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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Study of the triangular-lattice Hubbard model with constrained-path quantum Monte Carlo

arXiv:2603.14808v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We benchmark constrained-path Monte Carlo (CPMC) on the triangular-lattice Hubbard model for several fillings and $U$ values and show that symmetry-adapted trial wave functions substantially improve quantitative accuracy. Away from half-filling, simple free-electron-based trials that preserve the ground state symmetry yield energy deviations $\lesssim 1\%$ from exact diagonalization and density matrix renormalization group results. At half-filling, strong frustration in the intermediate to large $U$ regimes necessitates symmetry-projected trials to reach comparable accuracy, where both free-electron and symmetry-broken Hartree-Fock trials incur substantial constraint bias. Since the computational cost of CPMC with symmetry projection scales polynomially with system size, our results motivate its use as a practical route for studying competing ground states in strongly correlated, frustrated systems.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

"We don't complain; it's just part of being a woman": frequency, knowledge, and sociocultural beliefs about dysmenorrhoea in a South African university cohort

Introduction Dysmenorrhoea is highly prevalent globally and interferes with engagement in education, work, social participation, and quality of life. Although evidence suggests that sociocultural beliefs influence how menstrual pain is understood and managed, relatively little research has explored dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge and beliefs within South Africa. This study aimed to (1) determine the frequency of dysmenorrhoea, (2) assess dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge and compare knowledge between menstruating and non-menstruating individuals, and (3) explore commonly held generational, cultural, and religious beliefs related to dysmenorrhoea in a South African university cohort. Methods We analysed data collected as part of a cross-sectional survey conducted among staff and students at a South African university. Participants completed demographic questions, items assessing dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge, and an adapted Working Ability, Location, Intensity, Days of Pain, Dysmenorrhoea (WaLIDD) questionnaire. Participants were also invited to provide free-text responses describing generational, cultural, and religious beliefs about dysmenorrhoea. Quantitative data were analysed descriptively and compared between menstruating and non-menstruating participants. Free-text responses were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results A total of 863 participants completed the survey, including 578 current or past menstruators. The frequency (95%CI) of dysmenorrhoea was 75.4% (71.7-78.9). Most participants were classified as having moderate (53%) or severe (31%) dysmenorrhoea on the WaLIDD scale. Awareness of dysmenorrhoea was higher among participants who had menstruated than among those who had never menstruated (80.4% vs 55.3%, p

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Can Artificial Intelligence Accelerate Technological Progress? Researchers' Perspectives on AI in Manufacturing and Materials Science

arXiv:2511.14007v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) raises expectations of substantial increases in rates of technological progress, but such anticipations are often not connected to detailed ground-level studies of AI use in innovation processes. Accordingly, it remains unclear how and to what extent AI can accelerate innovation. To help to fill this gap, we explore and assess results from 32 interviews with U.S.-based academic manufacturing and materials sciences researchers experienced with AI and machine learning (ML) techniques. We found that AI was primarily used for modeling of materials and manufacturing processes, facilitating cheaper and more rapid search of design spaces for materials and manufacturing processes alike. Benefits included cost, time, and computation savings in technology development. However, AI/ML tools were unreliable outside design spaces for which dense data were already available; they required skilled and judicious application in tandem with older research techniques; and concerns were raised about the potential to detrimentally circumvent opportunities for disruptive theoretical advancement. Based on these results, we suggest there is reason for optimism about acceleration in sustaining innovations through the use of AI/ML; but that support for conventional empirical, computational, and theoretical research is required to maintain the likelihood of further disruptive advances in manufacturing and materials.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Weak continuous measurements require more work than strong ones

arXiv:2502.09732v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding the energy cost of quantum measurement process and its connection to the measurement performance faces the challenge of modeling the objectification process. The latter, turns the measurement result into an objective fact, available to independent observers, and is responsible for the measurement irreversibility. To address this issue, we propose and analyze a dynamical model of quantum measurement, able to capture nonideal (weak and inefficient) measurements. In this model, the objectification is induced by a contact with a macroscopic reservoir at equilibrium which is responsible for the redundant broadcast of the measurement outcome (producing a Spectrum Broadcast Structure (SBS) state) while inducing decoherence in the pointer basis, in the line of the theory of quantum Darwinism. We analyze the performance of the obtained measurement process by introducing figures of merit to quantify the strength of the measurement and its efficiency. We also derive and a lower bound on the measurement work cost that we can relate to the measurement quality. We take as an illustration the readout of a qubit via its coupling to a harmonic oscillator. We investigate the long sequences of extremely short and weak measurements (a.k.a continuous measurements), to find under which conditions they converge to an ideal (projective) measurement and analyze their work cost. Surprisingly, we find that a sequence converging to projective measurement has a much larger work cost than an equivalent strong measurement obtained from a single intense interaction with the apparatus. We extend this result to a large class of models owing to scaling arguments. Our analysis offers new insights into the trade-offs between measurement strength, energy consumption, and information extraction in quantum measurement protocols.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Enhancing LLM Safety Through a Theoretical Minimax Game Lens

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) necessitates effective mechanisms to ensure their responsible deployment by accurately distinguishing unsafe content from benign content. While substantial safety datasets are available in English, multilingual safety modeling remains underexplored due to limited open-source safety datasets in other languages. Even within English datasets, safe yet sensitive corner-case content is scarce, leading to shortcut learning by models and non-trivial false-positive rates. To mitigate these issues, we introduce a novel minimax reinforcement learning (RL) framework wherein a data generator and a classifier model co-evolve, facilitating the production of high-quality synthetic multilingual safety data. We theoretically formalize this interaction as a minimax game and rigorously demonstrate convergence to a Nash equilibrium. Empirical evaluations confirm that our synthetic data generation method significantly enhances the classifier model performance, enabling a substantially smaller model to surpass the state-of-the-art by nearly 10% on English benchmarks while achieving 4.5x faster inference speed. These results establish a scalable and efficient methodology for synthetic data generation, advancing the development of safer and more robust multilingual LLM deployments.

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

From Explicit Elements to Implicit Intent: A Predefined Library for Auditable Behavioral Inference

Authors:

We present SemantiClean, a modular framework for extracting structured semantic signals from e-commerce session data and driving pluggable inference targets including purchase intent, customer segmentation, and product affinity through a shared element library. Unlike conventional end-to-end predictors that optimise solely for accuracy, SemantiClean prioritises auditability, structural governance, and sigma=0 reproducibility, explicitly trading marginal predictive gains for element-level transparency and defensible decision trails. Built upon the Online Shoppers Purchasing Intention (OSPI) dataset, the framework organises twenty-four behavioural elements into a four-layer architecture (Functional, Interaction, Systemic, Contextual) and enforces signal quality through three anti-inflation mechanisms: RedundancyGroup contribution caps, TieredPenaltyCalculator bias penalties, and AdaptiveConstraintMode cold-start protection.This report introduces the LLM-Integrated Semantic Inference Engine, a fully implemented two-phase LLM-driven inference architecture that leverages complete element metadata at inference time. All quantitative results reported herein are produced by this engine. Deterministic engine outputs remain fully reproducible (sigma=0); LLM-dependent results (E8, E10) are subject to controlled output variability under fixed provider/model/temperature settings. The gender inference target remains non-functional in the current implementation and is excluded from all quantitative results.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

World Engine: Towards the Era of Post-Training for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous vehicles must operate safely in the real world, where errors can have severe consequences. Although modern end-to-end driving policies excel in routine scenarios, their reliability is limited by the scarcity of safety-critical ``long-tail'' events in real driving datasets. These rare interactions define the practical safety boundary of the learned policy, yet they are difficult to collect at scale in the real world. Here we show that this fundamental limitation can be addressed by post-training pre-trained driving models on synthesized high-stakes interactions. We introduce World Engine, a generative framework that reconstructs high-fidelity interactive environments from real-world logs and systematically extrapolates them into realistic safety-critical variations. This paradigm enables reinforcement-based post-training to align policies with safety constraints, circumventing the physical risks inherent in real-world exploration. On a public benchmark built on nuPlan, World Engine substantially reduces failures in rare safety-critical scenarios and yields significantly larger gains than scaling pre-training data alone. Furthermore, when deployed on a production-scale autonomous driving system, the resulting policy reduces simulated collisions and demonstrates measurable improvements in on-road testing, showing that post-training on synthesized, safety-critical interactions offers a scalable and effective pathway to safer autonomous driving. The full codebase suite, including training, is released to the public.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SorryDB: Can AI Provers Complete Real-World Lean Theorems?

arXiv:2603.02668v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present SorryDB, a dynamically-updating benchmark of open Lean tasks drawn from 78 real world formalization projects on GitHub. Unlike existing static benchmarks, often composed of competition problems, hillclimbing the SorryDB benchmark will yield tools that are aligned to the community needs, more usable by mathematicians, and more capable of understanding complex dependencies. Moreover, by providing a continuously updated stream of tasks, SorryDB mitigates test-set contamination and offers a robust metric for an agent's ability to contribute to novel formal mathematics projects. We evaluate a collection of approaches, including generalist large language models, agentic approaches, and specialized symbolic provers, over a selected snapshot of 1000 tasks from SorryDB. We show that current approaches are complementary: even though an agentic approach based on Gemini Flash is the most performant, it is not strictly better than other off-the-shelf large-language models, specialized provers, or even a curated list of Lean tactics.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

GMN4AD: Graph Matching Network for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis with Test-Time Domain Adaptation using Multi-centered Structure Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects millions of older adults, with prevalence expected to rise significantly in the coming years. Early diagnosis, particularly during the mild cognitive impairment (MCI) stage, is critical for timely intervention. Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (sMRI) has emerged as a key modality for detecting AD-related brain changes, but traditional graph-based approaches often struggle with modality and inter-site heterogeneity, limiting diagnostic performance. In this paper, we propose Graph Matching Network for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis (GMN4AD), designed to model interactions between heterogeneous brain graphs derived from neuroimaging data. Unlike conventional methods that treat each brain graph independently, GMN4AD leverages graph matching to capture cross-graph relationships, enhancing diagnostic precision. Furthermore, we introduce a test-time domain adaptation strategy that combines contrastive learning to mitigate domain shifts during inference. Extensive experiments on three public AD datasets demonstrate that GMN4AD achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, offering a robust and generalizable solution for AD diagnosis.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Prompt Perturbation for Reliable LLM Evaluation over Comparison Graphs

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) is important for understanding their capabilities, comparing competing systems, and supporting the deployment of reliable models in practice. For open-ended tasks, pairwise evaluation has become a popular paradigm, in which two responses to the same prompt are compared and the resulting judgments are aggregated into an overall ranking. A central challenge of this paradigm is intransitivity: the induced comparison outcomes may fail to support any coherent global ranking. For example, one may observe cyclic preferences such as $A \succ B \succ C \succ A$, or inconsistencies involving ties such as $A \equiv B\equiv C\neq A$. Such contradictions make the resulting leaderboard unstable and challenging to interpret. In this paper, we propose a prompt perturbation framework for improving the consistency of pairwise LLM evaluation. Our approach generates perturbed variants of each prompt, uses the resulting comparison graphs to identify and filter out structurally inconsistent comparison patterns, and then applies standard ranking methods to the filtered comparisons. A key feature of the proposed framework is that graph-level structural consistency is incorporated explicitly into the evaluation pipeline before ranking aggregation. This provides a simple and principled way to reduce cyclic inconsistencies and improve the reliability of LLM rankings.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MM++: Unsupervised Scale-Invariant Multilayer OOD Detection via Top-K Gated Feature Fusion

We introduce MM++ (Multilayer Mahalanobis++), a fully unsupervised, strictly post-hoc, and scale-invariant framework for Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection. To address the trade-off between scale invariance and hierarchical expressivity, MM++ constructs a principled joint feature space. It first identifies discriminative intermediate layers by measuring entropy density drops, which mark the boundaries of sharp semantic compression. By fusing these selected layers with the terminal representation, the framework captures latent cross-layer correlations while mitigating early-layer noise. Crucially, a Ledoit-Wolf regularized tied covariance matrix stabilizes this unified space, enabling reliable distance estimation. Requiring no auxiliary OOD data, classifier fine-tuning, or architectural modifications, MM++ delivers robust performance across distinct architectures for both near- and far-OOD detection.

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

SCAN: A Decision-Making Framework for Effective Task Allocation with Generative AI

arXiv:2606.15601v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce SCAN – a human-centric decision-making framework to facilitate learners for effective task allocation with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) based on Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development and Metacognition. In SCAN, we systematize and formalize AI-human interaction by introducing a task-identification approach with four "sub-zones": Substitute, Complement, Aid, and Non-negotiable. After describing the four sub-zones, we demonstrate how SCAN framework can be applied for knowledge workers in the workplace and students in education to metacognitively "scan" their use of Generative AI. We then discuss how such framework can be related to cognitive load theory, cognitive offloading, sycophancy, three decision-making modes in human-AI interactions (automation, augmentation, and collaboration), future of work such as upskilling and deskilling, and how it accounts for both human-human and human-AI learning. We propose that SCAN offers a great starting point before discussing whether GenAI complements or replaces our abilities when completing a task, with a general objective of sustaining lifelong learning, and a specific goal of reaching hybrid intelligence.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Dolph2Vec: Self-Supervised Representations of Dolphin Vocalizations

arXiv:2606.12503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) has opened new opportunities in bioacoustics by enabling scalable modeling of animal vocalizations without the need for expensive manual annotation. However, current SSL models in this domain prioritize broad generalization across species and are not optimized for uncovering the fine-grained structure of individual communication systems. In this work, we collect and release a novel dataset of over five years of longitudinal recordings, from five known dolphins in a semi-naturalistic marine environment, an unprecedented resource for studying dolphin communication. We adapt the Wav2Vec2.0 Baevski et al. (2020) architecture to this domain and introduce Dolph2Vec, the first large-scale, species-specific SSL model trained exclusively on this data. We benchmark our model on two biologically relevant tasks: signature whistle classification and whistle detection. Dolph2Vec significantly outperforms general-purpose baselines in both tasks. Beyond performance, we show that learned embeddings and codebook structure capture interpretable acoustic units aligned with dolphin whistle categories and possibly sub-whistle structure, enabling fine-grained analysis of communication patterns. Our findings demonstrate how SSL can serve as both a model and a scientific tool to explore hypotheses in animal communication research.

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

STRIDE: Strategic Trajectory Reasoning via Discriminative Estimation for Verifiable Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.15866v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become an effective post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models. However, existing RLVR methods typically rely on final-answer correctness to assign trajectory-level rewards, providing sparse supervision and treating all tokens uniformly regardless of their actual contribution to reasoning. Although recent studies introduce intermediate signals such as process rewards, high-entropy tokens, and semantic uncertainty, these signals are often not inherently verifiable and may fail to distinguish beneficial strategic patterns from harmful ones. To address this limitation, we propose STRIDE (Strategic Trajectory Reasoning with Discriminative Estimation), a fine-grained RLVR framework that derives strategic reasoning supervision from verifiable outcomes. STRIDE contrasts successful and failed trajectories within each response group to estimate the outcome-discriminative preference of each $n$-gram strategic pattern, and further combines this signal with reasoning saliency entropy to identify decision-relevant strategic patterns. These patterns are assigned differentiated advantage values during RL optimization, enabling more precise credit assignment while preserving the verifiability of RLVR. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STRIDE consistently improves reasoning performance across diverse models, tasks, and extended settings, including VLMs and agent-based systems.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Analysing drivers and interdependencies in European electricity markets using XAI

arXiv:2606.19118v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electricity markets are inherently complex systems characterised by strong nonlinearities, high-dimensional interactions, and increasing interdependence across regions. While deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated strong predictive capabilities for electricity prices, their lack of interpretability limits their usefulness for understanding the underlying drivers of price formation. This paper addresses this gap by combining DNN models with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques to analyse the determinants of electricity prices across 39 European bidding zones. We employ SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) to quantify feature contributions and apply and extend SSHAP, an aggregation framework to improve interpretability in high-dimensional settings. The analysis identifies that renewable energy sources, particularly solar, play a disproportionately important role in price formation despite their lower share in total power generation. Gas prices remain a dominant and consistent driver across electricity markets, while interconnections significantly shape price dynamics, highlighting the strong interdependence of European electricity systems. In addition, a synthetic EU-wide electricity market is constructed to explore the counterfactual scenario of a fully integrated market with a single price.

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

The Faithfulness Gap: Certifying Semantic Equivalence Between Natural-Language and Formal Mathematical Statements

arXiv:2606.16541v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoformalization, translating natural-language mathematics into formal proof assistants, is bottlenecked not by translation fluency but by faithfulness: a formal statement can typecheck and be provable, yet still encode a different theorem than the source intended. We introduce Bidirectional Provability Fingerprinting (\bpf{}), a framework that certifies faithfulness by characterizing each candidate through its forward and backward consequence neighborhoods in the ambient theory and matching these against probes derived from the natural-language statement. We further introduce four novel components: (i) Counterfactual Probe Generation (\cpg{}), a contrastive procedure that synthesizes probes targeting specific drift directions; (ii) the Equivalence Spectrum, a continuous faithfulness score that replaces brittle binary verdicts; (iii) Adaptive Probe Budget Allocation (\apba{}), an information-theoretic budget router; and (iv) Faithfulness-Guided Decoding (\fgd{}), which uses \bpf{} signals as a reward during autoformalization. We prove a drift detection theorem and a PAC-faithfulness result establishing that the equivalence class of a natural language statement is learnable from $\mathcal{O}(\log(1/\delta)/\varepsilon)$ probes under mild assumptions. We release \driftbench{}, a benchmark of $2{,}183$ NL/Lean~4 pairs with controlled drift labels across six subfields of mathlib4. \bpf{}\,+\,\cpg{} detects $89.6\%$ of drifted formalizations at a $3.0\%$ false-positive rate-against $41.2\%$ for typecheck and $63.3\%$ for LLM-judge baselines, and \fgd{} reduces the rate at which a state-of-the-art autoformalizer emits drifted statements by $47\%$. https://pmlrbd.github.io/BPF/

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Rigorous extension of semilocal collinear functionals to noncollinear DFT using $SU(2)$ rotations

arXiv:2605.31203v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the presence of spin-orbit coupling and in geometrically frustrated materials, a noncollinear treatment the magnetization density is essential. However, in density functional theory most exchange–correlation functional approximations were originally developed for locally collinear magnetization. Many practical approaches to noncollinear DFT have emerged over the past decade. However, a first-principles connection between widely used semilocal collinear functionals and their noncollinear generalizations remains lacking. In this work, a locally exact relation between collinear and noncollinear exchange–correlation functionals is derived at the level of gradient expansions within a $u(2)$ matrix representation of the energy functional. Within this framework, collinear semilocal variables naturally acquire distinct dependencies on transverse and longitudinal magnetization gradient components. The widely used Scalmani–Frisch scheme emerges as a first-order approximation. The transformation of collinear functional derivatives to noncollinear space is implemented through numerically robust $SU(2)$ rotations. A consistent description of local magnetic torques is demonstrated for the prototypical spin-frustrated Cr$_3$ cluster. The approach further extends to fully nonlocal functionals and provides a direct route towards numerically stable relativistic response calculations. The influence on magnetic properties in presence of spin-orbit coupling is illustrated through calculations of hyperfine couplings in the high-spin ground states of uranium and the uranium ion.

18.
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.

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

TivTok: Broadcasting Time-Invariant Tokens for Scalable Video Tokenization

Video tokenization is fundamental to scalable video generation, as the number of tokens directly determines the computational cost and the length of videos that can be modeled. Existing tokenizers mainly improve scalability by compressing videos into fewer tokens, but they often continue to represent persistent content, such as static backgrounds and consistent object appearances, repeatedly across frames and chunks. In this paper, we propose TivTok (Time-Invariant Tokenizer), a reuse-aware video tokenizer that makes persistent information reusable across time. TivTok represents a clip with Time-Invariant (TIV) tokens that encode information shared across frames and Time-Variant (TV) tokens that encode frame-specific residuals. To obtain this factorization, we introduce Scope-Induced Factorization (SIF), which assigns different attention scopes to the two token groups: TIV tokens attend to the full clip, whereas each TV token only accesses its corresponding frame together with the TIV tokens. In the decoder, Invariant Broadcasting (IB) reuses the same TIV tokens across frames and chunks for parallel reconstruction and long-video tokenization. Experiments show that TivTok achieves an rFVD of 12.65 on the standard $16{\times}256{\times}256$ benchmark and improves compression efficiency by 2.91$\times$ for 128-frame videos compared with the evaluated baselines, while using only 1.1\% of the tokens required by downsample-based tokenizers in our evaluation.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Accounting for Human Movement to Improve Exposure-Health Models

Background. Current exposure-health models rely on averaged, residential-based environmental exposures, failing to account for human movement. This aggregation can lead to exposure misclassification and biased exposure-response estimates, potentially distorting our understanding of the true health effects of environmental conditions. We developed exposure disaggregation regression models that explicitly account for human movement when linking environmental exposures to health outcomes. Methods. By weighting pixel-level exposures according to distance from home as a simple proxy for human movement, our model linked disaggregated environmental exposures to individual-level health outcomes. Weights were either fixed a priori or derived from a latent distance-decay power parameter learned from the data. We additionally evaluated model performance under a nonlinear exposure-response relationship. Model performance was assessed across multiple sample sizes (N = 1,114; 50,000; and 100,000). A simulation study examined parameter recovery using bias, empirical standard error (EmpSE), and credible interval coverage. As a case study, Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data from Albania were used to link acute respiratory infection (ARI) outcomes among children under five to pixel-level NDVI within a 3 km buffer around DHS cluster centroids, and the proposed models were applied to these data. Results. Across all models (fixed-weight, learned-weight, and restricted cubic spline models), parameter recovery improved with increasing sample size. At N = 1,114, estimates were biased and imprecise, with incorrect effect direction for exposure-response parameters (e.g., learned-weight {beta}1 bias = - 0.79; EmpSE = 2.61; coverage = 0.88). In contrast, the models accurately recovered parameters at larger sample sizes, including the latent distance-decay parameter (bias = - 0.02; EmpSE = 0.15; coverage = 0.95 at N = 100,000), demonstrating their ability to reliably learn movement-based exposure weights when sufficient data were available. Conclusion. Instead of relying on arbitrarily-sized buffers, this statistical framework provides a novel method for studying environmental exposure-health relationships whilst accounting for human movement. With sufficiently large sample sizes, it can accurately estimate the influence of disaggregated environmental exposures on individual-level health and help address exposure misclassification arising from residential-only metrics. This methodological framework remains scalable, interpretable, and adaptable to other exposures and outcomes, offering a foundation for future work that integrates richer mobility-informed exposure-health research.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Rethinking One-Step Image Editing through ChordEdit: Reproduction, Simplification, and New Insights

One-step image editing is important for making text-guided editing fast, practical, and easy to deploy, but its underlying mechanism is still not fully understood. We revisit ChordEdit through reproduction, ablation, and simplification. Our analysis shows that a) the chord window $\delta$ largely acts as an effective timestep shift from $t$ to $t - \delta$; b) chord transport acts on high-noise images and mainly performs low-frequency semantic editing; and c) proximal alignment acts on low-noise images and complements it by adding high-frequency target details. In this view, ChordEdit naturally decomposes editing into a coarse low-frequency transport stage and a fine high-frequency alignment stage. These findings suggest a path toward prompt-conditioned dynamic timestep selection for adaptive image editing. All code and results can be found at \href{https://github.com/Harvard-AI-and-Robotics-Lab/ChordEdit-Reproduction}{link}.

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

TechRAG: Evidence-Gated Multimodal Agentic RAG for Technical Literature Reasoning

arXiv:2606.01613v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents an agentic multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for domain-specific literature reasoning, instantiated on a curated corpus of several thousand papers in intelligent tires, vehicle dynamics, vehicle control, sensing, estimation, and machine learning. Unlike conventional single-pass RAG systems, the proposed architecture uses an autonomous, evidence-gated pipeline that classifies query intent, generates separate text and visual query rewrites, performs hybrid text retrieval with FAISS and BM25 followed by cross-encoder reranking, expands evidence through graph-guided chunk traversal over a Neo4j knowledge graph, and retrieves visual document evidence using ColSmol late-interaction embeddings with MUVERA fixed-dimensional encoding, approximate nearest-neighbor search, and MaxSim reranking. The framework scores evidence sufficiency using a 100-point rubric with hybrid rule-based/LLM review, retries retrieval through drift-guarded reformulation, searches external academic databases through optimize–search–vet loops, merges and deduplicates multimodal evidence, verifies citation integrity, and generates cited answers through Planner, Researcher, Writer, and Critic agents with self-correcting revision. Key contributions include: (i) a scalable multimodal retrieval architecture combining text, graph, and visual evidence over 40,000 document pages; (ii) an interpretable evidence sufficiency and retry mechanism; (iii) a multi-agent generation pipeline with evidence mapping and critic-driven revision; (iv) a domain knowledge graph with LLM-based entity extraction, OpenAlex author validation, and intra-corpus citation resolution; and (v) a route-dependent external search architecture for targeted literature expansion. The result is a practical, evidence-gated, multimodal agentic RAG architecture for technical reasoning over specialized research corpora.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DART: A design-aware microfluidic chip paradigm for real-time live-cell image analysis

High-throughput microfluidic live-cell imaging generates rich single-cell data. Yet semi-automated procedures for locating regions of interest (RoIs), each containing one cell population, and removing surrounding microfluidic structures from recorded images, scale with the number of RoIs. This prevents real-time image analysis and delays time-to-insight by hours to days. We introduce the Design-Aware and Real-Time capable (DART) paradigm for microfluidic cultivation chips, which aligns the CAD blueprint with the physical chip and thereby enables throughput-independent localization of all RoIs and fully automated image processing across diverse RoI geometries and chip layouts. DART establishes this alignment through embedded fiducial markers and deep-learning-based marker detection. We validate DART using the Swiss Army Knife chip, which combines eight structurally distinct RoI designs across 1164 RoI locations. DART localizes all RoIs in five minutes, removes microfluidic structures from raw microscopy images in 40 ms, and performs fully automated image analysis, including cell segmentation, in under 1.1 s per image. Together, these capabilities establish DART as an end-to-end hardware-software paradigm with real-time-capable analysis that paves the way toward closed-loop and outcome-driven smart microscopy.

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

The Standard Interpretable Model: A general theory of interpretable machine learning to deductively design interpretable methods using Lagrangian mechanics

arXiv:2606.12289v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Artificial Intelligence models grow in complexity, interpretability has become an indispensable tool for understanding, debugging, and controlling their computations. However, interpretability lacks general theories to deductively design interpretable methods. This gap between theories and methods results in a fragmented literature and inconsistent evaluation protocols. To fill this gap, we introduce the Standard Interpretable Model (SIM), a general theory grounded in Lagrangian mechanics that enables the deductive design of interpretable methods. Specifically, the SIM summarises, in a set of premises, what interpretability is for a target user. From these premises, the SIM systematically derives interpretability symmetries and corresponding constraints, which shape the landscape of a Lagrangian whose minima correspond to optimal interpretable models. To reach the minima, one can either update the parameter values of an opaque model to make it more interpretable or compile constraints into an interpretable architecture. We empirically show that the SIM identifies and solves limitations of existing methods (including traditional, concept-based, and mechanistic interpretability), highlights underexplored research directions, and informs the design of core programming interfaces. Beyond being a research method, the deductive nature of the SIM offers pedagogical grounding for interpretability curricula and may shift the scientific community's perspective of a discipline that has long been fragmented.

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

Cordyceps: Covert Control Attacks on LLMs via Data Poisoning

arXiv:2605.26595v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned on uncurated text datasets that adversaries can poison. Existing poisoning attacks primarily rely on fixed trigger phrases that defenses such as outlier detection, clean-data regularization, or online monitoring can neutralize. In this paper, we propose a data poisoning method that teaches an LLM an information hiding scheme reliably and stealthily through semantic associations between shared knowledge such as facts or concepts and attacker-chosen phrases. The induced hiding scheme can encode and decode arbitrary malicious instructions, thus revealing a new and subtle poisoning-induced vulnerability: covert control attacks. We precisely characterize covert control attacks and evaluate them across $5$ LLMs, $3$ backdoor defenses, and $4$ prompt injection defenses. With a small poisoned fraction, covert control attacks outperform heuristic-based prompt injection attacks in average attack success rate by about $40\%$ relative to clean fine-tuned models. They also circumvent defenses based on detection and fine-tuning, maintaining up to $93\%$ attack success rate after backdoor defenses and up to $98\%$ after prompt injection defenses.