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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Learning What to Remember: A Cognitively Grounded Multi-Factor Value Model for Agentic Memory

Authors:
Zhibao Chen↗Qian Cheng↗

arXiv:2606.12945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-running LLM agents accumulate interaction histories far larger than any context window, forcing a standing decision: what to encode deeply, what to forget, and what to retrieve under a fixed memory budget. Production systems answer with semantic similarity or recency – both mis-specified for the forgetting decision, which is made at consolidation time before the future query is known. We propose a multi-factor memory value function V(m)=\sum_i w_i f_i(m) over seven interpretable factors (emotional intensity, goal relevance, value alignment, self/user relevance, task utility, reliability, and usage history) drawn from cognitive psychology, whose weights are learned from a downstream objective by a gradient-free optimiser, and whose single scalar uniformly controls encoding depth, forget risk, and retrieval rank. We make a methodological point: on LongMemEval, scoring goal relevance against the held-out evaluation question saturates gold-evidence retention at \approx 0.98 – this measures retrieval, not forgetting. In the realistic blind regime, a learned multi-factor value retains 0.770 \pm 0.011 of gold evidence across 479 usable cases, versus 0.657 for uniform weights, 0.518 for the best single factor, and 0.368 for recency; every paired gap's 95% bootstrap CI is above zero, and a neural network over the same factors ties the linear model. The learned weights are interpretable – reliability, emotional intensity, and self/user relevance dominate, while query-time goal similarity is correctly down-weighted for the forgetting decision. A controlled synthetic task with planted confounds confirms the learner recovers a separating weighting (1.00 retention) where uniform weighting fails (0.62). The substrate is open-source; all experiments run on a single CPU with no API calls.

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

GRACE: Step-Level Benchmark for Faithful Reasoning over Context

Authors:
Hoang Pham↗Dong Le↗Anh Tuan Luu↗

Many reasoning tasks require models to reason over input context, from document-grounded question answering to rule-based deduction. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting produces traces that appear transparent, yet individual steps can silently deviate from the source evidence, even when the final answer is correct. Existing methods detect hallucinations at the response level but fail to identify where in the chain a failure occurs or what type it is. We introduce GRACE, the first human-annotated step-level faithfulness benchmark with a data-driven error taxonomy for context-grounded textual reasoning. GRACE covers CoT traces from 10 models across 4 source datasets, with each step annotated for faithfulness, error category, and natural language explanation. A data-driven taxonomy, discovered bottom-up via unsupervised clustering, organizes failures into two tracks: GRACE-Inference (deductive errors) and GRACE-Grounding (factual grounding errors), with four categories each. The evaluation set is human-annotated and challenging by design. Our experiments reveal substantial headroom for current models. In addition, integrating step-level faithfulness signals into reinforcement learning pipelines improves both downstream accuracy and reasoning reliability.

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04.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-06

Pathways of emergency care for severely ill children in Nigerian and Ugandan hospitals: A process mapping study

Authors:
Rami Subhi↗

by Rami Subhi, Abiodun Sogbesan, Dan Muramuzi, Mikael Burhin, Ayobami A. Bakare, Adegoke G. Falade, Freddy E. Kitutu, Freddie Ssengooba, Carina King, Sumit Kane, Belinda Dawson-McClaren, Hamish R. Graham, the MOXY-Implementation Research Collaboration Background Child mortality remains high in countries with weak emergency care systems. Facility organisation for paediatric emergency care is heterogeneous and under-described. We examined how hospitals in Uganda and Nigeria are organised to deliver emergency care for neonates and children. Methods and findings We conducted a qualitative, multi-method study in 26 purposively selected secondary and tertiary facilities in Uganda and Nigeria from October 2023 to December 2024. Embedded researchers documented patient pathways, resources for care, and care processes for severely ill children (

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05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Sequential Deep Learning to Predict Non-Central to Central Geographic Atrophy Progression from OCT Imaging

Authors:
Siraz↗Kamanda↗Nabil↗A. S↗Gholami↗Rao↗N. T↗Ong↗S. S↗Alam↗

Purpose: To develop and validate a temporal deep learning framework for predicting geographic atrophy (GA) progression across multi-year horizons using longitudinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) sequences. Design: Retrospective longitudinal cohort study. Subjects, Participants, and/or Controls: A total of 91 patients with dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) were identified from Wake Forest University School of Medicine (2013-2023), yielding 455 OCT volumes. Two prediction cohorts were defined: 32 patients with no GA (NGA) at baseline who subsequently developed GA, and 35 patients whose earliest GA manifestation was non-central GA (NCGA). Non-progressing patients served as negative controls. Methods: OCT B-scan volumes were encoded into visit-level feature representations using three pretrained architectures (ResNet-18, ResNet-50, ViT-B/16). Chronologically ordered visit embeddings, optionally augmented with inter-visit time intervals ({Delta}t), were processed through recurrent neural networks (RNN), long short-term memory networks (LSTM), and Transformer encoders to model longitudinal disease trajectories. Models were trained and evaluated independently for prediction horizons of 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 years using patient-level stratified splits (80/20). Performance was assessed across five random seeds. Main Outcome Measures: Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC), F1-score, and accuracy for predicting two clinically critical transitions: NGA to GA onset and NCGA to central GA (CGA) involvement. Results: For NGA to GA prediction, models achieved ROC-AUC of 0.84-0.94 at 2-4 years and 1.00 at 5-6 years. For NCGA to CGA prediction, Transformer-based models achieved peak AUC of 0.95 at 4 years and 0.96 at 5 years. Longer input sequences (8 visits vs. 4 visits) consistently improved NCGA to CGA performance at extended horizons. Temporal interval encoding improved stability in several LSTM configurations.

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

Stochastic Thermodynamics and SDE-based Generative Models

Authors:
Yaowen Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.18290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: SDE-based generative models, including diffusion models and the Schrödinger bridge, have found broad applications in signal processing tasks such as speech enhancement, image restoration, and time-series generation. This note presents a modeling framework for such models within the context of stochastic thermodynamics. The main results of this note are trajectory-level definitions of work, heat, and entropy production, along with a generalized Jarzynski identity and a second-law-like inequality. The proposed framework extends the original Jarzynski setup to accommodate time-dependent bath temperature and nonconservative driving forces. This thermodynamic perspective may deepen our understanding of diffusion models and the Schrödinger bridge from a nonequilibrium statistical mechanics viewpoint.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

The Latent Color Subspace: Emergent Order in High-Dimensional Chaos

Authors:
Mateusz Pach↗Jessica Bader↗Quentin Bouniot↗Serge Belongie↗Zeynep Akata↗

Text-to-image generation models have advanced rapidly, yet achieving fine-grained control over generated images remains difficult, largely due to limited understanding of how semantic information is encoded. We develop an interpretation of the color representation in the Variational Autoencoder latent space of FLUX.1 [Dev], revealing a structure reflecting Hue, Saturation, and Lightness. We verify our Latent Color Subspace (LCS) interpretation by demonstrating that it can both predict and explicitly control color, introducing a fully training-free method in FLUX based solely on closed-form latent-space manipulation. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/LCS.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

SAFE-Cascade: Cost-Adaptive Vision-Language Routing for Chart Question Answering

Authors:
Ayush Dwivedi↗Qixin Wang↗Ashvi Soni↗Ruoteng Wang↗Han Li↗Animesh Mahapatra↗Neeraj Agrawal↗Xintao Wu↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) are powerful for chart question answering, but invoking a VLM for every query can be unnecessarily expensive when many questions are answerable from OCR text and lightweight language reasoning. We demonstrate SAFE-Cascade, an interactive system for cost-adaptive chart question answering. Given a chart image and a natural-language question, SAFE-Cascade first extracts chart text with OCR, obtains a provisional answer from a text-only language model, and then uses a learned router to decide whether to accept the text answer or escalate to a VLM. The demo exposes this decision process to users: OCR evidence, text-only answer, routing probability, escalation decision, final answer, estimated cost, and estimated latency are shown side by side. SAFE-Cascade is designed as a transparent interface for understanding when visual grounding is actually needed. Users can upload or select charts, ask questions, inspect the evidence used by each pathway, compare text-only and VLM answers, and adjust the escalation threshold to explore the accuracy-cost frontier. The system is implemented with Azure Document Intelligence for OCR, gpt-5-mini as the text-only model, gemini-2.5-flash-image as the VLM, and a Random Forest router trained on inference-time features. On a held-out ChartQA test split of 375 examples from a 2,500-example experiment, SAFE-Cascade achieves 69.1% unified accuracy with 73.1% VLM invocation, compared with 67.7% accuracy and 100% VLM invocation for the full-VLM baseline. The observed +1.4 percentage-point difference is statistically uncertain, so we interpret SAFE-Cascade as matching full-VLM performance while reducing VLM calls by 26.9% and estimated cost by 9.3%. The demonstration shows how selective modality routing can make multimodal knowledge systems more transparent, tunable, and cost-aware.

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09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

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

Authors:
Lv↗Y.-p↗Wang↗S.-y↗Piao↗H.-n↗Gong↗Zeng↗K.-q↗Zhong↗Lei↗S.-f↗…

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.

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

Identifiable Markov Switching Models with Instantaneous Effects and Exponential Families

Authors:
Roel Hulsman↗Carles Balsells-Rodas↗Sara Magliacane↗

arXiv:2606.02231v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Temporal systems often exhibit non-stationary behaviour, such as seasonal climate variation or glucose fluctuations in patients with type-1 diabetes. One way to model non-stationarity is through discrete latent regimes, i.e., stationary segments of time. Such systems induce a Markov Switching Model (MSM), a class of Hidden Markov Models with autoregressive dependencies among latent regimes and observed variables. Identifying latent regimes is challenging in the presence of frequent regime switches and nonlinear and non-Gaussian dynamics, particularly when there are instantaneous effects between the variables, e.g., due to slow rates of measurements. In this work, we establish the identifiability of both latent regimes and regime-dependent causal structures under temporal regime dependencies, nonlinear lagged and instantaneous effects, and independent noise from the exponential family. Our identifiability theory subsumes non-temporal mixtures of causal models. Furthermore, we introduce FlowMSM, a regime detection framework that can be paired with any stationary causal discovery method to recover regime-dependent causal structures. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and a financial economics dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to detect latent regimes and discover causal structures from non-stationary time series.

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11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Who can compete with quantum computers? Lecture notes on quantum inspired tensor networks computational techniques

Authors:
Xavier Waintal↗Chen-How Huang↗Christoph W. Groth↗

arXiv:2601.03035v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This is a set of lectures on tensor networks with a strong emphasis on the core algorithms involving Matrix Product States (MPS) and Matrix Product Operators (MPO). Compared to other presentations, particular care has been given to disentangle aspects of tensor networks from the quantum many-body problem: MPO/MPS algorithms are presented as a way to deal with linear algebra on extremely (exponentially) large matrices and vectors, regardless of any particular application. The lectures include well-known algorithms to find eigenvectors of MPOs (the celebrated DMRG), solve linear problems, and recent learning algorithms that allow one to map a known function into an MPS (the Tensor Cross Interpolation, or TCI, algorithm). The lectures end with a discussion of how to represent functions and perform calculus with tensor networks using the "quantics" representation. They include the detailed analytical construction of important MPOs such as those for differentiation, indefinite integration, convolution, and the quantum Fourier transform. Three concrete applications are discussed in detail: the simulation of a quantum computer (either exactly or with compression), the simulation of a quantum annealer, and techniques to solve partial differential equations (e.g. Poisson, diffusion, or Gross-Pitaevskii) within the "quantics" representation. The lectures have been designed to be accessible to a first-year PhD student and include detailed proofs of all statements.

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

Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI

Authors:
NVIDIA↗Aditi↗Niket Agarwal↗Arslan Ali↗Jon Allen↗Martin Antolini↗Adeline Aubame↗Alisson Azzolini↗Junjie Bai↗Maciej Bala↗Yogesh Balaji↗Josh Bapst↗…

We introduce Cosmos 3, a family of omnimodal world models designed to jointly process and generate language, image, video, audio, and action sequences within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. By supporting highly flexible input-output configurations, Cosmos 3 seamlessly unifies critical modalities for Physical AI – effectively subsuming vision-language models, video generators, world simulators, and world-action models into a single framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that Cosmos 3 establishes a new state-of-the-art across a diverse suite of understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating omnimodal world models as scalable, general-purpose backbones for embodied agents. Our post-trained Cosmos 3 models were ranked as the best open-source Text-to-Image and Image-to-Video models by Artificial Analysis, and the best policy model by RoboArena at the time the technical report was written. To accelerate open research and deployment in Physical AI, we make our code, model checkpoints, curated synthetic datasets, and evaluation benchmark available under the Linux Foundation's OpenMDW-1.1 License at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3. The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3.

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Entanglement Detection by Approximate Entanglement Witnesses

Authors:
Samuel Dai↗Ning Bao↗

arXiv:2402.14755v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The problem of determining whether a given quantum state is separable is known to be computationally difficult. We develop an approach to this problem based on approximations of convex polytopes in high dimensions. By showing that a convex polytope constructed from a finite number of hyperplanes approximates the Euclidean ball arbitrarily well in high dimensions, we find evidence that a finite set of approximate entanglement witnesses is potentially sufficient to determine the entanglement of a state with high probability.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Precomputing Multi-Agent Path Replanning Using Temporal Flexibility

Authors:
Issa Hanou↗Eric Kemmeren↗Devin Wild Thomas↗Mathijs de Weerdt↗

arXiv:2601.04884v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Executing a multi-agent plan can be challenging when an agent is delayed, because this typically creates conflicts with other agents. So, we need to quickly find a new safe plan. Replanning only the delayed agent often does not yield an efficient plan, and sometimes cannot even yield a feasible one. On the other hand, replanning other agents may lead to a cascade of changes and delays, and it is computationally expensive. We show how to efficiently replan a single delayed agent by tracking and using the temporal flexibility of other agents while avoiding cascading delays. This flexibility is the maximum delay that the agent can take without changing the order with agents other than the initially delayed agent, or further delaying other agents. Our algorithm, FlexSIPP, precomputes all possible plans for the delayed agent and returns the changes to the other agents within the given scenario. We demonstrate our method in a real-world case study of replanning trains in the densely-used Dutch railway network and in the MovingAI MAPF benchmark set. Our experiments show that FlexSIPP provides effective solutions relevant to real-world adjustments, and within a reasonable timeframe.

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

Detecting Lookahead Bias in LLM Forecasts

Authors:
Zhenyu Gao↗Wenxi Jiang↗Yutong Yan↗

arXiv:2512.23847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a statistical procedure to detect lookahead bias in economic forecasts generated by large language models (LLMs). Using a date-only recall query for a firm-date pair, we estimate the probability that the LLM has internalized information about the realized outcome, a statistic we term Lookahead Propensity (LAP). LAP is materially positive throughout the in-sample period and collapses essentially to zero right after the training-data cutoff. We show that a positive interaction between LAP and the LLM forecast in an accuracy regression indicates lookahead-bias contamination, and apply the test to two forecasting tasks: news headlines predicting stock returns and earnings call transcripts predicting capital expenditures. In both applications, the LLM forecast's predictive power is amplified on high-LAP firm-date pairs, and the interaction loses significance on post-training-cutoff samples. Our test provides a cost-efficient, diagnostic tool for assessing the validity and reliability of LLM-generated forecasts.

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

AI Receptivity or AI Adoption Breadth? A Tool-Specific Reanalysis of the Lower-Literacy/Higher-Usage Link

Authors:
Hristo Inouzhe↗

arXiv:2606.13734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent evidence reported by Tully, Longoni, and Appel (2025) suggests that lower artificial intelligence (AI) literacy predicts greater receptivity toward AI. We revisit this claim using the public data from Study 3 of that article, which measures past usage of five AI tool categories on a five-point frequency scale. We first reproduce the negative association between AI literacy and aggregate AI usage using OLS on participant-level averages, binary logit, ordered logit, and multinomial logit specifications. We then show that the aggregate relationship masks substantial heterogeneity by tool type. In our demographic-adjusted primary specification, AI literacy does not significantly predict text AI usage (ordered-logit $\beta$ = -0.090, p = .387), whereas it remains a strong predictor of non-text AI adoption ($\beta$ = -0.377, p < .001). The non-text effect is also robust under Tully et al.'s original Study 3 control specification ($\beta$ = -0.502, p < .001). Binary, ordered-logit, and multinomial specifications suggest that the non-text relationship is primarily an adoption/non-adoption pattern rather than evidence of intensive use: the demographic-adjusted odds ratio of ever having used a non-text AI tool is 0.68. Thus, in the study that measures self-reported past usage rather than stated preferences, the evidence does not support a simple claim that lower AI literacy predicts greater receptivity to AI in general. It points instead to a narrower pattern of broader adoption across lower-penetration, non-text AI tools.

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

CEVAR: Centerline Embedding Extraction for Endovascular Aneurysm Repair

Authors:
Roman Naeem↗Timo Niiniskorpi↗Charlotte Sandstr\"om↗Naman Desai↗Anders Jeppsson↗Ida H\"aggstr\"om↗Fredrik Kahl↗H{\aa}kan Roos↗Jennifer Alv\'en↗

Long-term mortality rates after endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) remain elevated due to post-EVAR rupture caused by loss of seal in stent graft sealing zones. Structured CT review using centerline measurements improves detection, but current workflows require manual centerline editing and expert operators. We propose a transformer framework for automated, protocol-driven sealing zone assessment that combines 3D centerline tracking with embedding-based geometric prediction. Two state-of-the-art image-to-graph models are evaluated for aorto-iliac centerline extraction from follow-up CT and for measurement of stent position, vessel diameters, and seal lengths according to EVAR4C protocol. Across the full test set and a challenging no-contrast subset, the proposed fully automatic method outperforms the commercial semi-automatic workflow.

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

SPICE-Q and Large-Scale Quantum Chip Production

Authors:
Cai↗Ling Qiao↗Bin Yang↗Fumin Luo↗Chang Liu↗WeiGui Guo↗GuoRong Zhang↗XueFei Liu↗Qinglang Guo↗Bin Wu↗

arXiv:2606.17907v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose SPICE-Q, a SPICE-inspired design-technology co-optimization framework for superconducting quantum processors. Rather than replacing tools such as HFSS, Qiskit Metal, pyEPR, SQcircuit, SQuADDS, scqubits, or QuTiP, SPICE-Q aims to connect them through a unified, traceable data chain spanning process rules, layout, electromagnetic simulation, energy-participation-ratio and circuit quantization, Hamiltonian extraction, noise analysis, cryogenic test, and manufacturing feedback. The central mapping is from process and PDK constraints to layout geometry, electromagnetic modes, equivalent circuit parameters, effective Hamiltonians, and finally metrics such as frequency, coupling, anharmonicity, decoherence, readout performance, and yield. This flow must capture Josephson-junction variability, transmon frequency allocation, resonator and Purcell constraints, coupler crosstalk, microwave routing, 3D interconnects, material/interface loss, package modes, and wafer-scale process statistics. By introducing standardized model interfaces, statistical parameter models, model cards, version governance, and closed-loop calibration from cryogenic and fabrication data, SPICE-Q frames superconducting quantum-chip design as an engineering workflow rather than a collection of isolated simulations. We argue that scalable and fault-tolerant quantum processors will require such a continuous model chain from device physics and electromagnetic fields to quantum dynamics, noise, manufacturability, and system-level yield.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

SAGE: Stochastic Prompt Optimization via Agent-Guided Exploration

Authors:
Ziyi Zhu↗Luka Smyth↗Saki Shinoda↗Jinghong Chen↗

Context engineering has emerged as a primary lever for improving AI systems without parameter updates. Recent work showing that textual gradients do not function as real gradients motivates treating automatic prompt optimization (APO) as black-box search. We introduce SPO (Stochastic Prompt Optimization), a framework for stochastic search over prompt space, and compare three strategies of increasing sophistication: error-informed random search, a genetic algorithm with evolutionary operators, and SAGE (SPO via Agent-Guided Exploration), a multi-agent pipeline with diagnostic code execution. Across three benchmarks, no single strategy dominates; effectiveness depends on the interaction of landscape structure with error type. We further deploy SAGE on a mental-health chatbot under a continuous optimization paradigm, where it compounds eight cycles of individually-noisy A/B tests into a statistically robust gain in next-day retention. We argue that coupling qualitative diagnosis with quantitative validation is what makes agentic optimization effective for open-ended task-oriented dialogue.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

The Illusion of Multi-Agent Advantage

Authors:
Prathyusha Jwalapuram↗Hehai Lin↗Chuyuan Li↗Fangkai Jiao↗Sudong Wang↗Yifei Ming↗Zixuan Ke↗Chengwei Qin↗Giuseppe Carenini↗Shafiq Joty↗

Prevailing wisdom posits that Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are superior to Single-Agent Systems (SAS), citing advantages like context protection, parallel processing and distributed decision-making. However, empirical support for this claim relies primarily on comparisons with SAS baselines using benchmarks that prioritize isolated reasoning tasks, which do not adequately assess these advantages. Focusing on automatically generated MAS that are designed for enhanced generalizability over manually-designed counterparts, we perform a rigorous, systematic evaluation against SAS, specifically Chain-of-Thought with Self-Consistency (CoT-SC). Across traditional reasoning datasets and tasks with interactive multi-step workflows (e.g., BrowseComp-Plus), we demonstrate that automatic MAS consistently underperform CoT-SC despite being up to 10x more expensive. To isolate these failures from limitations inherent to task structure, we introduce a diagnostic synthetic dataset tailored for MAS featuring explicit task decomposition, context separation and parallelization potential. We show that expert-architected MAS consistently outperforms automatically generated architectures in both raw performance and cost-efficiency on this dataset, demonstrating that existing evaluation frameworks mask critical architectural gaps and inefficiencies of complex MAS by failing to account for the marginal utility of increased computational cost. Critically, systematic deconstruction of the generated MAS architectures reveals that current automated design paradigms produce architectural bloat that prioritizes superficial complexity which does not translate into functional utility, exposing a fundamental misalignment with multi-agent principles.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Clipping Makes Distributed and Federated Asynchronous SGD Robust to Stragglers

Authors:
Samuel Erickson↗Mikael Johansson↗

arXiv:2606.13287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In modern machine learning, parallelization of training is an important strategy for increasing scale. Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD), which maximizes the utilization of available hardware by avoiding waiting for slow workers. However, with constant step sizes, the convergence of ASGD is nonetheless affected negatively by slow workers due to large delays in updates. At the same time, it has been empirically observed in asynchronous training of deep learning models that gradient clipping "stabilizes" training. In this work, we provide a theoretical justification for this behavior, as we show that clipping removes the dependence of the maximum delay in the oracle complexity. We employ a sub-Weibull model of gradient noise which generalizes sub-Gaussian and sub-exponential distributions to more heavy-tailed distributions, motivated by empirical observations in deep learning. We show convergence in expectation, and the first time in asynchronous optimization, convergence with high probability.

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

Effects of Josephson Junction Non-idealities on Adiabatic Quantum Flux Parametron Circuits

Authors:
Daryoush Shiri↗Likai Yang↗Mohamed A. Hassan↗Philip Krantz↗Eric T. Holland↗

arXiv:2606.17338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adiabatic quantum flux parametron (AQFP) gate is a promising approach to scale up the cryogenic microwave electronics for superconducting qubit multiplexed control. However, the performance of these circuits depends on the quality of the Josephson junctions which are ideally superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) type following the ideal sinusoidal relation between current and quantum phase. We demonstrate how the non-sinusoidal current-phase relation in Superconductor-Normal metal-Superconductor (SNS) and weak link (WL) junctions affects the speed, delay, and margin of the AQFP gates. The JJ models are defined in the Keysight ADS simulator using symbolically defined device (SDD) method.

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

"Is This Not Enough?": Asymmetries in Institutional Accountability and Collective Sensemaking in the Case of Canada's Algorithmic Visa Triage System

Authors:
Dipto Das↗Matthew Tamura↗Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed↗Shion Guha↗

arXiv:2606.13071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper examines how algorithmic accountability in Canada's visa system is articulated institutionally and experienced by applicants across borders. We analyzed Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC)'s Algorithmic Impact Assessment (AIA) for the temporary resident visa (TRV) triage system using the algorithmic decision-making adapted for the public sector (ADMAPS) framework and analyzed Reddit discussions among applicants using a mixed-methods approach. We show that while institutional artifacts emphasize transparency, procedural safeguards, and bounded impacts, applicants engage in collective sensemaking to interpret opaque decisions, often relying on peer knowledge amid uncertainty. We identify three asymmetries between how institutional accountability is structured and how people perceive the process: epistemic asymmetry in access to decision logic, jurisdictional asymmetry in exposure shaped by geopolitical positioning, and temporal–relational asymmetry in how waiting and uncertainty are experienced. We emphasize why it is important to shift attention from institutional design to the uneven distribution of experiences with public-sector algorithmic governance. Together, these contributions demonstrate how algorithmic governance systems in the context of transnational migration produce structured asymmetries not captured by institutional disclosure frameworks, and how extending ADMAPS can account for those uneven translations of accountability.

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24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Daily briefing: First-ever ‘nuclear’ clocks put atomic clocks in the shade

Authors:
Flora Graham↗

Two research teams have created a new, long-awaited type of timekeeper. Plus, how backlash has saved an ocean-monitoring network targeted by Trump and how our cultural heritage is put at risk by climate change. Two research teams have created a new, long-awaited type of timekeeper. Plus, how backlash has saved an ocean-monitoring network targeted by Trump and how our cultural heritage is put at risk by climate change.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

DRIFT: Refining Instruction Data via On-Policy Data Attribution

Authors:
Zefan Wang↗Lincheng Li↗Tianyu Yu↗Yuan Yao↗

arXiv:2606.18307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizing the training data distribution for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) dictates the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing data curation methods excel at accelerating training under constrained budgets, they are less suited to elevating the capability upper bound. The challenge here is no longer to identify a smaller subset that preserves performance, but to refine the data distribution toward instances most capable of improving the final model. To address this problem, we explore instance-level data attribution using Influence Functions (IF). We identify that standard IF formulations struggle in this setting due to two structural limitations: a proximity gap caused by off-policy validation targets, and a severe bias towards gradient norm. We propose DRIFT (Data Refinement via On-Policy Influence Functions for Supervised Fine-Tuning). Instead of relying on external reference data, DRIFT utilizes the model's on-policy rollouts as validation targets, which empirically minimizes the parameter proximity gap and better aligns with the local neighborhood assumption of IF. It further applies signed weighting based on trajectory correctness and debiases influence scores against the gradient hacking issue, allowing a small set of validation queries to act as reliable anchors for attributing the full dataset. Experiments on 7B-parameter instruction and reasoning models show that DRIFT consistently raises the performance ceiling on both, outperforming existing data curation baselines.

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