1.29 of 19). Localization replicates on a second, structurally different tenant (Starbucks SG): all seven matching slices crater, so it is not a single-catalog artifact. We position it as a concrete, deterministic instantiation of the component-level evaluation EDDOps prescribes but leaves unimplemented, with CheckList as ancestor and as the deterministic mirror image of whole-workflow stochastic mutation testing. Our contributions: (a) a fully decomposed, sub-second, no-LLM per-layer harness for a production agent, (b) a coverage-honesty test-adequacy criterion that refuses to score an unexercised layer, and (c) the regression-injection demonstration that per-slice baseline-locked gates localize regressions an aggregate metric masks.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Fast-dLLM++: Fr\'{e}chet Profile Decoding for Faster Diffusion LLM Inference

Authors:
Siva Rajesh Kasa↗Yasong Dai↗Sumit Negi↗Hongdong Li↗

Diffusion large language models promise parallel token generation, yet inference remains bottlenecked by deciding which masked tokens can be safely committed together. Fast-dLLM addressed this with KV caching and confidence-guided parallel decoding, but its decoding theory uses a homogeneous high-confidence assumption that effectively reduces each candidate set to its weakest selected token. We argue that this leaves speed on the table because real decoding steps exhibit heterogeneous confidence profiles. We propose Fast-dLLM++, a training-free extension that introduces Fr\'{echet profile decoding}: selecting parallel commit sets from the full sorted confidence profile rather than a single worst-case confidence. The resulting rule is a heterogeneous-confidence generalization of Fast-dLLM's factor selector and it recovers the previous rule exactly in the equal-confidence case and adds a provable heterogeneity bonus when the selected tokens have uneven confidences. Fast-dLLM++ leaves the model, diffusion process, and cache implementation entirely unchanged, making it a drop-in replacement for existing Fast-dLLM decoding. Experiments on GSM8K, MATH, HumanEval, and MBPP with the LLaDA-8B model show that the theoretical improvement translates directly into empirical gains: profile-aware selection improves the accuracy–throughput frontier by exploiting safe parallelism that weakest-token rules miss, achieving up to 37\% higher throughput at comparable accuracy. Our code release is at https://github.com/Ringo-Star/FastdLLM_plusplus.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

SANA: What Matters for QA Agents over Massive Data Lakes?

Authors:
Austin Senna Wijaya↗Jiaxiang Liu↗Haonan Wang↗Eugene Wu↗

Exploratory question answering (EQA) over data lakes requires an LLM agent to discover relevant sources, analyze retrieved data, and adapt its actions based on intermediate results. End-to-end accuracy alone cannot distinguish failures in search, planning, data analysis, or the agent's Action Policy: its decisions about what to do next and when to submit an answer. We present SANA (Search Agent Navigation Ablation framework), a diagnostic ablation framework that transforms EQA tasks into runtime profiles containing gold source sequence, sanitized subquestions, and execution records. SANA uses these profiles to construct idealized search, planning, and data-analysis tools, allowing each component to be ablated; the residual gap is diagnostic evidence for policy failures. To illustrate SANA as a reusable evaluation framework, we adapted two recent EQA benchmarks, LakeQA and KramaBench, and evaluated lightweight and mid-sized agents under fixed prompts, budgets, data lakes, and runtimes. Across both benchmarks, data analysis is a consistent bottleneck while planning is less so. Search is a major limitation in LakeQA's large data-lake setting, but less so for the smaller-scale KramaBench. SANA thus deconstructs end-to-end task accuracies into a diagnosis of where data-lake agents fail, and allows for systematic comparisons of progress in search, planning, data analysis, and agent design.

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11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Cucurbituril-based anion-conducting membranes with supramolecular nanopores

Authors:
Ziang Xu↗

Nanoporous anion-conducting membranes have gained considerable interest for their potential to reduce resistance in electrochemical devices1–4. Current pore-forming methods, such as backbone engineering through polymers of intrinsic microporosity5,6 or covalent organic and metal–organic frameworks7,8, however, suffer from limited structural control, mechanical fragility or demanding synthesis. Here we establish a supramolecular strategy that overcomes these limitations by constructing uniform, dynamic nanopores. Co-assembly of the rigid macrocyclic host cucurbit[7]uril with the cationic polymer guest quaternized poly(piperidinium-terphenyl) yields a robust network of nanometre-scale channels while simultaneously enhancing mechanical and chemical stability. The dynamic host–guest interactions allow the pore structure to fluctuate on picosecond and angstrom scales. This transient environment supports low-friction hydroxide migration through a Grotthuss mechanism, producing a marked enhancement in ionic conductivity. This bottom-up design principle provides a versatile new tool for molecularly engineering transport pathways and promises to advance electrochemical reactors with respect to energy efficiency, operational stability and the production of high-purity products. A supramolecular strategy, in which uniform, dynamic nanopores are constructed, overcomes the limitations of limited structural control, mechanical fragility or demanding synthesis in nanoporous anion-conducting membranes, providing a versatile tool for molecularly engineering transport pathways.

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

Forget Without Compromise: Nexus Sampling for Streaming KV-Cache Eviction Under Fixed Budgets

Authors:
Duc Duong↗Hoang Anh Duy Le↗Jianwen Xie↗Anshumali Shrivastava↗Zhaozhuo Xu↗

arXiv:2606.23961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context and agentic LLM workloads push the KV cache past any fixed memory budget, forcing the inference stack to permanently evict tokens at every step of a continuous-inference stream. Existing methods all share the same template, a per-step direct-attention score followed by deterministic top-$K$ selection, which converts a single below-cutoff step into an irreversible verdict and permanently erases any subtly important token that direct attention cannot single out from noise. To address this challenge, we propose Nexus Sampling, a training-free eviction method that pairs Nexus scoring, an iterative walk over direct attention that surfaces bridge tokens, with weighted reservoir sampling, which retains tokens with inclusion probability in place of deterministic top-$K$. Theoretically, we show that Nexus Sampling dominates deterministic top-$K$ in long-run survival of subtly important tokens. Empirically, at 80% KV cache eviction, Nexus Sampling matches dense attention within 1% on LongBench while outperforming top-$K$ baselines on retrieval-heavy tasks, with up to 10x smaller per-sequence cache memory.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Geometry-Instructed Video Editing

Authors:
Chirui Chang↗Xiaoyang Lyu↗Yi-Hua Huang↗Haoru Tan↗Shizhen Zhao↗Yikang Ding↗Jianmin Bao↗Xin Tao↗Pengfei Wan↗Xiaojuan Qi↗

Object-level geometric edits, including translating, rotating, scaling, duplicating, or removing an object, are routine operations in digital content creation (DCC) workflows, yet they remain unreliable in generative video editing. The key challenge lies in specifying the target object's 3D state change unambiguously across viewpoint and time, while consistently updating geometry-dependent secondary effects such as shadows and reflections. We introduce GIVE, a geometry-instructed video editing framework that represents edits through a unified object-state formulation. Two video-aligned geometry streams describe the target object before and after editing: a depth-box encoding coarse 3D placement and extent, and an orientation-box providing an appearance-agnostic orientation cue. Together, these streams provide a compact pre/post geometric specification for object-state transitions. To provide paired supervision for learning these edits, we build a scalable graphics-engine pipeline that executes object-level edit programs and renders controlled before/after pairs, isolating the intended geometric edit while keeping secondary effects consistent with the transformation. Experimental results demonstrate that GIVE produces faithful geometric edits with temporal coherence and consistent secondary effects across operators in a unified framework, and shows promising transfer to in-the-wild videos. Project page: https://geometry-instructed-video-editing.github.io/give/

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

CODEBLOCK: Learning to Supervise Code at the Right Granularity

Authors:
Zhijie Deng↗Ling Li↗Jinlong Pang↗Kaiqin Hu↗Qi Xuan↗Zhaowei Zhu↗Jiaheng Wei↗

arXiv:2606.18286v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning of code LLMs typically applies uniform cross-entropy loss to all response tokens, implicitly assuming that every token provides equally useful learning signal. Recent token-level selection methods challenge this assumption in natural-language SFT by supervising only high-value tokens. However, directly transferring token-level masking to code can break syntactically and semantically coherent program units, because code depends on structural completeness and definition-use relations. We therefore propose CodeBlock, a structure-aware sparse supervision framework that selects structure-complete code evidence rather than isolated tokens. CodeBlock first selects high-quality instruction-response pairs, then partitions code responses into syntactically coherent coding items, estimates their utility by aggregating generalized cross-entropy over core logic tokens, and reranks them with data-flow reach and bridge signals to prioritize blocks that propagate or connect important program dependencies. During training, the full response remains available as context, while loss is applied only to selected code items and informative natural-language tokens. Experiments on six code-generation benchmarks show that CodeBlock achieves stronger average pass@1 than full-token SFT and competitive selection baselines, while using only 1.9% of supervised response tokens.

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

The Reservoir Attention Network: Cross-Pass State in Pretrained Transformers via Content-Addressable Reservoir Injection

Authors:
Emma Leonhart↗

arXiv:2606.15678v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A feasibility and dynamics study of the Reservoir Attention Network (RAN), an architecture that injects a fixed, randomly-initialized reservoir into the mid-layer attention of a pretrained transformer to carry state across forward passes. Experiments span GPT-2 (124M, 355M) to Qwen2.5 (0.5B, 1.5B) on a single consumer GPU. The tasks are minimal probes chosen to isolate individual mechanisms; the broader always-alive agent vision is treated throughout as compute-limited future work, not a claim of this paper. The reservoir is left untrained (fixed random) by design: this isolates whether untrained recurrent dynamics alone suffice to carry usable cross-pass state, leaving trained recurrence as a complementary, more expensive direction.

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

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

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

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

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17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Calibrated Uncertainty Quantification for Patient-Level AML Drug Sensitivity Prediction Using Split Conformal Prediction

Authors:
Shokrzadeh↗A. J↗

Accurate prediction of ex vivo drug sensitivity in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients from transcriptomic data is a critical challenge for precision oncology. Existing computational approaches have explored uncertainty quantification in cancer drug response prediction primarily using cell line data, while patient-level AML models typically rely on heuristic confidence measures rather than statistically calibrated uncertainty estimates. Here, we present a framework applying split conformal prediction to patient-level AML drug response modeling using the BeatAML 2.0 cohort. We trained Elastic Net and XGBoost regressors on bulk RNA-seq gene expression profiles from 318 AML patients, analyzing 34,764 patient-drug observations across 122 compounds. Baseline models achieved median Pearson R values of 0.291 (Elastic Net) and 0.281 (XGBoost) across 122 drugs. Wrapping these models with split conformal prediction yielded well-calibrated prediction intervals across three confidence levels: empirical coverages of 81.4%, 90.7%, and 95.5% against nominal targets of 80%, 90%, and 95%, respectively. Analysis of prediction interval widths revealed substantial drug-class-specific uncertainty patterns, with HDAC and BCL-2 inhibitors exhibiting markedly higher uncertainty than MDM2 inhibitors, suggesting a potential association between transcriptomic predictability and drug mechanism of action, although several drug classes were represented by only a small number of compounds. Predictive uncertainty was not significantly associated with ELN2017 molecular risk classification (Kruskal-Wallis p=0.395) or NPM1 mutation status (p=0.788). These results demonstrate that statistically valid uncertainty quantification can be achieved for patient-level AML drug response prediction despite substantial biological heterogeneity. to the best of our knowledge, no published study has applied split conformal prediction to patient-level ex vivo drug sensitivity prediction in the BeatAML cohort, providing a principled alternative to heuristic confidence scoring approaches. Keywords: Acute myeloid leukemia (AML); Ex vivo drug sensitivity; Conformal prediction; Uncertainty quantification; Precision oncology; BeatAML; Transcriptomic biomarkers; Machine learning.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning High Coverage Discriminative Parsimonious Rulesets

Authors:
Mariamma Antony↗Raman Sankaran↗Chiranjib Bhattacharyya↗Uma Satya Ranjan↗

arXiv:2606.14156v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning systems based on IF-THEN rule representations readily offer interpretability, making them a crucial focus in contemporary AI research. A key objective for such rule sets is to achieve both high discriminative power and interpretability. While existing state-of-the-art algorithms implicitly prioritize predictive accuracy, they often fall short on one or more quality metrics that ensure interpretability, such as coverage and parsimony of rule sets. Motivated by this, this paper propose the development of CDPR, which aims to create highly accurate and interpretable rule sets for classification problems. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first attempt to establish such an approach. In this study, we introduce two algorithms rooted in submodular maximization, which not only provide provable guarantees on coverage but also yield rule sets that are both discriminative and parsimonious. We empirically demonstrate that rule sets learned through our approaches achieve higher accuracy and interpretability and has more than a 2.5-fold improvement in average coverage rates when compared to the next best algorithm.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Do vision-language models search like humans? Reasoning tokens as a reaction-time analog in classic visual-search paradigms

Authors:
Farahnaz Wick↗

Visual search has been one of the most productive paradigms in the study of visual attention: the way reaction time scales with the number of items distinguishes parallel, "pop-out" search from serial, attention-demanding search. I ask whether vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit the same behavioral signatures. I adapt four classic paradigms: feature versus conjunction search, spatial-configuration (T-vs-L) search, enumeration, and the tilted/vertical search asymmetry; and present them to current frontier and mid-tier models. Because a single model call has no reaction time, I use the number of reasoning ("thinking") tokens a model spends per trial as a within-model analog of search effort, and I compare against a large public human benchmark (Wolfe et al., 2010). The models reproduce several human signatures: feature search costs flat effort while conjunction effort climbs with set size; frontier models hold accuracy where mid-tier models collapse to chance; and a resolution control shows the conjunction cost is genuine search rather than difficulty resolving small shapes. They also diverge from humans in informative ways. The target-present effort slope exceeds the target-absent slope, reversing the human ordering; enumeration remains accurate where humans would lose count; and a reasoning model with adaptive deliberation declines to deliberate on detection tasks altogether, so that a single search expresses itself as an effort gradient in one model and as an accuracy cliff in another. I argue that psychophysical paradigms, applied behaviorally, are a sharp and inexpensive probe of machine visual cognition, and that the points of divergence are as informative as the points of agreement.

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

What Type of Inference is Active Inference?

Authors:
Wouter W. L. Nuijten↗Mykola Lukashchuk↗Thijs van de Laar↗Bert de Vries↗

arXiv:2606.04935v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Active inference casts decision-making as inference, with the Expected Free Energy (EFE) unifying goal-directed and information-seeking behavior. Recent work showed that EFE minimization can be written as Variational Free Energy (VFE) minimization on a generative model augmented with epistemic priors. We prove that the VFE of the augmented model can be rewritten as the VFE of the predictive model plus explicit entropy-correction terms, making the EFE contribution transparent. We then show that proper EFE-based planning requires combining these epistemic corrections with a planning correction that turns marginal inference into policy optimization, yielding a full variational characterization of EFE-based planning. This clarifies which corrections are needed for cross-entropy planning and for full EFE-based planning. The same entropy-corrected formulation leads to a detailed message-passing scheme for EFE-based planning together with simpler ablations. Experiments on three grid-world environments show that full EFE-based planning outperforms ablations that omit either the planning correction or the epistemic corrections.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Tackling GNARLy Problems: Graph Neural Algorithmic Reasoning Reimagined through Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Alex Schutz↗Victor-Alexandru Darvariu↗Efimia Panagiotaki↗Bruno Lacerda↗Nick Hawes↗

arXiv:2509.18930v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neural algorithmic reasoning (NAR) is a paradigm that trains neural networks to execute classic algorithms by supervised learning. Despite its successes, important limitations remain: inability to construct valid solutions without post-processing and to reason about multiple correct ones, poor performance on combinatorial NP-hard problems, and inapplicability to problems for which strong algorithms are not yet known. To address these limitations, we reframe the problem of learning algorithm trajectories as a Markov decision process, which imposes structure on the solution construction procedure and unlocks the powerful tools of imitation and reinforcement learning (RL). We propose the GNARL framework, encompassing the methodology to translate problem formulations from NAR to RL and a learning architecture suitable for a wide range of graph-based problems. We achieve very high graph accuracy results on several CLRS-30 problems, performance matching or exceeding much narrower NAR approaches for NP-hard problems and, remarkably, applicability even when lacking an expert algorithm.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Toward Generalist Autonomous Research via Hypothesis-Tree Refinement

Authors:
Jiajie Jin↗Yuyang Hu↗Kai Qiu↗Qi Dai↗Chong Luo↗Guanting Dong↗Xiaoxi Li↗Tong Zhao↗Xiaolong Ma↗Gongrui Zhang↗Zhirong Wu↗Bei Liu↗…

Scientific progress depends on a repeated loop of exploration, experimentation, and abstraction. Researchers test candidate directions, interpret the evidence, and carry the resulting lessons into later attempts. We study how an AI agent can run this loop autonomously over long horizons. We introduce Arbor, a general framework for autonomous research that combines a long-lived coordinator, short-lived executors, and Hypothesis Tree Refinement (HTR), a persistent tree that links hypotheses, artifacts, evidence, and distilled insights across time. The coordinator manages global research strategy over the tree, while executors implement and test individual hypotheses in isolated worktrees. As results return, Arbor updates the tree, propagates reusable lessons, refines the search frontier, and admits verified improvements. This design turns autonomous research from a sequence of local attempts into a cumulative process in which strategy, execution, and evidence are carried across time. We evaluate Arbor under Autonomous Optimization (AO), an operational setting where an agent improves an initial research artifact through iterative experimentation without step-level human supervision. Across six real research tasks in model training, harness engineering, and data synthesis, Arbor achieves the best held-out result on all six tasks, attaining more than 2.5x the average relative held-out gain of Codex and Claude Code under the same task interface and resource budget. On MLE-Bench Lite, Arbor reaches 86.36% Any Medal with GPT-5.5, the strongest result in our comparison.

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

Task-guided cross-subject latent alignment: a multi-encoder-decoder VAE

Authors:
Angeliki Papathanasiou↗Jascha Achterberg↗Thomas E. Nichols↗Rui Ponte Costa↗

arXiv:2606.15989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aligning neural activity across subjects offers the promise of discovering shared computational principles and generalizable decoders. However, traditional alignment methods require shared stimuli across subjects, a constraint that limits applicability to naturalistic paradigms with limited or non-overlapping data. We introduce a Multi-Encoder-Decoder Variational Autoencoder (MED-VAE) that achieves cross-subject alignment without shared stimuli by anchoring representations to a common scaffold provided by a pretrained ANN. Using the Natural Scenes Dataset, we show that MED-VAE creates common latent spaces with superior semantic organisation, achieving higher cross-subject alignment than common methods while maintaining robust generalisation to held-out stimuli where traditional methods degrade. Reconstructing from these common spaces back to each subject's original neural space, MED-VAE preserves equal stimulus-driven signal in its cross-subject latent space. Finally, we show that this superior alignment directly enables cross-subject neural prediction, as demonstrated via cross-subject image decoding. In summary, we introduce a framework to identify generalisable common subspaces for cross-subject predictions and downstream tasks, demonstrated here for visual cortex responses to static images.

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

FLAT: Feedforward Latent Triangle Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Scene Generation

Authors:
Orest Kupyn↗Goutam Bhat↗Philipp Henzler↗Fabian Manhardt↗Christian Rupprecht↗Federico Tombari↗

Generating explorable 3D scenes from a single image requires strong generative priors and accurate geometric representations suitable for downstream use. Current video diffusion models offer high-quality generation and implicitly encode multi-view geometric structure in latent space. However, existing feedforward latent scene decoders typically output volumetric 3D Gaussians that lack a well-defined surface, limiting their use in simulation or standard graphics pipelines. This motivates decoding surface-aligned primitives that are not only renderable but also closer to explicit geometric assets. We ask whether compressed video diffusion latents can be mapped directly to explicit surface primitives in a single pass. To this end, we introduce FLAT and, for the first time, show that triangle splats can be decoded directly from video diffusion latents. Compared with decoding 3D Gaussians, predicting flat primitives is notoriously more challenging due to high sensitivity to primitive orientations, oftentimes leading to poor gradient flow. FLAT solves with two key ingredients: a ray-centered rotation parameterization for triangle regression and a novel product window function that improves gradient flow during differentiable triangle rendering. On standard benchmarks, FLAT achieves significantly better geometric accuracy while maintaining competitive visual quality compared to state-of-the-art feedforward baselines. We further show that a lightweight test-time refinement step converts the predicted triangle soup into a fully opaque, game-engine-ready representation that supports real-time rendering. By evaluating 3DGS, 2DGS, and triangle splatting variants under an identical training setup, we provide the first systematic analysis of representation tradeoffs in feedforward scene generation. The project page is available at https://flat-splat.github.io

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