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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

Authors:
Erkison Ewomazino Odih↗

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

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02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Active commuting, anxiety symptoms and mental wellbeing: a dose-response study

Authors:
Joensuu↗Jussila↗J. J↗Lanki↗Tiittanen↗Pasanen↗T. P↗Ekelund↗Halonen↗J. I↗

Climate change draws attention to the planetary health perspective in sport and exercise sciences, that is, to physical activity that supports both human wellbeing and environmental sustainability. Active commuting is a sustainable form of physical activity with well-established somatic health benefits. However, more knowledge is needed on its relationship with mental health. We examined dose-response associations between active commuting, anxiety symptoms, and mental wellbeing among Finnish adults, and whether green commuting environment moderates these relationships. We used data from the cross-sectional Environment and Health Survey collected in June-September 2023 in the ten largest cities in Finland. Employed participants with data on anxiety symptoms (Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7, GAD-7), mental wellbeing (World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index, WHO-5), commuting profile over a year (mode, frequency, distance, and perceived greenness along the commute route), and sociodemographic and lifestyle factors were included (n=1,672; mean age 45.3 years; 53.8% women). Active commuting was defined as travelling the entire commute by walking or cycling (including e-biking) that was converted into approximated annual km/week and MET-h/week. We used linear and logistic regression with restricted cubic splines to evaluate dose-response associations, adjusted for key covariates. The role of perceived greenness was tested using an active commuting x commute greenness interaction term. We found no dose-response relationships between active commuting and anxiety symptoms or mental wellbeing in any of the models. No effect modification by commute greenness was observed. More research on how active commuting may support planetary health from a mental health perspective is needed.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

The Benchmark Illusion: Pruned LLMs Can Pass Multiple Choice but Fail to Answer

Authors:
Rui Wen↗Lu Sun↗Jiayang Liu↗Zesheng Xu↗Tianshuo Cong↗Zheng Li↗

Compressing large language models reduces memory use and inference cost, but it can also create failures that standard benchmarks miss. A pruned model may still perform well on multiple-choice evaluations, yet fail to answer the same question in open generation. We ask what pruning changes: does it erase the correct answer, or does it make the answer harder to produce as the top output? We study this question with multilingual question answering, tracking the same questions before and after pruning. We find a benchmark illusion. Under high-sparsity pruning, especially Wanda, models often fail in greedy open generation while still selecting the correct answer under multiple-choice scoring. In these recognition-only errors, the answer is usually not gone, but demoted: it often reappears with beam search, sampling, or one in-context example. Overall, multiple-choice benchmarks can overstate the usability of compressed LLMs, creating an evaluation blind spot. Compressed models should be tested on what they can produce, not only on what they can recognize.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Graph Grounded Cross Attention Transformer Neural Network for Structurally Constrained Full Event Sequence Generation in Predictive Process Monitoring

Authors:
Fang Wang↗Ernesto Damiani↗

arXiv:2606.18726v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Structurally constrained event sequence generation remains challenging because generated paths must preserve transition feasibility, temporal order, termination, and attribute consistency. In predictive process monitoring (PPM), this challenge appears as full event sequence generation, whereas existing work mainly addresses component tasks such as next activity, remaining time, outcome, and attribute prediction. This paper proposes the Graph Grounded Cross Attention Transformer Neural Network (GGATN) for this unified PPM task. GGATN uses a global process graph as structured activity memory, contextualizes sequence positions through Transformer self attention, and injects process topology through graph grounded cross attention. Unlike autoregressive decoding, GGATN generates activities, timestamps, length, and event level and sequence level attributes in a single pass, followed by Viterbi style graph constrained decoding for feasible paths and explicit termination. Experiments on six benchmark event logs show more reliable generation quality than local instruction prompted LLM baselines. GGATN achieves strong performance on sequence similarity, Damerau Levenshtein similarity, bigram based control flow similarity, and duration distribution, while maintaining zero hallucinated activities and zero sequence level attribute inconsistency. Ablation analyses confirm the global graph encoder as a stable structural prior. Interpretability analyses show how graph structure, sequence context, feedback refinement, and constrained decoding shape generation.

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

Distribution Alignment for One-Shot Federated Learning via Optimal Transport

Authors:
Daniele Berardini↗Vito Paolo Pastore↗Vittorio Murino↗

arXiv:2606.16655v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One-Shot Federated Learning (OSFL) addresses extreme communication regimes in which clients interact with the server only once, amplifying the impact of heterogeneous client data distributions. In particular, the interaction of domain shift and label shift across clients induces misaligned feature representations that cannot be corrected through iterative optimization. Existing OSFL methods rely on distillation, server-side generation or ensemble-based aggregation, but assume aligned representations or address domain and label shift separately. We introduce SLOT-Align (Single-round, Learning-free Optimal Transport Alignment), a geometry-aware feature harmonization framework for OSFL. SLOT-Align uses a shared frozen encoder to extract compact feature statistics, constructs a global reference via Bures-Wasserstein barycenters, and aligns local representations using closed-form geodesic optimal transport maps. The method is computationally efficient and can be combined with existing OSFL pipelines relying on frozen encoders without modifying their training procedures. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks, pretrained backbones, and OSFL methods show that SLOT-Align consistently improves accuracy and robustness under joint domain and label shift.

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

Transposition Approach to Optimal Control of McKean-Vlasov SPDEs

Authors:
Liangying Chen↗Wilhelm Stannat↗

arXiv:2603.06245v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we investigate an optimal control problem for McKean-Vlasov stochastic partial differential equations, in which the coefficients depend on the law of the state process. For systems with nonconvex control sets, we establish a Pontryagin-type stochastic maximum principle that provides necessary optimality conditions for admissible controls. The analysis is based on the classical spike variation method together with the introduction of an adjoint backward stochastic partial differential equation involving Lions derivatives with respect to probability measures. Our results extend the stochastic maximum principle for McKean-Vlasov controlled stochastic differential equations to the infinite-dimensional SPDE setting.

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Bootstrapped Monitoring: Leveraging Transparent Reasoning to Oversee Stronger AI Agents

Authors:
Frank Xiao↗Mary Phuong↗

arXiv:2606.11998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trusted monitoring is a cornerstone of AI control. However, as frontier models grow more capable, the increasing capabilities gap between trusted and untrusted models may render trusted models unreliable monitors. We introduce bootstrapped monitoring, a protocol that addresses this by inserting a stronger, intermediate untrusted model with transparent chain-of-thought reasoning into the oversight chain. The untrusted monitor ($U_m$) evaluates the agent's actions, while a weaker trusted model ($T$) oversees $U_m$'s reasoning to detect collusion. We evaluate bootstrapped monitoring on multi-turn software engineering tasks (BashArena) across multiple agents and monitors. Bootstrapped monitoring substantially improves catch rates over trusted-only monitoring, even when the untrusted monitor actively colludes with the agent, provided we have access to its raw chain-of-thought. Our results suggest that bootstrapped monitoring can extend the useful lifetime of trusted models in control as AI capabilities advance.

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08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Human Universal Grasping

Authors:
Kevin Yuanbo Wu↗Tianxing Zhou↗Isaac Tu↗Billy Yan↗Irmak Guzey↗David Fouhey↗Dandan Shan↗Lerrel Pinto↗

arXiv:2606.17054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans can grasp objects effortlessly, whereas multi-fingered robots are far from this level of generality. We argue that the most natural source of robot grasping data is from humans, who pick up thousands of objects every day. We present HUG, a flow-matching model that generates diverse human grasps for any user-specified object in a single RGB-D image captured from a stereo camera. Using smart glasses, we first collect 1M-HUGs, an egocentric dataset of human grasps spanning 1M frames (27.8 hrs) and 6,707 object instances across 41 buildings. Next, to model the distribution of natural human grasps, our novel flow-matching model fuses RGB and depth observations to output a grasp parameterized by wrist translation, wrist rotation, and MANO hand pose. Predicted grasps can be retargeted to various robot hands, enabling zero-shot grasping in everyday scenes. To standardize evaluation, we build a new simulated benchmark, HUG-Bench, of 90 unseen objects from five geometric categories and various sizes, with metric-scale 3D meshes. We evaluate HUG in the real world on the 30-object test set of HUG-Bench across multiple stereo cameras, robot embodiments, and household environments. HUG outperforms the state-of-the-art grasping baselines by +23% and +34% on our challenging object set. Code, data, benchmark, checkpoints, and an interactive demo are released on our website: https://grasping.io/

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09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Perceptions of aging well among older adults with heart failure: insights from a qualitative study

Authors:
Reid↗R.-J↗Ofosu↗Goyal↗De Main↗Lambert↗W. M↗Navarro-Millan↗Sterling↗M. R↗Rajan↗Soroka↗…

Background: Heart failure (HF) is a prevalent and often debilitating cardiovascular condition among older adults, frequently accompanied by multimorbidity, functional limitations, and the need to age in place. Traditional models of successful aging emphasize disease absence and preserved function, yet most individuals with HF live with ongoing symptoms and chronic health challenges. How older adults with HF define aging well, particularly across different socioeconomic contexts, remains underexplored. Objectives: To explore how older adults with HF conceptualize aging well and to identify perceived facilitators and barriers across more and less resourced New York City neighborhoods. Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 adults diagnosed with HF residing in Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods classified by 2019 United States Census data. Interviews were guided by Rowe and Kahn's model. Transcripts were analyzed using an inductive-deductive thematic approach and interpreted in alignment with the Healthy People 2030 framework. Results: Participants had a mean age of 69 years; 50% identified as Black and 50% were women. Despite functional limitations, 65% reported aging well. Five themes emerged: maintaining physical function, maintaining cognitive function, sustaining social relationships, avoiding pain, and promoting overall well-being. Avoiding pain and promoting well-being extended beyond traditional models. Neighborhood context shaped priorities, with financial stability emphasized in more affluent areas and social cohesion prioritized in less affluent communities. Conclusions: Older adults with HF frequently perceive themselves as aging well despite chronic illness, reframing successful aging beyond disease avoidance. These findings support a patient-centered, place-informed model of aging well with implications for healthcare delivery and policy.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Jacobian Scopes: token-level causal attributions in LLMs

Authors:
Toni J. B. Liu↗Baran Zadeo\u{g}lu↗Nicolas Boull\'e↗Rapha\"el Sarfati↗Gurbir Arora↗Christopher J. Earls↗

Large language models (LLMs) make next-token predictions based on clues present in their context, such as semantic descriptions and in-context examples. Yet, elucidating which prior tokens most strongly influence a given prediction remains challenging due to the proliferation of layers and attention heads in modern architectures. We propose Jacobian Scopes, a suite of gradient-based, token-level causal attribution methods for interpreting LLM predictions. Grounded in perturbation theory and information geometry, Jacobian Scopes quantify how input tokens influence various aspects of a model's prediction, such as specific logits, the full predictive distribution, and model uncertainty (effective temperature). Through case studies spanning instruction understanding, translation, and in-context learning (ICL), we demonstrate how Jacobian Scopes reveal implicit political biases, uncover word- and phrase-level translation strategies, and shed light on recently debated mechanisms underlying in-context time-series forecasting. To facilitate exploration of Jacobian Scopes on custom text, we open-source our implementations and provide a cloud-hosted interactive demo at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Typony/JacobianScopes.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Grounded Inference: Principles for Deterministically Encapsulated Generative Models

Authors:
Marty O'Neill↗

arXiv:2606.19753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The incorporation of generative models into traditional computational systems presents both enormous opportunity and tremendous peril. Although many early adopters have realized these perils at great expense, the field still requires foundational frameworks to de-risk incorporation of AI into traditional systems. This manuscript establishes this foundation through the definition of four specific primitives of AI blended architecture, designed to enable deterministic encapsulation of probabilistic models. It further establishes two overarching anti-patterns broadly represented across industry to serve as warnings for engineers in this field. This framework was designed to enable successful integration of AI into traditional systems while providing a foundation upon which generative model providers could build the next generation of generative model interfaces.

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

Scalable Circuit Learning for Interpreting Large Language Models

Authors:
Naiyu Yin↗Dennis Wei↗Tian Gao↗Amit Dhurandhar↗Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy↗Yue Yu↗

arXiv:2606.16939v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A prominent research direction in mechanistic interpretability is learning sparse circuits over LLM components to reveal how they jointly produce model behavior. However, raw neurons are polysemantic, making learned circuits hard to interpret. Sparse autoencoder (SAE) features alleviate this, but their high dimensionality makes existing intervention-based circuit learning methods computationally prohibitive. We propose CircuitLasso, a scalable circuit-learning approach based on sparse linear regression. CircuitLasso recovers circuits whose structural accuracy matches that of state-of-the-art intervention-based methods on the benchmark data, at a fraction of the computational cost. For interpretability, CircuitLasso efficiently uncovers relationships among SAE features, showing how human-interpretable semantic features propagate through the model and influence its predictions. Finally, we validate the utility of our learned circuits by leveraging their insights to achieve comparable performance at substantially lower cost on a domain-generalization task.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Label Shift Aware Adaptation for Online Zero-shot Learning with Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP)

Authors:
Pengxiao Han↗Changkun Ye↗Yanshuo Wang↗Jinguang Tong↗Miaohua Zhang↗Xuesong Li↗Jie Hong↗Lars Petersson↗

Vision-language models like Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) have been extensively studied in data-scarce scenarios. A particularly challenging and realistic task in this area is online zero-shot learning with CLIP, where unknown test samples are predicted sequentially in random order by CLIP while keeping the feature extraction and model parameters fixed during the sequential inference phase. Most existing approaches in this setting address the problem by adapting representations online using incoming test samples, while neglecting the distribution of the data on which CLIP was initially trained. This mismatch can lead to degraded performance when the label distribution in the test data differs from that of the training domain. To address this gap, we propose Label Shift Aware (LSA), which formulates the online zero-shot classification task as a domain adaptation problem. Specifically, LSA adapts the predictions computed by CLIP, which was trained on an unknown source distribution, to a target distribution using only unlabeled test data, and applies label shift correction to mitigate the mismatch between the source and target domains. The extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed LSA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art online zero-shot learning methods based on CLIP.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Phase controlled spectral topology, dynamic stability and sensitivity in Non-Hermitian Cavity Magnonics

Authors:
Sachin Singh Bargahi↗Rajeev Singh↗Biswanath Bhoi↗

arXiv:2606.16522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We theoretically investigate a non-Hermitian cavity-magnon platform in which coherent photonmagnon interactions and reservoir-mediated dissipative coupling interfere through a single externally tunable phase. We show that this interference phase provides a universal control parameter that continuously rotates the effective coupling between Hermitian and anti-Hermitian regimes, enabling dynamic transitions between level repulsion and level attraction without modifying intrinsic system parameters. The resulting phase-controlled non-Hermitian topology gives rise to exceptional points, linewidth engineering, and zero-damping conditions. Owing to the propagation-direction dependence of the dissipative interaction, the system further exhibits strong nonreciprocal transport and phase-tunable isolation arising from asymmetric hybridization of the cavity and magnon modes. Beyond its spectral and transport properties, we establish a direct connection between nonHermitian spectral topology and nonequilibrium population dynamics. The interference phase governs the stability of the hybrid modes, driving transitions between stable relaxation, critical slowing down near exceptional points, oscillatory energy exchange, and exponentially amplified dynamics. We further demonstrate that the same phase-controlled exceptional topology can be exploited for enhanced sensing, where the eigenvalue response exhibits the characteristic square-root scaling associated with exceptional-point physics. Our results provide a unified framework linking spectral topology, directional transport, dynamical stability, and sensing functionality through reservoirengineered interference in cavity magnonic systems.

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

NeRD: Neuro-Symbolic Rule Distillation for Efficient Ontology-Grounded Chain-of-Thought in Medical Image Diagnosis

Authors:
Hongxi Yang↗Yiwen Jiang↗Siyuan Yan↗Jamie Chow↗Eunis Li↗Charlotte Poon↗Stephanie Fong↗Xiangyu Zhao↗Deval Mehta↗Yasmeen George↗Zongyuan Ge↗

Interpretability is essential for trustworthy medical image diagnosis. However, existing concept-driven interpretable methods have key limitations: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) require scoring all predefined concepts at inference time and for manual intervention, imposing a substantial burden on clinicians, while rationale-based generative approaches often select concepts by class discriminability, which can drift from diagnostic ontologies. To address these issues, we propose Neuro-Symbolic Rule Distillation (NeRD), a framework that produces efficient, ontology-grounded reasoning chains that are sufficient yet non-redundant, without manually crafting diagnostic rules. Experiments on two skin datasets demonstrate strong diagnostic performance and interpretability, and blinded expert evaluation confirms the clinical plausibility of NeRD rationales. Our method further enables a first expert-in-the-loop study for Multimodal Chain-of-Thought-based diagnosis, achieving efficient and effective concept-level intervention.

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

MA-SBI: Misspecification-Aware Simulation-Based Inference via Side-Channel Guidance

Authors:
Arunkumar V↗Manoranjan Gandhudi↗Gangadharan G. R↗Arun Prakash↗S. Senthilkumar↗

arXiv:2606.16923v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulation-based inference (SBI) of latent parameters is often hindered by simulator misspecification, the mismatch between simulated and real-world observations caused by inherent modeling simplifications. RoPE, the recent state-of-the-art for robust SBI, addresses this through optimal transport between learned representations of real and simulated observations, but requires ground-truth parameter calibration pairs that are typically unavailable in the very settings where SBI is needed. What practitioners do have is unstructured side-information such as regime labels, instruction text, and policy bulletins. We propose Misspecification-Aware Simulation-Based Inference (MA-SBI), a calibration-free framework that turns this side-channel into a posterior correction. A learned corrector maps side-channel text to an observation-space shift applied before any pre-trained amortized posterior, requiring no retraining and no parameter ground-truth. Our main theorem bounds achievable bias reduction by the mutual information between misspecification and side-channel, with a non-vacuous constant that extends to all sub-Gaussian noise via Donsker-Varadhan. On hide-the-calibration benchmarks, MA-SBI with text alone matches the oracle posterior across 10 seeds and two backbones (TOST equivalence), while RoPE given more data does not. The two approaches are complementary: where misspecification is structural and recoverable from parameter pairs, RoPE dominates, as the theory predicts. A stochastic variant improves posterior-predictive log-likelihood on real COVID and OxCGRT epidemiological data, and correctly leaves the posterior unchanged on a well-specified cognitive-science corpus.

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

A Judge-Aware Ranking Framework for Evaluating Large Language Models without Ground Truth

Authors:
Mingyuan Xu↗Xinzi Tan↗Jiawei Wu↗Doudou Zhou↗

arXiv:2601.21817v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on open-ended tasks without ground-truth labels is increasingly done via the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm. A critical but under-modeled issue is that judge LLMs differ substantially in reliability; treating all judges equally can yield biased leaderboards and misleading uncertainty estimates. More data can make evaluation more confidently wrong under misspecified aggregation. We propose a judge-aware ranking framework that extends the Bradley-Terry-Luce model by introducing judge-specific discrimination parameters, jointly estimating latent model quality and judge reliability from pairwise comparisons without reference labels. We establish identifiability up to natural normalizations and prove consistency and asymptotic normality of the maximum likelihood estimator, enabling confidence intervals for score differences and rank comparisons. Across multiple public benchmarks and a newly collected dataset, our method improves agreement with human preferences, achieves higher data efficiency than unweighted baselines, and produces calibrated uncertainty quantification for LLM rankings.

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

RIVET: Robust Idempotent Voice Attribute Editing

Authors:
Dareen Alharthi↗Bhuvan Koduru↗Rita Singh↗Bhiksha Raj↗

arXiv:2606.19629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice attribute editing models modify characteristics such as age and gender while preserving speaker identity. In large-scale speech datasets, however, attribute annotations are often noisy or inconsistent, which can cause conditional generative models to produce unstable edits. In this work, we show that idempotency provides an effective mechanism for improving robustness to noisy labels. An idempotent operator is one for which repeated application does not change the result, i.e., f(f(x)) = f(x). Enforcing this property acts as an implicit regularizer that reduces sensitivity to mislabeled examples. We introduce RIVET, a training framework that incorporates an idempotency objective to improve robustness to label noise. We evaluate RIVET under controlled label noise and on the GLOBE dataset with naturally noisy annotations. RIVET improves editing success and better preserves speaker identity than standard training, showing that idempotency improves robustness in voice editing models.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Mem-World: Memory-Augmented Action-Conditioned World Models for Persistent Robot Manipulation

Authors:
Zirui Zheng↗Jiaqian Yu↗Xiongfeng Peng↗jun shi↗Mingyi Li↗Chao Zhang↗Weiming Li↗Dong Wang↗Huchuan Lu↗Xu Jia↗

Action-conditioned world models have emerged as a promising paradigm for robot learning, offering a scalable alternative to costly real-world experimentation by generating action-consistent video rollouts. However, persistent world modeling remains challenging in manipulation: frequent end-effector occlusions and rapid wrist-camera motion make the current observation insufficient for predicting future views, causing models to forget or hallucinate scene details seen in earlier frames. Existing memory retrieval strategies often fail to identify informative history in dynamic manipulation scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose Mem-World, a memory-augmented multi-view action-conditioned world model. At its core, we present W-VMem, a 4D wrist-view-centered surfel-indexed memory that anchors historical observations to temporally evolving surface elements. By explicitly modeling when and where scene elements are observed, W-VMem enables geometry-aware retrieval of relevant history frames conditioned on future actions. During generation, relevant history frames are selected via surfel-based rendering and scoring, providing informative and non-redundant context for prediction. Extensive experiments show that Mem-World generates persistent rollouts in complex manipulation scenarios, enables more reliable policy evaluation than Ctrl-World, improving the Pearson correlation with real-world performance by 14.5\%, and supports effective policy improvement through synthetic data generation, increasing success rates from 58\% to 72\% on long-horizon tasks.

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

SciDef: Datasets and Tools for Automated Definition Extraction from Scientific Literature with LLMs

Authors:
Filip Ku\v{c}era↗Christoph Mandl↗Isao Echizen↗Radu Timofte↗Timo Spinde↗

Scientific concepts are often defined inconsistently across papers, making it difficult to compare findings, reuse terminology, and build reliable downstream resources. We present SciDef, a resource suite for scientific definition extraction. The suite contains DefExtra, a benchmark of 268 human-validated author-stated definitions from 75 academic papers; DefSim, 60 human-labeled definition-pair similarity judgments; and an open LLM-based pipeline for PDF preprocessing, chunking, definition extraction, prompt optimization, and evaluation. We validate the resources by benchmarking 16 language models across prompting strategies and chunking schemes. The strongest set-level configuration achieves a score of 0.397, while the highest-coverage configuration matches at least one prediction to 86.4% of gold definitions but over-generates candidate definitions. We further show that an NLI-based matching metric agrees strongly with human DefSim judgments. These results position SciDef as a reusable benchmark and tooling layer for definition-centric literature analysis, while highlighting relevance-aware filtering as the key bottleneck for fully automatic definition extraction. Code & datasets are available at https://github.com/Media-Bias-Group/SciDef.

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

Virtual Speech Therapist: A Clinician-in-the-Loop AI Speech Therapy Agent for Personalized and Supervised Therapy

Authors:
Shakeel Sheikh↗Patrick Marmaroli↗MD Sahidullah↗Slim Ouni↗Fabrice Hirsch↗Goncalo Leal↗Bjorn W Schuller↗

This paper develops Virtual Speech Therapist (VST), an intelligent agent-based platform that streamlines stuttering assessment and delivers customized therapy planning through automated and adaptive AI-driven workflows. VST integrates state-of-the-art deep learning-based stuttering classification, and multi-agent large language model (LLM) reasoning to support evidence-based clinical decision-making. The VST begins with the acquisition and feature extraction of patient speech samples, followed by robust classification of stuttering types. Building on these outputs, VST initiates an agentic reasoning process in which specialized LLM agents autonomously generate, critique, and iteratively refine individualized therapy plans. A dedicated critic agent evaluates all generated therapy plans to ensure clinical safety, methodological soundness, and alignment with peer-reviewed evidence and established professional guidelines. The resulting output is a comprehensive, patient-specific therapy draft intended for clinician review. Incorporating clinician feedback, the system then produces a finalized therapy plan suitable for patient delivery, thereby maintaining a clinician-in-the-loop paradigm. Experimental evaluation by expert speech therapists confirms that VST consistently generates high-quality, evidence-based therapy recommendations. These findings demonstrate the system's potential to augment clinical workflows, reduce clinician burden, and improve therapeutic outcomes for individuals with speech impairments. An interactive user interface for the proposed system is available online at: https://vocametrix.com/ai/stuttering-therapy-planning-agent , facilitating real-time stuttering assessment and personalized therapy planning.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MemRefine: LLM-Guided Compression for Long-Term Agent Memory

Authors:
Minjae Kim↗Jinheon Baek↗Soyeong Jeong↗Sung Ju Hwang↗

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly expected to operate over long-term interactions, where information from past dialogues must be preserved and recalled to support future tasks. However, as interactions accumulate, the memory store grows without bound and fills with redundant entries that inflate storage cost and degrade retrieval by crowding out the most useful evidence. Furthermore, this is especially limiting on resource-constrained platforms with hard memory budgets, motivating us to formulate storage-budgeted memory management, the task of keeping an already constructed memory store within a fixed budget while preserving information useful for future interactions. To this end, we then propose MemRefine, an LLM-guided framework that, since surface similarity poorly reflects factual value, uses similarity only to propose candidate pairs and defers delete, merge, and preserve decisions to an LLM judge based on factual content, iterating until the budget is met. Across multiple memory frameworks and long-term conversation benchmarks, MemRefine consistently meets target budgets while preserving downstream performance and outperforming rule-based baselines under tight budgets.

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24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Conflict-Aware Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts

Authors:
Yijun Lu↗Zihan Fang↗Pengpeng Qiao↗Zheng Lin↗Jing Yang↗Yuxin Zhang↗Por Lip Yee↗Zhe Chen↗Jun Luo↗

arXiv:2606.15625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The continuous scaling of large language models (LLMs) incurs prohibitive computational costs, making Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) a scalable alternative for efficient fine-tuning via sparse activation. While federated learning (FL) emerges as the paradigm for privacy-preserving collaborative optimization, integrating MoE into FL under data heterogeneity may trigger conflicting expert optimizations. Client-specific data distributions force same-indexed experts to optimize under inconsistent or even conflicting feature-label correlations. This mismatch induces destructive interference during aggregation, thus destabilizing the optimization trajectory and degrading model performance. To address this issue, we propose FC-MoE, a federated conflict-aware framework for MoE fine-tuning. It employs an importance aware weighting scheme to prioritize reliable local updates and utilizes gradient consensus projection to suppress conflicting updates, ensuring a stable global optimization path. Moreover, a local knowledge retention mechanism further preserves specialized client expertise by re-anchoring domain-specific residuals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FC-MoE accelerates convergence and enhances both global and local model performance in non-IID federated environments.

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25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Fifty years since a simple equation described the chaos of biology

Authors:
Michael P. H. Stumpf↗

An exploration of chaos theory in population dynamics showed that unpredictable systems can often be modelled using surprisingly simple mathematics. An exploration of chaos theory in population dynamics showed that unpredictable systems can often be modelled using surprisingly simple mathematics.

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