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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

‘Hidden hero’ peptides guard crops against sudden cold

Authors: Unknown Author

A protein signal remains silent under normal conditions but is activated under cold stress to protect developing pollen. This ‘on-demand’ resilience mechanism could enable the development of ‘climate smart’ crops that maintain high yields in good years and food security under climate stress. A peptide signal ensures that, in cold conditions, developing pollen receives nutrients at the right time.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

FBSDiff++: Improved Frequency Band Substitution of Diffusion Features for Efficient and Highly Controllable Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation

With large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models achieving significant advancements in open-domain image creation, increasing attention has been focused on their natural extension to the realm of text-driven image-to-image (I2I) translation, where a source image acts as visual guidance to the generated image in addition to the textual guidance provided by the text prompt. We propose FBSDiff, a novel framework adapting off-the-shelf T2I diffusion model into the I2I paradigm from a fresh frequency-domain perspective. Through dynamic frequency band substitution of diffusion features, FBSDiff realizes versatile and highly controllable text-driven I2I in a plug-and-play manner (without need for model training, fine-tuning, or online optimization), allowing appearance-guided, layout-guided, and contour-guided I2I translation by progressively substituting low-frequency band, mid-frequency band, and high-frequency band of latent diffusion features, respectively. In addition, FBSDiff flexibly enables continuous control over I2I correlation intensity simply by tuning the bandwidth of the substituted frequency band. To further promote image translation efficiency, flexibility, and functionality, we propose FBSDiff++ which improves upon FBSDiff mainly in three aspects: (1) accelerate inference speed by a large margin (8.9$\times$ speedup in inference) with refined model architecture; (2) improve the Frequency Band Substitution module to allow for input source images of arbitrary resolution and aspect ratio; (3) extend model functionality to enable localized image manipulation and style-specific content creation with only subtle adjustments to the core method. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments verify superiority of FBSDiff++ in I2I translation visual quality, efficiency, versatility, and controllability compared to related advanced approaches.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Digital programming of spin correlations in a fermionic lattice quantum simulator

arXiv:2606.13772v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Analog quantum simulation provides a highly controlled platform to study diverse quantum many-body phenomena. However, current methods for state initialisation are limited to thermal ensembles or uncorrelated product states. Here we present a hybrid approach that complements analog preparation with a digital quantum-gate protocol. This approach enables the engineering of target states with specific, long-range spin-correlations from the same initial resource state. By applying collisional gates to adiabatically prepared and filtered four-fermion singlet chains, we program diverse spin-correlation patterns, including that of a Heisenberg chain. We measure the spin correlations using a sequence of quantum gates followed by singlet-pair measurements. Our method paves the way to the targeted preparation of strongly correlated states of matter.

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

BALTO: Balanced Token-Level Policy Optimization for Hallucination Mitigation

Hallucinations remain a major obstacle to deploying large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive settings, where generated responses must be faithfully grounded in provided evidence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction for hallucination mitigation, but response-level faithfulness rewards suffer from a granularity mismatch: localized hallucinations can cause supported content to receive spurious penalties. Although recent work introduces fine-grained feedback such as claim-level verification and token-level rewards, unbalanced credit assignment can still induce length, verbosity, or optimization-noise biases. We propose BALTO, a Balanced Token-level Policy Optimization framework for hallucination mitigation. BALTO extracts checkable factual claims, verifies them against the reference context, and projects claim-level judgments to token-level labels. A balanced token-level credit assignment mechanism is introduced into the framework. This design redistributes probability mass from unsupported content toward faithful content, rather than suppressing the entire response. We systematically analyze the limitations of response-level rewards from a theoretical standpoint, and prove BALTO's advantages in training stability and optimization efficiency for hallucination mitigation. Experiments on ConFiQA, RAGTruth, and FinLLM-Eval show that BALTO achieves the highest faithfulness across all six model–benchmark settings and consistently outperforms existing post-training baselines in Q-Score, demonstrating a stronger faithfulness–informativeness trade-off.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

CoCoSI: Collaborative Cognitive Map Construction for Spatial Intelligence

Spatial intelligence is a key frontier for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), enabling them to reason about the physical world from visual experience. Inspired by human spatial cognition, recent approaches construct grid-based cognitive maps from multi-frame visual inputs to maintain coherent spatial representations over time. However, limited context lengths still challenge spatial understanding, while existing methods, such as long-context modeling and external memory, often require architectural changes, memory modules, or finetuning, limiting their applicability to off-the-shelf pretrained MLLMs. This motivates a lightweight, model-agnostic method for preserving spatial information beyond the native context window. To this end, we propose a plug-and-play multi-agent framework that collaboratively constructs cognitive maps as structured spatial memory, enhancing the spatial understanding of arbitrary pretrained MLLMs without architectural modification or additional training. Our framework features local-global agent coordination, cognitive map construction with atomic commits, and cross-agent verification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance on spatial understanding tasks while remaining fully training-free. Code will be released.

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

Indefinite Quantum Causality

arXiv:2606.19438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, operational approaches to quantum foundations have been developed as a means of understanding the core principles and distinctive features of quantum theory. Such approaches typically view physical processes as sequences of operations, with earlier operations serving as causes of later effects. However, a growing literature is emerging on the possibility of relaxing this assumption and allowing for quantum indefiniteness in the causal order. This development stems from a variety of motivations, both fundamental and applied, including exploring the role of causality in quantum theory, the interplay between quantum theory and general relativity, and higher-order quantum computing. A prominent offshoot of this development is the emergence of indefinite causal order as a feasible resource for quantum information processing. This review provides an overview of the current state of the art in the field, covering the methodology underlying indefinite quantum causality within the so-called "process matrix formalism", outlining key results and experimental implementations, and discussing recent advances.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Single Photon Cross-Phase Shifts Can Be Enhanced by Localization in both Frequency and Time

arXiv:2606.11516v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-photon optical nonlinearities face a fundamental trade-off: maximum nonlinearity requires both spectral resonance (narrow bandwidth) and high peak intensity (short duration), constraints that are incompatible due to the time-energy uncertainty relation. We demonstrate experimentally that this limitation does not need to exist in cases involving post-selection. We measure a cross-phase shift (XPS) produced by a resonant photon from a narrow-band source that is first transmitted through a cold atomic cloud and then localized in time through detection. The peak size of this XPS is greatly enhanced compared to that of Gaussian single-photon-level pulses without post-selection, benefiting from the narrow bandwidth of the resonant prepared state and the high intensity of the post-selected state simultaneously. We measure enhancements in the peak XPS of 6$\pm$1 at an optical depth (OD) of 2.4$\pm$0.1, and our results are in qualitative agreement across a range of optical depths with the recently developed weak value theory of atomic excitation [Thompson et al., APL Quantum 2, 036108 (2025)] for such post-selected photons. This work uncovers new consequences of having simultaneous knowledge of frequency and time, raising new foundational questions about how a particle behaves, and interacts with other systems, when its preparation and post-selection are non-commuting.

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

Structure-aware Knowledge-guided Heterogeneous Mamba for Zygomaticomaxillary Suture Assessment

The Zygomaticomaxillary Suture is a key circummaxillary structure that connects the zygomatic bone and the maxilla, which serves as a primary site of resistance during maxillary advancement, and its maturation status directly influences the timing and efficacy of orthopedic interventions. However, accurate staging of ZMS maturation remains challenging due to subtle high-frequency transitions in suture lines and the global semantic ambiguity between adjacent stages. To address this, we present the first public ZMS dataset, comprising 3,790 ZMS images covering the entire age range from 4 to 24 years. Based on this dataset, we propose SKMamba, a Structure-aware and Knowledge-guided Mamba-based multi-modal framework for automated ZMS maturation assessment. SKMamba adopts a decoupled dual-path architecture that mimics the hierarchical diagnostic process used by experienced orthodontists. We first introduce an Implicit Edge Extractor (IEE), which leverages structural pre-training to reduce trabecular noise and accentuate sutural boundaries. Complementarily, a Cross-Modal Semantic Alignment (CSA) module is designed to incorporate anatomical descriptions from a large language model (LLM). This module helps align local morphological cues with global semantic descriptions while ensuring that objective morphological evidence remains the primary basis for decisions. Extensive experiments on our ZMS dataset demonstrate that SKMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/galaxygxq1116/SKMamba.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Do Large Language Models Always Tell The Same Stories?

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the generation of high-quality prose, yet the question of whether these models are capable of generating diverse outputs remains contested. In this work, we investigate the diversity of LLM-generated stories through the framework of narrative similarity. Using a contrastive framework and a dataset of human-written stories and prompts from r/WritingPrompts, we collect narrative similarity judgments across 10 representative LLMs, utilizing both human evaluations and three different automatic annotation methods. Our findings reveal a consistent trend: LLM-generated narratives are consistently more similar to each other than human-written stories are. We demonstrate that frontier models in particular converge on a ``mean'' generic narrative that approximates individual human stories but lacks the collective diversity of human authors. Finally, we show that common mitigation strategies, including negative prompting and temperature scaling, fail to meaningfully address this homogeneity.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Cavity method for permutation models on Cayley trees

arXiv:2606.17751v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motivated by permutation statistical models arising in random tensor networks, we study permutation models on a Cayley tree whose variables take values in the symmetric group $\Sn$. The pair interaction is assumed to depend only on the cycle type of the relative permutation. Then the Boltzmann weight is written as a class function on $\Sn$. This property diagonalizes the edge convolution operator in irreducible representation sectors. As a result, the linear stability of the uniform paramagnetic cavity solution is controlled by the character eigenvalue ratios. For cycle-factorized weights, these eigenvalues can be expressed as specializations of Schur functions. We derive the instability criteria and also verify their validity by comparison with direct numerical iterations of the cavity equation.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

What level of expertise is necessary to generate ACLS training test questions: pre-med students vs. artificial intelligence?

Abstract Introduction In-hospital cardiac arrest carries high mortality despite standardized ACLS training. Educators face increasing time constraints in developing assessment tools for ACLS training. Two possible solutions to this problem are using pre-medical students or using artificial intelligence to generate test questions. This study compared the quality of pre-medical student-generated ACLS test questions vs. AI-generated ACLS test questions, testing the hypothesis that AI-generated questions are non-inferior to student-generated questions. Methods Ten pre-medical students created ACLS questions following predefined criteria, while an AI model (Northwell's Artificial Intelligence Hub) generated comparable questions. A blinded ACLS-certified physician evaluated questions on the qualities of Alignment, Clarity, Cognitive Level, and Question Design using a standardized rubric (Likert scale: 1 = poor quality, 5 = excellent). Student's T-test and Chi-square analysis were used to compare the quality of questions on different rubric domains within each arm (student vs. AI) and within one domain (eg, question Clarity) between arms. The Student's T test was used when 2 comparator groups were compared (eg, Clarity of student-generated vs. AI-generated questions) within one arm. The ANOVA test was used when comparing more than 2 comparator groups (eg, Alignment vs. Clarity vs. Cognitive Level) within one arm. Statistical significance was set as a priority at p

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Human-Enhanced Loop Modeling (HELM): Agent-Based Finite Element Modeling of Concrete Bridge Barriers

arXiv:2606.12025v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Finite element (FE) modeling of safety-critical infrastructure such as bridge barriers requires high-fidelity nonlinear dynamic analysis, yet the current FE modeling process remains labor-intensive and lacks automation. This paper presents the Human-Enhanced Loop Modeling (HELM) framework, a collaborative human-agent protocol that decomposes long-sequence finite element modeling into discrete, visually verifiable checkpoints across geometry generation, boundary condition definition, and material assignment. The framework is demonstrated through a 20-case matrix of reinforced concrete bridge barriers under MASH TL-4 and TL-5 lateral loading conditions, interfacing specialized agents with two widely used commercial FE softwares, i.e., ANSYS and LS-PrePost. Experimental results show that HELM improves the baseline autonomous modeling success rate from 20% to 75%, with agent-level pass rates for geometry and boundary condition tasks approximately doubling. Error analysis reveals that spatial reasoning and algebraic logic limitations constitute the primary failure modes, underscoring the value of structured human-in-the-loop intervention for modeling automation. The complete agent design code and prompts are open-sourced and can be accessed at: https://github.com/SimAgentDev/Ansys-LSPP-AgentKit.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Optimality Condition for the Petz Map

arXiv:2410.23622v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In quantum error correction, the Petz map serves as a perfect recovery map when the Knill-Laflamme conditions are satisfied. Notably, while perfect recovery is generally infeasible for most quantum channels of finite dimension, the Petz map remains a versatile tool with near-optimal performance in recovering quantum states. This work introduces and proves, for the first time, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimality of the Petz map in terms of entanglement fidelity. In some special cases, the violation of this condition can be easily characterized by a simple commutator that can be efficiently computed. We provide multiple examples that substantiate our new findings.

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

Can LLM Agents Infer World Models? Evidence from Agentic Automata Learning

We propose agentic automata learning to evaluate the extent to which tool-calling LLM agents can uncover hidden environments through interaction. In our setup, an agent should uncover a hidden deterministic finite automaton (DFA) by interacting with an oracle through (1) membership queries ("Does this string belong to the target language?") and (2) equivalence queries ("Is this the target DFA?"). This yields a scalable testbed with controlled task complexity, measurable interaction efficiency, and strong baselines (classic automata-learning algorithms). Evaluating state-of-the-art LLMs, we find that performance drops sharply as DFA size increases. Reasoning models are markedly stronger than non-reasoning models, yet trajectory analyses reveal recurring failures in query planning, evidence integration, and hypothesis construction. Overall, our results show that current LLM agents can sometimes perform non-trivial interactive discovery, but remain far less robust and efficient than classic algorithms for the task.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Transposable elements as evolutionary substrates of proteindisorder in the human proteome

Intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) are central contributors to protein function, evolution and human disease, yet the evolutionary routes that seed new disordered segments within pre-existing proteins are still poorly understood. Sequence insertions provide a powerful mechanism for disorder expansion, but the genomic donors of inserted IDR and its long-term conformational fate remain largely unknown. Transposable elements (TEs), abundant mobile genetic elements with distinctive compositional biases, represent compelling candidates for generating disorder within proteins. Here, we systematically mapped TE-derived segments across human proteins and isoforms, and we found that these insertions are strongly enriched in intrinsic disorder. The structural consequences of their insertion are shaped by TE class and family, reflecting the sequence biases of the elements from which they originate. Recent, Primate specific insertions preferentially generate disordered segments, whereas older insertions more frequently occupy ordered structural contexts, revealing an age-dependent transition in the conformational state of TE-derived sequences. TE-containing isoforms are expressed at lower levels than TE-free isoforms, particularly when insertions are young and disorder-rich, suggesting that intrinsic disorder may constrain the cellular tolerance of newly exonized sequences. These findings identify TEs as a major evolutionary mechanism linking genome mobility to the emergence of new disordered conformational ensembles in the human proteome.

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

Multi-Grade Deep Learning for Partial Differential Equations with Applications to the Burgers Equation

arXiv:2309.07401v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) show great promise for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), but their deep architectures introduce complex, large-scale, non-convex optimization challenges. Nonlinear PDEs, like the viscous Burgers' equation, compound these difficulties due to steep gradients and shock-like solutions. To address this, we propose a two-stage multi-grade deep learning (TS-MGDL) method. In the first stage, shallow networks are trained progressively grade by grade to fit the target function from low- to high-frequency components; previously learned grades are frozen, and each new residual block is trained solely to minimize the remaining approximation error. The second stage unfreezes and retrains selected layers using the first-stage network as initialization, achieving an interpretable, stable hierarchical refinement while mitigating optimization complexity. Furthermore, we theoretically prove that each grade and stage in TS-MGDL monotonically reduces the loss function under an appropriate optimization strategy. Numerical experiments on 1D, 2D, and 3D viscous Burgers' equations demonstrate that TS-MGDL significantly outperforms single-grade learning (SGL), reducing predictive errors by up to a factor of 60.

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

Structural Preservation and the Logical Expressiveness of Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.17882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bridges between graph neural networks (GNNs) and logical formalisms have been established by fixing architectural choices, such as the types of aggregation, combination, and activation functions. These choices define restricted classes of GNNs for which tight correspondences with logical formalisms can be obtained, by showing that logical formulae can be translated into equivalent GNNs and, conversely, that GNNs can be translated into equivalent formulae. In this paper we take a semantic perspective by establishing the logical expressiveness of classes of GNN classifiers that are preserved under structural properties: embeddings (extensions), injective homomorphisms, and homomorphisms. We show that, for each such property, there exists a fragment of graded modal logic characterising the class of GNNs. In particular, preservation under embeddings, injective homomorphisms, and homomorphisms corresponds to existential graded modal logic, its existential-positive fragment, and existential-positive modal logic, respectively. These results characterise the expressiveness of broad classes of GNNs independently of specific architectural choices, but we also show that each of these classes admits a GNN architecture of the same expressiveness. Technically, our approach uses a new well-quasi-order result for trees of bounded height, yielding finite representations of unravelling-invariant classes.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Mitigating Simplicity Bias in OOD Detection through Object Co-occurrence Analysis

arXiv:2605.07821v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for ensuring the reliability of deep learning models. Existing methods mostly focus on regular entangled representations to discriminate in-distribution (ID) and OOD data, neglecting the rich contextual information within images. This issue is particularly challenging for detecting near-OOD, as models with simplicity bias struggle to learn discriminative features in disentangled representations. The human visual system can use the co-occurrence of objects in the natural environment to facilitate scene understanding. Inspired by this, we propose an Object-Centric OOD detection framework that learns to capture Object CO-occurrence (OCO) patterns within images. The proposed method introduces a new OOD detection paradigm that understands object co-occurrence within an image by predicting disentangled representations for the test sample, then adaptively divides patterns into three scenarios based on object co-occurrence patterns observed in ID training data, and finally performs OOD detection in a divide-and-conquer manner. By doing so, OCO can distinguish near-OOD by considering the semantic contextual relationships present in their images, avoiding the tendency to focus solely on simple, easily learnable regions. We evaluate OCO through experiments across challenging and full-spectrum OOD settings, demonstrating competitive results and confirming its ability to address both semantic and covariate shifts. Code is released at https://github.com/Michael-McQueen/OCO.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Higher Population Coverage with Typhoid Conjugate Vaccine is Needed to Induce Herd Protection: Evidence from a Cluster-Randomized Trial in Urban Bangladesh

Introduction: A cluster randomized trial (CRT) in Bangladesh found that Vi-tetanus toxoid (Vi-TT) vaccine conferred 85% protection to vaccinees at 18 months of follow-up; however, it failed to confer significant herd protection to non-vaccinees. Methods: In the CRT, children aged 9 months to

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

Discovery and inference beyond linearity for epidemiological data by integrating Bayesian regression, tree ensembles and Shapley values

arXiv:2505.00571v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) is gaining popularity in epidemiology and healthcare studies for hypothesis-free discovery of risk and protective factors. ML is strong at discovering nonlinearities and interactions, but this power is compromised by a lack of reliable inference. Although Shapley values provide local measures of features' effects, valid uncertainty quantification for these effects is typically lacking, thus precluding statistical inference. We propose RuleSHAP, a framework that addresses this limitation by combining a dedicated Bayesian sparse regression model with an improved tree-based rule generator and Shapley value attribution. RuleSHAP provides detection of nonlinear and interaction effects, with uncertainty quantification at the individual level as a key contribution. We derive an efficient formula for computing marginal Shapley values within this framework. We apply RuleSHAP to data from an epidemiological cohort to detect and infer several effects for high cholesterol and blood pressure, such as nonlinear interaction effects between features like age, sex, ethnicity, BMI and glucose level. To conclude, we demonstrate the validity of our framework on simulated data.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Investigation of Neural Network Methods for Reconstruction and Classification of Texture Images Under Conditions of Incomplete Information

The automated analysis of heterogeneous natural textures is frequently hindered by physical damage and data loss, presenting a significant challenge to computer vision. While deep learning has shown success in controlled environments, its application to complex geological materials under conditions of incomplete information remains underexplored. This study presents an integrated framework for the inpainting and classification of high-resolution core sample images. We propose an end-to-end pipeline that utilizes object detection for sample segmentation, followed by image inpainting using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with Contextual Residual Aggregation (CRA) to reconstruct missing high-frequency details. Subsequently, we evaluate the performance of modern Transformer-based (Swin, ViT) and CNN architectures on the reconstructed data. Our experiments revealed a critical divergence between reconstruction quality and downstream utility: despite high structural fidelity (PSNR 28.7~dB, FID 74.01), classification accuracy plateaued at 53\%. To improve minority-class detection, we propose a confidence-based hybrid ensemble that raises MCA from 48\% to 58\%. These results highlight the limitations of current state-of-the-art generative models, which may produce visually plausible but semantically ambiguous features ("hallucinations") that confound classifiers. This work provides insights into the dependencies between image reconstruction quality and classification performance, offering a reproducible baseline for future research in non-destructive testing and material science. Given that cross-well accuracy remains in the 49–53\% range, we position the resulting system as a decision-support and screening tool for lithofacies interpretation rather than as a fully autonomous classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/GalymzhanAbdimanap/Lithology_recognition

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Explicit Context-Driven Neural Acoustic Modeling for High-Fidelity RIR Generation

arXiv:2509.15210v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Realistic sound simulation plays a critical role in many applications. A key element in sound simulation is the room impulse response (RIR), which characterizes how sound propagates within a given space. Recent studies have applied neural implicit methods to learn RIR using context information collected from the environment, such as scene images. However, these approaches do not effectively leverage explicit geometric information from the environment. To further exploit neural implicit models with direct geometric features, we present MiNAF, which queries a rough room mesh at given locations and extracts distance distributions as an explicit representation of local context. Our approach demonstrates that incorporating explicit local geometric features can better guide the model in generating more accurate RIR predictions. Through comparisons with conventional and state-of-the-art methods, we show that MiNAF performs competitively across various evaluation metrics.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

PoQ-Judge: A Multi-Architecture Evaluation Framework for Cost-Aware Proof-of-Quality in Decentralized LLM Inference

Decentralized LLM inference networks need lightweight, reference-free quality evaluation for Proof of Quality (PoQ). We present PoQ-Judge, a framework that trains dedicated judge models to score query-output pairs without ground-truth references. We study three architectures across the quality-cost tradeoff: a TextCNN judge, a MiniLM cross-encoder, and a DeBERTa judge. Using two-stage training on UltraFeedback plus GPT-labeled in-domain data, the best model reaches 0.747 Pearson correlation with the ground-truth proxy on a held-out test set, outperforming reference-based evaluators from prior work. As a reference-free component in composite scoring, it achieves 0.645 Pearson correlation, matching the best single reference-based evaluator while removing the need for reference answers. We also show that online calibration identifies semantic quality as the dominant dimension and that cascade evaluation reduces cost by 72.7 percent with only modest quality loss. Results are much stronger on QA than summarization, pointing to proxy quality as the main remaining limitation.

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

Can LLMs Accurately Score Medical Diagnoses and Clinical Reasoning?

arXiv:2604.14892v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating medical AI systems using expert clinician panels is costly and slow, motivating the use of large language models (LLMs) as alternative adjudicators. Here, we evaluate an LLM Jury, composed of three frontier AI models, for scoring 3334 diagnoses on 300 real-world low- and middle-income country (LMIC) hospital cases. Both LLM- and clinician-generated diagnoses are scored against expert panel diagnoses across four dimensions: diagnosis, differential diagnosis, clinical reasoning, and negative treatment risk. The LLM Jury scores are compared with expert and independent re-scoring panel scores to assess error metrics, inter-rater agreement, severe-risk errors, and the effect of post hoc calibration using isotonic regression. In our data, we find that: (i) the uncalibrated LLM Jury scores preserve ordinal agreement with the expert clinician panel scores, but are systematically lower; (ii) the probability of severe-risk errors is lower for the LLM Jury than the human expert re-score panels; (iii) the LLM Jury combined with LLM diagnoses can be used to identify diagnoses at high risk of error, enabling targeted expert review and improved panel efficiency; (iv) the calibrated LLM Jury scores and rankings of diagnosing agents show excellent agreement with those of the primary expert panels; (v) LLM Jury models show no self-preference bias, they did not score diagnoses generated by their own underlying model or models from the same vendor more (or less) favourably than those generated by other models. Together, these results provide evidence that a calibrated LLM Jury is a trustworthy and reliable proxy for expert clinician evaluation in medical AI benchmarking. Confirming these findings in other clinical settings is an important direction for future work.

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

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.