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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Beyond Problem Solving: UOJ-Bench for Evaluating Code Generation, Hacking, and Repair in Competitive Programming

arXiv:2606.12864v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite strong performance in competitive programming, the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in supporting human learning in the same setting remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce UOJ-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate not only the problem-solving ability of LLMs, but also their ability to identify errors in human-written code – a crucial educational activity traditionally supported by running test cases over online judge systems. UOJ-Bench consists of three distinct tasks: code generation, code hacking, and code repair, all constructed from real-world code submissions on the Universal Online Judge (UOJ) and evaluated through UOJ's native judging infrastructure. Our results show that under one-shot evaluation, even the strongest models fail to identify errors in more than 50% of a set of submissions that have been found to be incorrect by UOJ users. While test-time scaling improves success rates to above 90%, the substantial computational costs incurred from model inference limit its practicality for large-scale deployment. Despite these limitations, we find that the best-performing models under test-time scaling can uncover errors in over 5% of full-score submissions across roughly 30 problems, suggesting that frontier LLMs can already provide complementary signals beyond standard judging systems.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Revisiting the Systematicity in Negation in the Era of In-Context Learning

Understanding the meaning of negated sentences remains one of the challenges for language models, even in the era of large language models (LLMs). We analyze systematicity regarding LLM understanding of negation from two perspectives: behavioral systematicity and representational systematicity. For behavioral systematicity, we confirm that through demonstrations and in-context learning, LLMs can recognize negation expressions and scope within sentences to some extent, but they fail to achieve perfect performance. In particular, the difficulty of the negation scope recognition for models varies depending on the output format. For representational systematicity, we analyze the extent to which function vectors can be robustly constructed from in-context examples for tasks that are essential to understanding negation. The experiments suggest that while function vectors can be composed for negation cue extraction tasks, extracting function vectors for recognizing scope is more challenging.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Modelling magnetic material properties with uncertainty-aware neural networks

arXiv:2606.11870v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning is increasingly applied to accelerate the discovery of novel materials by exploring large compositional and structural design spaces. Yet, the scarcity of high-quality data and the frequent need for out-of-distribution prediction introduce substantial uncertainty, making the assessment of model reliability essential. In this work, we investigate uncertainty quantification as a means to evaluate model confidence in the context of permanent magnet research. In a first study, we benchmark classical and modern machine learning models for predicting intrinsic magnetic properties, focusing on the quality of their uncertainty estimates. We apply Gaussian negative log-likelihood loss and dropout-based Bayesian approximation as practical strategies for estimating predictive uncertainty. In a second study, we transfer these architectural features for uncertainty estimation to a more complex task: predicting coercivity from microstructural information using a graph neural network. Together, these studies demonstrate that uncertainty quantification not only enhances the trustworthiness of predictions but is also transferable across different modeling tasks.

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

Machine Learning and the Random Walk Puzzle: Forecasting the CAD/USD Exchange Rate with Expanding Window Evaluation and SHAP Interpretability

arXiv:2606.15058v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study examines whether machine learning (ML) models can outperform the naive random walk benchmark in forecasting the monthly USD/CAD exchange rate. Using daily data from the Bank of Canada spanning January 2017 to May 2026, resampled into 113 monthly observations, five ML models are evaluated: linear regression, random forest, gradient boosting, XGBoost, and AdaBoost. These models are benchmarked against the naive random walk model and exponential smoothing with Holt-Winters seasonality (ETS). All models are evaluated using an expanding-window framework to maintain strict out-of-sample integrity, and forecast-accuracy differences are assessed using the Diebold-Mariano (DM) test. Structural break detection identifies four significant breakpoints in the series, corresponding to the escalation of the US-China trade war in 2018, the COVID-19 economic recovery in 2020, the peak of the Bank of Canada rate-hiking cycle in 2022, and the start of the Bank of Canada rate-cutting cycle in 2024. SHAP, or Shapley Additive Explanations, analysis is applied to interpret the drivers of the best-performing ML model. The results show that the naive random walk model remains a formidable benchmark. Linear regression is the only model that statistically outperforms the naive random walk model, with a DM statistic of 3.0585 and a p value of 0.0071, whereas the ML ensemble models show only marginal differences. Random Forest with an expanding-window framework achieves the lowest MAPE of 1.17 percent among all models except the random walk. SHAP analysis confirms that short-term lags, particularly lag1 and lag2, and recent rolling means dominate predictions, consistent with the near-random-walk behavior of exchange rates.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Maternal and fetal HLA heterozygosity in preeclampsia: Insights from a large multi-ancestry pregnancy cohort

Preeclampsia (PE) is a leading cause of maternal and neonatal morbidity, with immune dysregulation at the maternal-fetal interface central to its pathogenesis. The highly polymorphic human leukocyte antigen (HLA) region mediates maternal immune tolerance of the semi-allogeneic fetus, yet the contribution of HLA diversity to PE risk remains poorly defined. Whether the HLA heterozygote advantage observed in other immune disorders is relevant to PE has not been systematically evaluated. Using data from the multi-ancestry TOPMed Boston-Colombia Collaborative for Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes (n = 12,790; 4,770 PE, 8,020 controls; 10,808 maternal, 1,982 fetal, including 1,848 pairs), we evaluated associations between heterozygosity across eight classical HLA loci and PE and four sub-phenotypes, adjusting for genetic ancestry. HLA heterozygosity was common across most loci (>80%). No individual maternal HLA locus was associated with overall PE; however, heterozygosity across class I loci showed a protective effect in preterm PE (OR=0.82, 95%CI:0.69-0.97), with a similar pattern for HLA-A heterozygosity (OR=0.78, 95%CI:0.64-0.96). In contrast, fetal heterozygosity at HLA-DQB1 was nominally associated with increased risk of PE (OR=1.36, 95%CI:1.03-1.79) and preterm PE (OR=1.73, 95%CI:1.13-2.73). No individual maternal or fetal HLA alleles were associated with PE. Maternal-fetal mismatch analysis demonstrated locus-specific associations with preterm PE, including increased risk with HLA-DQA1 mismatch and reduced risk with HLA-C mismatch. These findings highlight distinct maternal and fetal immunogenetic contributions to PE risk and underscore the importance of considering HLA diversity-rather than individual alleles alone-in studies of PE etiology.

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

Analyzing Initialization Strategies for the Local Unitary Cluster Jastrow Ansatz within the Quantum-Centric Supercomputing Framework

arXiv:2606.14933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this study, we analyze the choice of local unitary cluster Jastrow (LUCJ) ansatz initialization and sensitivity of the sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD) algorithm within the quantum-centric supercomputing (QCSC) framework. We examine six initialization strategies, including those based on coupled-cluster singles and doubles (CCSD), M{\o}ller-Plesset second-order perturbation theory (MP2), data-driven coupled-cluster (DDCC), and trivial (zeroes and random) initializations, across twelve molecular systems and three basis sets (STO-3G, cc-pVDZ, and aug-cc-pVDZ). We find that while the mean absolute percentage errors (MAPEs) between the alternative and CCSD-initialized t2-amplitudes span many orders of magnitude, the resulting SQD energies are largely insensitive to this variation. In particular, most initializations recover energies within chemical accuracy (+/-1.6 mEh) of the CCSD reference, with convergence improving as the basis set size increases. Notably, random initialization achieves performance competitive with CCSD across all basis sets, while zeroes initialization, despite having smaller deviations from CCSD, yields the worst energy agreement. Our results highlight that the proximity to the CCSD initialization is not a reliable predictor of the quality of electronic energies. These findings establish that configuration recovery within SQD, rather than circuit initialization, is the dominant factor governing energy accuracy, and suggest that computationally cheaper initialization strategies are viable alternatives to CCSD for QCSC workflows

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Fourier analysis of quantum neural network with non-linear data embedding

arXiv:2606.14206v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fourier analysis has become a crucial tool for understanding the expressivity of Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC) models, as well as an important indicator of barren plateaus (BP). While existing literature has only studied angle-embedded VQCs in a noiseless environment, here we develop the Fourier analysis of VQCs with non-linear data embedding, with particular focus on amplitude embedding, which provides a naturally compact encoding scheme. We first investigate a subtle difference in the domain of input features within amplitude embedding that leads to a distinct expressivity of the zero-frequency Fourier coefficient. By assuming that the ensemble of unitaries generated from the parameter space forms at least a 2-design with respect to the unitary group, we derive, via Weingarten calculus, that the mean of the Fourier coefficients is concentrated at zero, and the variance scales at an exponentially decaying order with respect to the multi-dimensional frequency magnitude. When a noise channel with unitary Kraus operators and probabilities $\{p_k\}$ is taken into account, the variance is further suppressed by a factor $\left(\sum_k p_k^2\right)^{Q}

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Distinguishing quantum processes with bounded coherent memory

arXiv:2606.19511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distinguishing multi-time quantum processes is a fundamental task underlying the diagnosis, benchmarking, and learning of temporally correlated quantum dynamics. The standard benchmark for distinguishing two processes is the strategy-norm distance, which optimizes over arbitrary adaptive probing strategies but can require large coherent memory and time-dependent control. We introduce machines for autonomous distinction~($\mathsf{MAD}$s): probing strategies that apply the same quantum instrument at each time step, retain the full classical outcome record, and carry a coherent memory of dimension $d_A$. Optimizing over these strategies defines a memory-parametrized distinguishability measure, $d^{(N)}_{\mathsf{MAD}}(\mathbf{P}^N,\mathbf{Q}^N;d_A)$. We show that the resulting hierarchy is monotone in coherent memory and complete at finite times. Specifically, any admissible $N$-step probing strategy can be compiled into a single $\mathsf{MAD}$ with an internal counter and sufficiently large coherent memory, so the hierarchy saturates the strategy-norm benchmark. For recurrent processes generated by repeated system–environment interactions, we derive a single-step description that separates the generation of new distinguishing information from the propagation and decay of information generated at earlier times. Numerical results in a repeated-interaction model show that increasing coherent memory systematically improves the $\mathsf{MAD}$ success probability and closes the gap to the strategy-norm distance while remaining substantially more tractable to evaluate. $\mathsf{MAD}$ distinguishability therefore provides an operational and scalable framework for quantifying what can be learned about genuinely multi-time quantum processes with bounded coherent memory.

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

Think Again or Think Longer? Selective Verification for Budget-Aware Reasoning

Test-time reasoning is increasingly used as a serving-time control knob, but extra reasoning is not uniformly valuable: it can repair failed attempts, waste compute on already-correct answers, or introduce harmful answer changes. We study this as a deployment allocation problem rather than a new-verifier problem. We introduce \sevra, Selective Verification for Reasoning Allocation, a serving-layer controller that decides whether to preserve a frozen solver's initial answer or invoke active verification. Using a frozen Qwen3-4B solver, we log intervention outcomes and train recoverability-aware gates from serving-visible attempt state. On \mathfive, selective verification reaches 76.3\% accuracy, compared with 75.5\% for always verifying, while reducing post-generation tokens by 26.8\% and harmful flips from 2.2\% to 1.0\%. However, an 8,192-token initial solve reaches 76.0\% accuracy with 28\% fewer total model tokens, showing that selective recovery is useful but not the best tested cost frontier. In frozen transfer to \gsm, the selective policy verifies only 3.0\% of examples, improves accuracy from 93.4\% to 94.5\%, and reduces verification tokens by 91.2\% relative to always verifying; again, a longer initial solve matches its accuracy with fewer realized tokens. On CommonsenseQA, always-on verification hurts, while Self-Consistency@5 improves accuracy at about five times the realized token cost. The resulting deployment rule is: tune the initial budget first, then use selective recovery when explicit checks, bounded retries, auditability, or regression-risk control matter.

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

AdaSTORM: Scaling LLM Reasoning on Dynamic Graphs via Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2606.16328v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable potential in dynamic graph reasoning, but suffer from a scaling bottleneck: current models can only handle graphs with tens of nodes, constrained by exponential reasoning overhead and finite context windows. While multi-agent systems (MAS) offer collective reasoning and topology-aware orchestration, capabilities naturally suited for graph-structured tasks, their application to dynamic graphs remains unexplored. This paper presents Scaling LLM Reasoning on Dynamic Graphs via Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Multi-Agent Collaboration (AdaSTORM), a framework that reformulates large-scale dynamic graph reasoning into two stages: (i) Adaptive Partitioning, partitioning large-scale dynamic graphs into subregions that match the model's reasoning capacity while minimizing inference cost; and (ii) Collaborative Reasoning, aligning graph partition topologies with a spatio-temporal decoupled multi-agent architecture. AdaSTORM is the first multi-agent framework tailored for dynamic graph reasoning. Extensive experiments show that AdaSTORM successfully breaks through the scaling bottleneck, scaling reasoning to thousand-node graphs with over 90% accuracy across several large-scale dynamic graph settings without external tools, significantly outperforms seven competitive baselines. Furthermore, it achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on existing benchmarks and generalizes robustly to real-world datasets. The source code is available at: https://github.com/irisorchid107/AdaSTORM/.

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

An Analysis of Speculative Window Decoders for Quantum Error Correction

arXiv:2606.24048v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum computing is essential for realizing the substantial computational speedups that quantum computing can bring, but it requires real-time error decoding with high performance. Speculative window decoding improves performance by reducing the time spent waiting for dependencies from prior decoding windows. However, speculative decoders have only been evaluated under the regime of superconducting qubits with fast gate speeds, surface codes, and matching decoders. Since different quantum technologies can have slower gate speeds, we evaluate the performance of speculative decoding under slow gate speeds. We also examine its sensitivity to speculation accuracy, decoder latency, processor count, and workload parallelism, which can vary across different quantum error correction codes, decoders, and hardware platforms. This work presents design principles for identifying when speculative decoding yields the greatest performance improvements. It also reveals the conditions under which non-speculative decoders outperform speculative decoders.

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

Rapid Poison: Practical Poisoning Attacks Against the Rapid Response Framework

The Rapid Response (RR) framework, deployed in production systems, including Anthropic's ASL-3 safeguards, continuously improves jailbreak-detection classifiers. When new jailbreaks emerge that bypass these classifiers, Rapid Response generates synthetic variants for training, helping the model generalize from the new attacks and quickly adapt. We reveal that prompt injection can infiltrate this pipeline to deliver poisoned samples into the classifier's training set, enabling two attack objectives: (I) targeted poisoning attacks that create false positives on harmless samples by categorizing them as a jailbreak, with a specific desired feature (e.g., certain formatting, subject, or keyword), (II) concept-based backdoor attacks that induce false negatives on jailbreak inputs, generalizing even to jailbreaks from attack strategies the defender explicitly trained against, when the backdoor trigger is present. Importantly, our threat model restricts adversaries to modifying only jailbreak samples (not benign data or labels), a constraint unexplored by prior work that makes the second objective particularly challenging. We address this with Omission Attack, which exploits a new phenomenon: when training on concept-absent unsafe samples, the classifier misassociates that concept's presence with the safe label. Both attacks cause substantial and in some cases near-complete label flipping at only a 1% poisoning rate, achieving up to 100% false positive rates and up to 96% false negative rates.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

A Self Consistency Based Reranking for Narrative Question Answering

Narrative question answering (NQA) is a challenging task in natural language processing that requires models to understand long textual contexts, capture relationships across events, and generate coherent responses. Despite recent advances in pretrained language models, most existing approaches rely on a single decoding output during inference, making them sensitive to generation variability and often resulting in incomplete or inconsistent answers .To address this limitation, we propose a self-ensemble Self-Consistency-Based reranking framework for narrative question answering. The proposed method generates multiple candidate answers for each story-question pair and selects the final answer based on semantic agreement among the generated responses. This allows the model to explore diverse answer formulations while improving robustness through consensus-based selection without requiring modifications to the underlying architecture .The framework combines pretrained and fine-tuned language generation with multi-answer inference and similarity-based reranking. We evaluate the proposed approach on the NarrativeQA dataset using multiple models, including FLAN-T5 (Base and Small) and Pegasus-Large, under both baseline and fine-tuned settings .Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves performance across all models. In particular, FLAN-T5-Base achieves the best overall performance, improving from 82.32% to 86.66% (+4.34%) when combined with self-ensemble inference. Additionally, the largest improvement is observed with Pegasus-Large, which increases from 72.50% to 87.07% (+14.57%), highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Quantifying mandibular positioning error and simulated temporomandibular joint-space changes in patient-specific occlusal splints

Patient-specific occlusal positioning splints can be regarded as physical realisations of planned mandibular transformations. However, the achieved mandibular pose may differ from the planned one because of acquisition, registration, fabrication, and positioning errors. This study presents a transformation-based biomedical engineering framework for quantifying mandibular positioning accuracy and propagating the resulting error to a simulated temporomandibular joint configuration. Multimodal 3D data, including CBCT, facial motion acquisition, and dental scans, were integrated in a common coordinate system. Positioning splints corresponding to selected mandibular poses were designed and fabricated, and their realised positions were evaluated using repeated scans of plaster models. Discrepancies between planned and achieved positions were represented as rigid-body error transformations and analysed in SE(3), together with surface-distance metrics. The estimated transformations were propagated to CBCT-derived TMJ structures to quantify changes in condyle-fossa distance maps. The results demonstrate a systematic translational component and anisotropic variability of mandibular positioning error, with measurable propagation to simulated TMJ-space changes. The proposed framework provides an objective method for documenting planned and achieved mandibular configurations and for analysing positioning uncertainty in patient-specific splint workflows.

15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Daily briefing: Human embryo genomes precisely altered

Authors:

The use of ‘base editing’ to precisely tweak human embryos has divided researchers. Plus, the number of lives saved by less-polluting cars in China and how to tip the world towards a sustainable future. The use of ‘base editing’ to precisely tweak human embryos has divided researchers. Plus, the number of lives saved by less-polluting cars in China and how to tip the world towards a sustainable future.

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

AIRMap: AI-Generated Radio Maps for Wireless Digital Twins

arXiv:2511.05522v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate, low-latency channel modeling is essential for real-time wireless network simulation and digital-twin applications. Traditional modeling methods like ray tracing are however computationally demanding and unsuited to model dynamic conditions. In this paper, we propose AIRMap, a deep-learning framework for ultra-fast radio-map estimation, along with an automated pipeline for creating the largest radio-map dataset to date. AIRMap uses a single-input U-Net autoencoder that processes only a 2D elevation map of terrain and building heights. Trained on 1.2M Boston-area samples and validated across four distinct urban and rural environments with varying terrain and building density, AIRMap predicts path gain with under 4 dB RMSE in 4 ms per inference on an NVIDIA L40S-over 100x faster than GPU-accelerated ray tracing based radio maps. A lightweight calibration using just 20% of field measurements reduces the median error to approximately 5%, significantly outperforming traditional simulators, which exceed 50% error. Integration into the Colosseum emulator and the Sionna SYS platform demonstrate near-zero error in spectral efficiency and block-error rate compared to measurement-based channels. These findings validate AIRMap's potential for scalable, accurate, and real-time radio map estimation in wireless digital twins.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

q-Askey Deformations of Double-Scaled SYK

arXiv:2605.13956v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We construct families of deformations of the double-scaled SYK (DSSYK) model and investigate their bulk interpretation. We introduce microscopic deformations of the SYK model which, after ensemble averaging and in the double-scaling limit, are described by a transfer matrix encoding the recurrence relations of basic orthogonal polynomials in the q-Askey scheme. For certain families of deformations in the semiclassical limit at finite temperature, the chord number (encoding Krylov complexity) corresponds to the length of an Einstein-Rosen bridge connecting an End-Of-The-World brane to an anti-de Sitter asymptotic boundary. By increasing one of the deformation parameters, the models eventually exhibit discrete energy levels, signaling a new geometric transition in sine dilaton gravity. Via the SYK-Schur duality, Krylov complexity also admits a representation-theoretic interpretation as the spread of the SU(2) spin in the index of an $\mathcal{N}=2$ SU(2) gauge theory. We study the operator algebras of the deformed theories. The algebras can be type II$_1$ or type I$_\infty$ factors, depending on the operators that are included. The entanglement entropy between the type II$_1$ algebras for a pure state manifests as an extremal surface through the Ryu-Takayanagi formula. We discuss connections between our results and the emergence of baby universes in the bulk.

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

PANDA: An LLM-Enhanced Performance-Driven Analog Design Framework Bridging Design Intent and Layout Generation

arXiv:2606.15052v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional design of analog circuits heavily relies on manual interventions across topology, sizing, and layout, with prior automation addressing stages in isolation. In this work, we propose PANDA, an LLM-enhanced framework that bridges high-level design intent to final layout by actively managing cross-stage dependencies through guided topology synthesis, substructure-aware sizing, and constraint-driven layout generation. This shifts automation from algorithm-centric execution to intent-centric co-design, reducing turnaround time from days or weeks to hours while improving design performance.

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

Multilevel Stochastic Plug-and-Play for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

Sparse-view computed tomography (SVCT) reduces radiation exposure and acquisition time, but the limited number of projection views makes the reconstruction problem severely ill-posed and leads to streak artifacts when analytical methods are used. Plug-and-Play (PnP) methods provide an effective way to combine data fidelity with learned image priors, while stochastic PnP methods further improve robustness by matching the denoiser input distribution through re-noising. However, these methods often require many iterations to converge, which limits their practical efficiency. In this work, we propose a multilevel (ML) stochastic PnP method for SVCT that accelerates stochastic PnP reconstruction. We highlight that, in the stochastic setting, directly enforcing prior coherence across levels would require accurately estimating fine-level prior gradients through multiple denoiser function evaluations, which substantially increases the computational cost. Motivated by this observation, we perform the multilevel steps in multiresolution analysis (MRA) approximation spaces. This choice is supported by the structure of the wavelet decomposition, which causes the prior-coherence correction to vanish in expectation, thereby avoiding costly estimation of fine-level stochastic prior gradients for the coarse-level corrections. Experiments on SVCT reconstruction show that our method, called Multilevel Stochastic Plug-and-Play (ML-SPnP), achieves reconstruction quality comparable to state-of-the-art methods while substantially reducing runtime.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

The Slop Paradox: How Synthetic Standardization Erodes Clinical Uncertainty and Cross-Modal Alignment in AI-Rewritten Radiology Reports

Authors:

AI-assisted clinical documentation tools increasingly summarize, standardize, and reformat radiology reports using large language models (LLMs). We present a controlled measurement of the resulting information degradation. Using 450 chest X-ray reports from the Indiana University dataset, we generate synthetic versions via three realistic LLM rewriting tasks: EHR summarization, standardized rewriting, and teaching case preparation. We measure entity erosion (via medical NER), hedging collapse (loss of clinical uncertainty language), and cross-modal alignment degradation (via BiomedCLIP image-text similarity). Our central finding is a dissociation between information loss and cross-modal fidelity. EHR summarization is the most destructive at the content level, eroding 51.4% of clinical entities and 43.7% of hedging language, yet it preserves image-text alignment almost entirely (a 2.5% drop). The two tasks meant to produce cleaner training data, standardized rewriting and teaching case preparation, do the reverse: they preserve more entities (26.8% and 29.3% eroded) but cause 14.9-16.5% alignment drops, six to seven times those of EHR summarization. We term this the slop paradox: rewriting that makes clinical text look cleaner for multimodal training is precisely what pulls it away from the image. Contrary to our pre-specified hypothesis, rare pathologies were not preferentially degraded: across nine rare-versus-common comparisons, no difference survived multiple-comparison correction, and nominal differences ran in the opposite direction (common > rare), so contamination is invisible to condition-specific monitoring. The dominant determinant of degradation is the type of AI rewriting task, not the clinical content. These findings bear on multimodal medical AI dataset construction and the governance of AI-assisted clinical documentation.

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

Contract-Based Compositional Shielding for Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.14130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe coordination problems surface in multi-agent reinforcement learning when global safety cannot be enforced by any agent unilaterally: the admissibility of one agent's action may depend on the dynamics of other agents. Decentralised shields can enforce safety at runtime, but purely factorised permissions often exclude optimal team behaviour that is safe only through coordination. We study deterministic safety guarantees for agents trained and deployed under decentralised execution, recovering team-optimal safe behaviour without centralised runtime control. Agents have a shared global specification $\phi$ in the safety fragment of Linear Temporal Logic ($\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ ), and select among tuples of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations whose conjunction implies the global specification $\phi$. Each agent may rely on the other agents' local obligations as assumptions because the whole contract tuple is certified simultaneously and allows projection into local action masks. At learning time, a non-stationary multi-armed bandit chooses among a library of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations to select the tuple that optimises team reward, all without forgoing end-to-end safety. We evaluate the approach across 6 environments and 15 algorithmic variants.

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

What's Missing in Vision-Language Models? Probing Their Struggles with Causal Order Reasoning

Despite the impressive performance of vision-language models (VLMs) on downstream tasks, their ability to understand and reason about causal relationships in visual inputs remains unclear. Robust causal reasoning is fundamental to solving complex high-level reasoning tasks, yet existing benchmarks often include a mixture of reasoning questions, and VLMs can frequently exploit object recognition and activity identification as shortcuts to arrive at the correct answers, making it challenging to truly assess their causal reasoning abilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce VQA-Causal and VCR-Causal, two new benchmarks specifically designed to isolate and rigorously evaluate VLMs' causal reasoning abilities. Our findings reveal that while VLMs excel in object and activity recognition, they perform poorly on causal reasoning tasks, often only marginally surpassing random guessing. Further analysis suggests that this limitation stems from a severe lack of causal expressions in widely used training datasets, where causal relationships are rarely explicitly conveyed. We additionally explore fine-tuning strategies with hard negative cases, showing that targeted fine-tuning can improve model's causal reasoning while maintaining generalization and downstream performance. Our study highlights a key gap in current VLMs and lays the groundwork for future work on causal understanding.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

RoboSSM: Scalable In-context Imitation Learning via State-Space Models

arXiv:2509.19658v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In-context imitation learning (ICIL) enables robots to learn tasks from prompts consisting of just a handful of demonstrations. By eliminating the need for parameter updates at deployment time, this paradigm supports few-shot adaptation to novel tasks. However, recent ICIL methods rely on Transformers, which have computational limitations and tend to underperform when handling longer prompts than those seen during training. In this work, we introduce RoboSSM, a scalable recipe for in-context imitation learning based on state-space models (SSM). Specifically, RoboSSM replaces Transformers with Longhorn – a state-of-the-art SSM that provides linear-time inference and strong extrapolation capabilities, making it well-suited for long-context prompts. Through diverse experiments on the LIBERO benchmark, we demonstrate the effectiveness of applying SSMs to ICIL, achieving improved generalization to both unseen and long-horizon tasks than Transformer-based ICIL methods by handling longer contexts at test-time. These results show for the first time that SSMs are an efficient and scalable backbone for ICIL. Our code is available at https://github.com/youngjuY/RoboSSM.

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

Acquisition state behaves as a structured, measurable variable governing lung-nodule AI: kernel-driven measurement instability and noise-driven detection fragility, invisible to DICOM metadata

AI governance for medical imaging is formalizing: the 2026 ACR-SIIM Practice Parameter recommends local acceptance testing and ongoing drift monitoring, and the ACR Assess-AI registry monitors AI outputs using DICOM metadata for context. We argue that a necessary, currently unmonitored layer sits beneath output metrics: whether incoming studies remain within the acquisition envelope a model was validated on. Using a LUNA16-trained MONAI RetinaNet lung-nodule detector, we test whether acquisition state behaves as a structured, measurable variable. On real paired CT differing only in reconstruction kernel (NLST B30f vs B80f), kernel alone shifted AI-measured diameter and flipped a Fleischner size category in 5.2% (8 of 155) of nodules at fixed patient and acquisition, while detection confidence was unchanged (Wilcoxon p=0.22). Under controlled LIDC-IDRI perturbations the effects dissociated by axis: the noise axis degraded detection confidence (p=5.9e-32, concentrated in nodules under 6 mm) but not measurement, while the frequency/kernel axis corrupted measurement (p=8.6e-13) but not detection. A 4-feature pixel fingerprint recovered reconstruction identity (patient-level AUC about 0.95 on real CT, 0.995 on a QIBA phantom) where the ConvolutionKernel DICOM tag was uninformative (identical labels across reconstructions). The kernel axis transported across four manufacturers (leave-one-vendor-out AUC 0.94-0.98, matching the within-vendor ceiling). Acquisition state thus maps to distinct AI failure modes, frequency content to measurement reliability and noise to detection sensitivity, and is not recoverable from metadata. Acquisition-aware, input-side validation is the missing layer for the acceptance-testing and drift-monitoring requirements now entering imaging-AI accreditation.

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

Sol Video Inference Engine: Agent-Native Full-Stack Acceleration Framework for Efficient Video Generation

arXiv:2606.23743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern video diffusion models achieve higher generation quality through scaling, but this also increases inference cost. Although many acceleration methods have been proposed, a central challenge is that the most effective acceleration strategy is highly instance-specific: a recipe that works well for one combination of model, hardware, and inference configuration often does not transfer to another. Different models vary in architecture, numerical sensitivity, and attention concentration patterns. Inference settings differ in spatial and temporal resolution and video duration, while hardware platforms differ in memory hierarchy, supported numerical formats, and kernel throughput. These factors create a large tuning space, making manual performance engineering costly. We present Sol Video Inference Engine, an agentic, native, training-free acceleration framework for video diffusion models. It organizes five broadly applicable techniques, cache, sparse attention, token pruning, quantization, and kernel fusion, into an agentic acceleration stack for instance-specific optimization. For a concrete deployment target defined by a model, hardware platform, and serving configuration, parallel skill agents optimize the implementation of each technique, an agent integrator composes them into a global acceleration stack, and a human validator provides feedback on generation quality. We instantiate this workflow on three video models with different sizes and architectures: 64B Cosmos3-Super, 22B LTX-2.3, and 2B SANA-Video. With little human effort, the full stack achieves more than 2x end-to-end acceleration while maintaining near-lossless VBench quality, demonstrating the effectiveness of the agent framework for video diffusion acceleration.