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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

FACTR 2: Learning External Force Sensing for Commodity Robot Arms Improves Policy Learning

arXiv:2606.12406v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation requires force sensitivity, but many robot arms lack dedicated force sensors due to their high cost. We present Neural External Torque Estimation (NEXT), a data-driven method that estimates external joint torques without needing any dedicated force sensors. NEXT trains in 1 minute from only 10 minutes of free-motion data, yet achieves estimates comparable to dedicated joint-torque sensors. NEXT enables force-feedback teleoperation on low-cost arms and improves policy learning through Force-Informed Re-Sampling Training (FIRST), which up-samples pre-contact and contact segments during behavior cloning. Across five long-horizon tasks, FIRST outperforms prior force-aware policies by over 17% in task progress. Together, NEXT and FIRST bring force-aware teleoperation and policy learning to off-the-shelf robots without additional sensing hardware. Video results and code are available at https://jasonjzliu.com/factr2

02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Daily briefing: Ancient ground squirrels ate like ‘zombies of the Pleistocene’

Authors:

Evidence from fossilized poo reveals the diverse diet of ancient ground squirrels. Plus, the science behind the peptide craze and our innate tendency to wander anticlockwise. Evidence from fossilized poo reveals the diverse diet of ancient ground squirrels. Plus, the science behind the peptide craze and our innate tendency to wander anticlockwise.

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

Improved Stochastic Optimization of LogSumExp

arXiv:2509.24894v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The LogSumExp function, dual to the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, plays a central role in many important optimization problems, including entropy-regularized optimal transport (OT) and distributionally robust optimization (DRO). In practice, when the number of exponential terms inside the logarithm is large or infinite, optimization becomes challenging since computing the gradient requires differentiating every term. We propose a novel convexity- and smoothness-preserving approximation to LogSumExp that can be efficiently optimized using stochastic gradient methods. This approximation is rooted in a sound modification of the KL divergence in the dual, resulting in a new $f$-divergence called the Safe KL divergence. Our experiments and theoretical analysis of the LogSumExp-based stochastic optimization, arising in DRO and continuous OT, demonstrate the advantages of our approach over existing baselines.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

InfoGeo: Information-Theoretic Object-Centric Learning for Cross-View Generalizable UAV Geo-Localization

Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) is fundamental for precise localization and navigation in GPS-denied environments, aiming to match ground or UAV imagery with satellite views. Existing approaches often rely on global feature alignment, but they suffer from substantial domain shifts induced by varying regional textures and weather conditions. This issue becomes even more pronounced in UAV-based scenarios, where the broader perspective inevitably introduces dense, fine-grained objects, creating significant visual clutter. To address this, we draw inspiration from Object-Centric Learning (OCL) and propose InfoGeo, an information-theoretic framework designed to enhance robustness and generalization. InfoGeo reformulates the optimization as an information bottleneck process with two core objectives: (i) maximizing view-invariant information by aligning the object-centric structural relations across views, and (ii) minimizing view-specific noisy signals through cross-view knowledge constraints. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks and challenging scenarios demonstrate that InfoGeo significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

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

From Consumption to Reflection: Designing Human-AI Relations for Stable Reasoning

arXiv:2606.11195v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have transformed how humans access information, but not how we reason with it. Their fluency accelerates consumption while bypassing the slow, reflective processes that underpin sound judgment. This paper introduces Relational Reflective Intelligence (RRI), an inference-time governance layer that operationalizes reflection through auditable reasoning loops. RRI operates not inside the model but around it, providing a practical structure for stable, auditable reasoning between humans and LLMs. The core premise is that LLMs inherit cognitive vulnerabilities similar to those that shape human thought: reliance on intuitive shortcuts, confusion between representation and reality, and a preference for coherence over falsification. When humans and models share these tendencies, their errors compound. We refer to this as relational drift, a failure that arises from interaction rather than from the model alone. Addressing this requires a shift from modeling relations between words to structuring relations between model outputs and human reasoning. RRI provides this missing layer through three components: the Rose-Frame, which identifies likely breakdowns in reasoning; the Architect's Pen, which introduces targeted reflection steps at critical moments; and an inference-time workflow that embeds these steps without retraining the model. Together, these elements transform human-AI interaction into a joint reasoning system with explicit checkpoints, conflict surfacing, and an auditable trail of assumptions. Rather than making machines think like humans or forcing humans to reason like machines, RRI creates a structured interaction in which both compensate for each other's limitations. It reframes AI safety as a cognitive architecture problem, where reliable decisions depend on embedding reflection directly into the interaction process.

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

Semiclassical limit of Polyakov-Liouville measure and Q-Curvature Uniformization on evev-dimensional manifolds

arXiv:2606.14443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the semiclassical limit of the Polyakov-Liouville measure $\boldsymbol{\nu}_\gamma$, which is a non-Gaussian measure on $H^{-\eps}(M)$ that has recently been extended from Riemann surfaces to general Riemannian manifolds $(M,g)$ of even dimension. We show that under an appropriate rescaling in the semiclassical limit as $\gamma\to0$, the normalized Polyakov-Liouville measure $\Q_\gamma$ concentrates on the unique smooth weight $u$ for which the conformal metric $e^{2u}g$ on $M$ has constant $Q$-curvature.

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

Towards Functional Correctness of Large Code Models with Selective Generation

arXiv:2505.13553v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The hallucination of code generation models hinders their applicability to systems requiring higher safety standards. One critical bottleneck in addressing code hallucination is the difficulty of identifying the functional correctness of generated code, due to its unnatural form. We address this core bottleneck by automatically generating unit tests using dynamic code analysis tools, leveraging the executable nature of code. Accordingly, we propose a selective code generator that abstains from uncertain generations – based on the functional correctness evaluated by generated unit tests – to theoretically control the correctness among non-abstained answers, \ie the false discovery rate. Finally, we propose to use generated unit tests in evaluation as well as in learning for precise code evaluation, calling this paradigm FuzzEval. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method along with the controllability of code hallucination and reasonable selection efficiency.

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

NetCause: Counterfactual Learning for Root Cause Analysis in Large-Scale Networks

arXiv:2606.13543v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can a learned model capture how faults propagate through a large-scale network and use this knowledge to causally attribute customer impact to its underlying root cause? Existing root cause analysis techniques often rely on static rules, correlation heuristics, or topology-local reasoning, which struggle to generalize in dynamic environments where faults propagate across complex physical and logical dependencies. We present NetCause, a self-supervised learning-based framework that models network incidents as graph-temporal processes and uses counterfactual simulation to rank candidate root causes. This approach produces an interpretable ranking of root cause hypotheses and integrates naturally with operator-defined mitigation and remediation actions. We train the model on over 1,500 incidents collected over six months from a leading cloud provider's production network and evaluate it on 31 expert-labeled incidents. NetCause consistently improves root cause ranking quality in the regime most relevant to operational decision-making, achieving a 16.1% accuracy improvement over a rule-based heuristic baseline. While training is computationally intensive, inference is lightweight, requiring only seconds of GPU runtime per incident (well below typical telemetry collection latencies).

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

INI-VPINN: A Variational Physics-Informed Neural Network with Implicit Neumann and Interface Handling for Multi-Material Domains with Geometric Singularities

arXiv:2606.18032v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a new weak-form Physics-Informed Neural Network approach (named INI-VPINN). INI-VPINN naturally incorporates Neumann boundary and interface conditions into the variational formulation. It removes the need for additional loss terms or multiple subdomain networks. This framework employs compact support weighting functions and integration by parts to implicitly impose flux and continuity constraints. In this way, it implicitly ensures physical consistency across material boundaries. The proposed method is tested on Poisson and Laplace problems with sharp interfaces and complex geometries. Results show that, compared with several other Physics Informed Neural Networks-based formulations, the INI-VPINN consistently achieves higher accuracy, smoother and faster convergence. The proposed framework provides a general approach for solving multimaterial problems with complex geometries and mixed Neumann-Dirichlet boundary conditions using neural networks. The implementation is publicly available in a GitHub repository.

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

Graph Diffusion Residuals for Control-Function Instrumental Variables

arXiv:2606.14636v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Control-function instrumental variable estimators need a first-stage residual, not merely a first-stage prediction. High-capacity first stages can interpolate treatment and leave too little residual information for the outcome equation. We study Adaptive Anisotropic Instrumental Heat Flow (A-IHF), a deterministic graph-diffusion residual extractor for flexible control functions. A-IHF treats treatment as a signal on a graph of first-stage features, uses pilot diffusion to detect large treatment jumps, attenuates conductance across those jumps, and computes the generated control with a sparse graph resolvent. Its observational selection rule uses only $(Z,X)$, combining graph generalized cross-validation, roughness, residualized-treatment relevance, and graph-admissibility filtering. The analysis decomposes error into structural leakage, residual attenuation, and residualized treatment variation, yielding finite-sample bounds, graph-admissibility rates under latent piecewise-smooth geometry, and finite-path selection calibration. Across 54 synthetic benchmark cells with tuned graph, kernel, tree, boosting, series, and neural control-function baselines, guarded observational A-IHF has the lowest average structural-response MSE; the A-IHF family beats the best non-A-IHF baseline in 32 cells. Performance is strongest when the graph captures piecewise-smooth first-stage structure.

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

Orchestrated Reality: From Role-Play to Living, Playable Game Worlds – LLM-Driven World Simulation as a Parameterized-Action POMDP

arXiv:2606.16014v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many games rely on storytelling combined with systems that track levelling, NPC behaviour, and consequence simulation; bridging tightly-authored narrative with deeply-simulated worlds – most acute in sandbox and open-world settings – has been prohibitively expensive. LLM-driven worlds open a new path: a single harness can coordinate numerical state, narrative voice, storytelling pacing, and rule logic together. Realising this requires the LLM system to sustain a persistent world (who is where, what has just happened, what is currently true), which today's deployed systems do not: the narrative voice asserts state in free prose without any validated representation, so a fully autonomous game engine remains infeasible. We treat this as an architectural choice, not a limitation of language models, and report work in progress on a framework – orchestrated reality – that makes the world a canonical object owned by a singleton orchestration agent analogous to the tabletop-RPG Game Master (GM). We formalise an LLM-driven game world for a human player as a Parameterized-Action POMDP: state is a tree of canonical JSON entities, actions decompose as $a=(k, x_k)$ (a discrete intent kind plus structured JSON parameters), the agent observes only a narrative projection $o=O(s)$ of state, and the transition kernel $F$ is an LLM-driven Plan-Diff-Validate-Apply (PDVA) pipeline that commits schema-validated, content-hashed JSON deltas. We give the formal model, a JSON-state example, a worked single-turn example, and a catalogue of 15 illustrative incidents drawn from a real deployment showing the framework in action. Empirical validation through a planned human player study – together with multi-NPC concurrent agency and deployment as an RL environment – is situated as future work.

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

Automating Low-Risk Code Review at Meta: RADAR, Risk Calibration, and Review Efficiency

arXiv:2605.30208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-assisted coding tools have altered software production. At Meta, significant lines of code per human-landed diff grew by 105.9% year over year and per-developer diff volume rose 51%, with agentic AI responsible for over 80% of that growth. Meanwhile, the share of diffs receiving timely review has declined, exposing a widening gap between code supply and reviewer bandwidth. We ask three questions that progress from feasibility through calibration to impact: (1) can risk-stratified automation operate at scale across diverse organizations, (2) how does tuning the risk threshold affect the trade-off between automation yield and safety, and (3) to what extent does automated review reduce end-to-end latency for AI-generated changes? We deployed RADAR (Risk Aware Diff Auto Review), a multi-stage funnel that classifies each diff by authorship and source type, applies eligibility gates, static heuristics, a machine-learned Diff Risk Score, LLM-based Automated Code Review, and deterministic validation before landing qualifying changes. We evaluate RADAR through telemetry covering 535K+ RADAR-reviewed diffs, observational before-after comparisons for policy changes, and difference-in-differences analysis of efficiency outcomes. RADAR has reviewed 535K+ diffs and landed 331K+. Relaxing the Diff Risk Score threshold from the 25th to the 50th percentile increased the approve rate to 60.31%. The revert rate for RADAR-reviewed diffs is 1/3 that of non-RADAR diffs, and the Production Incident rate is 1/50 that of non-RADAR diffs. RADAR reduces median time to close by over 330% and median diff review wall time by 35%. Risk-aware layered automation can materially reduce review bottlenecks created by AI-driven code growth without compromising production safety.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Sequential Deep Learning to Predict Non-Central to Central Geographic Atrophy Progression from OCT Imaging

Purpose: To develop and validate a temporal deep learning framework for predicting geographic atrophy (GA) progression across multi-year horizons using longitudinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) sequences. Design: Retrospective longitudinal cohort study. Subjects, Participants, and/or Controls: A total of 91 patients with dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) were identified from Wake Forest University School of Medicine (2013-2023), yielding 455 OCT volumes. Two prediction cohorts were defined: 32 patients with no GA (NGA) at baseline who subsequently developed GA, and 35 patients whose earliest GA manifestation was non-central GA (NCGA). Non-progressing patients served as negative controls. Methods: OCT B-scan volumes were encoded into visit-level feature representations using three pretrained architectures (ResNet-18, ResNet-50, ViT-B/16). Chronologically ordered visit embeddings, optionally augmented with inter-visit time intervals ({Delta}t), were processed through recurrent neural networks (RNN), long short-term memory networks (LSTM), and Transformer encoders to model longitudinal disease trajectories. Models were trained and evaluated independently for prediction horizons of 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 years using patient-level stratified splits (80/20). Performance was assessed across five random seeds. Main Outcome Measures: Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC), F1-score, and accuracy for predicting two clinically critical transitions: NGA to GA onset and NCGA to central GA (CGA) involvement. Results: For NGA to GA prediction, models achieved ROC-AUC of 0.84-0.94 at 2-4 years and 1.00 at 5-6 years. For NCGA to CGA prediction, Transformer-based models achieved peak AUC of 0.95 at 4 years and 0.96 at 5 years. Longer input sequences (8 visits vs. 4 visits) consistently improved NCGA to CGA performance at extended horizons. Temporal interval encoding improved stability in several LSTM configurations.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Addressing Detail Bottlenecks in Latent Diffusion for RGB-to-SWIR Image Translation

Latent diffusion models (LDMs) enable efficient image-to-image translation but discard fine spatial details during compression, degrading downstream perception tasks. We identify two bottlenecks: the autoencoder, which loses spatial information, and the conditioning pathway, which further degrades the source signal through naive downsampling. We propose two lightweight, backbone-agnostic fixes: a Source-Conditioned Autoencoder (SCAE) that injects high-resolution source features into the decoder via skip connections, and a Learnable Guidance Encoder (LGE) that replaces naive downsampling with a learned conditioning signal. Evaluated on RGB-to-SWIR translation for driving scenes with two denoiser backbones (U-Net and DiT), our approach improves detection mAP by up to 2x over the latent diffusion baseline, with up to 3.4x gains on small objects (COCO-small,

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

Multi-component Causal Tracing in Large Language Models

Causal tracing systematically intervenes on a large language model's (LLM's) internal representations to uncover and quantify the causal pathways linking specific inputs or computations to specific metrics of interest, quantifying the LLM's behavior. Building on previous single-component or single-layer studies, this paper presents a unified framework for causally tracing multiple components simultaneously. This framework systematically identifies the subsets of components (e.g., attention heads and multi-layer perceptron neurons) most critical to a desired target performance metric (e.g., accuracy and fairness). This is achieved by incorporating flexible interventions applied to a wide range of desired metrics. To address the combinatorial complexity of the multi-component problem, an efficient algorithm is designed that leverages soft interventions and a carefully designed metric transformation, converting the combinatorial search problem into a continuous one that can be solved efficiently under proper constraints, thereby generating proper binary decisions for selecting components. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently identifies subsets of the model's components that have a high impact on the target metric, outperforming existing baseline approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZiruiYan/multi-component-causal-tracing.

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

Overcoming Labelled Data Scarcity for Defect Classification in Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

arXiv:2506.01678v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) is a powerful technique for imaging surfaces with atomic resolution, providing insight into physical and chemical processes at the level of single atoms and molecules. A regular task of STM image analysis is the identification and labelling of features of interest against a uniform background. Performing this manually is a labour-intensive task, requiring significant human effort. To reduce this burden, we propose an automated approach to the segmentation of STM images that uses both few-shot learning and unsupervised learning. Our technique offers greater flexibility compared to previous supervised methods; it removes the requirement for large manually annotated datasets and is thus easier to adapt to an unseen surface while still maintaining a high accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by using it to recognise atomic features on three distinct surfaces: Si(001), Ge(001), and TiO$_2$(110), including adsorbed AsH$_3$ molecules on the silicon and germanium surfaces. Our model exhibits strong generalisation capabilities, and following initial training, can be adapted to unseen surfaces with as few as one additional labelled data point. This work is a significant step towards efficient and material-agnostic, automatic segmentation of STM images.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Structure-Based Immunoinformatics Design of a CTB-Adjuvanted Multi-Epitope Mucosal Vaccine Against Helicobacter pylori

Background: Helicobacter pylori coloniz the gastric mucosa of nearly half of the global population and is classified as a Group I carcinogen by the World Health Organization due to its strong association with gastric cancer. The growing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant H. pylori strains significantly compromises current therapeutic strategies, emphasizing the urgent need for effective prophylactic approaches. Research design and methods; In this study, a novel multi-epitope vaccine was designed targeting H. pylori, incorporating epitopes from four key virulence proteins: BabB, SabB, SabA, and VacA. Using an immunoinformatics-guided structural vaccinology approach, B- and T-cell epitopes were predicted, prioritized based on immunogenicity, conservation, population coverage, and non-homology to human proteins, and assembled into the final vaccine construct. To enhance immunogenicity and specifically stimulate mucosal immune responses, the cholera toxin B subunit (CTB) was fused at the N-terminal via an EAAAK linker, a novel application in H. pylori multi-epitope vaccines. The PADRE universal epitope and additional linkers were incorporated to optimize epitope presentation and helper T-cell activation. Results: Comprehensive evaluations of physicochemical, antigenic, allergenic, and toxic properties were conducted, followed by secondary and tertiary structure modeling, refinement, and validation. Conformational B-cell epitopes were mapped, and molecular docking, binding affinity analysis, energy minimization, and molecular dynamics simulations confirmed structural stability and receptor interactions. Codon optimization and in silico cloning predicted efficient expression in Escherichia coli, while immune simulations suggested robust humoral and cellular responses. Conclusions: This study presents a promising multi-epitope vaccine candidate against H. pylori, offering a rational framework for future experimental validation and potential clinical application.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Utility-Diversity Aware Online Batch Selection for LLM Supervised Fine-tuning

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a commonly used technique to adapt large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. In practice, SFT on a full dataset is computationally expensive and sometimes suffers from overfitting or bias amplification. This facilitates the rise of data curation in SFT, which prioritizes the most valuable data to optimze. This work studies the online batch selection family that dynamically scores and filters samples during the training process. However, existing popular methods often (i) rely merely on the utility of data to select a subset while neglecting other crucial factors like diversity, (ii) rely on external resources such as reference models or validation sets, and (iii) incur extra training time over full-dataset training. To address these limitations, this work develops UDS (Utility-Diversity Sampling), a framework for efficient online batch selection in SFT. UDS leverages the nuclear norm of the logits matrix to capture both data utility and intra-sample diversity, while estimating inter-sample diversity through efficient low-dimensional embedding comparisons with a lightweight memory buffer of historical samples. Such a design eliminates the need for external resources and unnecessary backpropagation, securing computational efficiency. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that UDS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art online batch selection methods under varying data budgets, and significantly reduces training time compared to full-dataset fine-tuning. Code is available at https://github.com/gfyddha/UDS.

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

Beyond Layer Importance in Layer-wise Sparsity: An Inter-Layer Perturbation-Absorption Perspective

The considerable layer-wise redundancy in large language models (LLMs) has established non-uniform sparsity allocation across layers as the standard pruning approach for efficient compression. Existing layer-wise allocation methods that estimate allocation strategy from local signals such as activation outliers or weight spectra mainly derive from local layer importance, whereas the final post-pruning performance is also influenced by the network's subsequent compensatory capacity. In this paper, we directly characterize this property through controlled perturbation experiments. We make the following empirical findings. First, layers exhibit highly heterogeneous responses to pruning-scale perturbations. In most cases, early layers amplify perturbations, while middle and late layers actively absorb them, with relative L2 drift decreasing monotonically across depth and direction realigning toward the unperturbed hidden-state trajectory. Second, absorption is a large-perturbation phenomenon. Under small perturbations the network exhibits amplification across all layers, and the transition to absorption occurs smoothly as perturbation magnitude grows to pruning scale. This enriches the linearized accumulation theory underlying related works. Building on these findings, we define an absorption coefficient per layer and propose absorption-aware correction, an orthogonal augmentation that improves OWL and AlphaPruning by reducing perplexity by 7.13% and boosting zero-shot accuracy by 1.02% across multiple model families at 70% sparsity.

20.
Science (Express) 2026-04-16

Protein-templated synthesis of dinucleotide repeat DNA by an antiphage reverse transcriptase | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Defense-associated reverse transcriptases (DRTs) are widespread bacterial anti-phage systems that use unconventional mechanisms of polynucleotide synthesis. We show that DRT3, which comprises two distinct RTs (Drt3a and Drt3b) and a noncoding RNA (ncRNA), synthesizes alternating poly(GT/AC) double-stranded DNA. Cryo–electron microscopy structures at 2.6 Å resolution reveal a D3-symmetric 6:6:6 complex of Drt3a, Drt3b, and ncRNA. Drt3a produces the poly(GT) strand using a conserved ACACAC template within the ncRNA. Notably, Drt3b synthesizes a complementary, protein-primed poly(AC) strand in the complete absence of a nucleic acid template, using conserved active site residues specific to Drt3b to enforce precise base alternation. These findings expand the functional landscape of nucleic acid polymerases, revealing a protein-templated mechanism for sequence-specific DNA synthesis.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Optimal Deterministic Multicalibration and Omniprediction

arXiv:2606.20557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A model is multicalibrated on a collection of group weights $G$ if it is calibrated – i.e. unbiased even conditional on its prediction – not just overall, but also after reweighting contexts by each $g \in G$. It is a useful property for many downstream applications and is a basic desideratum of trustworthy machine learning. Before this work, all predictors known to attain the minimax-optimal $\widetilde O(\varepsilon^{-3})$ sample complexity rate for $\varepsilon$-multicalibration were randomized, while deterministic predictors were known only with substantially worse sample complexity. Whether randomization is necessary for optimal sample complexity in multicalibration was explicitly asked by [CLNR26] and implicitly in several prior works. We resolve this open problem by giving a minimax-optimal multicalibration algorithm that outputs a deterministic predictor. We then generalize the algorithm to produce optimal deterministic predictors that satisfy outcome indistinguishability (OI) with respect to finite or finitely covered collections of tests. As an application, this also gives deterministic omnipredictors and panpredictors with optimal sample complexity, resolving open problems posed by [OKK25] and [BHHLZ25].

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

Plug-and-Adapt: Multimodal Coreference Resolution at First Sight with a Pretrained Alignment Model

Visual information helps resolve ambiguity in coreference resolution, leading to notable performance gains. However, existing Multi-modal Coreference Resolution (MCR) methods require training with (partially) annotated data from the target dataset before they can be applied, preventing their direct usability and raising concerns about generalization. While Vision-Language Large Models (VLLMs) with billions of parameters offer promising zero-shot capabilities, they remain largely inaccessible. Their massive size limits deployability, and many are only accessible through paid APIs. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-adapt method that strategically adapts a carefully pre-trained alignment model for immediate use in MCR tasks, designed to eliminate the need for training on scarce benchmark datasets or relying on resource-intensive VLLMs. Specifically, we first pre-train a fine-grained alignment model between textual and visual contextual information using vision-language alignment datasets. We then repurpose the alignment model to MCR through similarity aggregation by fusing visual and categorical cues with evidence theory, thereby enhancing effectiveness. Experiments on the Coreference Image Narratives (CIN) benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving a 5.31\% and 2.12\% improvement in CoNLL F1 over SOTA dedicated methods and popular VLLMs, respectively. We further evaluate our method on a masked CIN dataset for robustness testing and on a specially constructed VCR-MCR dataset for generalization assessment, with results confirming both capabilities.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

WorldReasoner: Evaluating Whether Language Model Agents Forecast Events with Valid Reasoning

Forecasting real-world events requires language-model agents to reason under uncertainty from incomplete, time-bounded information. Yet evaluating whether agents genuinely forecast requires more than final-answer accuracy: a model may be correct by recalling memorized training facts, citing fabricated evidence, or producing an unsupported causal story. We present WorldReasoner, an evaluation framework for temporally valid event forecasting. Each task gives an agent a resolved forecasting question, a simulated forecast date, and access only to evidence available before that date; after resolution, the framework scores the submitted probability, cited evidence, and optional causal event graph. WorldReasoner reports three complementary axes: outcome quality against resolved answers, evidence quality over cited sources, and reasoning quality against post-resolution hindsight graphs. The benchmark is built by an agentic construction pipeline that generates forecasting questions, collects time-stamped evidence, and builds hindsight reference graphs at scale, yielding 345 resolved tasks derived from 14,141 articles with graphs covering 8,087 extracted events. Across six controlled agent settings, temporally valid retrieval is the strongest driver of outcome accuracy; causal graph construction improves key-event recovery; and correct graph-enabled forecasts are more strongly grounded in key events and relevant sources, yet agents still struggle to convert grounded evidence into calibrated probabilities.

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

Contextualizing Biological Language Models across Modalities via Logit-Space Contrastive Alignment

arXiv:2606.18703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained biological language models expose per-token probability distributions through masked-token prediction, providing the likelihood interface central to sequence design, variant scoring, and mechanistic interpretation. Yet these distributions are learned from broad unlabeled corpora and are not naturally conditioned on task-specific biological contexts such as interaction partners, cellular environments, or therapeutic interventions. Existing contextual matching methods often distort this interface through pooled embeddings, contrastive latent spaces, or task-specific prediction heads. We introduce LOGICA (Logit-space Contrastive Alignment), a framework for context-conditioned prediction that performs contrastive learning directly in output-logit space. Using gated cross-modal adapters compatible with each model's native token head, LOGICA preserves the pretrained likelihood interface and converts contextualized token log-likelihoods into matching scores. Alignment is defined through context-sensitive token probabilities rather than proximity in a shared embedding space, enabling learning from sparse paired data across models with distinct vocabularies, without a shared tokenizer or decoder. LOGICA is particularly effective for mutation-local variant ranking, where comparisons reduce to context-conditioned likelihoods of mutant tokens at perturbed sites. Across protein–ligand binding, TCR–peptide activity, and drug-conditioned resistance prediction, LOGICA improves over prior state-of-the-art methods, including matched latent-contrastive and conditional MLM baselines, while retaining a token-level interface for interpretation and generation. On held-out-gene single-mutation drug-resistance prediction, LOGICA improves AUC from near-random latent-space baselines of $\sim$0.55 to $\sim$0.65.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Target-confidence Recourse Using tSeTlin machines: TRUST

arXiv:2606.18832v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Counterfactual explanations are widely used to provide algorithmic recourse in high-stakes decision-making systems. Most existing methods seek the smallest change to an input that flips a model's decision. However, decision-makers often rely not only on predicted labels but also on confidence thresholds and risk margins. Counterfactuals that barely cross a decision boundary can be fragile and unstable under noise or model variation. In this paper, we propose Target-confidence Recourse Using tSeTlin machines (TRUST), a framework in which users explicitly specify the desired prediction confidence for recourse. Rather than generating counterfactuals and evaluating confidence afterward, TRUST directly searches for minimal changes that satisfy a user-defined confidence target, enabling comparison of recourse options in terms of cost, confidence, and robustness. We instantiate TRUST using a Probabilistic Tsetlin Machine (PTM) combined with Bayesian optimization. The probabilistic clause-based structure of PTM links prediction confidence to the stability of decision rules. We show that counterfactuals satisfying the same rules can still differ substantially in reliability depending on how securely they satisfy those rules, revealing whether decisions are supported by robust or fragile clause activations. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that target-confidence counterfactuals produce more robust and interpretable recourse than conventional boundary-based approaches. Across multiple benchmarks, TRUST achieves perfect robustness while maintaining low recourse cost, including an L2 distance of 0.10 on the Haberman dataset at 0.92 confidence. By explicitly controlling confidence and exposing rule-level stability, TRUST provides actionable recourse for high-stakes decision support.