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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

EvoAgent: An Evolvable Agent Framework with Skill Learning and Multi-Agent Delegation

arXiv:2604.20133v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper proposes EvoAgent–an evolvable large language model (LLM) agent framework that integrates structured skill learning with a hierarchical sub-agent delegation mechanism. EvoAgent models skills as multi-file structured capability units equipped with triggering mechanisms and evolutionary metadata, and enables continuous skill generation and optimization through a user-feedback-driven closed-loop process. In addition, by incorporating a three-stage skill matching strategy and a three-layer memory architecture, the framework supports dynamic task decomposition for complex problems and long-term capability accumulation. Experimental results based on real-world foreign trade scenarios demonstrate that, after integrating EvoAgent, GPT5.2 achieves significant improvements in professionalism, accuracy, and practical utility. Under a five-dimensional LLM-as-Judge evaluation protocol, the overall average score increases by approximately 28\%. Further model transfer experiments indicate that the performance of an agent system depends not only on the intrinsic capabilities of the underlying model, but also on the degree of synergy between the model and the agent architecture. Code, data, and documents will be released at https://github.com/Focus-AI-Center/Mentarc-EvoAgent.git.

02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Global high-resolution mapping of seagrass to support conservation

Authors:

Seagrass ecosystems underpin coastal biodiversity1 and provide vital ecosystem services, including shoreline protection2, food security3 and climate mitigation4. Despite growing recognition as a nature-based climate solution, seagrasses are among the least mapped and most poorly understood vegetated coastal ecosystems5. Here we present, to our knowledge, the first global 10-m spatial resolution maps and change analysis of seagrass extent in clear, shallow coastal waters, derived from 4.75 million Sentinel-2 MSI satellite images for two periods (2019–2020 and 2023–2024). Using a deep-learning classifier trained on curated reference data, we identified 148,506 km2 of seagrass globally, including 5,961 km2 of intertidal and 142,545 km2 of subtidal areas. Sixty-nine per cent of global seagrass extent is concentrated in The Bahamas, Cuba, the USA, Australia and Indonesia, yet only 21% of seagrass areas are located within marine-protected areas. Over the 4 years of the study, 5,969 km2 (4%) of seagrass was lost, and an additional 6,221 km2 (4.2%) was degraded from dense to sparse cover in tropical regions. Our findings identify seagrass meadow hotspots and vulnerable regions to inform conservation and climate policy. Global high-resolution mapping shows widespread seagrass loss and degradation since 2019, with most meadows outside protected areas, highlighting urgent conservation and climate-policy needs.

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

Does Mixture-of-Experts Actually Help Inference on Consumer and Edge Hardware? An Empirical Study

arXiv:2606.21428v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models are often described as ideal for resource-constrained inference. Each token activates only a small subset of experts, so the per-token compute cost, in floating-point operations (FLOPs), resembles that of a much smaller dense model. Whether that FLOP advantage survives in practice is far less clear. We ask whether MoE models actually run faster and cheaper than comparable dense models on consumer-grade and edge hardware. We benchmark OLMoE-1B-7B (1.3 B active of 6.9 B total) against three dense baselines on an Apple M2 Pro and an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano 8 GB through \texttt{llama.cpp}, measuring throughput, memory, and on-device energy. The answer is device-dependent: OLMoE's active-parameter advantage is only partly realised on the laptop (~10% behind the same-active Llama-3.2-1B) and erodes on the edge device (~31% behind, at 2.1$\times$ the energy per token, with peak memory at the 8 GB ceiling). Patching \texttt{llama.cpp} to time the decode graph node-by-node shows routing accounts for under 9% of MoE-block compute on the cleaner edge backend, so the gap reflects total-parameter memory footprint, expert dispatch, and KV-cache pressure rather than routing. The implication is that on bandwidth-bound edge hardware, inference cost tracks total parameters, not active ones, and sparse activation does not buy back what the device is constrained on. These findings are bounded to one MoE model at this parameter scale and two devices, and we release the full measurement harness and per-run data.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Specifying AI-SDLC Processes: A Protocol Language for Human-Agent Boundaries

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20615v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI agents now participate as first-class team members across the software development lifecycle, yet no specification language exists for expressing the human-agent responsibility boundaries, approval gates, and governance constraints this collaboration requires. Existing approaches encode process in agent prompts (subject to drift), target adjacent domains (workflow management, business processes), or address only fragments (access control, approval gates). We propose a domain-specific language for specifying AI-SDLC processes as protocols, with formal syntax, well-formedness conditions, operational semantics, and enforcement invariants. The language distinguishes policy (declared intent) from mechanism (structural enforcement), enabling implementations to bound process non-determinism through primitives such as validation tokens and capability boundaries. Three results follow. A failure rate analysis shows that structural enforcement bounds system failure rates at a weighted product of agent and validator rates, while behavioral compliance permits cumulative or near-saturating growth. The 2+N team pattern (two human-in-control roles plus N specialized agent members) formalizes classical Separation of Duties for AI-SDLC. Kleene closure of orchestration loops and reflexive protocol-adherence validation emerge as design properties rather than special-case constructs. We position the contribution against multi-agent frameworks (MetaGPT), workflow specification (FlowAgent, BPMN extensions), and capability-based security (SAGA): the novelty lies in the specific integration, not any single primitive. A working implementation demonstrates feasibility; empirical evaluation is future work.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

On-site interactions in quantum thermal machines: efficiency, rectification and entanglement beyond local and global master equations

arXiv:2606.14593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in experimental techniques have opened new routes for harnessing non-equilibrium dynamics in mesoscopic quantum systems. In this context, we study the impact of on-site interactions on the transport properties of a continuous quantum thermal machine composed of two coupled oscillators connected to two thermal reservoirs. In the weak system-reservoir coupling regime, where a long-standing debate concerns which reduced description should be preferred, we first show that the Redfield master equation (RME) provides an accurate and unifying framework that interpolates between two well-known limits: the local and global master equations. By relying on the Hierarchy of Pure States (HOPS), a numerically exact stochastic method, we then explore the full parameter space and show that interactions can be leveraged to tune the efficiency of the thermal machine at high temperatures (while leaving it essentially unchanged at low temperatures), induce non-reciprocal transport under asymmetric reservoir couplings, and generate steady-state entanglement within the junction. We derive expressions for system-bath correlators, such as heat and particle currents, consistently across different frameworks. Our work features on-site interactions to enhance the versatility of quantum thermodynamic junctions and clarifies the role of non-Markovianity and non-linearities in quantum transport.

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

Natural Ungrokking: Asymmetric Control of Which Rules Survive Pretraining

Midway through an ordinary pretraining run, a small language model learns the pronoun-gender rule: cued with a girl's name ("Sue cried because"), it resolves the next pronoun to she, generalizing to held-out probes (0.94 by step 925). By step 3,500 the same model scores near zero on the same probes, although the rule's evidence is still in the training data. We call this within-run reversal natural ungrokking: the corpus decides, with no trace in the loss curve, which learned rules a model keeps. Which rules survive is predictable from one corpus statistic: how often the training stream shows the rule winning. Across un-intervened runs (two corpora, three budgets, three seeds), support frequency decides a rule's fate; the data-to-parameter ratio only modulates how deeply a doomed rule falls. The same emerge-then-collapse dynamics appear in public Pythia checkpoints, collapse depth ordered by model scale as predicted. The forgetting is a displacement: a competing surface pattern out-competes the rule, and the log-probability margin between them crosses zero within 100 training steps of the behavioral collapse. Control over this fate is asymmetric: the same edit that destroys a rule on demand cannot restore it. Flipping support to counter-evidence in place kills the rule with monotone dose-response in two unrelated rules; but injecting support back, even to 450 times the level that naturally sustains it, buys no recovery. Every confirmatory threshold and prediction was pre-registered before the data it governed was read.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Weisfeiler Lehman Test on Combinatorial Complexes: Generalized Expressive Power of Topological Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.00725v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Topological neural networks have emerged as effective tools for modeling higher-order relational structures beyond pairwise graphs, including hypergraphs, simplicial complexes, and cell complexes. However, existing Weisfeiler-Leman type expressivity analyses are typically developed on different structural domains and rely on domain-specific neighborhood systems, making their expressive powers difficult to compare within a common formalism. In this paper, we introduce the Combinatorial Complex Weisfeiler-Leman (CCWL) framework, a unified expressive power refinement defined on combinatorial complexes. By exploiting the ability of combinatorial complexes to represent both set-type relations and part-whole hierarchies, CCWL performs topological color refinement through four structural neighborhoods: boundary, co-boundary, lower adjacency, and upper adjacency. We show that, under specified lifting maps, CCWL can simulate several domain-specific WL-type refinements, thereby providing a common theoretical baseline for analyzing topological message passing. We further study the neighborhood sufficiency problem and prove that, under explicit coverage conditions, a reduced refinement using only lower- and upper-adjacent bridge information preserves the distinguishing power of the full four-neighborhood CCWL refinement. Guided by this theoretical result, we instantiate the reduced refinement as the Combinatorial Complex Isomorphism Network (CCIN). Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that CCIN achieves competitive performance against representative graph and topological neural network baselines. Ablation studies and resource-efficiency analyses further support the effectiveness of the proposed lower/upper-neighborhood design.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Collision models for open quantum systems coupled to finite environments

arXiv:2606.14163v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a system qubit repeatedly interacting with the same environmental qubit, with a reservoir acting on the environment between collisions via a completely positive, trace-preserving map. We show that complete suppression of system–environment correlations uniquely requires a full environmental reset, recovering a semi group dynamics with a time-independent Gorini–Kossakowski–Sudarshan–Lindblad generator, whereas a partial reset yields a continuous transition between Markovian and non-Markovian regimes governed by a single dimensionless relaxation parameter. For a resonant excitation-exchange interaction, we obtain exact closed-form expressions for the Bloch-vector dynamics for both a generalized depolarizing channel and a generalized amplitude-damping channel acting as the reservoir-induced map. Using the Breuer–Laine–Piilo measure and a Choi-matrix CP-divisibility witness, we identify three distinct dynamical regimes across the parameter space: CP-divisible Markovian dynamics, CP-indivisible but P-divisible dynamics, and non-P-divisible non-Markovian dynamics. The boundaries between these regimes, and the structural differences between uniform and anisotropic environmental relaxation, are characterized numerically.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

AMaNITA: an end-to-end workflow for native tRNA nanopore sequencing data analysis

Transfer RNA (tRNA) molecules serve as essential adapters during protein translation. While direct RNA sequencing (DRS) via Oxford Nanopore Technologies has emerged as a powerful platform for systematic tRNAome profiling, we currently lack a simple and robust statistical framework for nanopore tRNA data analyses. Here, we address this gap by developing AMaNITA (Abundance, Modifications, and Nanopore Intensity Toolbox Application), an end-to-end bioinformatic workflow that enables simplified, robust, and scalable analyses of nanopore native tRNA sequencing datasets. AMaNITA streamlines the entire analytical trajectory: from upstream processing (basecalling, mapping, filtering, batch effect correction) to downstream assessment of differential tRNA abundance and modification stoichiometry. The workflow generates an interactive HTML report for data exploration and analysis, allowing the user to download the source data files and resulting plots. AMaNITA can be executed using Singularity from the command line, without requiring installation of dependencies.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

As Easy as Rocket Science: Assessing the Ability of Large Language Models to Interpret Negation in Figurative Language

Figurative language and negation are two areas that challenge current language models, however, both are widely used throughout written and spoken language. Large language models (LLMs) are also widely used in everyday contexts where they cannot necessarily be tuned for a specific dataset. It is therefore essential to understand the ability of LLMs to correctly interpret text that includes both negation and figurative language. To investigate this, we develop a set of new annotations to an existing dataset of figurative language, and test a range of language models on the dataset. We find that the combination of negation and figurativeness can present a particular challenge, and that performance overall and across different negation types is particularly dependent on the prompt style used.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GeroQubit: a lightweight, honesty-first de-novo design platform for geroscience-native small molecules with calibrated uncertainty

Authors:

Computational molecule generation has outpaced its own credibility. We present GeroQubit, a GPU-free de-novo design platform that organizes candidates along a target x tissue x hallmark model and reports every signal alongside its measured baseline. We treat our tissue aging-signature readout as a mechanistic structural prior that we explicitly disclose is not validated against lifespan, and we surface efficacy only through a structure-to-lifespan k-NN whose weak but real signal (leave-one-out rho ~ 0.145) is wrapped in empirically-calibrated conformal intervals (90% target, 90.3% measured coverage). On a held-out retrospective recovery of ~1,940 ChEMBL binders against decoys, the score reaches ROC-AUC 0.945 with ~20x enrichment at 1% (BEDROC 0.91) and survives a scaffold-disjoint split - yet we report that it collapses to near-random (AUC 0.62) on genuinely novel chemotypes. Molecules are assembled reaction-first, so every candidate carries a verified synthetic route and atom-level synthon provenance; ADMET is handled as a multi-objective Pareto problem. We frame the disclosed weak signals and the hard-case failures not as flaws but as the honest, decision-useful output the field's own critics demand.

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

Microwave-free vector magnetometry and crystal orientation determination with Nitrogen-Vacancy centers using Bayesian inference

arXiv:2512.13835v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond provide a solid-state platform for quantum sensing. While optically detected magnetic resonance techniques offer high sensitivity, their reliance on microwaves introduces heating and stray electromagnetic fields that can perturb nearby samples. Optical approaches based on cross-relaxation between differently oriented NV centers remove this constraint but have so far required stringent alignment of the external field with crystallographic axes, restricting their practicality. Here we introduce a general framework for microwave-free vector magnetometry at near-zero field that leverages Bayesian inference to extract both the magnetic field vector and the NV orientation directly from photoluminescence maps. An analytical model of cross-relaxation resonances enables efficient inference under arbitrary field and orientation configurations, while naturally incorporating the discrete degeneracies of the NV symmetry. We experimentally demonstrate robust orientation determination and vector-field reconstruction, establishing a general route toward compact and alignment-free NV magnetometers for practical sensing applications.

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

Broadband High-Level Squeezed Light using Waveguide Optical Parametric Amplifiers with External Dispersion Compensation

arXiv:2606.17422v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate broadband phase-sensitive amplification (PSA) measurement of squeezed light generated by a waveguide optical parametric amplifier (OPA) with external dispersion compensation. In broadband systems, group velocity dispersion (GVD) induces a frequency-dependent rotation of the squeezing axis, which limits the observable bandwidth in PSA measurements. To overcome this limitation, we introduce external dispersion compensation between two OPAs and suppress the quadrature rotation over a wide frequency range. As a result, we observe a maximum squeezing of 5.9 dB near the carrier frequency and more than 5 dB of squeezing up to a frequency offset of 4.5 THz from the carrier. Furthermore, squeezing below the shot-noise level is confirmed up to a frequency offset of 6 THz from the carrier, corresponding to the accessible phase-matching bandwidth of the waveguide OPA. Our results establish a practical method for broadband characterization of squeezed light and provide a key step toward ultrafast continuous-variable quantum information processing.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Maximal rigidity of random measure and uniqueness pairs: stealthy processes, quasicrystals and periodicity

arXiv:2512.10686v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This article investigates the phenomenon of maximal rigidity in spatial processes, where perfect interpolation of the process is possible from partial information, specifically, from its restriction to a strict subdomain, often resulting in a trivial tail $\sigma$algebra. A classical example known since the 1930's is that a time series is fully determined by its values on the negative integers if its spectrum has a gap, or at least a sufficiently deep zero. We extend such results to higher dimensions and continuous settings by establishing a connection with the concept of uniqueness pairs, rooted in the uncertainty principle of harmonic analysis. We present several other manifestations of this principle, unify and strengthen seemingly unrelated results across different models: quasicrystals and stealthy processes are shown to be maximally rigid on cones, and discrete integer-valued processes are necessarily periodic when they have a simply connected spectrum. Finally, we identify a surprising class of continuous fields with seemingly standard behavior, such as linear variance and finite dependency range, that undergo a phase transition: they are perfectly interpolable on B(0, $\rho$) for $\rho$ ___ 2 $\pi$ but exhibit no rigidity for $\rho$ > 2.

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

A Dual-Branch Collaborative Framework for Joint Optimization of Underwater Image Enhancement and Object Detection

Due to wavelength dependent light absorption and scattering, underwater images usually suffer from color distortion and blurred details, which limits underwater object detection performance. Existing underwater image enhancement methods mainly focus on visual quality improvement, while it is still difficult to balance enhancement quality, processing efficiency, and downstream detection performance. Therefore, this paper proposes an efficient dual-branch underwater image enhancement framework for object detection. The detail enhancement branch improves brightness and local contrast to recover texture details in dark regions. The color restoration branch uses adaptive compensation to reduce color distortion and improve color gradation. By combining the complementary outputs of the two branches, the proposed framework provides clearer and more informative images for object detection. On the UIEB and EUVP datasets, the proposed method achieves UIQM scores of 2.249 and 2.576. When applied to the YOLOv8 detection task on the URPC dataset, the proposed method improves mAP50 by 2.1\% compared with the baseline. Extensive experiments show that our method improves object detection in complex underwater scenes, while balancing enhancement quality and processing efficiency.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Structuring The Future: Diffusion LLM Speculative Decoding via Calibrated Draft Graphs

Diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful alternative to autoregressive LLMs (AR-LLMs) with the potential to operate at significantly higher token-generation rates. To unlock this potential, we present Spiffy, a speculative decoding algorithm to accelerate dLLM inference while provably preserving the model's output distribution. This work addresses the unique challenges involved in applying ideas from speculative decoding of AR-LLMs to dLLMs. Spiffy performs auto-speculation to eliminate the overheads of an independent draft model, structuring draft states in the form of a novel directed draft graph to take advantage of the bidirectional, blockwise nature of dLLM generation. These draft graphs are calibrated offline to maximize acceptance rates and are dynamically pruned during inference for improved computational efficiency. We present a detailed formulation of Spiffy and demonstrate its ability to accelerate LLaDA, Dream, and SDAR models in combination with KV caching and threshold-based dynamic unmasking leading to up to $8.6\times$ reduction in model inferences and $6.3\times$ acceleration in token rate.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Bag of Dims: Training-Free Mechanistic Interpretability via Dimension-Level Sign Patterns

arXiv:2606.12629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that the standard basis of transformer hidden states already provides a training-free, architecture-general feature basis. Individual dimensions encode semantic content via their signs and confidence via their magnitudes, functioning as independent binary registers. We validate this Bag of Dims framework across three model families (Qwen 3.5-4B, Gemma 3-4B, Mistral 7B) through four progressive experiments. Sign patterns alone carry predictive content: replacing all magnitudes with unity achieves 72-93% top-5 next-token accuracy through the LM head, and pure Hamming scoring without any decoder reaches 80-90% top-4096. These sign patterns organize into semantic features: using a single-token type cache (one forward pass per vocabulary token, no context), we discover 175 categories via per-dimension sign consistency (mean AUC 0.80) from 50 anchors with zero training. A trained probe adds only +0.018 AUC and converges to axis-aligned weights, confirming negligible cross-dimension structure. This structure extends to attention: all 175 categories remain discoverable in K and V projections. On the write side, static FFN weight inspection links 20% of features to individual writer neurons (>0.70 agreement; random controls: 0%), with top-200 neuron coalitions achieving >0.70 agreement on 99.9% of prototypes via majority vote. Fully unsupervised discovery (random seeds, no labels) scales to 1500 features at 100% yield and 99% sparsity across all three models, with pairwise MI of 0.0014 bits confirming low inter-dimension coupling. These results establish that the standard basis already suffices for feature reading throughout the transformer compute pathway, requiring no training, no optimization, and no GPU-days beyond a single forward pass per vocabulary token.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A Tail-Respecting Splitting Numerical Scheme for Lévy-Driven SDEs With Superlinear Drifts

arXiv:2504.07255v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present an explicit numerical approximation scheme, denoted by $\{X^n\}$, for the effective simulation of solutions $X$ to a multivariate stochastic differential equation (SDE) with a superlinearly growing $\kappa$-dissipative drift, where $\kappa>1$, driven by a multiplicative heavy-tailed Lévy process that has a finite $p$-th moment, with $p>0$. We show that the strong $L^{p_X}$-convergence $\sup_{t\in[0,T]}\mathbf E \|X^n_t-X_t\|^{p_X}=\mathcal O (h_n^{\gamma})$ holds for any $p_X\in (0,p+\kappa-1)$, which is exactly the range where the $p_X$-moment of the solution is known to be finite. Additionally, for any $p_X\in (0,p)$ we establish strong uniform convergence: $\mathbf E\sup_{t\in[0,T]} \|X^n_t-X_t\|^{p_X}=\mathcal{O} ( h_n^{\delta} )$. In both cases we determine the convergence rates $\gamma$ and $\delta$. In the special case of SDEs driven solely by a Brownian motion, our numerical scheme preserves super-exponential moments of the solution. The scheme $\{X^n\}$ is realized as a combination of a well-known Euler method with a Lie-Trotter type splitting technique.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PolicyGuard: Towards Test-time and Step-level Adversary Defense for Reinforcement Learning Agent

arXiv:2606.12896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are becoming increasingly popular, the security of RL systems deserve more attention and exploration. In particular, recent work has revealed that RL agents are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where a victim agent behaves normally under standard conditions but executes malicious actions when a specific trigger is activated. Existing backdoor defenses for RL either require access to the agent's internal parameters, operate only at the model or trajectory level, or are limited to specific attack types. To ensure the security of RL agents, we propose \texttt{PolicyGuard}, a test-time step-level backdoor defense which leverages Gaussian Process (GP) posterior variance and adapts pseudo trajectories to enable uncertainty computation for individual time step. Besides, we also provide theoretical foundations to explain the efficacy of GP posterior variance. Extensive experiments across seven RL games demonstrate that PolicyGuard achieves state-of-the-art detection performance in most cases, with average AUROC of 0.856 for perturbation-based attacks and 0.859 for adversary-agent attacks.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

EComAgentBench: Benchmarking Shopping Agents on Long-Horizon Tasks with Distributed Hidden Intent

As LLM-based shopping agents enter production, existing benchmarks fail to capture how a shopper's requirements arrive: stated implicitly in the query, recorded in a profile, or revealed only when the right question is asked. Benchmarks that expose full intent upfront and grade only the final choice can neither pose this long-horizon challenge nor explain which requirement an agent missed. To address this gap, we introduce EComAgentBench, a benchmark of 662 tasks grounded in real Amazon products and reviews. Each task scatters these requirements across a visible query, a tool-gated profile, and scripted clarification; an agent must uncover hidden intent, verify candidates against attributes and review evidence, and commit to a single product within 100 tool calls. Moreover, typed, source-tagged rubrics grade every task, attributing each failure to a requirement and its source. Construction is automated yet reliable, with every answer fixed in code before any text is generated and every sample validated. Our evaluation of seven models reveals that even the strongest attains only 57.1% overall accuracy, and rubric satisfaction degrades from visible to hidden sources. Overall, we believe EComAgentBench will serve as a reproducible foundation for moving shopping agents from single-query search toward dependable assistance over long horizons.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

MENTOR: Reinforcement Learning via Flexible Teacher-Optimized Rewards for Tool-Use Distillation

Distilling the tool-use capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into small language models (SLMs) is essential for their practical application. The predominant approach, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), suffers from poor out-of-domain (OOD) generalization due to its rigid alignment with static teacher trajectories. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers an alternative, the capacity limitations of SLMs pose a severe dilemma: sparse outcome rewards provide insufficient guidance, whereas strict trajectory matching imposes overly restrictive constraints. To bridge this capacity-driven gap, we propose MENTOR, which introduces a flexible yet process-aware reward structure. Instead of enforcing rigid replication, MENTOR uses the teacher's reference to guide tool-use behavior, balancing behavioral alignment with downstream performance. Extensive experiments on controlled executable-tool benchmarks demonstrate that MENTOR improves OOD tool-use performance compared to SFT and strict RL baselines. Our findings suggest that within verifiable tool-use environments, flexible tool-use alignment offers a more effective approach than strict trajectory replication for developing adaptable small models.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Controlled Human Malaria Infection model for relapsing Plasmodium vivax

Background Plasmodium vivax malaria relapses are a major source of morbidity and onward transmission of infection. The underlying mechanisms are poorly understood and current therapies sub-optimal. We examined the safety and feasibility of a controlled human malaria infection (CHMI) model for relapsing P. vivax. Methods We conducted an open-label, proof-of-concept, CHMI study of relapsing P. vivax. Healthy, malaria-naive, Duffy-positive adults aged 18-45 years with extensive CYP2D6 metaboliser phenotype and normal blood glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) levels were recruited in Oxford, UK. Mosquito-bite CHMI was performed in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, using Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes infected with PvW1, a clonal isolate of P. vivax from Thailand. All follow-up visits were conducted in Oxford, UK. Primary P. vivax infections (qPCR > 500 genome copies/mL) were treated with artemether-lumefantrine (80mg/480mg at 8, 24, 36, 48 and 60 hours). From Day 28 following CHMI, participants attended a fortnightly clinic for clinical review and qPCR blood sampling, with additional assessments performed for any reported symptoms. P. vivax relapse infections (qPCR > 500 genome copies/mL) were treated with artemether-lumefantrine as per primary infection. Definitive anti-malarial treatment with atovaquone-proguanil (1000mg/400mg once daily for three days) and primaquine (0{middle dot}5 mg/kg/day for 14 days) was administered six months following CHMI, regardless of parasitaemia or symptoms. The primary objective was to assess the safety, feasibility and frequency of relapsing P. vivax after CHMI. Remote follow-up (5 years) is ongoing. The study is registered with ISRCTN registry (ISRCTN48625883). Findings 20 participants were screened for eligibility from 21 January 2025. Five participants (median age 22 years) underwent CHMI (five infected mosquitoes per participant) on 15 April 2025. All participants developed primary P. vivax infection and experienced at least one relapse infection. Two participants experienced a second relapse. Overall incidence rate was 3{middle dot}6 relapse infections per person-year. Solicited adverse events were mild or moderate and there were no serious adverse events. Definitive anti-malarial treatment was administered to all participants. One participant experienced primaquine-induced methaemoglobinaemia, resolving with early discontinuation of treatment (total dose 5{middle dot}3 mg/kg). To date, more than six months after primaquine treatment, no further relapses have been recorded. Interpretation CHMI of relapsing P. vivax is safe and feasible, allowing exploration of the mechanisms underlying relapse infections and providing a platform for future anti-relapse efficacy studies. Funding European Union Horizon Europe programme and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) via OptiVivax consortium; UK National Institute for Health and Care Research Biomedical Research Centre: Oxford; and UK Medical Research Council.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Extremal representations of functions of matrices and applications to multivariate prediction

arXiv:2606.19359v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivated by two seminal results of multivariate prediction theory by Helson and Lowdenslager and by Wiener and Masani we prove extremal representations of functions of matrices and derive their prediction-theoretic consequences. We also sketch a way to obtain matricial inequalities from our results. The main goal of the paper is the computation of the infimum of a set of values of the form $tr(A \Delta A^*)$, where $\Delta$ is a given non-negative Hermitian $n \times n$ matrix and the choices for $A$ exhauste a certain set of $n \times n$ matrices. In particular, we focus on norm-bounded unit spheres with certain types of properties of unitary invariance, what allows an application of the theory of majorization.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Nearest-neighbour gates are all you need: High-rate quantum low-density parity-check codes on a planar grid

arXiv:2606.19482v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-performance quantum low-density parity-check codes promise substantial reductions in the overhead of fault-tolerant quantum computation, but most constructions require long-range connectivity or qubit shuttling, both of which are difficult to realise in superconducting architectures. Here we introduce a family of quantum low-density parity-check codes that, for the first time, combines planar open-boundary layouts, finite-size advantages over surface codes, and syndrome extraction using only nearest-neighbour gates on a square grid of qubits. The key idea is to generate check-data connectivity dynamically: nearest-neighbour iSWAP walks both define the stabiliser supports and implement their measurement, avoiding the need for a long-range hardware graph. The resulting circuits achieve optimal constant-depth stabiliser measurement, independent of code size, and naturally remove leakage from the system by exchanging the role of check and data qubits at each syndrome extraction round. We find finite-size instances such as a [[323,14,15]] code, whose code-efficiency ratio is nearly an order of magnitude larger than that of rotated surface-code patches. At around 30 circuit qubits per logical qubit, the best directional tile-code layouts reduce the per-logical per-round logical error rate by up to a factor of 1000 relative to rotated surface-code memories. These results show that the advantages of quantum low-density parity-check codes can survive compilation into strictly planar nearest-neighbour circuits, bringing low-overhead fault-tolerant memories closer to near-term hardware.

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

Who Flips? Self- and Cross-Model Counterarguments Reveal Answer Instability in LLMs

Standard accuracy benchmarks are designed to test how closely large language models (LLMs) approach correct answers, but are not suitable for testing whether LLMs stick with a correct answer when that answer is challenged by a plausible counter-argument. We introduce a controlled protocol for evaluating answer stability: after a model answers a multiple-choice question correctly, we challenge the model's answer with a coherent argument for an incorrect option and measure whether the model flips. The setup a) isolates argumentative content from overt social pressure and b) varies argument length, self-attribution, and cross-model source. Across seven frontier models and 57 MMLU subjects, flip rates range from 17.5% to 97.3%, revealing large differences in stability that are not captured by accuracy metrics alone. We find that self-attribution consistently increases flip rates (mean +7.1pp, up to +18.7pp). Also, pooling wrong-answer arguments across models and selecting the most effective one per question yields stronger adversarial challenges than relying on any single source model. We further construct MaxFlip, a curated challenge set that amplifies flips by up to +23.6pp over standard self-generated challenges. We release the protocol, challenge records, and MaxFlip to support stability evaluation alongside standard accuracy benchmarks. Materials are available at https://github.com/nafisenik/WhoFlips and https://hf.co/datasets/nafisehNik/WhoFlips.