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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

CN-NewsTTS Bench: a target-level automatic benchmark for raw-input Chinese news TTS pronunciation

Authors:

Chinese news text contains dense written forms such as scores, hyphenated model names, ranges, unit symbols, percentages, English abbreviations, and mixed Chinese-Latin-digit names. These forms are frequent in real listening workflows, and a text-to-speech (TTS) system can preserve the written string while changing the spoken meaning. We introduce CN-NewsTTS Bench v0.1, an open target-level benchmark for evaluating whether Chinese news TTS products pronounce such targets correctly from raw text, without user-side rules, LLM rewriting, SSML hints, or manual edits. The release contains a 200-record development set, an 800-record public test set, 992 public auto-evaluable targets, fixed transcripts from a three-ASR ensemble, an automatic target scorer, and initial results for seven product TTS systems. We additionally report ASR-route diagnostics, ASR-subset ablations, category-level results, confidence intervals, and provider configuration metadata. The best system reaches 0.879 strict accuracy, while several systems remain below 0.60.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Global vs. Local Discrimination of Locally Implementable Multipartite Unitaries

arXiv:2509.10430v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study single-shot distinguishability of locally implementable multipartite unitaries under Local Operations and Classical Communication (LOCC) and global operations. As unitary discrimination depends on both the choice of probing states and the measurements on the evolved states, we classify LOCC and global distinguishability into two categories: adaptive strategies, where probing states are chosen based on measurement outcomes from other subsystems, and restricted strategies, where probing states remain fixed. Our findings uncover three surprising features in the bipartite setting and establish new structural limits for unitary discrimination: (i) Certain pairs of unitaries are globally distinguishable with restricted strategies but indistinguishable under LOCC, even with adaptive strategies. (ii) There exist sets of four unitaries that are distinguishable via LOCC, yet remain globally indistinguishable with restricted strategies. (iii) Some sets of unitaries are globally indistinguishable under adaptive strategies, when probed with separable states, but become distinguishable via LOCC.

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

From Persistence to Survival: Hypothesis Testing, Effect Sizes and Vectorisation for Topological Features

arXiv:2606.11911v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Persistence diagrams are common representations in topological data analysis, but they do not naturally live in a vector space, and the statistical tools developed for comparing them have largely evolved separately from those used for downstream prediction. We introduce STRAND (Survival Topological Representation ANalysis of Diagrams), which treats (collections of) PDs as survival data: each topological feature with persistence value $p = d - b$ is a fully observed time-to-event, and the persistence survival function $S(t) = \mathbb{P}(p > t)$ is the central object for comparing diagrams. From this single representation we derive (i) a non-parametric two-sample test with calibrated Type I error and high power from a small number of diagrams; (ii) interpretable effect sizes; and (iii) a 1-Wasserstein-stable feature vector for downstream machine learning. We validate calibration and power on synthetic manifolds with controlled topology, demonstrate competitive vectorisation across 14 graph and 3D point cloud benchmarks, and apply the method to study functional brain connectivity in fMRI/neuroscience data. To our knowledge, STRAND is the first method to provide hypothesis testing and vectorisation for persistence diagrams from a single coherent and interpretable representation.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Dialogue to Discovery: Attribute-Aware Preference Elicitation for Conversational Product Search Assistants

Conversational product search assistants offer a more expressive, natural, and interactive alternative to traditional keyword-based product search. With limited screen space, showing only a few items increases the need for precise preference elicitation, which can prolong conversations, leading to user frustration and session abandonment. Conversely, rushing to recommend items without a clear understanding of preferences risks poor matches and a degraded user experience. We present Dialogue to Discovery (D2D), an attribute-oriented preference elicitation framework that dynamically exploits the structure of product attributes to efficiently steer conversations toward the user's desired item. D2D adaptively prioritizes the most informative queries and strategically times product recommendations, reducing premature or off-target suggestions that harm engagement. To evaluate D2D, we curate three datasets from the Amazon Reviews corpus. In simulated conversations modelled using a multi-factor utilitarian patience framework, D2D achieves a 22.2-29.9% improvement in target-finding accuracy, 6.6-16.1% reduction in abandonment, and 27.5% shorter average conversations over the state-of-the-art baselines. A complementary user study further confirms significant gains in both user satisfaction and perceived efficiency.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Hallucination Detection and Correction in Medical VLMs via Counter-Evidence Verification

Vision-Language models (VLMs) reliability in medical diagnosis is challenged by trust-undermining hallucinations. Existing hallucination detection approaches mainly focus on identifying factual inconsistencies between generated text and reference data. While some studies analyze where models attend in images, they seldom verify whether such attention truly reflects the visual evidence supporting the generated text. To address this gap, we propose Co}unter-Evidence Verification (CoEV), a training-free plug-and-play framework that detects and corrects hallucinations through evidence-based factual consistency verification. CoEV performs bidirectional verification between textual assertions and visual evidence, testing whether each statement is supported by its corresponding evidence region, and assigns each statement into a four-quadrant diagnostic map capturing combinations of text factuality and visual grounding. CoEV detects hallucinated content and serves as a post hoc refinement tool, correcting hallucinations without retraining. Extensive experiments on four medical datasets show that CoEV combats hallucinations in VLMs.For hallucination detection, CoEV consistently outperforms existing methods, improving average PR-AUC and ROC-AUC by 3.0% and 3.9% absolute points respectively, with notable gains of up to 18.5% in specific VQA scenarios. For hallucination correction, it improves Micro-F1 by up to 12.5%, reduces hallucination rates by over 11.9% on medical report generation, and also boosts medical VQA accuracy. These results show that CoEV enables reliable detection and correction of hallucinations, providing clinicians with dependable, evidence-based cues for diagnosis. Code will be released upon acceptance.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

GLLaucoMed: A Secure LLM-Powered Agentic Workflow for Automated Medication Extraction from Free-Text Glaucoma Clinical Notes

Purpose: To evaluate the efficacy of large language models (LLMs) in extracting medication-related information from glaucoma clinical notes in the electronic health record (EHR). Design: Cross-sectional. Subjects: 1,250 subjects in the Bascom Palmer Ophthalmic Repository. Methods: Extracted clinical notes from glaucoma-related encounters between 2014 and 2024 were labeled by two glaucoma specialists with a third serving as an adjudicator. Graders were asked to label current topical medications (CTM), proposed changes to topical medications ({Delta}TM), current oral medications (COM), and proposed changes to oral medications ({Delta}OM) in a structured fashion. The dataset was split into development (10%), validation (10%), and test (80%) sets stratified by clinician. Development and validation sets were used to engineer and refine prompts, and the held-out test set was used for model assessment. Five LLMs (Claude Opus 4.6, DeepSeek-V3.2, GPT 5.2, Grok 4.1, and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B) were accessed via Microsoft Azure AI Foundry within a HIPAA-compliant environment. Inter-grader agreement was assessed with Gwet AC1. LLM performance was initially assessed in a binary fashion with F1 scores, and the degree of text match among positive cases was evaluated using exact match accuracy and Jaccard Index (JI). Main Outcome Measures: F1 score, exact match accuracy, JI. Results: Gwet AC1 for intergrader agreement was 0.799, 0.888, 0.985, and 0.988 for CTM, {Delta}TM, COM, and {Delta}OM, respectively. F1 scores for CTM were 0.985, 0.971, 0.978, 0.968, and 0.970 for Claude, Deepseek, GPT, Grok, and Qwen, respectively; for {Delta}TM: 0.905, 0.826, 0.897, 0.842, 0.855, respectively; for COM: 0.923, 0.887, 0.899, 0.906, 0.894, respectively; for {Delta}OM: 0.958, 0.815, 0.937, 0.835, 0.940, respectively. Among positive cases, range of exact match accuracies for CTM (N=1354) was 0.730- 0.882 and range of JIs was 0.809-0.918. For {Delta}TM (N=404), exact match accuracy range was 0.619-0.780 and JI range was 0.668-0.827. For COM (N=47), exact match accuracy range was 0.766-0.872 and JI range was 0.765-0.870. For {Delta}OM (N=25), exact match accuracy range was 0.583-0.920 and JI range was 0.583-0.922. Conclusions: The GLLaucoMed pipeline demonstrated high performance in extracting and standardizing medication data from unstructured clinical notes, including both current medications and proposed changes. Claude and GPT exhibited the strongest performance.

07.
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

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

MM-TRELLIS: Point-Cloud Guided Multi-Modal 3D Vehicle Generation in Autonomous Driving

Recovering realistic 3D vehicle models from autonomous driving scenes is crucial for synthesizing training data and building simulation environment. However, most existing vehicle generation methods fail to fully exploit multimodal sensors i.e. multi-view images and LiDAR point clouds) and rely on neural rendering based reconstruction, leading to low-quality mesh. Recently, native 3D generative models have made significant progress, yet they are not built for arbitrary multi-view inputs and often struggle with in-the-wild driving images. In this work, we present MM-TRELLIS, a multi-modal version of TRELLIS for in-the-wild 3D vehicle generation that integrates LiDAR and image sensors from autonomous driving datasets into native 3D generative models. Specifically, multi-view images are cycled as conditioning inputs, while LiDAR point clouds provide test-time guidance to ensure geometric accuracy and cross-view consistency. During denoising, we first align the guidance point cloud with the model priors, then enforce consistency between the generated geometry and the guidance point cloud. Finally, we introduce a voxel filtering strategy based on the opacity of 3D Gaussian Splatting to suppress floaters and produce clean meshes. Comprehensive experiments on Waymo dataset demonstrate our method outperforms existing methods in high-fidelity 3D vehicle generation. Code is available at https://github.com/HongliXiao/MM-TRELLIS.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

The Target ALS Global Natural History Study: Cross-platform proteomics to accelerate biofluid biomarker and drug target discovery in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal, rapidly progressive neurodegenerative disease of motor neurons for which therapeutics are limited. Improved biomarkers are imperative to improve patient care and therapeutic development. Here, we employed 35-plex isobaric tandem mass tag labeling based on isobutyl-proline reporter group (TMTpro) to perform unbiased proteomic analysis of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma from control (n= 28, n= 31) and sporadic ALS (sALS) (n= 39, n= 41), from the Target ALS Global Natural History Study (TALS GNHS). We identified 2,875 proteins in CSF and 1,118 proteins in plasma and identified known and novel differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) between controls and sALS, some of which were orthogonally validated using immunoassay. Comparison of TMTpro-MS and Olink proximity extension assay proteomics revealed common and non-overlapping differentially expressed proteins illustrating strengths unique to each platform. This initial cross-sectional proteomic study of biofluids from the TALS GNHS, with unrestricted availability of study results to the research community, highlights the potential of this resource as a potent platform for ALS biomarker discovery.

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

LLM-Assisted Stance Detection in Scientific Discourse: A Test Case in Bayesian Cognitive Science

Qualitative coding is central to social science, but expert annotation is difficult to scale. LLMs offer a possible extension, yet require careful validation when the target construct is interpretive, theoretically loaded, and only indirectly expressed. We study this problem in a difficult case: detecting whether authors treat Bayesian models as descriptions of mental and neural mechanisms (realism) or as useful mathematical tools (instrumentalism). Our method combines a theory-driven codebook, expert-coded reference annotations, a diagnostic-gated prompt-optimization search yielding a shared zero-shot prompt for three frontier LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro Preview), and multi-rater reliability analysis. The final prompt achieved a held-out combined reliability score of 0.76 (harmonic mean of ICC = 0.79 and $\alpha$ = 0.74), with all diagnostics satisfied. Deployed on 6,858 quotes from 210 articles, the three LLMs reached substantial quote-level agreement (ICC = 0.80; $\alpha$ = 0.76; combined = 0.78) and near-perfect article-level rank stability ($r$ = 0.96-0.97 across rater pairs). The corpus was predominantly weakly realist, but article-level stances were rarely uniform: only 1.4% of articles used a single band, while 59.5% spanned four or more. Low-level perception/motor articles scored 8.8 Realism points higher than high-level cognition articles ($p < .001$, $d = 0.60$), quantifying a long-held qualitative intuition. We present this as an expert-led case study; the framework is intended to generalize to similar theoretically demanding tasks, not to all qualitative analysis.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DreamReg: Belief-Driven World Model for 2D-3D Ultrasound Registration

Ultrasound (US) is widely used for surgical navigation, yet real-time registration between intraoperative 2D slices and preoperative 3D volumes remains challenging due to partial observability, speckle noise, and the action-dependent US acquisition. Existing methods are one-shot or short-horizon, making it hard for them to gather evidence over time or capture how surgeons adjust probe motion based on on-screen feedback. We propose DreamReg, a belief-driven world-model framework that formulates 2D-3D registration as belief updating over rigid transformations. DreamReg maintains a latent belief state that summarizes past observations and poses information, and continuously refines the transformation through learned dynamics as new slices arrive. During training, DreamReg is exposed to probe-motion trajectories that mimic clinical scanning behavior and learns to update its belief by conditioning pose refinement on the current US observation. During inference, DreamReg refines registration via internal imagination: it rolls out the learned world model to simulate candidate probe motions and their predicted observations, and integrates these imagined outcomes to converge to an accurate rigid transformation. Experiments on CAMUS and u-RegPro datasets demonstrate improved robustness and competitive registration accuracy for real-time guidance compared with state-of-the-art methods.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

High-Order Hermite Optimization: Fast and Exact Gradient Computation in Open-Loop Quantum Optimal Control using a Discrete Adjoint Approach

arXiv:2505.09857v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This work introduces the High-Order Hermite Optimization (HOHO) method, an open-loop discrete adjoint method for quantum optimal control. Our method is the first of its kind to efficiently compute exact (discrete) gradients when using continuous, parameterized control pulses while solving the forward equations (e.g. Schrodinger's equation or the Linblad master equation) with an arbitrarily high-order Hermite Runge-Kutta method. The HOHO method is implemented in QuantumGateDesign$.$jl (https://github.com/leespen1/QuantumGateDesign.jl), an open-source software package for the Julia programming language, which we use to perform numerical experiments comparing the method to Juqbox$.$jl (https://github.com/LLNL/Juqbox.jl). For realistic model problems we observe speedups up to 775x.

13.
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.

14.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-05

Heuristic multi-site optimization for protein sequence design using Masked Protein Language Models

Authors:

by Lijuan Wang, Yuze Wang, Chen Qiu, Liwei Xiao, Xianliang Liu, Junjie Chen Protein sequence design for tailored functional properties is a fundamental task in protein engineering, with critical applications in drug discovery and therapeutic development. Efficient navigation of the combinatorial vastness of protein sequence space to identify functional variants remains a formidable challenge. Conventional approaches, which predominantly rely on template-based local search or single-residue mutagenesis, are constrained by their susceptibility to local optima and their potential risk of destabilizing native structural stability. In this study, we introduce ProtHMSO, a heuristic multi-site optimization framework leveraging masked protein language models (ProtLMs) for context-aware sequence exploration. ProtHMSO mimics natural evolutionary mechanisms by employing ProtLM-derived substitution probabilities to guide heuristic searches for synergistic mutations, thereby constraining combinatorial search spaces through evolutionary and biophysical priors. ProtHMSO is further applied to replace the exploration strategies in genetic algorithms (GAs) and Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) for improving their convergence efficiency. Benchmark experiments demonstrate that protein sequences generated by ProtHMSO exhibit superior functional performance and closer alignment with natural sequence distribution, compared with state-of-the-art methods. These advancements highlight that ProtHMSO has strong potential and compatibility to accelerate functional protein discovery, offering a robust framework for efficient and context-aware exploration of protein sequence space.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Adherence to Red Reflex and Vision Screening Recommendations: A Deep Dive into Primary Care Implementation Gaps

Introduction: Early childhood vision screening is critical for detecting amblyopia and other vision-threatening conditions. Despite screening recommendations during well-child visits, rates remain low. Red reflex assessment is recommended to identify serious ocular pathology, yet its use in primary care is not well described. We examined rates and drivers of vision screening in pediatric primary care. Methods: We conducted a retrospective review of electronic health records for children 3 to 5 years attending well-child visits in 2022 in one of three representative primary care clinics within a university health system. Outcomes were documented red reflex and functional vision tests. We evaluated associations with patient demographics and clinic site using multivariable logistic regression Results: Among 1,003 visits, 21.1% (n=212) had a documented red reflex assessment, and 60.8% (n=610) a functional vision test. Younger children (ages 3 and 4 vs. 5 years) had higher odds of red reflex assessment [adjusted odds ratio (aOR) 9.00 and 8.64], and lower odds of a functional vision (aOR 0.47 and 0.59) test. Females had higher odds of red reflex assessment (aOR 1.53). Other/Multiracial children had lower odds of red reflex assessment than Non-Hispanic White children (aOR 0.48). Screening rates varied significantly by clinic site Conclusions: Visual function and red reflex assessment are inconsistently performed in pediatric primary care, with particularly low rates of red reflex documentation. Screening rates varied between clinics and were affected by age. These findings highlight missed opportunities for early detection of vision-threatening conditions and identify targets for improving adherence to pediatric vision screening recommendations

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Predicting Poets' Origins from Verse: A Computational Analysis of Regional Linguistic Fingerprints in the Complete Tang Poems

We ask whether the geographic origin of Tang-dynasty poets leaves a detectable linguistic trace in their work. Aggregating every poem attributed to each author in the Complete Tang Poems (Quan Tang Shi) and linking poets to their administrative circuit of origin via the China Biographical Database (CBDB), we build a poet-level corpus of 357 poets across the ten Tang circuits and frame origin prediction as multi-class classification. Using character $n$-gram TF-IDF together with interpretable domain features (imagery, season, and allusion), classical and neural models predict a poet's broad region (South vs.\ North) at $0.69$ accuracy, well above the $0.53$ majority baseline, and finer circuit-level origin above chance. Beyond classification, three findings emerge. (i) Linguistic distance between circuits grows with geographic distance (Mantel $r=0.40$, $p\approx0.09$ over nine circuits), evidence of a distance-decay effect in poetic language. (ii) The signal interacts with time: South/North separability is at chance in the High Tang and strongest in the Late Tang, consistent with court-driven homogenization at the empire's height followed by regional divergence. (iii) The model's confident errors are historically meaningful – in the Early Tang, every misclassification is a southern poet read as northern, reflecting the prestige of the northern court idiom. We further show that, when given the whole corpus through a hierarchical frozen-encoder representation, a classical-Chinese transformer (GuwenBERT) only matches – not beats – simple TF-IDF, and that combining them adds nothing, indicating that character $n$-grams already capture the regional signal. Our results position interpretable machine learning as a hypothesis generator for literary history.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Cardiac positronium lifetime in human PET: a reproducible right-left ventricular contrast that is not explained by blood oxygenation

Background. Ortho-positronium (o-Ps) lifetime, now measurable in vivo on long-axial-field-of-view (LAFOV) PET/CT, has been proposed as a biomarker of tissue oxygenation and hypoxia. Because o-Ps lifetime is dominated by tissue free-volume structure while the oxygen- specific contribution is small, whether an in-vivo lifetime contrast reflects oxygenation rather than anatomy is an open, identifiability-limited question. Aim. To test the oxygenation hypothesis directly using the heart's natural arterial/venous oxygenation contrast, with a built-in anatomical control. Methods. We re-analysed a public [82Rb]Cl human cardiac LAFOV PET/CT dataset (5.30 x 10^8 evaluated three-photon events). Per-compartment o-Ps lifetimes were extracted with a background-plus-two-component exponentially-modified-Gaussian (EMG) model. The list-mode to image mapping and right/left ventricle (RV/LV) identity were established lifetime-free (the mapping reproduces the provider's reconstructed image at block-correlation 0.998 and wins a joint multi-organ alignment panel). We applied a confound battery: registration stress test, blood-core vs wall, lung-air and wall-myocardium partial-volume, tissue density; and a structure/position-matched control (pulmonary artery, deoxygenated, vs aorta, oxygenated). An isotope-matched 82Rb uniform-quartz reference bounded the instrument's positional behaviour. All results were produced by two independent analysis pipelines. Results. RV o-Ps lifetime exceeded LV by delta tau = +0.304 ns (RV 1.700 +/- 0.172, LV 1.396 +/- 0.130 ns; about 1.4 sigma), in the oxygen-expected direction; the contrast was stable across +/-16 mm registration perturbation (sign preserved in 100% of 342 shifts) and resided in the blood core, not the wall. However, the matched-vessel control was null: pulmonary artery minus aorta = -0.011 +/- 0.344 ns. Lung-air and wall-myocardium partial-volume were disfavoured, and the effect fell within the isotope-matched 82Rb instrumental positional envelope (about 0.1-0.35 ns over 40 mm in uniform material). Conclusion. On this single subject, the cardiac o-Ps lifetime contrast does not provide a clean readout of blood oxygenation: an oxygenation effect of the observed (about 0.3 ns) magnitude is ruled out by the matched control, while a small physiological effect cannot be excluded. We provide a reusable confound-control battery for evaluating future in-vivo o-Ps oxygenation claims. Multi-subject replication with anatomy decoupled from oxygenation is required.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Artificial Intelligence-informed mobile behavioural interventions to support adolescents mental health in schools: protocol for a randomised controlled trial using the MindCraft app

Background: Children and young people (CYP) are particularly affected by mental health problems. Mobile apps provide a scalable and accessible approach to adolescent mental health support, and schools are well-positioned to address multiple risk factors and deliver large-scale interventions. By combining active (self-reported) and passive (sensor-derived) data, mobile apps can model mental states and deliver context-aware support. Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables adaptive, context-aware recommendations tailored to each user. However, there is limited research on AI-based mental health interventions in community CYP. MindCraft is a mobile app designed to monitor adolescents mental health using active and passive data and provide AI-informed recommendations ("nudges"). This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of personalised AI nudges delivered through MindCraft on improving mental health outcomes among adolescents in schools in the United Kingdom. Methods: The study is a three-arm RCT using a prospective cohort of secondary school students aged 14-19. Following informed consent, participants complete a baseline online assessment at school and download MindCraft. The primary outcome is the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire global and subscale scores. Secondary outcomes include the Eating Disorders Diagnostic Scale, the Sleep Condition Indicator Questionnaire, the Self-Injurious Thoughts and Behaviours Interview, the Self-Efficacy Questionnaire for Children and the World Health Organisation-Five Well-Being Index. Participants are randomised to: (1) an AI-informed intervention group receiving personalised nudges, (2) an active control receiving non-personalised nudges, or (3) a control group with self-monitoring only. Participants use the app for four weeks, with follow-up at one month. Repeated-measures analyses will assess changes across time points. Discussion: We hypothesise that AI nudges will have a greater positive effect on mental health outcomes at one month than general nudges and self-monitoring. Our findings will provide key evidence on the effectiveness of personalised mobile AI recommendations for adolescents mental health and inform school-based mental health prevention and early intervention. This study will contribute evidence on the ethical, acceptable, and scalable integration of AI-enabled digital mental health tools within public health and educational systems, with implications for the design of future digital public health interventions and policies supporting their safe integration in schools.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Persistent Homology as a Theory of Emergent Structure

Authors:

arXiv:2507.03065v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Why do some macroscopic structures remain identifiable even though their microscopic constituents continually change? Vortices persist while fluid parcels turn over, neural memories persist while spikes and synapses fluctuate, and institutions persist while individuals enter and leave. We propose a scale-relative answer: an emergent property is a persistent nontrivial homology class $[z]\in H_p=\ker\partial_p/\im\partial_{p+1}$, a macro-feature that is closed but not exact across a filtration of descriptions. This identification turns emergence into a measurement problem. Persistent bars detect stable macro-features, and we introduce a contractive-similarity (CS) graph operator to supply scaffold spectral gaps that predict robustness. Hodge decomposition separates harmonic macro-scaffold from exact and co-exact micro-flow; and functorial condensation explains when one level's emergent class becomes a unit for the next. The resulting scaffold-flow framework expresses six familiar signatures of emergence (i.e., inevitability, coherence, irreducibility, complementarity, robustness, and hierarchy) within one mathematical language. It also yields falsifiable predictions across atmospheric, neural, and social systems: genuine emergent structures should persist across filtrations, remain spectrally stable, respond disproportionately to harmonic interventions, and require timescale separation for hierarchical autonomy.

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

Vernier: Probing Representational Misalignment Behind Lexical Gaps in Causal Reasoning

Authors:

Instruction-tuned language models can answer the same causal-reasoning question differently after its English variable names are replaced by type-preserving placeholders, although the structural causal model and the gold answer are unchanged. We ask whether this lexical gap reflects information loss in the placeholder view or a misaligned read-out from a representation that still carries answer-relevant content. Vernier uses a paired-view weight update as an instrument and then inspects the mechanism left after the gap closes. In the working regimes, the evidence favours representational misalignment. A variable-name probe becomes more accurate on the placeholder view, and activation patching on Qwen-7B, Qwen-14B, and Llama-3.1-8B shows that the decision-token representation can transfer answer identity between views. The update that realigns the views is counterfactual augmentation over original and placeholder prompts, while the answer-subspace KL mainly sharpens intermediate answer-belief agreement. Success is bounded by model family, scale, and task. CRASS transfer is reliable across Qwen scales and Llama, e-CARE remains weak, and preliminary non-causal rename tasks show a similar qualitative pattern.

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

Disentangling Linguistic Relatedness from Task Alignment in Cross-Lingual Transfer

We study cross-lingual transfer by fine-tuning seven large language models (4B–671B parameters) on Arabic and evaluating zero-shot reading comprehension on Semitic languages and non-Semitic controls. Across dense and Mixture-of-Experts architectures, we find no evidence of Semitic-specific transfer: models with weak baselines improve dramatically across all languages, while strong-baseline models show only marginal gains regardless of language family. A chain-of-thought ablation reinforces this finding – the same models that benefit most from fine-tuning benefit equally from inference-time reasoning, suggesting both mechanisms address task-format alignment rather than cross-lingual knowledge transfer.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

PrologMCP: A Standardized Prolog Tool Interface for LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.14935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frontier reasoning-tuned language models still fail on deductive tasks at depth, and the cost of improved performance through extended internal reasoning scales poorly. Symbolic delegation offers a complementary route: a language model translates the problem, while a solver performs the inference. However, current autoformalization pipelines for logic programming are typically bespoke integrations tied to particular tasks or agents. We introduce PrologMCP, a task-agnostic, open-source server that exposes Prolog as a stateful tool through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Its compact tool interface, structured error reporting, and per-session isolation make the translate-run-inspect-repair loop a reusable primitive for MCP-capable agents. We evaluate a formalizer agent enhanced with PrologMCP against standard and reasoning LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4.1, and o4-mini) on two subsets of PARARULE-Plus: a general-purpose sample and a more challenging one targeting a specific failure mode of natural-language reasoning. On the general sample, the formalizer matches or exceeds reasoning LLMs (accuracy 1.00 vs.\ 1.00 / 0.998), with the largest gains over standard models (0.762 for GPT-4.1). On the challenging subset, the formalizer remains near-perfect (1.00 / 0.99) while reasoning LLMs drop to 0.95 / 0.94. These results suggest that delegating inference to Prolog via MCP is a robust and inspectable alternative to extended natural-language reasoning.

23.
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.

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

An Electric Potential-Augmented Benchmark Dataset for Physics-Guided Image Reconstruction of Electrical Capacitance Tomography

While deep learning has significantly advanced image reconstruction of Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT), most data-driven methods map directly between capacitance and permittivity distribution, treating the sensor as a black box. This overlooks the electric potential field – the fundamental physical link governing the nonlinear and ill-posed ``soft-field'' effect. To address this, we propose an electric potential-augmented ECT benchmark dataset designed to explicitly integrate latent physics behind ECT into the learning process. Generated via a COMSOL-MATLAB pipeline for an eight-electrode sensor as an example, the dataset comprises 20,000 randomized samples across four typical flow patterns. Crucially, alongside the conventional capacitance vectors and permittivity distributions depicted as images, each sample preserves eight excitation-wise full-field potential maps. Beyond data release, we provide illustrative evaluation protocols for both forward and inverse problems of ECT. Through comprehensive testing on both in-distribution (IID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, we systematically demonstrate how the inclusion of electric potential maps enhances modeling accuracy and robustness. Fundamentally, the explicit inclusion of latent field information significantly lowers the barrier to integrating physical laws into ECT modeling, thereby establishing a standardized foundation for future physics-guided machine learning of ECT image reconstruction.

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

Phys4D: Fine-Grained Physics-Consistent 4D Modeling from Video Diffusion

Recent video diffusion models have achieved impressive capabilities as large-scale generative world models. However, these models often struggle with fine-grained physical consistency, exhibiting physically implausible dynamics over time. In this work, we present Phys4D, a pipeline for learning physics-consistent 4D world representations from video diffusion models. Phys4D adopts a three-stage training paradigm that progressively lifts appearance-driven video diffusion models into physics-consistent 4D world representations. We first bootstrap robust geometry and motion representations through large-scale pseudo-supervised pretraining, establishing a foundation for 4D scene modeling. We then perform physics-grounded supervised fine-tuning using simulation-generated data, enforcing temporally consistent 4D dynamics. Finally, we apply simulation-grounded reinforcement learning to correct residual physical violations that are difficult to capture through explicit supervision. To evaluate fine-grained physical consistency beyond appearance-based metrics, we introduce a set of 4D world consistency evaluation that probe geometric coherence, motion stability, and long-horizon physical plausibility. Experimental results demonstrate that Phys4D substantially improves fine-grained spatiotemporal and physical consistency compared to appearance-driven baselines, while maintaining strong generative performance. Our project page is available at https://sensational-brioche-7657e7.netlify.app/