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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Low Spatial Cost CCZ Magic State Factory

arXiv:2606.24170v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a design framework for reconstructing gate-based magic state distillation protocols as compact joint-measurement architectures implementable with the surface code. The goal is to reduce the surface-code resource cost of a magic state factory while preserving the logical function and error-detection structure of the distillation protocol. We construct a reduced architecture for implementing an eight-to-three CCZ distillation protocol using smaller surface-code patches. The proposed factory preserves the single-fault-detection property and the leading-order error suppression of the protocol, while producing CCZ magic states with lower spatial cost than the design of Gidney and Fowler. The proposed design perspective can also be applied to T-state factories and other multiqubit non-Clifford resource-state factories. Our approach provides a framework for extending the design space of surface-code magic state factories beyond a single CCZ layout optimization.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

LegalWorld: A Life-Cycle Interactive Environment for Legal Agents

Civil litigation is inherently a life-cycle process: what a lawyer drafts on day one constrains what unfolds at trial months later. Yet existing legal benchmarks evaluate isolated subtasks, and prior legal-agent simulators reinitialize each scenario from shared ground truth, leaving cross-stage causal dependencies unmodeled. We present LegalWorld, a life-cycle interactive environment that models Chinese civil litigation as a causally connected state chain of five stages (seven sub-scenarios), grounded in 75,309 paired Chinese civil judgments. We pair it with reusable infrastructure (local memory, global case memory, a Skill/Tool library) that keeps each dispute consistent across its full life cycle. Building on this environment, we construct LongJud-Bench to evaluate agent capability across all five connected stages. 18,992 ratings from 217 legal-background evaluators confirm that LegalWorld trajectories are procedurally faithful and role-consistent; and a capability-level cross-model evaluation reveals sharp divergences that aggregate scores cannot expose, with no single backbone leading across consultation, drafting, and courtroom advocacy. Detailed resources will be released publicly.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

When Language Overwrites Vision: Over-Alignment and Geometric Debiasing in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2605.08245v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) increasingly power high-stakes applications, from medical imaging to autonomous systems, yet they routinely hallucinate, confidently describing content not present in the input. We investigate the root causes of these failure modes with a mechanistic analysis focusing on the decoder-based VLMs. We trace these failure modes to a geometric over-alignment: to bridge the modality gap required by attention mechanisms, decoder-based VLMs over-align visual embeddings with the text manifold, injecting a statistical linguistic bias that systematically overshadows fine-grained visual evidence. While prior work either aggressively closes this gap or suppresses hallucinations through expensive black-box decoding strategies, none addresses the underlying geometric cause. We provide the first quantitative characterization of this over-alignment, demonstrating that linguistic bias concentrates in the top principal components of a universal, dataset-agnostic text subspace. Building on this insight, we propose two complementary remedies: a training-free inference strategy and a bias-aware fine-tuning paradigm, both of which explicitly project out this subspace from visual representations. Our methods significantly reduce hallucinations across POPE, CHAIR, and AMBER benchmarks, and improve CLAIR scores on long-form captioning tasks, with the training-free variant adding no computational overhead over the base model.

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

CPS4: Class Prompt driven Semi-Supervised Spine Segmentation with Class-specific Consistency Constraint

Vision Language Model (VLM) has great potential to enhance the quality of pseudo labels in semi-supervised spine segmentation by leveraging textual class prompts to generate segmentation map, but no one has studied it yet. Although promising, it lacks explicit constraints to ensure consistency between spine class prompts and spine unit region, resulting in unsatisfactory performance in multi-class segmentation map generation. In this paper, we propose CPS4, the first text-guided semi-supervised spine segmentation network using class prompts to enhance the quality of spine pseudo labels. Specifically, CPS4 is implemented through two training stages. (i) Class-specific consistency constrained VLM pretraining stage: we propose token- and pixel-level attention loss to optimize the consistency between class prompts and spine units, forcing the textual class prompt to be closely coupled with the target spine unit in the semantic space. (ii) Class Prompt driven semi-supervised spine segmentation stage: using the pretrained vision-text encoder, we derive each class-specific binary segmentation map for the unlabeled spine image and integrate them into an unified multi-class segmentation map, improving the quality of the spine pseudo label generated by the semi-supervised spine segmentation network. Experimental results show that our CPS4 achieves superior spine segmentation performance with Dice of 80.44%, only using 5% labeled data on the public spine segmentation dataset, surpassing popular semi-supervised learning and VLM methods. Our code will be available.

05.
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

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.

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

EPMF: Efficient Perception-aware Multi-sensor Fusion for 3D Semantic Segmentation

We study multi-sensor fusion for 3D semantic segmentation that is important to scene understanding for many applications, such as autonomous driving and robotics. Existing fusion-based methods, however, may not achieve promising performance due to the vast difference between the two modalities. In this work, we investigate a collaborative fusion scheme called perception-aware multi-sensor fusion (PMF) to effectively exploit perceptual information from two modalities, namely, appearance information from RGB images and spatio-depth information from point clouds. To this end, we project point clouds to the camera coordinate using perspective projection, and process both inputs from LiDAR and cameras in 2D space while preventing the information loss of RGB images. Then, we propose a two-stream network to extract features from the two modalities, separately. The extracted features are fused by effective residual-based fusion modules. Moreover, we introduce additional perception-aware losses to measure the perceptual difference between the two modalities. Last, we propose an improved version of PMF, i.e., EPMF, which is more efficient and effective by optimizing data pre-processing and network architecture under perspective projection. Specifically, we propose cross-modal alignment and cropping to obtain tight inputs and reduce unnecessary computational costs. We then explore more efficient contextual modules under perspective projection and fuse the LiDAR features into the camera stream to boost the performance of the two-stream network. Extensive experiments on benchmark data sets show the superiority of our method. For example, on nuScenes test set, our EPMF outperforms the state-of-the-art method, i.e., RangeFormer, by 0.9% in mIoU. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ICEORY/PMF.

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

SGFormer++: Semantic Graph Transformer for Incremental 3D Scene Graph Generation

In this paper, we propose SGFormer++, a novel Semantic Graph Transformer for 3D scene graph generation (SGG), which aims to parse point cloud scenes into semantic structural graphs, where nodes denote detected object instances and edges encode their pairwise relationships, with the core challenge lying in modeling complex global scene structure. While existing graph convolutional network (GCN)-based methods suffer from over-smoothing and limited receptive fields, SGFormer++ leverages Transformer layers as its backbone to enable global message passing. Specifically, we introduce two key components tailored for 3D SGG: (1) a Graph Embedding Layer++ that efficiently integrates edge-aware global context with linear computational complexity, and (2) a Semantic Injection Layer++ that enriches visual features with linguistic priors from large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), boosting semantic representation without introducing extra trainable parameters. To further address the practical challenge of incremental SGG (I-SGG), where new relationship categories arrive sequentially, we equip SGFormer++ with a novel Spatial-guided Feature Adapter, which calibrates predicate features using subject-object spatial geometry to counter scale variation, and a Cascaded Binary Prediction Head that mitigates catastrophic forgetting via task-incremental classifier expansion and logit distillation. Extensive experiments on the 3DSSG benchmark demonstrate that SGFormer++ achieves state-of-the-art performance in both standard and incremental settings: it yields a significant 4.49% absolute improvement in Predicate A@1 under the incremental setting. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Andy20178/SGFormer.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Note on the local calculation of decoherence of quantum superposition in the static black holes

arXiv:2606.14178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the decoherence of a quantum spatial superposition of a static particle in Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m black holes. By treating the particle as a localized classical source coupled to a quantum scalar field, we reformulate the decoherence process in the Danielson-Satishchandran-Wald (DSW) gedankenexperiment through coherent state generation and derive the local expression for the decoherence functional in terms of the Wightman function. In the long-time limit, the decoherence rate is shown to be characterized by the low-frequency behavior of the Wightman function. We then employ the asymptotic matching method to calculate the analytical expressions of the Wightman functions in the Boulware, Unruh, and Hartle-Hawking vacua. We show that the decoherence behavior depends on the quantum state of the environmental field. While the Boulware vacuum gives vanishing decoherence for a static superposition, the thermal effects associated with Hawking radiation in the Unruh and Hartle-Hawking vacua can induce nonvanishing decoherence.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

HeRo-Q: A General Framework for Stable Low Bit Quantization via Hessian Conditioning

arXiv:2601.21626v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post Training Quantization (PTQ), a mainstream model compression technique, often leads to the paradoxical 'low error, high loss' phenomenon because it focuses solely on minimizing quantization error. The root cause lies in the Hessian matrix of the LLM loss landscape: a few high curvature directions are extremely sensitive to perturbations. To address this, we propose the Hessian Robust Quantization (HeRo Q) algorithm, which applies a lightweight, learnable rotation-compression matrix to the weight space prior to quantization. This joint framework reshapes the loss landscape by reducing the largest Hessian eigenvalue and reducing its max eigenvalue, thereby significantly enhancing robustness to quantization noise. HeRo-Q requires no architectural modifications, incurs negligible computational overhead, and integrates seamlessly into existing PTQ pipelines. Experiments on Llama and Qwen models show that HeRo Q consistently outperforms state of the art methods including GPTQ, AWQ, and SpinQuant not only achieving superior performance under standard W4A8 settings, but also excelling in the highly challenging W3A16 ultra low bit regime, where it boosts GSM8K accuracy on Llama3 8B to 70.15\% and effectively avoids the logical collapse commonly seen in aggressive quantization.

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

Trust Between AI Agents: Measuring Formation, Breakage, and Recovery, with Implications for Governing Multi-Agent Systems

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14923v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As language-model agents increasingly work in teams, each agent must decide how much to trust its teammates. Yet we lack a standard way to measure trust between AI agents. We propose a behavioral measure based on costly verification. In a cooperative survival game, checking a teammate's work consumes resources, while trusting a wrong answer can be fatal. Relative to a memoryless version of the same model, reduced verification provides an observable measure of trust. Using this framework, we study trust formation, breakage, and recovery across six frontier model snapshots. When paired with a consistently reliable teammate, four snapshots (Claude Opus 4.6, Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.1, and Gemini 3.1 Pro) reduce verification by roughly 60-85%, whereas two smaller snapshots show little or no such adjustment. Failures reverse this discount, but models differ in how they respond. Some concentrate renewed scrutiny on the culprit, while others become more cautious toward the entire team. Recovery is slower than formation, and clustered failures sustain suspicion far longer than the same number of failures spread apart. These differences have practical consequences. Models that form trust verify less, decide more quickly, and achieve higher payoffs in our environment. By contrast, persistent over-verification is associated with indecision rather than safety. Our results show that trust dispositions can be measured before deployment and suggest that calibration, rather than maximal suspicion, should be the central concern in the governance of multi-agent AI systems.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-20

EpiLink: a simulation-based compatibility model for genomic transmission clustering in infectious disease surveillance

Identifying recently linked infections from pathogen genome sequences is central to infectious disease surveillance, yet many clustering approaches rely on fixed genetic distance thresholds whose relationship to transmission is often unclear. This limitation is especially important in rapidly growing outbreaks and superspreading events, where many cases may be sampled close together in time and share little genetic variation, making true transmission links difficult to distinguish from other closely related infections. Supervised models can improve discrimination, but they require labelled transmission data that are rarely available during outbreak response. We developed EpiLink, a threshold-free method that estimates whether two cases are compatible with recent transmission. Here, compatibility means how well the observed genetic distance and sampling-time difference between two cases fit what would be expected if they were linked by defined recent transmission scenarios. EpiLink simulates plausible recent transmission histories while accounting for uncertainty in infection timing, testing delay, and mutation accumulation, then assigns higher scores to pairs whose observed differences are typical of those simulations. EpiLink was evaluated using both synthetic and empirical SARS-CoV-2 outbreak data from the 2020 Boston epidemic. Two EpiLink variants were compared to a logistic regression model trained on labelled transmission data. One EpiLink variant assumed deterministic mutation accumulation, with genetic differences proportional to elapsed evolutionary time; the other accounted for stochasticity by sampling mutation counts from a Poisson distribution. The logistic regression model performed better at distinguishing linked from unlinked pairs, but EpiLink achieved comparable clustering accuracy. In the Boston data, EpiLink recovered clusters enriched for documented conference and skilled nursing facility outbreaks. EpiLink thus provides an interpretable, simulation-based approach for identifying recent transmission clusters when fixed thresholds are difficult to justify and labelled transmission data are unavailable.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Agentra: A Supervisable Multi-Agent Framework for Enterprise Intrusion Response

arXiv:2606.18325v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enterprise intrusion response still depends on static playbooks and analyst-driven triage, creating delay between alert generation and containment. We present Agentra, a supervisable multi-agent Intrusion Response System (IRS) framework that converts alerts from IDS, EDR, and XDR platforms into structured incident response plans grounded in MITRE ATT&CK, MITRE D3FEND, and NIST CSF 2.0. Agentra decomposes response reasoning across role-scoped agents, validates proposed plans through a bounded Planner–Validator review loop, screens retrieved threat intelligence through a Moderator security gateway, gates actions through an Action Catalog and risk score, and records decisions in an append-only audit log. We evaluate Agentra against a static OASIS CACAO v2.0 cyber-playbook baseline on a 120-event corpus drawn from ThreatHunter-Playbook, Splunk BOTSv3, and DARPA OpTC. The strongest configuration improves FP-aware IRS F1 from 0.61 to 0.84 and restores the projected harmful-action rate to the static baseline level of 0.0% after Planner-only configurations introduce unsafe overreaction. These results indicate that multi-agent response planning can improve ontology-grounded IRS coverage while preserving analyst approval and auditability.

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

To GAN or Not To GAN: Segmentation Analysis on Mars DEM

arXiv:2606.13252v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To better understand Martian Surface, which is needed to enable Rovers navigate Mars with ease, it is necessary to be able to determine the location of mounds. Detecting and studying these morphologies can also help us find evidence of extraterrestrial life, in this case, more specifically, water or signs of life conducive environments. Detection of mounds was done by manually mapping morphological parameters onto Digital Elevation Models. This paper solves the problem by automatically detecting and or predicting mounds on Mars using Neural Network based Semantic Segmentation methodologies. This is done by using supervised semantic segmentation model and generative adversarial approach. A comparison of the approaches shows that adding extra artificially generated data did not improve the result.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Exceptional by Design: Long-Range Hopping as a Knob for Exceptional Point Control

arXiv:2606.24705v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exceptional points are degeneracies unique to non-Hermitian systems, where eigenvalues and eigenvectors coalesce, rendering the Hamiltonian defective. We investigate the exceptional-point structure and topological properties of a generalized non-Hermitian Rice-Mele model with balanced gain and loss, as well as next-nearest-neighbor hopping. The system hosts only second-order exceptional points under both periodic and open boundary conditions. Under periodic boundary conditions, the exceptional points in parameter space lie on lines and ellipses that are independent of the next-nearest-neighbor hopping, since the latter enters the bulk Hamiltonian only as an identity contribution. Under open boundary conditions, this independence is broken: the next-nearest-neighbor hopping not only shifts the energy of existing exceptional points but also generates new ones, with a specific condition signaling a topological gap closing observed only in the open-boundary spectrum. At special parameter points, multiple simultaneous second-order exceptional points yield degenerate configurations whose degeneracy grows with system size. Exceptional point locations are identified numerically via the condition number of the eigenvector matrix and confirmed by Jordan decomposition. The topological phase diagram, computed via a winding number framework for non-Hermitian systems without symmetry protection, reveals sectors with zero, one, and two edge states; the bulk-boundary correspondence is confirmed, and the non-Hermitian skin effect is absent.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Learning to Hear Hesitation: Continual Learning for Disfluency-Aware ASR

Despite advances in large-scale Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), disfluent speech remains challenging, as state-of-the-art systems are often optimized to omit disfluencies, leading to information loss and hallucinations. Prior work has focused on verbatim transcription and the integration of disfluency markers, but adapting models on limited datasets can lead to catastrophic forgetting of general-domain knowledge. We address this gap by leveraging continual learning (CL) with explicit disfluency tokens. We first introduce these tokens into a pretrained ASR model to establish stable token mechanisms, and then continue training on additional datasets with varying disfluency distributions. Through a detailed analysis of model dynamics during training, we identify a trade-off between marker learning and ASR performance, and a consistent cross-attention head mechanism shared across CL methods.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Spokes: Optimizing for Diverse Pretraining Data Selection

Diversity plays a critical role in data selection, improving performance under fixed data budgets by reducing redundancy and repetition. However, optimizing for diversity is inherently challenging, as it is a set-level property that depends on interactions between data points rather than individual examples. As a result, existing approaches typically rely on proxies or approximations, which often fail to ensure sufficiently diverse subsets. In this work, we directly optimize diversity by introducing a probabilistic diversification framework based on the G-Vendi score, optimized via exponentiated gradient descent. Our method produces subsets that are substantially more diverse than those obtained via random sampling, achieving a +489 increase in G-Vendi score on a 500k-sample subset. We evaluate our approach on FineWeb and DCLM, where it consistently outperforms existing methods. Notably, SPOKES (diversity-only) improves average downstream performance by +0.4 and +0.5 points over random sampling on DCLM and FineWeb, respectively. More importantly, jointly optimizing for both quality and diversity yields the strongest results: SPOKES achieves gains of +1.5 and +1.4 points on DCLM and FineWeb, outperforming all baselines, including semantic deduplication and quality filtering.

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

Naive Visual Memory is Not Enough: A Failure-Mode Study of GUI Agents

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents are increasingly used to automate complex computer tasks across applications, websites, and operating systems. To improve their reliability, recent work has introduced experiential memory, where agents retrieve prior trajectories to guide decision-making in similar states. More recent approaches further extend this idea to visual memory by storing and retrieving screenshots from past interactions, providing agents with richer contextual information than text-only memories. However, the effect of visual memory in GUI agents remains insufficiently understood: it is unclear which failures visual memory mitigates, or which failures it exacerbates. To systematically analyze the effect of visual memory, we introduce a taxonomy of four GUI agent failures (i.e., cognitive failure, visual state misunderstanding, hidden operation blindness, and grounding error) that map to distinct stages of the perception-reasoning-action pipeline. We find that prepending full-image memory has a divergent effect on the failure distribution: it reduces state-level failures but worsens action-level ones, and increases hidden operation blindness and grounding error. Motivated by this finding, we propose Action-Grounded Visual Memory (AGMem), an action-grounded memory framework for GUI agents. The core idea of AGMem is to store image crops that capture the local GUI region closely related to a successful action or a recovery, rather than storing full screenshots. Experiments on OSWorld show that AGMem improves task success rates by 33.3 % over full-image memory. These results demonstrate that AGMem is an effective representation for visual memory in GUI agents.

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

Silent Failures in Federated Personalization of Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.00947v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models are increasingly personalized on decentralized private data through federated learning and are now deployed at scale under growing regulatory requirements for post-market monitoring. We argue that this convergence creates a distinct and under-recognized class of trustworthiness failures, which we term "Silent Failures." These include amplified bias, fairness collapse, and alignment erosion that may remain difficult to detect because federated learning's privacy constraints limit visibility into model behavior. A landscape analysis of existing benchmarks reveals a structural divide. Federated benchmarks evaluate system performance but provide limited insight into model behavior, whereas centralized trustworthiness benchmarks assess behavior but require model access incompatible with federated privacy. We introduce a taxonomy of six silent failure modes arising from the interaction of foundation model personalization, dataset shift, and core federated constraints. Our analysis shows that privacy-preserving training alone is insufficient for trustworthy deployment. We conclude with a research agenda for privacy-preserving behavioral evaluation and propose that silent failures become a standard diagnostic category for trustworthy federated artificial intelligence.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Evaluating Deep-Learning Based Quantification of Breast Arterial Calcification on Mammography for Cardiovascular Risk Assessment

Purpose: To develop and evaluate a deep learning model for automated quantification of breast arterial calcification (BAC) on screening mammography and to assess whether AI-derived BAC burden predicts major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) in women. Methods: In this retrospective study, 202,006 women who underwent screening mammography without history of MACE were included. A BAC segmentation model was trained on an expert-annotated dataset using a multi-task U-Net with a ResNet-18 encoder to detect and segment BAC. BAC burden was quantified as area (mm{superscript 2}) from model-generated masks using DICOM pixel spacing and categorized by tertiles into low, intermediate, and high. The PREVENT score and incident MACE were identified from electronic health records. Cox proportional hazards models were developed to evaluate AI-derived BAC burden and PREVENT score alone, and combined models for 5 - and 10-year cardiovascular risk prediction. Results: Among 202,006 women (mean age 54.8{+/-}11.7 years), 23.1% had AI-detected BAC, and 7,701 (3.8%) developed incident MACE during a median follow - up of 7.5 years. On the geographically held-out test set, the BAC model achieved an AUROC of 0.97, Dice score of 0.6678, and Pearson correlation of 0.961 between AI-derived and manually annotated BAC burden. BAC burden increased with age and was higher among women who developed MACE. Five - year MACE incidence increased across BAC categories from 1.5% in women without BAC to 6.9% in those with high BAC burden. BAC burden alone showed modest prediction of MACE, with 5-year and 10-year AUROCs of 0.661 and 0.650, respectively, while PREVENT achieved AUROCs of 0.781 and 0.771. Adding BAC to PREVENT produced minimal improvement in discrimination. Conclusion: Deep learning-based BAC quantification from routine mammography is feasible, accurate, and associated with future cardiovascular risk. Although BAC added little to PREVENT for overall discrimination, it may serve as a scalable opportunistic imaging biomarker to identify women at elevated cardiovascular risk and support preventive care.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Quantitative Experimental Repeated Measures Study of Training Dynamics in a Small Llama Style Language Model Under a Compute-Aware Token Budget

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13370v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study examines training dynamics in a small Llama-style language model trained under a fixed, compute-constrained token budget. Rather than evaluating efficiency solely through endpoint performance, the study uses a quantitative experimental repeated measures design to analyze how validation loss, validation perplexity, rolling volatility, backslide behavior, spike behavior, and between-seed variability change across token-based training intervals. Six independent training runs were conducted on a 4.26-million-parameter model using the TinyStories corpus, CPU-based full-precision training, and a target budget of approximately 20 million cumulative training tokens. Metrics were collected across 21 intervals, producing 126 seed-by-interval observations. Repeated measures ANOVA showed statistically significant interval effects for validation loss, validation perplexity, and rolling volatility. Descriptive trajectories revealed rapid early improvement followed by non-monotonic degradation during later training intervals. Mean validation loss decreased from 8.3552 at initialization to 2.7996 near 4 million tokens, but increased to 3.9010 by the final checkpoint. Validation perplexity followed the same pattern, falling sharply early in training before rising later. Derived telemetry further showed recurrent validation-loss backslides and no interval-summary evidence of a stable phase under the predefined criteria. These findings suggest that compute-aware language model evaluation should examine training trajectories rather than endpoint metrics alone. In constrained compute settings, additional token exposure may increase computational cost without producing proportional generalization gains, and interval-level telemetry can reveal instability, regression, and diminishing returns that final metrics may obscure.

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

AI-Driven Assessment of Human Tutors: Linking Training Performance to Real-Life Practice

arXiv:2606.18617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: There exist numerous tutor training platforms. However, few provide AI-driven training and evaluation for human tutors based on real-life performance. We present an AI-driven system that assesses both open responses during training and authentic real-life tutoring. Unlike platforms that only assess learning through online training or simulations, our system utilizes Generative AI (Gemini-2.5-pro) to analyze transcriptions of authentic tutoring, measuring the transfer of tutor skills to real-life application. Human tutors instructing students remotely in math (N=86) completed six scenario-based lessons, averaging a significant 7.4% learning gain. Using mixed-effects models across 405 session-to-lesson pairs, we found that training performance significantly predicted real-life transcript scores with an effect size of 0.25 SD. Model comparison (AIC/BIC) indicated averaging open response and multiple choice performance during training predicted real-life tutor performance best, although open responses were comparatively more predictive. Exploratory analysis showed that after training, tutors were significantly more likely to encounter pedagogical opportunities to apply their skills (61.1% to 68.9%) and demonstrated higher execution quality within those opportunities (65.5% to 68.1%). Interrupted time series analysis suggested that these tutor improvements were part of a gradual trend over time rather than an immediate intervention effect of training. We illustrate an AI-driven method to link tutor training with real-life assessment. In doing so, we contribute open datasets, AI prompts, and scoring rubrics to support transparency and reproducibility.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Intellectual Property Literacy, Innovation Readiness and Innovation Practice in Syria's Pharmaceutical Sector: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background Innovation in pharmaceutical sectors operating under resource and institutional constraints may depend not only on knowledge and attitudes but also on the conditions that enable innovation-related activities to occur. This study examined the relationships among intellectual property (IP) literacy, innovation attitudes, innovation readiness, and reported innovation practice among pharmaceutical professionals in Syria. Methods A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 303 pharmaceutical professionals between March and April 2026. Four composite indices were constructed to assess IP literacy, innovation attitudes, innovation readiness, and innovation practice. Descriptive statistics, correlation analyses, group comparisons, and multivariable regression models were used to characterize patterns of association among study domains. The analysis was designed to identify empirical patterns rather than infer causal relationships. Results Innovation attitudes were comparatively high (73.56/100), whereas innovation readiness (17.00/100) and innovation practice (12.65/100) were substantially lower. IP literacy was positively associated with innovation readiness (r = 0.384, p < 0.001) and innovation practice (r = 0.205, p < 0.001). In contrast, innovation attitudes were not significantly associated with reported innovation practice (p = 0.332). Regression analyses indicated that the inclusion of innovation readiness improved model fit beyond specifications based on knowledge and attitudes alone ({Delta}R{superscript 2} = 0.058, p = 0.028). Significant differences in readiness and practice were observed across professional groups (p < 0.001), whereas knowledge and attitudes showed limited variation. Conclusions High levels of innovation-related knowledge and positive attitudes did not correspond to high levels of reported innovation practice in this setting. The findings suggest that innovation readiness may capture enabling conditions that are not reflected by knowledge or attitudinal measures alone. These results support the value of examining contextual and institutional factors when assessing innovation capacity in resource-constrained pharmaceutical systems. Given the substantial gap observed between innovation attitudes and innovation practice, educational strategies may represent one avenue for strengthening innovation readiness. In the Syrian context, strengthening innovation-oriented education and university-industry engagement may help cultivate innovation competencies and support the translation of research into practical applications.

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

MapDream: Task-Driven Map Learning for Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) requires agents to follow natural language instructions in partially observed 3D environments, motivating map representations that aggregate spatial context beyond local perception. However, most existing approaches rely on hand-crafted maps constructed independently of the navigation policy. We argue that maps should instead be learned representations shaped directly by navigation objectives rather than exhaustive reconstructions. Based on this insight, we propose MapDream, a map-in-the-loop framework that formulates map construction as autoregressive bird's-eye-view (BEV) image synthesis. The framework jointly learns map generation and action prediction, distilling environmental context into a compact three-channel BEV map that preserves only navigation-critical affordances. Supervised pre-training bootstraps a reliable mapping-to-control interface, while the autoregressive design enables end-to-end joint optimization through reinforcement fine-tuning. Experiments on R2R-CE and RxR-CE achieve state-of-the-art monocular performance, validating task-driven generative map learning.