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01.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-22

Affordable centimeter-scale 3D microscopy with submicrometer resolution

Authors: Unknown Author

Submicrometer-resolution three-dimensional (3D) imaging of large samples has been constrained by the short working distance, high cost and inflexible design of immersion objectives. We developed hybrid solid–liquid optics (HySIL) — a refractive framework with index-matched components — for submicrometer-resolution 3D imaging of centimeter-scale samples in various immersion media using inexpensive air objectives.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Multi-User Dueling Bandits: A Fair Approach using Nash Social Welfare

arXiv:2605.01961v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning from human preference data is becoming a useful tool, from fine-tuning large language models to training reinforcement learning agents. However, in most scenarios, the model is trained on the average preference of all human evaluators, which, under large variations of preferences, can be unfair to minority groups. In this work, we consider fairness in dueling bandits, a standard framework for online learning from preference data. We assume that each user has a (potentially distinct) Condorcet winner, which is an arm preferred to every other arm. Using these user-specific Condorcet winners as reference points, we evaluate and score arms according to their performance relative to the corresponding winner. To promote fairness across heterogeneous users, we adopt the well-established Nash Social Welfare objective, which maximizes the product of user utilities, thereby inherently penalizing inequality and preventing the marginalization of any single user. Within this framework, we construct a hard instance to establish a regret lower bound of $\Omega(T^{2/3}\min(K,D)^\frac{1}{3})$ for a time horizon $T$, $K$ arms, and $D$ users, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first result quantifying the cost of fairness in dueling bandits with heterogeneous preferences. We then present the Fair-Explore-Then-Commit and Fair-$\epsilon$-Greedy algorithms with a Condorcet winner identification phase. We further derive their regret upper bounds that match the lower-bound dependence on $T$ up to logarithmic factors.

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

OmniPath: A Multi-Modal Agentic Framework for Auditing Wheelchair Accessibility

arXiv:2606.24129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For a wheelchair user, a standard blue line on a map is often a broken promise. While platforms like OpenStreetMap (OSM) successfully capture where a path is, they frequently fail to convey how it physically feels to travel on it. This information barrier is problematic for wheelchair users. To solve this issue, we present OmniPath, a system that moves from passive mapping to proactive environmental auditing. Our framework fuses the network topology of OSM with the submeter precision of high-density aerial LiDAR (USGS 3DEP) to create a high-fidelity 3D model of the pedestrian environment. Rather than simply routing a user, our agent virtually traverses the network, analyzing the surface in 0.5 meter increments. It rigorously quantifies physical friction points specifically running slope, cross slope, and vertical discontinuities against ADA compliance standards, calculating a weighted severity score to categorize hazards from ``Mild'' to ``Critical.'' To ensure real world reliability, we validated the system against 200 physical ground truth field surveys across the National Mall using stratified random sampling. The framework demonstrated strong diagnostic reliability for high-severity hazards, achieving F1-scores of 0.60 for Severe and 0.58 for critical categories. By automating this micro-scale inspection, OmniPath identifies the ``invisible'' barriers that standard maps miss, effectively transforming a static dataset into accessibility data source that anticipates accessibility challenges before the user ever leaves home.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

RAIL: Rethinking Auditory Intelligence in Large Audio-Language Models with a CHC-Grounded Benchmark

arXiv:2606.11260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans process rich auditory environments through tightly integrated cognitive capabilities such as audio perception, audio reasoning, and memory. Despite recent progress in large audio-language models (LALMs) across speech understanding and multimodal audio reasoning, current evaluation paradigms remain largely task- or modality-centric, focusing on end performance while overlooking underlying auditory cognitive behaviours. This reveals a fundamental gap between how auditory cognition is understood in humans and how it is evaluated in LALMs, particularly in the lack of frameworks that operationalise cognitive principles beyond task-level metrics to systematically capture model behaviour. In this work, we introduce RAIL, a human-centric evaluation paradigm grounded in the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) cognitive framework. RAIL formalises auditory cognition into five core capabilities and develop them into structured evaluation tasks that probe how models process, retain, and integrate auditory information. We further construct a cognitively grounded benchmark with principled data curation and human-aligned evaluation protocols. Evaluating 26 state-of-the-art LALMs, we find that current models exhibit highly uneven performance across cognitive abilities. RAIL establishes a new evaluation paradigm that moves beyond task-centric benchmarking toward cognitively grounded assessment of auditory intelligence.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Approximating Whittle-Matern Fields over Discretized Manifolds

arXiv:2606.13827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Markovian Whittle-Matérn fields have been convergently approximated by discrete Gauss Markov Random Fields (GMRFs) with sparse precision matrices using a Finite Element approximation of the two-parameter family, \[ (\kappa^2 - \Delta)^{\alpha/2} u = \mathcal{W}, \;\; \kappa \in \mathbb{R}, \; \alpha \in \mathbb{N}. \] of SPDEs. Using recent developements in the analysis of Discrete Exterior Calculus (DEC), we present a different, yet closely related, convergent GMRF approximation to these Matérn fields over complete, boundaryless Riemannian manifolds discretized as well-centered simplicial complexes. This convergent method (i) is agnostic to $\alpha, \kappa$ and thus allows a universal approximation scheme for the precision and covariance matrices of the entire $(\alpha, \kappa)$-family of GMRFs, so they may be inferred rather than guessed. (ii) inherently models pointwise and piecewise-smoothed measurements of a random field and approximates both equally well (iii) is computationally independent of the interpolants used - it suffers no overhead if one convergent interpolant were replaced with another suitable interpolant over the same mesh. Furthermore, we show that, on discretizations that are well-connected in a precise sense, and volume-concentrated, the precision matrices are spectral functions of a graph-laplacian. We provide a low rank approximator to the family of such Matérn GMRFs and mention a use case: reducing the number of measurements needed to model the GMRF by compressed-sensing.

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

MeiBRD: Meta-Learning Intraoperative Biomechanical Residual Deformation

Accurate intraoperative liver registration is challenging due to substantial soft-tissue deformation yet sparse intraoperative measurements. Biomechanical models regularize this ill-posedness with prior knowledge but exhibit persistent prediction bias due to simplifying assumptions, while data-driven learning solutions struggle with data efficiency, generalization, and physical plausibility. We propose a hybrid registration framework that adapts a biomechanical prior using sparse intraoperative correspondences. Rather than learning a full deformation field, we learn a residual deformation function that corrects linear biomechanical predictions, modeled as a graph neural diffusion function with geometry-aware attention over the 3D liver mesh. To enable long-range information transfer of sparse observations, we take a novel perspective of sparse intraoperative measurements as context samples where input-output pairs of the residual deformation function are fully observed, casting the problem into learning-to-learn this residual function from intraoperative context samples with feedforward meta-learners. Experiments on a deformable liver phantom dataset demonstrate improved registration accuracy and generalization compared to rigid, biomechanical, and data-driven baselines, particularly for out-of-distribution geometries and deformations.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

XConv: Low-memory stochastic backpropagation for convolutional layers

arXiv:2106.06998v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training convolutional neural networks at scale demands substantial memory, largely because intermediate activations must be stored for backpropagation. Existing remedies (checkpointing, invertible architectures, or gradient-approximation methods such as randomized automatic differentiation) either add significant computation, impose architectural constraints, or require non-trivial code changes. We propose XConv, a near-drop-in replacement for standard 2D and 3D convolutional layers that addresses all three: it preserves standard backpropagation, imposes no architectural constraints, and integrates into existing codebases with minimal changes. XConv exploits the algebraic structure of convolutional weight gradients, storing highly compressed projections of the activations rather than the full tensors and approximating the gradients via multi-channel randomized trace estimation. The number of probing vectors sets a memory-accuracy tradeoff and recovers the exact gradient in the limit. We establish convergence guarantees and error bounds for the estimator, showing that its gradient-error variance is comparable to that of stochastic gradient descent. Empirically, XConv matches exact-gradient methods across classification, generative modeling, super-resolution, inpainting, and segmentation, with gaps that narrow as the number of probing vectors grows, while reducing activation memory by a factor of two or more when convolutional activations dominate, and remaining computationally competitive with optimized convolution kernels at larger batch sizes. At half precision the gradient-approximation error falls to the rounding floor, so XConv adds essentially no error beyond that of low-precision arithmetic. The savings matter most where activation memory rather than compute is the binding constraint, such as high-resolution and volumetric training and on-device finetuning.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Cardiac rhythm development: A wearable device index of risk for physical and mental illness in adolescence

Objective. The autonomic nervous system, which regulates cardiac rhythm, undergoes pronounced maturation across adolescence. How cardiac rhythm develops over this period, however, and whether individual differences in its development forecast mental and physical illness, remain open questions. We used three waves of Fitbit data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study to characterize the developmental trajectory of the cardiac rhythm and to test whether variation in that trajectory predicts onset of psychopathology and cardiometabolic disease. Methods. 8,301 adolescents contributed 242,811 valid Fitbit wear days across Waves 2 (Mage=12), 4 (Mage=14), and 6 (Mage=16). Cosinor mixed-effects models yielded three rhythm parameters per session: mesor (24-hour mean), amplitude (diurnal swing), and acrophase (peak timing). We first characterized age- and sex-specific trajectories, cross-wave stability, and factors shaping the rhythm. We then used parallel-process latent growth models to test whether within-person changes in rhythm tracked symptom trajectories, and hierarchical logistic models to test whether rhythm parameters predicted the first clinical onset of psychopathology and of obesity and hypertension. Results. The cardiac rhythm changed substantially across adolescence: mesor decreased, amplitude flattened, and acrophase shifted later. Within-person change in the rhythm tracked change in blood pressure, BMI, and trajectories of depression and ADHD symptoms. Higher mesor predicted incident onset of all five outcomes controlling for demographics, baseline symptoms, and behavior (ORs 1.36-1.54); amplitude, acrophase, and rhythm instability conferred additional risk. Conclusions. The 24-hour cardiac rhythm is a passively measurable substrate of adolescent autonomic development that indexes transdiagnostic risk for psychiatric and cardiometabolic illness.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SpikeDecoder: Realizing the GPT Architecture with Spiking Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.12287v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Transformer architecture is widely regarded as the most powerful tool for natural language processing, but due to a high number of complex operations, it inherently faces the issue of high energy consumption. To address this issue, we consider Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which are an energy-efficient alternative to conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to their naturally event-driven approach to processing information. However, this inherently makes them difficult to train. Often, many SNN-based models circumvent this issue by converting pre-trained ANNs. More recently, attempts have been made to design directly trainable SNN-based adaptations of the Transformer model structure. Although the results showed great promise, the application field was computer vision. Moreover, the proposed model incorporates only encoder blocks. In this paper, we propose SpikeDecoder, a fully SNN-based implementation of the Transformer decoder block, for applications in natural language processing. In a series of experiments, we analyze the impact of exchanging different blocks of the ANN model with spike-based alternatives to identify trade-offs and significant sources of performance loss. We further investigate the role of residual connections and the selection of SNN-compatible normalization techniques. Besides the work on the model architecture, we formulate and compare different embedding methods to project text data into spikes. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed SNN-based decoder block reduces the theoretical energy consumption by 87% to 93% compared to the ANN baseline.

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

QuechuaTok: Morphological Boundary Accuracy as a Necessary Metric for Tokenizer Evaluation in Agglutinative Low-Resource Languages

Tokenization is a foundational step in NLP pipelines, yet standard evaluation metrics such as fertility rate fail to capture morphological correctness for agglutinative languages. We present QuechuaTok, a systematic benchmark comparing four tokenization strategies - BPE, Unigram LM, WordPiece, and a morphology-aware PRPE tokenizer - for Southern Quechua (quz), a low-resource agglutinative language spoken by 8-10 million people in South America. Using a 200k-sentence corpus and the SQUOIA finite-state morphological analyzer (Rios, 2016) as silver standard, we evaluate three metrics: fertility rate, OOV rate, and morphological boundary accuracy (MorphAcc). Our results show that BPE achieves the lowest fertility rate (1.636 at 16k vocab) by memorizing surface word forms, while achieving only 6.67% MorphAcc. PRPE achieves 83.33% MorphAcc - the highest of all systems - demonstrating that fertility rate alone is insufficient to evaluate tokenizers for agglutinative languages. All code and models are publicly available at kaggle.com/code/macmaky/quechuatok

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

TextHOI-3D: Text-to-3D Hand-Object Interaction via Discrete Multi-View Generation and Joint Mesh Optimization

Text-conditioned 3D generation has progressed rapidly for images and isolated objects, but producing a hand-object mesh remains challenging: the output must preserve language semantics, cross-view consistency, object geometry, articulated hand shape, and physically plausible contact. We present TextHOI-3D, a staged framework that uses generated multi-view observations as an explicit interface between text-conditioned visual generation and geometry-aware hand-object recovery. TextHOI-3D learns a compact VQ token space for fixed-camera hand-object observations, predicts multi-view visual tokens from text with a CLIP-conditioned visual autoregressive model, and recovers a unified hand-object mesh through prior initialization, multi-view joint optimization, and anti-penetration refinement. The design separates semantic generation from geometric recovery while keeping both stages connected by a discrete multi-view representation. On HO3D-derived evaluations, the multi-view setting reduces object CD from 17.26 mm to 4.92 mm and penetration volume from 5.3721 cm^3 to 0.2193 cm^3 compared with a single-view counterpart, while improving hand errors and surface F-scores. These results support multi-view visual tokens as an effective intermediate representation for text-driven 3D hand-object mesh creation.

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

Understanding, Detecting, and Repairing Real-World In-Context-Learning-Based Text-to-SQL Errors

Large language models (LLMs) have been adopted for text-to-SQL tasks, utilizing their in-context learning (ICL) capability to translate natural language questions into SQL queries. However, such a technique faces correctness problems. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive study of text-to-SQL errors of ICL-based techniques. Our study covers four representative ICL-based techniques, five basic repairing methods, two benchmarks, and two LLM settings. We find that text-to-SQL errors are widespread and summarize 27 error types of 7 categories. We also find that existing repairing attempts have limited correctness improvement while having high computational overhead and many mis-repairs. Based on these findings, we propose MapleDoctor, a novel text-to-SQL error detection and repairing framework. The evaluation demonstrates that MapleDoctor outperforms existing solutions by repairing 13.8% more queries with a negligible number of mis-repairs and reducing 67.4% repair latency. The artifact is publicly available at GitHub.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

The Periodic Table of LLM Reasoning: A Structured Survey of Reasoning Paradigms, Methods, and Failure Modes

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across natural language processing tasks, yet reliable reasoning remains an open challenge. Although modern LLMs show progress in structured inference, multi-step problem solving, and contextual understanding, their reasoning behavior is often inconsistent and sensitive to prompting strategies, task design, and model scale. This survey provides a systematic analysis of more than 300 recent papers from arXiv, Semantic Scholar, Google Scholar, Papers with Code, and the ACL Anthology to examine how reasoning capabilities emerge in LLMs and where they fail. We make three main contributions. First, we introduce a structured taxonomy of LLM reasoning research, covering Chain-of-Thought reasoning, multi-hop reasoning, mathematical reasoning, common sense reasoning, visual and temporal reasoning, code and algorithmic reasoning, retrieval-augmented reasoning, tool-augmented and agentic reasoning, and reinforcement learning-based reasoning. Second, we analyze methodological trends across these paradigms, including prompting methods, model architectures, training objectives, reward modeling, and evaluation benchmarks. Third, we synthesize recurring limitations and failure modes, such as reasoning hallucinations, brittle multi-step inference, weak causal abstraction, and poor cross-domain generalization. By organizing a rapidly expanding literature, this survey offers a unified view of the current capabilities and limitations of reasoning in LLMs. We also identify emerging research directions, including meta-reasoning, self-evolving reasoning frameworks, multimodal reasoning, and socially grounded reasoning. Overall, this work aims to serve as a reference for developing more robust, interpretable, and generalizable reasoning systems in future language models.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Feature-Aligned Speech Watermarking for Robustness to Reconstruction Distortions

arXiv:2606.11828v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio watermarking aims to embed identifiable information into audio while remaining imperceptible. Existing methods adopt high-fidelity, low-energy designs to preserve perceptual quality, but the resulting watermarks lack robustness under suppression by speech reconstruction models. Improving robustness is challenging due to the inherent robustness-fidelity trade-off in existing designs, where increasing watermark energy improves robustness but reduces fidelity. To address this problem, we propose a feature-aligned watermarking method that aligns the watermark with the original speech feature distribution, allowing higher watermark energy to improve robustness while preserving imperceptibility. We use a pretrained speech codec to generate a pseudo-speech watermark and fuse it into the spectrogram of the input audio, with VAD loss and perceptual losses guiding embedding within voiced regions. Experiments show that our method maintains imperceptibility comparable to existing approaches while substantially improving robustness under both seen and unseen speech reconstruction models.

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

The Silent Cost of Artificial Intelligence Assistance: A Theory of Autonomy Surrender, the Recovery Mechanism, and the Restoration of Human Agency

arXiv:2606.13962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The integration of artificial intelligence into human decision-making environments has introduced a previously undertheorized cost: the gradual surrender of human autonomy in exchange for access to information and computational assistance. Building on the Human Identity and Autonomy Gap (HIAG) framework, this paper advances a theoretical model of autonomy surrender as a measurable, cumulative process driven by cognitive bandwidth depletion. The model proposes three interacting mechanisms: the silent cost of AI assistance, in which autonomy is transferred incrementally and without awareness; the surrender threshold, beyond which reclaiming autonomous function becomes cognitively and psychologically difficult; and the recovery mechanism, which establishes the design obligation and the ethical responsibility accompanying deliberate human re-assumption of control. The paper argues that human re-entry into the decision loop is not a passive option but an active cognitive event requiring intentional bandwidth restoration. The design of AI systems must incorporate structured re-entry pathways, here termed recovery mechanisms, that preserve human agency while appropriately distributing responsibility. The model further predicts a terminal state, here termed preference inversion, in which functional dependence on AI assistance is experienced not as a deficit but as a preference, transforming the restoration of autonomy from a design problem into a cultural and political one. Implications are drawn for AI system design, governance frameworks, and human factors research.

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

Strategic Decision Support for AI Agents

arXiv:2606.12587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditionally, decision support studies how humans use machine learning models to make better decisions. In modern agentic systems, this division of roles is increasingly reversed: AI agents act on behalf of users, while humans and tools becomes support mechanisms around them. This role reversal brings reliability concerns to the forefront, since agentic errors can be consequential and agent behavior must remain aligned with human goals and constraints. Departing from the classical view of decision support, we revisit its two basic principles, the cost–value tradeoff of seeking support and the role of uncertainty quantification, in a setting where AI agents are the central actors. We propose a framework for strategic decision support for AI agents through an optimization problem that minimizes support usage subject to controlling a counterfactual missed-support error: the probability that the agent acts alone on instances where support would have materially improved its output. At the population level, we show that the optimal policy is a threshold rule on the value of support. Building on this structure, we develop an online algorithm that adaptively thresholds such a score and uses randomized exploration to control missed-support error without distributional assumptions. We further introduce a calibration-on-the-fly method that reduces unnecessary support calls online. We instantiate this framework across diverse scenarios, including information gathering, human–AI collaboration, and tool use, showing how each can be modeled through the same strategic decision-support lens. Experiments across these settings show that our method reliably controls the target error while substantially reducing support usage in practice.

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

Structured Testbench Generation for LLM-Driven HDL Design and Verification-Oriented Data Curation

arXiv:2606.12983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated testbench generation has become a critical bottleneck in large language model (LLM)-driven Register Transfer Level (RTL) workflows, where large numbers of candidate designs must be verified rapidly and reliably. Existing prompt-based approaches treat testbench generation as unconstrained code synthesis, yielding stochastic outputs with high token cost, low reproducibility, and insufficient coverage. To address this gap, we present STG, a Structured Testbench Generation framework that exploits the inherent structure of hardware designs to generate deterministic testbenches. As a direct verification tool, STG runs 720x faster than an iterative LLM-based testbench generation flow and higher rate of successful compilation, achieves higher coverage, and reduces false-pass verdicts on incorrect DUTs. STG also helps identify errors in RTL generation benchmarks by exposing faulty benchmark testbenches. As a data curation engine, it is 11x faster than LLM-based filtering on a single CPU core with 127x less energy, and the resulting distilled models provide state-of-the-art performance in our multi-benchmark evaluation. As a test-time scaling oracle, it reduces node count by 14-47\%. Our models are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/AS-SiliconMind/siliconmind-v12.

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

GeoDial: A Multimodal Conversational Tutoring Dataset for Geometry Problem-Solving with Visual Tutor Turns

arXiv:2606.12419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Several educational domains rely heavily on diagrams and visual cues, yet most existing tutoring datasets are limited to text-only interactions. This limits the development of AI tutors that can teach in visually grounded ways used by human instructors. Thus, we introduce GeoDial, a multimodal tutoring dataset of over 1.3K teacher-student dialogs in the domain of geometry collected from experienced math teachers, where instructional turns are explicitly grounded in diagram highlights. We propose a scalable annotation protocol that integrates dialog acts, visual highlighting, and feedback, enabling fine-grained supervision of both language and visual tutoring behavior. To illustrate the challenges posed by this setting, we fine-tune several vision-language models on GeoDial and evaluate their ability to generate tutoring utterances and diagram highlights. While supervised fine-tuning substantially improves the quality of generated dialog, it struggles to produce accurate diagram highlights, revealing a key limitation of current methods and highlighting the need for approaches that more effectively integrate visual reasoning with pedagogical interaction.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Akasha 2: Hamiltonian State Space Duality and Visual-Language Joint Embedding Predictive Architectur

Authors:

We present Akasha 2, a state-of-the-art multimodal architecture that integrates Hamiltonian State Space Duality (H-SSD) with Visual-Language Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (VL-JEPA). The system leverages the Mamba-3 Selective State Space Model (SSM) augmented by a Sparse Mixture of Hamiltonian Experts (SMoE-HE) that enforces latent physical conservation laws through symplectic integration. For visual synthesis, we introduce Hamiltonian Flow Matching (HFM) and persistent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), enabling ultra-low latency (

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

Quality Perceptions and Intended Engagement in Response to AI-Generated and AI-Assisted News

arXiv:2409.03500v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in news production raises important questions about how audiences perceive and respond to AI-generated journalism. This preregistered survey experiment (N = 599, German-speaking Switzerland) examines (i) perceptions of article quality (measured as credibility, readability, and expertise) across news excerpts that were human-written, AI-assisted, or fully AI-generated, and (ii) self-reported intentions to engage following disclosure of AI involvement. Participants rated two short news excerpts before learning how they had been produced. Articles across all conditions were evaluated similarly in perceived quality. After disclosure, participants in the AI-assisted and AI-generated conditions reported a higher willingness to continue reading their assigned articles compared to the control group, but future willingness to read AI-generated news did not differ across conditions. Overall, the findings suggest that readers assess AI-generated and human-written news comparably in quality, while disclosure of AI use can momentarily increase curiosity or interest without yet changing longer-term reading intentions.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Point-Identification of a Robust Predictor Under Latent Shift with Imperfect Proxies

arXiv:2603.15158v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Addressing the domain adaptation problem becomes more challenging when distribution shifts across domains stem from latent confounders that affect both covariates and outcomes. Existing proxy-based approaches that address latent shift rely on a strong completeness assumption to uniquely determine (point-identify) a robust predictor. Completeness requires that proxies have sufficient information about variations in latent confounders. For imperfect proxies the mapping from confounders to the space of proxy distributions is non-injective, and multiple latent confounder values can generate the same proxy distribution. This breaks the completeness assumption and observed data are consistent with multiple potential predictors (set-identified). To address this, we introduce latent equivalent classes (LECs). LECs are defined as groups of latent confounders that induce the same conditional proxy distribution. We show that point-identification for the robust predictor remains achievable as long as multiple domains differ sufficiently in how they mix proxy-induced LECs to form the robust predictor. This domain diversity condition is formalized as a cross-domain rank condition on the mixture weights, which is substantially weaker assumption than completeness. We introduce the Proximal Quasi-Bayesian Active learning (PQAL) framework, which actively queries a small, targeted set of diverse domains that satisfy this rank condition. PQAL can recover the point-identified predictor, demonstrates robustness to varying degrees of shift and outperforms previous methods on synthetic data and semi-synthetic dSprites, IHDP, ACS Folktables datasets.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CogCanvas: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multi-Subject Reference-Based Image Generation

Multi-subject reference-based image generation requires jointly preserving multiple human identities, binding per-person objects and fashion items, and respecting a specified background scene, a regime where current diffusion models remain brittle. Existing benchmarks evaluate only one axis at a time and none jointly captures multi-identity composition with human-object interaction, background grounding, and spatial plausibility. We introduce CogCanvas, a benchmark of 1,952 curated reference images spanning 100 celebrity identities, 115 distinctive objects and fashion items, and 29 real-world background scenes including landmarks, from which we construct 1,361 compositional prompts covering 2-5 person group sizes. The curation pipeline combines DINOv2-based deduplication, two-stage aesthetic filtering, and automated derivation of structured interaction and position graphs that serve as ground-truth supervision. CogCanvas supports three tasks, reference-based multi-human-object generation (primary), text-to-image compositional generation, and reference retrieval, under a unified six-axis evaluation protocol. We introduce two metrics tailored to the multi-reference setting: BG-Sim, which scores background fidelity on SAM 3-masked regions via DINOv3 feature similarity, and Attr-VQA, which uses a multimodal LLM to verify per-subject attribute binding and inter-person interactions against the structured graphs. Benchmarking five SOTA methods reveals that every model degrades substantially as group size grows from 2 to 5, with near-complete failure on object/fashion binding beyond three subjects.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Better Adherence, Richer Context: A Field Evaluation of LLM-Powered Conversational Voice Diaries for Sleep

arXiv:2606.18596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sleep diaries are central to behavioral sleep medicine and cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, yet daily completion is difficult to sustain, and static forms often provide limited context for interpreting night-to-night sleep variation. We designed an LLM-powered conversational voice diary that delivers clinically grounded morning and evening sleep diary questions through proactive smart-speaker prompts, structured conversational intake, and adaptive follow-up dialogue. We evaluated the system in a four-week between-subjects field study with 30 university students, comparing it with a text-based mobile diary using matched diary items, reporting windows, and reminder intervals. Compared with the text-based diary, the conversational voice diary showed higher adherence and elicited more detailed contextual self-report about routines, stressors, environmental conditions, and other sleep-related factors. Participants also described the voice diary as easier to integrate into daily routines, despite longer perceived completion time. However, voice-based conversational intake produced lower completeness for some structured diary fields, revealing a trade-off between expressive richness and structured precision. These findings show both the promise and the challenge of using LLM-powered conversational voice assistants for longitudinal health self-report.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Doc-to-Atom: Learning to Compile and Compose Memory Atoms

Long input sequences are central to document understanding and multi-step reasoning in Large Language Models, yet the quadratic cost of attention makes inference both memory-intensive and slow. Context distillation mitigates this by compressing contextual information into model parameters, and recent work such as Doc-to-LoRA amortizes context distillation into a single forward pass that generates one LoRA adapter per document. However, producing a single monolithic adapter for all queries leads to irrelevant-query interference, limited compositional recall, and poor scalability to long-document reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose Doc-to-Atom (Doc2Atom), a compositional parametric memory framework that decomposes each document into semantically typed knowledge atoms. Each atom is compiled into an independent micro-LoRA adapter and a provenance retrieval key. At inference time, a lightweight query router selects and assembles only the relevant atoms into a query-specific adapter, which is then injected into a frozen base model. The entire system is trained end-to-end through a multi-objective distillation framework. Experiments on six diverse QA benchmarks demonstrate that Doc2Atom outperforms Doc-to-LoRA baselines while reducing the memory cost of document internalization.