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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp One-Dimensional Sub-Gaussian Comparison in Convex Order

Authors:

arXiv:2604.26819v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove that any random variable $X$ whose moment generating function is point-wise upper bounded by that of $ G \sim \mathcal{N}(0,1) $ must be dominated by $ G/\mathbb{E}[|G|] $ in convex order, meaning $ \mathbb{E}[f(X)] \le \mathbb{E}[f(G/\mathbb{E}[|G|])] $ for all convex $f$. This is sharp as witnessed by $ X \sim \mathrm{Unif}(\{-1,1\}) $ and $ f(x) = |x| $.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Neural Phase Correlation

Authors:

Correspondence is fundamentally relational: it seeks the unknown transformation between two observations of a common scene, not the content of either. Yet the dominant learning-based methods do not represent the transformation as a first-class object in the architecture. They encode each image independently and let a learned similarity function or a deep decoder discover the mapping implicitly. Phase correlation is the canonical exception, measuring the inter-image relationship directly in the Fourier domain, but the rigidity of its fixed basis confines it to global translation. We introduce a learned generalization of phase correlation that lifts this restriction by learning the basis on which the transformation decomposes. The same algebraic primitive extends to dense non-rigid deformations and to unitary dynamics. On the ACDC cardiac-MRI benchmark the framework matches or exceeds prior published baselines on both registration directions. On CAMUS echocardiography it matches state-of-the-art without auxiliary scoring or adaptive-smoothness mechanisms. Applied to time-evolved wavefunction pairs of the 1-D quantum harmonic oscillator, the same framework recovers the Hermite-function eigenstates and the quantized energy levels of the unknown Hamiltonian from observation pairs alone.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

How Do Instructions Shape Speech? Cross-Attention Attribution for Style-Captioned Text-to-Speech

arXiv:2606.20532v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Style-captioned text-to-speech systems use natural language to control voice characteristics, but how individual words influence acoustic output remains unclear. Understanding this is critical for diagnosing failure modes and improving controllability in expressive TTS. We propose cross-attention attribution for speech diffusion models, adapting the DAAM framework to the speech domain for the first time, and apply it to CapSpeech-TTS. Our method extracts per-token heatmaps across 25 layers and 24 ODE steps. We analyze 3,600 (style caption, text transcript) combinations comprising 120 style captions conditioning the generation of 30 text transcripts each, revealing how caption tokens shape waveforms. Results show: (1) style tokens have lower temporal variance than content/function tokens, confirming global conditioning; (2) style attention correlates with F0 and energy; (3) style conditioning peaks in early steps and deep layers; (4) attention entropy reaches its minimum at layer 17, co-occurring with the style importance peak, indicating maximal network selectivity at the most style-critical stage. This is the first study of how natural language influences cross-attention in speech diffusion models

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Keep Policy Gradient in Charge: Sibling-Guided Credit Distillation for Long-Horizon Tool-Use Agents

Long-horizon tool-use reinforcement learning can learn from outcome verification, but its trajectory-level advantage is broadcast across many reasoning, API, and answer tokens. Self-distillation promises a denser signal by reusing a policy's own rollouts or a privileged teacher. We show, however, that direct token-level self-distillation can silently destroy tool use: it rehearses teacher behavior without knowing which actions the verifier rewards, so useful skills and harmful shortcuts are amplified together. We introduce Sibling-Guided Credit Distillation (SGCD), which uses distillation for credit assignment rather than as a competing actor loss. Dynamic sampling produces mixed successful and failed sibling rollouts; an external LLM summarizes their contrast into a training-only stepwise credit reference; dense teacher/student divergence drives credit reassignment; and bounded detached credit weights reshape GRPO token advantages. The deployed student sees no external LLM, sibling evidence, or oracle. Across AppWorld and $\tau^3$-airline, SGCD improves over matched GRPO comparators: AppWorld TGC $42.9 \to 45.6$ on test_normal and $24.7 \to 27.0$ on test_challenge, and $\tau^3$-airline pass@1 $0.583 \to 0.602$.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Layer-Isolated Evaluation: Gating the Deterministic Scaffold of a Production LLM Agent with a No-LLM, Regression-Locked Test Harness

End-to-end task-success is the dominant way to evaluate LLM agents, but one aggregate number tells you that an agent regressed, not where. We present layer-isolated evaluation: a deployed ordering agent is decomposed into a fixed taxonomy of layers (ontology, intent, routing, decomposition, escalation, safety, memory, and cross-cutting envelope/defense), each exercised by its own assertion slice in a deterministic, no-LLM "pure" mode. The pure suite (238 cases across 23 slices; 225 run in 2.39 s, ~10 ms/case) runs in CI on every change against a locked per-slice baseline. We validate by controlled regression injection, degrading one layer at a time across seven non-safety layers. The effect we did not design in is masking: the aggregate pass-rate barely moves (-1.7 to -5.9 pp for six local regressions), while the matching slice craters (-25 to -91 pp). A layer's slice reacting to its own fault is partly by construction; the measured results are (i) the aggregate masking and (ii) that damage stays off the other slices: the injected layer's slice is the single worst-hit in 5 of 7 cases and top-3 in 7 of 7 (mean rank 1.29 of 19). Localization replicates on a second, structurally different tenant (Starbucks SG): all seven matching slices crater, so it is not a single-catalog artifact. We position it as a concrete, deterministic instantiation of the component-level evaluation EDDOps prescribes but leaves unimplemented, with CheckList as ancestor and as the deterministic mirror image of whole-workflow stochastic mutation testing. Our contributions: (a) a fully decomposed, sub-second, no-LLM per-layer harness for a production agent, (b) a coverage-honesty test-adequacy criterion that refuses to score an unexercised layer, and (c) the regression-injection demonstration that per-slice baseline-locked gates localize regressions an aggregate metric masks.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Preventing postpartum depression through mitigating breastfeeding grief: A convergent parallel mixed methods study

Background: Women who did not meet their breastfeeding goals often experience breastfeeding grief (BG) and may be likely to have postpartum depression (PD). Furthermore, PD is nearly twice as common in African American (AA) women as in Non-Hispanic White women. No research exists on BG and its role in PD. This study examined the BG experiences of AA women and its possible contributions to PD symptoms. Methods: A convergent parallel mixed methods design was used. A purposive sample of 16 AA women with children aged 6 months to 2 years with BG participated in individual semi-structured interviews about their experiences of BG and completed an online survey including the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS). Qualitative and quantitative data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis and descriptive statistics, respectively. Both data were integrated using joint display of data and side-by-side comparison. Results: The mean age of participants was 29.5 years. Four meaning-based themes about BG were generated including: We looked forward to breastfeeding, But it did not go as expected, So we grieve, and These would have helped. From quantitative results, 87.5% of participants reported a history of PD symptoms and almost 44% had EPDS scores >11. All participants reported that experiencing BG contributed to their PD symptoms. Findings suggest that BG influenced PD symptoms in AA women without prior diagnosis of depression. Conclusions: Qualitative and quantitative findings from this novel exploratory study revealed an overlap that AA women with BG report PD symptoms. Clinicians should support women to achieve their breastfeeding goals to prevent BG and PD. Keywords: African American; Breastfeeding grief; Mental health; Mixed methods; Postpartum depression

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CT-VDETR: Semi-supervised 3D Trauma Detection in Computed Tomography (CT) scans using Dense Vertex Relative Position Encoding

Accurate detection and localization of traumatic injuries in abdominal CT remain challenging because voxel-level annotations are limited and expensive to obtain. We present a label-efficient framework for 3D abdominal trauma detection that combines self-supervised pretraining with semi-supervised transformer-based detection. First, we use Masked Image Modeling (MIM) on 1098 CT volumes to pretrain a 3D U-Net encoder for anatomical representation learning. Next, we adapt V-DETR to dense volumetric CT through a feature adapter that converts the encoder feature grid into a compact token sequence for transformer decoding. The pretrained encoder is then integrated with V-DETR and 3D Vertex Relative Position Encoding (3D V-RPE) to improve the localization of irregularly shaped injuries. Finally, semi-supervised teacher-student consistency regularization leverages 2,000 additional unlabeled volumes during detector training. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of a 3D DETR-style detector to the RSNA abdominal trauma detection task. On this benchmark, the proposed method achieves 31.33% test mAP@0.50 using only 78 labeled training volumes, corresponding to a 1.53x improvement over supervised-only training. These results show that combining medical-domain pretraining with semi-supervised learning is an effective strategy for label-scarce 3D medical detection.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Contact-Based Fringe Projection Profilometry for High-Resolution 3-D Surface Measurement of Reflective and Transparent Objects

This paper presents a contact-based 3-D surface measurement method based on a Digital Fringe Projection (DFP) system, belonging to the vision-based tactile sensing family pioneered by the commercially successful GelSight sensor. Such sensors have proven effective for robotic fingertip manipulation and contact sensing. However, because GelSight employs photometric stereo with RGB LEDs, it does not measure absolute depth directly but instead infers it by integrating estimated surface gradients, which can accumulate reconstruction errors; in addition, it becomes increasingly difficult to calibrate as the sensing area grows, and its depth accuracy is challenged on highly reflective or transparent objects. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a fringe-projection-based contact measurement technique that performs triangulation-based 3-D reconstruction on a coated silicone contact surface, providing dense per-pixel surface geometry and full-field 3-D shape measurement over the contact region. By integrating high-accuracy digital fringe projection into the sensor, our approach simplifies calibration over larger areas and enhances depth precision for complex surfaces. Experimental results, including a direct comparison with a GelSight Mini sensor, a sphere-fitting accuracy evaluation, and an uncertainty analysis, confirm that the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy and stability of structured-light-based 3-D measurements, allowing reliable reconstruction of objects with diverse optical properties.

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

QPILOTS: Efficient Test-Time Q-Steering for Flow Policies

arXiv:2606.14801v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow-matching and diffusion policies are expressive action generators, but optimizing them with temporal-difference reinforcement learning (RL) remains difficult. Effective policy extraction requires exploiting the critic's action gradient, yet directly backpropagating this signal through a multi-step denoising process can be numerically unstable. Existing methods work around this either by discarding gradient information, distilling the policy into a simpler one-step actor, or repeatedly fine-tuning the denoising policy as the critic improves. We propose QPILOTS, a method that leaves the original policy unmodified and steers the denoising process at inference time. At each denoising step, instead of evaluating the critic on the noisy intermediate action where critic predictions are unreliable, we first project that intermediate state to an estimate of the final clean action and compute the critic gradient there. We introduce two variants: QPILOTS-U uses a fast single-point approximation, while QPILOTS-M draws differentiable posterior samples via a learned auxiliary network. On a standard offline-to-online RL benchmark, QPILOTS achieves the best aggregate performance, reaching an average success rate of 90% across 50 tasks. We also apply QPILOTS to steer a large, frozen, pretrained Vision-Language Action (VLA) foundation model, outperforming or matching prior inference-time approaches across six manipulation tasks in simulation.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Scalar-pathway fidelity improves physical accuracy in short-range equivariant interatomic potentials

arXiv:2606.15892v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate interatomic potentials enable molecular dynamics of materials, molecules, and interfaces beyond density-functional-theory length and time scales. Equivariant neural network potentials have improved the representation of local geometry. However, their deployable energy surfaces ultimately manifest through invariant scalar channels, whose aggregation and spectral resolution remain comparatively underexamined. Here we use Physics-Aware Neighborhood (PAN) pooling and Physics-Guided Spectral (PGS) mixers as controlled scalar-pathway probes: lightweight, symmetry-preserving modifications that act only on \(\ell=0\) channels while leaving the equivariant tensor backbone unchanged. Using MACE as a high-body-order mechanistic scaffold, PAN adds coordination-sensitive amplitude modulation, whereas PGS augments edge and readout scalar features with radial and tapered spectral bases. Across metallic Ag, covalent Si, a short-range ionic LiF/Li–F subset, and MD17/rMD17 molecules, this scalar-pathway correction reduces MACE force errors by 22–27\% and energy errors by 19–22\%; on systems with stress labels, stress errors decrease by 27–28\%, at approximately 5\% additional inference-FLOPs cost. Directionally consistent gains in Allegro and NequIP further indicate that the correction is portable across distinct short-range equivariant backbones, although effect sizes remain architecture-dependent. These results identify scalar-pathway fidelity as a practical design dimension for short-range equivariant interatomic potentials.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

On the Berry-Keating Operator

arXiv:2606.24405v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We review here two different viewpoints on the Berry-Keating operator $H_{BK}$, whose connection to the Riemann hypothesis remains an intriguing and not yet fully understood question, despite considerable attention in the recent literature. In particular, we propose two somehow complementary views to $H_{BK}$: the first is based on a purely Hilbertian point of view, on dilation operators and on the Mellin transform. The second is a distributional approach, with a specific view to ladder operators, generalized eigenstates of $H_{BK}$, and generalized coherent states.

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

Teaching Values to Machines: Simulating Human-Like Behavior in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate a remarkable capacity to adopt different personas and roles; however, it remains unclear whether they can manifest behavior that adheres to a coherent, human-like value structure. In this work, we draw on established psychological value theory to induce human-like values in LLMs and assess their alignment with patterns observed in human studies. Using validated psychological questionnaires, we conduct large-scale experiments – over 5 million questions – to evaluate value structures and value-behavior relationships in leading LLMs and compare them to humans. Our findings reveal strong agreement between value-prompted LLMs and humans across both dimensions. Moreover, incorporating human value distributions enhances population-level simulations with value-induced LLMs. These findings highlight the potential of value-induced LLMs as effective, psychologically grounded tools for simulating human behavior.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Improving End-to-End Speech Recognition for Dysarthric Speech through In-Domain Data Augmentation

arXiv:2606.19797v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dysarthric speech recognition is crucial for facilitating effective communication among individuals with dysarthria. However, accurately recognizing dysarthric speech poses significant challenges due to varying severity levels and limited data availability. In this paper, we explore data augmentation techniques for dysarthric automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems by fine-tuning the End-to-End pre-trained Wav2Vec2 model, with a specific focus on severity levels. To address the challenges of data scarcity and the need for extensive data in fine-tuning pre-trained ASR systems for dysarthric speech, we investigate four prominent data augmentation methods: Speaking-Rate Modification (SRM), Pitch Modification (PM), Formant Modification (FM), and vocal tract Length Perturbation (VTLP), tailored to different aspects of dysarthria. The study uses individually fine-tuned Wav2Vec2 models for each severity class as baseline systems. Additionally, we conducted severity-specific fine-tuning of the ASR model using augmented data. Results demonstrate distinct efficacy patterns for each augmentation technique across severity levels. The best WERs were achieved with SRM ($s$=0.8) for low (9.02\%) and medium (38.11\%) severities, and with PM ($\tau$=0.8) for high severity (55.15\%), reflecting relative improvements of 30.02\%, 16.64\%, and 15.47\%, respectively. These results confirm the effectiveness of the augmentation methods in improving dysarthric ASR performance.

14.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

GrassSV – hybrid method to detect structural variants in high throughput DNA-seq data

by Dominik Witczak, Krzysztof Sychla, Julia Wysocka, Artur Laskowski, Wojciech Frohmberg, Marta Glowacka, Alicja Dzik, Piotr Lukasiak, Jacek Blazewicz, Aleksandra Swiercz Genetic diversity is crucial for populations to adapt and survive in dynamic environments. This diversity arises from genetic mutations, which manifest in the genome as structural variants (SVs). Several types of SVs exist, but not all are equally easy to detect. Current SV detection tools tend to specialize in certain SV types or require the use of multiple tools to obtain a comprehensive variant profile, which increases computational cost and complexity. While some methods excel at identifying breakpoints, they often struggle with accurately classifying variant types, and their precision depends strongly on data quality and sequencing technology. At present, the majority of available genomic data originates from high-quality short reads, which remain the most affordable sequencing technology. In this manuscript, we introduce GrassSV, a novel and computationally efficient method that employs a hybrid pattern-matching approach to detect all major classes of structural variants using short-read sequencing data. GrassSV integrates depth-of-coverage analysis with contig-based pattern recognition to ensure both sensitivity and precision while minimizing false positives and runtime. Its robustness was demonstrated on the human Genome in a Bottle dataset, as well as on synthetic data derived from the yeast genome, where it achieved high accuracy across all SV types at a lower computational cost compared to existing methods. This makes GrassSV a practical alternative to multi-tool pipelines typically required for comprehensive SV detection. GrassSV is available at https://github.com/Domomod/GrassSV under GPL-3.0 license and the benchmark at: https://github.com/Domomod/GrassBenchmark.

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

Multi-agent rendezvous in fluid flows via reinforcement learning

arXiv:2606.11274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rendezvous is a critical task for multi-agent systems, requiring agents to coordinate to meet at an unspecified location. However, achieving this in fluid environments presents a challenge, as it remains unclear how agents can exploit underlying fluid kinematics to facilitate convergence. In this study, we adopt a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach to develop physics-informed rendezvous strategies in vortical flows. Compared to a naive strategy, where agents navigate toward their counterparts, MARL strategies significantly improve the rendezvous rate. MARL strategies also show transferability across varying vortex intensities, vortex scales, and swarm sizes. By breaking the symmetry of the state-action map, MARL strategy leverages a non-intuitive mechanism that prevents agents from becoming trapped in separate vortices, thereby enhancing rendezvous success. Additionally, a heuristic strategy is extracted from the learned strategy and also outperforms the naive strategy. Furthermore, a theoretical analysis demonstrates that fluid deformation impedes the rendezvous process. Large finite-time Lyapunov exponents identify where fluid effects separate adjacent agents, suggesting that targets should be planned in weak-deformation regions. Our findings reveal the important role that agent-fluid interactions play in multi-agent tasks and highlight the MARL capability to explore swarm intelligence in complex flow environments.

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

Filtered Conformal Ellipsoids for Graph-Native Time Series

arXiv:2606.17014v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Joint prediction sets for multivariate time series should control a single event while adapting to cross-coordinate dependence. We study filtered conformal ellipsoids: a frozen state-space filter emits a one-step predictive mean and covariance, and split-conformal calibration is applied to the resulting Mahalanobis scores. The filter is used to choose the ellipsoid shape; conformal calibration chooses the scalar radius, so the construction benefits from a learned predictive covariance without relying on Gaussian tail probabilities for coverage. The main difficulty is that filtered scores are dependent and learned recurrent filters need not contract in their raw hidden state; we therefore analyse contraction in an observable predictive-law quotient that identifies hidden states producing the same future sequence of emitted Gaussian laws. Under a stable Bayes Gaussian-projection filter, covariance bounds, and a finite-horizon observability Fisher condition, small excess Gaussian negative log-likelihood implies contraction of the learned emitted laws. Combined with a threshold-autocovariance envelope this yields a Chebyshev-type approximate coverage bound for filtered split-conformal prediction under dependence; a sharper Bernstein-type bound requires an additional geometric-mixing concentration assumption. Under Gaussian oracle realisability we also obtain a near-oracle log-volume comparison within the class of conditionally valid Gaussian ellipsoid rules. We instantiate the framework with a GCN-GRU filter with diagonal-plus-low-rank covariance. On moderate-size graph-native traffic benchmarks (METRLA-$20$ and PEMSBAY-$50$), the learned filter gives sharper at-target ellipsoids than static-covariance and non-filter baselines; at full-graph scale and on non-graph-native datasets, factor and copula baselines can be stronger.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

The Representational Limit of Scalar Interactions: An Interventional Decomposition

arXiv:2606.19410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Signed pairwise interaction scores fundamentally conflate uniqueness (U), redundancy (R), and synergy (S). We prove this on a minimal 3-way XOR structural causal model: faithful indices such as Shapley-Taylor return zero per pair, whereas projective indices such as Shapley Interaction spread the third-order effect into pair scalars that conflate the three mechanisms. We introduce Stochastic Hi-Fi, a post-hoc, retraining-free predictability decomposition that estimates per-feature U/R/S profiles by interventional masked inference. The estimator provides exact interventional semantics, finite-sample Monte Carlo bounds, strict variance reduction from coupled diamond sampling, and uniform finite-vocabulary convergence. Across tabular SCMs, Stochastic Hi-Fi recovers structure missed by scalar baselines (up to 411x larger interaction-magnitude recovery ratios). It also separates redundant and synergistic heads in the GPT-2 IOI circuit. On NIH ChestX-ray14, Stochastic Hi-Fi matches GradCAM on Pointing Game and improves substantially on Deletion AUC.

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

EDEN: A Large-Scale Corpus of Clinical Notes for Italian

We present EDEN (Emergency Department Electronic Notes), a new and unique large-scale corpus of clinical notes produced in Emergency Departments of Italian hospitals. The corpus, in its current version, is composed of approximately 4 million clinical notes fully anonymized, covering diverse phases of patient care during the stay in the emergency department. In addition, a subset of about six thousand notes has been manually annotated by clinical experts through a structured Case Report Form (CRF) containing 132 items relevant for two patient situations in emergency departments, dyspnea and loss of consciousness. Items may assume numerical values (e.g., for blood saturation), categorical (e.g., for level of consciousness ), binary (e.g., for presence of traumas), and mixed value types. The annotation process involved multiple clinicians and underwent iterative revision to resolve ambiguities in item formulation, resulting in a richly structured (although high imbalanced) resource. The dataset aims to fill a relevant gap of data able to support both the development and the use of Large Language Models in concrete medical applications. We describe the data collection protocol, the on-site anonymisation pipeline, corpus statistics, and the annotation scheme. Finally, we propose CRF-filling as a novel structured information extraction benchmark, and provide zero-shot baseline resulting from Gemma-27B and MedGemma-27B. To the best of our knowledge, the EDEN dataset is the largest freely available corpus of clinical notes existing for the Italian language.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SoftMoE: Soft Differentiable Routing for Mixture-of-Experts in LLMs

arXiv:2606.17952v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures enable scaling LLM parameters under a fixed inference budget by activating only a small subset of experts via top-$k$ routing. While this preserves causality and suits autoregressive language models, the discrete top-$k$ operator is not differentiable, forcing a fixed number of active experts per input and resulting in inefficient use of computation. We propose SoftMoE, which replaces discrete routing with a truncated soft top-$k$ LapSum relaxation, allowing gradient-based optimization of expert routing. We further parameterize the mean number of active experts per layer and impose a global budget constraint, enabling the model to learn how to allocate expert capacity across layers. SoftMoE remains fully compatible with autoregressive modeling and achieves performance comparable to or better than sparse MoE on language modeling and downstream tasks, while activating significantly fewer experts. Notably, the learned allocation is highly non-uniform, with later layers activating more experts. The source code is publicly available$^\dagger$.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Hierarchical symmetry selects log-Poisson cascades: classification, uniqueness, and stability

arXiv:2604.01632v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Within i.i.d. multiplicative cascades, a single axiom – the hierarchical symmetry, a linear contraction on incremental scaling exponents – is shown to be necessary and sufficient for the cascade multiplier to be log-Poisson. We prove: (1) a characterization theorem determining the log-Poisson law with explicit parameters, within the class of all multipliers with finite lattice moments; (2) a classification theorem locating the log-Poisson class inside the log-infinitely-divisible family and identifying the mechanism by which every rival sub-family fails the symmetry; (3) a stability theorem with sharp constants – $(1+\beta)^{1/2}$ when the limiting increment is known, $\sqrt{2}$ when it is fitted – and (4) an unconditional propagation theorem transferring the bound to the multiplier distribution at the sharp rate $\Theta(\sqrt{\varepsilon})$, with a matching lower bound. Beyond independence, the classification extends exactly at the level of asymptotic statistics (limiting cumulant generating function, large deviations, multifractal spectrum) and provably not at the level of laws: an explicit stationary ergodic Markov multiplier satisfies the symmetry exactly with a non-log-Poisson marginal, while exchangeable multipliers collapse to the i.i.d. log-Poisson cascade and finite-state Markov multipliers cannot satisfy the symmetry at all. In the continuous category of exactly scale-invariant log-infinitely-divisible multifractal random measures, no finite moment window of structure-function exponents identifies the cascade class, whereas at the level of the scale-invariance generator the symmetry selects exactly the Barral-Mandelbrot compound Poisson cascade, with scale-ratio-free stability constants. The proofs reduce to second-moment identities on [0,1] via the change of variables $u = e^{kx}$, boundedness of the multiplier, and multiplicative couplings.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Toward Generalist Autonomous Research via Hypothesis-Tree Refinement

Scientific progress depends on a repeated loop of exploration, experimentation, and abstraction. Researchers test candidate directions, interpret the evidence, and carry the resulting lessons into later attempts. We study how an AI agent can run this loop autonomously over long horizons. We introduce Arbor, a general framework for autonomous research that combines a long-lived coordinator, short-lived executors, and Hypothesis Tree Refinement (HTR), a persistent tree that links hypotheses, artifacts, evidence, and distilled insights across time. The coordinator manages global research strategy over the tree, while executors implement and test individual hypotheses in isolated worktrees. As results return, Arbor updates the tree, propagates reusable lessons, refines the search frontier, and admits verified improvements. This design turns autonomous research from a sequence of local attempts into a cumulative process in which strategy, execution, and evidence are carried across time. We evaluate Arbor under Autonomous Optimization (AO), an operational setting where an agent improves an initial research artifact through iterative experimentation without step-level human supervision. Across six real research tasks in model training, harness engineering, and data synthesis, Arbor achieves the best held-out result on all six tasks, attaining more than 2.5x the average relative held-out gain of Codex and Claude Code under the same task interface and resource budget. On MLE-Bench Lite, Arbor reaches 86.36% Any Medal with GPT-5.5, the strongest result in our comparison.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

From Drift to Coherence: Stabilizing Beliefs in LLMs

arXiv:2606.17832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often hypothesized to perform implicit Bayesian inference, yet a key coherence condition, the martingale property of predictive beliefs, has been shown to fail in controlled synthetic in-context learning settings. We revisit this question in a more typical usage regime: generic multiple-choice question answering. Exploiting the discrete answer space, we compute exact predictive distributions and study belief dynamics induced by autoregressive answer resampling. We introduce prompted predictive resampling (PPR), where an LLM generates a sequence of answers to the same question. Empirically, PPR reveals early-stage belief drift, indicating martingale violations. However, after sufficient resampling steps, the belief process self-stabilizes and converges to a coherent predictive distribution. Based on this observation, we further propose (i) a seed-answer prompting strategy to accelerate stabilization, and (ii) a self-consistency loss that amortizes early-stage drift into the model via fine-tuning. Experiments on multiple-choice QA benchmarks show that our methods substantially reduce belief drift and improve predictive coherence without sacrificing accuracy.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Red-Teaming the Agentic Red-Team

arXiv:2606.24496v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The use of agentic systems to perform offensive security operations has moved from a theoretical possibility to a commoditized capability. However, while the community has focused on creating more and more capable agents, less attention has been allocated to assessing the security of those systems. In this work, we present the first in-depth security analysis of the most widely used agentic systems for offensive security operations. We show that most of these tools share common design flaws that enable an active adversary to exfiltrate API keys, establish persistent footholds, and fully compromise the operator's machine, even when the agent operates inside a sandboxed container. To support our analysis, we introduce a full cyber kill chain for such agentic systems, capturing the progression from initial LLM manipulation to lateral movement, persistence, guardrail bypass, and sandbox escape. Building on our security analysis, we derive a robust architecture for agentic offensive-security tools and propose actionable, broadly applicable design principles that mitigate the disclosed attack paths at the architectural level.

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

TimeLens: On-Device Artifact Recognition with Retrieval-Augmented Question Answering for the Grand Egyptian Museum

TimeLens is an AI-powered bilingual mobile guide for the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). Pointing a phone at an exhibit, a visitor sees the artifact recognized in real time and can ask follow-up questions answered in English or Arabic. The work addresses three problems specific to in-gallery deployment: fine-grained visual similarity among 51 catalogued artifacts (many near-identical Ramesside statues), the gap between curated training data and handheld camera conditions, and the risk of an AI guide stating unsupported historical facts. Two engineering contributions are reported. First, an on-device artifact detector was developed through a data-quality-driven iteration study – from foundation-model auto-annotation (YOLO-World), through spatial label-cleaning rules, to a fully hand-annotated dataset – isolating label quality as the decisive factor: the final YOLOv8n model resolves every previously failing class while remaining a 5.97 MB TensorFlow Lite asset that runs in real time on a mid-range phone (mAP@0.5 = 0.995, mAP@0.5:0.95 = 0.924). Second, a bilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) guide, grounded in a 108-record ChromaDB knowledge base, was benchmarked across seven candidate language models, with Gemma 4 E2B (Q4 K M) selected; ten targeted optimizations reduce end-to-end latency from over 30 s to approximately 10 s. Both subsystems are integrated in a production Flutter application with bilingual interface, museum location gating, and text-to-speech support.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Controlled Human Malaria Infection model for relapsing Plasmodium vivax

Background Plasmodium vivax malaria relapses are a major source of morbidity and onward transmission of infection. The underlying mechanisms are poorly understood and current therapies sub-optimal. We examined the safety and feasibility of a controlled human malaria infection (CHMI) model for relapsing P. vivax. Methods We conducted an open-label, proof-of-concept, CHMI study of relapsing P. vivax. Healthy, malaria-naive, Duffy-positive adults aged 18-45 years with extensive CYP2D6 metaboliser phenotype and normal blood glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) levels were recruited in Oxford, UK. Mosquito-bite CHMI was performed in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, using Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes infected with PvW1, a clonal isolate of P. vivax from Thailand. All follow-up visits were conducted in Oxford, UK. Primary P. vivax infections (qPCR > 500 genome copies/mL) were treated with artemether-lumefantrine (80mg/480mg at 8, 24, 36, 48 and 60 hours). From Day 28 following CHMI, participants attended a fortnightly clinic for clinical review and qPCR blood sampling, with additional assessments performed for any reported symptoms. P. vivax relapse infections (qPCR > 500 genome copies/mL) were treated with artemether-lumefantrine as per primary infection. Definitive anti-malarial treatment with atovaquone-proguanil (1000mg/400mg once daily for three days) and primaquine (0{middle dot}5 mg/kg/day for 14 days) was administered six months following CHMI, regardless of parasitaemia or symptoms. The primary objective was to assess the safety, feasibility and frequency of relapsing P. vivax after CHMI. Remote follow-up (5 years) is ongoing. The study is registered with ISRCTN registry (ISRCTN48625883). Findings 20 participants were screened for eligibility from 21 January 2025. Five participants (median age 22 years) underwent CHMI (five infected mosquitoes per participant) on 15 April 2025. All participants developed primary P. vivax infection and experienced at least one relapse infection. Two participants experienced a second relapse. Overall incidence rate was 3{middle dot}6 relapse infections per person-year. Solicited adverse events were mild or moderate and there were no serious adverse events. Definitive anti-malarial treatment was administered to all participants. One participant experienced primaquine-induced methaemoglobinaemia, resolving with early discontinuation of treatment (total dose 5{middle dot}3 mg/kg). To date, more than six months after primaquine treatment, no further relapses have been recorded. Interpretation CHMI of relapsing P. vivax is safe and feasible, allowing exploration of the mechanisms underlying relapse infections and providing a platform for future anti-relapse efficacy studies. Funding European Union Horizon Europe programme and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) via OptiVivax consortium; UK National Institute for Health and Care Research Biomedical Research Centre: Oxford; and UK Medical Research Council.