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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Trust Without Trusting: A Recomputable Trust Protocol for Autonomous Agents

arXiv:2605.06738v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous AI agents already transact at production scale – 69,000 bots, 165 million transactions, $50 million in volume on a single marketplace – and any party can verify a signed credential without a central service. In an open agent world that covers most of what trust requires: there are no universal borders, and each party chooses for itself whom to deal with. Borders appear only where a closed space draws one – a marketplace, a platform, or a consortium sets house rules. Whoever draws the border holds the authority to apply it, and may apply it as they choose, behind closed doors. This paper addresses the gap that opens there: when you rely on someone else's border, how do you check that they applied their own published rules – taking no one's word for it, and handing the check to no new trusted party? Our answer is the Combined Evidence Protocol (CEP): a five-condition predicate any party recomputes from anchored data, turning "did the boundary-owner follow its own admission rules" into a fact anyone verifies rather than a claim anyone believes. The move that secures optimistic rollups secures this – correctness rests on recomputation, so the measurement belongs to everyone and the oracle problem dissolves. Its load-bearing setting is a consortium of co-equal, mutually distrusting peers under a shared charter, each able to verify, independently, that the rules they jointly agreed are the rules being applied. CEP belongs to the family of trustless systems – optimistic and zero-knowledge rollups, verifiable ML, self-sovereign-identity predicates. The infrastructure beneath it is live: a W3C VC + DID trust layer running since March 2026, anchored on Base L2, continuing arXiv:2605.06738 and standing on its own.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Gender Differences in AI Literacy Workshop Outcomes and Deepfake Engagement

arXiv:2606.14718v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Artificial Intelligence (AI) literacy initiatives expand in K-12 settings, understanding how gender shapes student baseline perceptions, tool-use, and responsiveness to interventions is essential for equitable curriculum design. This study examines gender differences in AI literacy, safety awareness, and STEM career aspirations among Australian secondary students (Years 7, 8, and 10; N(pre) = 199, n(post) = 136) from two co-educational government schools who participated in a one-day AI literacy workshop. Using statistical regression methods controlling for year level and school, we found that pre-workshop, male students reported significantly higher STEM career interest across all three domains (AI, computer science, and engineering), while female students were significantly more likely to use AI for schoolwork and to seek advice from AI tools. Gender-differentiated patterns also emerged in deepfake behaviours: males were significantly more likely to have created or shared deepfake content. Both genders improved in AI knowledge post-intervention, yet females showed a richer profile of gains: wider conceptual understanding, greater confidence, and meaningful increases in AI and CS career interest that partially narrowed the gender STEM gap. These findings highlight the need for gender-responsive AI curricula, particularly deepfake safety education for male students, and demonstrate that even single-day workshops can narrow gender gaps in STEM aspirations and AI confidence.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Exact Entanglement Dynamics Beyond Nearest-Neighbor Dual-Unitary Floquet Systems

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11311v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exact results using dual-unitarity largely rely on nearest-neighbor structures, while finite-range interactions typically lead to complications. Going beyond the usual nearest-neighbor setting, we introduce an analytically tractable family of finite-range kicked Ising models that admit exact closed-form entanglement dynamics. The construction is based on a staggered structure in which dual-unitarity is present on sublattices that are then coupled to each other. The central observation is that these inter-sublattice couplings do not obstruct the dual-unitarity of the resulting model. For the minimal interaction range of $r= 2$, we derive exact expressions for all the $n-$Rényi entanglement entropies at all times and show that the result is the sum of the two coupled sublattice contributions. Our framework extends naturally to larger finite interaction ranges and to systems with heterogeneous local Hilbert spaces, without additional assumptions. It thus provides a controlled setting for studying exact entanglement growth beyond strictly nearest-neighbor dual-unitary models.

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

Deep Temporal Modeling and Ensemble Fusion for Multimodal Emotion Recognition from Physiological Signals

Physiological stress and emotion recognition are important for health monitoring and affective computing. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of deep learning models such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN), and Transformer on the WESAD dataset for multimodal affect recognition using wrist and chest sensor signals. We perform ablation studies to assess the individual contributions of each modality by training models on wrist-only and chest-only inputs. In addition, we implement a late-fusion ensemble strategy that combines predictions from all three architectures trained on multimodal input. We also employ early fusion at the sensor level by concatenating wrist and chest signals before feeding them into each model. Our results show that Transformer models consistently achieve the highest accuracy in multimodal settings, while TCN models perform best in the wrist-only configuration. The ensemble method yields the highest overall accuracy (98.91 +/- 0.13%) and macro-F1 score (98.56 +/- 0.17%). These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of sensor fusion and ensemble-based fusion in developing robust systems for physiological emotion recognition.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

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

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.

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

Absolute continuity, supports and idempotent splitting in categorical probability

arXiv:2308.00651v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Markov categories have recently turned out to be a powerful high-level framework for probability and statistics. They accommodate purely categorical definitions of notions like conditional probability and almost sure equality, as well as proofs of fundamental results such as the Hewitt–Savage 0/1 Law, the de Finetti Theorem and the Ergodic Decomposition Theorem. In this work, we develop additional relevant notions from probability theory in the setting of Markov categories. This comprises improved versions of previously introduced definitions of absolute continuity and supports, as well as a detailed study of idempotents and idempotent splitting in Markov categories. Our main result on idempotent splitting is that every idempotent measurable Markov kernel between standard Borel spaces splits across another standard Borel space, and we derive this as an instance of a general categorical criterion for idempotent splitting in Markov categories.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

FlowBench: separating planning, fault recovery and interpretation in agentic bioinformatics

Agentic large language model (LLM) systems are being deployed in bioinformatics faster than they are understood, and single-metric evaluations conflate capabilities that fail independently. We introduce FlowBench, a benchmark that decomposes agentic bioinformatics performance into planning, fault recovery, biological interpretation, and end-to-end output-fidelity. Existing systems achieve high plan completeness, but their closed, single-provider designs prevent attribution of performance to scaffolding versus the underlying model. We therefore built FlowAgent, a modular, provider-agnostic framework whose components can be selectively disabled and whose backbone model can be swapped across providers on a shared harness, and used it to evaluate 23 models from three main providers. Three findings emerge. First, generating a valid workflow plan from a named toolchain is largely solved, whereas inferring an appropriate toolchain from biological intent alone is uniformly difficult regardless of model tier, compressing all models into a narrow 44-57% pass-rate band. Second, ablation shows that the dependency-structured plan and a completeness-reflection step drive performance, while adding a same-context validator-driven retry makes structural quality worse. Third, fault recovery and data-grounded interpretation remain unsolved. Models frequently propose fixes that force a clean exit while leaving the underlying data invalid, and data-grounded interpretation lags internal-knowledge recall by a consistent margin. Safety does not emerge from capability, and reasoning-tier models were among the least reliable at recognising unrecoverable faults. Once planning saturates, agent architecture and refusal calibration, not model scale, are the productive frontier.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Deep Generative Model for Resting-State EEG Synthesis and Transferable Representation Learning

arXiv:2503.02636v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Resting-state EEG provides a non-invasive view of spontaneous brain activity, but extracting meaningful patterns is often limited by scarce high-quality data and reliance on manually engineered features. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) can synthesize neural signals and learn transferable representations directly from raw data, a dual capability that remains underexplored in EEG research. Here, we introduce REST-GAN, a GAN-based framework for resting-state EEG that combines adversarial training with an auxiliary self-supervised reconstruction objective to support signal synthesis and unsupervised feature extraction. Although trained only on raw time-domain signals, without explicit frequency-domain or sensor-topographic supervision, the generated time series reproduced key temporal, spectral, and connectivity properties of real EEG. In band-power feature space, generated samples showed high precision and recall across eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions (EO: 0.91/0.67; EC: 0.87/0.65), while group-average spectral coherence matrices showed low mean absolute differences from real data across frequency bands (~0.01-0.03). The representations learned by the model's critic transferred to independent resting-state demographic classification tasks, outperforming models trained directly on raw EEG and showing competitive performance relative to a recent EEG foundation model, while requiring substantially less training data and computational resources. These findings highlight a computationally efficient, architecture-driven strategy in which generative models serve not only as EEG signal generators, but also as unsupervised feature extractors. This approach may support more data-efficient EEG analysis while reducing reliance on manual feature engineering. The implementation code for REST-GAN is available at: https://github.com/Yeganehfrh/REST-GAN.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

SEAGAN: domain-Specific and Edge-Aware Graph Attention Network for Dynamic Plant Processes

arXiv:2606.19623v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) provide a flexible framework for learning from scientific data linked through physical, biological, or functional relationships. One promising domain is plant physiology, where measured responses often arise from multiple interacting processes whose exact separation remains difficult even with manual intervention. In plant physiology, a key example is the A-Ci curve, which relates net CO2 assimilation rate (Anet) to leaf intercellular CO2 concentration (Ci) and is used to estimate photosynthetic parameters in leaf and crop-canopy models. However, reliable estimation requires identifying the active biochemical limitation state at each curve point, which remains a major source of uncertainty. Here, we formulate limitation-state identification along A-Ci curves as a graph-based node classification problem, with curve points as nodes. Domain-specific graph representations are created using distance-based k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) and auxiliary-signal-guided (ASG) connectivity, with edge attributes encoding pairwise relations. The framework was evaluated against conventional learning baselines, graph-based architectures, and an automated fitting-based benchmark. Results on a large synthetic dataset with known ground-truth limitation states show that graph-based models improve classification, particularly near biochemical transition regions. The best-performing configuration, SEAGAN (domain-Specific and Edge-Aware Graph Attention Network for Dynamic Plant Processes), integrates process-aware node features, edge attributes, kNN connectivity, and graph attention with weighted cross-entropy loss, achieving an F1-score of 0.857 and an accuracy of 0.882. The results show that representing A-Ci curves as graphs improves biochemical limitation-state analysis, with edge-aware attention over local kNN neighborhoods providing the most effective strategy.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Recirculating Quantum Photonic Networks for Fast Deterministic Quantum Information Processing

arXiv:2602.11033v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A fundamental challenge in photonics-based deterministic quantum information processing is to realize key transformations on time scales shorter than those of detrimental decoherence and loss mechanisms. This challenge has been addressed through device-focused approaches that aim to increase nonlinear interactions relative to decoherence rates. In this work, we adopt a complementary architecture-focused approach by proposing a recirculating quantum photonic network (RQPN) that minimizes the duration of quantum information processing tasks, thereby reducing the requirements on nonlinear interaction rates. The RQPN consists of a network of all-to-all connected nonlinear cavities with dynamically controlled waveguide couplings, and it processes information by capturing a photonic input state, recirculating photons between the cavities, and releasing a photonic output state. We demonstrate the RQPN's architectural advantage through two examples: first, we show that processing all qubits simultaneously yields faster operations than single- and two-qubit decompositions of the three-qubit Toffoli gate. Second, we demonstrate implementations of a measurement-free correction for single-photon loss, achieving up to seven-fold speedups and significantly improved hardware efficiency relative to state-of-the-art architecture proposals. Our work shows that a single hardware-efficient recirculating architecture substantially reduces the temporal overhead of multi-qubit gates and quantum error correction, thereby lowering the barrier to experimental realizations of deterministic photonic quantum information processing.

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

Entropy-Aware On-Policy Distillation of Language Models

On-policy distillation is a promising approach for transferring knowledge between language models, where a student learns from dense token-level signals along its own trajectories. This framework typically uses reverse KL divergence, encouraging the student to match the teacher's high-confidence predictions. However, we show that the mode-seeking property of reverse KL reduces generation diversity and yields unstable learning signals when the teacher distribution has high entropy. To address this, we introduce Entropy-Aware On-Policy Distillation. Our key idea is augmenting the standard reverse KL objective with forward KL when teacher entropy is high, capturing the full range of plausible outputs while retaining precise imitation elsewhere. It balances mode-seeking precision with mode-covering robustness without sacrificing on-policy training efficiency. Experiments show that our method maintains generation diversity (sustained token-level entropy) and improves student-teacher alignment (lower forward KL on high-entropy tokens). Across six math reasoning benchmarks, this yields Pass@8 accuracy gains of +1.37 for Qwen3-0.6B-Base, +2.39 for Qwen3-1.7B-Base, and +5.05 for Qwen3-4B-Base compared to baseline on-policy distillation methods. These results demonstrate that accounting for teacher uncertainty is essential for maintaining diversity and achieving effective knowledge transfer.

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

Gaming-Resistant Insurance Contracts for Autonomous AI Agents: Strategy-Proof Toll Mechanism Design

arXiv:2606.16326v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Paper A defines a time-consistent actuarial runtime that prices each side-effect-bearing action against a contractually fixed safe default and gates execution against a reserve budget. It treats the operator as passive. This paper makes the operator strategic. We characterise a five-attack space for autonomous AI-agent insurance contracts and prove when the actuarial runtime is gaming-resistant. Two attack surfaces – post-toll safe-default selection and within-boundary action splitting – are closed by Paper A's minimal-authority and no-splitting clauses. The remaining three require new contract clauses. First, common-control aggregation prevents cross-boundary re-routing from reducing toll below the boundary potential applied to total exposure. Second, interface failures such as invalid JSON are contract-relevant events, not safety wins: treating them as zero-toll safe defaults can reward unreliable models, while escalation fees reverse the incentive. We validate this interface-compliance theorem on committed cross-model traces from the companion empirical paper. Third, a model-identity menu with a componentwise-minimum penalty schedule makes truthful reporting of the deployed model weakly dominant. We then compose these clauses with Paper A's runtime guarantees to obtain joint incentive compatibility over the five-attack space. Finally, a two-parameter premium family discharges operator individual rationality and weak budget balance at the truthful equilibrium. The result is an incentive-compatibility layer for actuarial control of autonomous-agent side effects.

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

Semantic Robustness Certification for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) are now widely used in downstream tasks. However, real-world applications often expose VLMs to distribution shifts induced by semantic variation (e.g., shape, size, and style). Robustness certification determines if a model's prediction changes when transformations are applied to its input. While most certification frameworks study geometric or pixel-level transformations over inputs, this work proposes a novel framework that enables certifying VLM robustness under semantic-level transformations. Leveraging the open-vocabulary capability of VLMs, we use text prompts as semantic proxies to construct transformations parameterized by an extent that controls the degree of semantic variation. By characterizing the VLM decision boundary in closed form, our framework quantitatively certifies extent intervals for which the predicted class remains unchanged under the semantic transformation. Our framework is the first to certify VLM robustness under semantic-level variations without requiring additional data for each variation, making it practical to apply. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show that our framework enables certifying robustness under diverse semantic variations across scenarios.

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

LOKI: Memory-Free Null-Space Constrained Lifelong Knowledge Editing

arXiv:2606.19679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Lifelong knowledge editing aims to efficiently and sequentially update language models over time, as new knowledge becomes available or when the model makes mistakes, while preserving acceptable performance on past knowledge. One unresolved challenge is that existing methods modify a fixed set of layers for all new knowledge samples, reducing flexibility and increasing catastrophic forgetting. Another is requiring access to previous knowledge and extensive pre-processing to obtain data statistics. To address these challenges, we introduce LOKI, a novel approach that uses dynamic layer selection based on the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion and projects gradient updates onto the null-space of the model weights, bypassing the requirement for previous knowledge access. We show that LOKI achieves superior performance to existing approaches across a wide variety of experiments, achieving up to a 14\% improvement in average accuracy.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Mean-field BSDEs with non-Lipschitz coefficients and double mean reflections

arXiv:2510.11228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The present paper is devoted to the study of mean-field backward stochastic differential equations (MFBSDEs) with double mean reflections whose generators are not Lipschitz continuous. With the help of the Skorokhod problem and some a priori estimates for MFBSDEs, we establish the existence and uniqueness results for doubly mean reflected MFBSDEs.

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

Prototype-Based Semantic Consistency Alignment for Domain Adaptive Retrieval

arXiv:2512.04524v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Domain adaptive retrieval aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, enabling effective retrieval while mitigating domain discrepancies. However, existing methods encounter several fundamental limitations: 1) neglecting class-level semantic alignment and excessively pursuing pair-wise sample alignment; 2) lacking either pseudo-label reliability consideration or geometric guidance for assessing label correctness; 3) directly quantizing original features affected by domain shift, undermining the quality of learned hash codes. In view of these limitations, we propose Prototype-Based Semantic Consistency Alignment (PSCA), a two-stage framework for effective domain adaptive retrieval. In the first stage, a set of orthogonal prototypes directly establishes class-level semantic connections, maximizing inter-class separability while gathering intra-class samples. During the prototype learning, geometric proximity provides a reliability indicator for semantic consistency alignment through adaptive weighting of pseudo-label confidences. The resulting membership matrix and prototypes facilitate feature reconstruction, ensuring quantization on reconstructed rather than original features, thereby improving subsequent hash coding quality and seamlessly connecting both stages. In the second stage, domain-specific quantization functions process the reconstructed features under mutual approximation constraints, generating unified binary hash codes across domains. Extensive experiments validate PSCA's superior performance across multiple datasets.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Systematic Evaluation of Black-Box Uncertainty Estimation Methods for Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.19868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks, their outputs often remain unreliable and may contain hallucinations, making uncertainty estimation (UE) essential for building trustworthy LLMs. In practice, many mainstream LLMs are only accessible through restricted APIs, where internal signals such as logits and hidden states are unavailable, making black-box UE especially important. However, existing work on black-box UE for LLMs remains fragmented in methodology and lacks a unified empirical comparison. To address this gap, we present a systematic review of black-box UE methods and organize them into five categories: verbalization-based, sampling-based, explanation-based, multi-agent, and hybrid methods. We further build a unified evaluation framework and benchmark 24 representative methods across 4 models and 4 dataset settings. Our results show that no single method consistently dominates across all settings. Nevertheless, methods that reason over and compare candidates in the answer space are generally effective, and hybrid methods that combine multiple uncertainty signals perform well under most conditions. By releasing the benchmark data and a unified evaluation framework, we aim to facilitate reproducible comparisons and support future research, while our empirical findings provide practical guidance for developing future black-box UE methods for LLMs.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Context-aware Modality-Topology Co-Alignment for Multimodal Attributed Graphs

Multimodal Attributed Graphs (MAGs) model real-world entities by coupling graph topology with heterogeneous attributes such as text and images. They support graph-centric tasks requiring structural and class-discriminative representations, and modality-centric tasks requiring fine-grained cross-modal correspondence. However, existing MAG methods often rely on fixed graph contexts or uniformly fused representations, causing task-agnostic propagation and over-compressed fusion that hinder diverse task requirements and modality-specific evidence preservation. To address this, we propose CoMAG, a unified MAG backbone that learns task-adaptive reliable contexts and modality-preserving alignment within them. CoMAG first conducts Reliable Context Learning by estimating edge reliability from multimodal semantic consistency, complementing raw topology with semantic neighbors, and selecting context components through a task-aware gate. It then performs Modality-preserving Hop-token Alignment by maintaining modality-specific multi-hop trajectories, matching modality-hop tokens across modalities, and decoupling shared and private representations. Thus, CoMAG produces graph and modality representations from one forward pass while retaining modality-specific cues. We further analyze stable propagation, over-smoothing mitigation, and modality-collapse control. Experiments on nine OpenMAG datasets compare CoMAG with feature-only, graph-only, multimodal, and unified MAG baselines across graph-level prediction, modality matching, and graph-conditioned generation. Results show that CoMAG achieves the best reported performance, demonstrating that task-adaptive reliable contexts and modality-preserving alignment improve structural prediction, cross-modal matching, and graph-conditioned generation while retaining sparse edge-linear complexity.

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

Mosaic: Data-Free Knowledge Distillation via Mixture-of-Experts for Heterogeneous Distributed Environments

arXiv:2505.19699v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine learning paradigm that enables clients to collaboratively train models while preserving data privacy. However, the coexistence of model and data heterogeneity gives rise to inconsistent representations and divergent optimization dynamics across clients, ultimately hindering robust global performance. To transcend these challenges, we propose Mosaic, a novel data-free knowledge distillation framework tailored for heterogeneous distributed environments. Mosaic first trains local generative models to approximate each client's personalized distribution, enabling synthetic data generation that safeguards privacy through strict separation from real data. Subsequently, Mosaic forms a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) from client models based on their specialized knowledge, and distills it into a global model using the generated data. To further enhance the MoE architecture, Mosaic integrates expert predictions via a lightweight meta model trained on a few representative prototypes. Extensive experiments on standard image and multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that Mosaic consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches under both model and data heterogeneity. The source code has been published at https://github.com/Wings-Of-Disaster/Mosaic.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Hierarchical GRU with Input-Conditioned Slot Queries for Ball Action Anticipation

We present a hierarchical model for ball action anticipation in football broadcast video. Given a 30-second observation window, the system predicts actions occurring in the subsequent 5-second window across 10 classes. A shared local Transformer encodes clip-level features within each 5-second sub-window; a GRU then aggregates temporal context across all sub-windows; finally, a Transformer decoder with K input-conditioned event slots decodes the anticipation target via three decoupled heads (objectness, class, temporal offset). We introduce frequency-reweighted Hungarian matching that systematically favours rare action classes, and Gaussian soft targets for temporal bin supervision. On the SoccerNet Ball Action Anticipation benchmark, our method achieves 17.91% mAP on the test server.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Bidirectional Tutoring for Developmental Motor Learning in Robots: Co-Developed Interaction Dynamics Support Stable Learning

arXiv:2606.19728v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Infants are well known to develop their motor skills through dense interaction with caregivers. Although such social interaction is crucial for human development, motor-skill learning in robots is often treated as a unidirectional process in which robots passively receive demonstrations from tutors. This overlooks a key property of social interaction: it is inherently bidirectional, with tutor and learner dynamically adapting to each other. In such interactions, the robot's past experiences may function as prior constraints that shape the dynamics of their co-developed trajectories. We hypothesize that bidirectional tutoring allows such constraints to guide the formation of consistent behavioral patterns that preserve behavioral coherence and support generalization, whereas unidirectional interaction lacks such constraints and leads to broader, less consistent behavioral patterns. To examine this hypothesis, we conducted two experiments with a physical humanoid robot performing an object manipulation task: one involving human-robot interaction and another employing an AI tutor interacting with the real robot through an adaptive intervention mechanism designed to examine whether similar effects would emerge under more controlled conditions. We implement the developmental learning framework using a free-energy-principle-based neural network extended with generative replay, which supports stable sequence-by-sequence learning from single tutored episodes. Across both settings, bidirectional tutoring fostered consistent behaviors and stage-wise generalization, while the robot gradually required less tutor guidance. These results suggest that bidirectional tutoring, as an embodied and socially grounded approach, provides an effective scaffold for developmental motor learning in robots.

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

From Memorization to Creation: Evaluating the Cognitive Depth of LLM-Generated Educational Questions

arXiv:2606.18257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While LLMs show promise in automating educational content creation, their ability to generate questions that stimulate higher-order thinking remains understudied. This work evaluates six widely-used LLMs through a Bloom's Taxonomy lens, focusing on their capacity to transcend rote memorization and achieve cognitive leaps. Using a hybrid human–AI evaluation protocol, we generate and analyze 20{,}700 questions across computer science, K–12 math, and social-science domains. Key contributions include: (1) a fine-grained prompting strategy that reduces question repetitiveness by 24.45\% for Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, and increases the proportion of higher-order cognitive level outputs by 11.53\% for InternLM3-8B-Instruct; (2) quantitative metrics for cognitive shift intensity (CogShift) and category drift, revealing InternLM3's superior performance in multi-level transitions; (3) an interpretability analysis revealing metric-level correlations that enhance the transparency of Chain-of-Thought prompting. Our findings highlight the importance of cognitive-aware prompt design and provide benchmarks for deploying LLMs in personalized learning systems.

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

Decoupling Inference from State Updates in Low-Latency Feature Engines via Probabilistic Thinning

arXiv:2606.16981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Streaming data systems increasingly underpin Machine Learning workflows that maintain large numbers of continuously updated aggregations. In production settings, each incoming event typically triggers read-modify-write operations to persistent storage, making high-frequency state updates a dominant source of latency, contention, and operational cost. In this work, we decouple inference from state persistence in streaming Machine Learning pipelines via probabilistic thinning: every event is scored, but durable state updates are selectively triggered by informative events. Unlike approaches that shed input or state, we show that persistence-path control is achievable without a high-frequency in-memory control plane or cross-worker coordination, relying exclusively on approximate statistics retrieved from disk-backed key-value stores. We model the resulting stochastic processes, derive bounds on filtering rates, and prove that common time-based aggregations remain unbiased under variance-aware formulations, preventing systemic error accumulation. We evaluate the approach in a controlled setting that isolates per-event costs, demonstrating substantial reductions in storage Input/Output and serialization overhead. Across experiments, up to 90% of events are excluded from the persistence path while preserving and in some cases improving downstream utility.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Hantavirus Disease in Uruguay: Trends and Mortality Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Introduction: Hantavirus disease is an emerging and potentially severe zoonosis of global distribution. In Uruguay, it is transmitted by rodents inhabiting peridomestic, suburban, and rural areas. Global incidence is estimated at 150,000 to 200,000 cases per year, with up to 300 annual cases in the Americas. Since 1997, Uruguay's Ministry of Public Health (MPH) has monitored Hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HCPS), the most common clinical presentation in the region. By 2019, a total of 271 cases had been identified in the country, with an estimated mortality rate of nearly 50%. Objectives: To describe the clinical, epidemiological, and occupational characteristics of patients with Hantavirus disease in Uruguay during the pre-pandemic (2018-2019) and pandemic (2020-2021) periods. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional, observational study was conducted, including all serologically confirmed cases of Hantavirus infection reported to the MPH between 2018 and 2021. Clinical and demographic data were extracted from the mandatory reporting form for zoonotic diseases. Incidence and case fatality rates were calculated, and factors associated with fatal outcomes were analyzed. Results: A total of 58 confirmed cases were identified between 2018 and 2021. Most patients were male (62%), with a mean age of 36.5 years (SD 16). A decline in incidence was observed during 2020-2021, with no significant change in case fatality. Direct rodent exposure was the most frequently associated risk factor. Montevideo and Canelones were the most affected departments. Renal and pulmonary involvement were significantly associated with mortality. Conclusion: Hantavirus remains a relevant public health concern in Uruguay. Although a decrease in incidence was observed during the COVID-19 pandemic years, case fatality rates remained high. The findings underscore the need for sustained surveillance and early recognition, particularly in urbanizing regions.