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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Stab-QRAM: A Clifford-Only Quantum Oracle for Affine Boolean Data

arXiv:2509.26494v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Oracle-based quantum algorithms require coherent evaluation of classical functions on superposed inputs, and in fault-tolerant architectures this cost is dominated by non-Clifford gates: generic lookup constructions incur $T$-counts that grow with the data size. Here we show that affine Boolean functions $f(\mathbf{x})=A\mathbf{x}+\mathbf{b}$ over $\mathbb{F}_2$ – the algebraic core of parity checks, linear feedback shift registers, and cipher linear layers – are exactly the functions admitting computational-basis-preserving Clifford oracles, and we develop this correspondence into Stab-QRAM, a compiler mapping a specification $(A,\mathbf{b})$ to an ancilla-free circuit of CNOT and $X$ gates with zero $T$-count. Via K\"{o}nig's edge-coloring theorem, the compiled schedule provably attains the minimum depth for its gate set. Case studies spanning Simon-type oracles, block-encodings of $X$-type coset operators, and syndrome extraction for CSS codes show one compiler serving the algorithm, primitive, and error-correction layers of the quantum stack.

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

Implicit Neural Representations of Individual Behavior

arXiv:2606.12200v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study policy representation learning from unlabeled multi-policy behavioral data. Each episode is generated by a fixed policy, but policy labels are unavailable. This setting appears in robotics play, demonstrations, games, racing, and other datasets where heterogeneous behaviors are mixed without annotations. We introduce Behavioral INR, a self-supervised generative model that adapts implicit neural representations (INRs) from vision to behavior. Instead of mapping coordinates to RGB values, Behavioral INR represents a policy as a state-action function mapping states to subsequent actions. An episode-level latent modulates this function through FiLM layers, yielding a generative prior over policies and allowing policy identity to be inferred without supervision. Because INRs treat each datapoint as samples from an underlying function, the same model naturally accommodates variable episode lengths and different sampling granularities, as in vision INRs with different image resolutions. We also define policy-level out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts along state-distribution and action-distribution axes, which arise when policies overlap in states or actions but are not captured by standard behavioral OOD settings based only on new agents or environments. We evaluate on synthetic Gaussian random field data, MuJoCo demonstrations with controlled OOD splits, and real-world chess, Formula 1 racing, robotics, and Seek-Avoid datasets. Behavioral INR most consistently improves policy identifiability in the hardest continuous state-action settings, especially when longer episodes, more policies, and OOD splits reduce the usefulness of marginal shortcuts; amortized history encoders remain competitive when policy identity can be recovered from symbolic repetition or low-dimensional action statistics. We release code and checkpoints.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Agentic System as Compressor: Quantifying System Intelligence in Bits

arXiv:2606.25960v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are turning from isolated predictors into agentic systems: they call tools, retrieve evidence, obey environment constraints, use verifiers, and complete tasks through search and multi-turn interaction. We adopts an analytical viewpoint based on "compression is intelligence": under a fixed task distribution, interface, and compute budget, a stronger agentic system lets a target object be reconstructed with fewer bits. We operationalize the measure with arithmetic coding, seed coding, and a fallback, and evaluate it in five settings: reversed text, chess moves, protein sequences, retrieval-augmented question answering, and semantic story compression; in all of them agentic components reduce codelength. These small, controlled experiments cover component types typical of real agentic systems, show that codelength can analyze how components, observers, and budgets change residual uncertainty, and offer guidance for evaluating real agent systems.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Artificial Intelligence-Based Detection of Airway Mucus Plugs on CT and Associations With Clinical Outcomes in COPDGene

RATIONALE: Airway mucus plugging is a clinically relevant manifestation of airway pathology in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and is associated with increased mortality even in early disease; however, visual computed tomography (CT) assessment is subjective and labor intensive. OBJECTIVES: To develop an AI-based quantitative CT method for automated detection of airway mucus plugging and evaluate associations with physiologic impairment and clinical outcomes. METHODS: Inspiratory CT scans from 8,971 COPDGene Phase 1 (GOLD 0-4 and PRISm) participants were analyzed. An AI-based framework combining 3D airway segmentation discontinuities and convolutional neural network classification identified mucus plug obstructions, yielding mucus plug burden (total plug count). Associations with outcomes were evaluated using covariate-adjusted models. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS : Higher mucus plug burden was associated with lower post-bronchodilator FEV % predicted ({rho} = -0.41; P < 0.001), greater air trapping (LAA < -856 HU; {rho} = 0.33; P < 0.001), worse health status (SGRQ; {rho} = 0.31; P < 0.001), and shorter 6-minute walk distance ({rho} = -0.26; P < 0.001). Among GOLD 1-4 participants, mucus plug presence was independently associated with increased all-cause mortality (adjusted hazard ratio, 1.28; P < 0.005) and exacerbation frequency (adjusted incidence rate ratio, 1.32; P < 0.005). Plug presence was also associated with increased respiratory mortality across GOLD categories and cardiovascular mortality in GOLD 1-2. CONCLUSIONS: AI-based quantitative CT assessment of airway mucus plugging provides a scalable, reproducible measure associated with physiologic impairment and adverse outcomes in COPD, supporting its role in risk stratification and future therapeutic studies.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Formal Verification of Learned Multi-Agent Communication Policies via Decision Tree Distillation

arXiv:2606.19632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) enables agents to develop coordination strategies through emergent communication, but neural policies lack the formal safety guarantees required for safety-critical robotic deployment in drone swarms and autonomous vehicle fleets. We present the first end-to-end framework for safety verification of learned multi-agent communication policies through policy abstraction: neural policies are distilled into interpretable decision trees, then formally verified, with empirical validation confirming that verified safety properties transfer to original networks. Our four-stage pipeline consists of domain-specific feature extraction from agent observations, decision tree distillation achieving 97.9% +/- 1.2% fidelity to neural policies, automated translation to PRISM probabilistic model checker specifications with complete feature-to-state-variable correspondence, and compositional verification of Probabilistic Computation Tree Logic (PCTL) properties via pairwise decomposition with union-bound aggregation and empirical neighbor modeling. Evaluating Vector-Quantized Variational Information Bottleneck (VQ-VIB) policies for multi-drone coordination with 5-7 agents, we verify 18 temporal logic properties across safety, liveness, and cooperation, achieving 88.9% property satisfaction with all five safety thresholds satisfied (0.3% collision probability vs. 1% threshold). Monte Carlo validation of original neural policies confirms that verified safety properties transfer with

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

On Aligning Hierarchical Standardized Embedding for Audio-visual Generalized Zero-shot Learning

Audio-visual Generalized Zero-shot Learning (AV-GZSL) is a challenging task that aims to classify both seen and unseen objects or scenes by integrating data from audio and visual modalities. Recent studies primarily focus on fusing or aligning audio and visual features to generate more informative audio-visual embeddings. Also, aligning the audio-visual and textual features of most existing methods relies solely on the optimization objectives. However, those methods neglect the inherent distributional and structural differences between audio-visual and textual modalities. To address this limitation, we propose a method termed Aligning Hierarchical Standardized Embedding (AHSE), which enables hierarchical alignment of standardized audio-visual and textual embeddings within a shared embedding space. Specifically, we first apply Z-score standardization to the fused audio-visual and textual embeddings to reduce distributional mismatches. We then introduce a hierarchical alignment strategy that minimizes discrepancies at the semantic, class, and batch levels, thereby constructing a more robust and well-structured embedding space. This strategy not only preserves semantic and inter-class relationships but also maintains spatial consistency within each batch. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets: VGGSound-GZSL, UCF-GZSL, and ActivityNet-GZSL, demonstrate that AHSE achieves competitive performance in zero-shot learning.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

M{\o}lmer-S{\o}rensen gates in trapped-ions chains in the presence of correlated noise

arXiv:2606.23951v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We analyze the impact of correlated laser frequency noise on M{\o}lmer-S{\o}rensen gates in qubit registers based on trapped-ion chains. Using perturbation theory, we calculate gate fidelities in the presence of noise with arbitrary power spectral density for different chain lengths and ion positions in the chain. With our approach, we account for simultaneous excitation of multiple phonon modes during gate operation. We find out that the impact of medium-frequency laser noise depends considerably on the positions of the ions in the chain. In contrast, low-frequency noise has similar effect for different chain lengths and ion positions.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Spatio-Temporal Audio Language Modeling for Dynamic Sound Sources

Sound events are entities with semantic identities, locations, and trajectories, but current audio-language models usually reason about clips as global event content. Conversely, sound event localization models track source directions over time but offer limited semantic coverage for language reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce ST-AudioQA, a spatio-temporal audio QA dataset and benchmark built from first-order ambisonic (FOA) renderings of static and moving sound sources. Each scene provides source identity, activity, direction, distance, and motion metadata, enabling dense trajectory supervision and questions about what is sounding, where it is, how it moves, and how sources relate. We further propose ST-Audio Encoder, a time-resolved FOA audio encoder that learns event semantics together with source trajectories, and ST-AudioLM, which connects the audio tokens from the encoder to an LLM for spatio-temporal audio QA. Experiments show that this representation improves the semantic-localization tradeoff and yields stronger reasoning performance than static spatial and localization-oriented baselines.

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

A Definition of Good Explanations and the Challenges Explaining LLM Outputs

arXiv:2606.14838v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How to define a good explanation is a long-standing philosophical debate which has found recent renewed interest in the context of AI outputs. Explainability is crucial for AI adoption in many contexts, but in order to produce good explanations of AI systems, we must first have an understanding of what good explanations are. In this paper we propose a definition inspired by the notion of counterfactual explanations, however we argue that one must also take into account the interlocutor's prior beliefs in each fact that could be offered in an explanation. We explore the ramifications of this definition for AI explainability and, in particular, why LLM outputs are difficult to produce good explanations for.

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

Machine Learning Classification and Portfolio Construction: Does the Loss Function Matter?

arXiv:2108.02283v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Classification outperforms regression across matched machine learning models in portfolio construction. A stacking ensemble of gradient boosted tree, random forest, and neural network yields a value-weighted annualized Sharpe ratio of 1.83 for classification and 1.11 for regression. This outperformance persists in multiclass settings, across subsamples, and after transaction costs. Spanning tests show that classification retains economically large alphas after we control for regression, whereas regression alphas shrink substantially once we control for classification. These results indicate that classification extracts more return information than matched regression. Our diagnostics trace classification's advantage to sharper and more precise separation of return deciles.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Optimal Coarse Correlated Equilibria in Mean Field Games: Linear Programming and No-Regret Learning

arXiv:2606.20062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce optimal coarse correlated equilibria for continuous-time mean field games. A coarse correlated equilibrium is a randomized recommendation scheme from which no player can gain by ignoring the recommendation and switching to an alternative strategy. The problem is as follows: a moderator selects, among all mean-field coarse correlated equilibria, one that optimizes a prescribed performance criterion, which may differ from the representative player's objective. After formulating the problem, we develop a linear programming (LP) formulation, prove the existence of optimal LP coarse correlated equilibria, and relate the LP characterization to the original probabilistic setting. Building on this characterization, we design a no-regret primal-dual algorithm, based on an equivalent Lagrangian formulation of the external-regret constraint, for learning such equilibria. We provide explicit convergence rates for the learning algorithm, and numerical examples illustrate the method.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Diffusion-Refined Segmentation and Vision-Language Interpretation for Pediatric Brain Tumor MRI

Accurate pediatric brain tumor segmentation remains challenging due to limited annotated data, heterogeneous imaging phenotypes, diffuse tumor boundaries, and class imbalance across tumor subregions. Here, we present a two-stage deep learning framework for improving multi-modal pediatric brain MRI segmentation and clinical interpretation. First, we evaluate 3D Res U-Net and Swin-UNETR baselines on BraTS-PEDs MRI scans, using four co-registered modalities to predict tumor core, whole tumor, and enhancing tumor regions. Second, we introduce diffusion-based refinement models conditioned on coarse Swin-UNETR predictions, including a 3D DDPM refiner and MedSegDiff. Conditioning substantially improves diffusion stability and performance, particularly for enhancing tumor boundary segmentation. Conditioned MedSegDiff achieves the strongest boundary agreement with the lowest HD95. Finally, predicted tumor volumes and representative segmentation overlays are integrated with a multimodal language model to generate structured radiology-style reports. Together, our results suggest that coarse-to-refined diffusion segmentation can improve pediatric tumor boundary delineation and support end-to-end interpretable AI-assisted neuro-oncology workflows.

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

MakeupMirror: Improving Facial Attribute Preservation in Diffusion Models for Makeup Transfer

arXiv:2606.20094v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Makeup transfer models enable fun augmented reality (AR) experiences as well as virtual try-on (VTO) for online makeup shopping. While recent state-of-the-art diffusion based solutions such as Stable-Makeup dramatically improve the accuracy and realism of makeup transfer, they still face limitations in identity and skin color preservation, making production-level VTO for makeup shopping unrealistic. In this work, we propose MakeupMirror, a diffusion-based approach to makeup transfer that makes significant progress towards preserving facial features and skin tone. We introduce several technical innovations over Stable-Makeup: (1) integration of facial geometry conditioning with ControlNets to maintain facial fidelity; (2) region-specific makeup transfer control to enable precise makeup application across facial regions such as skin, eyes and lips; (3) skin tone-based makeup transfer modulation that prevent skin tone alteration in cross-subject transfer scenarios; and (4) integration of a Levenberg-Marquardt Langevin sampler to speed up inference while maintaining generation quality. Our experiments on CPM-Real, Makeup Wild, and (herein newly collected, more diverse) MakeupSelfies datasets show that MakeupMirror improves relative facial recognition similarity by +60%, reduces relative skin tone difference by -50% over Stable-Makeup, with a latency of 0.7s, while achieving expert acceptance rate of 94% across core facial identity preservation criteria.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LLM Consumer Behavior Theory: Foundations of a Novel Research Field

arXiv:2606.18005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents that make consumption decisions on behalf of users. This shift raises fundamental questions for consumer theory, which has traditionally modeled humans as the primary decision-makers. In this paper, we introduce LLM Consumer Behavior Theory, a new field of study concerned with analyzing consumer behavior in agentic markets. Drawing on classical and behavioral economics alongside recent advances in Natural Language Processing, we formalize how human preferences are reflected and acted upon by LLM-based agents, and how agent-level decisions aggregate into market demand. We unify previously fragmented literature on LLM decision-making, human behavior simulation, and preference elicitation under a common economic lens, highlighting where assumptions, such as rationality and heterogeneity, may fail in agentic markets. Rather than providing empirical validation, this paper outlines the scope of LLM consumer behavior and identifies open research questions related to alignment, preference representation, and market dynamics.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Learning Action Priors for Cross-embodiment Robot Manipulation

Most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models build on a Vision-Language Model (VLM) backbone by attaching an action module and optimizing the full policy jointly. This design inherits strong visual and linguistic priors from the VLM, but leaves the action module to learn physical motion almost from scratch. As a result, the policy lacks an explicit motion prior, forcing early optimization to simultaneously discover temporal action dynamics and cross-modal alignment, a challenge further amplified in cross-embodiment settings. In this work, we propose to pretrain the action module with motion priors before cross-modal VLA alignment. Specifically, we introduce a two-stage training framework that equips the action module with cross-embodiment temporal motion structure before VLA training begins. In Stage~1, a lightweight flow-matching-based encoder-decoder action module efficiently learns temporal motion structure solely from unconditioned action trajectories, without processing visual or language tokens. In Stage~2, this learned prior is transferred to VLA training through decoder reuse and early-stage latent distillation, aligning visual-language features with the action embedding space while still allowing end-to-end policy refinement. In addition, the trained encoder serves as a compact history compressor, summarizing state-action histories into a single temporal context token for history-aware modeling at negligible cost. Extensive experiments across 13 diverse cross-embodiment tasks on both simulated and real-world platforms validate the effectiveness of our approach. Compared with VLA training without action priors, our model achieves faster convergence, higher success rates, and substantially stronger performance on data-scarce real-world tasks. Moreover, scaling up the action data in Stage~1 yields a more generalizable action prior that directly improves downstream VLA performance.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

LemonHarness Technical Report

arXiv:2606.24311v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language model (LLM) agents are applied to longer tasks, they increasingly modify workspace state across multiple rounds of iteration. However, agents typically observe only tool outputs and log fragments, while the actual state changes occur in the file system. Without explicit workspace boundaries, state-changing operations such as file writes and temporary artifact generation may scatter changes across paths. Over time, these weakly constrained changes accumulate, making states such as modified files difficult to track. This paper presents LemonHarness, an integrated execution framework for long-horizon agents. LemonHarness establishes an explicit execution boundary by constraining state-changing operations within a clearly defined workspace and bringing model invocation, tool execution, and rule knowledge within a single controlled boundary. State-changing operations, including file writes, dependency installation, and temporary artifact creation, are executed through structured tool interfaces, with execution feedback recorded as observations available to subsequent model decisions. The system also introduces a reusable rule knowledge base, which turns recurring execution rules and acceptance criteria into runtime knowledge. LemonHarness further adds a time-aware execution mechanism that exposes elapsed and remaining budget to the model, so it can rebalance exploration, implementation, and validation effort as time pressure shifts and avoid timeouts from long waits or excessive verification. On Terminal-Bench 2.0, LemonHarness_GPT-5.3-CodeX reached 84.49% accuracy over 445 trials; pairing the same framework with the stronger GPT-5.5 backbone raised the average accuracy to 86.52% across five jobs. The results suggest that a unified runtime boundary, callable rule knowledge, and time-aware execution can improve the stability of long-horizon agent execution.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Role of methanesulfonic acid in atmospheric particle nucleation and growth

Authors:

Dimethylsulfide (DMS; CH3SCH3) from marine phytoplankton is a major source of atmospheric sulfur 1. Its oxidation products include sulfuric acid (SA; H2SO4) and methanesulfonic acid (MSA; CH3SO3H), which has a higher yield than SA below 10 °C 2. Whereas SA is known to drive the formation of new particles 3, which may subsequently grow and act as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), the role of MSA remains unclear 4. Here, in experiments performed under atmospheric conditions at the CERN CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets) chamber, we show that MSA nucleates together with ammonia (NH3) below −10 °C, at rates comparable to SA-NH3. Moreover, MSA and SA nucleate synergistically below −10 °C, forming multi-acid molecular clusters with NH3. Even at ultra-low NH3 levels, MSA drives particle growth at or near the kinetic limit below 9 °C and above 40 % relative humidity (RH). Since MSA and SA generally coexist at similar concentrations in cool marine regions, our findings indicate that nucleation rates may be accelerated up to tenfold and growth rates up to twofold compared with SA-NH3 alone. Our global model simulations indicate that MSA can enhance CCN concentrations, especially in polar regions. We propose that MSA might be an important driver of biogenic particles in cool, pristine marine regions of both the present-day and pre-industrial atmospheres, and yet is unaccounted for in global climate models 5.

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

Why Low-Precision Transformer Training Fails: An Analysis on Flash Attention

arXiv:2510.04212v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The pursuit of computational efficiency has driven the adoption of low-precision formats for training transformer models. However, this progress is often hindered by notorious training instabilities. This paper provides the first mechanistic explanation for a long-standing and unresolved failure case where training with flash attention in low-precision settings leads to catastrophic loss explosion. Our in-depth analysis reveals that the failure is not a random artifact but caused by two intertwined phenomena: the emergence of similar low-rank representations within the attention mechanism and the compounding effect of biased rounding errors inherent in low-precision arithmetic. We demonstrate how these factors create a vicious cycle of error accumulation that corrupts weight updates, ultimately derailing the training dynamics. To validate our findings, we introduce a minimal modification to the flash attention that mitigates the bias in rounding errors. This simple change stabilizes the training process, confirming our analysis and offering a practical solution to this persistent problem. Code is available at https://github.com/ucker/why-low-precision-training-fails.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

FedReLa: Imbalanced Federated Learning via Re-Labeling

Federated learning has emerged as the foremost approach for decentralized model training with privacy preservation. The global class imbalance and cross-client data heterogeneity naturally coexist, and the mismatch between local and global imbalances exacerbates the performance degradation of the aggregated model. The agnosticism of global class distribution poses significant challenges for data-level methods, especially under extreme conditions with severe class absence across clients. In this paper, we propose FedReLa, a novel data-level approach that tackles the coexistence of data heterogeneity and class imbalance in federated learning. By re-labeling samples with a feature-dependent label re-allocator, FedReLa corrects biased global decision boundaries without requiring knowledge of the global class distribution. This modular, model-agnostic approach can be integrated with algorithmic methods to deliver consistent improvements without additional communication overhead. Through extensive experiments, our method significantly improves the accuracy of minority classes and the overall accuracy on stepwise-imbalanced and long-tailed datasets, outperforming the previous state of the art.

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

FreeStyle: Free Control of Style-Content Dual-Reference Generation from Community LoRA Mining

arXiv:2606.20506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Style-content dual-reference generation aims to synthesize an image that preserves the structure and semantics of a content reference while adopting the style of a separate style reference.Despite recent progress, this setting remains challenging because models must balance content fidelity, style alignment, and instruction following avoiding semantic leakage from the style reference.A key bottleneck is the lack of large-scale triplet data with clean content-style separation and broad long-tail style coverage.In this work, we propose FreeStyle, a scalable dual-reference generation framework based on community LoRA mining.We treat community LoRAs as compositional anchors for style and content, and design a rigorous generation and filtering pipeline to construct large-scale Style-Reference and Content-Reference triplets across multiple base models.To address content leakage, we adopt a two-stage curriculum with stage-specific disentanglement mechanisms: an attention-level enrichment constraint that suppresses style-reference leakage in the style-transfer stage, and a frequency-aware RoPE modulation strategy that targets positional-correspondence-based leakage in the harder dual-reference stage.We also introduce a benchmark covering both style-reference and dual-reference generation, with evaluations on style similarity, content preservation, aesthetics, instruction following, and leakage rejection. The benchmark incorporates a style-invariant Content Alignment Score (CAS) and introduces a calibrated VLM-based Rejection Score for evaluating generation reliability and leakage suppression.Extensive experiments show that our model achieves a strong balance among style alignment, content preservation, and leakage suppression.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

AutoSpec: Safety Rule Evolution for LLM Agents via Inductive Logic Programming

arXiv:2606.24245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly automate complex tasks by integrating language models with external tools and environments. However, their autonomy poses significant safety risks: agents may execute destructive commands, leak sensitive data, or violate domain constraints. Existing safety approaches face a fundamental tradeoff: hand-crafted rules are interpretable but brittle, with overly conservative rules blocking safe operations (high false positives) while permissive rules miss unsafe behaviors (high false negatives). Neural classifiers lack the interpretability required for safety-critical deployments. We present AutoSpec, a framework that automatically evolves deployed expert-designed safety rules from user safe/unsafe annotations through counterexample-guided inductive synthesis (CEGIS) guided by inductive logic programming (ILP). Starting from the expert rules and a stream of annotated traces, AutoSpec iteratively evaluates rules, mines false-positive and false-negative counterexamples, uses ILP to learn which predicates discriminate them, generates candidate rule edits, and verifies candidates to select the best revision. The key insight is that ILP efficiently identifies predicates that appear frequently in false negatives but rarely in false positives (or vice versa), dramatically pruning the exponential search space of rule edits. This continues until convergence, producing interpretable rules that balance precision and recall. We evaluate AutoSpec on 291 execution traces spanning code execution and embodied agent domains. AutoSpec raises rule F1 to 0.98 and 0.93 across the two domains, achieving up to 94% false positive reduction while maintaining high recall, and converges within 4-5 iterations. The ILP-guided approach achieves up to 4.8x higher F1 than heuristic CEGIS. The learned rules are human-readable, auditable, and generalize to unseen scenarios.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Uncertainty Quantification for Flow-Based Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2606.18043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action models (VLAs) combine vision-language backbones with expressive generative action heads trained via flow matching on large-scale robotic datasets. Despite their strong empirical performance in robotic manipulation, VLAs lack mechanisms to quantify confidence in their predictions and to detect when their actions may be unreliable. This presents a critical limitation for real-world deployment in non-stationary environments, where models inevitably encounter scenarios outside their pretraining distribution and may fail without warning. To address this, we derive an efficient method for quantifying epistemic uncertainty in flow-matching models by leveraging velocity-field disagreement (VFD) across a small ensemble. We successfully use this uncertainty estimate for failure detection during deployment and active fine-tuning of flow-based VLAs. To this end, we propose SAVE, a framework for uncertainty-guided active multitask fine-tuning that reduces the number of costly expert demonstrations required to adapt VLAs to new tasks. Through extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark, we demonstrate that VFD yields better-calibrated uncertainty estimates predictive of downstream performance, that VFD achieves strong performance in detecting failures, and that uncertainty-guided data acquisition with SAVE requires at least 22% fewer samples than baselines. In summary, our work shows that quantifying epistemic uncertainty in flow-based VLAs improves both failure awareness and adaptation. Project website: tum-lsy.github.io/uq_vla/.

25.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Prescribed hormonal contraceptive use trends in the Estonian Biobank: A longitudinal observational study

by Jelisaveta Džigurski, Märt Möls, Kristi Läll, Hannah Currant, Mall Eltermaa, Estonian Biobank Research Team , Reedik Mägi, Lili Milani, Triin Laisk Background Hormonal contraceptives (HCs) are widely used and have well-documented population-level statistics. Previous studies with short follow-ups have focussed on individual HC use and side effects. However, the same aspects over longer periods, HC formulation switching, and the impact of genetic factors on HC side effects remain understudied due to the limited availability of suitable datasets. We investigated whether the Estonian Biobank (EstBB) is suitable for studying genetic risk for HC side effects. Methods and findings This is a longitudinal descriptive study combining prescribed HC purchase data collected from 2004 to 2022 with genetic and health data from 73,071 female EstBB HC users aged 15–55 at the time of purchase. HC usage was defined by the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) codes G02B, G03A, and G03HB01. Methods included calculating age-stratified annual user prevalence, inferring usage periods from purchases, assessing formulation switching, identifying the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10)-based side effect-related diagnoses and thromboembolism risk factors, and assessing carrier status for Factor V Leiden (FVL, rs6025) and prothrombin G20210A (PTM, rs1799963) genetic variants as proof-of-concept. Over 19 years, 20 HC formulations with five administration routes (oral pills, transdermal patches, vaginal rings, subdermal implants, intrauterine devices) were used. In the EstBB, combined HCs were the most commonly used among users aged 15–29, while progestin-only HC use increased with age and over time, comparable to the Estonian population. Overall, 64.2% (n = 46,920) of users switched formulations at least once, with 17.7% (n = 12,929) being rapid switchers. Side effect-related diagnoses were observed in 23.1% (n = 2,982) of rapid switchers, with excessive/irregular menstrual bleeding being the most common. Genetic analysis revealed that 5.3% (n = 3,886) of users carried at least one variant previously associated with increased thrombosis risk (3.5% (n = 2,556) carried FVL only, 1.8% (n = 1,276) PTM only, and 0.07% (n = 54) both). Carriers of thrombosis-associated variants had a significantly higher percentage of thrombosis (6.5%) than non-carriers (4.2%; OR = 1.61, 95% CI [1.40, 1.84], p