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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Implicit Neural Representations of Individual Behavior

arXiv:2606.12200v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study policy representation learning from unlabeled multi-policy behavioral data. Each episode is generated by a fixed policy, but policy labels are unavailable. This setting appears in robotics play, demonstrations, games, racing, and other datasets where heterogeneous behaviors are mixed without annotations. We introduce Behavioral INR, a self-supervised generative model that adapts implicit neural representations (INRs) from vision to behavior. Instead of mapping coordinates to RGB values, Behavioral INR represents a policy as a state-action function mapping states to subsequent actions. An episode-level latent modulates this function through FiLM layers, yielding a generative prior over policies and allowing policy identity to be inferred without supervision. Because INRs treat each datapoint as samples from an underlying function, the same model naturally accommodates variable episode lengths and different sampling granularities, as in vision INRs with different image resolutions. We also define policy-level out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts along state-distribution and action-distribution axes, which arise when policies overlap in states or actions but are not captured by standard behavioral OOD settings based only on new agents or environments. We evaluate on synthetic Gaussian random field data, MuJoCo demonstrations with controlled OOD splits, and real-world chess, Formula 1 racing, robotics, and Seek-Avoid datasets. Behavioral INR most consistently improves policy identifiability in the hardest continuous state-action settings, especially when longer episodes, more policies, and OOD splits reduce the usefulness of marginal shortcuts; amortized history encoders remain competitive when policy identity can be recovered from symbolic repetition or low-dimensional action statistics. We release code and checkpoints.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Representation-Induced Symmetry Trapping in Adaptive Variational Quantum Simulations of Multi-Reference Topologies

arXiv:2606.13387v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the trainability of adaptive quantum chemistry algorithms under multi-reference static correlation requires understanding how representation topologies intertwine with molecular geometry. We systematically expose a deep physical dependence on point-group symmetry by evaluating a spin-conserved SUSD operator pool across highly stretched configurations (2 x Re) of asymmetric LiH, symmetric BeH2, and asymmetric H2O. Under asymmetric distortions, the non-local mapping constraints of the Bravyi-Kitaev transformation create an optimization trapping effect–an encodement-locked manifestation of the broader barren plateau crisis. Crucially, by comparing these to the symmetrical stretching baseline of BeH2, we demonstrate that the preservation of point-group symmetry structurally protects the optimization landscape, proving that ansatz symmetry restrictions are necessary but insufficient without accounting for the underlying fermion-to-qubit representation. While current methods rely on numerical pruning to throttle pool sizes, our structural approach establishes that the mapping representation remains a critical factor in maintaining landscape trainability. Furthermore, exploiting structural overlap within our pool, we introduce a covariance-driven, adaptive shot-allocation filter. Diverging from static energy-variance minimization frameworks, our allocation engine operates as a dynamic runtime diagnostic tool. By continuously monitoring the gradient precision threshold epsilon, it aggressively prunes dead symmetry channels and triggers an automated circuit-termination sequence upon detecting representation-induced flat-lined states (dE/dtheta approx 0). This integration of algebraic measurement reuse with topology-aware statistical filtering provides a promising, resource-efficient strategy for executing deep variational algorithms on early fault-tolerant architectures.

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

Incumbent Advantage: Brand Bias and Cognitive Manipulation Dynamics in LLM Recommendation Systems

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming a major way for consumers to find products, but we do not yet understand how brands compete in this new channel. We study brand dynamics in LLM recommendations using skincare products – a category where consumers cannot easily judge quality before buying and must rely on brand reputation – across three commercial LLMs (GPT-4o-mini, Claude Sonnet, Gemini 3 Flash), with a robustness check on search goods. In three experiments, we find: (1) a Conditional Monopoly where well-known brands get recommended 100% of the time (IAI = 10.0) when all products have the same specifications, but this dominance disappears with less than a +0.1-star rating advantage for a competitor; (2) authority-style marketing language, including fabricated clinical-evidence claims, breaks this monopoly at a Bias Surplus Value equal to +0.17 rating points, with each model responding differently; and (3) a social dilemma in multi-brand GEO competition: when all brands adopt the same optimization strategy, individual payoff falls from +0.802 to +0.007 in our payoff proxy, and non-participating brands receive zero recommendations in our tests. Our results suggest that generative engine optimization (GEO) should be studied not only as a security risk, but also as an emerging marketing practice that shapes market competition.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Modelling the public-health impact of indoor air quality interventions on respiratory virus transmission

Respiratory virus transmission occurs in indoor settings where ventilation, occupancy, and dwell time determine exposure levels. Improving indoor air quality (IAQ) therefore could help reduce disease burden associated with respiratory viruses, yet its population-level impact remains poorly quantified. Here, we develop an individual-based transmission modelling framework that links within-location airborne dynamics to individual infection risk and population-level spread, whilst explicitly incorporating heterogeneity in ventilation and baseline indoor air quality across locations. We use this modelling approach to evaluate IAQ-improving interventions (air-quality interventions or AQIs), using hypothetical endemic and pandemic pathogen archetypes with properties similar to SARS-CoV-2 and influenza, and evaluate how effects on key epidemiological metrics (such as annualized incidence and epidemic final size) depend on AQI coverage, efficacy and allocation strategy. At 20% AQI intervention coverage and 80% efficacy, annualized incidence was reduced by approximately 7.2% for an endemic 'SARS-CoV-2-like' respiratory virus, and 17.0% for an endemic 'influenza-like' virus; at 60% coverage (80% efficacy) the reductions were 26.3% and 56.4%, respectively. Targeting AQI installation to the highest-risk locations outperformed random allocation: for SARS-CoV-2-like transmission, 20% coverage at 80% efficacy cut absolute incidence by 10.8% when targeted versus 7.2% when random; for influenza-like transmission, this comparison was 28.9% versus 17.0%. In epidemic scenarios, random installation at 40% coverage and 60% efficacy reduced final size by 23.7% (influenza-like) versus 6.3% (SARS-CoV-2-like). These results support treating clean indoor air as core public-health infrastructure and prioritising risk-based deployment of IAQ-improving interventions to maximise population-level benefit within budgetary and operational constraints.

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

How Many Shots Are Enough for a Quantum Circuit?

arXiv:2606.16965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum algorithms require repeated circuit executions, known as shots, to estimate output distributions accurately. Determining the minimal number of shots needed to meet a target accuracy is crucial to reduce costs and resource usage, especially on today's noisy and expensive quantum hardware. In this paper, we address the shot optimisation problem in a black-box setting, where no assumptions are made about the structure of the quantum circuit or the noise model of the backend. We introduce IncrementalExecution, a novel online framework that dynamically determines when to stop executing shots based on the principle of point of diminishing returns: the point at which additional shots no longer significantly alter the empirical distribution of a fixed circuit. The framework supports customisable policies for shot management, enabling flexible trade-offs between execution cost and result fidelity within static execution scenarios. We assess our proposal through an extensive experimental evaluation spanning 33,750 framework configurations across 180 unique static quantum circuit-backend combinations, for a total of 7.3M independent experiments. Unlike prior work that relies on problem-specific knowledge or algorithm-dependent assumptions (e.g., variational or adaptive workflows), our approach is applicable to a large set of static circuits and immediately deployable on current quantum cloud platforms.

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

Phonikud: Overcoming Phonetic Underspecification for Hebrew Text-To-Speech

Text-to-speech (TTS) for Modern Hebrew is challenged by the language's orthographic complexity, with existing solutions ignoring underspecified phonetic features such as stress. We present a framework for more phonetically accurate Hebrew TTS with four contributions: (1) Phonikud, an open-source Hebrew grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) system that outputs fully-specified International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions, designed by augmenting a base diacritizer. (2) The ILSpeech corpus of paired Hebrew audio, text, and expert IPA annotations. (3) A benchmark for the previously unmeasured task of Hebrew G2P conversion. (4) Hebrew audio-to-IPA models capturing previously disregarded phonetic details for automatic TTS evaluation. Our results show that Phonikud more accurately predicts Hebrew phonemes than prior methods, and that small, local TTS models with phonetic input from Phonikud approach large proprietary systems. We release our code, data, and models at https://phonikud.github.io.

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

InfoNCE Induces Gaussian Distribution

arXiv:2602.24012v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Contrastive learning has become a cornerstone of modern representation learning, allowing training with massive unlabeled data for both task-specific and general (foundation) models. A prototypical loss in contrastive training is InfoNCE and its variants. In this work, we show that the InfoNCE objective induces Gaussian structure in representations that emerge from contrastive training. We establish this result in two complementary regimes. First, we show that under certain alignment and concentration assumptions, projections of the high-dimensional representation asymptotically approach a multivariate Gaussian distribution. Next, under less strict assumptions, we show that adding a small asymptotically vanishing regularization term that promotes low feature norm and high feature entropy leads to similar asymptotic results. We support our analysis with experiments on synthetic and CIFAR-10 datasets across multiple encoder architectures and sizes, demonstrating consistent Gaussian behavior. This perspective provides a principled explanation for commonly observed Gaussianity in contrastive representations. The resulting Gaussian model enables principled analytical treatment of learned representations and is expected to support a wide range of applications in contrastive learning.

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

Monotonic Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Monotonicity as an Inductive Bias

arXiv:2606.17886v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monotonicity has been a long-running architectural inductive bias for neural networks, motivated by tabular, scientific, and economic settings where outputs are known to respond monotonically to certain inputs. Existing approaches are MLP- or flow-based and lack per-edge functional transparency; the only Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) variant with monotonicity, MonoKAN, enforces the constraint only on a restricted parameter subset and requires a projection-style training procedure. We close this gap with MKAN, a KAN with hard monotonicity guaranteed for all parameter values via exponential reparameterization of B-spline coefficients, positive edge weights, and a monotone base activation. Training reduces to standard unconstrained gradient descent. Our headline theoretical contribution is a representation-cost theorem: any $C^K, K >0$ feature extractor inducing a ball-shaped semantic-neighborhood partition admits a monotone realization of the equivalent neighborhood structure at $N' = N^* + k \le 2N^*$, where $k$ is the number of non-monotone coordinates of the original. The bound is architecture-agnostic and gives a principled sizing rule for monotone encoders. Empirically, MKAN is competitive with state-of-the-art monotone NNs on the SMM/ICML-2024 benchmark while being the only method that combines hard unconstrained monotonicity with KAN's per-edge functional transparency; the $2N^*$ prediction is validated in a self-supervised feature-size sweep on four real datasets, and on a controlled monotone-generative dataset MKAN recovers ground-truth factors with substantially higher Spearman alignment than KAN, MLP, and linear baselines.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

XPR: An Extensible Cross-Platform Point-Based Differentiable Renderer

Point-based differentiable rendering underpins modern 3D reconstruction, novel-view synthesis, and learning-based graphics pipelines, but developing new rendering methods often requires extensive low-level implementation, hardware-specific kernels, and manually written backward passes. This limits rapid prototyping, reproducibility, exploration, and deployment, especially across diverse hardware platforms. This paper presents XPR, an extensible cross-platform framework for point-based differentiable rendering. XPR introduces a high-level programming interface that separates method-specific logic from the shared rendering pipeline, allowing users to implement new methods in a few lines of code. Its pipeline decomposes rendering into modular, statically shaped parallel operations that can be lowered by a cross-platform compiler to GPUs, TPUs, CPUs, and other ML accelerators. We demonstrate implementations of 3DGS, 3DGUT, and LinPrim, with only a few 100s lines of Python code, each of which can be compiled to a range of hardware platforms with the XLA compiler. These results show that XPR enables fast experimentation and portable execution for emerging point-based differentiable rendering systems.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Physically Constrained Ensemble Gaussian Process Modelling for Expensive Quantum Systems with Heteroskedastic Noise

arXiv:2606.11240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate modeling of quantum many-body systems often requires computationally expensive simulations such as Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) or Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) calculations. These methods, while precise, impose significant time and resource constraints, limiting their use in exhaustive parameter exploration. Moreover, these expensive simulations can contain variable errors over the large unknown parameter space, which needs to be quantified and propagated. Thus, predictive modelling is required to estimate the functional space accurately over scarcely sampled data with heteroskedastic noise, while preserving the physical relevance of the estimation. Therefore, we present a Physically Constrained Ensemble Gaussian Process (pc-EGP) framework designed to efficiently model complex and noisy quantum systems under physical consistency constraints. The proposed method first enforces physical constraints as a user controlled weighted penalty to the data-driven loss function of the Gaussian Process (GP) surrogates. Then an ensemble of such GP models is trained with variable noisy simulations via numerical quadrature method where these multiple GP(s) at different nodes is integrated as a quadrature weighted average. We first demonstrate the framework on synthetically generated data before applying to quantum systems. In the first case study, we leverage DMRG simulations of the Bose-Hubbard Model to predict the critical interaction parameter Uc governing the superfluid-to-Mott-insulator transition. In the second case study, we demonstrate our method on QMC simulations, of a quantum liquid confined inside a nanoporous silicate with the goal of optimizing a chemical environment to realize a one-dimensional superfluid. Compared to conventional GP, pc-EGP achieves a better balance of accuracy and physically meaningful predictions.

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

Mitigating Disparate Impact of Differentially Private Learning through Bounded Adaptive Clipping

arXiv:2506.01396v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) has become an essential framework for privacy-preserving machine learning. Existing DP learning methods, however, often have disparate impacts on model predictions, e.g., for minority groups. Gradient clipping, which is often used in DP learning, can suppress larger gradients from challenging samples. We show that this problem is amplified by adaptive clipping, which will often shrink the clipping bound to tiny values to match a well-fitting majority, while significantly reducing the accuracy for others. We propose bounded adaptive clipping, which introduces a tunable lower bound to prevent excessive gradient suppression. Our method improves worst-class accuracy by over 10 percentage points on Skewed and Fashion MNIST compared to unbounded adaptive clipping, 7 points compared to Automatic clipping, and 5 points compared to constant clipping. The code is available at https://github.com/TrustworthyMLHelsinki/adaptive-clipping-fairness.

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

One Step Closer to Ground Truth: A Multi-Scale Residual-Aware Representation Learning Pipeline for Predicting Time Series Data

arXiv:2606.10678v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformer-based models have emerged as leading paradigms in time-series forecasting in recent years, employing self-attention mechanisms to capture long-range dependencies. Despite their success, these single-stage forecasting architectures exhibit persistent systematic residual biases arising from structural discrepancies, unmodeled stochastic components, or inadequate multi-scale temporal representations. This limitation persists when residuals are treated as irreducible noise, precluding adaptive correction of structured error patterns. To address this limitation, we introduce a two-stage, model-agnostic framework that explicitly decouples forecasting and residual learning into distinct stages of representation learning. A base transformer first generates the initial predictions. Subsequently, a dedicated meta-corrector dynamically models structured error patterns across multivariate channels, preserves cross-variable dependencies, and iteratively refines the residual bias of the base transformer. By formalizing this pipeline as a hypothesis space expansion, our framework addresses approximation limitations inherent in single-stage architectures, removes reliance on restrictive assumptions, and enables end-to-end learning of complex error dynamics. Evaluated on eight popular benchmark datasets using established protocols, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, with significant improvements in standard metrics (MSE, MAE). The results demonstrate the framework's ability to mitigate systematic biases and enhance robustness to complex temporal dynamics, advancing the practical applicability of transformer-based forecasting models.

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

ITNet: A Learnable Integral Transform That Subsumes Convolution, Attention, and Recurrence

arXiv:2606.19538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Convolutional networks, recurrent networks, and transformers each encode different inductive biases – locality, sequential memory, and content-dependent pairwise interaction – and have remained mathematically distinct since their inception. We show that this fragmentation reflects not a fundamental diversity in how signals should be processed, but rather incomplete views of a single underlying mathematical object: a learnable integral transform. We introduce the Integral Transform Network (ITNet), a unified architecture built around a learnable kernel that depends jointly on positions and features. This kernel is implemented as a small neural network, specifically an MLP, that models pairwise interactions, enabling the model to adapt its behavior from data. We show that convolution, self-attention (including multi-head), and autoregressive recurrence (including LSTM, GRU, S4, and Mamba) arise as special cases under appropriate parameterizations, and that ITNet is a universal approximator of continuous operators. To make this practical, we develop tiled kernel fusion, importance-weighted Monte Carlo integration, and learned low-rank factorization, enabling efficient and scalable computation. A single ITNet architecture with a shared operator and lightweight modality-specific encoders matches or exceeds specialized baselines on ImageNet-1K , GLUE, ModelNet40, VQA\,v2 and NLVR2. The results demonstrate that a single learned interaction mechanism can recover the behavior of all three architectural families from data.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

WOMBET: World Model-Based Experience Transfer for Robust and Sample-efficient Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2604.08958v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) in robotics is often limited by the cost and risk of data collection, motivating experience transfer from a source task to a target task. Offline-to-online RL leverages prior data but typically assumes a given fixed dataset and does not address how to generate reliable data for transfer. We propose World Model-Based Experience Transfer (WOMBET), a framework that jointly generates and utilizes prior data. WOMBET learns a world model in the source task and generates offline data via uncertainty-penalized planning, followed by filtering trajectories with high return and low epistemic uncertainty. It then performs online fine-tuning in the target task using adaptive sampling between offline and online data, enabling a stable transition from prior-driven initialization to task-specific adaptation. We show that the uncertainty-penalized objective provides a lower bound on the true return and derive a finite-sample error decomposition capturing distribution mismatch and approximation error. Empirically, WOMBET improves sample efficiency and final performance over strong baselines on continuous control benchmarks, demonstrating the benefit of jointly optimizing data generation and transfer.

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

FinAcumen: Financial Multimodal Reasoning via Self-Evolving Experience Memory Harness

arXiv:2606.17642v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial multimodal reasoning requires agents to coordinate numerical computation, retrieval, visual interpretation, and temporal grounding across heterogeneous evidence sources. Existing tool-augmented agents improve execution fidelity, yet remain largely stateless across episodes, repeatedly rediscovering reasoning strategies and failure patterns. In high-stakes financial settings, this leads to unreliable tool routing, noisy retrieval, and hallucination-prone reasoning. We present FinAcumen, a financial reasoning agent framework centered on selective experience memory for tool-augmented multimodal reasoning. FinAcumen accumulates financially grounded reasoning experience from prior trajectories, distilling successful strategies and failure-derived cautionary rules into a persistent memory bank. During inference, retrieved experiences condition reasoning only when semantic relevance exceeds a calibrated threshold, while irrelevant memory is explicitly suppressed through a fallback mechanism. A deterministic financial tool environment further grounds numerical computation, retrieval, visual decoding, and answer verification.Across four financial multimodal reasoning benchmarks, FinAcumen consistently improves a frozen 8B vision-language model over finance-specialized models and approaches leading proprietary general-purpose models. Further analysis shows that selective experience activation improves reasoning reliability under retrieval uncertainty. Our code is anonymously available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FinAcumen

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Utility-Aware DRL-Based TXOP Adaptation for NR-U and Wi-Fi Coexistence Networks

arXiv:2605.00457v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The coexistence of NR-U and Wi-Fi in the unlicensed spectrum introduces a challenging resource management problem, where heterogeneous channel access mechanisms can lead to unbalanced spectrum utilization and severe Wi-Fi performance degradation. To address this issue, this paper proposes a utility-aware deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework for adaptive transmission opportunity (TXOP) control in NR-U/Wi-Fi coexistence networks. The coexistence process is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP), in which the NR-U TXOP duration is treated as a controllable variable for regulating post-access channel occupancy. A deep Q-network (DQN) is then employed to learn adaptive TXOP control policies through online interaction with the coexistence environment. A key feature of the proposed framework is the integration of a configurable reward and criterion design, which enables explicit control of the fairness-efficiency-utility tradeoff. Three operating policies are developed, namely absolute fairness, moderate fairness, and utility-oriented moderate fairness, to characterize different coexistence operating points. Simulation results show that the proposed framework achieves a Jain fairness index above 0.9 under strict fairness control. Compared with the absolute fairness policy, the moderate fairness policy improves aggregate throughput by 68.22%, while the utility-oriented policy achieves a 177.6% improvement under the adopted utility evaluation metric. These results demonstrate that the proposed utility-aware DRL framework provides an effective and flexible solution for adaptive TXOP control and tradeoff management in heterogeneous unlicensed coexistence networks.

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

All Eyes on the Workflow: Automated and Efficient Event Discovery from Video Streams

Disciplines such as business process management and process mining aid organizations by discovering insights about processes on the basis of recorded event data. However, an obstacle to process analysis is data multi-modality: for instance, data in video form are not directly interpretable as events. Existing approaches rely on a dictionary of activity label as input, cannot provide frame-by-frame labeling explanations, or rely on superseded computer vision techniques. In this work, we present SnapLog, an approach to extract event data from videos by converting frames to feature vectors using image embeddings and performing temporal segmentation through frame-wise similarity matrices. A generalized few-shot classification is then used to assign labels to the video segments, yielding labeled, timestamped sub-sequences of frames that are interpretable as events. Conventional process mining techniques can be used to analyze the resulting data. We show that our approach produces logs that accurately reflect the process in the videos.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Postoperative Cognitive Decline in Older Patients with Cardiovascular Disease and Preoperative Mild Cognitive Impairment

Objective. Older adults undergoing cardiac surgery may be vulnerable to postoperative cognitive decline. However, no studies have examined postoperative cognitive outcomes in older patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD) according to preoperative mild cognitive impairment (MCI). This study examined 12-month postoperative cognitive outcomes in older CVD patients according to preoperative MCI diagnosis and explored predictors of postoperative cognitive decline. Method. Twenty-two older CVD patients ([≥]65 years) and twenty-five controls were included. Neuropsychological assessment was conducted at baseline in both groups and repeated 12 months after surgery in the CVD group. MCI was diagnosed using current clinical criteria. Postoperative cognitive change was examined across preoperative MCI groups. Results. Fifty percent of patients met criteria for postoperative MCI, showing high diagnostic stability relative to preoperative frequency (45.5%). The preoperative CVD-MCI group showed a decline in working memory, executive functions, visual memory, and naming, whereas CVD-nMCI group declined only in verbal memory. Furthermore, CVD-MCI showed more heterogeneous postoperative cognitive trajectories of change than CVD-nMCI, who showed stability. Estimated IQ, APACHE-II score, and postoperative frailty were important variables in predicting the postoperative pattern. Conclusions. MCI frequency remained high and stable in older CVD patients across the preoperative and one-year postoperative period. However, this apparent diagnostic stability masks subclinical cognitive decline, particularly among patients with preoperative MCI, who showed greater susceptibility to further impairment. Estimated IQ, APACHE-II score, and postoperative frailty may be considered relevant predictors of outcome. These results highlight the value of preoperative neuropsychological assessment for characterizing postoperative cognitive risk in older CVD patients.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Designing AI-Supported Focus Groups: A Role x Modality Playbook

arXiv:2606.11835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collecting participants' lived experiences is central to design research. Focus groups are uniquely valuable because participants not only share individual accounts but also respond to one another, surfacing comparison, disagreement, and collective sensemaking. However, focus groups are resource-intensive and highly sensitive to facilitation: moderators must probe for specificity, balance participation, manage topic flow, and sustain psychological safety, and subtle facilitation choices can shape what becomes salient. Recent HCI work and commercial meeting tools show that generative AI can scaffold live conversation through prompting, turn regulation, thematic mapping, and real-time summarization. Yet UXR teams lack a clear map of what these capabilities mean in focus groups and what methodological risks they introduce. We synthesize AI supports for live conversation and translate them into a focus-group-specific playbook organized by AI role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied).We synthesize prior work on AI-supported live conversation and propose a focus-group-specific playbook of AI supports organized by role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied). We characterize interactional trade-offs and identify open questions for evaluating AI-supported focus groups as methodological configurations.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Decision-Aware Memory Cards: Counterfactual-Inspired Context Selection and Compression for Tool-Using LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.08151v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern large language model (LLM) agents do not simply need longer contexts; they need decision-relevant evidence at the moment of action. We study decision-aware context selection: ranking retrieved files, tests, traces, rules, and memories by their expected effect on an agent's next action rather than by semantic similarity alone. We present the Counterfactual-Inspired Context Layer (CICL), which builds an instance context graph, estimates decision-oriented utility for candidate units, and compresses selected evidence into typed memory cards. The same schema can be instantiated with hosted LLM judges, local surrogates, or lightweight rankers, making the selection protocol auditable across model choices. On 50 SWE-bench Verified file-retrieval instances, Qwen3.6-Plus reranking of BM25 top-50 candidates improves hit@1 from 0.58 to 0.78 and MRR@10 from 0.634 to 0.790, with all 2,500 judgments parseable. Controlled diagnostics show that CICL identifies action-critical evidence: removing the top-utility semantic unit reduces F1 from 0.245 to 0.000. In selected-then-compressed mode, memory cards save 44.93 tokens per query while preserving selected evidence. CICL provides a practical layer for measuring, ranking, and compressing decision-critical context for tool-using agents. Code is available at https://github.com/stephen-guan-researcher/CICL.

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

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Discrete-Time Gaussian Process Mixtures for Robot Policy Learning

arXiv:2505.03296v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Mixture of Discrete-time Gaussian Processes (MiDiGap), a novel approach for flexible policy representation and imitation learning in robot manipulation. MiDiGap enables learning from as few as five demonstrations using only camera observations and generalizes across a wide range of challenging tasks. It excels at long-horizon behaviors such as making coffee, highly constrained motions such as opening doors, dynamic actions such as scooping with a spatula, and multimodal tasks such as hanging a mug. MiDiGap learns these tasks on a CPU in less than a minute and scales linearly to large datasets. We also develop a rich suite of tools for inference-time steering using evidence such as collision signals and robot kinematic constraints. This steering enables novel generalization capabilities, including obstacle avoidance and cross-embodiment policy transfer. MiDiGap achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse few-shot manipulation benchmarks. On constrained RLBench tasks, it improves policy success by 76 percentage points and reduces trajectory cost by 67%. On multimodal tasks, it improves policy success by 48 percentage points and increases sample efficiency by a factor of 20. In cross-embodiment transfer, it more than doubles policy success. We make the code publicly available at https://midigap.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

From Concept-Aligned Tokens to Vulnerable Features: Mechanistic Localization of Jailbreaks

Jailbreak attacks expose a persistent failure mode in safety-aligned LLMs: models can be pushed into harmful behavior, but the internal representations enabling this shift remain poorly localized. Recent mechanistic safety studies often explain such behavior through broad representational objects, including global refusal directions, activation steering vectors, and refusal-related SAE features. We instead ask whether jailbreak vulnerability can be traced to finer-grained, prompt-conditioned SAE feature subgroups. We introduce a token-driven mechanistic pipeline that decomposes the residual stream of Gemma-2-2B into Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features and identifies feature subgroups associated with unsafe behavior. Using single-category unsafe examples from BeaverTails to reduce cross-category interference, we extract harmful concepts from adversarial responses and align them with concept-relevant prompt tokens through subspace similarity. We then apply three feature-grouping strategies: cluster-based, hierarchical-linkage, and single-token-driven, to identify SAE feature subgroups across all 26 layers. Finally, we amplify the top features in each subgroup and evaluate the resulting generations with a standardized harmfulness judge. Single-token-driven grouping achieves harmfulness comparable to full cluster-based grouping, showing that individual harmful prompt tokens are sufficient to localize vulnerability-relevant SAE feature subgroups without relying on broader cluster-level aggregation. These subgroups appear across early and mid-to-late layers, with stronger concentration in mid-to-late layers, where targeted steering exposes specific model vulnerabilities. Overall, our results suggest that jailbreak susceptibility can be traced to sparse, token-localized SAE feature subgroups, complementing prior accounts based on broad adversarial, refusal, or steering directions.

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

Adversarial Bandit Optimization with Globally Bounded Perturbations to Convex Losses

arXiv:2606.19891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study adversarial bandit optimization in which the loss functions may be non-convex and non-smooth. In each round, the learner selects an action and observes only the loss incurred at that action. The loss consists of an underlying convex and $\beta$-smooth component and an adversarial perturbation that may be chosen after observing the learner's action. The perturbations are subject to a global budget controlling their cumulative magnitude over time. This framework extends the globally budgeted, post-action perturbation model from underlying linear losses to general convex and $\beta$-smooth losses. For this broader class, we establish expected regret guarantees that explicitly characterize the effect of the perturbation budget. To establish these guarantees, we modify a standard bandit optimization algorithm and develop an analysis that controls the additional regret caused by the perturbations. In the absence of perturbations, our results reduce to regret guarantees for the standard bandit convex optimization setting with $\beta$-smooth losses.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Maternal deaths associated factors in the Conflict-Affected North West Region of Cameroon. Lessons from a cross-sectional survey

Background Maternal mortality is a significant global public health crisis, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and conflict-affected regions. Cameroon's maternal mortality ratio is high at 406 deaths per 100,000 live births, while the ongoing Anglophone conflict has further exacerbated maternal healthcare delivery in the North West Region (NWR){middle dot} Despite the evidence-based interventions like partographs, obstetric kits, birth preparedness plans, and active management of the third stage of labour, implementation gaps persist across health facilities. Objective The study aimed to assess factors related to preventable maternal deaths in the NWR of Cameroon by exploring maternal health service usage, implementation of obstetric measures, demand-side challenges, accessibility barriers, and health system weaknesses. Methodology The study employed a quantitative descriptive cross-sectional survey design{middle dot} Data was collected with structured questionnaires from postpartum women and healthcare workers in selected health facilities and catchment communities in the NWR{middle dot} Also, a multistage sampling technique was adopted, and Cochran's formula generated a sample size of 109 respondents{middle dot} In addition, data were analysed using SPSS version 27 and Stata version 18, employing descriptive and inferential statistics. Results In this study, while 70{middle dot}64 percent of females attended at least 4 ANC visits, only 38{middle dot}53 percent met WHO ANC adequacy requirements. Facility delivery was 96{middle dot}33 percent, yet only 38{middle dot}46 percent received completed delivery plans. Conflict-related challenges affected access, with 44{middle dot}95 percent reporting insecurity-associated movement difficulties, while 44{middle dot}95 percent reported increased transportation expenses due to the conflict. Near-miss complications were reported among 27.52 percent of participants. Delivery record reviews indicated that obstetric kits were utilised in 81{middle dot}76 percent of deliveries, partographs were accessible in 86{middle dot}49 percent of records but correctly filled in just 60{middle dot}81 percent , while oxytocin administration was 95{middle dot}95 percent. Integrated Health Centres showed poorer adherence with intrapartum interventions compared with District and Regional Hospitals (p