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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

A PubMed-Scale Dataset of Structured Biomedical Abstracts

Structured abstracts are important for biomedical literature processing, by facilitating information retrieval, text mining, and knowledge synthesis. However, a vast portion of abstracts indexed in PubMed remain unstructured, presenting a significant bottleneck for downstream text-processing workflows and applications. To resolve this limitation, we introduce Structured PubMed, a comprehensive corpus of section-labeled biomedical abstracts compiled from the complete PubMed database, encompassing over 23.2 million research-article records. The corpus is divided into two distinct subsets: a collection of 5.9 million author-structured abstracts parsed from official XML files, and an automatically labeled collection of 17.2 million originally unstructured abstracts structured via a verbatim-extraction Large Language Model pipeline. Every record is harmonized under a unified five-section schema and mapped to its original PubMed identifier, publication type, and publication date. This dataset can be utilized to train sentence-classification models, benchmark text-segmentation architectures, and perform large-scale, section-specific information extraction at an unprecedented PubMed-wide scale.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

OmniPlan: An Adaptive Framework for Timely and Near-Optimal Network Planning Optimization

arXiv:2606.18105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Network planning optimization is a fundamental problem across diverse domains, including transportation systems, communication networks, and power grids. It requires simultaneous optimization of multiple competing objectives under complex constraints. Existing network planning optimization frameworks rely on mixed integer programming (MIP) solvers, heuristics, and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) models to compute planning decisions. However, they lack effective adaptability to diverse and dynamic user intents, thus leading to the trade-off between execution time and optimality. In this paper, we propose OmniPlan, an adaptive framework that achieves both timeliness and near-optimality in network planning optimization. To achieve the adaptability lacking in existing solutions, OmniPlan employs a large language model (LLM)-based interpreter to convert heterogeneous natural-language intents into a unified and quantifiable user-preference vector. Then it employs a mixture-of-experts architecture that integrates MIP solvers, heuristics, and DRL models as specialized experts, where OmniPlan adapts to diverse intents by dynamically selecting timely and near-optimal experts. Finally, it incorporates a DRL-based expert configuration module that fine-tunes optimization objective weights to align planning decisions with user-specific preferences. We evaluate OmniPlan with a representative real-world workload, i.e., distributed machine learning (ML), where we leverage OmniPlan to offload a wide spectrum of ML inference tasks, e.g., decision trees, SVM, naive Bayes, XGBoost, and random forests, onto a network of hardware devices. Our experiments on a real-world testbed indicate that OmniPlan achieves near-optimal and low-execution-time offloading for real-world ML inference tasks, reducing latency by up to 97.8\% and network device resource consumption by up to 11.5\%.

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

Continual Backdoor Training in IoT/CPS

arXiv:2606.14987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-physical systems (CPS) increasingly rely on continual learning (CL) to adapt to evolving environments, device heterogeneity, and concept drift, thereby improving overall utility. While continual adaptation is essential for long-lived IoT deployments where data patterns evolve, it also introduces new security vulnerabilities. In particular, backdoor attacks can exploit incremental updates, replay buffers, and representation reuse to implant persistent malicious behaviors that remain dormant during normal operation but activate upon specific triggers. In this paper, we present a backdoor attack in continual learning used in IoT/CPS systems. To this end, we formalize an IoT/CPS-specific threat model, analyze why continual learning amplifies backdoor persistence in IoT pipelines, and evaluate our technique under varying conditions. Our analysis highlights critical open challenges in securing lifelong learning in IoT/CPS and industrial IoT (IIoT) environments, as well as the need for heightened security controls.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Observable signatures of exceptional points from left-right eigenstate distinction

arXiv:2606.11333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-Hermitian quantum systems exhibit qualitatively distinct physical behavior compared to Hermitian systems, a prime example being spectral singularities known as exceptional points. Their relevance in, e.g., quantum sensing, unidirectional transport, and robust lasing makes it important to be able to identify exceptional points through observable features of a many-body system. Here, using as an example a one-dimensional complex XY spin chain realizing both rotation-time RT- and parity-time PT-symmetric regimes, we develop a framework for detecting exceptional points based on the distinction between left and right eigenvectors of the Hamiltonian, which in a non-Hermitian system are no longer the adjoint of each other. We first show that a global measure constructed from the difference between the Hamiltonian and its adjoint locates exceptional points via distinct non-analytic behavior. At the level of observables, differences in local spin correlations evaluated on the right and left eigenstates provide a reliable static detection scheme. In contrast, static bipartite entanglement measures fail to capture this distinction, urging us to study the quantum dynamics of the model. Following a sudden quench, we demonstrate that the time-averaged right-left entanglement entropy difference directly encodes signatures of the exceptional point. In the RT-symmetric regime, it exhibits a pronounced peak at the exceptional point, whereas in the PT-symmetric regime it behaves as an order-parameter-like quantity, remaining finite in one phase and vanishing at the transition. Our results establish a direct link between the structure of non-Hermitian eigenstates and observable signatures of exceptional points, providing a practical route to identify them in existing quantum simulators.

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

MambaH-Fit: Rethinking Hyper-surface Fitting-based Point Cloud Normal Estimation via State Space Modelling

We present MambaH-Fit, a state space modelling framework tailored for hyper-surface fitting-based point cloud normal estimation. Existing normal estimation methods often fall short in modelling fine-grained geometric structures, thereby limiting the accuracy of the predicted normals. Recently, state space models (SSMs), particularly Mamba, have demonstrated strong modelling capability by capturing long-range dependencies with linear complexity and inspired adaptations to point cloud processing. However, existing Mamba-based approaches primarily focus on understanding global shape structures, leaving the modelling of local, fine-grained geometric details largely under-explored. To address the issues above, we first introduce an Attention-driven Hierarchical Feature Fusion (AHFF) scheme to adaptively fuse multi-scale point cloud patch features, significantly enhancing geometric context learning in local point cloud neighbourhoods. Building upon this, we further propose Patch-wise State Space Model (PSSM) that models point cloud patches as implicit hyper-surfaces via state dynamics, enabling effective fine-grained geometric understanding for normal prediction. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms existing ones in terms of accuracy, robustness, and flexibility. Ablation studies further validate the contribution of the proposed components.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Adverse Childhood Experiences Reorganise the Brain-Personality Network Across the Psychosis Spectrum

Exposure to adverse childhood experiences is a pervasive risk factor for psychosis, exhibiting a linear relationship across the psychosis spectrum from subclinical schizotypal traits to schizophrenia spectrum disorders. While this association is often conceptualised within the vulnerability-stress framework, the systemic mechanisms through which childhood trauma reconfigures the brain-personality interactome remain poorly understood. We examined clinical, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging data from a sample of low- and high-schizotypy individuals, and patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia spectrum disorder (N=120). Our aim was to map how trauma reconfigures interactions between neurobiology and schizotypal phenomenology. We adopted a mixed graphical model approach to jointly estimate conditional dependencies between childhood trauma, regional brain morphometry, and schizotypal traits across the psychosis spectrum. Our results show that childhood trauma reconfigures the brain-personality network, shifting it from a state driven by cognitive processes to one anchored in emotional (limbic) reactivity. This transition is marked by the increased influence of impulsive traits and a significant strengthening of connections within the salience network. These changes converge with a reduced thickness of the frontal executive regions, the brain's control centres, identified in our models. Collectively, our results suggest a structural phenomenological decoupling, where trauma conditioned affective circuits may bypass weakened top-down regulatory controls. These findings highlight the necessity of using integrative frameworks to capture how trauma fundamentally reshapes the relationship between the brain and schizotypal personality.

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

Modeling Day-Long ECG Signals to Predict Heart Failure Risk with Explainable AI

arXiv:2601.00014v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Heart failure (HF) affects 11.8% of adults aged 65 and older, reducing quality of life and longevity. Preventing HF can reduce morbidity and mortality. We hypothesized that artificial intelligence (AI) applied to 24-hour single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) data could predict the risk of HF within five years. To research this, the Technion-Leumit Holter ECG (TLHE) dataset, including 69,663 recordings from 47,729 patients, collected over 20 years was used. Our deep learning model, DeepHHF, trained on 24-hour ECG recordings, achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.80 that outperformed a model using 30-second segments and a clinical score. High-risk individuals identified by DeepHHF had a two-fold chance of hospitalization or death incidents. Explainability analysis showed DeepHHF focused on arrhythmias and heart abnormalities. This study highlights the feasibility of deep learning to model 24-hour continuous ECG data, capturing paroxysmal events essential for reliable risk prediction. Artificial intelligence applied to single-lead Holter ECG is non-invasive, inexpensive, and widely accessible, making it a promising tool for HF risk prediction.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Bridging the Morphology Gap: Adapting VLA Models to Dexterous Manipulation via Intent-Conditioned Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2606.12109v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization in robotic manipulation, yet the vast majority of pre-trained pipelines remain strictly confined to low-DoF parallel grippers. Adapting these rich semantic priors to high-DoF dexterous hands introduces a severe morphology gap, direct end-to-end joint fine-tuning inherently causes catastrophic forgetting of spatial reasoning and acute action manifold collapse due to data scarcity. In this paper, we present InDex, a novel, data-efficient adaptation framework rooted in cross-morphology semantic inheritance. Rather than discarding the pre-trained 1-DoF parallel grasp output, we repurpose it as a continuous, macroscopic virtual grasp intent proxy to sequentialize the control topology. We implement a two-stage decoupled learning architecture: the first stage parameter-efficiently aligns the VLA backbone to predict continuous arm trajectories and the scalar grasp intent; the second stage freezes this spatial backbone and leverages an intent-conditioned denoising diffusion head to decode fine-grained joint articulations for multi-fingered end-effectors. Extensive simulation benchmarks across a suite of multi-stage, contact-rich dexterous manipulation tasks demonstrate that InDex effectively masters intricate skills with minimal demonstration data, substantially outperforming monolithic baselines while preserving the robust spatial generalizability of the original VLA prior.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

SPATIA: Multimodal Generation and Prediction of Spatial Cell Phenotypes

Understanding how cellular morphology, gene expression, and spatial context jointly shape tissue function is a central challenge in biology. Image-based spatial transcriptomics technologies now provide high-resolution measurements of cell images and gene expression profiles, but existing methods typically analyze these modalities in isolation or at limited resolution. We address the problem by introducing SPATIA, a multi-level generative and predictive model that learns unified, spatially aware representations by fusing morphology, gene expression, and spatial context from the cell to the tissue level. SPATIA also incorporates a spatially conditioned generative framework with confidence-aware OT reweighting and morphology-profile alignment for modeling target-state morphology distributions. Specifically, we propose a confidence-aware flow matching objective that reweights weak optimal-transport pairs based on uncertainty. We further apply morphology-profile alignment to encourage biologically meaningful image generation, enabling the modeling of microenvironment-dependent phenotypic transitions. We assembled a multi-scale dataset consisting of 25.9 million cell-gene pairs across 17 tissues. We benchmark SPATIA against 18 models across 12 tasks, spanning categories such as phenotype generation, annotation, clustering, gene imputation, and cross-modal prediction. SPATIA achieves improved performance over state-of-the-art models, improving generative fidelity by 8% and predictive accuracy by up to 3%.

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

Momentum-Guided Semantic Forecasting (MoFore) for Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning

Authors:

Self-supervised video representation learning has recently advanced through contrastive learning, masked reconstruction, and predictive representation learning. Reconstruction-based approaches such as MAE and VideoMAE learn representations by recovering masked visual content [he2022mae,tong2022videomae], while contrastive methods such as CLIP learn semantically meaningful embedding spaces through representation alignment [radford2021clip]. In this work, we introduce a Momentum-Guided Semantic Forecasting framework (MoFore) for self-supervised video representation learning. Instead of optimizing for pixel-level reconstruction or task-specific semantic alignment, the proposed method learns temporally predictive video representations by forecasting future latent embeddings from temporally distant context clips. To improve robustness across temporal scales, we further introduce randomized temporal-gap forecasting during training. The framework combines predictive latent forecasting with contrastive regularization to encourage temporal consistency while preventing representation collapse. Experiments on the UCF101 dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework learns temporally consistent and semantically meaningful video representations without using action labels during training. Quantitative analysis shows strong temporal stability and emergent category-level structure in the learned embedding space, while qualitative retrieval experiments reveal motion-aware organization across related activities. Overall, the results suggest that long-range latent forecasting provides an effective and computationally efficient approach for self-supervised video representation learning without relying on reconstruction-based objectives.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Convex training of Lipschitz-regularized shallow neural networks

arXiv:2606.19652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we introduce a training procedure for shallow neural networks that promotes robustness against adversarial attacks. We solve a non-convex Lipschitz-regularized training program by introducing a convex restriction that can be efficiently solved to global optimality. Our approach can be employed as a post-processing step by taking a pre-trained network as an initial solution to then solving the convex program whose optimal network is guaranteed to be no worse than the initial one. We illustrate the improvements of our training procedure with experiments using real world datasets for regression tasks under an adversarial setting. We show numerically that solving our proposed convex program yields networks with lower objective values on the Lipschitz-regularized program compared to existing methods. Additionally, we show that on certain datasets, networks obtained using our convex training program are both more accurate and robust with respect to adversarial attacks.

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

DRA-GRPO: Your GRPO Needs to Know Diverse Reasoning Paths for Mathematical Reasoning

Post-training LLMs with Reinforcement Learning, specifically Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has emerged as a paradigm for enhancing mathematical reasoning. However, standard GRPO relies on scalar correctness rewards that are often non-injective with respect to semantic content: distinct reasoning paths receive identical rewards. This leads to a Diversity-Quality Inconsistency, where the policy collapses into a narrow set of dominant modes while ignoring equally valid but structurally novel strategies. To bridge this gap, we propose Diversity-aware Reward Adjustment (DRA), a theoretically grounded framework that calibrates the reward signal using the semantic density of sampled groups. By leveraging Submodular Mutual Information (SMI), DRA implements an Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) mechanism that effectively de-biases the gradient estimation. This creates a repulsive force against redundancy, driving the policy to achieve better coverage of the high-reward landscape. Our method is plug-and-play and integrates seamlessly with GRPO variants. Empirical evaluations on five math benchmarks demonstrate that DRA-GRPO consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving an average accuracy of 58.2% on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B with only 7,000 training samples and $55 cost, highlighting the critical role of diversity calibration in data-efficient alignment. The code is available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/DRA-GRPO.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Pruning via Causal Attribution Preserves Reasoning Performance in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) excel at multi-step reasoning but incur substantial inference cost. We introduce Causal Attribution Pruning (CAP), a training-free method that identifies critical attention heads by measuring their causal impact on reasoning tasks and uses these head-level scores to guide fine-grained weight pruning. For each attention head, CAP estimates the expected performance degradation when the head is masked during forward passes on a small calibration set of reasoning problems. These causal scores are then converted into weight-level importance values for the corresponding projection matrices. Unlike magnitude-only or activation-based criteria, CAP's interventional measurement directly captures each head's functional contribution, yielding relative accuracy gains of up to 61% over Wanda on ARC-Challenge at 20% sparsity. We evaluate CAP on GSM8K, StrategyQA, and ARC-Challenge using Llama-3-8B-Instruct and Mistral-7B-Instruct at 10%, 20%, and 50% sparsity. At moderate sparsity (10-20%), CAP improves over Wanda in most model-benchmark configurations. with especially large gains on ARC-Challenge for Llama-3. Our results suggest that attention-head-level causal attribution can better preserve reasoning performance on downstream benchmarks than correlational pruning criteria at equivalent sparsity, while remaining limited by coarse MLP attribution at 50% sparsity.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Dimension-Free Approximate Tensorization of Quantum Hypercontractivity for Qudit Depolarizing Semigroups

arXiv:2606.17729v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove almost tensorization for hypercontractivity and logarithmic-Sobolev constants for a class of reversible quantum Markov semigroups satisfying the positive off-diagonal scaling (PODS) property. This class includes qubit examples and generalized depolarizing semigroups with respect to full-rank states in arbitrary finite dimensions. For any such semigroup $(\Phi_t)_{t\ge 0}$ and every tensor power $n$, we show that the log-Sobolev constant of the product semigroup $\Phi_t^{\otimes n}$ is at least $2/(3\ln 2)$, approximately 0.96, times the log-Sobolev constant of the single-site semigroup $\Phi_t$, independently of $n$ and the local dimension $d$. The proof first establishes exact tensorization of the $(q,2)$-hypercontractive inequality for integer $q$, in particular $q=3$, and then extends the estimate to all real $q>2$ by complex interpolation; the standard implication from hypercontractivity to logarithmic-Sobolev inequalities yields the stated almost tensorization result. As an application of the same method, we also obtain sharp $(q,2)$-hypercontractivity estimates for qubit depolarizing channels.

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

GEASS: Gated Evidence-Adaptive Selective Caption Trust for Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) hallucinate objects that are not present, and a growing line of work tries to curb this by feeding the model its own generated caption as auxiliary evidence – assuming that a caption, once available, is something to consume. We show this fails: naively appending a caption can lower accuracy rather than raise it, dropping Qwen2.5-VL-3B$^\dagger$ on HallusionBench by nearly ten points. To understand why, we build GD-Probe, a diagnostic set that pairs a global and a detail question on the same image, so that any difference in caption effect is attributable to the question alone. Caption utility proves to be a per-query property: the same caption helps global questions and harms detail ones, through a single mechanism – an embedded caption competes with the image for attention and pulls the model's evidence onto its own text – whose sign is set by whether the caption covers the queried content. Crucially, this regime is readable from quantities the decoder already emits, with no attention access or grounding. We turn this into GEASS (Gated Evidence-Adaptive Selective Caption Trust), a training-free, logit-level module that decides per query how much of the caption to trust, gating it by the clean path's confidence, weighting it by the entropy reduction it induces, and raising the evidence bar when the two pathways disagree. Across four VLMs and two benchmarks (POPE and HallusionBench), GEASS improves over both vanilla inference and contrastive decoding under a single fixed setting, adding only two forward passes and no parameters.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Model Collapse Is Not a Bug but a Feature in Machine Unlearning for LLMs

arXiv:2507.04219v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current unlearning methods for LLMs optimize on the private information they seek to remove by incorporating it into their fine-tuning data. We argue this not only risks reinforcing exposure to sensitive data, but also fundamentally contradicts the principle of minimizing its use. As a remedy, we propose a novel unlearning method-Partial Model Collapse (PMC), which does not require unlearning targets in the unlearning objective. Our approach is inspired by recent observations that training generative models on their own generations leads to distribution collapse, effectively removing information from model outputs. Our central insight is that model collapse can be leveraged for machine unlearning by deliberately triggering it for data we aim to remove. We theoretically analyze that our approach converges to the desired outcome, i.e. the model unlearns the data targeted for removal. We empirically demonstrate that PMC overcomes four key limitations of existing unlearning methods that explicitly optimize on unlearning targets, and more effectively removes private information from model outputs while preserving general model utility. Overall, our contributions represent an important step toward more comprehensive unlearning that better aligns with real-world privacy constraints. Code available at https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/daml/partial-model-collapse/.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Towards practical PDMP sampling: Metropolis adjustments, locally adaptive step-sizes, and NUTS-based time lengths

arXiv:2503.11479v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Piecewise-Deterministic Markov Processes (PDMPs) hold significant promise for sampling from complex probability distributions. However, their practical implementation is hindered by the need to compute model-specific bounds. Conversely, while Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) offers a generally efficient approach to sampling, its inability to adaptively tune step sizes impedes its performance when sampling complex distributions like funnels. To address these limitations, we introduce three innovative concepts: (a) a Metropolis-adjusted approximation for PDMP simulation that eliminates the need for explicit bounds without compromising the invariant measure, (b) an adaptive step size mechanism compatible with the Metropolis correction, and (c) a No U-Turn Sampler (NUTS)-inspired scheme for dynamically selecting path lengths in PDMPs. These three ideas can be seamlessly integrated into a single, `doubly-adaptive' PDMP sampler with favourable robustness and efficiency properties.

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

A Mathematical Forum Platform for Collaborative Problem Solving and Dataset Generation for AI Reasoning

arXiv:2606.12976v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sharing mathematical content in online forums remains a significant friction point for students and educators: writing raw LATEX is error-prone, standalone optical character recognition tools require platform switching, and current forum software offers no integrated path from a photograph of a formula to a rendered post. We present a unified system that eliminates this friction by embedding an image to LATEX conversion pipeline directly inside a forum posting interface. A user uploads or captures an image of a mathematical expression; the system routes it through the Mathpix OCR API, detects whether the returned output is LATEX or plain text containing inline math, applies the appropriate delimiter normalisation, and renders a live preview in either LATEX or Markdown mode before the post is committed to the database. The architecture is organized in three loosely coupled layers: image processing, rendering, and storage, and supports both desktop and mobile clients. A provisional US patent application has been filed covering the core methods. We describe the full system design, each component in detail, the data schema, and the key technical innovations, and we position the work against existing standalone tools and forum platforms to demonstrate the practical gap it closes. Beyond immediate usability, we argue that a deployed platform of this kind constitutes a continuously growing, community-validated dataset of mathematical problems and step-by-step solutions, a resource that can be used to train and benchmark AI systems for accurate mathematical reasoning

19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Improved quantum processor logical error rates via correction and detection

Authors:

Performing quantum algorithms for critical problems in physics and chemistry requires substantially lower error rates than the physical error rates of present quantum computers. Achieving such low logical error rates requires quantum error correction1,2 and physical error rates below a critical threshold value3–8. We experimentally demonstrate on a trapped-ion quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD)9,10 improvements in logical error rates ranging from 11× to 800× compared with several physical circuit baselines, including quantum computation on multiple qubits. Our results hinge on two quantum error correction code constructions optimized for an ion-trap processor: a 12-qubit code encoding two qubits inspired by Knill11 and a 16-qubit tesseract colour code encoding four qubits12,13. These constructions are combined with a scalable method of error detection and post-selection to achieve reduced logical error rates. Our results show that state-of-the-art quantum devices are already able to make use of fault tolerance and error correction to strongly suppress errors in non-trivial quantum circuit computations. Experimental demonstration of quantum error-correcting codes combined with error detection and post-selection applied to a trapped-ion quantum processor shows improvements in logical error rates ranging from 11× to 800× compared with several physical circuit baselines.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Knowing When to Ask: Self-Gated Clarification for Hierarchical Language Agents

arXiv:2606.11349v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In hierarchical reasoning, failures often originate at intermediate decision points where the agent commits to a wrong branch without recognizing that it lacks critical information. Rather than treating clarification as an external uncertainty trigger, we propose ACTION-RATING, a formulation that places it inside the agent's action space on a shared ordinal scale with navigation, so that asking competes directly with acting at every decision point and help-seeking becomes observable at intermediate states. Two structurally distinct information-seeking modes emerge from the agent's own ratings: mandatory (no viable branch) and opportunistic (residual uncertainty despite a leading candidate). On Harmonized Tariff Schedule classification (30,000-node taxonomy, three benchmarks, 9~LLMs across 4 families), we observe a regime shift from mandatory to opportunistic clarification, with Information-Seeking Effectiveness (ISE), a local diagnostic defined as the fraction of help interactions followed by a correct next navigation step (not a final-task metric), rising from 50% to 74%. Three diagnostic contrasts fail to reproduce this structure. A separability test shows that the information-seeking pattern (mode split, ISE ranking) persists when answer quality is degraded (-18.8% accuracy), supporting an empirical separation between where an agent seeks help and the quality of the help it receives. Under the controlled answer channel, accuracy gains reach +16.2% at 10-digit; we read this as an upper bound on what better localization could unlock, not a deployment estimate.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Path integral control of open quantum systems

arXiv:2410.18635v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate open-loop quantum state preparation for a class of open quantum systems whose dynamics follow a Gorini-Kossakowski-Lindblad-Sudarshan (GKLS) master equation that admits a trajectory-based stochastic representation. The deterministic control objective is reformulated as a stochastic optimal control problem – interpreting stochasticity as a methodological tool akin to stochastic Schrödinger equation unravelings – which situates the problem within the path integral control framework. For the class of GKLS generators under consideration, this reformulation leads to an explicit expression for the optimal control as a weighted average over stochastic quantum trajectories, thereby eliminating the need for gradient evaluations. Building on this theoretical result, we derive a control update rule for piecewise-constant control pulses and demonstrate that adaptive importance sampling progressively enhances the control estimator during optimization, culminating in the algorithm we term Path integral Quantum Control (PiQC). We further introduce an annealed variant of PiQC, wherein a synthetic noise schedule gradually steers open-system trajectories toward closed-system dynamics, enabling high-fidelity unitary state preparation. Numerical studies on a dissipative single-qubit system and a multi-qubit Nuclear Magnetic Resonance model verify that PiQC yields precise open-loop controls and displays robustness to Hamiltonian perturbations. We propose PiQC as a trajectory-based alternative to gradient-based approaches, which might offer a viable solution in quantum control problems where gradient computation is infeasible or computationally demanding.

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

VISA: VLM-Guided Instance Semantic Auditing for 3D Occupancy World Models

Semantic 3D occupancy provides a voxelized world state for autonomous driving and robot decision making, but object and rare-class errors can affect free-space interpretation, collision checking, and temporal state propagation. We show that a common VLM strategy, aligning 3D voxel or object features with crop-caption embeddings, improves text-space similarity without reliably improving closed-set occupancy mIoU. Motivated by this mismatch, we propose VISA, a training-time semantic auditing approach for existing occupancy world models. VISA queries an offline VLM on a representative crop of each physical object instance, obtains a structured audit with class hypotheses, plausible confusions, reliability, attributes, and evidence, and propagates it along the object track. The audit is grounded to matched 3D object voxels and distilled into semantic logits through reliability-weighted taxonomy, attribute-factor, and scene-level audit graph losses, while inference remains unchanged and requires no VLM. On nuScenes, averaged across three runs, VISA improves OccWorld from 19.06 to 20.05 mIoU and GaussianWorld from 21.36 to 21.91 mIoU; on GaussianWorld, object mIoU improves from 18.18 to 19.16 and rare-class mIoU from 15.60 to 16.79. These results suggest that VLMs are better suited to closed-set occupancy as reliability-aware semantic auditors than as generic caption-embedding targets.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Simplex-Constrained Sparse Bagging: Transitioning from Uniform Priors to Sparse Posteriors in Ensemble Learning

arXiv:2606.13589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Simplex-Constrained Sparse Bagging (SCSB), a mathematically rigorous framework for post-training compression and probability calibration of bootstrap-based bagging ensembles. Standard bagging ensembles (such as Random Forests, Bagged SVMs, and Bagged Neural Networks) assign uniform voting power to all constituent estimators. However, this naive uniform prior ignores the varying local competence of base estimators and contributes to model overconfidence. We formulate ensemble pruning and calibration as a joint optimization problem over the probability simplex by minimizing the Out-Of-Bag (OOB) loss. To induce sparsity, we address the theoretical "L1-simplex paradox" – the mathematical reality that the L1 norm is constant on the simplex and fails to prune – by introducing a concave quadratic penalty. SCSB is model-agnostic and achieves up to 96% ensemble compression, yielding linear inference speedups and superior probability calibration (lowered Expected Calibration Error) while preserving or enhancing generalization accuracy.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Perceptions of aging well among older adults with heart failure: insights from a qualitative study

Background: Heart failure (HF) is a prevalent and often debilitating cardiovascular condition among older adults, frequently accompanied by multimorbidity, functional limitations, and the need to age in place. Traditional models of successful aging emphasize disease absence and preserved function, yet most individuals with HF live with ongoing symptoms and chronic health challenges. How older adults with HF define aging well, particularly across different socioeconomic contexts, remains underexplored. Objectives: To explore how older adults with HF conceptualize aging well and to identify perceived facilitators and barriers across more and less resourced New York City neighborhoods. Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 adults diagnosed with HF residing in Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods classified by 2019 United States Census data. Interviews were guided by Rowe and Kahn's model. Transcripts were analyzed using an inductive-deductive thematic approach and interpreted in alignment with the Healthy People 2030 framework. Results: Participants had a mean age of 69 years; 50% identified as Black and 50% were women. Despite functional limitations, 65% reported aging well. Five themes emerged: maintaining physical function, maintaining cognitive function, sustaining social relationships, avoiding pain, and promoting overall well-being. Avoiding pain and promoting well-being extended beyond traditional models. Neighborhood context shaped priorities, with financial stability emphasized in more affluent areas and social cohesion prioritized in less affluent communities. Conclusions: Older adults with HF frequently perceive themselves as aging well despite chronic illness, reframing successful aging beyond disease avoidance. These findings support a patient-centered, place-informed model of aging well with implications for healthcare delivery and policy.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Entropy: Learning from Token-Level Distributional Deviations for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606.19771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning; however, it faces a fundamental optimization instability: uniform token updates precipitate entropy collapse, leading to premature convergence to suboptimal strategies, whereas excessive Shannon Entropy maximization can cause entropy explosion, driving blind exploration toward incoherent reasoning chains. To resolve this dichotomy, we introduce the Independent Combinatorial Tokens (ICT) framework, which shifts the optimization focus from scalar uncertainty to the distributional properties of token logits. By leveraging the Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence between token logits distributions, ICT identifies tokens with distinctive distributional patterns as critical branching points for guiding effective exploration in LLM reasoning. Our theoretical analysis, grounded in both Shannon and second-order Rényi entropy, proves that selectively updating on these tokens regulates policy concentration: it reduces the overall distribution uncertainty measured by Shannon entropy, while controlling probability concentration captured by second-order Rényi entropy. This dual effect prevents over-concentrated token generation from weakening exploration and effectively stabilizes the training landscape. Empirical results demonstrate that updating only the top 10% of unique tokens on Qwen2.5 (0.5B/1.5B/7B) models yields an average pass@4 improvement of 4.58%, with a maximum gain of 14.9%, over GRPO, 20-Entropy, and STAPO baselines across seven benchmarks spanning math, commonsense, and Olympiad-level problems.