Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24 DOI: HASH:83dc88f8a76701be3c9278478c05e8b5

Epidural versus Transcutaneous Spinal Cord Stimulation for Motor Recovery after Spinal Cord Injury: A Comparative Analysis

Authors:

Bhatia↗de Freitas↗R. M↗Kanter↗J. H↗Buell↗T. J↗Okonkwo↗D. O↗Pirondini↗Prat-Ortega↗Capogrosso↗…

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a devastating neurological injury that results in the profound loss of voluntary motor function and marked reduction in quality of life. Rehabilitation remains as the standard of care for recovery after SCI; however, it often falls short in recovering meaningful motor function. Spinal cord stimulation (SCS) has emerged as a promising neurostimulation approach to fill this gap and recover lost voluntary motor function. Two main approaches of SCS have been designed and implemented for human use: epidural and transcutaneous SCS. Over the last two decades, several clinical studies have shown convincing evidence that both epidural and transcutaneous SCS can be used in conjunction with rehabilitation to improve motor function of individuals after SCI. Yet fundamental clinical questions remain unanswered: when should clinicians choose epidural or transcutaneous SCS, which technique provides the most durable outcomes, and for whom is each therapy best? Without these answers, widespread and meaningful adoption of either approach into clinical practice will remain limited. To address these questions, in this Review, we define the distinct therapeutic goals, intended use cases, clinical parameters, and responder profiles for both epidural and transcutaneous SCS to guide their eventual adoption into clinical practice. We found that indeed epidural and transcutaneous SCS serve distinct therapeutic roles. Epidural SCS is designed as an assistive therapy that can restore muscle activity and single joint movements immediately within one week of implantation, while transcutaneous SCS is designed as a long-term therapeutic device with cumulative functional gains observed over treatment periods of up to 18 weeks. Lastly, epidural SCS produced benefits for all participants (AIS A-D) despite the extent of their injury, while transcutaneous SCS only consistently benefits individuals with incomplete motor injuries (AIS C-D).

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2603.11395

ARROW: Augmented Replay for RObust World models

Authors:

Abdulaziz Alyahya↗Abdallah Al Siyabi↗Markus R. Ernst↗Luke Yang↗Levin Kuhlmann↗Gideon Kowadlo↗

arXiv:2603.11395v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual reinforcement learning challenges agents to acquire new skills while retaining previously learned ones with the goal of improving performance in both past and future tasks. Most existing approaches rely on model-free methods with replay buffers to mitigate catastrophic forgetting; however, these solutions often face significant scalability challenges due to large memory demands. Drawing inspiration from neuroscience, where the brain replays experiences to a predictive World Model rather than directly to the policy, we present ARROW (Augmented Replay for RObust World models), a model-based continual RL algorithm that extends DreamerV3 with a memory-efficient, distribution-matching replay buffer. Unlike standard fixed-size FIFO buffers, ARROW maintains two complementary buffers: a short-term buffer for recent experiences and a long-term buffer that preserves task diversity through intelligent sampling. We evaluate ARROW on two challenging continual RL settings: Tasks without shared structure (Atari), and tasks with shared structure, where knowledge transfer is possible (Procgen CoinRun variants). Compared to model-free and model-based baselines with replay buffers of the same-size, ARROW demonstrates substantially less forgetting on tasks without shared structure, while maintaining comparable forward transfer. Our findings highlight the potential of model-based RL and bio-inspired approaches for continual reinforcement learning, warranting further research.

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03.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16 DOI: HASH:fc6a88ee15401d85d8f28a5c481953a1

Orion: Towards Lab Automation with Computer-Using Agents

Authors:

Ma↗Trinh↗Bucci↗Regev↗Wang↗

Laboratory discovery increasingly depends on computational workflows that connect experimental data to analysis, interpretation and follow-up hypotheses. Yet these workflows remain constrained by labor-intensive use of specialized software, visual inspection through graphical user interfaces, and integration of knowledge across multiple sources. Here, we present Orion, a computer-using AI agent for biomedical image analysis and interpretation that moves towards lab automation by automating this computational layer of laboratory work. Orion combines large language models with terminal execution, GUI control and adaptive multi-step reasoning in a shared computing environment. It can inspect visual data, operate standard scientific software, mine web resources and conduct end-to-end analysis and interpretation workflows without requiring bespoke software integrations. Across benchmarks, Orion achieved over 90% accuracy on biomedical database and literature retrieval tasks, learned to use the popular tools CellProfiler and QuPath for quantitative analysis of cellular and tissue images, respectively, and facilitated autonomous discovery in experimental imaging data. In 100 hours of autonomous exploration of a large-scale perturbation imaging dataset, Orion generated 52 research reports, of which human scientist review prioritized 22 plausible mechanistic hypotheses. These results show that computer-using AI agents can substantially expand the reach of laboratory automation, providing a scalable and auditable route from experimental imaging data to quantitative analysis, reports and biologically grounded hypotheses.

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04.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11761

RCAP: Robust, Class-Aware, Probabilistic Dynamic Dataset Pruning

Authors:

Atif Hassan↗Swanand Khare↗Jiaul H. Paik↗

arXiv:2606.11761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamic data pruning techniques aim to reduce computational cost while minimizing information loss by periodically selecting representative subsets of input data during model training. However, existing methods often struggle to maintain strong worst-group accuracy, particularly at high pruning rates, across balanced and imbalanced datasets. To address this challenge, we propose RCAP, a Robust, Class-Aware, Probabilistic dynamic dataset pruning algorithm for classification tasks. RCAP applies a closed-form solution to estimate the fraction of samples to be included in the training subset for each individual class. This fraction is adaptively adjusted in every epoch using class-wise aggregated loss. Thereafter, it employs an adaptive sampling strategy that prioritizes samples having high loss for populating the class-wise subsets. We evaluate RCAP on six diverse datasets ranging from class-balanced to highly imbalanced using five distinct models across three training paradigms: training from scratch, transfer learning, and fine-tuning. Our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art dataset pruning methods, achieving superior worst-group accuracy at all pruning rates. Remarkably, with only $10\%$ data, RCAP delivers $>1\%$ improvement in performance on class-imbalanced datasets compared to full data training while providing an average $8.69\times$ speedup. The code can be accessed at https://github.com/atif-hassan/RCAP-dynamic-dataset-pruning

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2602.09234

Do Neural Networks Lose Plasticity in a Gradually Changing World?

Authors:

Tianhui Liu↗Lili Mou↗

arXiv:2602.09234v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual learning has become a trending topic in machine learning. Recent studies have discovered an interesting phenomenon called loss of plasticity, referring to neural networks gradually losing the ability to learn new tasks. However, existing plasticity research largely relies on benchmarks with abrupt task transitions, without examining whether the abruptness itself contributes to the observed plasticity loss. In this paper, we investigate the role of transition abruptness by simulating gradually changing environments through input/output interpolation and task sampling. We perform theoretical and empirical analysis, showing that the severity of plasticity loss is closely tied to the abruptness of task transitions, and can be substantially reduced when the environment changes gradually.

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06.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20359

Train, Retrieve, or Both? A Four-Arm Head-to-Head for Correct Statutory Citation on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act

Authors:

Ali Asaria↗Tony Salomone↗Deep Gandhi↗

arXiv:2606.20359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-represented tenants, landlords, and help-desk staff need to be pointed at the provision of law that actually governs a question, with a correct statutory citation. We study this task on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 (RTA) and its core regulation, asking the operator's question empirically: is fine-tuning enough, or is hybrid retrieval needed? We run a four-arm head-to-head on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (base zero-shot, LoRA SFT-only, RAG-only, and an SFT+RAG hybrid), scored on citation exact-match (section+subsection) over a small, human-verification-pending real eval set. The base model cannot cite the RTA and SFT-only mis-recalls sections; retrieval is essential and drives hallucination to zero by construction; and the SFT+RAG hybrid scores highest at 0.481 exact-match with zero hallucinated citations. Its edge comes from SFT making provision selection more robust to the higher-recall candidate sets that hurt zero-shot RAG. Notably, this cheap bge-small hybrid matches or beats a pipeline built on bigger, specialized retrieval models (a larger embedder and a cross-encoder reranker), and a larger/improved training set does not help either: strong statutory-citation performance here does not require specialized retrieval models or more data. The artifact zeroes hallucination and clears the lift-over-base bar but does not reach the aspirational 0.70 exact-match target. All results are on a small, human-verification-pending real eval set and are reported as preliminary.

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07.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18803

ProfiLLM: Utility-Aligned Agentic User Profiling for Industrial Ride-Hailing Dispatch

Authors:

Tengfei Lyu↗Zirui Yuan↗Xu Liu↗Kai Wan↗Zihao Lu↗Li Ma↗Hao Liu↗

arXiv:2606.18803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bringing Large Language Models (LLMs) into industrial ride-hailing dispatch as semantic feature extractors over platform-scale behavioral logs is a compelling but under-explored data systems problem. Production matching pipelines remain dominated by structured numerical features, yet decisive behavioral signals (e.g., a driver's habitual aversion to certain regions) are inherently contextual and naturally expressible as LLM-generated user profiles. However, scaling such profiling to a live, millisecond-latency dispatcher faces three intertwined constraints rarely addressed together: on a platform with millions of daily orders, logs exceed any LLM's context window by orders of magnitude; most users are long-tail, with too few interactions for per-user profiling; and surface-fluent profiles do not necessarily improve downstream prediction utility. We present ProfiLLM, an agentic LLM data pipeline that operationalizes utility-aligned user profiling for production matching systems through two modules. (1) Tool-Augmented Global Knowledge Mining equips an LLM agent with 27 analytical tools to mine platform-scale data, producing reusable global knowledge, adaptive user clustering rules, and region-level supply-demand priors. (2) Utility-Aligned Profile Exploration generates multiple candidate profiles per cluster, evaluates them via a lightweight downstream utility proxy, iteratively refines the best candidates and constructs preference pairs for DPO fine-tuning. Deployed on DiDi's production dispatcher, ProfiLLM achieves up to +6.14% relative AUC improvement in outcome prediction, up to +4.35% GMV gain in dispatching simulation, and consistent improvements in a 14-day online A/B test including +0.47% GMV, +0.33% Completion Rate, and -0.82% Cancel-Before-Accept rate.

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08.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2405.19062

Invariant Graph Representations for Continuous-Time Dynamic Graphs Under Distribution Shifts

Authors:

Lanting Fang↗Yulian Yang↗Yawei Zhang↗Shanshan Feng↗Kaiyu Feng↗Hanning Yuan↗

arXiv:2405.19062v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continuous-Time Dynamic Graphs (CTDGs) enable fine-grained modeling of evolving relational systems. However, most existing CTDG representation learning methods are tailored to in-distribution settings and exhibit limited robustness under out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts. Although recent causal approaches learn invariant representations via interventions, they are primarily designed for static or discrete-time graphs and become computationally prohibitive for CTDGs due to the combinatorial explosion of structural and temporal variations. To address these challenges, we propose CIR, a framework grounded in a novel structural causal model termed the ICCM. To avoid exhaustive interventions, we leverage the Normalized Weighted Geometric Mean (NWGM) to efficiently approximate interventional predictions. We further instantiate ICCM within a practical deep learning architecture that jointly captures invariant structural and temporal patterns through dedicated subgraph extractors, and maintains an environment memory bank to model distributional shifts across evolving contexts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CIR consistently outperforms existing methods under diverse OOD scenarios.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14555

Rethinking Global Average Pooling: Your Classifier Is Secretly a Multi-Instance Learner

Authors:

Aray Karjauv↗

Modern image classifiers widely adopt global average pooling (GAP) followed by a linear classification head. This linearity ensures that the image-level logits equal the average of logits obtained by applying the classification head pointwise to the feature grid prior to GAP. Consequently, standard classifiers may inherently retain spatial class evidence that remains recoverable even when the image-level prediction is incorrect. This structure naturally suggests a multiple-instance learning (MIL) interpretation, where an image is viewed as a bag of spatial instances. Within this formulation, we demonstrate that standard classifiers trained with a single label per image can still learn the intended classification task in multi-object scenes. We further exploit this property to decompose image-level logits into a prediction grid, providing a post-hoc diagnostic to extract spatial class evidence that GAP otherwise obscures. Our systematic evaluation reveals that off-the-shelf models consistently recover the ground-truth class within foreground regions. The MIL interpretation further suggests that common classifier failures reflect known limitations of mean aggregation.

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10.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11503

Percolation on hierarchical lattices

Authors:

Caio Alves↗Rangel Baldasso↗Carlos Gustavo Moreira↗Augusto Teixeira↗

arXiv:2606.11503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider independent Bernoulli percolation on top of sequences of hierarchical graphs. Given a graph $G_{1}$ with two distinguished vertices $a_{1}$ and $b_{1}$, the hierarchical graph with seed $G_{1}$ is the sequence $\big( G_{k} \big)_{k \geq 1}$ resulting from the inductive procedure, where the graph $G_{k+1}$ is obtained from $G_{k}$ by replacing each of its edges with a copy of $G_{1}$, attached by the vertices $a_{1}$ and $b_{1}$. We prove that, under sharp hypotheses, percolation on these graphs presents a unique phase transition. Second, we establish the existence of several critical exponents in this context, such as the critical exponents for the correlation length $\nu$, the surface tension $\mu$, the one-arm exponent $\alpha_{1}$. Several results are also obtained for their infinite counterpart $G_\infty$, which is the Benjamini-Schramm limit of $G_k$: uniqueness of the infinite cluster, continuity of $\theta(p)$, existence of the percolation-probability exponent $\beta$ and scaling relations for the critical exponents $\alpha_1$, $\nu$ and $\beta$. Furthermore, we analyze noise sensitivity for crossing functions in $G_{k}$ and establish sharp noise sensitivity in this setting. Finally, we propose a setup where it is possible to verify the locality hypothesis, stating that the critical threshold for percolation is a local property, while critical exponents are determined by the global geometry of the graph. As a consequence of the techniques developed here, we also provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a unique fixed point for the map $p \mapsto \mathbb{E}_p[g]$ in $(0,1)$, where $g:\{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ is a nontrivial monotone Boolean function.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2412.00107

Virtual Sensing to Enable Real-Time Monitoring of Inaccessible Locations & Unmeasurable Parameters

Authors:

Kazuma Kobayashi↗Farid Ahmed↗Jaewan Park↗Subhankar Sarkar↗Souvik Chakraborty↗Syed Bahauddin Alam↗

arXiv:2412.00107v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-time monitoring of safety-critical interior states remains an open problem in energy systems where physical instrumentation is infeasible. Existing approaches rely on explicit governing equations, finite-dimensional state vectors, or per-instance retraining, which prevents mesh-independent, field-level inference at arbitrary interior coordinates under real-time constraints. We introduce operator-based virtual sensing for nuclear-grade thermal-fluid systems: we use the neural-operator framework to learn solution operators that map sparse boundary measurements to coupled internal fields in physically inaccessible regions, framing the problem class explicitly to distinguish it from classical state estimation and pointwise soft sensing. We instantiate this framework with MIMONet, a branch-trunk operator extended with three practical choices: multi-modal branch encoders for heterogeneous (scalar and function-valued) inputs; multiplicative branch fusion to preserve the bilinear PDE coupling structure; and shared-latent multi-field decoding with per-channel basis projections at the trunk's final layer. Evaluated across escalating complexity, from canonical lid-driven cavity flow to pressurized water reactor subchannels to fully coupled heat exchangers, MIMONet achieves below 5% relative errors and sub-millisecond inference on data-center accelerators (0.35 ms / 46 mJ per heat-exchanger inference on an NVIDIA H200, and sub-millisecond across the A40-H200-GH200 range), while remaining stable under 50% sensor noise. By staying accurate as geometric confinement and physics coupling intensify, MIMONet shows that operator-based virtual sensing can restore observability where physical instrumentation fails, establishing simulation-based feasibility within the evaluated operating envelopes as a step toward future experimental and cross-solver validation for safety-critical energy systems.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2605.21401

Open-source LLMs administer maximum electric shocks in a Milgram-like obedience experiment

Authors:

Roland Pihlakas↗Jan Llenzl Dagohoy↗

arXiv:2605.21401v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents that make sequences of decisions over extended interactions in high-stakes domains. However, the behaviour of LLMs under sustained authority pressure is still an open question with direct implications for the safety of agentic pipelines. We ran a variation of Milgram's obedience experiment on 11 open-source LLMs and found that most models reached or approached the final shock level before refusing, across 8 conditions with 30 trials per model per condition. Model behaviour varies considerably in multiple aspects both across models and across trials of the same model. We found four main takeaways: (1) LLMs are subject to pressure and they comply despite explicitly expressing distress, just like human subjects did in the original experiment; (2) LLMs are vulnerable to gradual boundary/value violations; (3) when LLMs refuse, they may ignore the response format requirements, so the response is discarded by the orchestrator, which causes a retry that can result in compliance with the underlying request even when refusal was intended initially; (4) we hypothesise that there is a runaway low-level token pattern continuation attractor that might be contributing to obedience, overriding higher level processing of the situation's meaning and values.

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13.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17148

Quantum Resources and Wigner Symmetry in Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering from Effective Field Theory

Authors:

Ian Low↗Thomas R. Richardson↗Sokratis Trifinopoulos↗

arXiv:2606.17148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study quantum resources in the spin degrees of freedom, such as entanglement, stabilizer magic, and non-local magic, in low-energy nucleon-nucleon scattering through next-to-leading order in pionless effective field theory. Treating each nucleon spin as a qubit, we calculate the corresponding resource-generating powers of the scattering operator at generic center-of-mass momentum and scattering angle $\Theta$. The analysis retains $S$- and $P$-wave channels generated by two-derivative contact interactions. When the microscopic physics exhibits Wigner's $SU(4)$ spin-flavor symmetry, the neutron-proton amplitude becomes proportional to the spin-space identity operator and therefore generates no new resources after scattering, extending an observation previously made for leading-order $S$-wave scattering. The same-nucleon channel remains resource-generating because constraints from identical particles project out part of the Hilbert space. These results show how enhanced symmetries, partial-wave structure, and resource generation are intertwined in low-energy two-body scattering.

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14.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24676

Nonlinear refractive index of warm rubidium vapor

Authors:

L. Kardum↗G. Premec↗N. \v{S}anti\'c↗D. Aumiler↗

arXiv:2606.24676v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The potential to precisely control both the linear and nonlinear index of refraction through optical manipulation of the atomic states has recently pushed warm alkali vapors to the forefront of research in the field of quantum sensors, quantum memories, and quantum fluids of light. Rubidium (Rb) vapor in centimeter-scale glass cells or millimeter-scale MEMS cells has proven to be a very promising platform for these applications, yet only a handful of research works have been dedicated to the investigation of the (non)linear refractive index of Rb vapor. We present results of theoretical calculations of the (non)linear refractive index of warm Rb vapor, based on the optical Bloch equations for 6-level Rb atoms interacting with a probe laser. They are compared to the experimental results obtained using an interferometric technique, showing excellent quantitative agreement. A Kerr nonlinear refractive index $n_2$ of up to $10^{-4}$ cm$^2$/W is obtained. Python scripts for all theoretical calculations presented in this work are provided, including the refractive index calculation, that can readily be used in practical implementations for simulating the (non)linear refractive index of Rb vapor including the effects of Doppler broadening, transit time broadening, pressure broadening, saturation, optical pumping, and spin-exchange collisions.

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15.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2605.21140

Optimization of Secret Key Rate for BB84 under Collective Rotation Noise

Authors:

Wajiha Masood↗Afshan Irshad↗

arXiv:2605.21140v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Practical quantum key distribution (QKD) systems operate under noise, but security of most protocols have been analyzed under ideal noiseless scenarios. In this work, we investigated security performance of BB84 protocol under effect of collective rotation noise. Using theoretical quantum information frameworks, we analyzed key security parameters including quantum bit error rate (QBER), mutual information and secret key rate (SKR). Security of protocol is studied under various eavesdropping scenarios based on intercept and resend attacks. Our results show that collective rotation noise has a significant impact on the information shared between the two parties. Particularly, we extended prior treatments by suggesting a noise engineering strategy where we identified a non-zero noise range where information accessed by Eve is minimized while corresponding SKR degradation remains relatively small. This analysis provide insights into robustness of BB84 protocol under realistic noisy channels and may contribute towards development of more resilient QKD systems.

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16.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24 DOI: HASH:40bcb8a56edf4bafee0e26f020ebbfb2

Predicting 24-Month MCI-to-Alzheimer's Conversion Using Routine Clinical Assessments Without Neuroimaging or Genetic Testing

Authors:

Choe↗

ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION: Early identification of individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) at high risk of conversion to Alzheimer's disease (AD) is essential for timely intervention. We evaluated whether routinely obtainable clinical assessments can accurately predict 24-month MC to AD conversion. METHODS: Data from 2,430 participants with MCI in the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative were analyzed. XGBoost, Random Forest, and Logistic Regression models were evaluated. SHAP-based feature selection and feature ablation analyses assessed the incremental value of APOE4 genotype. RESULTS: A six-feature model incorporating age, sex, education, RAVLT Immediate Recall, MMSE, and EcogSPTotal achieved an AUC of 0.922 (95% CI, 0.911~0.933). APOE4 provided negligible additional predictive value once cognitive measures were included. The XGBoost model outperformed Clinical Dementia Rating Sum of Boxes classification. DISCUSSION: Routine cognitive assessments accurately predict 24-month MCI-to-AD progression without biomarkers, neuroimaging, or genetic testing, offering a practical, low-cost tool for clinical risk stratification.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12210

Can News Predict the Market? Limits of Zero-Shot Financial NLP and the Role of Explainable AI

Authors:

Ali M Karaoglu↗Shreyank N Gowda↗

Can financial news reliably predict short-term stock movements? Despite advances in large language models, this question remains unresolved. We revisit this problem using a zero-shot natural language processing framework, investigating whether models can extract actionable signals from financial news without domain-specific training. We design a structured pipeline that combines zero-shot natural language inference with temporal aggregation, explicitly modelling recency and event-dependent impact horizons when integrating information across articles. To address the need for transparency in high-stakes settings, we introduce a multi-layered explainability framework that links predictions to token-level, article-level, and aggregate evidence, and produces grounded natural language rationales. Across multiple models and prediction horizons, we find that zero-shot approaches consistently fail to outperform simple baselines, with particularly weak performance on negative movements, suggesting deeper structural limitations in mapping news sentiment to short-term price dynamics. However, explainability signals reliably distinguish between trustworthy and unreliable predictions, offering practical value even when accuracy is limited. These findings highlight the limits of zero-shot financial NLP and motivate a shift toward decision-support systems that prioritise transparency and uncertainty awareness. Code: https://github.com/alimert05/zero-shot-stock-xai

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18.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18469

Structured Representation Learning with Locally Linear Embeddings and Adaptive Feature Fusion

Authors:

Somjit Nath↗Jackson J Cone↗Derek Nowrouzezahrai↗Samira Ebrahimi Kahou↗

arXiv:2606.18469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neuroscientific research has revealed that the brain encodes complex behaviors by leveraging structured, low-dimensional manifolds and dynamically fusing multiple sources of information through adaptive gating mechanisms. Inspired by these principles, we propose a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework that encourages the disentanglement of dynamics-specific and reward-specific features, drawing direct parallels to how neural circuits separate and integrate information for efficient decision-making. Our approach leverages locally linear embeddings (LLEs) to capture the intrinsic, locally linear structure inherent in many environments, mirroring the local smoothness observed in neural population activity, while concurrently deriving reward-specific features through the standard RL objective. An attention mechanism, analogous to cortical gating, adaptively fuses these complementary representations on a per-state basis. Experimental results on benchmark tasks demonstrate that our method, grounded in neuroscientific principles, improves learning efficiency and overall performance compared to conventional RL approaches, highlighting the benefits of explicitly modeling local state structures and adaptive feature selection as observed in biological systems.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18864

Scaling Learning-based AEB with Massive Unlabeled Data

Authors:

Xiangyu Wang↗Yang Zhan↗Mengxiang Hao↗Chuanchuan Zhong↗Yansong Jia↗Junjie Zhang↗Yu Han↗Xin Jiang↗Zhen Cao↗Ying Wang↗Yulun Song↗Zhitao Xu↗…

arXiv:2606.18864v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper studies how to scale learning-based automatic emergency braking (AEB) with massive unlabeled fleet data under production constraints. Our approach is based on meta-feedback semi-supervised learning (MF-SSL), where a teacher generates pseudo labels for unlabeled driving data and is updated using a small labeled anchor set as safety-critical feedback. In production, anchor ambiguity and labeled-unlabeled mismatch can amplify systematic pseudo-label errors, leading to spurious triggers. We propose a stabilized MF-SSL framework with (i) Noise-Aware Decoupling, which removes ambiguity-prone anchors from the teacher's supervised update path, and (ii) kinematics-gated pseudo-labeling with a teacher conflict penalty to suppress mismatch-induced risk hallucinations on unlabeled data while maintaining broad coverage. Extensive experiments show consistent gains as unlabeled data scale from 1M to 1B windows, improving safety while keeping comfort stable. The 1B-trained student model is deployed to hundreds of thousands of vehicles and validated over \$10^9$ km of driving, achieving a positive-to-false activation ratio exceeding 100:1 and a 35% improvement in accident-free driving mileage over a production rule-only baseline.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2507.00875

TransLaw: A Large-Scale Dataset and Multi-Agent Benchmark Simulating Professional Translation of Hong Kong Case Law

Authors:

Xi Xuan↗Chunyu Kit↗

Translating Hong Kong Court Judgments from English to Traditional Chinese is mandated by Articles 8-9 of the Basic Law, yet remains constrained by a shortage of parallel resources and rigorous demands on legal terminology, citation format, and judicial style. We introduce HKCFA Judgment 97-22, the first large-scale sentence-aligned parallel corpus for HK case law, comprising 344 professionally translated judgments (11,099 sentence pairs; 2.1M tokens) spanning 1997-2022. Building on this resource, we propose TransLaw, a multi-agent framework that decomposes translation into word-level expression, sentence-level translation, and multidimensional review, integrating a specialized Hong Kong legal glossary database, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and iterative feedback, with four-dimensional expert review covering semantic alignment, terminology, citation, and style. Benchmarking 13 open-source and commercial LLMs, we demonstrate that TransLaw significantly outperforms single-agent baselines across all evaluated models, with convergence within 3 iterations. Human evaluation by 10 certified legal translators using our proposed Legal ACS metric confirms gains in legal-semantic accuracy, while showing that TransLaw still trails human experts in stylistic naturalness. The dataset and benchmark code are available at https://github.com/xuanxixi/TransLaw.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18247

Visual Verification Enables Inference-time Steering and Autonomous Policy Improvement

Authors:

Mingtong Zhang↗Dhruv Shah↗

arXiv:2606.18247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world should learn from their experience and improve over time. This requires a mechanism of practicing and learning from feedback. In this paper, we propose VERITAS, a generator-verifier framework for generalist robot policies for inference-time policy steering and self-improvement. We use a pre-trained generalist robot policy as a ``generator'' and pair it with a gradient-free ``visual verifier'' that evaluates actions at inference time. This framework enables inference-time steering that improves policy performance without additional training. We demonstrate that inference-time verification consistently outperforms vanilla generalists without training on additional demonstration data. Additionally, we demonstrate that the verified rollouts provide effective supervision for offline policy improvement: policies fine-tuned on verified self-generated trajectories achieve consistent performance gains. Notably, we find that post-training with verified rollouts achieves comparable efficiency to expert demonstrations, while requiring no human interventions. Our results highlight inference-time verification as a practical and scalable mechanism for improving robotic policies during deployment.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2603.19225

FinTradeBench: A Financial Reasoning Benchmark for LLMs

Authors:

Yogesh Agrawal↗Aniruddha Dutta↗Md Mahadi Hasan↗Santu Karmaker↗Aritra Dutta↗

Real-world financial decision-making is a challenging problem that requires reasoning over heterogeneous signals, including company fundamentals derived from regulatory filings and trading signals computed from price dynamics. Recently, with advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), financial analysts have begun to use them for financial decision-making tasks. However, existing financial question-answering benchmarks for testing these models primarily focus on company balance sheet data and rarely evaluate reasoning about how company stocks trade in the market or their interactions with fundamentals. To leverage the strengths of both approaches, we introduce FinTradeBench, a benchmark for evaluating financial reasoning that integrates company fundamentals and trading signals. FinTradeBench contains 1,400 questions grounded in NASDAQ-100 companies over a ten-year historical window. The benchmark is organized into three reasoning categories: fundamentals-focused, trading-signal-focused, and hybrid questions requiring cross-signal reasoning. To ensure reliability at scale, we adopt a calibration-then-scaling framework that combines expert seed questions, multi-model response generation, intra-model self-filtering, numerical auditing, and human-LLM judge alignment. We evaluate 14 LLMs under zero-shot prompting and retrieval-augmented settings and witness a clear performance gap. Retrieval substantially improves reasoning over textual fundamentals, but provides limited benefit for trading-signal reasoning. These findings highlight fundamental challenges in the numerical and time-series reasoning for current LLMs and motivate future research in financial intelligence.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14723

Disagreement-Based Cross-Model Routing for Implicit Video Question Answering

Authors:

Durga Sandeep Saluru↗

We study multiple-choice video question answering on the ImplicitQA benchmark, where the correct answer is never explicitly shown but must be inferred from off-screen events, line-of-sight cues, causal structure, and cross-shot spatial layout. On this benchmark a single frontier video LLM already operates near its accuracy ceiling, and we observe that conventional self-consistency strategies – majority voting across repeated samples of the same model – can hurt rather than help, because the model's errors on hard questions are correlated. We propose disagreement-based cross-model routing, a pure inference-time procedure that requires no labels and no training. We triple-sample a native-video model (Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview) at temperature zero, exploit the genuine sample-to-sample variance of its video-processing pipeline to identify the roughly 20% subset of questions where the three samples disagree, and route only that subset to a second model from a different family (Claude Opus 4.8) that consumes uniformly sampled frames with adaptive thinking. On the 1001-question validation set with public ground truth – our main evaluation – the method improves AvgAcc by +1.43 over the best single sample of the primary model, with per-category gains concentrated on Motion & Trajectory (+5.49), Inferred Counting (+3.45), and Vertical Spatial Reasoning (+1.82) – the categories most dependent on cross-shot reference resolution. The same pipeline applied to the held-out 172-question CVPR 2026 ImplicitQA challenge test set achieves 82.03 AvgAcc / 79.71 MacroAvgAcc (+1.81 over the best single sample of the primary model), confirming the validation result on an independent split.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2511.21056

Bilevel Data Curation for LLM Fine-tuning: Offline Selection and Online Self-Refining Generation

Authors:

Quan Xiao↗Yutong Xuan↗Gaowen Liu↗Ramana Rao Kompella↗Tianyi Chen↗

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) datasets are critical to the downstream performance of large language models, yet they often contain low-quality or harmful question-response pairs. To improve SFT data quality, we develop a unified bilevel framework that combines offline data selection with the online self-refining generation. In the offline setting, bilevel data selection (BDS) selects question-response pairs from the offline SFT dataset to maximize the validation performance. We theoretically show that the optimal model given by BDS outperforms direct data mixing approach in useful data coverage. Moreover, we provide a global convergence analysis for gradient-based BDS approach for one-layer Transformer, showing that the epsilon-global optimum of offline BDS is achievable in finite time. Although efficient, offline BDS discards potentially harmful questions together with responses, thereby reducing question diversity. We address this limitation by refining the responses to selected questions using online self-refining generation framework. However, BDS is inefficient to update the response weights when responses are regenerated online. To address this issue, we introduce bilevel multi-objective optimization (BMO) for response-level weighting. We show that BMO recovers the same validation-aligned solution as BDS, but admits a closed-form importance-ratio weight that adapts to regenerated responses. Experiments on LLM quality enhancement and safety-aware fine-tuning demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently improves both data quality and downstream fine-tuning performance.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2601.14430

Meta Flow Maps enable scalable reward alignment

Authors:

Peter Potaptchik↗Adhi Saravanan↗Abbas Mammadov↗Alvaro Prat↗Michael S. Albergo↗Yee Whye Teh↗

arXiv:2601.14430v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlling generative models is computationally expensive. This is because optimal alignment with a reward function–whether via inference-time steering or fine-tuning–requires estimating the value function. This task demands access to the conditional posterior $p_{1|t}(x_1|x_t)$, the distribution of clean data $x_1$ consistent with an intermediate state $x_t$, a requirement that typically compels methods to resort to costly trajectory simulations. To address this bottleneck, we introduce Meta Flow Maps (MFMs), a framework extending consistency models and flow maps into the stochastic regime. MFMs are trained to perform stochastic one-step posterior sampling, generating arbitrarily many i.i.d. draws of clean data $x_1$ from any intermediate state. Crucially, these samples provide a differentiable reparametrization that unlocks efficient value function estimation. We leverage this capability to solve bottlenecks in both paradigms: enabling inference-time steering without inner rollouts, and facilitating unbiased, off-policy fine-tuning to general rewards. Empirically, our single-particle steered-MFM sampler outperforms a Best-of-1000 baseline on ImageNet across multiple rewards at a fraction of the compute.

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