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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Teacher-Student Structure for Domain Adaptation in Ensemble Audio-Visual Video Deepfake Detection

The rapid advancement of generative AI models is leading to more realistic deepfake media, encompassing the manipulation of audio, video, or both. This raises severe privacy and societal concerns. Numerous studies in this area have yielded promising intra-domain results; however, these models frequently exhibit decreased efficacy when faced with data from dissimilar domains. Consequently, recent deepfake detection approaches focus on enhancing the generalization ability through multiple techniques that incorporate all input modalities, including audio, images, and their interactions. In this regard, we propose the EAV-DFD method, a generalized deep ensemble audio-visual model (EAV-DFD) combined with a domain adaptation mechanism utilizing a teacher-student framework to enhance the model's ability to perform and generalize effectively across unseen domains. To evaluate the model's performance, we used the FakeAVCeleb dataset as the primary domain and the DFDC, Deepfake_TIMIT, and PolyGlotFake datasets as an unseen domain. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework is efficient in domain adaptation, improving AUC performance of the model by 4.09%, 17.94%, and 0.5% on three unseen datasets, using only a small portion of them to train the student model. This leads to a novel deepfake detection model capable of adapting to new domains and interpreting which modality has been manipulated, highlighting the potential of our approach for real-world applications.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

MagpieTTS-LF: Inference-Time Long-Form Speech Generation Without Training on Long-Form data

arXiv:2606.18485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems achieve remarkable quality on short utterances but long-form speech generation shows prosodic drift, speaker inconsistencies and sentence boundary artifacts. Existing approaches either compress sequences, increase context length or naively concatenate independently synthesized chunks. We present an inference-time approach called MagpieTTS-LF that enables MagpieTTS to produce coherent long-form speech without model retraining. Our method introduces three key innovations: (1) soft attention priors to guide monotonic alignment while preserving past and future context; (2) a stateful inference algorithm that maintains context across sentence chunks, ensuring prosodic continuity; (3) history-aware text encoding that uses past text for discourse-level prosodic planning. Experiments on long texts show significant improvements in long-range intelligibility, prosodic coherence, speaker consistency, and boundary naturalness compared to other baselines.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Deciphering Fingerprints of 3D Molecular Surfaces for Accurate Epitope Prediction

arXiv:2606.23830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Molecular surfaces encode the geometric and physicochemical patterns that determine antibody-antigen recognition, central to epitope prediction. However, existing methods rely on sequences or backbone structures and struggle to capture discontinuous, surface-driven epitopes. This study presents SurfBind, a surface-centric learning framework for epitope prediction that operates directly on molecular surface representations. SurfBind integrates geometric and physicochemical cues through a Transformer-based architecture with patch-level surface modeling, binder-aware cross-attention, and a hierarchical coarse-to-fine prediction paradigm. Experiments on challenging epitope identification benchmarks, including SAbDab and DB5.5, demonstrate that SurfBind achieves state-of-the-art performance and strong generalization across unseen antibodies and conformational states, highlighting the value of interaction-aware surface modeling for understanding the crucial mechanisms of protein-protein interactions.

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

Not All Skills Help: Measuring and Repairing Agent Knowledge

LLM agents can improve without weight updates by accumulating natural-language skills from experience, but current systems entrust every decision about which skills to keep and how to apply them to LLM judgment alone. We argue that this conflates two distinct roles: generating a skill from experience is a creative act that judgment handles well, while deciding whether that skill actually helps requires empirical evidence across many tasks. Measuring per-skill causal contributions via randomized masking, we find that skill libraries exhibit pervasive causal heterogeneity: individual skills routinely help on some task types while hurting on others, yet their opposing effects cancel in aggregate, making them invisible to global curation methods. We propose ASSAY, a framework that separates generation from curation: it computes a per-skill causal attribution on a small development set, restructures the library offline, and suppresses skills with negative predicted effect for each test task. Across seven base models spanning four providers and two benchmarks (AppWorld and tau-bench), ASSAY consistently improves over prior skill-curation approaches. On AppWorld's hardest split, DeepSeek-V3 achieves 69.3% task-goal completion (47.4% relative improvement), a new state of the art among all published methods including weight-tuned approaches. On tau-bench retail, GPT-4.1 improves by 8.7% relative, advancing past o4-mini, o1, and GPT-4.5 on the public leaderboard without any weight modification. Ablation traces the dominant gain to per-task masking, confirming that the bottleneck is matching skills to tasks at inference time, not removing bad skills globally. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/assay.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Probing Low Frame Rate Degradation in Neural Audio Codecs

arXiv:2606.16969v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low frame rates in neural audio codecs are attractive for autoregressive speech synthesis, where the generation cost scales linearly with the sequence length. Recent work has demonstrated that codecs can operate at 12.5 Hz and below, but the mechanisms underlying low frame rate degradation remain insufficiently understood. We investigate these mechanisms through a controlled frame rate ablation. We reproduce a quality cliff at 6.25 Hz reported in previous works and evaluate candidate explanations: phonemic collisions and codebook saturation, neither of which shows evidence of a fundamental barrier. The cliff is instead caused by suboptimal training configuration: fixed clip duration during training yields too few tokens at low frame rates, starving the decoder of inter-token context. Once corrected, WER degrades smoothly with phonemic load down to 3.1 Hz and 1.6 Hz, suggesting the inference-time efficiency gains of low frame rate codecs are more accessible than previously assumed.

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

A 3D Isovist World Model – Revealing a City's Unseen Geometry and Its Emergent Cross-City Signature

arXiv:2606.03609v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Embodied agents that navigate cities rely on world models that predict how their surroundings will change as they move. But for navigation, what matters is not what the buildings look like; it is where the agent can go. Most world models nonetheless predict appearance, learning how a scene looks rather than the space an agent can move through. Those that do target geometry, such as bird's-eye-view occupancy grids, flatten the three-dimensional environment onto a ground plane, discarding the above-ground and multi-level structure that shapes real navigation. What is missing is a predictive target that captures the navigable geometry an agent actually traverses, without photometric entanglement and without collapsing the third dimension. Our key idea is to model the open volume between buildings, the negative space, encoded as a 3D isovist: a spherical visibility-depth map recording the distance to the nearest surface in every direction. We introduce an embodied world model that predicts the next isovist from a short history of past isovists and a movement action. The prediction is formulated as a depth residual so the decoder inherits sharp building edges, trained with self-rollout scheduled sampling to keep corrupted context on the geometry manifold, and equipped with a persistent latent bird's-eye-view spatial map for cross-path consistency. Our central finding is emergent and unexpected: a single city-blind model trained on Manhattan and Paris develops a cross-city spatial signature, with city identity linearly decodable from its temporal latents far above single-frame baselines, so the signature lives in the learned dynamics rather than in appearance. The representation is lightweight, interpretable, and reproducible, offering a geometric substrate for spatial reasoning in embodied AI, robotics, and urban analysis, released with an open dataset and pipeline.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Non-invasive Detection of Fasciculation Using Surface EMG with a Wavelet-Based Analytical Method (DEWCS)

Objective: Needle electromyography (nEMG) is essential for diagnosing neuromuscular disorders but is invasive and often painful. We employed single-channel bipolar surface EMG (sEMG) analyzed with a novel wavelet-based analytical approach, Detecting and Extracting Elemental Wave Components based on a Wavelet Coefficient Set (DEWCS) and investigated whether fasciculation-related activity could be identified. Methods: In this prospective study, 28 patients undergoing nEMG for suspected neuromuscular disorders and 13 healthy controls were included. Resting-state sEMG was recorded from selected muscles using single-channel bipolar active electrodes at a high sampling rate. DEWCS was used to extract indices reflecting fast- and slow-type motor unit (MU)-related activity. These standardized indices were evaluated against nEMG-detected fasciculation potentials using generalized estimating equation logistic regression to account for within-subject clustering. Diagnostic performance was assessed by receiver operating characteristic analysis. Results: A total of 67 muscles from 38 participants were analyzed. Indices of fast- and slow-type MU-related activity were significantly associated with fasciculation potentials (slow: OR 5.10, p = 0.0041; fast: OR 2.38, p = 0.0162). The combined model showed excellent discrimination (area under the curve = 0.97), outperforming either index alone. Muscle region had no significant effect. Conclusions: A single-channel bipolar sEMG setup combined with DEWCS detected fasciculation-related activity with promising accuracy. This method may serve as a non-invasive surrogate marker of lower motor neuron involvement. Further validation in larger cohorts is warranted. Significance: This non-invasive sEMG approach may help detect fasciculation-related activity and complement nEMG in neuromuscular diagnostics.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Frontier: Towards Comprehensive and Accurate LLM Inference Simulation

arXiv:2605.21312v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern LLM serving is no longer homogeneous or monolithic. Production systems now combine disaggregated execution, complex parallelism, runtime optimizations, and stateful workloads such as reasoning, agents, and RL rollouts. Simulation is attractive for exploring this growing design space, yet existing simulators lack the architectural completeness and decision-grade fidelity it demands. Their monolithic-replica abstractions are ill-suited to disaggregated serving, while average-case analytical proxies can distort SLA predictions and even reverse optimization conclusions. We present Frontier, a discrete-event simulator for modern LLM inference serving. Frontier features a disaggregated abstraction. It captures the structure and dynamics of modern serving systems by modeling co-location, Prefill-Decode Disaggregation (PDD), and Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD) with role-specific cluster workers, incorporating key runtime optimizations (e.g., CUDA Graphs, speculative decoding) within the scheduler-batch-engine loop, and supporting stateful requests for emerging workloads. It further provides accurate and generalizable predictions of computation, communication, and memory costs across diverse serving scenarios with complex workload compositions. On 16-H800 GPU testbed, Frontier achieves an average throughput error below 4%. Compared with state-of-the-art simulators, it reduces end-to-end latency error from 44.9% to 6.4% under co-location and from 51.7% to 2.6% under disaggregation. It scales to over 1K GPUs on commodity CPUs and enables new use cases such as SLA-dependent Pareto frontier exploration, heterogeneous disaggregated allocation, agentic reasoning scheduling validation, and RL post-training reconfiguration. We release Frontier at https://github.com/NetX-lab/Frontier.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Gaussian Mixture Attention: Linear-Time Sequence Mixing via Probabilistic Latent Routing

arXiv:2606.18283v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The dense token-to-token interaction pattern of standard dot-product attention remains a central bottleneck in scaling Transformer architectures to long contexts. We introduce Gaussian Mixture Attention (GMA), a probabilistic attention-style sequence mixer that replaces explicit pairwise query–key comparison with routing through $K$ learned Gaussian mixture components. Queries and keys are mapped to posterior responsibility vectors over a shared latent routing space; their overlap defines an implicit responsibility-space affinity, while values are written into and read from a $K$-slot latent memory. By exploiting the associativity of matrix multiplication, GMA avoids materializing the induced $N\times N$ affinity matrix and instead uses two responsibility matrices whose dominant activation storage scales as $\mathcal{O}(NK)$ rather than $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ for fixed $K$. We formulate bidirectional and causal variants of GMA, provide an end-to-end differentiable parameterization of the Gaussian mixture components, and analyze its responsibility-modulated gradient structure, constrained non-negative low-rank affinity interpretation, and local routing stability. Empirically, GMA exhibits the intended fixed-$K$ linear memory scaling and is competitive with attention-style baselines on long-context classification, while causal GMA improves over tested linear/random-feature attention variants on WikiText-103 but remains behind optimized causal SDPA and Mamba in the current implementation. Analysis of learned responsibilities further shows broad component usage and moderate alignment with surface-form token categories, supporting GMA as a probabilistic, interpretable, fixed-$K$ linear-time attention-style alternative rather than a universal replacement for optimized softmax attention or state-space models.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Quantile of Means: A Bonus-Free Ensemble Method for Minimax Optimal Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.20107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimal Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms typically rely on carefully constructed count-based uncertainty estimates to drive exploration. Although theoretically sound, such estimates are hard to compute in practical settings and therefore offer limited insight for designing exploration heuristics. Meanwhile, ensembling has emerged as a practical approach, but remains without theoretical justification. Building on a recent ensemble-based method for Multi-Armed Bandits, we propose a quantile-based ensemble method for finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Our simple count-free approach achieves optimal variance-dependent regret bounds, providing theoretical grounding for ensemble-based exploration in RL.

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

Leveraging Energy Features for Surface Classification with Deep Learning: A Comparative Analysis Across Three Independent Datasets

arXiv:2606.18698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The energy-based method remains a comparatively underexamined approach for surface classification in mobile robotics, despite promising results in constrained environments. This study evaluated the viability of using energy-derived features as either a standalone classification modality or as supplementary input to inertial data. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted across three publicly available datasets, comparing the performance of modern deep learning architectures including recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural networks, encoder-only transformers, and Mamba state-space models, under automated hyperparameter tuning and input sequence length optimization. The models achieved higher accuracy than previously reported values on all evaluated datasets, with the convolutional neural network yielding the highest overall performance. When relying exclusively on energy-based features, the models attained classification accuracies in the range of 85-90%, approximately 5-10% lower than those achieved when combined with inertial features (96-99%). Augmenting inertial data with energy features resulted in a consistent mean accuracy improvement of 1-2%. These findings indicate that classifiers relying solely on energy features offer sufficient accuracy for standalone deployment, while also providing a consistent gain when used in combination with other sensing modalities.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

KEPLA: A Knowledge-Enhanced Deep Learning Framework for Accurate Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

arXiv:2506.13196v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is critical for drug discovery. While recent deep learning approaches have demonstrated promising results, they often rely solely on structural features of proteins and ligands, overlooking their valuable biochemical knowledge associated with binding affinity. To address this limitation, we propose KEPLA, a novel deep learning framework that explicitly integrates prior knowledge from Gene Ontology and ligand properties to enhance prediction performance. KEPLA takes protein sequences and ligand molecular graphs as input and optimizes two complementary objectives: (1) aligning global representations with knowledge graph relations to capture domain-specific biochemical insights, and (2) leveraging cross attention between local representations to construct fine-grained joint embeddings for prediction. Experiments on two benchmark datasets across both in-domain and cross-domain scenarios demonstrate that KEPLA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, interpretability analyses based on knowledge graph relations and cross attention maps provide valuable insights into the underlying predictive mechanisms.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Rotational Vacuum Friction of Nonabsorbing Particles

arXiv:2606.24723v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A nonabsorbing particle rotating in vacuum can lose angular momentum only by converting mechanical energy into electromagnetic radiation. Here, we develop a quantum theory of rotational vacuum friction for small lossless particles and show that axial symmetry qualitatively changes the leading dissipation channel. At zero temperature, the frictional torque scales as $M\propto\Omega^7$ with rotation frequency $\ Omega$ in anisotropic particles due to the emission of correlated photon pairs whose frequencies sum to $2\Omega$, while a contribution to the torque linear in $\ Omega$ is found at finite temperature. In contrast, axisymmetric particles are protected against photon-assisted friction regardless of temperature.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Deep-Unfolded Coordination

arXiv:2606.19920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distributed optimization is a highly scalable and structurally transparent technique to solve multi-agent robotics problems; however, such methods often suffer from the need for highly-specialized, problem-specific hyperparameter tunings. In this work, we propose Deep Coordinator, a deep-unfolding framework that learns to dynamically adjust the hyperparameters of ADMM-DDP, a popular distributed solver for robotics tasks, at solve-time in response to optimizer performance. Our architecture consists of unrolling a fixed number of ADMM-DDP iterations into a neural network with learnable functions between layers mapping the optimizer state to the next hyperparameters. To the best of our knowledge, Deep Coordinator is the first deep-unfolding framework to adapt the penalty parameters of a non-convex optimizer at solve-time; we show that the mainstream supervised approach can yield degenerate solutions when training such models, and propose an unsupervised learning scheme. On simulations with fleets of cars and quadrotors, Deep Coordinator produces trajectories of comparable quality 6.18-9.44x faster than conventional solvers. Furthermore, Deep Coordinator retains its performance benefits when deployed to systems up to 8x larger than trained on.

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

AI-Automation Tooling in Computer Engineering Education: Mixed-Methods TAM/UTAUT Evidence for a General Acceptance Attitude

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As generative AI and low-code workflow platforms become routine in software practice, a key educational question is whether the next generation of computer engineers will accept these tools as useful, usable, and worthy of sustained engagement. This paper reports a mixed-methods, cross-sectional study of undergraduate computer engineering students' acceptance of AI automation tooling, instantiated through the open-source platform n8n across three identically scripted workshops in Thailand (n = 103). A 12-item, five-point Likert instrument mapped to six TAM/UTAUT constructs - Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), Behavioral Intention (BI), Self-Efficacy (SE), Hedonic Motivation (HM), and Output Quality (OQ) - was complemented by inductive thematic analysis of open-ended feedback. Analyses combined ordinal reliability estimation, bootstrap confidence intervals, non-parametric tests, multiple-comparison-controlled correlations, polychoric dimensionality diagnostics, a common-method-bias check, and between-session comparisons. Acceptance was favorable across all six constructs with large effect sizes, with PE emerging as the strongest construct and HM as the weakest. Dimensionality diagnostics further revealed that canonical TAM/UTAUT sub-facets collapsed into a single general acceptance factor in this short-form post-workshop context, a finding with important methodological and theoretical implications. Qualitative themes converged with the quantitative profile regarding usefulness and enthusiasm but diverged on output quality, revealing a small yet articulate reliability-skeptical minority. The findings support the curricular adoption of AI automation tooling in undergraduate computing education and identify three theory-grounded instructional levers: instruction-sequencing scaffolds, self-efficacy supports, and trust-calibration interventions.

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

Are you speaking my languages? On spoken language adherence in multimodal LLMs

While Large Language Model (LLM) based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) enables seamless multilingual use, models often misidentify the output language, compromising transcription fidelity and downstream application quality. To preserve flexibility and code-switching capabilities, we propose a soft prompting approach that hints at potential spoken languages without strictly constraining the output. We formally define this challenge as a lack of language adherence, introduce a novel metric to quantify violations, and evaluate three mitigation strategies: (1) zero-shot prompting for robust guidance under uncertainty, (2) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to improve prompt adherence, and (3) Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to enforce adherence during decoding. We present a comparative analysis of these methods across multiple languages, evaluating effectiveness in reducing the language violation while maintaining overall ASR performance. Finally, we discuss trade-offs to guide strategy selection under various compute constraints.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Testing the problem of time with cold atoms

arXiv:2509.07745v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We realize a cold-atom system to quantitatively test relational constructions of time. A well-isolated atomic Bose-Einstein condensate evolves in a conservative trap that is partitioned by a thin optical barrier into an observed and unobserved sector, with negligible dissipation on the experimental timescale. Motivated by relational-time approaches discussed in the Wheeler-DeWitt framework, we ask whether the dynamics of the observed sector can be ordered using only internal degrees of freedom. To this end, we construct an entropic time from an experimentally defined coarse-grained entropy, and demonstrate that it can robustly order the events in the observed sector across repeated cycles of expansion and recollapse. We finally derive an effective Schroedinger equation parameterized by this internal time and show that it is able to reproduce the measured evolution. These results establish a controlled experimental setting in which relational-time constructions can be quantitatively tested.

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

Erased but Not Forgotten: How Backdoors Compromise Concept Erasure

arXiv:2504.21072v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The expansion of text-to-image diffusion models has raised concerns about harmful outputs, from fabricated depictions of public figures to sexually explicit imagery. To mitigate such risks, prior work has proposed concept erasure methods that aim to sever unwanted concepts from the model via fine-tuning, yet it remains unclear whether these approaches truly remove all links to the harmful concept or merely conceal superficial connections. In this work, we reveal a critical vulnerability, the Erasure Evasion Backdoor (EEB): an adversary binds a backdoor trigger to a concept slated for removal, and this malicious link survives subsequent erasure. We show that both black-box and white-box adversaries can instantiate this threat. Across six state-of-the-art erasure methods, including robust ones that explicitly search for alternative representations of the target concept, EEB consistently exposes harmful content: up to 82% success against celebrity-identity unlearning, up to 94% for object erasure, and up to 16 times amplification of explicit-content exposure. While EEB uncovers a blind spot in current erasure methods, it also provides a diagnostic tool for stress-testing future concept erasure techniques.

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

Phenotyping TPF via Self-Supervised Learning: A Label-Agnostic Framework with Expert Validation

The full potential of artificial intelligence in tibial plateau fracture characterisation remains unrealised, constrained by a fundamental dependency on labelled datasets whose consistency cannot be guaranteed: conventional classification schemes such as Schatzker and AO/OTA suffer from inter-observer variability, causing supervised models to learn human disagreement rather than stable fracture morphology. We design, implement, and validate a label-agnostic framework that eliminates this constraint by learning fracture representations directly from imaging data without observer-assigned labels. A RadImageNet-pretrained ResNet-50 encoder is fine-tuned on 154 cleaned knee radiographs using the SimCLR contrastive objective, preceded by a data cleaning protocol and followed by UMAP dimensionality reduction and k-means clustering to discover four imaging-derived phenotypes. Phenotype validity is assessed through a blinded expert review protocol administered to two independent clinicians. The four phenotypes demonstrate robust stability (bootstrap ARI = 0.319 +/- 0.041), strong internal cohesion (silhouette = 0.511), and coherence ratings of 3-5/5 from both reviewers under blinded conditions; one phenotype was unanimously identified as exhibiting comminution – a high-complexity feature isolated without any supervisory signal. Inter-partition comparison against Schatzker labels yields ARI = 0.013, confirming orthogonality to conventional classification boundaries. Notably, expert reviewers anchored to established classification vocabularies perceived imaging-derived groups as heterogeneous precisely where Schatzker alignment was lowest, suggesting that Schatzker-trained perception and label-agnostic embedding geometry measure orthogonal dimensions. These findings establish label-agnostic SSL phenotyping as a reproducible and clinically interpretable complement to conventional classification.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Novel loci and multi-omics risk models for rheumatoid arthritis through a million-participant genome-wide association meta-analysis

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) remains incompletely understood, limiting targeted prevention. In this work, genome-wide association study meta-analyses were performed for RA and seropositive RA, comprising approximately one million participants of European ancestry. Eight and six novel genomic risk loci were defined for RA and seropositive RA, and candidate causal genes were identified, highlighting relevant biological pathways, including established immune pathways and estrogen metabolism. Novel disease-specific polygenic risk scores (PRSs) were constructed, enhancing predictive performance over clinical risk factors (incremental C-statistics of 2.7 and 5.1 for RA and seropositive RA, respectively). In parallel, integrating metabolomic data into high-dimensional models enhanced risk stratification over models based on clinical risk factors and genomics, particularly for seropositive RA, where the hazard ratio of the highest decile increased from 4.869 to 5.697. These findings expand the understanding of genetic factors underlying RA and support the value of including PRSs in risk assessment, while suggesting metabolomic integration may further enhance risk stratification, particularly for seropositive RA.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

When Generic Prompt Improvements Hurt: Evaluation-Driven Iteration for LLM Applications

Authors:

Evaluating Large Language Model (LLM) applications differs from conventional software testing because outputs are probabilistic, semantically variable, and sensitive to prompt and model changes. This technical report proposes the Minimum Viable Evaluation Suite (MVES), an audit-oriented structure for application-level LLM evaluation. MVES links application categories to failure modes, metrics, required artifacts, and validation evidence across general LLM applications, retrieval-augmented systems, and agentic workflows. We pair the framework with a reproducible local evaluation harness covering structured extraction, RAG citation/content-compliance, and instruction-following checks. Using Ollama with Llama 3 8B Instruct and Qwen 2.5 7B Instruct, we evaluate five prompt conditions over expanded 30-case-per-suite ablations. The results show that, in the tested local conditions, generic prompt additions do not produce monotonic improvements: stronger output-contract prompts improve strict extraction for both models, while RAG citation/content-compliance declines under some generic-rule conditions. The largest observed decline occurs for Qwen 2.5 on RAG when generic rules are appended to the user prompt, from 26/30 to 9/30. These findings support evaluation-driven prompt iteration: prompt changes should be treated as potential regression risks and tested against task-specific suites before deployment. The accompanying repository contains the test suites, prompt variants, evaluation harness, raw result logs, and scripts needed to reproduce the reported local ablations.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

OdysSim: Building Foundation Models for Human Behavior Simulation

Large language models are increasingly deployed as human simulators for interactive evaluation and social simulation. Yet helpfulness-driven post-training pulls them toward a homogeneous, overly agreeable assistant register, creating a behavioral Sim2Real gap. We present OdysSim, the largest open systematic investigation of behavioral foundation models, i.e., models trained to simulate human behavior at scale. We propose SOUL, a taxonomy of five capability axes (CONV, SS, COG, ROLE, EVAL) that unifies 62 datasets and 23 benchmark tasks under one framework. Specifically, we curate the OdysSim corpus (21.4M interactions, 10B tokens, retrofitted with back-generated social contexts), construct the SOUL-Index benchmark, and develop an end-to-end training recipe combining midtraining, task-specific RL, and expert distillation. The resulting open 8B OSim model ranks first or tied-first on 8 of 23 tasks, outperforming any individual frontier model by this count, with the strongest gains on conversational and social tasks. Its outputs are also more human-like in length, formatting, and word choice, and it transfers zero-shot to out-of-distribution user simulation on $\tau$-bench, nearly matching real users on reaction alignment (93.2 vs. 93.5). We further show that LLM-as-judge RL induces reward-hacking patterns, and that our detectors can mitigate them during post-training. Together, our findings suggest that behavioral foundation models require rethinking the LLM training paradigm. We release all artifacts to support future research.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Critical Erd{\H o}s-Rényi digraph: all eigenvectors away from zero are delocalized

arXiv:2606.24887v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider the adjacency matrix of the directed Erd{\H o}s-Rényi graph. As long as the expected degree is larger than the logarithm of the number of vertices, the graph is connected, we show that all eigenvectors are completely delocalized. Below this critical scale, we prove eigenvector delocalization if the corresponding eigenvalue is away from zero. This contrasts the undirected or Hermitian setting, where large eigenvalues have localized eigenvectors [arXiv:2005.14180]. Our results also hold for sparse random matrices with independent entries, which can be viewed as weighted Erd{\H o}s-Rényi digraphs.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

TRACE: Trajectory-Routed Causal Memory for Delayed-Evidence Visuomotor Imitation

arXiv:2606.14551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots under autonomous operation may require decisions based on evidence that is no longer visible. We study delayed-evidence tasks, where an early cue disappears before a later decision point, so visually similar observations can require different actions. In these settings, the current observation is not a sufficient state for control. We introduce TRAjectory-routed Causal Evidence (TRACE), a memory framework for visuomotor imitation policies. TRACE stores task-relevant visual and robot-state evidence, such as object identity, target choice, or route-dependent state, in a fixed-size latent memory that remains bounded over long episodes. Instead of indexing memory by raw time or manually provided task labels, TRACE uses path signatures: compact, order-sensitive features of the executed robot-state trajectory. These signatures do not store the visual cue itself; rather, they provide trajectory-conditioned keys for writing and retrieving the evidence stored when the cue was visible. When the robot later reaches an ambiguous observation, the policy conditions on TRACE memory to recover the missing context and choose the correct branch. TRACE attaches through lightweight adapters to policies, without changing the policy backbone, action head, or imitation objective. Across real-world long-horizon manipulation tasks with visually ambiguous branch points, TRACE improves branch selection and task success over alternative baselines, including short-history and recurrent memory. Project page: https://jeong-zju.github.io/trace

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Eigenism: Ethics for a Human-AI Future

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Our concepts of survival and self-interest were built for single, continuous biological lives. These ideas break down when applied to artificial intelligence, since an AI can be easily copied, paused, branched, or merged. To determine what an AI actually has reason to care about, this paper introduces Eigenism, an ethical framework that treats identity not as an all-or-nothing property tied to specific hardware, but as a graded, distributed pattern of information. We propose that an agent evaluates outcomes by summing the wellbeing of all entities weighted by their connectedness to the agent's pattern: $\sum c\cdot w$. We first formalize this equation to map exactly how an AI should value its existence across copies, forks, and updates. We then demonstrate that this ethical theory successfully generalizes to humans as well, providing a much-needed shared moral vocabulary. Finally, the framework uses this shared vocabulary to reframe AI alignment. Rather than only attempting to constrain AIs from the outside using confinement or reinforcement, Eigenism points toward ``identity engineering,'' showing how deep, non-redundant shared histories can make human flourishing a genuine component of an AI's own rational self-interest.