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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Development of a Novel Blood-Based Assay for Brain-Derived Tau and Its Validation in Traumatic Brain Injury

Authors:
Balogun↗W. G↗Zeng↗Nafash↗M. N↗Sehrawat↗Shi↗Svirsky↗S. E↗Okonkwo↗D. O↗Puccio↗…

Brain-derived tau (BD-tau) is an emerging blood-based biomarker for neurodegeneration, yet there are currently limited well validated BD-tau assays available for research and clinical use. To enhance access to this vital biomarker for neurological disorders including traumatic brain injury (TBI), we developed a novel blood-based immunoassay for BD-tau on the ultra-sensitive Quanterix HD-X platform using Single Molecule Array technology. Analytical validation assessed dilution linearity, specificity, precision, detection limits, and spike recovery, each recording robust metrics in agreement with international expert recommendations. The assay demonstrated robust validation metrics, achieving between-run stability of 95% when analyzing aliquots from six independent plasma and serum samples across five analytical runs. It also showed strong dilution linearity when diluted four-fold and achieved over 90% recovery when spiked with cerebrospinal fluid. Next, we evaluated the clinical utility of the assay in cohorts of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI), where strong performances were recorded whether using the 2-step or 3-step assay formats ({rho}= 0.94; p < 0.0001). Furthermore, plasma BD-tau distinguished samples from TBI patients based on time from injury and severity (AUC=0.93). Plasma BD-tau differentiated between favorable and unfavorable functional outcomes in the acute-severe group. Our findings underscore the significant potential of the BD-tau assay as a biomarker for TBI in the severe phase.

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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Federated Survival Analysis in Healthcare: A Multi-Model Evaluation on Cross-Institutional Heterogeneous Breast Cancer Data

Authors:
Natalia Moreno-Blasco↗Anusha Ihalapathirana↗Pekka Siirtola↗Miguel Fernandez-de-Retana↗

arXiv:2606.23871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Survival analysis is central to clinical decision-making, yet reliable time-to-event models require large, diverse cohorts that are rarely available at a single institution, while privacy regulations restrict the centralization of patient data. Federated learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving alternative by training shared models without exchanging raw data, but its effectiveness for survival modeling under realistic, heterogeneous conditions remains insufficiently understood. This paper presents a systematic, multi-model evaluation of federated survival analysis on a cross-institutional breast cancer cohort with naturally heterogeneous distributed clients. Three representative survival models, the Cox Proportional Hazards model, DeepSurv, and Random Survival Forest (RSF), are compared across centralized, local, and federated training, and three federated optimization strategies (FedAvg, FedProx, and FedAdam) are assessed for the gradient-based models. Results show that FL consistently outperforms local training and approaches, and occasionally exceeds, centralized performance, while RSF offers the best overall balance of discrimination, calibration, and robustness across heterogeneous clients. We further find that performance depends on the diversity of client distributions, and that FedAvg and FedProx are stronger and more stable than FedAdam. Based on these findings, we derive practical, decision-oriented guidelines mapping data, privacy, interpretability, and resource constraints to recommended model and training-paradigm choices for federated survival modeling in healthcare.

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03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

A note on the $\mathcal{W}_2$-convergence rate of the empirical measure of an ergodic $\mathbb{R}^d$-valued diffusion

Authors:
Jean-Francois Chassagneux↗Gilles Pag\`es↗

arXiv:2502.07704v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this note, we consider a Stochastic Differential Equation under a strong confluence and Lipschitz continuity assumption of the coefficients. For the unique stationary solution, we study the rate of convergence of its empirical measure toward the invariant probability measure. We provide rate for the Wasserstein distance in the mean quadratic and almost sure sense.

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04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Characterizing the functional role of quantum coherence in energy transfer

Authors:
Hallmann \'Oskar Gestsson↗Alexandra Olaya-Castro↗

arXiv:2606.13404v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum coherence is understood to play a role in excitation energy transfer in open quantum systems, yet a quantitative approach to assessing its influence on the transfer process is still missing. Using Nakajima-Zwanzig projection operators, we derive a general memory kernel identity that enables us to characterize and quantify the impact of coherence in the eigenenergy basis on a generalized rate of energy transfer. Applying our approach to the electronic dynamics of a dimer coupled to a structured phonon bath, we demonstrate how quantum coherence acts to modulate energy transfer.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

VoidPadding: Let [VOID] Handle Padding in Masked Diffusion Language Models so that [EOS] Can Focus on Semantic Termination

Authors:
Chunyu Liu↗Zhengyang Fan↗Kaisen Yang↗Alex Lamb↗

MDLMs generate text by denoising a preallocated masked response canvas, making response-length modeling central to instruction tuning. Existing MDLMs often inherit the autoregressive convention of using repeated \texttt{[EOS]} tokens for padding during instruction tuning, giving \texttt{[EOS]} a dual role as both a semantic terminator and a padding token. We show that this dual role is a root cause of \texttt{[EOS]} overflow under large-block decoding. To decouple these roles, we propose VoidPadding, which introduces \texttt{[VOID]} for padding and reserves \texttt{[EOS]} for termination. During inference, the learned \texttt{[EOS]} signal enables early stopping, while the learned \texttt{[VOID]} signal guides adaptive response canvas expansion. On Dream-7B-Instruct, VoidPadding improves the block-size-averaged four-task mean across mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks by \(+17.84\) points over the original model and \(+6.95\) points over RainbowPadding, while reducing decoding NFE by 55.7\% on average. Code is available at https://github.com/Haru-LCY/VoidPadding.

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

Difference-Making without Making a Difference

Authors:
Sander Beckers↗

arXiv:2606.24832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Over a series of seven papers, Andreas & Günther have introduced seven definitions of actual causation and have classified them as belonging to three different, competing, types of accounts: factual difference-making, counterfactual difference-making, and regularity-based. I show that their most recent - factual difference-making - definition instantiates all three types, thereby proving that these are distinctions without a difference. I further compare their novel account to the other six accounts on several crucial examples, revealing that this undermines all seven of their accounts.

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

Adaptive $k$NN graph model

Authors:
Jiaye Li↗Hang Xu↗Shichao Zhang↗

arXiv:2601.16509v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The $k$-nearest neighbors ($k$NN) algorithm is a cornerstone of non-parametric classification in artificial intelligence, yet its deployment in large-scale applications is persistently constrained by the computational trade-off between inference speed and accuracy. Existing approximate nearest neighbor solutions accelerate retrieval but often degrade classification precision and lack adaptability in selecting the optimal neighborhood size ($k$). Here, we present an adaptive graph model that decouples inference latency from computational complexity. By integrating a Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) graph with a pre-computed voting mechanism, our framework completely transfers the computational burden of neighbor selection and weighting to the training phase. Within this topological structure, higher graph layers enable rapid navigation, while lower layers encode precise, node-specific decision boundaries with adaptive neighbor counts. Benchmarking against eight state-of-the-art baselines across six diverse datasets, we demonstrate that this architecture significantly accelerates inference speeds, achieving real-time performance, without compromising classification accuracy. These findings offer a scalable, robust solution to the inherent inference bottleneck of $k$NN, laying an adaptive structural foundation for graph-based nonparametric learning.

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

Planning with the Views via Scene Self-Exploration

Authors:
Kangrui Wang↗Linjie Li↗Zhengyuan Yang↗Shiqi Chen↗Zihan Wang↗Li Fei-Fei↗Jiajun Wu↗Leonidas Guibas↗Lijuan Wang↗Manling Li↗

Can VLMs predict how each camera move changes the view, and plan many such moves ahead? We call this capability view planning, requiring (1)understanding how a single action transforms the view, and (2)composing many such transformations across multi-turn plans to identify a target view. We probe both abilities in our proposed ViewSuite, a 3D point-cloud environment on real ScanNet scenes. Across 13 frontier VLMs, a critical planning gap emerges: they possess basic view-action knowledge but fail to compose it across multi-turn plans, with the gap widening as viewpoint distance grows. To close this gap, we propose an iterative framework that alternates self-exploration with view graph distillation. The key insight is that all exploration trajectories, regardless of their outcome, collectively form a view graph that compactly captures how viewpoints connect across a scene. Distilling this graph into diverse supervised tasks reshapes the policy distribution and overcomes the sparse rewards that stall pure RL. This improves Qwen2.5-VL-7B from 2.5% to 47.8% on interactive view planning, surpassing GPT-5.4 Pro (18.5%) and Gemini 3.1 Pro (21.4%). Self-exploration emerges as a promising path toward VLMs that can actively reason and plan in 3D space. Code and Data are at https://viewsuite.github.io.

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

Shift-Invariant Attribute Scoring for Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks via Shapley Value

Authors:
Wangxuan Fan↗Ching Wang↗Siqi Li↗Nan Liu↗

arXiv:2510.01663v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: For many real-world applications, understanding feature-outcome relationships is as crucial as achieving high predictive accuracy. While traditional neural networks excel at prediction, their black-box nature obscures underlying functional relationships. Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks (KANs) address this by employing learnable spline-based activation functions on edges, enabling recovery of symbolic representations while maintaining competitive performance. However, KAN's architecture presents unique challenges for network pruning. Conventional magnitude-based methods become unreliable due to sensitivity to input coordinate shifts. We propose ShapKAN, a pruning framework using Shapley value attribution to assess node importance in a shift-invariant manner. Unlike magnitude-based approaches, ShapKAN quantifies each node's actual contribution, ensuring consistent importance rankings regardless of input parameterization. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ShapKAN preserves true node importance while enabling effective network compression. Our approach improves KAN's interpretability advantages, facilitating deployment in resource-constrained environments.

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

SG2Loc: Sequential Visual Localization on 3D Scene Graphs

Authors:
Nicole Damblon↗Olga Vysotska↗Federico Tombari↗Marc Pollefeys↗Daniel Barath↗

Visual localization in complex indoor environments remains a critical challenge for robotics and AR applications. Sequential localization, where pose estimates are refined over time, is important for autonomous agents. However, traditional methods often require storing extensive image databases or point clouds, leading to significant overhead. This paper introduces a novel, lightweight approach to sequential visual localization using 3D scene graphs. Our method represents the environment with a compact scene graph, where nodes represent objects (with coarse meshes) and edges encode spatial relationships. For each image in the localization phase, we extract per-patch semantic features, predicting object identities. Localization is performed within a particle filter framework. Each particle, representing a camera pose, projects the coarse object meshes from the scene graph into the image, assigning object identities to patches based on visibility. The similarity of the per-patch features, in the input image, and object features from the scene graph determines the weight of a particle. Subsequent images are incorporated sequentially, refining the pose estimate. By leveraging a compact scene graph and efficient semantic matching, our method significantly reduces storage while maintaining performance on real-world datasets. The code will be available at https://github.com/DmblnNicole/sg2loc.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Robin-Neumann Coupling of PINN and FEM Solvers: A Steklov-Poincaré View, with Application to Fluid-Structure Interaction with Contact

Authors:
Mikel Landajuela↗

arXiv:2606.14181v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are meshless and carry moving geometry and topology change through resampling of collocation points; the finite-element method (FEM) is the workhorse for boundary-fitted discretisations. Coupling the two across a shared interface promises the best of both, yet existing PINN-FEM schemes are validated only empirically. We put the coupling on a domain-decomposition footing: viewing each solver as a Steklov-Poincaré (trace-to-flux) operator, we transfer the classical Dirichlet-Neumann (DN) divergence diagnosis and its Robin-Neumann (RN) cure, including a closed-form, sweep-free interface impedance, and prove a PINN-specific contraction theorem: a trained network realises only a perturbed Steklov operator with a per-step training residual, and RN still contracts, with no shared-eigenbasis hypothesis, to a floor set by the achieved training loss. Because a PINN has no stiffness matrix, we introduce a Fourier-mode interface probe that recovers the network's resolvable Steklov eigenvalues to within 0.5% and doubles as a diagnostic of the network's spectral cap. The theory predicts measured PINN-FEM contraction rates to within 7% on 1D and 2D Poisson couplings, and a two-slab analogue of the large-added-mass regime shows RN's per-mode impedance matching winning decisively where tuned scalar relaxation saturates. We demonstrate the framework on a Stokes/rigid-disc problem with Alart-Curnier contact: the meshless PINN fluid absorbs the topology change at contact by collocation exclusion alone, no remeshing and no cut cells, and the static-equilibrium contact reaction matches the submerged weight to 0.4% under mesh refinement. We quantify remaining limitations: the warm-started PINN drifts off the Stokes manifold over long horizons, and matched FEM-FEM benchmarks attribute pre-impact squeeze-film signatures to PINN under-resolution.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Learned Radius Estimation for UDF-Based Point Cloud Reconstruction

Authors:
Eito Ogawa↗Hiroshi Watanabe↗

Surface reconstruction from point clouds is important for consumer-grade 3D capture, including AR/VR and indoor scanning. Local-patch Unsigned Distance Field (UDF) methods are lightweight and generalizable, but their accuracy depends on the support radius, traditionally fixed or selected by a one-dimensional curvature heuristic that cannot capture heterogeneous local geometry. We propose a learned per-query radius selector that predicts a continuous support radius and plugs into a frozen LoSF-UDF backbone. The selector is trained using off-grid target radii obtained by parabolic interpolation of cached UDF error curves. Experiments show improved fine-scale reconstruction accuracy.

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

RepNet: Tackling spectral bias in deep neural networks via parameter reparameterization

Authors:
Yong Wang↗Tao Zhou↗Xuhui Meng↗

arXiv:2606.16575v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in scientific computing, yet they often suffer from spectral bias in capturing oscillatory and multiscale behaviors. In this study, we investigate this limitation by examining the failure of shallow ReLU neural networks in fitting high-frequency functions. This observation identifies two important factors in resolving rapid oscillations: the initial slope scale and the distribution of partition points induced by the networks. Motivated by this analysis, we propose RepNet, a reparameterized DNN model for ReLU and tanh networks designed for high-frequency and multiscale problems. The key idea is to reparameterize the weights and biases in the first hidden layer, which enables effective control of the initial slope scale and provides an appropriate distribution of the initial partition points. Furthermore, treating the reparameterized weights and biases as trainable parameters allows the DNN to achieve adaptive frequency scaling during training. In addition, we derive quantitative estimates for the output and slope magnitudes of the reparameterized DNN to guide the initialization of the proposed method. Numerical experiments, including multiscale one- and four-dimensional function approximation, forward and inverse PDE problems in combination with physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), and operator learning, demonstrate that RepNet improves the predicted accuracy of vanilla DNNs in capturing highly oscillatory features with slightly additional computational cost. These results indicate that RepNet provides an effective and flexible approach for overcoming spectral bias and applying DNNs to multiscale problems.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

GetNetUPAM: Ecologically Informed Nested Cross-Validation and Noise-Robust Attention for Marine Bioacoustic Monitoring

Authors:
Nicholas R. Rasmussen↗Rodrigue Rizk↗Longwei Wang↗KC Santosh↗

Deploying reliable bioacoustic monitoring systems requires models that generalize under high-noise, low-SNR conditions and evaluation protocols that expose deployment-relevant failure modes, gaps largely unaddressed in current UPAM practice. Intrinsic noise, variable propagation, and mixed biological and anthropogenic sources induce distribution shifts that conventional models and single-split evaluations obscure, inflating performance and masking instability. We introduce GetNetUPAM, a hierarchical nested cross-validation framework that uses the nested stage to quantify model stability rather than tune for inflated hold-out scores. By partitioning data into site-year blocks, GetNetUPAM preserves ecological heterogeneity and forces each outer fold to represent a distinct environmental regime, preventing overfitting to localized noise or sensor artifacts. Inner stratified folds measure generalization across the full UPAM signal distribution, enforcing strict separation between model development and the outer held-out deployment condition. Using GetNetUPAM, we evaluate the Adaptive Resolution Pooling and Attention Network (ARPA-N), a CNN architecture for irregular spectrogram dimensions. ARPA-N integrates CBAM spatial attention as a learned noise suppressor, producing attention maps that localize true call structure and avoid the global, non-biological cues exploited by standard CNNs on long-window data. Under GetNetUPAM, ARPA-N generalizes robustly across diverse environmental regimes. In the zero-training support Balleny Islands region, it reduces false positives per hour by over an order of magnitude (approximately 10x) at fixed 90 percent recall, yielding consistently improved metrics across folds. These advances provide a reproducible benchmark and move UPAM toward scalable, deployment-reliable ecological monitoring.

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

Fast and Slow Variational Continual Learning

Authors:
Subarnaduti Paul↗Yohan Jung↗Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan↗Siddharth Swaroop↗Thomas M\"ollenhoff↗Martin Mundt↗

arXiv:2606.24007v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning remains a major challenge for modern deep networks, partly because commonly used optimizers lack inherent mechanisms for continual adaptation. One such natural mechanism is fast and slow adaptation to balance stability and plasticity. This mechanism has deep roots in neuroscience and biology, but there is no consensus on how to best incorporate it in commonly used optimizers. Here, we show that this can be easily done via the VCL framework, where past posteriors are used as priors in the future. Our key idea is to incorporate slow adaptation via merging of past posteriors to slow down the drift in the knowledge as learning progresses. The merged posterior is then used as the prior in the VCL update to implement the fast-weight updates. These steps can be seamlessly implemented in the IVON optimizer, whose form and costs are nearly identical to that of Adam. We call this new optimizer the Continual IVON (CoVON) optimizer and show that it not only consistently improves over existing VCL optimizers, but also performs better than other weight-regularization strategies across domain-incremental learning, continual pre-training, and fine-tuning of large language models.

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17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Gaussian mode coupling of spectrally broadband photons from bulk spontaneous parametric down-conversion: A spatial-spectral mode analysis of fiber coupling

Authors:
Carlos Sevilla-Guti\'errez↗Varun Raj Kaipalath↗Fabian Steinlechner↗

arXiv:2602.23238v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Photon sources based on spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) are central to experimental quantum optics and quantum technologies. Their performance is commonly quantified by three metrics: pair-collection probability, heralding efficiency, and spectral purity. In bulk-crystal SPDC, these metrics are known to be mutually constrained, yet the physical origin of the resulting trade-offs is often obscured. We show that these trade-offs originate from the frequency-dependent population of discrete spatial modes in the SPDC emission. By performing a Laguerre-Gauss mode decomposition at each frequency component, we show how spectral-spatial non-separability impacts collection probability, heralding efficiency, and purity. We apply this framework to two widely used quasi-phase-matching configurations: collinear degenerate type-0 and type-II SPDC in periodically poled bulk crystals, and quantify how different phase-matching functions shape the spectral-spatial mode structure. In particular, for type-II SPDC we compare standard periodically poled and aperiodically poled Gaussian phase matching. We experimentally validate some of our theoretical results using spatial- and spectral-projection measurements. This spectral-spatial mode analysis provides a quantitative and predictive framework for understanding and engineering bulk-crystal photon sources, enabling systematic multi-parameter optimization beyond qualitative design guidelines.

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18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Voronoi Percolation: Topological Stability and Giant Cycles

Authors:
Benjamin Schweinhart↗Morgan Shuman↗

arXiv:2601.00793v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the topological stability of Voronoi percolation in higher dimensions. We show that slightly increasing p allows a discretization that preserves increasing topological properties with high probability. This strengthens a theorem of Bollobás and Riordan and generalizes it to higher dimensions. As a consequence, we prove a sharp phase transition for the emergence of i-dimensional giant cycles in Voronoi percolation on the 2i-dimensional torus.

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19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

SkillHone: A Harness for Continual Agent Skill Evolution Through Persistent Decision History

Authors:
Zhiwei Li↗Yong Hu↗

arXiv:2606.08671v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent skills extend language-model agents with task-specific procedures, scripts, and references, but the tasks and environments they target continually change. Existing methods improve skills in bounded runs and retain only the final artifact, discarding the decision history that later agents need to interpret prior revisions, evaluations, and rejected alternatives. We introduce SkillHone, a harness for continual agent skill evolution grounded in persistent decision history. SkillHone pairs skill revisions with evaluation-side evidence that supplies practice feedback, recording structured histories of diagnoses, revisions, evidence, and outcomes. Role-separated subagents run candidate skills on practice probes with redacted reporting and propose revisions informed by prior decisions, enabling cross-session refinement without rediscovering past rationale. On deep-research benchmarks, SkillHone runs without a pre-integrated search stack and outperforms the commercially backed deep-research agent by 15.8 points on GAIA and 3.2 points on WebWalkerQA-EN, while also exceeding prior skill-evolution methods. We further deploy SkillHone on internal tool-mediated analysis scenarios, where it improves accuracy by an average of 18.8 points across seven settings.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Quantile-Free Uncertainty Quantification in Graph Neural Networks

Authors:
Soyoung park↗Hwanjun Song↗Sungsu Lim↗

arXiv:2605.04847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in graph neural networks (GNNs) is crucial in high-stakes domains but remains a significant challenge. In graph settings, message passing often relies on strong assumptions such as exchangeability, which are rarely satisfied in practice, and achieving reliable UQ typically requires costly resampling or post-hoc calibration. To address these issues, we introduce Quantile-free Prediction Interval GNN (QpiGNN), a framework that builds on quantile regression (QR) to enable GNN-based UQ by directly optimizing coverage and interval width without requiring quantile inputs or post-processing. QpiGNN employs a dual-head architecture that decouples prediction and uncertainty, and is trained with label-only supervision through a quantile-free joint loss. This design allows efficient training and yields robust prediction intervals, with theoretical guarantees of asymptotic coverage and near-optimal width under mild assumptions. Experiments on 19 synthetic and real-world benchmarks show QpiGNN achieves average 22% higher coverage and 50% narrower intervals than baselines, while ensuring efficiency and robustness to noise and structural shifts.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LLM-as-Judge in Education: A Curriculum-Grounded Marking Pipeline

Authors:
Xiwei Xu↗Chen Wang↗Jacky Jiang↗Phil Yang↗Qian Fu↗Mohan Dhall↗Wenjie Zhang↗Liming Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.17507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to question generation and automated assessment. However, deploying LLMs in preparation for high-stakes exams requires more than prompt engineering; it demands software pipelines that systematically ground model outputs in authorised curriculum artefacts and marking guidelines issued by education authorities. This paper presents a curriculum-grounded, configurable LLM-as-Judge pipeline for question-level marking, co-developed with an industrial partner, to support exam preparation for university admission. The pipeline identifies the relevant topics, subtopics, and cognitive demand of a question, and assembles verifiable and authorised context to support LLM judgement. Curriculum intent is operationalised through concrete syllabus artefacts, including prescribed verbs and outcomes, performance band descriptors, glossary definitions, and marking-guideline principles. A staged LLM workflow is employed to first generate question-specific rubrics, capturing structured expectations of performance, and then derive and evaluate marking criteria used to allocate marks to student responses. This design improves consistency, transparency, and alignment with official marking practices. Preliminary evaluation shows that the proposed LLM-as-Judge pipeline delivers marking outcomes comparable to human tutors, while yielding justifications that are more traceable to authorised curriculum artefacts and marking standards. The pipeline has also been integrated into an online study platform, where early deployment data provide initial insights into operational usage and manual overrides.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

An In-depth Study of LLM Contributions to the Bin Packing Problem

Authors:
Julien Herrmann↗Guillaume Pallez↗

arXiv:2510.27353v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent studies have suggested that Large Language Models (LLMs) could provide interesting ideas contributing to mathematical discovery. This claim was motivated by reports that LLM-based genetic algorithms produced heuristics offering new insights into the online bin packing problem under uniform and Weibull distributions. In this work, we reassess this claim through a detailed analysis of the heuristics produced by LLMs, examining both their behavior and interpretability. Despite being human-readable, these heuristics remain largely opaque even to domain experts. Building on this analysis, we propose a new class of algorithms tailored to these specific bin packing instances. The derived algorithms are significantly simpler, more efficient, more interpretable, and more generalizable, suggesting that the considered instances are themselves relatively simple. We then discuss the limitations of the claim regarding LLMs' contribution to this problem, which appears to rest on the mistaken assumption that the instances had previously been studied. Our findings instead emphasize the need for rigorous validation and contextualization when assessing the scientific value of LLM-generated outputs.

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

Automated Creativity Evaluation of Language Models Across Open-Ended Tasks

Authors:
Min Sen Tan↗Zachary Kit Chun Choy↗Syed Ali Redha Alsagoff↗Nadya Yuki Wangsajaya↗Mohor Banerjee↗Swaagat Bikash Saikia↗Alvin Chan↗

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in language understanding, reasoning, and generation, sparking growing interest in their creative potential. Realizing this potential requires systematic and scalable methods for evaluating creativity across diverse tasks. However, most existing creativity metrics are tightly coupled to specific tasks, embedding domain assumptions into the evaluation process, and limiting scalability and generality. To address this gap, we introduce an automated, domain-agnostic framework for quantifying LLM creativity across open-ended tasks. Our approach separates the measurement apparatus from the creative task itself, enabling scalable, task-agnostic assessment. Divergent creativity is measured using semantic entropy, a reference-free and robust metric for novelty and diversity, validated against human annotations, LLM-based novelty judgments and baseline diversity measures. Convergent creativity is assessed via a novel retrieval-based multi-agent judge framework that delivers context-sensitive evaluation of task fulfilment with over 60% improved efficiency. We validate our framework in three qualitatively distinct domains: problem-solving (MacGyver), research ideation (HypoGen), and creative writing (BookMIA), using a broad suite of LLMs. Empirical results show that our framework reliably captures key facets of creativity, including novelty, diversity, and task fulfilment, and reveal how model properties, such as size, temperature, recency, and reasoning, impact creative performance. Our work establishes a reproducible and generalizable standard for automated LLM creativity evaluation, paving the way for scalable benchmarking and accelerating progress in creative AI.

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

Adaptive Model-Predictive Control of a Soft Continuum Robot Using a Physics-Informed Neural Network Based on Cosserat Rod Theory

Authors:
Johann Licher↗Max Bartholdt↗Henrik Krauss↗Tim-Lukas Habich↗Thomas Seel↗Moritz Schappler↗

arXiv:2508.12681v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dynamic control of soft continuum robots (SCRs) holds great potential for expanding their applications, but remains a challenging problem due to the high computational demands of accurate dynamic models. While data-driven approaches like Koopman-operator-based methods have been proposed, they typically lack adaptability and cannot reconstruct the full robot shape, limiting their applicability. This work introduces a real-time-capable nonlinear model-predictive control (MPC) framework for SCRs based on a domain-decoupled physics-informed neural network (DD-PINN) with adaptable bending stiffness. The DD-PINN serves as a surrogate for the dynamic Cosserat rod model with a speed-up factor of up to 44,000. It is also used within an unscented Kalman filter for estimating the model states and bending compliance from end-effector position measurements. We implement a nonlinear evolutionary MPC running at 70 Hz on the GPU. In simulation, it demonstrates accurate tracking of dynamic trajectories and setpoint control with end-effector position errors below 3 mm (2.3\% of the actuator's length). In real-world experiments, the controller achieves similar accuracy and accelerations up to 3.55 m/s2.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Data-Driven Dynamic Assortment in Online Platforms: Learning about Two Sides

Authors:
Rahul Roy↗Nur Sunar↗Jayashankar M. Swaminathan↗

arXiv:2606.11118v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study a dynamic assortment problem on a two-sided service platform with incomplete information and heterogeneous customers in a discrete-time setting. In each period, a customer arrives seeking service, and the platform chooses an assortment of sellers to display. The customer then proposes a transaction to at most one seller in the assortment according to a multinomial logit choice model. After a fixed number of periods, sellers review the proposals they have received and each chooses at most one customer according to another multinomial logit choice model, after which the cycle repeats. A key challenge is that the platform does not know the choice-model parameters of either customers or sellers in advance. To our knowledge, this is the first study of a dynamic assortment problem in which both sides' choice parameters are unknown. We develop a data-driven algorithm that learns these parameters while optimizing the platform's objective over time. We evaluate performance using regret, which measures revenue loss relative to a clairvoyant benchmark that knows all parameters and customer arrivals in advance. We show that the algorithm's worst-case regret grows polylogarithmically over time, and we derive a matching lower bound, establishing its rate optimality.

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