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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Multi-entropy in heavy local quenches

arXiv:2606.12526v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the time evolution of tripartite entanglement in heavy local quenches in two-dimensional holographic conformal field theories. Our diagnostic is the genuine multi-entropy of adjacent intervals, computed from both bulk and boundary perspectives. A perturbative bulk analysis shows that the first-order small-mass perturbation around the vacuum geodesic network cancels identically at any time after the quench. In the fully back-reacted geometry, a vacuum-subtracted genuine multi-entropy arises from a mismatch between the winding selected by the trivalent geodesic network and the windings selected independently by the pairwise geodesics. In the sharp quench limit, the time dependence of genuine multi-entropy is kinematically fixed to logarithms of rational functions of time and is independent of the heavy operator dimension. The CFT calculation reproduces the same formula within the heavy-light vacuum block approximation, where the branch choice in the heavy-background uniformization map corresponds to the winding selection in the bulk. These results indicate that, in this setup, the genuine multi-entropy is controlled by global saddle selection, rather than by a local energy response or quasiparticle propagation.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Preferences of a Voice-First Nation: Large-Scale Pairwise Evaluation and Preference Analysis for TTS in Indian Languages

Crowdsourced pairwise evaluation has emerged as a scalable approach for assessing foundation models. However, applying it to Text to Speech(TTS) introduces high variance due to linguistic diversity and multidimensional nature of speech perception. We present a controlled multidimensional pairwise evaluation framework for multilingual TTS that combines linguistic control with perceptually grounded annotation. Using 5K+ native and code-mixed sentences across 10 Indic languages, we evaluate 7 state-of-the-art TTS systems and collect over 120K pairwise comparisons from over 1900 native raters. In addition to overall preference, raters provide judgments across 6 perceptual dimensions: intelligibility, expressiveness, voice quality, liveliness, noise, and hallucinations. Using Bradley-Terry modeling, we construct a multilingual leaderboard, interpret human preference using SHAP analysis and analyze leaderboard reliability alongside model strengths and trade-offs across perceptual dimensions.

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

KeepLoRA++: Continual Learning with Layer-Scaled Residual Gradient Adaptation

Continual learning for pre-trained vision-language models requires balancing three competing objectives: retaining pre-trained knowledge, preserving knowledge from a sequence of learned tasks, and maintaining the plasticity to acquire new knowledge. This paper presents KeepLoRA++, balancing these objectives through a unified dual-dimensional knowledge retention mechanism. We analyze knowledge distribution of Transformer architecture from both inter-layer and intra-layer perspectives. The inter-layer perspective examines how retention is distributed across layers, while the intra-layer perspective focuses on the parameter space within each layer. Our analysis reveals a structural property: general transferable knowledge is mainly encoded in the shallow layers and the principal subspace of the parameters, while task-specific adaptations are localized in the deep layers and the residual subspace. Motivated by this insight, KeepLoRA++ introduces a layer-scaled residual gradient adaptation method. New tasks are learned by restricting LoRA parameter updates to the residual subspace, combined with a shallow-to-deep layer scaling, to prevent interference with previously acquired capabilities. Specifically, the gradient of a new task is projected onto a subspace orthogonal to both the principal subspace of the pre-trained model and the dominant directions of previous task features, while simultaneously assigning smaller update magnitudes to shallow layers and larger ones to deeper layers. Our theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations confirm that KeepLoRA++ successfully balances these three competing objectives, consistently outperforming representative baselines across image classification, visual question answering, and video understanding tasks.

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

CausalDrive: Real-time Causal World Models for Autonomous Driving

World models have emerged as a promising paradigm for scaling autonomous driving (AD) data, yet existing video generative models fall short as interactive simulators. Layout-conditioned renderers rely on "oracle" future trajectories of all background agents, rendering them strictly non-reactive. Conversely, pure action-conditioned predictors lack semantic control over complex interactions and suffer from prohibitive diffusion latencies, hindering closed-loop policy learning. To bridge this gap, we present CausalDrive, a controllable, real-time foundation driving world renderer. CausalDrive operates solely on the initial front-view frame, the ego-vehicle's trajectory, and a macroscopic text prompt. By excluding future NPC layouts, we compel the model to intrinsically predict causal interactions, enabling text-driven control over Driving Sociology, allowing users to dynamically orchestrate diverse counterfactual reactions to identical ego-actions. To overcome the efficiency bottleneck and address the covariate shift in autoregressive generation, we propose a novel Context-Forced DMD architecture. This combines continuous flow-matching with a self-correcting distillation objective, achieving interactive speeds of 12 FPS. This breakthrough transforms the passive video generator into a playable neural simulator. We demonstrate its versatility across three downstream applications: (1) generative closed-loop evaluation with significantly mitigated collision artifacts, (2) large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) post-training driven by a Video2Reward module, and (3) real-time human-in-the-loop simulation. Extensive experiments validate that policies trained within CausalDrive's reactive scenarios exhibit superior interaction capabilities in the real world.

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

Beyond the Smile: A Hybrid Convolutional VAE for Crypto Volatility Surfaces

arXiv:2606.16961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a convolutional variational autoencoder for cryptocurrency implied-volatility surfaces, together with a deployable predictor that combines it with a quadratic smile re-fit through a deterministic per-tenor routing rule. Trained on 6,034 fully-filled hourly Binance Options surfaces of BTC and ETH spanning May-October 2023 and parameterised on a common $6 \times 7$ tenor-delta grid, the model attains a hidden-cell surface-completion RMSE in the 0.94-1.56 vol-point range across both markets and mask rates 10-50%. The hybrid predictor attains 0.83 vol points at 50% masking against 7.00 for the smile re-fit alone, an eightfold reduction obtained at no additional inference cost. Under structurally-correlated hole patterns that emulate the withdrawal of an entire tenor of strikes, the smile re-fit incurs 9.6-13.1 vol points of error while the learned model remains at 1.5-1.9, isolating a regime in which the generative model is the only viable predictor. Joint training on BTC and ETH improves the in-distribution model on both markets by 9-27% relative to the better-performing single-symbol counterpart, indicating a substantially shared vol-surface manifold across the two largest cryptocurrencies over the observation window. The hybrid is calendar- and butterfly-arbitrage-free at the listed strikes, a property that the parametric smile re-fit alone fails at high mask rates. The per-snapshot reconstruction error of the trained model flags the late-October ETF-anticipation rally and the August $17$, $2023$ flash crash as elevated-error periods without supervision. All training and evaluation infrastructure is released to support reproducible follow-on work.

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

ScaffoldAgent: Utility-Guided Dynamic Outline Optimization for Open-Ended Deep Research

arXiv:2606.20122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended deep research (OEDR) requires systems to acquire knowledge through multi-round retrieval and generate coherent long-form reports. The outline plays a central role as a structural scaffold that coordinates retrieval, evidence organization, and generation. However, existing methods either fix the outline before writing or refine it with local heuristics, leading to scaffold drift under continuous information accumulation and delayed feedback for evaluating outline modifications. We propose ScaffoldAgent, a utility-guided dynamic outline optimization framework for OEDR. ScaffoldAgent models outline evolution as a structured decision process with three operations: Expansion, Contraction, and Revision, enabling controlled updates to the report scaffold. It further introduces a utility-guided feedback mechanism that estimates the downstream value of each outline operation from retrieval gain, structural coherence, and trial-generation quality. The resulting utility signal guides node selection, operation scheduling, and termination during inference. Experiments on DeepResearch Bench and DeepResearch Gym show that ScaffoldAgent consistently improves long-form report generation and factual grounding over existing deep research agents.

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

WebSP-Eval: Evaluating Web Agents on Website Security and Privacy Tasks

arXiv:2604.06367v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Web agents automate browser tasks, ranging from simple form completion to complex workflows like ordering groceries. While current benchmarks evaluate general-purpose performance~(e.g., WebArena) or safety against malicious actions~(e.g., SafeArena), no existing framework assesses an agent's ability to successfully execute user-facing website security and privacy tasks, such as managing cookie preferences, configuring privacy-sensitive account settings, or revoking inactive sessions. To address this gap, we introduce WebSP-Eval, an evaluation framework for measuring web agent performance on website security and privacy tasks. WebSP-Eval comprises 1) a manually crafted task dataset of 200 task instances across 28 websites; 2) a robust agentic system supporting account and initial state management across runs using a custom Google Chrome extension; and 3) an automated evaluator. We evaluate a total of 8 web agent instantiations using state-of-the-art multimodal large language models, conducting a fine-grained analysis across websites, task categories, and UI elements. Our evaluation reveals that current models suffer from limited autonomous exploration capabilities to reliably solve website security and privacy tasks, and struggle with specific task categories and websites. Crucially, we identify stateful UI elements are a primary reason for agent failure, with toggles causing more than 45% task failure across many models.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Multi-view feature High-order Fusion for Space Weak Object Detection and Segmentation

Weak objects are common in images and videos of space applications. However, it is hard to learn proper representations from their limited appearance information. Inspired by multi-view learning, we develop simple multi-view attentions, treating their outputs as multi-view features. We also propose a multi-view feature high-order fusion method (MHF) to aggregate more accurate and richer features of weak objects. Our MHF extends the commonly used low-order feature fusion method to higher orders. It enhances the model's capacity to capture relevant and complementary information about weak objects. This is achieved by introducing high-order multi-view features perception and a recursive task-contribution gated selection of multi-view features. The new operation is highly flexible and customizable. It is compatible with various variants of multi-view feature representations. We conduct extensive experiments on two newly constructed space science datasets and an open, large-scale satellite video dataset. Our MHF serves as a plug-and-play module and significantly improves various vision transformers and convolution-based detection and segmentation models. We achieve all state-of-the-art accuracies on both tasks across three datasets. Our MHF can be a new basic module for visual modeling that effectively represents weak objects in terms of multi-view learning. The code will be available at https://github.com/Kingdroper/MHF.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Primary care practitioners preconception health literacy and information-seeking: A cross-sectional survey.

Background Parental health before pregnancy influences maternal and child outcomes. Primary care professionals, including general practitioners [GPs], midwives, and naturopaths, can provide preconception care, yet many report limited knowledge and difficulty accessing relevant information. This study described Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths preconception health literacy, including knowledge and ability to access information. Methods Between July and September 2022, Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths completed a 32-item online cross-sectional survey. Participants were recruited through professional associations, and data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics Results Participants (N=373) included naturopaths (40.7%), GPs (32.4%), and midwives (26.8%). Reported barriers to clinician health literacy including lack of preconception care resources (25.5%), and limited clinician knowledge (23.6%). The proportion identifying limited clinician knowledge differed significantly between professions (GP: 31.4%; midwives: 23.0%; naturopaths: 17.8%; p=0.030). The highest level of accurate knowledge regarding preconception exposures was for pre-pregnancy obesity (82.7%), while low birth weight was the most accurately identified preconception outcomes (83.7%). Incorrect responses were most common for maternal multivitamin use as an exposure (28.3%) and childhood leukaemia as an outcome (26.3%). Differences between professions were strongest for infant outcomes, with moderate associations observed for shoulder dystocia (V=.2355), precipitous labour (V=.2173), macrosomia (V=.2060), labour dystocia (V=.2018) and cryptorchidism (V=.2018). Discussion Preconception health literacy varies across primary care professions. Clinicians require greater access to targeted resources and education tailored to their differing scopes of practice and experience. Improving clinician preconception health literacy may strengthen consistent evidence-based care and support better maternal, child, and long-term family health outcomes.

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

Weighted Bayesian Conformal Prediction

arXiv:2604.06464v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conformal prediction provides distribution-free prediction intervals with finite-sample coverage guarantees, and recent work by Snell \& Griffiths reframes it as Bayesian Quadrature (BQ-CP), yielding powerful data-conditional guarantees via Dirichlet posteriors over thresholds. However, BQ-CP fundamentally requires the i.i.d. assumption. Meanwhile, weighted conformal prediction handles distribution shift via importance weights but remains frequentist, producing only point-estimate thresholds. We propose Weighted Bayesian Conformal Prediction (WBCP), which generalizes BQ-CP to arbitrary importance-weighted settings by replacing the uniform Dirichlet $\Dir(1,\ldots,1)$ with a weighted Dirichlet $\Dir(\neff \cdot \tilde{w}_1, \ldots, \neff \cdot \tilde{w}_n)$, where $\neff$ is Kish's effective sample size. We prove four theoretical results: (1)~$\neff$ is the unique concentration parameter matching frequentist and Bayesian variances; (2)~posterior standard deviation decays as $O(1/\sqrt{\neff})$; (3)~BQ-CP's stochastic dominance guarantee extends to per-weight-profile data-conditional guarantees; (4)~the HPD threshold provides $O(1/\sqrt{\neff})$ improvement in conditional coverage. We instantiate WBCP for spatial prediction as Geographical BQ-CP, where kernel-based spatial weights yield per-location posteriors with interpretable diagnostics. Experiments on synthetic and real-world spatial datasets demonstrate that WBCP maintains coverage guarantees while providing substantially richer uncertainty information.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Development of a Novel Risk Prediction Model for Rheumatoid Arthritis-Associated Interstitial Lung Disease (RA-ILD): A Longitudinal Study

Background: Interstitial lung disease (ILD) is one of the most common and potentially most devastating extra-articular complication of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and is associated with substantial morbidity and mortality. However, reliable tools for the early identification of ILD in patients with RA remain limited. This study aimed to identify plasma protein biomarkers of RA-ILD and develop an interpretable machine learning model for risk prediction using data from the UK Biobank. Methods: We first evaluated the association between baseline RA and the risk of incident ILD in the UK Biobank using Cox proportional hazards models. Mendelian randomization analysis was then performed to investigate the potential causal relationship between RA and ILD. Finally, we analyzed 2,920 plasma proteins measured using the Olink platform in 781 eligible RA patients. Proteins associated with ILD risk were identified using Cox proportional hazards models and subsequently used to construct eight machine learning models. Model performance was assessed using the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) and decision curve analysis. The best-performing model was further interpreted using Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) to evaluate feature importance. Results: Compared with participants without RA, Patients with baseline RA had a significantly higher risk of developing ILD (Hazard ratio: 4.425, 95% CI: 3.549,5.518). The MR supported a potential causal association between RA and ILD (Odds ratio: 1.227, 95% CI: 1.121,1.343). Among the eight machine learning models, the CatBoost model showed the best performance, achieving an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.884 (95% CI: 0.773,0.996). The SHAP analysis identified LAG3, NPC2, and LAMP3 are the three most important plasma protein predictors of ILD development in patients with RA. Conclusion: Plasma proteomics combined with machine learning may provide a promising approach for identifying biomarkers and predicting ILD risk in patients with RA. LAG3, NPC2, and LAMP3 may serve as candidate biomarkers for RA-ILD and warrant further validation. Keywords: Rheumatoid arthritis, Interstitial lung disease, Mendelian randomization, Machine learning, Plasma proteins.

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

CogGen: Cognitive-Load-Inspired Fully Unsupervised Deep Generative Modeling for Compressively Sampled MRI Reconstruction

arXiv:2603.04438v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fully unsupervised deep generative modeling (FU-DGM) offers significant potential for compressively sampled magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) reconstruction. Representative FU-DGM formulations, such as deep image prior (DIP) and implicit neural representation (INR), employ architectural bias to induce a low-dimensional manifold in the image space that aligns with the forward observation. However, as the underlying inverse system is highly ill-posed, prolonged iterative fitting in FU-DGM typically leads to poor efficiency and noise amplification. In this paper, guided by the cognitive principle of easy-to-hard learning, we propose CogGen, an FU-DGM framework that reformulates CS-MRI reconstruction as a staged inversion problem. Specifically, CogGen implements an self-paced curriculum learning (SPCL)-driven progressive scheduling strategy through an MRI-aware dual-threshold weighting criterion, which adaptively regulates k-space measurement participation. The data-consistency residual thresholding evaluates the fitting reliability of the current generator, while the k-space radius thresholding controls stage-wise measurement exposure, thereby avoiding uniform fitting throughout optimization. Theoretically, our analysis shows that, when early stages favor easy-to-fit measurements, CogGen yields a reduced local sufficient-iteration bound and a smaller cumulative noise-amplification bound, explaining the improved convergence behavior and reconstruction fidelity of CogGen within a finite iteration budget. Numerical experiments demonstrate that both CogGen instantiations, CogGen-DIP and CogGen-INR, achieve superior performance over prevailing CS-MRI reconstruction techniques, including unsupervised and supervised pipelines.

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

If These Walls Could Talk: Critical Play with Large Language Models in Museums

arXiv:2606.15565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in museums to as role playing chatbots which let visitors talk to simulated versions of people and artefacts from the past. While such installations can be playful and engaging, they are also problematic because LLMs cannot be trusted to speak truthfully. I identify a fundamental dilemma for the use of LLMs in museum chatbots: LLMs cannot be trusted to tell the truth, and efforts to make them more reliable may ruin that which is attractive about the bots in the first place - their ability to engage in life-like conversation. In response, I propose designing for critical play with LLM-based bots: Designing for playful interactions with bots that are unreliable but still able to represent the past in an adequate and engaging manner - as fictional characters representing historical narratives, styles of discourse, diverse perspectives, humor and satire.

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

HMR-Net: Hierarchical Modular Routing for Cross-Domain Object Detection in Aerial Images

Despite advances in object detection, aerial imagery remains a challenging domain, as models often fail to generalize across variations in spatial resolution, scene composition, and semantic label coverage. Differences in geographic context, sensor characteristics, and object distributions across datasets limit the capacity of conventional models to learn consistent and transferable representations. Shared methods trained on such data tend to impose a unified representation across fundamentally different domains, resulting in poor performance on region-specific content and less flexibility when dealing with novel object categories. To address this, we propose a novel modular learning framework that enables structured specialization in aerial detection. Our method introduces a hierarchical routing mechanism with two levels of modularity: a domain routing layer that uses latent geographic embeddings to assign inputs to domain-specialized expert modules, and a scene routing mechanism that allocates image subregions to scene-specific expert modules. This allows our method to specialize across datasets and within complex scenes. Additionally, the framework contains a conditional expert module that uses external semantic information (e.g., category names or textual descriptions) to enable detection of novel object categories during inference, without the need for retraining or fine-tuning. By moving beyond monolithic representations, our method provides an adaptive framework for remote sensing object detection. Comprehensive evaluations on four datasets highlight improvements in multi-dataset generalization, region-level specialization, and open-category detection.

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

SpatialAvatar-0: High-Quality 4D Head Avatar with Multi-Stage Reconstruction

High-quality 4D head avatars from one or a few source portraits are central to telepresence, AR/VR, and digital-human interaction. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as the dominant representation, with two complementary regimes (generalizable feed-forward predictors and per-subject refiners) maturing in parallel. However, existing feed-forward predictors are trained on a single dataset family with a hard-coded source count, inheriting the corresponding domain bias. Per-subject refiners require 300K–600K iterations and rely on adaptive densification that destroys upstream Gaussian layouts, preventing the two regimes from sharing a representation end-to-end. To bridge both regimes we propose SpatialAvatar-0 on a shared FLAME-mesh-bound Gaussian representation: a feed-forward generator with a parameter-free K-source mean-pool and a monocular-temporal to multi-view-spatial two-phase schedule that anchors against identity-prior collapse onto the smaller multi-view set. We further introduce a 10K-iter layout-preserving per-subject refinement loop that freezes the FLAME-binding and Gaussian count and replaces densification with a three-component anti-spike regularization. On VFHQ/HDTF cross-domain zero-shot we surpass the in-domain leader GAGAvatar by +1.5 dB PSNR despite never training on either test domain, and on the SplattingAvatar monocular benchmark we lead every reported metric, surpassing the 300K-iter GeoAvatar by +1.3 dB PSNR at up to 60x shorter per-subject schedule than common SOTA baselines. Website: https://spatialwalk.github.io/SpatialAvatar-0.

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

LineageMark: Multi-user White-box Watermarking for Contribution Tracing in Model Derivation Chains

arXiv:2606.17123v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In open large language model (LLM) ecosystems, models are frequently adapted across multiple domains and applications, forming multi-stage derivation chains. Consequently, tracking and verifying historical contributions is essential for model provenance and intellectual property protection. However, existing watermarking methods are mainly designed for single-user, one-time embeddings, often fail under repeated model derivation and incremental updates. To address this problem, we propose LineageMark, a multi-user white-box watermarking framework for model derivation chains. The framework encodes watermarks in model parameters using a projection-based approach. Stable carriers are first selected to reduce sensitivity to model changes, each watermark bit is then represented as a projection statistic over these carriers. Additional watermark insertions introduce only bounded perturbations in the projection space, and margin constraints are used to maintain signal integrity. We evaluate the effectiveness of LineageMark in multi-stage model derivation chains. Experimental results show that LineageMark preserves contributor watermarks across multi-stage derivation and supports incremental multi-user watermark insertion. Furthermore, it exhibits robustness against perturbations such as re-watermarking, fine-tuning, quantization, and pruning.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

MathVis-Fine: Aligning Visual Supervision with Necessity via Progressive Dependency-Guided Training for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.17888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has extended from purely linguistic domains to multimodal scenarios; however, existing approaches often treat visual inputs as homogeneous or auxiliary signals, failing to capture the intricate and sample-specific dependencies between text and images in mathematical problem-solving. This gives rise to two core issues: first, the supervisory signals for visual content are generalized and coarse-grained, lacking adaptation to the actual necessity of visual information in each sample; second, training feedback becomes inaccurate when visual rewards are uniformly applied without distinguishing the complementary relationships among inputs. These limitations hinder models from achieving precise multimodal reasoning. In this work, we propose a framework for modeling fine-grained visual dependencies in mathematical reasoning. We first construct the MathVis-Fine dataset, augmenting fine-grained visual annotations with visual dependency ratings. Building upon this dataset, we introduce a two-stage progressive visual enhancement training paradigm that balances answer correctness rewards and visual grounding rewards according to the intrinsic visual dependency level of each sample, thereby mitigating reward bias and improving supervision accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the MathVis-Fine framework effectively enhances visual perception progressively based on visual dependency, offering a more precise training framework for multimodal mathematical reasoning. We will release the dataset upon acceptance.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Rumination as a cognitive vulnerability factor in perinatal bereavement: evidence from the CARING study

Purpose. Perinatal loss is associated with a high risk of persistent psychological distress, including prolonged grief, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress symptoms. Cognitive processes such as rumination may play a crucial role in maintaining and amplifying distress following loss, yet their specific contribution in perinatal bereavement remains underexplored. Methods. The CARING (Cognitive Analysis and Rumination INvestigation in perinatal Grief) study employed a cross-sectional design involving 298 parents who experienced perinatal loss within the previous five years. Participants completed an anonymous online survey including measures of depressive rumination (Ruminative Response Scale, RRS), angry rumination (Anger Rumination Scale, ARS), perinatal grief (Perinatal Grief Scale, PGS), general psychopathology (SCL-90), and post-traumatic stress symptoms (NSESSS). Non-parametric analyses were conducted to examine associations between rumination patterns and psychological outcomes. Results. Higher levels of rumination were significantly associated with greater perinatal grief, depressive and anxiety symptoms, and post-traumatic stress. Depressive rumination showed consistently stronger associations with all outcomes compared to angry rumination. Participants presenting both depressive and angry rumination exhibited the highest levels of grief intensity, psychological distress, and PTSD symptoms, suggesting a graded relationship between rumination patterns and severity of distress. Rumination levels were not significantly associated with gestational age at loss or with having received psychological support. Conclusions. Rumination, particularly in its depressive form, appears to function as a transdiagnostic cognitive vulnerability factor in perinatal bereavement. These findings highlight rumination as a potential target for early screening and tailored psychological interventions aimed at reducing long-term distress following perinatal loss.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

World Models in Pieces: Structural Certification for General Agents

arXiv:2606.24842v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the big-world regime, agents cannot be universally capable and their ability is inevitably specialized across a world model in pieces. Consequently, standard uniform guarantees fail to distinguish between the understanding of critical bottlenecks and irrelevant failures. We first formalize this limitation by proving that general agents are not universal, rendering standard worst-case analysis uninformative. To overcome this, we introduce structural certification, a transition-local framework that maps bounded goal-conditioned performance to entry-wise guarantees on the agent's internal world model. Our main contribution is constructive. We provide algorithms that filter specific transitions using deep compositional goals and prove that a general agent on these goals has a structural world model with a $\mathcal{O}(1/n) + \mathcal{O}(\delta)$ error bound. Conversely, this bound is tight in the small-$\delta$ regime, whose existence is explicitly guaranteed by our certification. These results enable the certifiable deployment of general agents by localizing the specific transitions where long-horizon planning is reliable.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Pretrained self-supervised speech models can recognize unseen consonants

Modern pretrained self-supervised automatic speech recognition models are trained on large-scale audio data to encode speech into contextualized representations. However, their training data are heavily skewed toward high-resource languages with little data from low-resource languages, raising concerns about the potential underrepresentation of typologically uncommon speech sounds such as click consonants primarily found in Khoisan languages. This leads to our central research question: Can these models recognize click consonants as accurately as other speech sounds? To address this question, we fine-tune and compare pretrained self-supervised speech models (Wav2Vec2 and HuBERT) on data from two click-rich Khoisan languages (G|ui and West !Xoon). Our results reveal that the fine-tuned models consistently recognize clicks more accurately than non-clicks, suggesting that self-supervision enables generalization across human speech sounds including rare phonemes.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Continual Self-Improvement with Lightweight Experiential Latent Memories

arXiv:2606.17803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance by scaling inference-time compute, yet remain fundamentally stateless, discarding the rich, self-produced reasoning traces generated during this process. We investigate whether models can instead learn online from this experience, converting transient computation (reasoning traces) into persistent reusable knowledge, and without external supervision or access to future data. We show that In-Context Learning (ICL) over raw reasoning traces fails to generalize, reflecting a fundamental limitation of token-level reuse: individual traces lack the abstraction needed for transfer, even after refinement (e.g. self-reflection). In contrast, drawing inspiration from recent works on unsupervised reinforcement learning, we find that lightweight per-instance training with self-generated test-time signals (majority voting) as rewards yields substantial gains, often surpassing full-dataset offline training, motivating a shift from raw traces to learned latent representations. Building on this insight, we propose an online method that distills inference-time compute spent on encountered problems into compact modular latent memories capturing the underlying reasoning structure. These memories are stored and retrieved for future inputs, enabling continual improvement while avoiding catastrophic forgetting through modular design. Importantly, our method is highly efficient, parametrized as extremely lightweight soft prompt memories (~0.001% of model parameters) and trained with only a few gradient steps, yet achieving performance competitive with full parametric updates and offline training. Across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, our approach significantly outperforms zero-shot and raw data ICL baselines, while transferring effectively across datasets.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Learning to Decide with AI Assistance under Human-Alignment

arXiv:2605.12646v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: It is widely agreed that when AI models assist decision-makers in high-stakes domains by predicting an outcome of interest, they should communicate the confidence of their predictions. However, empirical evidence suggests that decision-makers often struggle to determine when to trust a prediction based solely on this communicated confidence. In this context, recent theoretical and empirical work suggests a positive correlation between the utility of AI-assisted decision-making and the degree of alignment between the AI confidence and the decision-makers' confidence in their own predictions. Crucially, these findings do not yet elucidate the extent to which this alignment influences the complexity of learning to make optimal decisions through repeated interactions. In this paper, we address this question in the canonical case of binary predictions and binary decisions. We first show that this problem is equivalent to a two-armed online contextual learning problem with full feedback, and establish a lower bound of $\Omega (\sqrt{|H| \cdot |B| \cdot T} )$ on the expected regret any learner can attain, where $H$ and $B$ denote the sets of human and AI confidence values. We then demonstrate that, under perfect alignment between AI and human confidence, a learner can attain an expected regret of $O(\sqrt{|H| \cdot T\log T})$ and, when $\sqrt{|H|} = O(\log T)$ and $B$ is countable, a non-trivial generalization of the Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz inequality improves the regret bound to $O(\sqrt{T\log T})$. Taken together, these results reveal that alignment can reduce the complexity of learning to make decisions with AI assistance. Experiments on real data from two different human-subject studies where participants solve simple decision-making tasks assisted by AI models show that our theoretical results are robust to violations of perfect alignment.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

From Observation to Intervention: A Causal Audit of Expert Importance in Mixture-of-Experts Models

Interpretability methods routinely use population-level summary statistics over observed model behaviour to license claims about the effects of targeted interventions on specific computations; in Pearl's terms, they treat rung-1 associational evidence as if it supported rung-2 interventional conclusions, a move whose validity is rarely tested. We examine one concrete instance: the use of routing statistics in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) pruning, where utilization rates, activation norms, and routing weight distributions are treated as predictors of which experts can be removed without functional cost. A token-level interventional audit across three high-redundancy MoE architectures (OLMoE-1B-7B-0924, Qwen1.5-MoE-A2.7B, DeepSeek-V2-Lite) finds no observational metric predicts causal expert importance in any model: across all 60 metric-layer combinations effect sizes stay below Cohen's $d = 0.23$, and no metric is reliably positive under our corrected, dual-test criterion. A per-token routing weight control, run with identical $n$, rules out insufficient power, recovering a signal whose CI excludes zero at OLMoE's final MoE layer ($d = +0.231$, 95\% CI $[+0.09, +0.37]$, $p = 0.0013$). Existing pruning methods succeed in this regime not by identifying dispensable experts but because early-layer redundancy renders most selection criteria interchangeable. Our results provide an explicit counterexample to the common inferential step from population-level observational summaries to token-level interventional claims about expert importance, and illustrate how interventional audits can calibrate the evidential standards for interpretability claims.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Digital programming of spin correlations in a fermionic lattice quantum simulator

arXiv:2606.13772v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Analog quantum simulation provides a highly controlled platform to study diverse quantum many-body phenomena. However, current methods for state initialisation are limited to thermal ensembles or uncorrelated product states. Here we present a hybrid approach that complements analog preparation with a digital quantum-gate protocol. This approach enables the engineering of target states with specific, long-range spin-correlations from the same initial resource state. By applying collisional gates to adiabatically prepared and filtered four-fermion singlet chains, we program diverse spin-correlation patterns, including that of a Heisenberg chain. We measure the spin correlations using a sequence of quantum gates followed by singlet-pair measurements. Our method paves the way to the targeted preparation of strongly correlated states of matter.