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

Multi-Adapter PPO: A Cross-Attention Enhanced Wavelength Selection Framework for LIBS Quantitative Analysis

arXiv:2606.17476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) quantitative analysis faces critical challenges in wavelength selection due to high-dimensional spectral data and the fundamental trade-off between prediction accuracy and feature efficiency. This paper presents a novel Multi-Adapter PPO framework that transforms wavelength selection into a reinforcement learning problem, leveraging cross-attention mechanisms and multiple specialized adapters to capture complex spectral relationships. Our approach outperforms traditional Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) by an average of 28.4\% in comprehensive score and 45.2\% in prediction accuracy across steel and coal datasets. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance in balancing prediction accuracy with feature efficiency, achieving state-of-the-art results in LIBS quantitative analysis while maintaining interpretability and computational efficiency. We released our code and dataset here: https://github.com/Hflying/MAPPO

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Efficient Magic State Factory Via Transversal Non-Clifford Gate

arXiv:2606.16199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Magic-state preparation is a central component of fault-tolerant quantum computing. Recent theoretical and experimental successes in code-switch-based magic-state preparation have underscored the promise of these methods for quantum error correction. Similarly, magic-state cultivation has likewise been demonstrated in both numerical and experimental settings. However, a thorough comparison between magic-state cultivation and code-switch-based magic-state factories is still missing. In this work, we carry out end-to-end simulations of magic-state preparation using code switching and compare its resource requirements and performance against magic-state cultivation. As part of this analysis, we develop a lattice-surgery protocol for transfer between the doubled color code and the rotated surface code. We extend the complete code-switching protocol to the $d=5$ doubled color code and perform the corresponding end-to-end simulations. Finally, we propose two fault-tolerant magic-state preparation protocols that combine phase-kickback checks with a transversal non-Clifford gate.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Scalable Pairwise Kernel Learning with Stochastic Vec Trick

arXiv:2606.16979v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pairwise learning is a specialized form of supervised learning that focuses on predicting outcomes for pairs of objects. In this work, we introduce SPaiK, a new scalable kernel learning method tailored for pairwise settings. Our approach preserves the expressive power of kernel methods while substantially reducing computational and memory requirements. The key innovation is the stochastic generalized vec trick (sGVT), a stochastic extension of the sparse Kronecker product multiplication algorithm, which enables efficient large-scale training with pairwise kernels. By incorporating sGVT, SPaiK makes it possible to apply kernel-based pairwise learning to datasets of a size previously out of reach. We evaluate the performance of SPaiK on seven real-world drug-target affinity datasets and compare the results with state-of-the-art methods in pairwise learning.

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

MosaicQuant: Inlier-Outlier Disaggregation for Unified 4-Bit LLM Quantization

4-bit quantization significantly reduces the memory footprint and accelerates the inference of large language models (LLMs). However, its limited bit-width representation struggles to faithfully capture both dense common values (inliers) and rare large-magnitude values (outliers), causing substantial accuracy degradation. Existing mixed-precision methods mitigate this by retaining outliers in high precision, but at the cost of breaking the uniformity of low-bit execution, introducing precision conversion and extra data movement that undermine practical speedup. We propose MosaicQuant, a unified 4-bit LLM quantization paradigm built on a novel principle of inlier–outlier disaggregation. Rather than elevating outlier precision, MosaicQuant quantizes the full weight matrix into a dense 4-bit base component, where inliers are captured faithfully while outlier are inevitably quantized. A sparse 4-bit residual component is then introduced to compensate for these quantization errors, selectively targeting the most error-critical weight blocks where output distortion is shown to be concentrated. However, a unified representation alone is insufficient, as naïvely executing the sparse residual as a separate kernel still breaks the unified low-bit inference pipeline. To bridge this gap, we introduce ZipperEngine, which fuses sparse block computation into the dense 4-bit GEMM kernel via an overlapped pipeline, unifying not only the representation but also the execution into a single coherent low-bit inference pipeline. Extensive experiments on LLaMA3 and Qwen3 demonstrate that MosaicQuant preserves near-FP16 accuracy while achieving up to $1.24\times$ speedup over the W16A16 baseline.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A2D2: Fine-Tuning Any-Length Discrete Diffusion for Adaptive Decoding

arXiv:2606.13565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discrete diffusion models offer a simple and stable likelihood-based framework for sequence generation, recently extended to any-length settings via token insertion. Principled reward-guided fine-tuning for any-length discrete diffusion, however, remains largely unexplored. We introduce Fine-Tuning Any-Length Discrete Diffusion for Adaptive Decoding (A2D2), a unified framework for reward-guided fine-tuning of any-length discrete diffusion models via joint optimization of the insertion and unmasking policies together with a quality-based inference schedule. We derive the Radon-Nikodym derivative for the joint insertion-unmasking path measures, enabling theoretically guaranteed convergence to the intractable reward-tilted sequence distribution without requiring target samples. Building on this, we establish unmasking and insertion quality as tractable approaches for minimizing decoding error and introduce the Adaptive Joint Decoding (AJD) loss, which provably yields the optimal path measure that generates the reward-tilted distribution. Empirically, A2D2 improves reward optimization while enhancing generation flexibility and accuracy over prior fixed-length fine-tuning and inference-time guidance methods.

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

MobileFineTuner: A Mobile-Native Framework for On-Device LLM Fine-Tuning in Real-World Embedded AI Applications

arXiv:2512.08211v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are moving from cloud-centric services toward on-device embedded AI, where models interact with private, longitudinal signals sensed from users and their physical environments. Mobile phones are a natural platform for such applications because they are continuously carried by users, connected to wearable sensors, and deeply integrated with daily mobile applications. However, practical LLM fine-tuning on commodity phones remains difficult. Existing fine-tuning frameworks are largely Python-based and server-oriented, making them hard to deploy inside mobile applications. We present MobileFineTuner, a mobile-native open-source framework for end-to-end LLM fine-tuning on commodity mobile phones. MobileFineTuner is implemented in C++ and provides a reusable training stack. To make fine-tuning feasible under mobile resource constraints, MobileFineTuner integrates a resource-aware training runtime with memory-efficient attention, activation checkpointing, gradient accumulation, parameter sharding, and energy-aware scheduling. We evaluate MobileFineTuner on real mobile phones using GPT-2, Gemma 3, and Qwen2.5 models across multiple fine-tuning tasks. The results show that MobileFineTuner reproduces standard Full-FT and LoRA fine-tuning behavior, substantially reduces memory pressure and improves executability on memory-constrained phones. We further demonstrate MobileFineTuner through a private campus health-agent application, where a local LLM is fine-tuned on user-specific wearable-sensing records to provide more personalized responses while keeping raw records on the phone. These results establish MobileFineTuner as a practical toolkit for studying and building on-device LLM fine-tuning applications in embedded AI and sensing systems.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Inflationary branch decoherence and the cosmological arrow of time

Authors:

arXiv:2602.21263v3 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze branch decoherence in inflationary quantum cosmology by computing reduced density matrices and branch-overlap factors for long-wavelength perturbations. The Hartle-Hawking no-boundary state is real in the semiclassical regime and contains both expanding and contracting WKB components, whereas the tunneling state is selected as an outgoing complex WKB branch; expanding-contracting decoherence is therefore central for the former and mainly diagnostic for the latter. Using the influence-functional formalism, we derive the noise kernel for a light spectator environment and evaluate decoherence under horizon-based and EFT-motivated coarse grainings. We then compute the single-mode branch overlap directly from the Bunch-Davies mode functions, obtaining $|\mathcal{D}_k(z)|=[z^2/(z^2+1)]^{1/4}$ in the massless limit and $|\mathcal{D}_k(z)|\sim z^\nu$ on superhorizon scales for massive fields, where $z=-k\eta$ is the dimensionless wavenumber with $\eta$ the conformal time. In the massless case, the accumulated geometric branch functional is evaluated in closed form, with a leading cutoff-sensitive phase-space term and a universal subleading contribution. The calculation provides an explicit quantitative bridge between quantum-cosmological boundary conditions, inflationary squeezing, and the emergence of effectively classical cosmological histories.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Within-host pathogen population diversity predicts treatment response in tuberculosis

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) treatment outcomes remain suboptimal, and standard clinical diagnostics cannot reliably identify patients at high risk of treatment failure or relapse at the time of diagnosis. While within-host Mycobacterium tuberculosis genetic diversity is hypothesized to reflect the viable bacterial burden and adaptive capacity of the infection, its clinical prognostic value remains unknown. Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 364 patients with newly diagnosed, rifampicin-susceptible pulmonary TB in South Africa. Patients received standard 6-month therapy and were monitored for up to two years to ascertain composite unfavorable outcomes (treatment failure, death, or relapse). To accurately detect low-frequency (unfixed) genetic variants and eliminate reference bias artifacts, we mapped medium to high depth short-read sequences against matched, patient-specific long-read assemblies. The association between baseline pathogen genetic diversity and clinical outcomes was evaluated using multivariable Cox proportional-hazards models. Results: After bioinformatic filtering, true unfixed variants were relatively rare but significantly enriched in genes mediating pathogen adaptation and drug tolerance, including transporter proteins and two-component regulatory systems. Within-host bacterial genetic diversity (i.e., the total number of unfixed variants) ranged from 0-20, with a median of 1 per patient. In survival analysis adjusting for known clinical risk factors–including HIV status, prior TB, baseline smear positivity, and radiographic lung involvement–baseline within-host genetic diversity emerged as a strong, independent predictor of unfavorable treatment outcomes. For patients with greater than 3 unfixed variants at diagnosis, each increase of 5 unfixed variants was associated with more than double the risk of a composite unfavorable outcome (adjusted Hazard Ratio, 2.36; 95% CI, 1.27 to 4.39; p=0.007). Conclusions: Baseline within-host pathogen genetic diversity is an independent predictor of unfavorable TB treatment outcomes. As sequencing becomes increasingly integrated into routine diagnostics, quantifying unfixed variants is an accessible approach that promises to risk-stratify patients and guide the duration of individualized regimens.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Machine-learned, finite temperature Fermi-operator expansions suitable for GPUs and AI-hardware

arXiv:2605.08523v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present several finite-temperature recursive Fermi-operator expansion schemes based on the second-order spectral projection (SP2) method. Our approach builds on a previous observation that the electronic structure problem, as formulated through a recursive SP2 expansion, can be mapped onto the architecture of a deep neural network. Using this perspective, we generalize SP2 to finite electronic temperatures by constructing machine learning models that determine optimized recursive expansion coefficients. The same approach is also applied to the prediction of the electronic entropy for fractional occupation numbers. The coefficients are trained for a specified chemical potential and electronic temperature and are not available in closed analytical form. However, by employing an appropriate affine rescaling strategy to the Hamiltonian matrix, we eliminate the need to retrain the model for different temperatures and chemical potentials. Our approach avoids explicit diagonalization and relies solely on highly optimized matrix-matrix multiplication kernels. Compared to state-of-the-art diagonalization, we achieve an order-of-magnitude speedup in the single-particle finite-temperature density matrix calculation for small and moderately sized matrices on modern GPUs and dense matrix multiply units.

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

Investigating Inductive Biases for Machine Learning Emulation of Sudden Stratospheric Warmings in Idealised Isca Simulations

arXiv:2606.18857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine-learning emulators are increasingly used for weather prediction and have the potential to extend skill on subseasonal-to-seasonal timescales by learning dynamically important sources of predictability. A key challenge is whether the models can exploit predictability anchors, such as stratospheric variability, that influence tropospheric circulation beyond short lead times. We test how architectural inductive bias affects emulation of sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) dynamics using paired idealised Isca simulations that differ only in an imposed wave-2 heating perturbation. Across convolutional, transformer, and graph-based architectures trained for one-step prediction, model differences are modest when the stratosphere is dynamically quiet but widen substantially when SSW-like variability is active. Our results identify explicit three-dimensional vertical coupling as a key inductive bias for machine-learning emulation of stratospheric dynamics. However, Eliassen-Palm flux diagnostics show that low forecast error does not guarantee physically faithful wave-mean-flow interaction, with coherent errors remaining in stratospheric wave-driving structure.

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

CRAFTIIF: Cross-Resolution Analytic Four-Type Interpretable Isolation Forest for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Anomaly detection in multivariate time series is challenged by four structurally distinct anomaly types – point (isolated spikes), distributional (level shifts), temporal (rhythm changes), and collective (inter-sensor correlation breakdowns) – each requiring different feature representations. Most unsupervised methods target only one or two types and provide limited interpretability. We present CRAFTIIF (Cross-Resolution Analytic Four-Type Interpretable Isolation Forest), a fully unsupervised framework targeting all four types without dataset-specific tuning. CRAFTIIF generates K=500 random analytic wavelet feature draws across four families (Morlet, DOG, Haar, Coiflet), each targeting a specific anomaly type, feeding five structured Isolation Forests – one per type plus a meta-IF for compound anomalies. An adaptive Otsu/MAD threshold calibrates detection automatically across anomaly rates from 0.1% to 69.2%. Because each IF is trained exclusively on type-specific features, branch firing provides direct anomaly-type attribution by construction, without post-hoc explanation. Evaluated on all 19 datasets of the mTSBench benchmark (Zhou et al., TMLR 2026), CRAFTIIF achieves mean F1=0.228 (all 19 datasets) and F1=0.322 (13 detectable datasets), ranking first among all 25 evaluated methods on VUS-PR (0.463 vs. previous best 0.329, +40.7%). A diagnostic framework – oracle F1, detectability limits, and branch separation ratios – identifies 6 of 19 datasets as fundamentally undetectable by any unsupervised method. Ablation over 11 conditions confirms adaptive thresholding (+38% F1), four-branch structure (+20%), and meta-IF (+23%) are each essential. Code: https://github.com/smitswil/craftiif

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

BrainG3N: A Dual-Purpose Tokenizer for Controllable 3D Brain MRI Generation

arXiv:2606.19651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Three-dimensional (3D) brain MRI is central to clinical neurology and neuro-oncology, where generative models could augment under-represented cohorts, simulate disease trajectories, and support privacy-preserving data sharing. Latent diffusion has been the go-to solution for modeling imaging data, but it places two competing demands on the tokenizer: encoder embeddings must retain the clinical information that downstream tasks act on, and the decoder must reconstruct anatomically faithful volumes. Existing reconstruction-driven tokenizers achieve the second at the expense of the first. To address this, we introduce a fully volumetric masked-autoencoder (MAE) based tokenizer for 3D brain MRI latent diffusion, decoupling encoder and decoder: a frozen 3D MAE encoder produces clinically informative embeddings, while a dedicated CNN decoder reconstructs voxels from a linear projection of those embeddings. We pretrain the encoder on 35,309 volumes from 18 public cohorts spanning four modalities, ten disease categories, and 200+ acquisition sites, and demonstrate its dual utility in two settings. First, on a 23-task linear-probing benchmark, the encoder outperforms or matches SOTA models (i.e., BrainIAC, BrainSegFounder, and MedicalNet) on 21 of 23 tasks. Second, a conditional diffusion transformer (DiT) trained on these clinically informative embeddings supports both conditional generation across six variables and patient-specific longitudinal forecasting. Together these results establish a single 3D brain-MRI embedding space capable of both downstream clinical tasks and controllable generation.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Language Shapes Mental Health Evaluations in Large Language Models

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in socially sensitive mental health contexts, including support chatbots, screening, and content moderation. This raises a reliability question: do semantically equivalent mental health inputs elicit comparable evaluations across languages, or systematic shifts consistent with language-associated social and cultural contexts? We examine this question in an English-Chinese setting with GPT-4o and Qwen3-32B using a two-level framework: construct-level evaluative orientation, measured by psychometric stigma instruments, and decision-level behavior, measured by binary stigma detection and four-class depression severity classification. Across instruments and models, Chinese prompts elicit higher stigma-related scores than English prompts. At the decision level, Chinese prompts reduce sensitivity to stigmatizing content and produce more conservative depression severity judgments, leading to more under-estimation errors. These findings show that prompt language can shift both evaluative orientation and downstream behavior in LLM-based mental health evaluation. They highlight the need to evaluate multilingual LLMs not only for aggregate performance, but also for whether they apply comparable evaluative standards across languages in socially sensitive domains.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

NoiseTilt: Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernels for Diffusion Reward Alignment

arXiv:2606.18066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernel (NTRK), a reward-guided diffusion sampler that injects reward gradients through the noise term, leaving the pretrained reverse kernel unchanged and requiring only a single sample per step. Reward-guided sampling at inference time has greatly expanded the versatility of pretrained diffusion models. Yet existing methods face a trade-off. Gradient-based guidance shifts the reverse mean, steering generation but pushing intermediate states outside the region that the model was trained on and degrading quality. Search-based methods preserve quality but gain no gradient signal. No prior method achieves both. NTRK resolves this by keeping the reverse mean fixed and biasing the noise term toward high reward. We introduce a whitening operator, the central mechanism behind NTRK, that makes the reward gradient safe to inject as noise without losing its guiding signal. Across various reward alignment tasks, NTRK outperforms recent state-of-the-art baselines without losing sample quality. Remarkably, on aesthetic generation, NTRK surpasses the reward of the best baseline at 500 NFEs using only 25 NFEs, a 20$\times$ reduction in compute.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ScaleWoB: Guiding GUI Agents with Coding Agents via Large-Scale Environmental Synthesis

arXiv:2605.25160v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: GUI agents powered by large language models are advancing rapidly, creating urgent needs for evaluation and training based on realistic environments. However, directly doing so in real-world environments introduces some challenges that cannot be overlooked. Real-world environments are complex and uncontrollable, making it difficult to construct verifiable rewards and to save or reset states. Existing works prioritize reproducibility but are often limited to open-source apps or file-operation tasks for reliable reward building, leaving a persistent gap from real-world usage. Furthermore, relying on virtual machines or docker images demand high resource requirements and suffer from slow response speeds, which limit the efficiency. We present \sys, a framework that could produce high-fidelity synthesized interactive environments for GUI agents across platforms with verifiable rewards. These environments behave as backend-free webpages accessible via URL, requiring near-zero setup and low resource cost, making the approach suitable for both large-scale evaluation and downstream agent training. We support multiple GUI platforms including mobile, desktop, and automotive/in-vehicle interfaces based on the same pipeline, covering 100+ environments and 1000+ verifiable tasks. Among them, 120 challenging tasks across 63 simulated mobile applications are released as a fully synthesized mobile GUI agent benchmark. Experiment results on five state-of-the-art mobile GUI agents reveal substantial headroom – the average success rate is only 27.92\%, dropping to 17.82\% on long-horizon subset – while humans reach 92.08\%. A comparison against real-world sample tasks shows that assessments made in our synthetic environments generalize to real apps. The project website is at https://scalewob.github.io.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

PermDoRA – Understanding Adapter Interference in Language Models: Limits of Parameter-Space Geometry

arXiv:2606.11262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Access control in large language models (LLMs) requires modular mechanisms to enable domain-specific behavior without retraining or cross-domain interference. A common hypothesis is that interference during adapter composition arises from overlap in linear parameter updates, suggesting that enforcing orthogonality or directional independence should improve multi-domain performance. We test this hypothesis using DoRA-RBAC, a hierarchical adapter composition framework based on weight-decomposed low-rank adaptation. We compare conventional Euclidean merging with a geometry-aware Riemannian-inspired merging strategy that approximates the Frechet mean via normalized directional averaging across multiple QA benchmarks (GPQA, PubMedQA, SimpleQA, WMDP) on LLaMA-3.1-8B and Mistral-7B. Our results show that while single-domain performance matches LoRA, geometry-aware merging provides no consistent advantage over standard averaging in multi-domain settings.Diagnostic analysis further reveals that angular alignment and orthogonality of adapter updates are weak predictors of composition performance. These findings suggest that adapter interference is not governed primarily by parameter-space geometry, but is instead consistent with interactions in shared nonlinear representations.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Children's DNA Methylation and Family Dynamics in a Congo Basin Subsistence Community: Links with Parental Conflict and Fathers' Caregiving

Family environments may contribute to children's long-term health through biological processes, including epigenetic regulation such as DNA methylation (DNAm). However, most studies in this area focus on Euro-American populations while also rarely including fathering data. The current study investigated children's blood DNAm associations with positive (father caregiving) and negative (parental conflict) family dynamics in a smaller-scale subsistence society living in the Congo Basin rainforest. We measured DNAm from dried blood spots of 54 children (mean age=8.48 years) and conducted three epigenome-wide association studies aimed at discovering differential co-methylated regions (CMRs) associated with family dynamics. Via path models, we investigated the health implications and shared contribution of family factors of the identified CMRs. Differential DNAm associated with family dynamics was localized to genes related to stress, immunology, development, and aging, thus possibly linking to children's physical health and were simultaneously connected to other family factors such as number of siblings. Our findings suggested similarities in biological embedding of family factors across socio-ecologically diverse contexts.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Sphere Packings in Higher Dimension (after Boaz Klartag)

arXiv:2606.13313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let $\delta_n^L$ be the maximal density of a lattice sphere packing in the $n$-dimensional Euclidean space. We explain how Boaz Klartag proved the inequality $\delta_n^L \geq c n^2 2^{-n}$ where $c>0$ is a universal constant. In higher dimension, even for non-lattice sphere packings, this new lower bound is a substantial improvement. Klartag's proof uses the probabilistic method in two different ways. The first, very standard, relies on the statistical properties of a uniformly chosen random lattice. The second, completely new, studies the stochastic evolution of an ellipsoid constrained to contain non nonzero lattice points in the interior.

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

The Hidden Evolution of Disguised Visual Context inside the VLM

arXiv:2606.20077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual tokens enter Large Language Models (LLMs) as raw, foreign signals. How they are transformed into meaningful representations and interact with the language space depends entirely on the integration architecture. Whether by treating visual tokens as in-context prompts within the input sequence or injecting them directly into the LLM's intermediate layers. A controlled comparison and understanding of how these architectural choices affect visual information and its internal transformation to integrate with the LLM remains underexplored. We provide a fair comparison by evaluating in-context and layer-wise injection VLM integration paradigms under identical training conditions across single image, multi-image, and video benchmarks. In doing so, we uncover a hidden evolution where visual tokens enter the LLM as disguised visual context, raw representations lacking linguistic structure, but are progressively reshaped depending on the integration paradigm, each capturing fundamentally different frequency characteristics of the visual signal. We show that this evolution inside the LLM determines what visual features the VLM can utilize effectively, how visual representations align with the language space, and ultimately how each paradigm performs across different tasks. We further demonstrate that attention allocation alone is insufficient, and that performance is driven by the quality of visual representations at each layer.

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

Multiagent Protocols with Aggregated Confidence Signals

arXiv:2606.13591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Confidence is used for reliability, oversight, and a range of downstream decision tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP), yet no existing method produces or evaluates a confidence for the output of a multiagent system. Prior work uses confidence within multiagent debate (MAD) to weight messages, trigger debate, or calibrate individual agents, but it never aggregates these into a single confidence for the system itself. We introduce three protocols that produce a final answer along with a single aggregated confidence by first transforming raw confidence signals to make them comparable across models, then combining them via soft voting or a probability fusion we call Bayesian fusion. This aggregated confidence is substantially more discriminative (AUARC) than that of the best single agent or the standard debate baselines, while correctness (F1-score) stays stable and recovers the losses MAD incurs on more ambiguous tasks. Analyzing two estimators, sequence probability and self-report, alongside parametric and non-parametric calibrators, we find that calibration improves F1 for both estimators while AUARC is less reliant on it. We evaluate six homogeneous and heterogeneous debating pairs per benchmark, across five benchmarks and four task types, spanning a range of model capabilities and sizes.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Neither Parallel Nor Sequential: How DiffusionGemma Actually Commits Tokens

arXiv:2606.14620v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open diffusion language models are marketed as parallel, non-autoregressive decoders, yet the order in which a shipped checkpoint actually commits its tokens is almost never measured. We instrument DiffusionGemma 26B, a masked discrete-diffusion mixture-of-experts model built on Gemma 4, hooking its sampler's accept step to record which canvas positions commit, when, and at what confidence. Across a 686-prompt, six-regime probe suite we find that its decoding is neither parallel nor block-autoregressive: it follows a partial left-to-right commit bias whose apparent strength depends almost entirely on the granularity at which you look. Order is weak token by token and strengthens smoothly as the analysis is coarsened, so the model's "block size" turns out to be an artifact of the measuring ruler rather than the architecture. The model commits in large simultaneous batches, leaving much of the within-batch order genuinely undefined rather than merely unobserved. The behaviour is regime-dependent: structured JSON is committed in essentially arbitrary order, and a position's commit confidence tracks correctness on mathematical reasoning but carries no signal on factual recall. Commitment is aggressive, finishing in a short late burst well inside the step budget, while task accuracy matches the model's autoregressive Gemma-4 sibling. Beyond these findings, our central contribution is methodological: measuring decoding order honestly demands handling trailing-EOS padding, within-regime confounding, commit non-monotonicity, block-size sensitivity, and large commit-batch ties, each of which can otherwise manufacture a decoding-order result that is not really there.

22.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-12

General-purpose large language models outperform specialized clinical AI tools on medical benchmarks

Specialized clinical artificial intelligence (AI) tools are entering medical practice despite scarce independent evaluation. We quantitatively evaluate two clinical AI tools, OpenEvidence and UpToDate Expert AI, built on large language models (LLMs) against three frontier LLMs: GPT-5.2, Gemini 3.1 Pro and Claude Opus 4.6. Our evaluation has three stages: (1) 500 MedQA questions testing medical knowledge, (2) 500 HealthBench items measuring alignment with clinicians and (3) the real clinical queries (RCQ) benchmark, built from 100 de-identified queries from physicians to a general-purpose language model in a live clinical environment. For the RCQ benchmark, 12 US clinicians performed randomized, blinded review of model outputs, producing 1,800 model–question annotations. Frontier LLMs outperformed clinical AI tools in all three evaluations. Clinical AI tools performed comparably to auto-enabled Google Search AI Overview on the RCQ. These findings highlight the need for independent, real-world evaluation of AI tools before they enter clinical settings. In an independent evaluation, frontier large language models outperformed specialized clinical artificial intelligence tools on medical knowledge, clinician alignment and real-world clinical queries.

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

JourneyFormer: Encoding Airbnb Guest Journey with Sequence Modeling

arXiv:2606.19108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sequence modeling has become increasingly popular in recommendation and ranking algorithms, owing to its capacity to model users' historical behaviors and infer user intentions. Despite its theoretical simplicity, the practical deployment of a sequence model in production is non-trivial due to complexity of the sequence and sparse labels. For example, in Airbnb, guest sequences are often long, exploratory and complex, and we focus on booking labels, which are sparse. As such, we are often required to make various design decisions regarding data and modeling to strike a balance between effectiveness and scalability. This work delved into these production challenges and deployed JourneyFormer, a sequence modeling solution for search ranking at Airbnb. We detail crucial design considerations, covering aspects such as guest event selection, ID embeddings, model architecture, and label attribution. Additionally, we describe several tailored strategies to accelerate model training and inference. JourneyFormer has been successfully deployed within Airbnb's production, where its effectiveness and impact have been evidenced not only by improved offline ranking metrics but also by significant gains in key business metrics through online A/B testing across 2 production surfaces.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

LUCID: Learning Embodiment-Agnostic Intent Models from Unstructured Human Videos for Scalable Dexterous Robot Skill Acquisition

arXiv:2606.11628v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The most widely-adopted robot learning pipelines today learn skills from robot demonstrations or structured human data, which are expensive to collect and tied to specific embodiments. In contrast, unstructured human videos provide a scalable alternative. They contain diverse manipulation demonstrations across objects, scenes, and strategies, but are not directly connected to robot action. We propose LUCID, a two-stage framework that learns task intent from unstructured human videos drawn from internet-scale datasets and learns robot control in massively-parallel simulation. The intent model predicts short-horizon intent (what should happen next in the scene) from the current observation in closed loop. An embodiment-specific sensorimotor policy converts this intent into robot actions. The intent interface is shared across controllers, so the same intent model can be applied to different embodiments, from our primary dexterous hand to a parallel-jaw gripper. We evaluate LUCID on five real-world manipulation tasks: stirring, wiping, and binning supervised by only internet video, with zero-shot transfer to novel scenes and object instances; and push-T and cable routing supervised by 1 hr each of self-collected smartphone video. Project page: https://lucid-robot.github.io/.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Retrospective Progress-Aware Self-Refinement for LLM Agent Training

LLM-based agents trained with reinforcement learning optimize step-wise action prediction but lack metacognitive awareness of task progress, inducing a gap that hinders long-horizon scaling. A pilot study reveals that online progress prompting hurts performance while retrospective demonstrations help, yet this capability cannot emerge from outcome-reward training alone. We present RePro, Retrospective Progress-Aware Training, a framework that trains agents to self-generate progress signals via a forward-then-reflect rollout paradigm: the agent executes actions online, then retrospectively reassesses its step-wise progress given the completed trajectory and known outcome. RePro initializes with a Retrospection Warmup that teaches reflection format from minimal external demonstrations, then further trains through RePro-PO with a composite reward that produces self-generated signals without continuous external supervision. Experiments on WebShop, ALFWorld, and Sokoban show that RePro enhances the Qwen family's performance, with up to $12\%$ absolute success rate gains.