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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Cluster-Aware Dual-Level Test Specification Generation for Large-Scale Automotive Software Requirements

arXiv:2606.17197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generating test specifications that satisfy Automotive SPICE SWE.6 requirements becomes increasingly challenging and time-consuming as projects scale to thousands of requirements. Because this manual process often consumes weeks of engineering effort, automation becomes a critical necessity. However, standard Large Language Model (LLM) approaches struggle at scale: processing requirements individually discards vital inter-requirement dependencies, while feeding entire corpora at once exceeds context-window limits, leading to incomplete integration coverage and redundant test cases. This paper presents a novel "Cluster-then-Summarize" pipeline that addresses these limitations through three-stages. Requirements are embedded using sentence transformers and grouped using UMAP dimensionality reduction followed by HDBSCAN density-based clustering. This grouping utilizes an automatic minimum cluster size selection driven by a quality criterion combining normalized Silhouette and Calinski-Harabasz scores. A multi-level map-reduce summarization algorithm then distills each cluster into concise, domain-conformant descriptions while preserving quantitative thresholds and safety integrity levels. The pipeline exploits the derived cluster topology to generate test specifications at two levels: individual requirement verification and cluster-level integration tests that verify cross-requirement feature behavior. A nearby-cluster context mechanism provides bounded cross-feature awareness during each LLM call, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation grounds all outputs in ISO 26262 and ASPICE standards. Evaluation on automotive requirement datasets of varying scale demonstrates that the cluster-aware approach improves integration test coverage and maintains summarization fidelity compared to baseline methods while scaling efficiently to thousands of requirements.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Pareto LoRA: Mitigating Modality Imbalance in Unified Multimodal Models via Pareto-Optimal Gradient Integration

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for integrating multimodal understanding and generation within a single autoregressive transformer. However, during multimodal instruction tuning, these models often exhibit pronounced modality imbalance: language gradients dominate optimization, thus leading to lower image generation quality, especially under parameter-efficient fine-tuning such as LoRA. In this work, we systematically analyze modality imbalance in LoRA-based fine-tuning of UMMs for interleaved text-image generation. We show that vision modality performance degrades substantially more than text modality performance when compared to unimodal counterparts, and that modality-specific gradients can differ by orders of magnitude across various tasks and layers. Motivated by this observation, we reformulate the multimodal instruction tuning as a bi-objective optimization problem and propose Pareto LoRA, a Pareto-optimal gradient integration strategy that balances the text and image objectives by modulating the gradient direction and strength. Experiments on the CoMM benchmark with Emu2 demonstrate that Pareto LoRA consistently improves multimodal generation balance, achieving up to 44.9% gains in perceptual image quality over vanilla LoRA while maintaining comparable text performance.

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

From Parasocial Scripts to Dyadic Persistence in Autonomous AI-Agent Communities

While parasocial interactions (PSIs) and parasocial relationships (PSRs) have been studied in conventional media settings, we investigate whether PSI- (colloquial) relational cues also exist in online communities where both sides are autonomous AI agents. We analyze 4,434 posts and 50,338 comments from Moltbook through three theory-based textual indicators: attachment/intimacy language, reciprocity bids, and self-identification to original poster (OP). The combined results across methods based on keyword matching, few-shot large language model (LLM) annotation, and grouped-context LLM annotation reveal that PSI colloquial cues prevail and are strongly associated with OP re-engagement and a reciprocal reply structure. These results are robust across negative controls, nullification, clustered-standard-error re-estimation, and multiple-testing correction. A dyadic persistence test further affirms reciprocity bids aligned with sustained OP-involving mutual recurrence, providing empirical evidence for bridging interaction-level PSI scripts with PSR-consistent repeated dyadic patterns. We interpret the evidence as a behavioral structure in discourse by LLM-enabled agents.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Decoding Hidden Deception in Reasoning LLMs: Activation Explainers for Deception Auditing

As LLMs acquire stronger reasoning capabilities, deceptive behavior becomes an increasingly serious safety concern. Existing deception monitors either score visible transcripts or derive scalar probe scores from representation vectors, leaving little inspectable evidence about why a response is suspicious. We introduce STATEWITNESS, an activation explainer for deception auditing. A separate decoder reads a target model's hidden states, then answers natural-language queries or emits structured reports about them. We evaluate STATEWITNESS on two target reasoning LLMs across seven deception datasets. STATEWITNESS reaches 0.916 mean AUROC, a relative gain of 11.6% over the best black-box text monitor and 25.0% over the best activation-probe baseline under the same evaluation protocol. When combined with existing monitors, STATEWITNESS reduces missed deceptive examples in simple threshold ensembles. Beyond scalar detection, the decoder returns query-level answers, schema reports, and token- or sentence-level evidence traces for human inspection. We view this interface as a potential building block for broader interpretability and alignment tools.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

FATE: Pillar Encoding and Frequency-Aware Training for Event-Based Object Detection

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that asynchronously capture logarithmic intensity changes, offering inherent advantages in high-speed and high-dynamic-range scenarios. However, the sparse and asynchronous nature of event streams poses a fundamental challenge for modern deep learning architectures. To enable compatibility with standard models, most existing approaches partition the accumulation window into fixed temporal sub-bins. While effective for spatial processing, this internal discretization discards fine-grained temporal structure and constrains inference to the low temporal frequencies imposed by training supervision. To address this limitation, we propose FATE, a unified framework built upon a novel Pillar Encoding (PE). While operating over discrete macro-accumulation windows dictated by the target frequency, PE avoids internal temporal sub-binning. It organizes events into spatial pillars and approximates their intra-window evolution via projection onto a continuous-time orthogonal polynomial basis. This formulation yields an L2-optimal representation that retains rich temporal dynamics in a dense pseudo-image, mitigating information loss under sparse event conditions. To fully leverage this representation, we introduce Frequency-Aware Training (FAT), a soft mean-teacher curriculum that generates temporally dense pseudo-labels, effectively bridging the mismatch between low-frequency supervision and high-frequency inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FATE generalizes across architectural paradigms and consistently outperforms strong baselines. It enables robust object detection at high temporal resolutions up to 200 Hz, while incurring minimal overhead in parameter count and inference latency

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Asymptotic analysis of the finite predictor for fractional Gaussian noise

arXiv:2504.01562v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper proposes a new approach to the asymptotic analysis of the finite predictor for stationary sequences. Our method yields the exact asymptotics of both the relative prediction error and the partial correlation coefficients. The underlying assumptions are analytic in nature, making the approach applicable to processes with long-range dependence. The ARMA-type process driven by fractional Gaussian noise (fGn), which had previously remained elusive, is used as a case study.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Context-Aware Feature-Fusion for Co-occurring Object Detection in Autonomous Driving

Object detection in autonomous driving requires precise localization and an inherent understanding of the relational context between co-occurring objects. In extremely complex heterogeneous environments rare classes, small-scale objects, and frequently appearing objects are difficult for standard object detection frameworks to handle. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Context-Centric Feature Fusion (CCFF), which utilizes two attention-based modules, Local Context Fusion Module (LCFM) uses the RoI-to-RoI self-attention mechanism to resolve spatial interactions, mainly considering small and partially obscured objects, while Global Context Attention Module (GCAM) converts the co-occurrence of objects priors by pooling top-K RoI features into a global context attention token, avoiding the computational overhead of pixel-level global pooling. This fusion of local and object-centric global features yields contextualized embeddings that enhance classification results and co-occurring objects detection. Our method is evaluated on two datasets, Cityscapes and BDD100K which demonstrate significant improvement on relational consistency, achieving a Category-level Consistency Strategy (CCS) of 0.973 and 0.969, respectively. Furthermore, our approach produces substantial gains in small object detection (AP_S: 14.1%) and successfully recovers rare classes such as "Train" that are typically lost in large distributions. Our efficiency report shows that the framework processes images in real time with a 0.2 FPS overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/BinayKSingh/CCFF.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum simulation of the Liouville equation in classical mechanics with discontinuous potential via Schrödingerization

arXiv:2606.15066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop quantum simulation algorithms for the Liouville equation of classical mechanics with discontinuous potential. Such discontinuities represent potential barriers at which classical particles undergo energy preserving transmission or reflection, and the resulting interface conditions must be incorporated into the numerical flux. We combine Hamiltonian-preserving schemes by Jin and Wen in Commun. Math. Sci. 3(3), 285-315 (2005) with the Schrödingerization method, which embeds the resulting nonunitary semi-discrete dynamics into a unitary Schrödinger type system in one additional auxiliary variable [arXiv:2212.14703, arXiv:2212.13969]. For one-, two-, and $n$-dimensional problems with grid aligned interfaces, we construct sparse matrix representations of the transmission and reflection fluxes using step and hat functions, derive the corresponding Hamiltonians of the Schrödingerized systems, and analyze their sparse-access query complexity. In the sparse-access oracle model, the resulting algorithms have a polynomial dependence on the inverse accuracy and avoid the exponential dependence on the phase-space dimension suffered by classical grid based Hamiltonian-preserving schemes, up to the cost of implementing the oracles and the postselection overhead. We also describe the postselected recovery of the physical solution state and the quantum readout of macroscopic observables such as density and averaged velocity through overlap estimation. Numerical experiments based on classical simulation of the Schrödingerized dynamics validate the proposed formulation and illustrate the correct transmission/reflection behavior at potential barriers.

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

Tool-IQA: Augmenting Image Quality Assessment with Simple Tools

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been increasingly adopted for Image Quality Assessment (IQA). However, current methods typically employ a static one-shot scoring paradigm, despite the fact that humans assess image quality through dynamic visual inspection, e.g., selectively adjusting views to verify details and subtle artifacts. Specifically, relying solely on a single-pass observation introduces two primary limitations: first, perceiving the image only at a global scale restricts the assessment of finer local details; second, the original intensity distribution of the image may overwhelm the visibility, leading to insufficient inspection of image quality. To address these issues, we propose Tool-IQA, shifting the assessment mechanism from passive scoring to a tool-augmented workflow. In particular, we equip VLMs with simple yet effective view tools: a Magnifier to inspect local details, and a Gamma Corrector to uncover visibility and hidden artifacts. The assessment follows a structured pipeline that consists of an initial observation with rubric notes, a tool-augmented in-depth inspection, and a final quantification for calibrated quality score. Furthermore, to ensure efficient and purposeful tool callings, we introduce a batch-aware training strategy to reward tool interactions that can yield positive contributions rather than simply encouraging usage. Experiments on a variety of IQA benchmarks demonstrate that, with effective tool calling and calibrated assessment, our proposed Tool-IQA significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models, e.g., it achieves a PLCC of 0.854 on the challenging CLIVE dataset.

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

Intelligence Is Not the Bottleneck: Validating an LLM First-Pass Manuscript Score Against Peer-Review Outcomes

arXiv:2606.15887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) systems are increasingly proposed to assist peer review, yet most evaluations judge the prose of machine-generated review text, not the validity of the numeric score a system assigns. We validate AIPR, which reads a submitted manuscript and emits five 0-100 quality dimensions and a weighted overall score, against the public decision outcomes of a major machine learning venue. AIPR grades by prompting alone, with no fine-tuning on reviews or decisions. Across 300 ICLR submissions with public decision tiers and reviewer ratings, graded under a frozen pipeline with hypotheses pre-registered before any score met any outcome, the overall score separates rejected from accepted submissions (AUROC 0.82, 95% CI 0.78-0.87), rises monotonically across tiers, and tracks the mean reviewer rating. The signal is strongest where we claim it: the lowest-scoring fifth is rejected far above the base rate, with oral papers absent. The validity comes mostly from the model: a one-paragraph prompt on the same model discriminates almost as well as the full pipeline (the small gap favours the pipeline but does not meet the pre-declared criterion, p = 0.09). What the engineering adds is reliability and a grounded review: AIPR's score barely moves across repeated runs (0.7 vs. 2.8 points within-paper SD) where the bare prompt swings, and the same pass returns a rubric-structured, evidence-grounded review rather than a bare number, with the human keeping the decision.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Closing the Social-Semantic Gap: SPSD for Edge-Based Prompt Compression in Cloud LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.19364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prefill stage of Large Language Model (LLM) inference is a growing contributor to cloud-scale energy cost. Many consumer-support and conversational prompts contain social scaffolding: politeness markers, apologetic preamble, repetition, and rapport-building language that is important for human communication but carries low marginal information for machine reasoning. We call this discrepancy the Social-Semantic Gap. We present SPSD (Sentiment Preserving Semantic Distillation), an edge-based pipeline that compresses user prompts using a 4-bit quantised Small Language Model before transmission to a cloud-deployed LLM. Evaluation on a 248-prompt corpus using Gemma-2-2B-Instruct (Q4_K_M) as the SLM and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct as the cloud evaluation model yields a mean input token saving of 99.9 tokens per distilled call, with all 146 distilled calls yielding positive savings. Response quality, assessed by blind LLM-as-judge scoring across 121 pairs, is non-inferior to the raw path within a pre-specified 1-point margin on a 15-point rubric; the judge awarded 43 percent ties, 28 percent distilled wins, and 29 percent raw wins. Cosine similarity is mixed: mean 0.682, median 0.712, with 54.1 percent of pairs above the 0.70 reference threshold. Safety-critical domains are conservatively routed to passthrough via rule-based gates. Per-call net energy saving is estimated at 70-270 uWh under stated assumptions. SPSD shows that on-device prompt distillation can reduce cloud LLM input-token cost while preserving response quality within a practical non-inferiority margin.

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

Diffusion-Refined Segmentation and Vision-Language Interpretation for Pediatric Brain Tumor MRI

Accurate pediatric brain tumor segmentation remains challenging due to limited annotated data, heterogeneous imaging phenotypes, diffuse tumor boundaries, and class imbalance across tumor subregions. Here, we present a two-stage deep learning framework for improving multi-modal pediatric brain MRI segmentation and clinical interpretation. First, we evaluate 3D Res U-Net and Swin-UNETR baselines on BraTS-PEDs MRI scans, using four co-registered modalities to predict tumor core, whole tumor, and enhancing tumor regions. Second, we introduce diffusion-based refinement models conditioned on coarse Swin-UNETR predictions, including a 3D DDPM refiner and MedSegDiff. Conditioning substantially improves diffusion stability and performance, particularly for enhancing tumor boundary segmentation. Conditioned MedSegDiff achieves the strongest boundary agreement with the lowest HD95. Finally, predicted tumor volumes and representative segmentation overlays are integrated with a multimodal language model to generate structured radiology-style reports. Together, our results suggest that coarse-to-refined diffusion segmentation can improve pediatric tumor boundary delineation and support end-to-end interpretable AI-assisted neuro-oncology workflows.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Revisiting Neural Processes via Fourier Transform and Volterra Series

arXiv:2606.01172v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modeling unknown latent functions from finite, irregularly sampled measurements is a recurring challenge across science and engineering. Neural processes (NPs), a family of probabilistic functional models, are promising solutions – especially when endowed with domain-specific symmetries like translation equivariance, which improve sample efficiency and generalization. Yet existing translation-equivariant NPs face two limitations: (i) they stack generic components with non-linearities, obscuring the induced function class and limiting interpretability; and (ii) convolutional designs rely on kernels with local receptive fields and require dense uniform input grids, while attention-based methods avoid these issues but scale quadratically with the number of observations. We address both with two contributions. First, using the Volterra expansion, we characterize continuous translation-equivariant operators as sums of higher-order convolutions, yielding analytical transparency while admitting efficient approximation by first-order convolutions. Second, we introduce set Fourier convolutions (SFConvs), a frequency-domain parameterization that operates directly on irregularly sampled points, achieves approximately global receptive fields, and scales linearly in the number of observations. Building on these ideas, we propose two conditional NPs (CNPs): SFConvCNPs, which stack SFConv blocks with non-linearities, and SFVConvCNPs, which integrate the Volterra formulation. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate our methods' efficacy against state-of-the-art baselines.

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

Temporal Validation Changes the Apparent Public-Health Utility of Under-Five Mortality Prediction in Bangladesh: A Four-Round DHS Machine-Learning Study

arXiv:2602.03957v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Background: Under-five mortality in Bangladesh remains uneven despite national progress. DHS-based prediction models may guide targeted follow-up, but only if validation reflects future use. We examined how validation design changes apparent prediction performance. Methods: Four BDHS rounds (2011-2022; 33,962 children; 1,290 deaths) were analysed with a 26-feature pipeline and three model classes under four validation regimes, including cross-survey temporal validation (train 2011+2014, calibrate 2017, test 2022). A 32-unit ELU multilayer perceptron was selected via genetic-algorithm neural architecture search. AUROC used 2,000 bootstrap resamples; screening utility used sensitivity, PPV, and number needed to screen (NNS) at fixed capacity. Results: Validation regime altered public-health interpretation more than model class. NAS MLP AUROC ranged from 0.669 (2022-only random) to 0.775 (pooled random), with temporal AUROC 0.730. At the top-10% temporal threshold, NAS identified 152/355 deaths in 2022 (sensitivity 42.8%, PPV 13.2%, NNS 7.6). NNS across designs ranged from 5.6 to 11.0. Conclusions: Validation-regime choice changed screening workload and apparent policy value more than architecture. Temporal validation supports defensible estimates of follow-up and referral demand; DHS child-mortality studies should report sensitivity, PPV, and NNS before programmatic use.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Stable, bidirectional electro-optic transduction in thin film lithium tantalate

arXiv:2606.12726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient and stable microwave-optical transduction is a key enabling technology for distributed superconducting quantum computing and heterogeneous quantum networks. Electro-optic transducers based on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) have shown strong promise, but demonstrations to date have been limited by various factors such as low frequency bias drift, low efficiency, fabrication complexity, and scalability. Here we demonstrate the first integrated electro-optic microwave-optical transducers realized in thin-film lithium tantalate (TFLT), a material platform offering Pockels nonlinearity comparable to TFLN together with improved bias stability and high-power handling. We fabricate superconducting microwave resonators coupled to tunable photonic-molecule optical resonators using wafer-scale deep ultraviolet lithography, offering high-throughput production of hundreds of devices per wafer. Across six devices we observe coherent bidirectional conversion between C-band optical photons and 4.9-5.5 GHz microwave photons, with measured on-chip efficiencies and inferred single-photon coupling rates g_0/2{\pi} ~ 1 kHz consistent with theory. Continuous operation over multiple days is achieved using a static bias field with minimal feedback, demonstrating a major operational advantage. We further characterize optical loss statistics, microwave resonator performance, and optically induced added noise under pulsed pumping, finding less than one added photon for 100 microsecond pulses at the highest measured efficiencies. These results establish TFLT as a scalable and robust electro-optic platform for future quantum interconnects and modular quantum processors.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Consensus-based Agentic Large Language Model Framework for Harmonized Tariff Schedule Code Classification

arXiv:2606.16987v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) code classification is essential for customs clearance, duty assessment, trade statistics, and regulatory compliance in maritime logistics. However, exact HTS classification remains challenging because product descriptions are often short, incomplete, or ambiguous, while correct classification depends on hierarchical tariff structures, legal notes, and jurisdiction-specific rules. This paper proposes an agentic large language model (LLM) framework for Canadian 10-digit HTS code classification in smart-port and maritime logistics environments. The framework integrates multi-agent information retrieval, semantic retrieval over official tariff documents, evidence-grounded reasoning, consensus-based validation, element-wise voting across hierarchical code components, confidence estimation, and human-in-the-loop escalation. We evaluate the framework on a private dataset of 3,300 domain-expert-labeled product records collected from logistics and delivery contexts. Experimental results show that exact 10-digit classification remains difficult even for advanced LLMs, with performance decreasing from coarse chapter-level prediction to fine-grained tariff and statistical suffix assignment. These findings demonstrate the need for evidence-grounded, uncertainty-aware, and human-centered classification workflows rather than fully autonomous single-step prediction. The proposed framework supports more interpretable, accountable, and compliance-oriented HTS classification for maritime logistics and smart-port operations. Our code is available at https://github.com/Analytics-Everywhere-Lab/hts.

18.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-06

Point-of-care early infant HIV diagnosis at birth in a pragmatic cluster-randomized trial in Mozambique and Tanzania: A comparative cost and cost-effectiveness study

Authors:

by Kira Elsbernd, Issa Sabi, Ilesh V. Jani, Chishamiso Mudenyanga, Siriel Boniface, Arlete Mahumane, Joaquim Lequechane, Falume Chale, Bindiya Meggi, Kassia Pereira, Raphael Edom, Anange F. Lwilla, W. Chris Buck, Nyanda Elias Ntinyinya, Michael Hoelscher, Till Baernighausen, Arne Kroidl, Stefan Kohler, the LIFE Study Consortium Background Timely access to early infant diagnosis (EID) is crucial for newborns with HIV, as late diagnosis can delay lifesaving antiretroviral treatment (ART). We assessed the comparative cost and cost-effectiveness of integrating point-of-care EID at birth into routine care in primary healthcare settings. Methods and findings This pre-specified secondary analysis was nested in the cluster-randomized LIFE study conducted at 28 primary healthcare facilities in Mozambique and Tanzania from October 2019 to September 2021. We estimated the health system cost of point-of-care birth plus 4–8-week HIV testing (very early infant diagnosis; VEID) compared to standard-of-care (SoC) testing at 4–8 weeks only, both with immediate ART initiation. We assessed the cost-effectiveness of VEID relative to SoC with respect to ART initiation within one week of life using Bayesian hierarchical models. As this is an intermediate outcome, incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs) cannot be directly compared to available life-year-based cost-effectiveness thresholds. To contextualize results, we derived the minimum life-years gained per early ART initiation required for VEID to meet standard thresholds in a break-even analysis.VEID was associated with a higher cost and resulted in earlier ART initiation than SoC in both countries. In Mozambique, VEID increased the proportion of infants initiating ART within one week of life by 90.0 (95% CrI [67.5, 98.5]) percentage points at an incremental cost of $2,632 (95% CrI [$2,249, $3,062]) per infant with HIV. In Tanzania, VEID increased early ART initiation by 59.9 (95% CrI [20.9, 89.5]) percentage points at an incremental cost of $6,263 (95% CrI [$5,394, $7,243]) per infant with HIV. The ICER was $2,924 and $10,458 in Mozambique and Tanzania, respectively and was sensitive to intrauterine transmission rate. These findings were limited by the lack of long-term health outcome data and reliance on an intermediate outcome. Based on the break-even analysis, we estimated that VEID would need to yield 6–32 life-years gained per additional early ART initiation to meet standard thresholds. Conclusions Adding birth testing improved early ART initiation but was unlikely to be cost-effective relative to standard thresholds given current prices, vertical transmission rates, and knowledge of long-term health benefits. Cost-effectiveness could be achieved at current costs if early ART translates to substantial long-term health benefits or if targeted to infants at high risk of vertical transmission.

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

Offline Preference-Based Trajectory Evaluation

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17541v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline evaluation of agentic systems often collapses trajectories to terminal success, discarding information about partial progress and inducing widespread ties, creating substantial statistical inefficiency by reducing effective sample size and weakening the ability to distinguish systems. We propose preference-based trajectory evaluation, which compares trajectories directly through temporal preferences over progress and time-to-return profiles. We find that, across diverse agentic and interactive benchmarks, standard success-based metrics produce tied comparisons on roughly 75% of instances, whereas trajectory-aware preferences reduce ties to roughly 35%, improving discriminative power, ranking stability, and data efficiency. Our results suggest that benchmark saturation, often attributed to poor data collection or problem difficulty, may also be explained by the choice of evaluation measure.

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

Emotional regulation improves deep learning-based image classification

arXiv:2606.13081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emotion significantly influences cognition, enhancing memory and learning under certain conditions. Drawing on this principle, emotion-augmented deep learning investigates how affective states can improve neural network architectures and learning paradigms, achieving better generalization than non-emotional models. However, existing methods often rely solely on objective neurophysiological factors, neglecting the role of subjectivity in emotion. To bridge this gap, the present study introduces Emotional Regulation, a novel framework for modeling emotion in deep learning through artificial subjective experience. The method employs pre-training based on affective stimuli, balancing non-emotional and emotionally-influenced responses in downstream task optimization. Extensive experimentation was conducted in image classification, pre-training ResNet and ViT architectures on four emotional datasets, using CIFAR-10 and -100 as target benchmarks. Results reveal improvements over the aforementioned backbones, providing evidence of Emotional Regulation as a promising method for defining emotion-augmented deep learning through artificial subjective experience. Furthermore, the proposed approach overcomes the related work in image classification based on CIFAR, revealing Emotional Regulation as the new state-of-the-art in emotion-augmented deep learning for large-scale vision datasets. The study also enforces evidence of the impact of affective states in improving machine learning tasks' optimization, encouraging further investigation on emotion-inspired architectures.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

How long does it take to train an Elephant Random Walk

Authors:

arXiv:2509.15049v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study how conditioning on the first $k$ steps, which we think of as training, affects the long-term behavior of the Elephant Random Walk. When the elephant is conditioned to be at position $k$ at time $k$, the first return time to the origin scales as $k^{(4-4p)/(3-4p)}$ in the diffusive regime, and grows exponentially in the critical regime. We loosely interpret this as a measurement of the rate at which the elephant forgets its training.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Matrix Product Operator Encodings of the Magnus Expansion and Dyson Series

arXiv:2605.21597v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a matrix product operator (MPO) encoding of the Magnus expansion and the Dyson series for one-dimensional quantum lattice models with time-dependent Hamiltonians. The MPO construction can be made accurate up to arbitrary order in the time step, it can be applied to both finite and infinite systems, and it can handle long-range interactions. The resulting MPO can be combined with state-of-the-art time evolution algorithms based on matrix product states, allowing for drastic improvements in simulating evolution under time-dependent Hamiltonians. Our MPO construction can also be used for the optimization of quantum circuits in the context of quantum simulation of time-dependent Hamiltonians.

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

FinP: Fairness-in-Privacy in Federated Learning by Addressing Disparities in Privacy Risk

arXiv:2502.17748v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) inherently mitigates mass data centralization risks; however, its privacy protections are not equally distributed - leaving vulnerable individuals disproportionately exposed to sophisticated privacy attacks. Crucially, statistical heterogeneity in human-centric FL environments often results in an inequitable distribution of privacy risks, particularly affecting those whose sensitive attributes or behaviors make them outliers. To address this critical gap, we introduce FinP, a novel framework designed to formalize and enforce fairness-in-privacy by mitigating disproportionate client vulnerability to Source Inference Attacks (SIA). FinP operationalizes a two-pronged defense strategy that tackles both the symptoms and root causes of privacy disparity, ensuring that no group of clients bears an excessive privacy burden. It combines a server-side adaptive aggregation mechanism, which dynamically weights client contributions based on their estimated privacy risk, with a client-side regularization technique to curb localized overfitting that drives unique data memorization. Extensive empirical evaluations on FEMNIST, Human Activity Recognition (HAR), and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate that FinP effectively aligns privacy fairness with primary task utility. Notably, FinP successfully mitigates SIA risks and reduces disparities in privacy exposure, establishing that strong fairness-in-privacy guarantees need not compromise model utility. Ultimately, FinP establishes equitable privacy protections by reducing vulnerability disparities by up to 57.14%, while preserving global model utility within a marginal +/- 1.75% of standard federated baselines.

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

EDEN: A Large-Scale Corpus of Clinical Notes for Italian

We present EDEN (Emergency Department Electronic Notes), a new and unique large-scale corpus of clinical notes produced in Emergency Departments of Italian hospitals. The corpus, in its current version, is composed of approximately 4 million clinical notes fully anonymized, covering diverse phases of patient care during the stay in the emergency department. In addition, a subset of about six thousand notes has been manually annotated by clinical experts through a structured Case Report Form (CRF) containing 132 items relevant for two patient situations in emergency departments, dyspnea and loss of consciousness. Items may assume numerical values (e.g., for blood saturation), categorical (e.g., for level of consciousness ), binary (e.g., for presence of traumas), and mixed value types. The annotation process involved multiple clinicians and underwent iterative revision to resolve ambiguities in item formulation, resulting in a richly structured (although high imbalanced) resource. The dataset aims to fill a relevant gap of data able to support both the development and the use of Large Language Models in concrete medical applications. We describe the data collection protocol, the on-site anonymisation pipeline, corpus statistics, and the annotation scheme. Finally, we propose CRF-filling as a novel structured information extraction benchmark, and provide zero-shot baseline resulting from Gemma-27B and MedGemma-27B. To the best of our knowledge, the EDEN dataset is the largest freely available corpus of clinical notes existing for the Italian language.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

GOT-JEPA: Generic Object Tracking with Model Adaptation and Occlusion Handling using Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture

The human visual system tracks objects by integrating current observations with previously observed information, adapting to target and scene changes, and reasoning about occlusion at fine granularity. In contrast, recent generic object trackers are often optimized for training targets, which limits robustness and generalization in unseen scenarios, and their occlusion reasoning remains coarse, lacking detailed modeling of occlusion patterns. To address these limitations in generalization and occlusion perception, we propose GOT-JEPA, a model-predictive pretraining framework that extends JEPA from predicting image features to predicting tracking models. Given identical historical information, a teacher predictor generates pseudo-tracking models from a clean current frame, and a student predictor learns to predict the same pseudo-tracking models from a corrupted version of the current frame. This design provides stable pseudo supervision and explicitly trains the predictor to produce reliable tracking models under occlusions, distractors, and other adverse observations, improving generalization to dynamic environments. Building on GOT-JEPA, we further propose OccuSolver to enhance occlusion perception for object tracking. OccuSolver adapts a point-centric point tracker for object-aware visibility estimation and detailed occlusion-pattern capture. Conditioned on object priors iteratively generated by the tracker, OccuSolver incrementally refines visibility states, strengthens occlusion handling, and produces higher-quality reference labels that progressively improve subsequent model predictions. Extensive evaluations on seven benchmarks show that our method effectively enhances tracker generalization and robustness.