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

High-Fidelity 3D Geometric Reconstruction of Pelvic Organs from MRI: A Hybrid Deep Learning and Iterative Optimization Approach

Patient-specific 3D reconstruction of pelvic organ geometry from MRI is important for pelvic floor modeling and downstream patient-specific analysis. However, while previous studies have focused primarily on either image segmentation or downstream use of 3D models, the reconstruction of high-fidelity, high-quality geometries remains labor-intensive and poorly standardized. The study introduced a hybrid deformable shape modeling framework that integrates deep learning prediction with iterative optimization for the reconstruction of the bladder, uterus, and rectum. The framework consists of three core components: a geometry-aware multi-level deep learning architecture that preserves topological consistency of pelvic organs; a two-stage amortized optimization training strategy that balances global shape capture and local surface refinement; and a holistic synergy mechanism–where iterative optimization provides supervision for deep learning during the training phase, and during inference, deep learning rapidly predicts the global organ morphology, followed by iterative optimization to refine local surfaces and mesh quality. This framework demonstrated marked superiority in geometric fidelity than current mainstream deep learning-based organ reconstruction models. For individual anatomical structures, the reconstructed 3D geometries for the bladder, rectum, and uterus achieved significantly lower Chamfer Distance values and higher Dice Similarity Coefficient scores. In addition, while maintaining high computational efficiency, the proposed architecture yielded superior overall volumetric mesh quality. At the patient level, the framework achieved higher mean values for the 10 worst elements for both minSICN and minSIGE compared to traditional geometric post-processing algorithms.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

An Extensible and Lightweight Unified Architecture for Demosaicing Pixel-bin Image Sensors

Pixel-bin image sensors are becoming the default choice for smartphone cameras due to their resolution vs light-gathering trade-off. However, their larger inter-color separation compared to the Bayer color filter array (CFA) makes them challenging to demosaic. Furthermore, existing deep learning-based demosaicing methods are CFA-specific, requiring multiple individual models that take up precious onboard resources and demand larger development and maintenance efforts. In this work, we propose a modular unified architecture for demosaicing various pixel-bin sensors that provides higher image quality while being extensible and lightweight. Additionally, to enable plug-and-play operation, we introduce a learning-free CFA-identification module to detect the CFA type of raw data accurately.

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

Mind the Perspective: Let's Reason Recursively for Theory of Mind

arXiv:2606.11724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning requires inferring agents' beliefs from partial and asymmetric observations, which remains an open challenge for LLMs. Existing prompting-based approaches improve ToM reasoning through observable-event filtering or temporal belief chains, without explicitly modeling nested beliefs. We introduce RecToM, an inference-time framework for ToM reasoning that models nested beliefs via recursive perspective construction. RecToM constructs each character perspective from the preceding character perspective along the character chain specified by the question, reducing higher-order belief questions to actual-world questions within the final constructed perspective. We further provide a KD45 analysis showing that RecToM's perspective construction induces a well-formed belief modality beyond simple event filtering. Experiments on ToM benchmarks, including Hi-ToM, Big-ToM, and FanToM, across multiple LLM backbones show that RecToM consistently outperforms recent advanced approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Notably, RecToM reaches 100\% accuracy on Hi-ToM with GPT-5.4 and Qwen3.5, a benchmark requiring higher-order ToM reasoning.

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

ArtNet: A JEPA-Like Articulatory Predictive Framework for Robust Zero-Shot Phoneme Recognition

arXiv:2606.16595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zero-shot cross-lingual phoneme recognition is often hindered by the fragility of direct acoustic-to-symbol mapping, which is susceptible to language-specific variations. Echoing joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) work in vision, we propose ArtNet, a framework that explores a structured feature prediction task based on articulatory features to enhance acoustic robustness. Specifically, ArtNet integrates an articulatory predictor, designed to extract universal articulatory representations from self-supervised learning (SSL) features, with a variational information bottleneck (VIB) to suppress language-specific variations. Experiments on seven unseen languages demonstrate that ArtNet, particularly when synergized with the proposed vector-space inventory alignment (VSIA) strategy, significantly outperforms competitive baselines, achieving a 20.56\% relative reduction in phoneme error rate (PER) and 7.01\% in phoneme feature error rate (PFER).

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

Quantum Measurement and Continuous Markov Processes

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15958v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: These are the lecture notes for a course on diffusive quantum measuring instruments. They were prepared and delivered at the Perimeter Institute on Mondays and Thursdays, from 2:30 to 4:00 PM, beginning October 27th, 2025 and ending December 11th, 2025. These lectures were recorded and can be found at https://pirsa.org/c25038.

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

Distribution Preference Optimization: A Fine-grained Perspective for LLM Unlearning

arXiv:2510.04773v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities learned from vast corpora, concerns regarding data privacy and safety are receiving increasing attention. LLM unlearning, which aims to remove the influence of specific data while preserving overall model utility, is becoming an important research area. One of the mainstream unlearning classes is optimization-based methods, which achieve forgetting directly through fine-tuning, exemplified by Negative Preference Optimization (NPO). However, NPO's effectiveness is limited by its inherent lack of explicit positive preference signals. Attempts to introduce such signals by constructing preferred responses often necessitate domain-specific knowledge or well-designed prompts, fundamentally restricting their generalizability. In this paper, we shift the focus to the distribution-level, directly targeting the next-token probability distribution instead of entire responses, and derive a novel unlearning algorithm termed Distribution Preference Optimization (DiPO). We show that the requisite preference distribution pairs for DiPO, which are distributions over the model's output tokens, can be constructed by selectively amplifying or suppressing the model's high-confidence output logits, thereby effectively overcoming NPO's limitations. We theoretically prove the consistency of DiPO's loss function with the desired unlearning direction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiPO achieves a strong trade-off between model utility and forget quality. Notably, DiPO attains the highest forget quality on the TOFU benchmark, and maintains leading scalability and sustainability in utility preservation on the MUSE benchmark.

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

An Integrated Hardware-Software Design for Low-Data Spatial Defect Detection in Robotic Visual Inspection with Hybrid Optoelectronic Neural Networks

To address data overload and inefficient shape-level annotation in robotic visual inspection, this paper proposes a hardware-software integrated optoelectronic architecture. A non-imaging, low-data paradigm is established to minimize annotation dependency. First, a sensor-in-the-loop strategy reconfigures a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) as a physical optical convolutional layer, enabling photonic-domain feature extraction that unifies sensing hardware and processing software. To suppress data volume at the source, a block-based compressed sensing strategy encodes spatial information into low-dimensional temporal signals, drastically reducing redundancy. Subsequently, to bypass laborious manual defect shape annotation, natural language descriptions guide the network to align with highly generalizable features from Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), steering the attention maps of the optoelectronic neural network toward defect shapes. Furthermore, a Localization Accuracy for Attention (LAA) metric is proposed to quantify shape-level defect localization performance. Experiments on transparent material defect detection validate the system's effectiveness. Parametric analysis reveals how measurement matrices, compression ratios, and block sizes affect accuracy. Results show that, compared to traditional imaging, the proposed architecture maintains equivalent accuracy while reducing data volume by 90% for Vision Transformers and computational workload by 60% for Convolutional Neural Networks. This low-data paradigm offers an efficient solution for industrial automation scenarios involving massive data streams, high acquisition costs, or constrained edge resources.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

LLMZero: Discovering Adaptive Training Strategies for RL Post-Training via LLM Agents

RL post-training strategies are dataset-dependent and reveal a recurring empirical pattern: capacity parameters accumulate monotonically across stages, while regularization parameters predominantly oscillate in response to shifting training dynamics. This distinction matters because fixed schedules commit all parameters to fixed trajectories and therefore cannot express the non-stationary exploration-exploitation tradeoffs that regularization must track; the principle provides actionable design rules for multi-stage training. We discover this through LLMZero, a system where LLM agents search over training trajectories via tree search, diagnosing pathologies at each checkpoint and proposing coordinated multi-parameter transitions. Across 4 diverse GRPO tasks, LLMZero discovers strategies that improve over the base model by 9% to 140% relative and over grid search by 6% to 15% relative, consistently outperforming random search and the skill-based agent. The structural principle transfers across tasks, providing an explanation for why discovered strategies take qualitatively different forms yet share similar parameter dynamics.

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

Fast When, Careful Who: Dual-Process Multiparty Turn-Taking with Diffusion Augmentation

Reliable turn-taking is essential for spoken dialogue systems. However, most existing methods are designed for two-speaker interaction and struggle with realistic multiparty audio containing overlap and rapid speaker changes. We study multiparty turn-taking on the VoxConverse dataset and propose an audio-only two-stage pipeline that separates when to trigger a turn boundary from whether the floor is actually transferring. A fast trigger scans the audio and proposes candidate end-of-turn times, while a lightweight verifier runs only at those times to decide \textsc{Hold} or \textsc{Shift} and support next-speaker prediction. We report results in the full multiparty setting and a controlled dyadic top-2 projection for comparability. We also investigate diffusion-based, label-preserving background-audio mixing as a data augmentation strategy. Results show improved shift detection over a baseline, with further improvements from diffusion augmentation.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Containment Gap: How Deployed Agentic AI Frameworks Fail Public-Facing Safety Requirements

arXiv:2606.12797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic large language model systems that autonomously invoke tools, maintain persistent memory, and execute multi-step plans are increasingly deployed in public-facing domains, including government services, healthcare triage, and financial advising. We ask whether the frameworks used to build these systems provide architectural-level structural safety guarantees. Applying six containment principles derived from a compositional model of agentic architectures, we audit three dominant frameworks (LangChain, AutoGPT, and OpenAI Agents SDK) and find no native compliance in any of them. Memory integrity, a defense against one of the most prevalent vulnerability classes, is not observed in any of the three evaluated frameworks. We validate these findings empirically: in a simulated government benefits agent built on LangChain, a single memory-poisoning write induces persistent targeted corruption across all tested seeds and backends, increasing the wrongful denial rate for targeted applicants to 88.9%. Under a complex five-factor policy, the same attack preserves aggregate accuracy while increasing targeted wrongful denials by 3.5x, rendering the corruption difficult to detect through standard monitoring. We then introduce two lightweight containment mechanisms: a memory integrity validator and a policy gate, which eliminate both attack vectors with sub-millisecond overhead (

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

TurnGuide: Enhancing Meaningful Full Duplex Spoken Interactions via Dynamic Turn-Level Text-Speech Interleaving

Full-Duplex Speech Language Models (FD-SLMs) are specialized foundation models designed to enable natural, real-time spoken interactions by modeling complex conversational turn-taking such as interruptions, backchannels, and overlapping speech. End-to-end (e2e) FD-SLMs leverage real-world double-channel conversational data to capture nuanced two-speaker dialogue patterns for human-like interactions, but their conversational abilities often degrade compared to pure-text conversation due to prolonged speech sequences and limited high-quality spoken dialogue data. Although interleaved text-speech generation could mitigate this degradation, integrating discrete text tokens into continuous double-channel audio streams could disrupt the precise time alignment required for fluid interaction. To address this, we propose TurnGuide, a novel text-speech interleaved generation approach for e2e FD-SLMs that dynamically segments assistant speech into dialogue turns and interleaves turn-level text and speech generation. This approach allows FD-SLMs to integrate the semantic intelligence of LLMs without compromising the natural acoustic flow. Extensive experiments show that TurnGuide not only significantly improves e2e FD-SLMs to produce semantically meaningful, coherent speech but also achieves state-of-the-art performance on various turn-taking events. Demos are available at https://dreamtheater123.github.io/TurnGuide-Demo/. Code is available at https://github.com/dreamtheater123/TurnGuide.

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

Certified Finite-Shot Operating Windows for Virtual Distillation and Symmetry Verification

arXiv:2606.15464v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error mitigation methods are usually compared through their infinite-shot bias, but on real devices the comparison is decided by finite sampling budgets, estimator instabilities, and per-shot resource costs. We develop a finite-shot operating-window theory that makes this comparison certifiable for virtual distillation (VD) and symmetry verification (SV): for each method we derive a mean-squared-error law with explicit, non-asymptotic remainder constants. For VD, the law captures the statistical bias and denominator instability of its quotient estimator, with a concentration certificate locating the sample size beyond which the quotient is trustworthy; for SV, it isolates the bias floor left by undetectable errors and the sampling penalty set by the acceptance probability. A selection trichotomy classifies any two-method comparison into a tie, uniform dominance, or a genuine tradeoff with a certified crossing window, including a self-consistency test that rejects spurious crossings. The theory makes falsifiable predictions – operating-window locations scaling as $p^{-2}$ or $p^{-1}$ in the noise rate, and the sign pattern of all pairwise comparisons – which exact white-box experiments confirm with fitted exponent $-1.97$ against the predicted $-2$ and with $300/300$ sign agreement, within a pre-registered analysis whose single failed gate, an over-strict all-instance criterion, is reported and audited in full. Gate-level simulation and archived runs on two IBM backends then test the windows under device conditions: idealized VD windows exist, but realistic interferometry overhead and denominator instability erase them, and calibrated SV is the practical winner in the tested QAOA instances. This absence of a universal winner is not a failure of mitigation; it is the regime structure that certified operating windows predict.

13.
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.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

SSNAPS: Audio-Visual Separation of Speech and Background Noise with Diffusion Inverse Sampling

arXiv:2602.01394v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper addresses the challenge of audio-visual single-microphone speech separation and enhancement in the presence of real-world environmental noise. Our approach is based on generative inverse sampling, where we model clean speech and ambient noise with dedicated diffusion priors and jointly leverage them to recover all underlying sources. To achieve this, reformulate a recent inverse sampler to match our setting. We evaluate on mixtures of 1, 2, and 3 speakers with noise and show that, despite being entirely unsupervised, our method consistently outperforms leading supervised baselines in WER across all conditions. We further extend our framework to handle off-screen speaker separation. Moreover, the high fidelity of the separated noise component makes it suitable for downstream detection of the acoustic scene. Code and pretrained models will become available upon acceptance. Demo page: https://ssnaps2026.github.io/ssnaps2026/

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

SkillAudit: Ground-Truth-Free Skill Evolution via Paired Trajectory Auditing

arXiv:2606.14239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are structured procedural packages that guide frozen LLM agents in specialized workflows. Skills rarely remain sufficient after deployment: edge cases, API changes, and deployment constraints become visible only through use, making skill evolution a practical necessity. Existing methods depend on privileged feedback such as held-out validation scores, hidden test outcomes, or environment rewards – signals often unavailable when a practitioner has only a task description and workspace data. We introduce SkillAudit, a framework for evolving agent skills without ground-truth feedback. The key idea is paired trajectory auditing: at each iteration, the same task is executed with and without the candidate skill, isolating how the skill changes agent behavior without external labels. To turn behavioral differences into edit guidance, SkillAudit uses Process-Aligned Contrastive Evaluation (PACE), a cluster of evaluators that maps trajectory divergences to diagnostic signals linked to specific passages in the skill document. A structural verifier, compiled once from the task specification and then fixed, checks task constraints and rolls back harmful updates. SkillAudit routes edits through two pipelines: Refine removes noisy or irrelevant guidance from broadly useful skills, while Repair replaces passages that conflict with the task. Across 89 containerized tasks spanning 8 professional domains, SkillAudit achieves 73.9% average task reward, outperforming an agent without skills (40.9%) and the static expert skill (56.7%). These gains are obtained without accessing hidden tests, reference solutions, or external scoring functions during evolution.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Exponential speedup in quantum simulation of Kogut-Susskind Hamiltonian via orbifold lattice

arXiv:2506.00755v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate that the orbifold lattice Hamiltonian – an approach known for its efficiency in simulating SU($N$) Yang-Mills theory and QCD on digital quantum computers – can reproduce the Kogut-Susskind Hamiltonian in a controlled limit. While the original Kogut-Susskind approach faces significant implementation challenges on quantum hardware, we show that it emerges naturally as the infinite scalar mass limit of the orbifold lattice formulation, even at finite lattice spacing. Our analysis provides both a general analytical framework applicable to SU($N$) gauge theories in arbitrary dimensions and specific numerical evidence for $(2+1)$-dimensional SU($N$) Yang-Mills theories ($N=2,3$). Using Euclidean path integral methods, we quantify the convergence rate by comparing the standard Wilson action with the orbifold lattice action, matching lattice parameters, and systematically extrapolating results as the bare scalar mass approaches infinity. This reformulation resolves longstanding technical obstacles and offers a straightforward implementation protocol for digital quantum simulation of the Kogut-Susskind Hamiltonian with exponential speedup compared to classical methods and previously known quantum methods, modulo a standard assumptions made also for the original Kogut-Susskind approach.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

The Personalization Trap: How User Memory Alters Emotional Reasoning in LLMs

When an AI assistant remembers that Sarah is a single mother working two jobs, does it interpret her stress differently than if she were a wealthy executive? As personalized AI systems increasingly incorporate long-term user memory, understanding how this memory shapes emotional reasoning is critical. We investigate how user memory affects emotional intelligence in large language models (LLMs) by evaluating 15 models on human-validated emotional intelligence tests. We find that identical scenarios paired with different user profiles produce systematically divergent emotional interpretations. Across validated user-independent emotional scenarios and diverse user profiles, systematic biases emerged in several high-performing LLMs where advantaged profiles received more accurate emotional interpretations. Moreover, LLMs demonstrate significant disparities across demographic factors in emotion reasoning and supportive recommendations tasks, indicating that personalization mechanisms can embed social hierarchies into models' emotional reasoning. These results highlight a key challenge for memory-enhanced AI: systems designed for personalization may reinforce social inequalities. To mitigate these disparities, we curate a general-purpose preference dataset designed to reduce demographic profiles' influence on emotional understanding.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ED3R: Energy-Aware Distributed Disaster Detection Enabled by Cooperative Robotic Agents

Robotics are expected to support environmental monitoring and natural disaster management, where decisions must be made under uncertainty, resource limitations, and strict operational constraints. In critical missions, such as wildfires, robotic agents must not only identify hazardous events with sufficient confidence, but also manage the energy cost and time until detection. This paper introduces ED3R, an energy-aware distributed framework for wildfire detection under uncertainty. ED3R enables hierarchical cooperative decision-making between a robot and a remote controller. The remote controller decides upon the robot's motion, while the robot senses the environment and decides where to execute the wildfire detection (onboard or remotely) and how. The common goal is to detect wildfires with a required confidence while minimizing the energy consumed by any robot operation. ED3R further integrates mechanisms to avoid nearby obstacles, prevent redundant exploration, enable adaptive early mission completion, and ensure feasibility through a custom penalty function. ED3R also introduces a forward-looking capability, enabled through distributed neural regression models that allow the agents to anticipate the future by evaluating candidate strategies before execution. The framework is evaluated through realistic robotics simulations, ablation studies, and baseline comparisons. Overall, ED3R achieves a mission success rate of up to 97.18%. Especially in the most demanding missions, it reduces energy consumption by up to 36.4% and detects wildfires up to 41% faster than baselines.

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

Kolmogorov Regression for Robust Diffusion Policies

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18186v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finite-dimensional (FD) diffusion policies exhibit temporal drift owing to discretization artifacts that degrade long-horizon performance (when deployed on physical systems). We introduce a backward Kolmogorov equation that lifts diffusion policies to a Cameron-Martin space – a subset of the Hilbert space. Essentially, replacing stochastic score matching with a deterministic boundary-value PDE problem. Our core innovation thrives on Gaussian measure theory whereupon the diffusion noise covariance operator is realized from a colored noise distribution which prescribes a notion of regularity on samples from the model at inference time. We train the diffusion model with a derived precision-weighted Cameron- Martin loss and a Kolmogorov residual is introduced as a PDE diagnostic during inference. These substitutions yield (i) convergence guarantees where the bound's constants depend on the effective rank of the kernel rather than action dimension, (ii) improved trajectory regularity via spectral weighting, and (iii) a deterministic failure detector without reward signals. Validation across two application domains demonstrates substantial improvements: on the PushT manipulation benchmark, the Cameron-Martin loss achieves a 17% improvement in maximum episode reward (0.95 vs. 0.78 for MSE) and 67.6% reduction in inter-step drifts during inference via the introduced residual magnitude. Similarly, on a 6-station manufacturing line with constant work-in-process (CONWIP) flow control, we achieve 28.4% lower RMSE than classical LSTM baselines; a high starvation-event recall (1.0 in test cycles), and effective bottleneck identification (Precision@1 = 1.0 in test set, 13x signal-to-noise ratio). We then certify the dispatch policies with Hamilton-Jacobi reachability theory which reduces deadlock events by 96% compared to uncontrolled dispatch over 100 simulated runs (351 events prevented).

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Mind-Studio: Executable World Models with Lookahead Evaluation for Partially Observable Games

arXiv:2606.16070v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World-model synthesis aims to turn interaction experience into an internal model of environment dynamics. Existing symbolic approaches often fit observed transitions or mixtures of local rules, but they do not produce a complete executable program that can run independently of the real environment. We present Mind-Studio, a framework that synthesizes executable pygame-style world models from state-action-next-state trajectories using large language models. Mind-Studio combines entropy-selected traces with a lightweight game skill file containing object, action, and static scene information extracted from screenshots. We evaluate synthesis quality with a K-step lookahead fidelity protocol that compares generated world-model rollouts against Real-ALE rollouts from the same state. On Montezuma's Revenge, Mind-Studio improves chosen-action next-state prediction from 0.3% for PoE-World to 48.7% while verifying 5 of 8 subgoals; across Alien, Assault, and Skiing, it achieves stronger branch-level fidelity than prior learned lookahead sources.

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

Beyond Classification: A Cough Regression Benchmark for Respiratory Acoustic Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.15436v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Respiratory acoustic foundation models (FMs) excel at cough classification, yet their ability to predict continuous health quantities from cough audio remains largely unexplored, despite the clinical value of passive age, BMI, and disease probability estimation in settings where physical measurements are unavailable. We introduce the multi-model, multi-target cough regression benchmark evaluating five FMs (OPERA-CT, OPERA-CE, OPERA-GT, HeAR, M2D+Resp) across six targets on three datasets under subject-disjoint protocols, comparing linear, MLP-small, and full MLP regression heads. MLP-small beats the mean-predictor baseline on all tasks and linear probing in 23 of 30 model x task cases, with full MLP overfitting on small clinical data but recovering on larger sets, revealing a dataset size x head-capacity trade-off. HeAR leads within-dataset age regression on Coswara (9.12 yr MAE); its CIDRZ result is excluded from headline claims owing to possible HeAR-CIDRZ pretraining overlap. OPERA-GT is favored over OPERA-CT on age in all three datasets, with the CIDRZ margin within seed variance, extending a generative-pretraining advantage from breath to cough. HeAR and M2D+Resp reach near-full performance at N = 50 samples while OPERA models require N = 400. Cross-dataset transfer is strongly asymmetric as large diverse data generalises to small clinical populations (CoughVID to CIDRZ: -0.17 yr) but not vice versa (CIDRZ to Coswara: +2.43 yr, +26.6%).

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Contaminated Collaboration: Measuring Gender Bias Transfer in LLM-Assisted Student Writing

Gender bias in LLMs has been studied extensively in model outputs, with biased prompts shown to amplify stereotyped generations. Whether such bias propagates into text produced by humans who use these systems, however, remains underexplored. We investigate whether gender bias in an LLM writing assistant transfers into career plan essays written by students. We first verify that a gender-biased prompt induces gender-differentiated language in LLM-generated essays, while a neutral prompt does not. We then recruited participants (N = 123) in a controlled environment to write career plan essays for paired biographical profiles differing only in gender under three conditions: no AI assistance, neutral LLM assistance, or gender-biased LLM assistance. Students in the biased condition produced essays with a significantly larger agentic gap and more gender-stereotypic occupation suggestions than those in the control and neutral conditions. Our results also reveal that this bias transfer is asymmetric: agency is suppressed in female-target essays while male-target writing remains largely unaffected. Our findings highlight the risk of bias propagation in AI-assisted writing, calling for fairness-aware design in educational AI tools.

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

Point-Cloud-Assistant Localized Statistical Channel Prediction by Tangent Gaussian Splatting

arXiv:2606.18734v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate, site-specific channel information is crucial for optimizing next-generation wireless networks. Among various approaches, localized statistical channel modeling (LSCM), which models the channel multipath angular power spectrum (APS) from the reference signal received power (RSRP) measurement, has emerged as a state-of-the-art method tailored for efficient network optimization. However, despite its effectiveness, LSCM cannot predict APS at the vast majority of locations where no measurements are available, which significantly restricts its applicability in large-scale, real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we present point-cloud-assisted tangent Gaussian splatting (PC-TGS), the first framework to extrapolate APS to unmeasured outdoor grids by integrating sparse radio measurements with dense LiDAR-based geometry. PC-TGS represents environmental scatterers as anisotropic 3D Gaussians, initialized and refined through a relaxed-mean reparameterization of the raw point cloud. A tangent-plane projection accurately maps each Gaussian into the local angular domain, while a depth-aware electromagnetic splatting process aggregates their contributions. To ensure practical deployment, we derive a closed-form Gaussian-weighted average (GWA) for APS bin integration and provide a provable error bound. { Evaluations on a LiDAR-scanned city-scale dataset (5M points, 6,310 RSRP samples) demonstrate that PC-TGS achieves better APS and RSRP prediction performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines and faster inference time for APS extrapolation task. These results highlight the potential of PC-TGS to enable geometry-aware and data-efficient channel prediction in large-scale wireless digital twins.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

CEO-Bench: Can Agents Play the Long Game?

Language model agents are becoming proficient executors at isolated, short-horizon tasks such as software engineering and customer service. Yet real-world challenges require a combination of sophisticated skills that remain largely untested in agents: (1) navigating long horizons amid uncertainty; (2) acquiring information in noisy environments; (3) adapting to a changing world; (4) orchestrating multiple moving parts toward a coherent goal. We introduce CEO-Bench, which evaluates these capabilities together by simulating a representative real-world task: operating a startup for 500 days. An agent manages pricing, marketing, budgeting, and many other aspects of a fictional company through a programmable Python interface, operating in the same environment and facing the same challenges as a human CEO. Success demands analyzing noisy, interconnected business databases, translating signals into sound strategy, and coordinating many decisions with programming. The strongest agents write sophisticated code that simulates customer cohorts to forecast future cash and mines negotiation history to uncover hidden customer preferences. Even so, most state-of-the-art models struggle in this environment. Only Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 finish above the $1M starting balance, and neither consistently turns a profit. CEO-Bench takes a first step toward measuring the intelligence required to drive sustained, adaptive progress over time.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Bridging Passive and Active: Enhancing Conversation Starter Recommendation via Active Expression Modeling

Large Language Model (LLM)-driven conversational search is shifting information retrieval from reactive keyword matching to proactive, open-ended dialogues. In this context, Conversation Starters are widely deployed to provide personalized query recommendations that help users initiate dialogues. Conventionally, recommending these starters relies on a closed "exposure-click" loop. Yet, this feedback loop mechanism traps the system in an echo chamber where, compounded by data sparsity, it fails to capture the dynamic nature of conversational search intents shaped by the open world. As a result, the system skews towards popular but generic suggestions. In this work, we uncover an untapped paradigm shift to shatter this harmful feedback loop: harnessing user "free will" through active user expressions. Unlike traditional recommendations, conversational search empowers users to bypass menus entirely through manually typed queries. The open-world intents in active queries hold the key to breaking this loop. However, incorporating them is non-trivial: (1) there exists an inherent distribution shift between active queries and formulated starters. (2) Furthermore, the "non-ID-able" nature of open text renders traditional item-based popularity statistics ineffective for large-scale industrial streaming training. To this end, we propose Passive-Active Bridge (PA-Bridge), a novel framework that employs an adversarial distribution aligner to bridge the distributional gap between passively recommended starters and active expressions. Moreover, we introduce a semantic discretizer to enable the deployment of popularity debiasing algorithms. Online A/B tests on our platform, demonstrate that PA-Bridge significantly boosts the Feature Penetration Rate by 0.54% and User Active Days by 0.04%.