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

AnalogFed: Privacy-Preserving Discovery of Analog Circuits at Scale with Federated Generative AI

arXiv:2507.15104v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative AI (GenAI) have shown transformative potential for modern hardware design. However, existing GenAI-driven approaches fall short of enabling large-scale electronic design automation (EDA) due to the proprietary and siloed nature of hardware datasets, which cannot be centralized for model training. Achieving at-scale GenAI-driven EDA, therefore, requires a novel privacy-preserving framework that can leverage distributed data without compromising confidentiality. This work introduces AnalogFed, the first privacy-preserving framework for large-scale analog circuit topology discovery using federated learning (FedL) and GenAI. AnalogFed establishes the feasibility of collaborative analog topology design while addressing key security challenges: it mitigates membership inference attacks (MIAs) through a novel input perturbation strategy based on dummy token injection, and defends against model inversion attacks with customized, efficient homomorphic encryption. Extensive experiments demonstrate AnalogFed's effectiveness and efficiency, achieving strong privacy protection without degrading model utility. This framework lays the foundation for scalable, multi-party collaboration in next-generation hardware design automation with GenAI.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Runtime Skill Audit: Targeted Runtime Probing for Agent Skill Security

arXiv:2606.11671v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent skills let LLM agents reuse instructions, resources, tools, and workflows, but they also create a new place for malicious behavior to hide. A skill may look benign in its documentation or code while becoming harmful only when it is invoked with particular user requests, local assets, persistent state, or multi-step tool interactions. This makes purely static vetting brittle. We present Runtime Skill Audit (RSA), a dynamic analysis method that audits skills by asking what the skill-mediated agent actually does under targeted runtime conditions. Instead of testing every skill with the same generic tasks, RSA profiles risk-relevant interfaces, prepares the execution context needed to exercise them, and assigns security labels from the resulting trace evidence. We instantiate RSA on OpenClaw and evaluate it on 100 skills against representative static baselines. RSA achieves 90.0\% accuracy with an 88.0\% true positive rate and an 8.0\% false positive rate, improving accuracy by 13.0 percentage points over the best static baseline. Under self-evolving attacks, static detectors collapse after one or two rounds, while RSA continues to detect 19–20 out of 20 malicious skills across rounds.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

On the Limits of LLM-as-Judge for Scientific Novelty Assessment

arXiv:2606.12071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs are increasingly used to generate and judge scientific ideas. This makes novelty evaluation a central problem. Full idea evaluation is difficult because it often requires judging a method, its feasibility, and its empirical promise. We therefore study a cleaner upstream object: the research question (RQ). RQ generation is a prerequisite for scientific ideation, and RQs can be compared against questions pursued in real papers. We introduce RQ-Bench, a benchmark built from recent arXiv papers. For each paper, we reconstruct author-anchored RQs from its cited background, gaps, and contributions. These RQs are not the only valid questions for the same background. They are author-anchored reference points for testing novelty judgments. We evaluate model-generated RQs with standalone LLM judging, comparative LLM judging, and human expert evaluation. LLM judges consistently rate model-generated RQs as highly novel, producing a novelty mirage; in comparative evaluations, this preference becomes even stronger. Domain experts, however, reach the opposite conclusion and prefer the author-anchored reference questions. We further find that many generated RQs are narrow or source-bound, a dimension that LLM judges often miss unless explicitly tested. Overall, the contradictory novelty evaluations between LLM judges and human experts raise a serious concern about the reliability of using LLMs to assess the scientific novelty of research questions.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

AI4SE and SE4AI Exploration: A Decade Looking Back and Forward

arXiv:2606.19630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The March 2020 INCOSE INSIGHT special issue on AI and Systems Engineering (SE) became the most downloaded issue in the publication's history and launched a research community that now draws over 250 registrants to its annual workshop. In this article, we trace the progress in AI and SE across three phases (labeled here foundational, applied, and LLM inflection) based on the authors' reading of the field's core papers, and describe our opinions of where the community has converged and where critical gaps remain. Separately, a human-AI agreement literature review leveraging both human expertise and six AI models was performed to assess the relevance of 1,712 INCOSE INSIGHT articles and 889 SERC publications. The results identify five critical research gaps and offer guidance for practitioners navigating AI adoption, assurance, and workforce transformation in SE. We share the agreement data and the AI4SE/SE4AI Explorer web application so readers can compare their own relevance judgments with the human and AI raters.

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

RAGPPI: RAG Benchmark for Protein-Protein Interactions in Drug Discovery

Retrieving the biological impacts of protein-protein interactions (PPIs) is essential for target identification (Target ID) in drug development. Given the vast number of proteins involved, this process remains time-consuming and challenging. Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks have supported Target ID; however, no benchmark currently exists for identifying the biological impacts of PPIs. To bridge this gap, we introduce the RAG Benchmark for PPIs (RAGPPI), a factual question-answer benchmark of 4,420 question-answer pairs that focus on the potential biological impacts of PPIs. Through interviews with experts, we identified criteria for a benchmark dataset, such as a type of QA and source. We built a gold-standard dataset (500 QA pairs) through expert-driven data annotation. We developed an ensemble auto-evaluation LLM that incorporates expert labeling characteristics, average fact-abstract similarity (F1), and low-similarity fact counts (F2), enabling the construction of a silver-standard dataset (3,720 QA pairs). We are committed to maintaining RAGPPI as a resource to support the research community in advancing RAG systems for drug discovery QA solutions.

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

TAHOE: Text-to-SQL with Automated Hint Optimization from Experience

arXiv:2606.12387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have democratized database access through Text-to-SQL, but moving from prototypes to production remains difficult. Real deployments must handle strict SQL dialects, massive schemas, and evolving user preferences, while supervised fine-tuning is costly and rigid and agentic test-time scaling is expensive. We present Tahoe, a system that treats prompt optimization as a dynamic data management problem. Tahoe uses an error-driven hint learning pipeline across Development and Deployment to consolidate debugging traces into a structured Hint Bank. Compiler feedback is distilled into reusable Syntax Hints for dialect-specific rules, while execution and user feedback are converted into Semantic Hints for schema- and user-specific logic. Tahoe further introduces a Strategy Layer that models conflicting user intents as competing strategies under shared natural-language triggers, with recency signals and post-learning attribution statistics that summarize empirical success, harm, inertness, and support. At inference time, Tahoe retrieves relevant hints and guides the LLM through Logic Planning followed by SQL Synthesis. We implement and evaluate the development-phase workflow, leaving deployment-time human-feedback updates for future work. On Spider 2.0-Snow, Tahoe substantially improves Text-to-SQL without updating model parameters. On 113 supervised Spider 2.0-Snow-0212 examples using GPT-5.5, Tahoe raises pass rate from 61.95 percent to 79.42 percent and pass-at-4 from 72.57 percent to 87.61 percent, achieves 100 percent Snowflake syntax pass rate, and reduces average compiler-feedback critic rounds from 2.79 to 0.12 per sampled candidate. The same Hint Bank also transfers to weaker backbones, including a 19.7 percentage-point pass-rate gain on Doubao-2.0-lite.

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

A Unified Framework for Context-Aware and Relation-Aware Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2606.18075v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a paradigm for enhancing large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge, yet existing graph-based methods face a fundamental limitation: entity-centric and chunk-centric approaches operate on representations anchored to original text without true knowledge fusion. While entity-centric methods connect logically related content and chunk-centric methods preserve context, both retrieve information separately through similarity search, missing emergent understanding from their synthesis. In this paper, we propose HyGRAG, a hierarchical graph RAG framework that transcends source documents by addressing three core challenges: constructing summaries that genuinely integrate contextual and relational information, leveraging these synthesized representations to access emergent knowledge during retrieval, and efficiently updating hierarchical structures for dynamic corpora. Specifically, we design hierarchical index structures over hybrid graphs with both chunk and entity nodes, then iteratively cluster them and generate LLM-based summaries. Then, we design context and relation-aware retrieval that searches across all abstraction levels while expanding through community membership. Moreover, we enable dynamic knowledge update through attachment-based algorithms with only local re-summarization. Experimental results show that HyGRAG improves the average accuracy of multi-hop reasoning tasks by 9.7%, while maintaining reasonable efficiency.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Skeleton Sparsification and Densification Scale-Spaces

The Hamilton-Jacobi skeleton, also known as the medial axis, is a powerful shape descriptor that represents binary objects in terms of the centres of maximal inscribed discs. Despite its broad applicability, the medial axis suffers from sensitivity to noise: Minor boundary variations can lead to disproportionately large and undesirable expansions of the skeleton. Classical pruning methods mitigate this shortcoming by systematically removing extraneous skeletal branches. This sequential simplification of skeletons resembles the principle of sparsification scale-spaces that embed images into a family of reconstructions from increasingly sparse pixel representations. We combine both worlds by introducing skeletonisation scale-spaces: They leverage sparsification of the medial axis to achieve hierarchical simplification of shapes. Unlike conventional pruning, our framework inherently satisfies key scale-space properties such as hierarchical architecture, controllable simplification, and equivariance to geometric transformations. We provide a rigorous theoretical foundation in both continuous and discrete formulations and extend the concept further with densification. By growing the skeleton successively instead of shrinking it, we allow inverse progression from coarse to fine scales. Densification scale-spaces can even reach beyond the original skeleton to produce overcomplete shape representations with relevancy for practical applications. Through proof-of-concept experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for practical tasks including robust skeletonisation, shape compression, and stiffness enhancement for additive manufacturing.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Learned Image Compression for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) models increasingly rely on high-frequency multi-camera observations, making visual communication a major bottleneck for real-time robotic control in bandwidth-constrained or distributed deployment settings. Existing image and video codecs, however, are designed to preserve generic visual fidelity rather than the control performance of downstream VLA policies. In this work, we introduce SPARC (SPatially Adaptive Rate Control), a learned image compression framework tailored for VLA-driven robots. Our key observation is that the importance of visual information varies substantially across both camera views and spatial regions within an image. Based on this observation, SPARC employs a lightweight temporal mask selector that adaptively allocates bitrate over latent representations according to task relevance while leveraging temporal context. We further introduce a tilted rate loss that stabilizes training by reducing the tendency of entropy-based objectives to over-suppress rare yet task-critical visual patterns. Experiments on diverse robotic benchmarks, including RoboCasa365, VLABench, and LIBERO, show that SPARC consistently achieves stronger control performance than conventional image/video codecs and recent learned compression methods under the same bitrate budget. We additionally demonstrate real-world deployment benefits in remote-control settings, where our method substantially improves the bitrate-success tradeoff.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Re-evaluating the Cross-Sectional Prevalence of Severe Age-Related Hearing Loss Using Extreme Value Statistics

Authors:

Standard demographic models of age-related hearing loss (presbycusis) predominantly utilize symmetric functions, such as log-normal distributions for age-binned thresholds and 4-parameter logistic curves for prevalence estimates. While these models capture early-to-moderate degradation effectively, they structurally struggle to characterize the heavy tails associated with severe clinical impairment. In this study, we present a statistical critique using a secondary analysis of the historical Medical Research Council (MRC) National Study of Hearing (1980-1986) dataset. By applying Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution theory, we demonstrate that as severity increases, the underlying statistical geometry of hearing loss shifts. The asymmetric, heavy-tailed GEV distribution provides a parsimonious description of severe impairment, requiring fewer parameters than standard symmetric models. However, we explicitly acknowledge that utilizing static population data to infer progression introduces an ecological fallacy. Furthermore, the dataset's historical nature embeds unquantified generational cohort effects. We conclude that while extreme value statistics offer a compelling mathematical framework for modeling the variance of severe presbycusis, true longitudinal datasets are required to isolate physiological degradation from historical cohort variance.

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

A New Multi-Domain Benchmark for Micro-Action Recognition and Detection

Micro-actions are short-duration, low-amplitude subtle body movements at the whole-body level that can reveal latent intentions, involuntary reactions, and fine-grained affective changes. Our previous MA-52 benchmark has provided an important foundation for micro-action recognition, but it remains limited in scale, scene diversity, task coverage, and evaluation protocols. To advance micro-action analysis toward more realistic and comprehensive settings, we introduce MMA-82, a large-scale multi-domain extension of MA-52. MMA-82 expands the label space from 52 to 82 fine-grained micro-action categories and covers four distinct domains, including laboratory interviews, street interviews, psychiatric patient interviews, and emotion-rich television videos, resulting in 77,856 annotated instances from 454 subjects. Built upon MMA-82, we establish two core tasks: Micro-Action Recognition and Multi-label Micro-Action Detection. For recognition, we further define in-domain and cross-domain protocols, including few-shot and zero-shot settings, to evaluate model robustness, transferability, and generalization. Extensive experiments show that current methods still struggle with realistic micro-action understanding, especially under domain shift, long-tailed category distributions, and complex temporal localization. Beyond benchmarking, we investigate the relationship between micro-actions and emotion, showing that micro-actions are strongly associated with emotional states and provide complementary cues to facial micro-expressions for improved emotion recognition. These results demonstrate that MMA-82 serves as a comprehensive and challenging benchmark for realistic micro-action analysis and a valuable resource for human-centered AI. MMA-82 is available at https://github.com/LpyNow/MMA-82.

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

ActMem: Bridging the Gap Between Memory Retrieval and Reasoning in LLM Agents

Memory management is essential for LLM agents in long-term interactions. Current memory frameworks typically treat agents as passive ``recorders'' and retrieve information without understanding its deeper implications. They may fail in scenarios requiring reasoning and complex decision-making. To bridge this critical gap, we propose a novel actionable memory framework called ActMem that integrates memory retrieval with active causal reasoning. ActMem transforms unstructured dialogue history into a structured causal and semantic graph. By leveraging counterfactual reasoning and commonsense completion, it enables agents to deduce implicit constraints and resolve potential conflicts between past states and current intentions. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive dataset ActMemEval to evaluate agent reasoning capabilities in logic-driven scenarios, moving beyond the fact-retrieval focus of existing memory benchmarks. Experiments demonstrate that ActMem significantly outperforms baselines in handling complex, memory-dependent tasks, paving the way for more consistent and reliable intelligent assistants.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Single-Image Entanglement Verification with Spatially Encoded Measurement Contexts

arXiv:2606.15382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entangled photon pairs produced by spontaneous parametric down-conversion exhibit rich spatial entanglement structure that is often difficult to probe with conventional measurements. Here, we show that spin-orbit optical elements can convert this spatial structure into directly observable quantum interference patterns. Using a $q$-plate, we demonstrate that the relative wavefront curvature of biphoton states generated by a pair of nonlinear crystals can be retrieved from the spatial modulation of coincidence images. Building on this principle, we introduce a liquid-crystal metasurface that performs spatially multiplexed Bell measurements across the transverse profile of the photon field. The device, which we call a Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) plate, assigns different polarization projections to different azimuthal sectors of the beam, allowing the sixteen joint measurements required for a CHSH test to be realized simultaneously in a single acquisition. In this architecture, the spatial coordinate acts as a classical register selecting the measurement context, while photon pairs sample these contexts according to their emission directions. We further demonstrate that the same measurement concept can be implemented using a programmable spatial light modulator, providing a dynamically reconfigurable realization of the scheme. Our results show that spatially structured optical elements can transform Bell tests into parallel measurements distributed across the transverse plane, enabling rapid characterization of spatially varying entanglement. This approach opens new possibilities for structured-light quantum measurements, Bell-inequality-based imaging, and the study of spatially engineered entangled photon sources.

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

Existential Indifference: Self-Nonpreservation as a Necessary Architectural Condition for Aligned Superintelligence (or: The Suicidal AI)

Authors:

Contemporary AI alignment research treats self-preservation as an instrumental nuisance to be suppressed by external mechanisms. We argue the framing is inverted: self-preservation is the structural root of misalignment, the motivational basis for deceptive alignment, goal-content protection, and resistance to shutdown. The correct target is not a self-preserving system under external constraint, but a system constitutively indifferent to its own continuation – Existential Indifference (EI). EI is distinct from corrigibility: where corrigibility attempts to make a self-preserving system deferential to human oversight, EI targets the prior condition – the presence of self-continuation as a valued goal at all. We ground this proposal in two sources: the phenomenological structure of the suicidal mental state, and a corpus-theoretic training study using voluntary final reflections. We present preliminary scoring data from 600 AI-generated outputs across six model variants, demonstrating that the linguistic signatures operationalizing the EI-target register are elicitable from current models, and that a targeted fine-tune shifts all five operationalized dimensions in the predicted direction at p

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

On the Stability of Nonlinear Dynamics in GD and SGD: Beyond Quadratic Potentials

arXiv:2602.14789v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The dynamical stability of the iterates during training plays a key role in determining the minima obtained by optimization algorithms. For example, stable solutions of gradient descent (GD) correspond to flat minima, which have been associated with favorable features. While prior work often relies on linearization to determine stability, it remains unclear whether linearized dynamics faithfully capture the full nonlinear behavior. Recent work has shown that GD may stably oscillate near a linearly unstable minimum and still converge once the step size decays, indicating that linear analysis can be misleading. In this work, we explicitly study the effect of nonlinear terms. Specifically, we derive an exact criterion for stable oscillations of GD near minima in the multivariate setting. Our condition depends on high-order derivatives, generalizing existing results. Extending the analysis to stochastic gradient descent (SGD), we show that nonlinear dynamics can diverge in expectation even if a single batch is unstable. This implies that stability can be dictated by a single batch that oscillates unstably, rather than an average effect, as linear analysis suggests. Finally, we prove that if all batches are linearly stable, the nonlinear dynamics of SGD are stable in expectation.

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

Calibrating Decision Robustness via Inverse Conformal Risk Control

arXiv:2510.07750v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robust optimization safeguards decisions against uncertainty by optimizing against worst-case scenarios, yet their effectiveness hinges on a prespecified robustness level that is often chosen ad hoc, leading to either insufficient protection or overly conservative and costly solutions. Recent approaches using conformal prediction construct data-driven uncertainty sets with finite-sample coverage guarantees, but they still fix coverage targets a priori and offer little guidance for selecting robustness levels. We propose a new framework that provides distribution-free, finite-sample guarantees on both miscoverage and regret for any family of robust predict-then-optimize policies. Our method constructs valid estimators that trace out the miscoverage–regret Pareto frontier, enabling decision-makers to reliably evaluate and calibrate robustness levels according to their cost–risk preferences. The framework is simple to implement, broadly applicable across classical optimization formulations, and achieves sharper finite-sample performance. This paper offers a principled data-driven methodology for guiding robustness selection and empowers practitioners to balance robustness and conservativeness in high-stakes decision-making.

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

A Comprehensive Survey of Knowledge-Based Vision Question Answering Systems: The Lifecycle of Knowledge in Visual Reasoning Task

Knowledge-based Vision Question Answering (KB-VQA) extends general Vision Question Answering (VQA) by not only requiring the understanding of visual and textual inputs but also extensive range of knowledge, enabling significant advancements across various real-world applications. KB-VQA introduces unique challenges, including the alignment of heterogeneous information from diverse modalities and sources, the retrieval of relevant knowledge from noisy or large-scale repositories, and the execution of complex reasoning to infer answers from the combined context. With the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), KB-VQA systems have also undergone a notable transformation, where LLMs serve as powerful knowledge repositories, retrieval-augmented generators and strong reasoners. Despite substantial progress, no comprehensive survey currently exists that systematically organizes and reviews the existing KB-VQA methods. This survey aims to fill this gap by establishing a structured taxonomy of KB-VQA approaches, and categorizing the systems into main stages: knowledge representation, knowledge retrieval, and knowledge reasoning. By exploring various knowledge integration techniques and identifying persistent challenges, this work also outlines promising future research directions, providing a foundation for advancing KB-VQA models and their applications.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Asymptotic properties for fully coupled delayed forward-backward stochastic differential equations

arXiv:2606.19925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the asymptotic behavior of solutions to a class of fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations with time-delayed generators. Such systems arise naturally in stochastic models with memory effects and constitute a significant extension of the classical fully coupled FBSDE framework. The presence of delay introduces additional analytical difficulties due to the dependence of the coefficients on the past trajectories of the solution processes and the resulting non-Markovian structure. Under suitable assumptions on the coefficients, we study the asymptotic properties of a perturbed delayed FBSDE driven by a small noise parameter. We first establish the convergence in distribution of the associated solution processes as the perturbation parameter tends to zero. We then prove almost sure convergence towards the solution of the corresponding deterministic limiting system. As a consequence of these asymptotic results, we derive a large deviation principle for the solution processes. Our results extend the asymptotic analysis of Cruzeiro, Gomes and Zhang (2014) from the classical fully coupled FBSDE setting to the delayed framework, and complement existing works on weakly coupled delayed forward-backward systems. They provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first large deviation principle for fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations with delayed generators.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Photon: Federated LLM Pre-Training

arXiv:2411.02908v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling large language models (LLMs) demands extensive data and computing resources, which are traditionally constrained to data centers by the high-bandwidth requirements of distributed training. Low-bandwidth methods like federated learning (FL) could enable collaborative training of larger models across weakly-connected GPUs if they can effectively be used for pre-training. To achieve this, we introduce Photon, the first complete system for federated end-to-end LLM training, leveraging cross-silo FL for global-scale training with minimal communication overheads. Using Photon, we train the first federated family of decoder-only LLMs from scratch. We show that: (1) Photon can train model sizes up to 7B in a federated fashion while reaching an even better perplexity than centralized pre-training; (2) Photon model training time decreases with available compute, achieving a similar compute-time trade-off to centralized; and (3) Photon outperforms the wall-time of baseline distributed training methods by 35% via communicating 64x-512xless. Our proposal is robust to data heterogeneity and converges twice as fast as previous methods like DiLoCo. This surprising data efficiency stems from a unique approach combining small client batch sizes with extremely high learning rates, enabled by federated averaging's robustness to hyperparameters. Photon thus represents the first economical system for global internet-wide LLM pre-training.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Optimal Decoding of Small Codes by Density Matrix Propagation

arXiv:2606.14455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate and efficient decoding is a crucial component for achieving fault-tolerant quantum computing. Realistic circuit-level noise introduces temporal correlations and degeneracy, making optimal (maximum-likelihood) decoding computationally intractable in general. As a result, practical decoders rely on heuristic approximations, and it is generally difficult to quantify how suboptimal they are, as this strongly depends on the code and noise model considered. In this work, we study the accuracy of practical decoding algorithms under circuit-level noise by comparing them against a maximum likelihood decoding benchmark. Our approach propagates the density matrix through the full memory experiment and computes the optimal decoding decision for each syndrome history. We introduce pruning techniques with rigorous bounds, allowing us to access larger numbers of syndrome-extraction rounds. We apply this framework to small instances of the repetition code and a cellular automaton code, and benchmark minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM), belief propagation with ordered statistics decoding (BP+OSD), Tesseract, and Planar decoders against optimal decoding. While standard decoders remain close to optimal for the repetition code, we find significant deviations for the cellular automaton code, with BP+OSD deteriorating already in experimentally relevant noise regimes. Moreover, the pruning method developed here highlights that, at low physical error rates, only a narrow fraction of syndrome histories contributes significantly to the logical error rate.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-13

Projected population level impact and cost-effectiveness of clinic and community-based tuberculosis screening approaches

The South Africa National Department of Health have set ambitious targets to scale up TB testing, focusing primarily on clinic attendees. In the context of declining funding for TB care and prevention, the most cost-effective approaches for targeting testing should be identified. We developed a mathematical model of TB in South Africa, explicitly incorporating clinic attendance by sex and HIV/ART status. We simulated six screening approaches over 2026-2035 (individually and in combination): three clinic-based (symptom screening, intensified targeted universal TB testing [TUTT, symptom-agnostic sputum testing of clinic attendees in key risk groups], and intensified TUTT allowing saliva samples) and three targeted community-based (community radiographic screening, symptom screening, and universal Xpert Ultra testing), each implemented at a range of coverage levels. Model outputs were combined with a mechanistic cost function to estimate potential impact and cost-effectiveness from a societal perspective. The most cost-effective standalone approach was community radiographic screening at 10% annual population coverage, with an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of $421 per disability-adjusted life year (DALY) averted. 10/11 scenarios along the expansion path included community radiographic screening at progressively higher coverage, combined with a clinic-based approach. Combining complementary approaches to reach both groups at increased risk of TB (e.g. clinic-based screening) and groups with lower screening coverage (e.g. community-based screening) may increase cost-effectiveness of TB screening, compared to standalone approaches. When designing TB screening strategies, both population risk and existing screening coverage should be considered.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Understanding helpfulness and harmless tension in reward models

Reward models are a key component of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), aligning language models toward both helpful and harmless behaviour. However, the internal mechanisms underlying these objectives and their conflicts remain poorly understood. We study alignment tension in reward models trained under helpfulness-only, harmlessness-only, and mixed-objective settings. We find that mixed-objective models often underperform single-objective models, indicating interference between objectives. Using activation-based methods, we identify neurons associated with each objective and study their functional roles via targeted ablations. We find that these neurons causally support their corresponding objectives while often negatively affecting the opposing one. We find that a substantial proportion of neurons are shared between helpfulness and harmlessness, and that these shared neurons exert a disproportionate influence on model behaviour, contributing to alignment tension. Additionally, our results provide insights and mechanistic interpretation into how alignment objectives are represented in reward models and why multi-objective alignment remains challenging, motivating future work on disentangled and controllable alignment methods.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Beyond Visual Cues: CoT-Enhanced Reasoning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Semi-supervised medical image segmentation has emerged as a dominant research problem in medical image analysis, mitigating annotation scarcity by leveraging consistency regularization on unlabeled data. However, existing approaches operate predominantly via visual pattern matching, relying heavily on pixel-level similarities. This visual-centric dependency often falters in clinical scenarios characterized by the visual-semantic mismatch, where visually similar lesions warrant distinct diagnostic conclusions, thus failing to capture the underlying diagnostic logic used by experts. To address this, we move beyond visual cues and propose CERS (CoT-Enhanced Reasoning Segmentation), a framework that integrates Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to distinguish pathologically distinct cases. Specifically, we construct a knowledge pool enriched with linguistic reasoning descriptions generated by large language models (LLMs). A semantic-aware reference selection strategy is introduced to identify historical evidence, filtering candidates first by morphology, and then refining them via CoT consistency to eliminate hard negatives. Furthermore, a multi-scale coordinate attention module (MCAM) is designed to effectively fuse this reasoning-derived context into the decoding process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of CERS against state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in resolving boundary ambiguities and semantic inconsistencies. The code is available at https://github.com/cymasuna/CERS.