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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

EComAgentBench: Benchmarking Shopping Agents on Long-Horizon Tasks with Distributed Hidden Intent

Authors:
Zeyao Du↗Tong Li↗Haibo Zhang↗

As LLM-based shopping agents enter production, existing benchmarks fail to capture how a shopper's requirements arrive: stated implicitly in the query, recorded in a profile, or revealed only when the right question is asked. Benchmarks that expose full intent upfront and grade only the final choice can neither pose this long-horizon challenge nor explain which requirement an agent missed. To address this gap, we introduce EComAgentBench, a benchmark of 662 tasks grounded in real Amazon products and reviews. Each task scatters these requirements across a visible query, a tool-gated profile, and scripted clarification; an agent must uncover hidden intent, verify candidates against attributes and review evidence, and commit to a single product within 100 tool calls. Moreover, typed, source-tagged rubrics grade every task, attributing each failure to a requirement and its source. Construction is automated yet reliable, with every answer fixed in code before any text is generated and every sample validated. Our evaluation of seven models reveals that even the strongest attains only 57.1% overall accuracy, and rubric satisfaction degrades from visible to hidden sources. Overall, we believe EComAgentBench will serve as a reproducible foundation for moving shopping agents from single-query search toward dependable assistance over long horizons.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

EiCAP: Beyond Fluency, Probing and Improving Emotional Intelligence in LLMs via Psychologically Grounded Multi-Turn Dialogue

Authors:
Nizi Nazar↗Pardis Sadat Zahraei↗Dilek Hakkani-T\"ur↗Natasa Milic-Frayling↗Ehsaneddin Asgari↗

Large Language Models increasingly serve in emotionally sensitive roles, including mental health support, education, and crisis response, yet they lack a principled framework for assessing or improving Emotional Intelligence (EI). We introduce EiCAP, a unified, psychologically grounded six-layer EI taxonomy operationalized into two complementary resources. EiCAP-Bench is a multi-turn, one-vs-three forced-choice evaluation suite with 3,174 probes across 24 subcategories and cross-turn dependencies that reflect real conversational EI demands. EiCAP-SFT is a 152,820-dialogue supervision corpus aligned to the same taxonomy, enabling controlled, interpretable fine-tuning. Two key findings emerge. First, generic conversational supervised fine-tuning does not confer EI: fine-tuning on UltraChat yields no significant gain in any of the 24 subcategories, with a macro score of 24.6%, near the chance level of 25%. Second, applying EI-grounded LoRA, using approximately 0.8% of parameters, directly to Qwen-2.5-7B-Base achieves significant gains in all 24 subcategories, reaching a macro score of 75.33%, a gain of 51.7 percentage points over Base and 37.1 percentage points over Instruct. Crucially, an ablation shows that the UltraChat pre-stage is counterproductive, reducing performance by 21.4 percentage points: direct EI-grounded training is both necessary and sufficient.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Semantic search for 100M+ galaxy images using AI-generated captions

Authors:
Nolan Koblischke↗Liam Parker↗Francois Lanusse↗Jo Bovy↗Irina Espejo↗Shirley Ho↗

Finding scientifically interesting phenomena through slow manual labeling campaigns severely limits our ability to explore the billions of galaxy images produced by telescopes. In this work, we develop a pipeline to create a semantic search engine from completely unlabeled image data. Our method leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to generate descriptions for galaxy images, then contrastively aligns a pre-trained astronomy foundation model with these embedded descriptions to produce searchable embeddings at scale. We find that current VLMs provide descriptions that are sufficiently informative to train a semantic search model that outperforms direct image similarity search. Our model, AION-Search, achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on finding rare phenomena despite training on randomly selected images with no deliberate curation for rare cases. Furthermore, we introduce a VLM-based re-ranking method that nearly doubles the recall for our most challenging targets in the top-100 results. For the first time, AION-Search enables flexible semantic search for over 100 million galaxy images, enabling discovery from previously infeasible searches, including the identification of 36 new extragalactic stellar stream candidates. More broadly, our work provides an approach for making large, unlabeled scientific image archives semantically searchable, expanding data exploration capabilities in fields from Earth observation to microscopy. The code, data, and app are publicly available at https://github.com/NolanKoblischke/AION-Search

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Recovering Stranded Discrimination in Knowledge Tracing: Per-Item Bias Correction via Empirical-Bayes Shrinkage

Authors:
Xiaoran Yan↗Cheng Tang↗Atsushi Shimada↗

arXiv:2606.14123v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deployed knowledge-tracing models are typically frozen after training, yet systematic per-item logit bias arises, from limited per-item expressivity in backbone architectures and from post-deployment shifts in item properties, degrading prediction quality. Global post-hoc calibrators such as Platt scaling, temperature scaling, and isotonic regression improve probability estimates but leave discriminative ability, as measured by AUC, unchanged. This AUC invariance is a structural consequence of monotone score-only transforms; recovering the stranded discrimination requires conditioning on item identity. We propose SLC (State-space Logit Correction), which converts binary observations to Gaussian pseudo-observations via Laplace/IRLS, applies empirical-Bayes shrinkage through a Kalman smoother, and fits an offset-Platt link. The state-space formulation also yields a detectability bound that characterizes the Bernoulli information floor, explaining why temporal tracking provides no benefit at current data densities. Across four datasets, five backbones, and three seeds, SLC improves AUC on all four datasets and NLL on three, with the advantage concentrating on sparse items. Cross-domain controls suggest that the same phenomenon can arise beyond education when the deployed backbone leaves entity-level bias.

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

Fast LLM-Based Semantic Filtering: From a Unified Framework to an Adaptive Two-Phase Method

Authors:
Kyoungmin Kim↗Martin Catheland↗Anastasia Ailamaki↗

arXiv:2606.08090v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating a natural-language yes/no predicate over a document corpus under an accuracy target - the semantic filter - is a cornerstone of LLM-based data processing. Calling the LLM on every document (the oracle) is prohibitive, so cascades pair the oracle with a fast proxy. As deployed today, they leave four limitations on the table. (1) Each cascade family - model-free clustering, prebuilt small-LLM proxies, online-trained proxies - commits to a single representation and pipeline, and wins on only a narrow query regime. (2) The strongest online proxy invests in a custom training scheme on a bi-encoder over dense embeddings, missing the token-level evidence richer predicates require. (3) The proxy is trained against binary yes/no labels, wasting the LLM's per-document confidence at the boundary documents it most needs to learn. (4) Existing calibrations add a uniform safety margin, conflating genuine proxy uncertainty with small-sample noise and inflating cascade cost. We address these by (1) composing families adaptively - model-free clustering first, online proxy only when needed, with oracle calls shared across phases; (2) replacing the cosine bi-encoder with a hybrid of off-the-shelf token-aware models; (3) training the proxy with the oracle's per-document confidence as a soft label; and (4) a calibration that adds the safety margin only where the labeled sample is sparse. We are also the first to use the oracle's per-document confidence for three purposes: a query-level difficulty compass, a lower bound on the minimum oracle calls any proxy-based cascade can make, and the proxy's soft training label. At a 90% accuracy target on three 10K-document corpora, our methods are 1.6-2.0x faster than the best prior method per corpus and meet the target on 95% of queries; the BER-derived lower bound indicates a further ~4-20x of headroom for future work.

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06.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Ten simple rules for turning your qualifying exam into an NIH-style fellowship proposal: A guide for graduate students

Authors:
Courtney Peña-Lima↗

by Courtney Peña-Lima, Cameron S. Bader, Brendan K. Ball, Troy C. Dildine, Mekhala V. Dissanayake, Iris van ‘t Erve, Albina Ibrayeva, Amy Nippert, M.K. Quinn, Chelse Spinner, Samuel Thompson, Antonio Tomasso, Crystal M. Botham Qualifying exams, often referred to as “quals” or candidacy exams, are an important milestone in doctoral programs. Although the style of quals varies greatly by program and institution, it is usually a proposal that requires students to develop research ideas as well as their scientific writing skills. Many quals are modeled after funding mechanisms that graduate students can apply to and on a topic that the student will pursue in their dissertation. This paper offers graduate students a step-by-step guide on how to turn their quals into a fellowship-style research proposal, using National Institutes of Health (NIH) mechanisms as a benchmark, as this is the norm within US research institutions. This paper will be most useful for students who have completed or are in the process of completing proposal-based qualifying exams, usually in the second year of a doctoral program.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

A Survey on Deep Learning Architectures for Point Cloud Classification and Segmentation

Authors:
Minhas Kamal↗Hiranya Garbha Kumar↗Balakrishnan Prabhakaran↗

Point cloud stands as the most widely adopted format for representing 3D shapes and scenes due to its simplicity and geometric fidelity. However, its inherent unordered and irregular nature, exacerbated by sensor noise and occlusions, introduces unique challenges for machine learning based methodologies. To combat these issues, diverse strategies have been developed, including converting to a format that has orderliness, extracting local geometry, and permutation-invariant or self-attention-based processing. In this paper, our focus is directed towards deep learning models for three fundamental tasks in 3D vision: point cloud classification, part segmentation, and semantic segmentation. We begin by formally defining point cloud data, followed by an in-depth discussion on its structural characteristics. Then, we categorize notable works based on their backbone structure and evaluate their performance on popular benchmarks. Beyond empirical comparison, we offer insights into architectural innovations and limitations. We also outline open challenges and promising future directions for 3D point cloud understanding.

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08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

QC-GAN: A Parameter-Efficient Quaternion Conformer GAN for High-Fidelity Speech Enhancement

Authors:
Shogo Yamauchi↗Hideaki Tamori↗Makoto Sakai↗Yosuke Yamano↗Tohru Nitta↗

arXiv:2606.18611v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a parameter-efficient speech enhancement framework, Quaternion Conformer GAN (QC-GAN), which combines a Quaternion Conformer generator with MetricGAN-based training. The Hamilton product encodes the magnitude and phase via structured weight sharing, reducing the number of layer parameters while preserving their interdependencies. A metric-learning discriminator was employed to maximize perceptual quality by optimizing the approximate perceptual evaluation scores. On the VoiceBank+DEMAND dataset, QC-GAN achieved a Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) score of 3.48 with only 0.89M parameters, delivering a performance comparable to state-of-the-art models at less than half their size. A 35K-parameter variant achieved a PESQ score of 3.23, surpassing conventional methods with significantly fewer parameters. Evaluation on the DNS-Challenge 3 dataset further confirmed generalization to real-world conditions.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Offline Diffusion Policy for Multi-User Delay-Constrained Scheduling

Authors:
Zhuoran Li↗Ruishuo Chen↗Hai Zhong↗Longbo Huang↗

arXiv:2501.12942v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective multi-user delay-constrained scheduling is crucial in various real-world applications, including embodied AI, instant messaging, live streaming, and data center management, where efficient resource allocation is required among users with diverse delay sensitivities. In these scenarios, schedulers must make real-time decisions to satisfy both delay and resource constraints without prior knowledge of system dynamics, which are often time-varying and challenging to estimate. {Current learning-based methods typically require online interactions with actual systems during the training stage. Therefore, these approaches are often difficult or impractical, as they can significantly degrade system performance and incur substantial service costs.} To address these challenges, we propose a novel offline reinforcement learning-based algorithm, named \underline{S}cheduling By \underline{O}ffline Learning with \underline{C}ritic Guidance and \underline{D}iffusion Model (SOCD), to learn efficient scheduling policies purely from pre-collected offline data. SOCD innovatively employs a diffusion policy, complemented by a sampling-free critic network for policy guidance. By integrating the Lagrangian multiplier optimization into the offline reinforcement learning, SOCD efficiently trains high-quality constraint-aware policies exclusively from available datasets, eliminating the need for online interactions with the system. Experimental results demonstrate that SOCD is resilient to various system dynamics, including partially observable and large-scale environments, and delivers superior performance compared to existing methods.

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10.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Two-component exciton condensates in an electron–hole bilayer

Authors:
Ruishi Qi↗

Macroscopic quantum coherence emerges when bosons condense into a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC)1–5. Excitons are a long-sought solid-state route to high-temperature BECs with strong interactions, electrical tunability and potentially multicomponent spinor order, but conclusive evidence for equilibrium condensation has remained elusive. Here we report evidence for two-component exciton BECs in MoSe2/hBN/WSe2 electron–hole bilayers6–9 by probing the spin–valley susceptibility of constituent electrons and holes. This heterostructure hosts equilibrium exciton fluids with four spin–valley flavours. Magneto-optical spectroscopy in a dilution refrigerator reveals three exciton condensate phases with distinct flavour polarizations. At zero magnetic field, the many-body ground state is a coherent superposition of two condensed intravalley exciton flavours. Under a magnetic field, the intravalley exciton condensate first switches to a two-component intervalley condensate through a first-order quantum phase transition at a weak critical field and then turns into a fully polarized single-component condensate at high fields. The condensate signatures form a dome in density–temperature space, persisting up to approximately 1.8 K. Our results establish van der Waals electron–hole bilayers as a versatile platform for strongly interacting, multicomponent exciton BECs. Macroscopic quantum coherence arises in two-component exciton Bose–Einstein condensates within MoSe2/hBN/WSe2 electron–hole bilayers, exhibiting distinct spin–valley polarized phases, quantum phase transitions under magnetic fields and stable condensate behaviour up to approximately 1.8 K.

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

Ten Digits on a Train: AI-Assisted Verification of Two Eigenvalue Problems

Authors:
Matthew J. Colbrook↗

arXiv:2606.23821v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate numerical eigenvalues are often difficult to certify, especially in singular or non-normal settings. This article reports a human–AI collaboration on two such computations. For a singular self-adjoint Schrödinger operator, a verified zero count and Dirichlet–Neumann bracketing certify the complete negative spectrum to ten decimal places. For a delicate non-normal atom–molecule benchmark, a previously unresolved resonance pair is separated, with each member enclosed to ten digits. The second result is achieved not by increasing the precision of one-way shooting, but by reformulating the problem as a global matching system for projective solution lines. The infinite tail is encoded as uncertainty in the terminal projective data, and a componentwise, tail-robust Krawczyk–Brouwer inclusion supplies the certificate. This gives a reusable architecture for analytic boundary-value systems with ill-conditioned propagation and uncertain asymptotic data. The collaboration also exposes the strengths and limits of AI assistance. AI rapidly produced accurate candidates and plausible proof strategies, but several failed, including one apparently complete tail argument that omitted the componentwise check required by a nonuniform polydisc. Validated computation is a stringent test of AI-assisted mathematics: the output is not merely a number, but a number with a proof. These examples show why the proof object matters, and why human mathematical judgment remained decisive. More broadly, as AI makes code, exposition, and plausible numerical claims inexpensive, standards for verification, attribution, peer review, and training must adapt. The implications are unsettling; the opportunity is extraordinary.

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

PRISMR: Overcoming Parse Collapse in Multimodal Listwise Ranking via Parameterized Representation Internalization

Authors:
Hao Jiang↗Xin Li↗Annan Wang↗Zhi Yang↗Haoxiang Zhang↗Yichi Zhang↗Weisi Lin↗

arXiv:2606.12942v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative listwise ranking with Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) aims to capture global list context in a single forward pass, but its effectiveness degrades in long-context multimodal scenarios. We identify a recurring failure mode, parse collapse, where the autoregressive decoder produces fluent yet incomplete rankings by silently omitting candidates and terminating early. This failure stems from limited context utilization rather than simple formatting mistakes, making prompt engineering and constrained decoding insufficient. We propose PRISMR (Parameterized Representation Internalization for Semantic Multimodal Ranking), a framework that replaces transient in-context list processing with parametric structural conditioning. PRISMR uses a lightweight hypernetwork to encode multimodal candidates in parallel and generate item-specific LoRA weights, which are synthesized into an instance-specific adapter for a LMM. This paradigm enables more robust internalization of list structure while preserving the base model. We further introduce a large-scale multimodal review-ranking benchmark for evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that PRISMR substantially reduces parse collapse, improves listwise ranking performance, and transfers effectively across domains and instruction-tuned backbones.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LLM-Powered Multi-Agent System for Automated Crypto Portfolio Management

Authors:
Yichen Luo↗Yebo Feng↗Jiahua Xu↗Paolo Tasca↗Yang Liu↗

arXiv:2501.00826v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cryptocurrency portfolio management requires the fusion of heterogeneous multi-modal signals, including structured price and on-chain time series, unstructured news text, and technical indicators, under high-volatility and real-time constraints. While deep learning approaches show predictive capability, their opacity limits practical adoption, and single large language model (LLM) agents struggle to process the breadth of modality-specific inputs needed for robust decision-making. We propose a multi-agent system (MAS) framework in which three modality-specialised agents, a Crypto Agent for market dynamics, a News Agent for weekly news sentiment, and a Trading Agent for signal fusion and portfolio execution, decompose the task across three communication architectures: hierarchical, collaborative, and debate. We evaluate four capability configurations: zero-shot, chain-of-thought (CoT), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and skill-augmented. In a 52-week backtest over calendar year 2025 across the top 15 L1 blockchain native cryptocurrencies by market capitalisation as of January 2025, the best configuration, Hierarchical (Skill), achieves a cumulative return of 133.52% and a Sharpe ratio of 1.502, outperforming single-agent variants, passive benchmarks, and deep learning baselines. An ablation study identifies the Crypto Agent as the most critical component, with its removal reducing cumulative return by 42.57 percentage points. A cross-model comparison further shows that MAS outperforms the single-agent baseline under GPT-4o, GPT-5, and Claude Sonnet 4.5, suggesting that the benefit of multi-agent coordination is model-agnostic. Unlike black-box deep learning models, every portfolio decision is traceable to explicit agent reasoning, offering an interpretable and effective approach to multi-modal cryptocurrency portfolio management.

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14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Enteral docosahexaenoic and arachidonic acid supplementation and retinopathy of prematurity: a re-analysis of randomized controlled trials in preterm infants

Authors:
Sjoebom↗Pivodic↗Lundgren↗Moltu↗S. J↗Frost↗Robinson↗D. T↗Henriksen↗Hellstroem↗Nilsson↗A. K↗…

Background. A recent meta-analysis by Dang et al. [1] concluded that enteral supplementation with docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), with or without arachidonic acid (ARA) did not significantly affect retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) outcomes in preterm infants. Of four eligible trials that supplemented both DHA and ARA, only two contributed to each ROP outcome analyzed, and severe ROP was not assessed. Methods. We replicated the eligibility criteria and search strategy of Dang et al., restricted to trials that supplemented both DHA and ARA, and reanalyzed three ROP endpoints (any ROP, ROP requiring treatment, and severe ROP [stage 3 and/or treated]) using complete outcome records from all eligible trials. Crude risk ratios (RR) were pooled by Mantel-Haenszel fixed-effect meta-analysis. Gestational age-adjusted odds ratios (adjOR) were pooled on the log scale by inverse-variance random-effects meta-analysis with restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimation of between-study variance and Hartung-Knapp confidence intervals. Results. Five trials were included; one trial was identified in our replicated search but was excluded by Dang et al. without a stated rationale. The pooled estimate for any ROP was consistent with Dang et al. (RR 0.87 [95% CI 0.71-1.08]; adjOR 0.70 [0.46-1.08]). For ROP requiring treatment, the crude RR suggested a lower risk but did not reach statistical significance (RR 0.60 [0.35-1.04]), whereas the gestational age-adjusted estimate indicated lower odds (adjOR 0.47 [0.23-0.94]). For severe ROP, DHA+ARA supplementation produced a significant protective effect in both unadjusted and adjusted models (RR 0.56 [0.36-0.86]; adjOR 0.42 [0.19-0.96]). Conclusions. When all eligible trials contribute to each endpoint and severe ROP is included as an outcome, enteral DHA+ARA supplementation reduces severe ROP and is associated with lower odds of ROP requiring treatment after adjustment for gestational age. These findings differ from the conclusions of Dang et al. and support reconsideration of DHA+ARA supplementation as a strategy to reduce sight-threatening ROP in preterm infants.

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

The Perceived Fragility of Explanations in Audio Models: Manipulation of Attribution with Unchanged Predictions

Authors:
Piotr Kit{\l}owski↗Dominik Wi\k{a}cek↗Mateusz Modrzejewski↗

arXiv:2606.14466v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates the fragility of post-hoc explanation methods in audio deepfake detection. While previous work on explanation manipulation focused on images using standard $L_p$ metrics, we introduce a psychoacoustic framework that optimizes inaudible perturbations to decouple model attributions from final classifications. We evaluate this vulnerability across state-of-the-art architectures under strict prediction-preserving constraints. By evaluating the manipulation cost through domain-specific perceptual audio quality metrics alongside explanation alignment criteria, our framework demonstrates that an adversary can systematically distort automated explanation heatmaps while preserving the predicted deepfake label. Full code available at: https://github.com/cncPomper/Audio-XAI

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

HorusEye: Language as Dynamic Attention for Emergency Visual Analysis

Authors:
Armel Yara↗

We introduce HorusEye, Language as Dynamic Attention for Emergency Visual Analysis. Our investigation followed five stages. The first one is benchmarking RefCOCO-Degraded, a dataset of 15,244 images (3,811 base images x 4 conditions: Clean, Fog, Smoke and Thermal) with systematic visual degradation. Through four research questions, we evaluate multiple VLMs (Gemini, Qwen2-VL, BLIP-2, LLaVA, Kosmos-2) across visual grounding the second stage, language feedback recovery the third one, health VQA tasks the fourth, and hallucination analysis the final stage. Our key finding is that language feedback effectiveness is model-dependent: Gemini achieves +47.3% improvement in thermal conditions through iterative language feedback, while Qwen2-VL shows -5.1% degradation under the same protocol. We also identify the 'Thermal Paradox' where cropping strategies that improve RGB performance catastrophically fail in thermal imagery. Furthermore, BLIP-2 uniquely hallucinates more under degradation, making it unsuitable for emergency deployment

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17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Symmetric Cooperative Motion in Higher Dimensions

Authors:
Louigi Addario-Berry↗Gavin Barill↗Hannah Cairns↗Jessica Lin↗

arXiv:2606.13459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove a distributional convergence result for a multidimensional version of symmetric cooperative motion which was introduced and studied in one dimension in [HRW, SCM1]. Our approach relies on framing the associated recursive distributional equation as a discretization of the porous medium equation. A major challenge is to analyze the behaviour of finite difference schemes which approximate weak solutions of the porous medium equation with unbounded initial data. In overcoming this difficulty, we perform a detailed analysis of the probability mass function of symmetric cooperative motion, in which we introduce several new comparison arguments for the discrete process. Consequently, along the way, we establish a novel multidimensional convergence result for a finite difference scheme approximating the ZKB/Barenblatt solution of the porous medium equation, which is of independent interest.

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18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Cardiac rhythm development: A wearable device index of risk for physical and mental illness in adolescence

Authors:
Giampetruzzi↗Kircanski↗Pine↗D. S↗Gotlib↗I. H↗

Objective. The autonomic nervous system, which regulates cardiac rhythm, undergoes pronounced maturation across adolescence. How cardiac rhythm develops over this period, however, and whether individual differences in its development forecast mental and physical illness, remain open questions. We used three waves of Fitbit data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study to characterize the developmental trajectory of the cardiac rhythm and to test whether variation in that trajectory predicts onset of psychopathology and cardiometabolic disease. Methods. 8,301 adolescents contributed 242,811 valid Fitbit wear days across Waves 2 (Mage=12), 4 (Mage=14), and 6 (Mage=16). Cosinor mixed-effects models yielded three rhythm parameters per session: mesor (24-hour mean), amplitude (diurnal swing), and acrophase (peak timing). We first characterized age- and sex-specific trajectories, cross-wave stability, and factors shaping the rhythm. We then used parallel-process latent growth models to test whether within-person changes in rhythm tracked symptom trajectories, and hierarchical logistic models to test whether rhythm parameters predicted the first clinical onset of psychopathology and of obesity and hypertension. Results. The cardiac rhythm changed substantially across adolescence: mesor decreased, amplitude flattened, and acrophase shifted later. Within-person change in the rhythm tracked change in blood pressure, BMI, and trajectories of depression and ADHD symptoms. Higher mesor predicted incident onset of all five outcomes controlling for demographics, baseline symptoms, and behavior (ORs 1.36-1.54); amplitude, acrophase, and rhythm instability conferred additional risk. Conclusions. The 24-hour cardiac rhythm is a passively measurable substrate of adolescent autonomic development that indexes transdiagnostic risk for psychiatric and cardiometabolic illness.

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

Kalman Linear Attention: Parallel Bayesian Filtering For Efficient Language Modelling and State Tracking

Authors:
Vaisakh Shaj↗Cameron Barker↗Aidan Scannell↗Andras Szecsenyi↗Elliot J. Crowley↗Amos Storkey↗

arXiv:2602.10743v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: State-space language models such as Mamba and gated linear attention (GLA) offer linear-complexity, parallelisable alternatives to transformers, but their linear state updates limit expressivity and robust state tracking. We close this gap from a probabilistic angle, casting sequence mixing as exact Bayesian filtering with the Kalman filter as the core primitive. Classical Kalman filters give principled state and uncertainty estimates but are viewed as inherently sequential; we show that reparameterising them in information form turns their updates into an associative scan - so the per-token recurrent update is non-linear (a Möbius/precision recursion) yet remains temporally parallel. The resulting Kalman Linear Attention (KLA) layer is a drop-in sequence mixer that performs time-parallel probabilistic inference, carries an explicit belief-state uncertainty, and is strictly more expressive than GLA-style linear updates at the same computational cost. This expressivity translates directly into stronger state tracking: KLA solves permutation-composition ($A_5$) tasks that linear SSMs and attention cannot, while staying scan-parallel. As a drop-in primitive it also matches or improves on modern SSMs and GLAs across synthetic token-manipulation and zero-shot commonsense benchmarks, and is among the first stacked Bayesian-filtering primitives trained at the billion-token scale.

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

How to Detect and Measure the AI Dangers to Democracy

Authors:
Giulia Sandri↗Claudio Novelli↗

arXiv:2606.16054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Research on artificial intelligence and democracy has grown quickly over the last decade. A shared conclusion in this literature is that AI does not create new democratic problems so much as it makes old ones worse. We now see this across information ecosystems, in elections, and in public administration. However, despite growing evidence, we lack a clear way to prioritize risks in this area, compare them across domains, and identify where democratic control is most likely to break down. So, our problem is: How can we systematize the problems that AI systems pose to democratic processes? This paper argues that principal agent theory may fit the task. In many phases of democratic systems, principals delegate key functions to AI systems and their providers without really being able to monitor how these systems operate or the outputs they produce. Treating AI as a delegation problem helps identify accountability gaps and other governance failures. Most importantly, as we shall illustrate, it provides metrics for empirical assessments of AI impact on democracy. As a second analytical element, we draw on the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and its seven characteristics of trustworthy AI, which supply substantive criteria for evaluating delegated tasks. Operationalized across the three domains through measurable indicators and domain specific trustworthiness criteria, we propose an analytical framework that centers on institutional assessability as the central condition for democratic control over AI. However, we stress that how severe a harm is, and how much risk is acceptable, are evaluative judgments that current methodologies neither acknowledge nor operationalize. This becomes acute when such evaluative judgments are (silently) delegated to private vendors. We identify this as a strong limitation left for future work.

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

Counterfactual Optimization of Baseball Pitch Sequences and Estimation of Its Impact on Season-Level Statistics

Authors:
Ryota Takamido↗Hiroki Nakamoto↗

arXiv:2606.17345v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although pitch sequencing is a central topic in baseball analytics, previous studies have primarily focused on optimizing the final pitch within a single plate appearance, leaving the role of preceding setup pitches and their impact on long-term season-level performance insufficiently examined. To address these issues, this study conducted counterfactual analyses using MLB Statcast data. A Transformer-based machine-learning model was trained to predict whether a target pitch would result in an in-play outcome or swing-out. Counterfactual pitch sequences were then generated by replacing either the final pitch or the preceding setup pitch with alternative pitch types and locations while keeping the surrounding contextual information fixed. Optimal counterfactual selections were defined as those that minimized the predicted in-play probability, and their expected effects on pitchers' seasonal statistics were estimated using regression models linking model outputs to season statistics. The results suggest that the optimization of both final and setup pitches may substantially influence season-level performance, including improvements of more than 1.0 in K/9. The analyses also provided several practical insights, including velocity-band-specific effective locations, the importance of pitch commands, and the expansion of pitch-selection options through middle-velocity pitches. These findings quantitatively support the strategic importance of pitch sequencing in baseball.

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23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices Regarding Maternal Nutrition Counselling Among Frontline Health Workers in Udupi, Karnataka, India: A Sequential Explanatory Mixed-Methods Study

Authors:
Amrutha↗M. S↗Rao↗C. R↗Hebbar↗Vennila↗Maiya↗G. A↗Bhat↗Kotebagilu↗N. P↗Bhagavath↗…

Background Indias maternal nutrition profile is undergoing a dual-direction shift, with persistent undernutrition coexisting alongside rising overweight and micronutrient deficiencies. Despite national efforts through Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) and the National Health Mission (NHM), maternal dietary diversity remains suboptimal in India. Frontline health workers (FLWs) play a central role in delivering nutrition counselling; however, gaps remain between knowledge and its translation into practice, highlighting the need to strengthen training, applied competencies, and health system support within primary care settings. Objective To assess knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) regarding maternal nutrition counselling among FLWs and to explore contextual factors influencing counselling delivery. Methods A sequential explanatory mixed-methods study was conducted in Udupi, Karnataka, India. In phase one, 46 FLWs- Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA), Community Health Officers (CHO), and Primary Health Care Officers (PHCO) completed a validated Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices (KAP) questionnaire. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Kruskal-Wallis test, Spearman correlation, and exploratory multiple linear regression. In phase two, one focus group discussion with 21 participants was conducted and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results FLWs demonstrated moderate KAP scores (37.50 {+/-} 5.09), with lower scores observed in dietary diversity knowledge and counselling practices. CHOs and PHCOs had significantly higher knowledge (p < 0.001) and practice scores (p = 0.002) compared to ASHAs, while attitudes were similar across cadres. Knowledge was positively associated with practice ({rho} = 0.389, p = 0.008). Exploratory regression indicated that cadre and knowledge were associated with practice, while attitude was not statistically significant. Qualitative findings suggested that counselling was largely protocol-based and constrained by workload, limited counselling tools, economic barriers, and cultural food practices. Conclusion Despite positive attitudes towards maternal nutrition counselling, frontline health workers demonstrated gaps in knowledge and counselling practices. Mixed-methods findings suggest that counselling delivery is shaped by both provider competencies and health-system constraints, highlighting the need for implementation-focused strategies to strengthen maternal nutrition counselling in routine antenatal care.

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

Thinking in Boxes: 3D Editing in Real Images Made Easy

Authors:
Pradhaan S Bhat↗Naveen Chandra R↗Rishubh Parihar↗Vaibhav Vavilala↗R. Venkatesh Babu↗D. A. Forsyth↗Anand Bhattad↗

Text and 2D-conditioning interfaces provide weak, ambiguous control over spatial transformations in image editing – particularly under large object motions and camera changes. Prior work has used 3D primitives such as boxes, but only as loose conditioning signals indicating approximate object location rather than specifying the transformation. We instead use 3D boxes as structured specifications: the user provides the input and output boxes of the edit, casting editing as a well-posed geometry problem. This ``thinking in boxes'' interface, where each box face is color-coded to convey 3D orientation, gives precise control over translation, rotation, scaling, and viewpoint changes in real images while preserving scene and object identity, and recovering previously unseen object regions. To ground transformations in scene appearance, we introduce a depth-aligned planar floor as a global reference frame, shaded with depth-aware cues. Conditioned on this structure, an image generator produces consistent results under large transformations. Trained in two stages – on synthetic multi-object scenes and a small set of real-world videos from Objectron – the system generalizes to complex, in-the-wild real images. Our method operates directly on real photographs and substantially outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods on large 3D edits.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Decoding the Multimodal Maze: A Systematic Review on the Adoption of Explainability in Multimodal Attention-based Models

Authors:
Md Raisul Kibria↗S\'ebastien Lafond↗Janan Arslan↗

arXiv:2508.04427v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal learning has witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, particularly with the integration of attention-based models, leading to significant performance gains across a variety of tasks. Parallel to this progress, the demand for explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has spurred a growing body of research aimed at interpreting the complex decision-making processes of these models. This systematic literature review analyzes research published between January 2020 and early 2024 that focuses on the explainability of multimodal models. Framed within the broader goals of XAI, we examine the literature across multiple dimensions, including model architecture, modalities involved, explanation algorithms and evaluation methodologies. Our analysis reveals that most studies are concentrated on vision-language and language-only models, with attention-based techniques being the most commonly employed for explanation. However, these methods often fall short in capturing the full spectrum of interactions between modalities, a challenge further compounded by the architectural heterogeneity across domains. Importantly, we find that evaluation methods for XAI in multimodal settings are largely non-systematic, lacking consistency, robustness, and consideration for modality-specific cognitive and contextual factors. To address these gaps, we not only synthesize findings from the surveyed works but also incorporate a complementary analysis that integrates recent and emerging advances driving multimodal explainability. Based on these insights, we provide a comprehensive set of recommendations aimed at promoting rigorous, transparent, and standardized evaluation and reporting practices in multimodal XAI research. Our goal is to support future research in more interpretable, accountable, and responsible multimodal AI systems, with explainability at their core.

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