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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Weaving Multi-Source Evidence for Biomedical Reasoning: The BioMedHop Benchmark and BioWeave Framework

Biomedical question answering (QA) increasingly requires reasoning over interacting entities, where supporting evidence is scattered across biomedical knowledge graphs, literature documents, and web-accessible resources. However, existing biomedical QA benchmarks mainly focus on exam-style knowledge, literature comprehension, or short-range multi-hop inference, leaving source-conditioned graph reasoning and evidence topology construction underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce BioMedHop, a multi-source graph-grounded benchmark for evaluating biomedical reasoning over structured evidence topologies. BioMedHop contains 10,045 instances across KG, document, web, and hybrid evidence settings, covering shared-neighbor matching, intersection reasoning, path-based reasoning, and counting, with option-based, open-ended, and numeric count renderings. To support this benchmark, we further propose BioWeave, a source-aware reasoning framework that retrieves biomedical KG paths, gathers supporting clues from documents and web sources, assembles them into a unified evidence graph, and verifies answers through entity-level evidence support. Comprehensive experiments show that BioWeave achieves the best overall performance among compared methods on BioMedHop, outperforming the strong hybrid baseline ToG-2 by 10.5% in the overall average. Moreover, BioWeave consistently improves different LLM backbones and enables smaller models, such as Qwen3-4B, to achieve reasoning performance comparable to GPT-4-Turbo.

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

Are Online Skill and Memory Modules Always Worth Their Tokens? A Budget-Constrained Study of Web Agents

Online web agents often augment a base actor with memory, workflow, or skill modules. These modules can improve performance, but they also consume test-time tokens, a cost rarely reported alongside the actor's inference cost. We study online augmentation, where this overhead is paid on every task, and re-evaluate its benefits under a fixed total inference budget. We compare AWM, ASI, and ReasoningBank with a token-matched vanilla baseline that uses the same budget for additional actor steps. Across three WebArena domains and three models, Gemini 3 Flash, GPT-5.4-mini, and Qwen 3.6-27B, the vanilla baseline matches or surpasses all three augmentation methods in aggregate success rate while often using fewer total tokens. We observe a similar trend on WorkArena-L1 with Qwen 3.6-27B, indicating that the effect extends to enterprise knowledge-work tasks. Our results suggest that skills and workflow memory can be useful in specific domains, but their apparent gains often vanish against a budget-matched actor. We further show that run-to-run variance materially affects outcomes and should be reported as a core evaluation criterion for online web agents.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Does Mixture-of-Experts Actually Help Inference on Consumer and Edge Hardware? An Empirical Study

arXiv:2606.21428v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models are often described as ideal for resource-constrained inference. Each token activates only a small subset of experts, so the per-token compute cost, in floating-point operations (FLOPs), resembles that of a much smaller dense model. Whether that FLOP advantage survives in practice is far less clear. We ask whether MoE models actually run faster and cheaper than comparable dense models on consumer-grade and edge hardware. We benchmark OLMoE-1B-7B (1.3 B active of 6.9 B total) against three dense baselines on an Apple M2 Pro and an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano 8 GB through \texttt{llama.cpp}, measuring throughput, memory, and on-device energy. The answer is device-dependent: OLMoE's active-parameter advantage is only partly realised on the laptop (~10% behind the same-active Llama-3.2-1B) and erodes on the edge device (~31% behind, at 2.1$\times$ the energy per token, with peak memory at the 8 GB ceiling). Patching \texttt{llama.cpp} to time the decode graph node-by-node shows routing accounts for under 9% of MoE-block compute on the cleaner edge backend, so the gap reflects total-parameter memory footprint, expert dispatch, and KV-cache pressure rather than routing. The implication is that on bandwidth-bound edge hardware, inference cost tracks total parameters, not active ones, and sparse activation does not buy back what the device is constrained on. These findings are bounded to one MoE model at this parameter scale and two devices, and we release the full measurement harness and per-run data.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Multi-agent imitation learning with function approximation: Linear Markov games and beyond

arXiv:2602.22810v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we present the first theoretical analysis of multi-agent imitation learning (MAIL) in linear Markov games where both the transition dynamics and each agent's reward function are linear in some given features. We demonstrate that by leveraging this structure, it is possible to replace the state-action level "all policy deviation concentrability coefficient" (Freihaut et al., arXiv:2510.09325) with a concentrability coefficient defined at the feature level which can be much smaller than the state-action analog when the features are informative about states' similarity. Furthermore, to circumvent the need for any concentrability coefficient, we turn to the interactive setting. We provide the first, computationally efficient, interactive MAIL algorithm for linear Markov games and show that its sample complexity depends only on the dimension of the feature map $d$. Building on these theoretical findings, we propose a deep MAIL interactive algorithm which clearly outperforms BC on games such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Connect4.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Electrical-Circuit Simulation of the Uhlmann Phase

arXiv:2606.24559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Uhlmann phase extends the concept of geometric phases to mixed quantum states through a parallel-transport condition on purification amplitudes, but its experimental realization has so far required sophisticated quantum platforms with carefully engineered auxiliary degrees of freedom. In this work, we reformulate the Uhlmann parallel-transport condition as a linear matrix differential equation and vectorize it to obtain an effective dynamical generator. This generator can be directly mapped onto the admittance matrix of a classical RC circuit, thereby translating the Uhlmann dynamics into the evolution of circuit node voltages. We illustrate the mapping using the equatorial-loop model and, via a rotating-frame transformation followed by a real decomposition, derive a time-independent, real-valued dynamical system suitable for analog implementation. LTspice simulations of the resulting active RC network faithfully reproduce the Uhlmann geometric phase and its topological transition at the critical purity, demonstrating that classical electrical circuits offer a simple and accessible platform for probing mixed-state geometric phases.

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

Where Does Social Reasoning Come From? Capability Provenance in Language Models

We use training-data attribution as an interpretable tool for capability discovery, mapping which regions of the pretraining corpus support social-reasoning versus STEM-reasoning in OLMo3-7B. Training-data attribution measures how strongly each training document influences a model's predictions on a benchmark, but document-level scores are too noisy to identify which corpus regions support which capabilities, and prior work has emphasized factual knowledge rather than reasoning. We compute gradient-based attribution (TrackStar via Bergson) over a working set drawn from the de-duplicated Dolma3 mix, aggregate influence across WebOrganizer's 24-format x 24-topic taxonomy (576 bins), and contrast benchmark pairs in a 2x2 design that varies domain (social vs. STEM) and capability type (reasoning vs. knowledge): SocialIQA and MMLU Social Sciences against ARC-Challenge and MMLU STEM. Social and STEM reasoning draw on qualitatively distinct corpus regions, and the contrast is sharper at the reasoning level than at the knowledge level. Targeted machine unlearning provides partial causal validation: forgetting high-attribution topic bins (e.g., Literature for SocialIQA) degrades the aligned benchmark more than within-bin random baselines, and we open-source all code, sampling manifests, the bin-level influence matrix, and unlearning checkpoints.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Managing Task Execution for Unknown Workloads in Batteryless IoT: A Hardware-Agnostic Evaluation

arXiv:2606.24340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has been shifting toward batteryless, energy-harvesting architectures. Sustaining reliable operation in these systems requires intelligent management of highly volatile stored energy. As edge applications grow in complexity, traditional energy-aware schedulers struggle with unpredictable workloads due to their reliance on static execution thresholds or pre-measured, hardware-specific task profiles. To overcome this, we propose two novel, hardware-agnostic dynamic scheduling strategies treating applications as a "black box," requiring no prior energy information: a model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent and an on-the-fly Approximated Prediction (AP) method. We evaluate these methods against an adaptive task rate approach (AsTAR) and optimized static thresholds using a custom-built, physically accurate simulation framework driven by real-world solar data and dynamic LoRa transmission profiles. Rather than claiming universal superiority, our analysis exposes the distinct operational trade-offs of each method: the AP approach delivers lightweight, near-oracle task throughput; the RL agent provides tunable survival-execution balancing; and AsTAR excels at execution pacing across long energy gaps. Finally, we demonstrate that while these advanced strategies provide critical resilience for severely constrained systems with small capacitors, devices with larger energy buffers can efficiently rely on simpler, less computationally expensive static policies.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

PolyAlign: Conditional Human-Distribution Alignment

Post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and preference optimization typically align language models toward a single global assistant behavior. While effective for improving average helpfulness, this can suppress the natural variation of human responses across languages, tasks, and dialogue settings. We study this problem as conditional human-distribution alignment: models should match the human response distribution appropriate to the current interaction context, rather than a universal response style. We introduce PolyAlign, a distribution-aware alignment framework that organizes bilingual interaction data into bucket-specific human reference distributions defined by language, interaction track, response family, and length. PolyAlign combines Bucket-Aware SFT, which balances optimization across heterogeneous buckets, with Human-Distribution Preference Optimization (HDPO), which regularizes preference learning using critic-estimated distance to bucket-specific human support. Across a bilingual evaluation suite covering English and Chinese single- and multi-turn settings, PolyAlign improves conditional naturalness and distributional faithfulness while preserving competitive task utility. The results suggest that post-training should move beyond global alignment objectives toward interaction-aware alignment with human response distributions.

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

Variable-Rate Deep Image Compression based on Low-Rank Adaptation by Progressive Learning

In the digital age, image compression is crucial for numerous applications, including web media, streaming services, high-resolution medical imaging, and connected vehicle networks, enabling efficient data storage and transmission. With the increasing demand for high-quality image communication, the need for advanced compression techniques becomes increasingly critical. Numerous Deep Image Compression (DIC) techniques have recently been introduced, showing impressive performance compared to traditional standards. However, variable-rate image compression remains an unresolved issue. Specific DIC methods deploy multiple networks to attain different compression rates, whereas others use a single model, which often results in higher computational complexity and reduced performance. This work proposes a progressive learning approach for variable-rate image compression based on the parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). We introduce an additional LoRA Rate-Adaptive Module (LoRAM) in DIC methods. Due to the re-parameterized merging of LoRA, our proposed method does not introduce additional computational complexity during inference. Compared to methods utilizing multiple models, comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance, saving 99\% in parameter storage, 90% in datasets, and 97% in training steps.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

VistaRef: Boosting Visual Spatial Orientation Awareness for Pointing-to-Object Detection

Grounding deictic gestures in natural images is fundamental to AR and human-robot collaboration, providing a basis for seamless spatial interaction. While Transformer-based visual models have achieved significant progress in general object detection, their global attention mechanisms often neglect micro-geometric relationships, degrading orientation accuracy. In pointing tasks, this deficiency manifests as an inability to accurately capture the pointing ray implied by finger poses, which results in pointing drift and localization ambiguity when dealing with distant or densely packed objects. To address this, we propose VistaRef, a framework designed to explicitly enhance spatial orientation awareness. First, we develop the Local Hand Entity Modeling (LHEM) module, which incorporates hand-pose embeddings to strengthen the model's capability to capture subtle finger deviations. Second, drawing inspiration from multi-view geometry, we construct the Geometric Ray Modeling (GRM) module to transform implicit orientation information into explicit spatial geometric features, guiding feature aggregation and deep fusion via attention mechanisms. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Orientation-Consistent Alignment Loss (OCAL) to synergistically supervise hand presence and pointing consistency, ensuring that all architectural improvements collectively serve the core objective of spatial localization. Experimental results demonstrate that VistaRef significantly outperforms the baseline, achieving a 14-point absolute gain in grounding accuracy. Qualitative analysis further confirms that VistaRef effectively models the geometric correlation from hand to target, bridging the spatial perception gap inherent in traditional Transformers for complex scenarios. Code: https://github.com/lingli1724/VistaRef.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Stop When Further Reasoning Won't Help: Attention-State Adaptive Generation in Reasoning Models

By incorporating test-time compute scaling, large reasoning models (LRMs) can solve complex problems through explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning processes. However, they often suffer from overthinking, resulting in redundant token outputs and degraded accuracy. Current methods to mitigate this issue remain limited: training-based approaches require substantial computational resources, while training-free methods rely on well-crafted prompts or unreliable confidence signals. In this work, we investigate early stopping from the perspective of attention distributions and propose a simple method, ASAG, which infers the model's reasoning state and adaptively adjusts the generation strategy. The proposed framework is training-free and plug-and-play, enabling seamless integration into existing LRMs. Extensive experiments on nine benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements across mainstream LRMs with varying parameter scales, including the DeepSeek-R1-Distill and Qwen3 series. Specifically, ASAG improves average accuracy by 3.2% while reducing the number of generated tokens by nearly 40% across all reasoning tasks on Qwen3-8B.

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

Learning Credal Ensembles via Distributionally Robust Optimization

arXiv:2602.08470v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Credal predictors are models that are aware of epistemic uncertainty and produce a convex set of probabilistic predictions. They offer a principled way to quantify predictive epistemic uncertainty (EU) and have been shown to improve model robustness in various settings. However, most state-of-the-art methods mainly define EU as disagreement caused by random training initializations, which mostly reflects sensitivity to optimization randomness rather than uncertainty from deeper sources. To address this, we define EU as disagreement among models trained with varying relaxations of the i.i.d. assumption between training and test data. Based on this idea, we propose CreDRO, which learns an ensemble of plausible models through distributionally robust optimization. As a result, CreDRO captures EU not only from training randomness but also from meaningful disagreement due to potential distribution shifts between training and test data. Empirical results show that CreDRO consistently outperforms existing credal methods on tasks such as out-of-distribution detection across multiple benchmarks and selective classification in medical applications.

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

Kubo-Martin-Schwinger conditions for non-Hermitian systems

arXiv:2606.13251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the extension of the Kubo–Martin–Schwinger (KMS) thermal equilibrium condition to non-Hermitian Hamiltonians with real spectra and biorthogonal eigensystems, providing a systematic analysis through three complementary routes. Our central result is a thermodynamic characterisation of quasi-Hermiticity: for $H \in M_d(\mathbb{C})$ diagonalisable with real spectrum, the biorthogonal Gibbs functional $\omega_{\rm{bi}}(A) = Z_{\rm{bi}}^{-1} \sum_n e^{-\beta E_n}\langle\phi_n|A|\psi_n\rangle$ satisfies $\omega_{\rm{bi}}(A^\dag A) \geq 0$ for all $A$ if and only if $H$ is quasi-Hermitian. The proof constructs the metric $\eta$ directly from the eigenprojectors of $\omega_{\rm{bi}}$ via the Riesz representation theorem, with no prior choice of $\eta$, providing a metric-free certificate of quasi-Hermiticity outside the Mostafazadeh–Scholtz framework. Under the full quasi-Hermitian hypothesis, we prove that the $\eta$-Gibbs state $\omega_\eta(A) = Z_\eta^{-1}\, \rm{Tr}[\eta e^{-\beta H}A]$ satisfies all three analytic KMS conditions, using the Hadamard three-line theorem and Bari's theorem on Riesz bases. The result is non-trivial: the transported state $\hat\omega(X) = \rm{Tr}[e^{-\beta h}X\eta]/Z_\eta$ differs from the Gibbs state of the isospectral Hermitian partner $h = \eta^{1/2}H\eta^{-1/2}$ whenever $[\eta,h]\neq 0$, so the KMS property cannot be deduced from the Hermitian theory by similarity. The gap between this result and the full Haag–Hugenholtz–Winnink $C^*$-algebraic framework is identified. Failure modes at exceptional points and for complex spectra are analysed, and the relation to the Fagnola–Umanità quantum detailed balance condition for open systems is discussed.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

A Streaming Sparse Cholesky Method for Derivative-Informed Gaussian Process Surrogates Within Digital Twin Applications

arXiv:2511.00366v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Digital twins are developed to model the behavior of a specific physical asset (or twin), and they can consist of high-fidelity physics-based models or surrogates. A highly accurate surrogate is often preferred over multi-physics models as they enable forecasting the physical twin future state in real-time. To adapt to a specific physical twin, the digital twin model must be updated using in-service data from that physical twin. In this paper, we combine and extend several previous surrogate-related advancements with the goal of demonstrating an end-to-end digital twin (DT) solution for predicting performance of an aircraft structure (the physical asset). To this end, we extend Gaussian process (GP) models to include derivative data, for improved accuracy, with dynamic updating to ingest physical twin data during service. Including derivative data, however, comes at a prohibitive cost of increased covariance matrix dimension. We circumvent this issue through our modified dynamic sparse Cholesky linear system solver. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the prediction accuracy of the derivative-enhanced sparse Cholesky GP method produces improved models upon dynamic data additions. Lastly, we demonstrate the developed algorithm within a DT framework to model fatigue crack growth in an aerospace vehicle, thereby exhibiting through our assembled engineered system how digital twin technologies can be combined in practice.

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

UXBench: Measuring the Actionability of LLM-Generated UX Critiques

arXiv:2606.16262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as UX judges that inspect interfaces, diagnose usability problems, and propose repairs. Yet no controlled benchmark measures whether the resulting critiques are reliable and actionable across heterogeneous product surfaces. We introduce UXBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs as interaction-grounded UX judges. UXBench comprises local-first runnable web fixtures spanning ten product-surface families, paired with coverage-gated browser exploration that forces models to collect interaction evidence before reporting. Each judge model produces a structured UX report over seven rubric dimensions; report quality is measured by whether a fixed downstream repair agent can improve the interface based on the critique. We evaluate eight frontier models under both an automated repair-lift protocol and a blind human validation study. Results show that UX judging is neither saturated nor one dimensional: models differ meaningfully in report actionability, exhibit distinct rubric-level repair signatures, vary in fixture-level reliability, and trade leadership across surface categories

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Apertus LLM Family Expansion via Distillation and Quantization

arXiv:2605.29128v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The wide adoption of LLMs has led to their use in great variety of applications and scenarios, such as chatbot assistants and data annotation, creating the need for the models to satisfy certain budget and hardware constraints. This has led to the trend of LLMs being released in batches consisting of similar models of various sizes for the family of models to adhere to as wide of a range of constraints as possible. In this paper, we validate distillation and quantization as a cost-effective way to expand model families to new sizes and hardware formats. Based on the open-recipe Apertus 8B LLM, we produce Apertus-v1.1 - a distilled family of models with up to 4B parameters trained on 1.7T permissive license tokens. We demonstrate cost-efficiency and strong accuracy performance of our approach for covering large ranges of hardware and systems requirements.

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

Learning from the Self-future: On-policy Self-distillation for dLLMs

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has proven effective for post-training large language models (LLMs), yet its application to diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) remains unexplored. Existing OPSD methods are inherently autoregressive-centric. They inject privileged information via left-to-right prefix conditioning with token-level divergence supervision, a design that fundamentally conflicts with the arbitraryorder generation of dLLMs. We introduce d-OPSD, the first OPSD framework tailored for dLLMs. Our approach makes two core contributions. First, we reframe self-teacher construction by using self-generated answers as suffix conditioning, enabling the student model to learn from "self future-experience" rather than privileged prefixes. Second, we shift supervision from token-level to step-level, aligning training with the iterative denoising process of dLLMs. Experiments across four reasoning benchmarks show that d-OPSD consistently outperforms RLVR and SFT baselines with superior sample efficiency, requiring only around 10% of the optimization steps by RLVR and opening a promising pathway for dLLM posttraining. The code is available at https://github.com/xingzhejun/d-OPSD.

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

Redact or Keep? A Fully Local AI Cascade for Educational Dialogue De-Identification

Educational dialogue is a valuable but sensitive resource for research: the same transcripts that capture authentic learning often capture personally identifiable information (PII) entangled with curricular content, where "Riemann" may refer to a real student or to a mathematical concept. Existing approaches force a tradeoff between governance and accuracy. Commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) can handle this ambiguity but require sending student data to third parties, while local named entity recognition (NER) systems preserve governance but over-redact curricular terms. We propose a fully local cascade framework that reframes de-identification from open-ended entity recognition to constrained privacy triage. A recall-first union proposer combines two lightweight encoders with deterministic rules to over-generate candidate spans; a context-aware reviewer then makes a binary Redact/Keep decision for each candidate using surrounding dialogue and speaker role. We evaluate three reviewer configurations against same-family LLM-only baselines and a commercial API on math tutoring transcripts from two large platforms. The strongest local configuration reaches 0.958 macro F1, compared with 0.767 for a same-family LLM-only baseline and 0.706 for the commercial API, while running entirely on a single laptop. On a targeted challenge set of curricular-personal name ambiguity, the same configuration degrades by only 0.03 F1 versus 0.19 to 0.25 for smaller reviewers. These results suggest that for educational de-identification, problem formulation matters more than model scale.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Deployment-readiness audit of calibration, clinical utility, and fairness in perioperative infection prediction

Objective: Clinical risk scores intended to guide patient-level decisions can show strong average performance. However, predicted probabilities can be systematically too high or too low in specific subgroups even when overall performance is strong. We audited deployment readiness of a strong end-of-surgery postoperative infection model across clinically relevant subgroups and tested mitigation strategies in miscalibrated subgroups. Materials and Methods: We analyzed out-of-fold predictions for 10,719 surgical procedures at a Swiss tertiary hospital, with 504 postoperative bacterial infection events. Prespecified axes were recorded sex, age stratum, and an EHR-derived physiological-reserve proxy. Within subgroups and pairwise intersections, we evaluated discrimination, calibration, threshold-specific errors, and decision-curve net benefit at the prespecified operating threshold. We compared group-specific isotonic recalibration with Wasserstein-barycenter postprocessing and demonstrated portability in SUPPORT2. Results: Overall AUROC was 0.876. While sex-marginal discrimination was similar in women and men (0.878 vs 0.875), age and reserve stratification revealed deployment-readiness failures. Calibration-in-the-large ranged from -0.86 in frail patients to -2.47 in non-frail patients. At the 0.10 operating threshold, decision-curve net benefit was positive in frail patients but negative in pre-frail and non-frail patients. Isotonic recalibration corrected average physiological-reserve-stratified calibration without worsening Brier scores, whereas Wasserstein postprocessing worsened calibration in most procedure clusters. Discussion: Discrimination-only or sex-marginal evaluation would have missed subgroup failures with clinical-utility implications. Conclusion: Subgroup fairness audits for clinical deployment should jointly evaluate discrimination, calibration, and utility. We implemented the audit as the open-source isitfair framework for identifying deployment-relevant subgroup failures, comparing mitigation strategies, and generating structured reports.

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

Steering Emotional Dynamics for Art Therapy: Controllable Narrative Script Generation through Hierarchically Guided LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.16481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Art therapy plays a vital role in emotional healing, in which narrative creation acts as the primary vehicle for emotional expression. Given the inherently dynamic nature of emotions during healing, narratives with finely controlled emotional fluctuations enable individuals to safely project inner conflicts and achieve emotional catharsis. Recently, with the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), automated narrative generation technology has provided a new pathway to support such artistic designs. However, while existing methods can produce fluent texts, they struggle to generate narratives that adhere to specified affective trajectories, failing to meet the demands of emotion-oriented psychological healing. To address these issues, this paper proposes EC-Script, an LLM agent-based framework that enables hierarchical control of the affective trajectory in narrative generation for emotional healing. To ensure that the generated narratives strictly follow the given emotional patterns, EC-Script establishes overall narrative direction through Emotion-Trajectory Planning, propels scene-level plot development with Character-Driven Scene Generation, and regulates local emotional changes of characters via Emotion-Controlled Script Writing. Ultimately, it outputs scene-by-scene script content that remains highly consistent with the preset affective trajectory. Experimental results demonstrate that EC-Script significantly outperforms baseline methods in affective trajectory adherence, exhibiting excellent and reliable emotional controllability, thereby providing effective technical support for AI-assisted emotional healing scenarios.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A quantum implementation of high-order power method for estimating geometric entanglement of pure states

arXiv:2405.19134v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Entanglement is one of the fundamental properties of a quantum state and is a crucial differentiator between classical and quantum computation. There are many ways to define entanglement and its measure, depending on the problem or application under consideration. Each of these measures may be computed or approximated by multiple methods. However, hardly any of these methods can be run on near-term quantum hardware. This work presents a quantum adaptation of the iterative high-order power method for estimating the geometric measure of entanglement of multi-qubit pure states using rank-1 tensor approximation. This method is executable on early fault-tolerant (hybrid) quantum hardware and does not depend on quantum memory. We simulate this algorithm and mitigate the effects of noise on the results of the computation using a theoretical model based on a known mitigation approach, which assumes a global depolarising noise channel.

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

MorphStrata: Layer-Specific Perturbations for Generating Morphence Students in Time-Series Moving Target Defense

arXiv:2606.17435v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series forecasting models remain vulnerable to gradient-based adversarial attacks while existing defense mechanisms typically incur a trade-off in robustness for bounded response and compute cost. The problem is pronounced in Moving Target Defense where maintaining multiple randomized model instances substantially exacerbates the training overhead. In this work, we introduce MorphStrata, a student generation strategy with selective, layer-specific stochastic noise injection that extends the traditional Morphence defense. MorphStrata uses a Transformer backbone as the teacher and perturbs randomly selected architectural blocks to create structured heterogeneity across student models in response to varied data distributions and threat models. We evaluate against vanilla Transformer and Morphence backbones on a suite of benchmarks including the Jena Climate, Electricity Load Diagrams, and Appliances Energy Prediction using FGSM, BIM and PGD attacks across multiple attack strengths. Across datasets and attack regimes, the proposed ensemble maintains comparable adversarial RMSE. Specifically, for high entropy, periodic datasets as in the case of the AEP data, MorphStrata achieves the lowest RMSE across all attacks and perturbation budgets, improving over the static baseline by up to 24.11% and 97.97% under FGSM and BIM respectively at an epsilon value of 0.5 over 30 randomized trials. Targeting the layers to generate MorphStrata students accounts for less than 1% increase in train-times over the Morphence MTD baseline for most of the experiments, while accounting for double digit gains in adversarial RMSE reduction. We also observe a positive correlation between higher pairwise L2 distance (among generated students) and overall defense effectiveness. In summary, MorphStrata maintains adversarial robustness as an MTD defense at marginal cost deltas when compared to existing baselines.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Simulation-Based Multi-Fillet Evaluation of Woody Breast Poultry Fillets

Woody breast (WB) is a myopathy in modern broiler chickens that causes the breast muscle to become unusually stiff and fibrous, leading to decreased meat quality and significant economic losses. State-of-the-art automated WB detection relies on a side-view imaging system to analyze the bending behavior of a single fillet as it falls off a conveyor belt. While highly accurate, this approach is constrained by its single-fillet field of view, creating throughput bottlenecks on commercial processing lines. In this paper, we address this limitation via a novel multi-fillet detection architecture utilizing a top-down camera configuration. To validate our approach, we first develop a high-fidelity digital twin of an industrial conveyor system. Next, we synthesize a diverse dataset of 3D fillet meshes and model their viscoelastic bending dynamics using a physics-based simulation engine. Lastly, a continuous 2D shape deformation score is extracted from the top-down perspective as the simulated fillets traverse the roller precipice. Experimental results demonstrate that the top-down shape score effectively captures the contour changes of the fillets as it bends, providing a robust and scalable alternative to a side-view imaging system for simultaneous multi-fillet WB evaluation.

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

Designing AI-Supported Focus Groups: A Role x Modality Playbook

arXiv:2606.11835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collecting participants' lived experiences is central to design research. Focus groups are uniquely valuable because participants not only share individual accounts but also respond to one another, surfacing comparison, disagreement, and collective sensemaking. However, focus groups are resource-intensive and highly sensitive to facilitation: moderators must probe for specificity, balance participation, manage topic flow, and sustain psychological safety, and subtle facilitation choices can shape what becomes salient. Recent HCI work and commercial meeting tools show that generative AI can scaffold live conversation through prompting, turn regulation, thematic mapping, and real-time summarization. Yet UXR teams lack a clear map of what these capabilities mean in focus groups and what methodological risks they introduce. We synthesize AI supports for live conversation and translate them into a focus-group-specific playbook organized by AI role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied).We synthesize prior work on AI-supported live conversation and propose a focus-group-specific playbook of AI supports organized by role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied). We characterize interactional trade-offs and identify open questions for evaluating AI-supported focus groups as methodological configurations.

25.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-12

General-purpose large language models outperform specialized clinical AI tools on medical benchmarks

Specialized clinical artificial intelligence (AI) tools are entering medical practice despite scarce independent evaluation. We quantitatively evaluate two clinical AI tools, OpenEvidence and UpToDate Expert AI, built on large language models (LLMs) against three frontier LLMs: GPT-5.2, Gemini 3.1 Pro and Claude Opus 4.6. Our evaluation has three stages: (1) 500 MedQA questions testing medical knowledge, (2) 500 HealthBench items measuring alignment with clinicians and (3) the real clinical queries (RCQ) benchmark, built from 100 de-identified queries from physicians to a general-purpose language model in a live clinical environment. For the RCQ benchmark, 12 US clinicians performed randomized, blinded review of model outputs, producing 1,800 model–question annotations. Frontier LLMs outperformed clinical AI tools in all three evaluations. Clinical AI tools performed comparably to auto-enabled Google Search AI Overview on the RCQ. These findings highlight the need for independent, real-world evaluation of AI tools before they enter clinical settings. In an independent evaluation, frontier large language models outperformed specialized clinical artificial intelligence tools on medical knowledge, clinician alignment and real-world clinical queries.