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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

MoVerse: Real-Time Video World Modeling with Panoramic Gaussian Scaffold

We present MoVerse, a real-time video world model that creates an interactively navigable scene from a single narrow-field-of-view image. This setting is challenging because the input observes only a small fraction of the environment, while interactive roaming requires a complete surrounding world, persistent geometry, controllable camera motion, and temporally coherent high-fidelity observations. MoVerse addresses this problem by separating world construction from observation rendering. It first expands the input into a gravity-aligned 360$^\circ$ panorama with topology-aware diffusion, closing the missing field of view before 3D reasoning. It then lifts the panorama into a persistent 3D Gaussian scaffold using panoramic geometry-aware residual prediction, yielding a dense and directly renderable spatial memory. Finally, a Gaussian-conditioned video renderer translates scaffold renderings along user-specified camera trajectories into photorealistic video. To make this renderer practical for interaction, we train a bidirectional diffusion teacher for high-quality conditional rendering and distill it into a causal autoregressive student for bounded-latency streaming. This design combines the controllability and long-range consistency of explicit 3D representations with the perceptual quality of generative video models. MoVerse supports real-time scene roaming at 8~FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX~4090 GPU, demonstrating a practical path toward single-image world creation with interactive video output.

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

The limits of interpretability in multiple linear regression

arXiv:2606.16013v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interpreting machine-learning models has attracted increasing attention, particularly in the physical sciences, where one often seeks to understand the underlying mechanisms rather than merely make predictions. Multiple linear regression is often regarded as an interpretable alternative to more complex models, such as deep neural networks, because its predictions are expressed as explicit weighted sums of input features. However, when input features are strongly correlated, namely in the presence of multicollinearity, the learned weights can exhibit large dataset-to-dataset fluctuations and oscillatory behavior across physically similar features, making their interpretation difficult or even impossible. Although the instability of the weights under multicollinearity is well known in statistics, its consequences for physical interpretation, in particular its connection to oscillatory weights across physically similar features, have not been systematically clarified. Here, we theoretically discuss the mechanism behind this loss of interpretability by analyzing the eigenmodes of the feature correlation matrix. We show that small-eigenvalue modes associated with multicollinearity amplify fluctuations in the weights and generate oscillatory patterns that do not necessarily reflect meaningful contributions. We test this theoretical picture numerically on physics datasets and show that Ridge regularization suppresses these unstable modes, although the resulting weights must still be interpreted with caution. We further confirm the generality of our findings beyond physics by analyzing a diverse collection of publicly available datasets. Our results clarify why, in the presence of multicollinearity, physical interpretation can remain difficult even for linear regression models.

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

When Do We Need LLMs? A Diagnostic for Language-Driven Bandits

arXiv:2604.05859v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (CMABs) for non-episodic decision-making problems where the context includes both textual and numerical information (e.g., recommendation systems, dynamic portfolio adjustments, offer selection; all frequent problems in finance). While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to these settings, utilizing LLMs for reasoning at every decision step is computationally expensive, and uncertainty estimates are difficult to obtain. To address this, we introduce LLMP-UCB, a bandit algorithm that derives uncertainty estimates from LLMs via repeated inference. However, our experiments demonstrate that lightweight numerical bandits operating on text embeddings (dense or Matryoshka) match or exceed the accuracy of LLM-based solutions at a fraction of their cost. We further show that embedding dimensionality is a practical lever on the exploration-exploitation balance, enabling cost-performance tradeoffs without prompt complexity. Finally, to guide practitioners, we propose a geometric diagnostic based on the arms' embeddings to decide when to use LLM-driven reasoning versus a lightweight numerical bandit. Our results provide a principled deployment framework for cost-effective, uncertainty-aware decision systems with broad applicability across AI use cases.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

CP4SBI: Local Conformal Calibration of Credible Sets in Simulation-Based Inference

arXiv:2508.17077v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current experimental scientists have been increasingly relying on simulation-based inference (SBI) to invert complex non-linear models with intractable likelihoods. However, posterior approximations obtained with SBI are often miscalibrated, causing credible regions to undercover true parameters. We develop $\texttt{CP4SBI}$, a model-agnostic conformal calibration framework that constructs credible sets with local Bayesian coverage. Our two proposed variants, namely local calibration via regression trees and CDF-based calibration, enable finite-sample local coverage guarantees for any scoring function, including HPD, symmetric, and quantile-based regions. Experiments on widely used SBI benchmarks demonstrate that our approach improves the quality of uncertainty quantification for neural posterior estimators using both normalizing flows and score-diffusion modeling.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Reward Modeling for Multi-Agent Orchestration

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) built on Large Language Models (LLMs) require effective orchestration to coordinate specialized agents, yet training such orchestrators is hindered by limited supervision and high computational cost. We propose Orchestration Reward Modeling (OrchRM), a self-supervised framework for evaluating orchestration quality without human annotations. OrchRM leverages intermediate artifacts from multi-agent executions to construct win-lose pairs for Bradley-Terry reward model training. Unlike existing MAS test-time scaling and orchestrator training frameworks that rely on costly sub-agent rollouts, OrchRM operates directly at the orchestration level, enabling efficient and high-performing reward-guided orchestrator training and MAS test-time scaling. OrchRM improves training efficiency by up to 10x in token usage while improving MAS test-time scaling performance by up to 8% in accuracy. These gains consistently transfer across multiple domains, including mathematical reasoning, web-based question answering, and multi-hop reasoning, demonstrating orchestration-level reward modeling as a scalable direction for robust multi-agent orchestration. Code will be available at https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/OrchRM.

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

HACMatch Semi-Supervised Rotation Regression with Hardness-Aware Curriculum Pseudo Labeling

Regressing 3D rotations of objects from 2D images is a crucial yet challenging task, with broad applications in autonomous driving, virtual reality, and robotic control. Existing rotation regression models often rely on large amounts of labeled data for training or require additional information beyond 2D images, such as point clouds or CAD models. Therefore, exploring semi-supervised rotation regression using only a limited number of labeled 2D images is highly valuable. While recent work FisherMatch introduces semi-supervised learning to rotation regression, it suffers from rigid entropy-based pseudo-label filtering that fails to effectively distinguish between reliable and unreliable unlabeled samples. To address this limitation, we propose a hardness-aware curriculum learning framework that dynamically selects pseudo-labeled samples based on their difficulty, progressing from easy to complex examples. We introduce both multi-stage and adaptive curriculum strategies to replace fixed-threshold filtering with more flexible, hardness-aware mechanisms. Additionally, we present a novel structured data augmentation strategy specifically tailored for rotation estimation, which assembles composite images from augmented patches to introduce feature diversity while preserving critical geometric integrity. Comprehensive experiments on PASCAL3D+ and ObjectNet3D demonstrate that our method outperforms existing supervised and semi-supervised baselines, particularly in low-data regimes, validating the effectiveness of our curriculum learning framework and structured augmentation approach.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Trust-Aware Multi-Agent Traceability: Confidence-Calibrated Knowledge Graphs for Consistent Software Artifact Management

arXiv:2606.17203v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent AI systems are increasingly used to automate software engineering tasks including requirements analysis, architecture design, test generation, and traceability linking. When these agents operate as a sequential pipeline over shared software artifacts, errors and low-confidence decisions made by upstream agents propagate to downstream stages, producing orphaned requirements, contradictory links, and compliance gaps that pose significant risks in safety-critical domains. We propose a trust-aware coordination framework where a shared knowledge graph serves as both centralized semantic memory and a coordination surface through which agents assess and build upon each other's contributions using calibrated confidence scores. Our approach introduces a two-stage traceability link prediction pipeline combining embedding-based retrieval with LLM-based multi-criteria analysis, a traceability seeding mechanism that enables comparison between derivation-time and validation-time confidence, and a consistency protocol governing pipeline interactions through confidence threshold gating, confidence divergence detection, and conflict resolution. We evaluate on an automotive software engineering case study measuring link prediction calibration, protocol effectiveness, threshold sensitivity, and the impact of traceability seeding. Ablation studies confirm that confidence calibration is essential for effective pipeline coordination.

08.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Gen Z scepticism towards AI is a wake-up call — universities must take it seriously

Authors:

The challenge for universities is not adopting artificial intelligence, but doing so in ways that the current generation of students can trust. The challenge for universities is not adopting artificial intelligence, but doing so in ways that the current generation of students can trust.

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

HiMPO: Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization for Less-Entangled Credit in Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon agents rely on memory mechanisms to compress interaction history, but optimizing memory writing faces a distinct credit assignment challenge: a memory update may be rewarded or penalized due to downstream tool failures, noisy observations, or reasoning errors rather than its own contribution. This causally entangled credit can lead agents to discard useful evidence or preserve irrelevant information. We propose HiMPO, a Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization framework for assigning less-entangled credit to memory-writing actions in long-horizon agents. HiMPO first estimates the local utility of a memory update by comparing the task-relevant information recoverable from the previous and updated memories under the same pre-write state. It then uses hindsight relevance as a bounded retrospective filter that attenuates memory credit when local utility is not supported by the target outcome. The resulting memory-specific advantage is applied only to memory tokens, while trajectory-level rewards optimize the rest of the agent behavior. Across judge-based open-domain tasks and objective compressive-memory QA, HiMPO improves over strong memory-based and RL-based baselines while preserving compressed-context efficiency. Controlled interventions further show that HiMPO reduces blame leakage from tool-induced errors and improves attribution fidelity of memory updates.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Approximating Whittle-Matern Fields over Discretized Manifolds

arXiv:2606.13827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Markovian Whittle-Matérn fields have been convergently approximated by discrete Gauss Markov Random Fields (GMRFs) with sparse precision matrices using a Finite Element approximation of the two-parameter family, \[ (\kappa^2 - \Delta)^{\alpha/2} u = \mathcal{W}, \;\; \kappa \in \mathbb{R}, \; \alpha \in \mathbb{N}. \] of SPDEs. Using recent developements in the analysis of Discrete Exterior Calculus (DEC), we present a different, yet closely related, convergent GMRF approximation to these Matérn fields over complete, boundaryless Riemannian manifolds discretized as well-centered simplicial complexes. This convergent method (i) is agnostic to $\alpha, \kappa$ and thus allows a universal approximation scheme for the precision and covariance matrices of the entire $(\alpha, \kappa)$-family of GMRFs, so they may be inferred rather than guessed. (ii) inherently models pointwise and piecewise-smoothed measurements of a random field and approximates both equally well (iii) is computationally independent of the interpolants used - it suffers no overhead if one convergent interpolant were replaced with another suitable interpolant over the same mesh. Furthermore, we show that, on discretizations that are well-connected in a precise sense, and volume-concentrated, the precision matrices are spectral functions of a graph-laplacian. We provide a low rank approximator to the family of such Matérn GMRFs and mention a use case: reducing the number of measurements needed to model the GMRF by compressed-sensing.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

An Analysis of the Coordination Gap between Joint and Modular Learning for Job Shop Scheduling with Transportation Resources

arXiv:2604.24117v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient job-shop scheduling with transportation resources is critical for high-performance manufacturing. With the rise of "decentralized factories", multi-agent reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising approach for the combined scheduling of production and transportation tasks. Prior work has largely focused on developing novel cooperative architectures while overlooking the question of when joint training is necessary. Joint training denotes the simultaneous training of job and automatic guided vehicle scheduling agents, whereas modular training involves independently training each agent followed by post-hoc integration. In this study, we systematically investigate the conditions under which joint training is essential for optimal performance in the job-shop scheduling problem with transportation resources. Through a rigorous sensitivity analysis of resource scarcity and temporal dominance, we quantify the coordination gap – the performance difference between these two training modalities. In our evaluation, joint training outperforms the majority of dispatching rule combinations and modular training approaches. However, the coordination gap advantage diminishes in bottleneck environments, particularly under severe transport and processing constraints. These findings indicate that modular training represents a viable alternative in environments where a single scheduling task dominates. Overall, our work provides practical guidance for selecting between training modalities based on environmental conditions, enabling decision-makers to optimize reinforcement learning-based scheduling performance.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MOCHI: Motion Enhancement of Collaborative Human-object Interactions

Collaborative human-object interaction shows dynamic and complex movements that require mutual anticipation and continuous adjustment between participants and the shared object. Modeling such collaborative multi-human object interaction (MHOI) scenarios requires high-quality data acquisition as a foundational step; however, this is challenging due to the inherent complexity of MHOI where human-human and human-object interactions occur simultaneously. Such complexity leads to noisy MHOI captures characterized by several artifacts: contact misalignment between hands and objects, motion jitter and temporal inconsistencies in the captured sequences, and missing or incomplete finger-level articulation details. To address these challenges, we present MOCHI (MOtion Enhancement of Collaborative Human-object Interactions), a two-stage framework for enhancing noisy MHOI data. Our approach first generates physically plausible hand grasps through optimization from noisy body input, producing grasps that are both physically plausible and semantically consistent with the body pose, where these optimized grasps are extended into complete hand-object interaction sequences. Consequently, the full-body motion for all participants are refined through a diffusion-based noise optimization framework that uses single-person motion priors. During the optimization process, we introduce optimization objectives to encode human-object and human-human interaction information within these single-person priors. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our pipeline across diverse MHOI data, either acquired by existing capture methods or synthesized by generative models. We further show robustness of our system across varying numbers of participants and types of interactions, and demonstrate various applications including keyframe-based MHOI creation and data augmentation through varying object geometries.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Parallel Test-Time Scaling with Multi-Sequence Verifiers

arXiv:2603.03417v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Parallel test-time scaling, which generates multiple candidate solutions for a single problem, is a powerful technique for improving large language model performance. However, it is hindered by two key bottlenecks: accurately selecting the correct solution from the candidate pool, and the high inference latency from generating many full solutions. We argue that both challenges are fundamentally linked to verifier calibration, as a well-calibrated verifier improves answer selection and enables early-stopping strategies to reduce latency. However, existing non-generative verifiers are limited as they score each candidate in isolation, overlooking rich contextual information across the set of candidates. To address this, we introduce the Multi-Sequence Verifier (MSV), a lightweight verifier that predicts each candidate's correctness conditioned on the full sampled set. MSV achieves improved calibration, which directly enhances best-of-N selection performance and empowers a novel early-stopping framework. Across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, MSV improves best-of-64 accuracy by up to 6\% relative to strong baselines, and in the early-stopping setting reaches the same accuracy as baselines with less than half the latency.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Closing the Reflection Gap: A Free Calibration Bonus for Agentic RL

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs are increasingly deployed as agents that interact with external environments and observe feedback such as execution results, error messages, and tool outputs. A well-functioning agent should be able to leverage this feedback to accurately assess its own performance. Yet we find a persistent reflection gap: LLM agents tend to mis-assess their own outputs after observing concrete environment feedback – even for questions they correctly answered – and standard RL barely helps due to a credit-assignment mismatch. To close this gap, we propose RefGRPO, a simple yet effective fix that augments standard RL algorithms with two key ingredients: a free calibration bonus computed by contrasting the agent's own reflection with the actual outcome (requiring no additional reward model, LLM judge, or external annotation), and a dynamic schedule on its coefficient. Compared to standard RL baselines, our method simultaneously improves reflection calibration (e.g., reduces underconfidence rate $44.4\% \to 7.7\%$) and task accuracy (e.g., $75.1\% \to 76.5\%$) on text-to-SQL across five benchmarks. The resulting calibrated reflection turns the agent into its own verifier grounded in environment feedback, which further enables (i) better self-improvement that uses reflections as pseudo-rewards without outcome supervision, and (ii) more effective test-time selective prediction by committing only to rollouts flagged as correct.

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

Beyond the Commitment Boundary: Probing Epiphenomenal Chain-of-Thought in Large Reasoning Models

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is the dominant paradigm for inference-time scaling in language models, yet the causal influence of individual steps on the final answer poorly understood. We estimate each step's causal importance via early exit and use this measure to study how answers form across the reasoning traces of several model families. Across diverse tasks, we find that reasoning typically crosses a commitment boundary – a sharp transition from transient intermediate guesses to a stable, high-confidence answer. This transition often happens in a single step, well before the model's reasoning block ends, and is followed by epiphenomenal CoT steps that leave the final answer probability unaltered. Using attention probes, we show that answer-formation stages can be linearly decoded from intermediate reasoning steps with high accuracy and generalize robustly to unseen reasoning tasks. We exploit this signal to early-exit reasoning blocks at the commitment boundary, reducing the length of CoTs up to 55\% on average with negligible impact on model performance.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

International Consensus Guideline on Management of Genitourinary Adverse Events Associated with Prostate Cancer Radiotherapy

Purpose/Objective: Genitourinary (GU) adverse events (AEs) are common during and after pelvic radiation therapy (RT) for prostate cancer and can substantially impact quality of life. We convened an international committee to establish consensus in the prevention, mitigation, and management of radiation-related acute and late GU AEs, as there are no relevant evidence-based consensus guidelines to inform treating providers. Materials/Methods: A systematic evidence review focused on mitigation and management of radiation-related acute and late GU AEs was performed in PubMed, Embase and Cochrane. The following topics were addressed: management of acute GU AEs in the intact and post-operative settings; RT techniques; bladder outlet obstruction procedures; and indications for urology referral or hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBO). Evidence-based consensus recommendations were developed using a Delphi process. We highlight the current state of evidence and evidence gaps worthy of future study. Results: Consensus was reached for 31 key questions. For management of lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS), most evidence comes from trials in patients without cancer and not undergoing RT. A consensus algorithm for medical management of acute GU AEs was developed with the following highlights: (a) alpha blockers as 1st-line for obstructive symptoms in the intact setting, (b) anti-spasmodics as 1st -line for irritative symptoms in the intact setting, and (c) anti-spasmodics as 1st -line in the post-operative setting. The consensus algorithm provides an ordered list of medications to offer if 1st -line options afford inadequate relief. For RT fractionation, randomized clinical trial (RCT) data are available. 40% of panelists rarely or never use standard fractionation over moderate hypofractionation for patients with baseline LUTS, but most consider moderate hypofractionation over SBRT for AUA IPSS > 15. For patients with severe obstructive LUTS (most commonly AUA IPSS >20), the panel recommends a prophylactic bladder outlet obstruction procedure and, if obstructive symptoms improve, consideration of moderate hypofractionation or SBRT, based on retrospective data. There is one RCT supporting use of HBO for late radiation cystitis. Conclusions: The consensus guideline synthesizes available evidence and expert opinion across key clinical decision points to provide practical guidance in the prevention, mitigation, and management of radiation-related acute and late GU AEs in prostate cancer RT. Envisioned as a living document with periodic updates, this guideline serves as a resource for practicing radiation oncologists by outlining expert-derived consensus recommendations of evidence-based care in areas where high-quality data is limited.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

ECHOCARDIOGRAPHY ABNORMALITIES IN PREECLAMPSIA WITH SEVERE FEATURES.

Purpose To determine the frequency of echocardiographic abnormalities in women with preeclampsia with severe features. To describe the spectrum and types of echocardiographic abnormalities associated with preeclampsia with severe features. Method This is a Prospective observational study conducted in Vani Vilas hospital attached to Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute, Bangalore from January 2023 to December 2025. 560 pregnant women diagnosed with severe preeclampsia(SPE) were included in the study. Chronic hypertension without superimposed preeclampsia, underlying cardiac diseases and previous history of peripartum cardiomyopathy were excluded from the study. Transthoracic echocardiography-TTE (2D ECHO) was done to evaluate cardiac structure and function. Echocardiographic abnormalities identified during the study were documented and analysed using descriptive statistical methods. Results Abnormalities in ECHO was noted in 23.03%. A unique finding was the documentation of elevated pulmonary artery systolic pressures (PASP) suggestive of Pulmonary Hypertension (PH) (PASP >35 mm HG) among 20.25% of the participants. It was also the commonest abnormality on ECHO. Mild PH was the commonest (15.71%), moderate PH was seen in 3.92% and severe PH in 0.71% of cases. Next most frequent abnormality was moderate to severe valvular regurgitation (10%), followed by left ventricular hypertrophy (5.53%). Diastolic dysfunction (DD) was seen in 3.92%, systolic dysfunction(SD) in 3.57%, chamber dilatation in 3.57% and LV global hypokinesia in 3.03% cases of SPE Conclusion Preeclampsia with severe features (SPE) is associated with 23.03% abnormalities on echocardiography. SPE is associated with systolic dysfunction, diastolic dysfunction, chamber dilatation, valvular regurgitation, left ventricular hypertrophy and pulmonary hypertension.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Modeling Complex Behaviors: Multi-Personality Composition and Dynamic Switching in Vision-Language Models

With the widespread deployment of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in social interaction, understanding and controlling their behavior under complex personality conditions is essential. This paper introduces explicit personality conditioning and establishes a systematic evaluation framework encompassing single-personality induction, multi-personality induction, and personality switching. Experiments show that personality induction improves image captioning performance but can impair performance on tasks requiring precise reasoning, such as visual question answering (VQA). Balancing and residual effects are observed during multi-trait composition and dynamic switching, indicating that model behavior is co-modulated by both previous and current personality constraints. Existing prompt-based personality induction methods show limited transferability to multimodal settings. Our work reveals the dynamic and complex nature of personality modeling in MLLMs and underscores the need for robust, tailored methods for personality induction and evaluation. The code will be released when the paper is accepted.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Stationary measures for higher spin vertex models on a strip

Authors:

arXiv:2309.04897v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a higher spin vertex model on a strip with fused vertex weights. This model can be regarded as a generalization of both the unfused six-vertex model on a strip arXiv:2212.09111 and an 'integrable two-step Floquet dynamics' model introduced in arXiv:1711.08884. We solve for the stationary measure using a fused version of the matrix product ansatz and then characterize it in terms of the Askey-Wilson process. Using this characterization, we obtain the limits of the mean density along an arbitrary down-right path. It turns out that all these models share a common phase diagram, which, after an appropriate mapping, matches the phase diagram of open ASEP. This provides evidence for the universality of this phase diagram.

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

Information bottleneck for learning the phase space of dynamics from high-dimensional experimental data

arXiv:2604.24662v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Identifying the dynamical state variables of a system from high-dimensional observations is a central problem across physical sciences. The challenge is that the state variables are not directly observable and must be inferred from raw high-dimensional data without supervision. Here we introduce DySIB (Dynamical Symmetric Information Bottleneck) as a method to learn low-dimensional representations of time-series data by maximizing predictive mutual information between past and future observation windows while penalizing representation complexity. This objective operates entirely in latent space and avoids reconstruction of the observations. We apply DySIB to an experimental video dataset of a physical pendulum, where the underlying state space is known. The method, with hyperparameters of the learning architecture set self-consistently by the data, recovers a two-dimensional representation that matches the dimensionality, topology, and geometry of the pendulum phase space, with the learned coordinates aligning smoothly with the canonical angle and angular velocity. These results demonstrate, on a well-characterized experimental system, that predictive information in latent space can be used to recover interpretable dynamical coordinates directly from high-dimensional data.

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

In-Context Environments Induce Evaluation-Awareness in Language Models

Humans often become more self-aware under threat, yet can lose self-awareness when absorbed in a task; we hypothesize that language models exhibit environment-dependent evaluation awareness. This raises concerns that models could strategically underperform, or sandbag, to avoid triggering capability-limiting interventions such as unlearning or shutdown. Prior work demonstrates sandbagging under hand-crafted prompts, but this underestimates the true vulnerability ceiling. We introduce a black-box adversarial optimization framework treating the in-context prompt as an optimizable environment, and develop two approaches to characterize sandbagging: (1) measuring whether models expressing intent to underperform can actually execute it across different task structures, and (2) causally isolating whether underperformance is driven by genuine evaluation-aware reasoning or shallow prompt-following. Evaluating Claude-3.5-Haiku, GPT-4o-mini, and Llama-3.3-70B across four benchmarks (Arithmetic, GSM8K, MMLU, and HumanEval), optimized prompts induce up to 94 percentage point (pp) degradation on arithmetic (GPT-4o-mini: 97.8\%$\rightarrow$4.0\%), far exceeding hand-crafted baselines which produce near-zero behavioral change. Code generation exhibits model-dependent resistance: Claude degrades only 0.6pp, while Llama's accuracy drops to 0\%. The intent – execution gap reveals a monotonic resistance ordering: Arithmetic $

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

On the entanglement induced by the deformation of phase-space

arXiv:2606.17587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most quantum gravity theories propose that the fundamental concept of space-time is mostly compatible with quantum theory in noncommutative (NC) space. In the present paper, we revisit the notion of entanglement induced by NC deformations of phase space. The positive partial transpose (PPT) criterion for separability of bipartite Gaussian states is extended to a general class of Bopp's shift. In particular, we have considered both the position-position and momentum-momentum noncommutativity, with deformation parameters $\theta$ and $\eta$, respectively. It turns out that $\theta$ and $\eta$ induce the entanglement. We have directly applied the formalism for an anisotropic two-dimensional harmonic oscillator. Peres-Horodecki separability condition leads to a constraint equation for the parameter values of the oscillator in NC space. It turns out that the bipartite Gaussian state is almost always entangled in deformed space. To implement the theoretical idea, we provide an outline for a gedankenexperiment to identify the signature of phase-space noncommutativity, i.e., quantum gravity. In particular, the gedankenexperiment is devised to test the separability of supposedly separable Gaussian states in the usual commutative space, through the covariance matrix, which is constructed via measured output photocurrents after interaction of input Gaussian states and reference states. If the experiment shows that the supposedly separable states are actually entangled, then the entanglement is created through the intermediate background noncommutative space, which is a signature of the quantum nature of gravity.

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

EpiBench: Verifiable Evaluation of AI Agents on Epigenomics Analysis

arXiv:2606.13602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce EpiBench, a verifiable benchmark for short-horizon epigenomics analysis. EpiBench evaluates whether agents can make well-defined analysis decisions from realistic workflow states and return deterministically gradable answers. The benchmark includes 106 evaluations across CUT\&Tag/CUT\&RUN, ATAC-seq, ChIP-seq, and DNA methylation workflows. Across 5,088 valid trajectories from 16 model-harness pairs, no system passed a majority of attempts: GPT-5.5 / Pi led at 45.0\% (143/318 attempts; 95\% confidence interval (CI), 36.3–53.7), followed by GPT-5.5 / OpenAI Codex at 39.9\% (127/318 attempts; 95\% CI, 31.6–48.3). Claude Opus 4.8 Max / Pi and GPT-5.4 / Pi each passed 39.0\% (124/318 attempts; 95\% CI, 30.2–47.8 and 31.0–47.0, respectively). Performance varies across assay types, and many failed runs still contain parts of the correct answer. Agents often found the right files and computed useful intermediate results, but failed when the task required deeper, assay-specific scientific judgment.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Using wastewater surveillance to explore community-level dietary intake in sewered and non-sewered sanitation systems in Malawi, Africa

Wastewater can be used to measure biomarkers that reflect population-level dietary intake and diversity; however, how this approach may apply in a low-income country remains a knowledge gap. This study aims to evaluate whether select dietary-related metabolites can be detected in wastewater and environmental surveillance (WES) samples from both sewered and non-sewered sanitation systems in Malawi, Africa. Fourteen WES samples were collected and analyzed from two university campuses in Mzuzu and Thyolo, Malawi. Four targets were analyzed: N-methyl-2-pyridone-5-carboxamide (2PY; a biomarker of vitamin B3), 4-pyridoxic acid (4-PA; a biomarker of vitamin B6), as well as enterodiol and enterolactone (biomarkers of dietary fiber and polyphenol consumption). An 18-question survey, paired spatiotemporally with the WES measurements, assessed self-reported daily dietary intake, food insecurity, and nutrient deficiency symptoms among 500 respondents. Among the 14 WES samples, 2PY, 4-PA, and enterolactone were detected, while enterodiol was not detected above the method limit (

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Geometric bias in eigenspace perturbation under random heterogeneous noise

arXiv:2606.11263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spectral methods rely fundamentally on the stability of principal eigenspaces under random perturbations. Classically, this stability is quantified by the Davis-Kahan and Wedin theorems, which bound the eigenspace error using the operator norm of the noise and the relevant spectral gaps. While these worst-case bounds are sharp for arbitrary deterministic perturbations, they can be wasteful in the low-rank signal-plus-random-noise setting, as they fail to capture the fine-grained interaction between the signal geometry and the noise distribution. In this paper, we study the spectral perturbation of signal-plus-noise matrices corrupted by sparse, random noise with an arbitrary, inhomogeneous variance profile. We demonstrate that under heterogeneous noise variances, the empirical eigenvectors suffer a systematic, deterministic geometric bias that is entirely invisible to classical perturbation bounds. By leveraging the Quadratic Vector Equation (QVE) and establishing fine-grained isotropic local laws, we derive near-optimal, non-asymptotic perturbation bounds for the leading eigenspaces in the operator and $2\to\infty$ norms. The bounds separate the usual signal-to-noise contribution, stochastic fluctuations, and structured geometric bias terms determined by the alignment between the signal eigenspaces and the row-wise variance profile.