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01.
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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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NIM4-ASR: Towards Efficient, Robust, and Customizable Real-Time LLM-Based ASR

Authors:
Yuan Xie↗Jiaqi Song↗Guang Qiu↗Xianliang Wang↗Kai Qiao↗Junfeng Yuan↗Shengqing Liu↗Yi Zhang↗Bowen Chen↗Ming Lei↗Jie Gao↗Jie Wu↗…

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a mainstream paradigm in recent years. Although existing LLM-based ASR models demonstrate impressive performance on public benchmarks, their training remains predominantly data-driven, leaving key practical challenges insufficiently addressed – particularly limited downward scalability in resource-constrained deployments and hallucinations under acoustically challenging conditions. To address these issues, we present NIM4-ASR, a production-oriented LLM-based ASR framework optimized for both efficiency and robustness. Grounded in a principled delineation of functional roles between the encoder and the LLM, we redesign the multi-stage training paradigm to align each module with its intended capability boundary. Specifically, we reformulate the pre-training architecture and objective to mitigate the modality gap and improve parameter efficiency; introduce an iterative asynchronous SFT stage to preserve acoustic fidelity and constrain representation drift; and design an ASR-specialized reinforcement learning stage to further enhance recognition quality and robustness. We additionally incorporate a suite of production-oriented optimizations, including robustness under noisy and silent conditions, real-time streaming inference, and hotword customization via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Experiments show that NIM4-ASR achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple public benchmarks with merely 2.3B parameters, while substantially outperforming larger-scale competitors on internal benchmarks – particularly in entity-intensive real-world scenarios. NIM4-ASR further supports million-scale hotword customization via RAG with sub-millisecond retrieval latency, enabling efficient adaptation to emerging entities and personalized user requirements.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Smooth time-dependent control of dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates

Authors:
Chris Whitty↗Aitor Ala\~na↗Michele Modugno↗Xi Chen↗G\'eza T\'oth↗Andreas Ruschhaupt↗Eugene Ya. Sherman↗

arXiv:2606.20507v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider protocols for control of dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates where the critical role is played by the long-range anisotropic interatomic magnetic dipole-dipole interaction. The phase diagram of such a condensate has been explored theoretically and experimentally with certain values of the interatomic scattering length corresponding to superfluid and supersolid phases, where supersolidity appears as a modulation in the ground state density. Preparation of this modulated ground state is challenging, since excitations appear as a result of a finite-time evolution required to produce qualitative changes in the wavefunction density. To solve this problem we consider the time-dependent control of a dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate using shortcuts to adiabaticity techniques, concentrating on design of the time-dependent scattering length, a parameter of the system easily tunable by contemporary experiments. The first technique is the variational approach based on the Euler-Lagrange equations for a separable ansatz describing the evolution of the superfluid state. Secondly, we study the transition from superfluid to supersolid using a direct optimization protocol. We discuss the fidelity of the developed protocols in terms of the evolution time.

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

Latent Action Pretraining Through World Modeling

Authors:
Bahey Tharwat↗Yara Nasser↗Ali Abouzeid↗Ian Reid↗

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have gained popularity for learning robotic manipulation tasks that follow language instructions. State-of-the-art VLAs, such as OpenVLA and $\pi_{0}$, were trained on large-scale, manually labeled action datasets collected through teleoperation. More recent approaches, including LAPA and villa-X, introduce latent action representations that enable unsupervised pretraining on unlabeled datasets by modeling abstract visual changes between frames. Although these methods have shown strong results, their large model sizes make deployment in real-world settings challenging. In this work, we propose LAWM, a model-agnostic framework to pretrain imitation learning models in a self-supervised way, by learning latent action representations from unlabeled video data through world modeling. These videos can be sourced from robot recordings or videos of humans performing actions with everyday objects. Our framework is able to transfer learned knowledge across tasks, environments, and embodiments. It outperforms models pretrained with ground-truth robot actions and other similar pretraining methods on the LIBERO benchmark and real-world setup, while being efficient and practical for real-world settings.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

3D-RFT: Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Video-based 3D Scene Understanding

Authors:
Xiongkun Linghu↗Jiangyong Huang↗Baoxiong Jia↗Siyuan Huang↗

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards ( RLVR ) has emerged as a transformative paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models ( LLMs), yet its potential in 3D scene understanding remains under-explored. Existing approaches largely rely on Supervised Fine-Tuning ( SFT), where the token-level cross-entropy loss acts as an indirect proxy for optimization, leading to a misalignment between training objectives and task performances. To bridge this gap, we present Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Video-based 3D Scene Understanding (3D-RFT ), the first framework to extend RLVR to video-based 3D perception and reasoning. 3D-RFT shifts the paradigm by directly optimizing the model towards evaluation metrics. 3D-RFT first activates 3D-aware Multi-modal Large Language Models ( MLLM s) via SFT, followed by reinforcement fine-tuning using Group Relative Policy Optimization ( GRPO) with strictly verifiable reward functions. We design task-specific reward functions directly from metrics like 3D IoU and F1-Score to provide more effective signals to guide model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 3D-RFT-4B achieves state-of-the-art performance on various video-based 3D scene understanding tasks. Notably, 3D-RFT-4B significantly outperforms larger models (e.g., VG LLM-8B) on 3D video detection, 3D visual grounding, and spatial reasoning benchmarks. We further reveal good properties of 3D-RFT such as robust efficacy, and valuable insights into training strategies and data impact. We hope 3D-RFT can serve as a robust and promising paradigm for future development of 3D scene understanding.

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

ReportQA: QA-Based Radiology Report Evaluation

Authors:
Yiming Shi↗Shaoshuai Yang↗Xi Chen↗Haolin Li↗Hengyu Zhang↗Che Jiang↗Kaiwen Wang↗Xun Zhu↗Dong Xie↗Fei Wang↗Dejing Dou↗Miao Li↗…

Radiology report evaluation is essential for advancing automated report generation. Natural language generation metrics have limited clinical relevance. Clinical efficacy (CE) metrics evaluate important medical findings, but focus mainly on presence and cover only a limited set of entities. Due to heavy reliance on manual annotations, it is difficult for CE metrics to extend clinical entities or attributes. In clinical practice, radiology reports serve as a medium for information transfer. Clinicians use them to perform downstream diagnostic tasks without directly inspecting images. Based on this insight, we propose ReportQA, a clinical-related and flexible radiology report evaluation framework, supporting detailed quantitative analysis of radiology report generation systems. We first collect datasets covering multiple imaging modalities and anatomical regions. We then construct knowledge trees of clinical entities and attributes with radiologist guidance, and use large language models (LLMs) to extract structured information from raw reports. Next, we generate QA pairs from predefined templates and apply quality control through self-filtering and report-based filtering. During evaluation, the report is treated as context, and an LLM acts as a judge model to answer the QA pairs. Based on the resulting QA accuracy, we introduce QAScore metric. Compared with existing metrics, QAScore shows better alignment with radiologist judgments. Experiments on multiple state-of-the-art vision-language models reveal that current report-based inference paradigms struggle to learn fine-grained clinical representations and exhibit strong negative prior biases. In contrast, question-driven inference provides a more effective alternative. For reproducibility and extensibility, we release the knowledge trees, structured reports, and QA pairs, along with the pipeline code for QA construction and evaluation.

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

DIPHINE: Diffusion-based $\Phi$-ID Neural Estimator

Authors:
Simon Pedro Galeano Munoz↗Mustapha Bounoua↗Giulio Franzese↗Pietro Michiardi↗Maurizio Filippone↗

arXiv:2606.18997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Uncovering the true informational architecture of real-world complex systems requires disentangling how their components uniquely store, redundantly share, and synergistically integrate information over time. Integrated Information Decomposition ($\Phi$ID) is a framework for decomposing the information dynamics of multivariate systems into sixteen non-overlapping atoms that characterize redundant, unique, and synergistic modes of information storage, transfer, and integration. Existing methods to compute $\Phi$ID are restricted to Gaussian or discrete systems, preventing its application to continuous non-Gaussian dynamical systems. We address this limitation by proposing DIPHINE (Diffusion-based $\Phi$-ID Neural Estimator), the first neural estimator that leverages score-based diffusion models to jointly estimate all the mutual information terms required by $\Phi$ID from a single amortized network, recovering the sixteen atoms through Möbius inversion. We provide a theoretical analysis of error propagation through the inversion, showing that the Jacobian of the mapping from mutual informations to atoms is integer-valued and that the synergy-to-synergy atom is provably the hardest to estimate. We demonstrate accurate recovery of ground-truth atoms on synthetic benchmarks, superior performance compared to established mutual information estimators, and the ability to extract physiologically interpretable information-dynamic structure on an application involving real data without any distributional assumptions.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

LiveStarPro: Proactive Streaming Video Understanding with Hierarchical Memory for Long-Horizon Streams

Authors:
Zhenyu Yang↗Kairui Zhang↗Bing Wang↗Shengsheng Qian↗Changsheng Xu↗

Despite the remarkable progress of Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs), current online architectures still struggle to simultaneously process continuous video streams, decide autonomously when to respond, and preserve long-horizon contextual memory. These obstacles undermine real-time responsiveness and cause severe forgetting throughout prolonged interactions. In this work, we introduce LiveStarPro, a live streaming assistant that is designed for proactive video understanding over long-horizon streams. The design of LiveStarPro rests on three complementary components. The first component is Streaming Verification Decoding (SVeD), an inference framework that identifies the appropriate response timing through single-pass perplexity verification, thereby eliminating the dependency on explicit silence tokens. The second component is Streaming Causal Attention Masks (SCAM), a training strategy that enforces incremental video-language alignment over variable-length streams. The third component is Tree-Structured Hierarchical Memory (TSHM), a recursive memory architecture that organizes evicted historical information into event chains and consequently enables efficient retrieval from effectively unbounded video streams. To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation under realistic online conditions, we further present OmniStarPro, a large-scale benchmark that spans 15 diverse real-world scenarios and that extends to hour-scale streams for the assessment of long-term recall. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiveStarPro consistently surpasses existing methods, attaining a 28.9% improvement in semantic correctness and an 18.2% reduction in timing error, while its streaming key-value cache further yields a 1.58x inference speedup over the same model without caching. The model and the code are publicly available at https://github.com/sotayang/LiveStarPro.

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09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Federated Learning for Feature Generalization with Convex Constraints

Authors:
Dongwon Kim↗Donghee Kim↗Sung Kuk Shyn↗Kwangsu Kim↗

arXiv:2606.14416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated learning (FL) often struggles with generalization due to heterogeneous client data. Local models are prone to overfitting their local data distributions, and even transferable features can be distorted during aggregation. To address these challenges, we propose FedCONST, an approach that adaptively modulates update magnitudes based on the parameter strength of the global model. This prevents over-emphasizing well-learned parameters while reinforcing underdeveloped ones. Specifically, FedCONST employs linear convex constraints to ensure training stability and preserve locally learned generalization capabilities during aggregation. A Gradient Signal to Noise Ratio (GSNR) analysis further validates the effectiveness of FedCONST in enhancing feature transferability and robustness. As a result, FedCONST effectively aligns local and global objectives, mitigating overfitting and promoting stronger generalization across diverse FL environments, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Library-Aware Doubles and Iterative Repair for Large Language Model-Generated Unit Tests in OpenSIL Firmware

Authors:
Ma Toan Bach↗Yuchi Zheng↗Haingo Razafindranto↗Tanvir Alam↗Aric Leather↗Ranveer Sandhu↗Jitesh Arora↗

arXiv:2606.19725v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Validating changes in low-level C firmware is expensive because unit tests (UTs) are fragile under strict build constraints, where missing headers, unresolved symbols, and dependency mismatches frequently prevent compilation and linking. This study introduces an automated UT authoring workflow for the Open-Source Silicon Initialization Library (openSIL) firmware codebase maintained by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) that reduces manual effort through a large language model (LLM) guided multi-agent pipeline. The workflow combines automated generation of test scaffolds, library-aware creation or reuse of stubs, mocks, and fakes, and an iterative compile-dispatch repair loop driven by build logs and line-coverage feedback. We evaluate the approach using compilation success, repair iterations, dispatch success, and line coverage, with time, cost, and token usage as secondary measures. Across 76 functions under test, the workflow generated compilable UTs for 73 functions. In a configuration without line coverage guidance or retrieval augmentation, mean line coverage reached 73.9%. On a 48-function subset evaluated under both configurations, mean line coverage reached 98.8% with line-coverage guidance alone and reached 94.7% when combined with vector-database retrieval. Results show that automated generation-and-repair pipelines can substantially improve UT creation efficiency and coverage for constrained firmware environments while reducing manual debugging effort.

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

StyleShield: Exposing the Fragility of AIGC Detectors through Continuous Controllable Style Transfer

Authors:
Guantian Zheng↗

arXiv:2605.00924v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-generated content (AIGC) detectors are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings such as academic integrity screening, yet their reliability rests on a fundamental paradox: as language models are trained on human-written corpora, the statistical boundary between AI and human writing will inevitably dissolve as models improve. Commercial incentives have further distorted this landscape – detection services and "de-AIification" tools often operate within the same supply chain, replacing evaluation of content quality with judgment of content origin. We present StyleShield, the first flow matching framework for conditional text style transfer, operating directly in continuous token embedding space via a DiT backbone with zero-initialized cross-attention adapters conditioned on frozen Qwen-7B representations. At inference, we adapt the SDEdit paradigm from image synthesis to text embeddings, with a single parameter gamma providing smooth continuous control over the evasion-preservation trade-off. On a multi-domain Chinese benchmark, StyleShield achieves 94.6% evasion against the training detector and >=99% against three unseen detectors, maintaining 0.928 semantic similarity. We further introduce RateAudit, a document-level scheduling algorithm that demonstrates detection-rate verdicts can be set to arbitrary values, directly questioning the reliability of score-based evaluation.

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

Examining Human-Like Behaviors in LLMs: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Model Behaviors, User Factors, and System Prompts

Authors:
Sunnie S. Y. Kim↗Margit Bowler↗Leon A Gatys↗

arXiv:2606.18258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a wide range of human-like behaviors, from expressing thoughts and emotions, to engaging in relationship-building with users, to refusing requests and maintaining boundaries. Despite their prevalence, researchers and practitioners lack methods and empirical insights to make informed decisions about when and what types of human-like behaviors LLMs should exhibit. To fill this gap, we present a multi-dimensional analysis of the prevalence, potential effects, and controllability of these behaviors using LLM-as-a-judge and human evaluation. Across 21,000 multi-turn conversations from four widely used models (gpt-4o, gpt-4.1-mini, claude-sonnet-4.6, gemini-2.5-flash), we find that human-like behaviors are pervasive but vary across models and user factors (conversation goals and user profiles). In terms of perceived appropriateness, human evaluators judged self-referential and relationship-building behaviors as less appropriate from LLMs than from humans, but boundary-maintaining behaviors more appropriate from LLMs than from humans. Finally, we show that system prompting can control these behaviors, though it requires careful evaluation to avoid unintended effects. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide recommendations for responsible LLM design and evaluation.

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

Fine-tuning LLMs for Passive Depression Severity Estimation from AI Mental Health Dialogue

Authors:
Olivier Tieleman↗Ziyi Zhu↗Ting Su↗Samuel J. Bell↗Thomas D. Hull↗Caitlin A. Stamatis↗

Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and early detection of symptom change is essential for timely intervention. Validated instruments such as the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) support symptom monitoring at scale, but real-world completion rates are low, introducing response bias and systematic missingness. Passive approaches that infer severity from routinely generated data could close this gap. We address this by predicting PHQ-9 total scores directly from transcripts of conversations between users and an AI mental health application, requiring only conversation text and no additional clinical data. We fine-tune a Qwen3.5-27B backbone with a regression head, augment 3,111 ground-truth labels with pseudolabels generated by a reasoning model (Claude Opus) and iteratively trained intermediate models, for a combined dataset of 6,283 users. On a held-out test set of 842 users, our best model achieves MAE = 2.6, RMSE = 4.0, Pearson r = 0.80, and AUC = 0.91 at the PHQ-9 >= 10 clinical threshold. We also find AUC > 0.87 at every severity threshold from PHQ-9 >= 3 to PHQ-9 >= 24, demonstrating that the model captures depression severity across the full clinical spectrum. This work opens the door to passive, continuous symptom monitoring in AI mental health platforms, without requiring users to complete self-report measures.

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

MambaH-Fit: Rethinking Hyper-surface Fitting-based Point Cloud Normal Estimation via State Space Modelling

Authors:
Weijia Wang↗Yuanzhi Su↗Pei-Gen Ye↗Yuan-Gen Wang↗

We present MambaH-Fit, a state space modelling framework tailored for hyper-surface fitting-based point cloud normal estimation. Existing normal estimation methods often fall short in modelling fine-grained geometric structures, thereby limiting the accuracy of the predicted normals. Recently, state space models (SSMs), particularly Mamba, have demonstrated strong modelling capability by capturing long-range dependencies with linear complexity and inspired adaptations to point cloud processing. However, existing Mamba-based approaches primarily focus on understanding global shape structures, leaving the modelling of local, fine-grained geometric details largely under-explored. To address the issues above, we first introduce an Attention-driven Hierarchical Feature Fusion (AHFF) scheme to adaptively fuse multi-scale point cloud patch features, significantly enhancing geometric context learning in local point cloud neighbourhoods. Building upon this, we further propose Patch-wise State Space Model (PSSM) that models point cloud patches as implicit hyper-surfaces via state dynamics, enabling effective fine-grained geometric understanding for normal prediction. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms existing ones in terms of accuracy, robustness, and flexibility. Ablation studies further validate the contribution of the proposed components.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Leadership as Coordination Control: Behavioral Signatures and the Recovery-Advantage Boundary in Multi-Agent LLM Teams

Authors:
Haewoon Kwak↗

Team science holds that leadership is contingent: it helps only under specific conditions, and capable, autonomous teams may need none at all. We ask the analogous question for multi-agent LLM teams: under what measurable conditions does process-level coordination control add value, and do those conditions match what team science predicts? We use behavioral signatures (majority lock-in, exploration, recovery from an incorrect round-0 consensus) and per-action ablations, clean because each controller is an explicit action set, not a monolithic prompt. We operationalize three classical leadership styles (transactional, transformational, situational) as controllers over a shared action vocabulary (explore, revise, accept, synthesize). A matched controller with the same actions but an arbitrary rule recovers no better than majority voting, so the theory-derived rule, not the vocabulary, does the work. Across four task regimes and three open-weight model families, no controller dominates by accuracy, as the contingency view predicts: transactional control matches a shared round-0 vote on all 12 (model, regime) combinations to within 1.3pp, and gains appear only on the one combination where the round-0 majority is unreliable (llama-4-scout social; situational +8pp over flat). A recovery-advantage account, tested with four boundary probes, says a controller beats plain interaction only where the round-0 majority is unreliable, the task is recoverable, and undirected interaction does not already repair it. These regions map onto contingency theory (leadership substitutes, path-goal redundancy, the situational readiness gap), so a largely null accuracy result is what the theory predicts, not a failure of the controllers. We read process-level coordination control as a contingency to be measured and theory-mapped, not a leaderboard to be topped.

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

RASST: Retrieval-Augmented Simultaneous Speech Translation

Authors:
Jiaxuan Luo↗Siqi Ouyang↗Jiaxing Xu↗Lei Li↗

Simultaneous speech translation produces target text incrementally from partial speech input. Recent speech large language models have markedly improved SST quality but still struggle with rare and domain-specific terminology. Retrieval augmentation has helped in automatic speech recognition and neural machine translation, but extending it to SST is non-trivial: retrieval must be fast and accurate under partial speech, and the model must decide whether and when to apply retrieved terms during incremental generation. We propose Retrieval-Augmented Simultaneous Speech Translation (RASST), which addresses both challenges. For accurate cross-modal retrieval under partial input, RASST trains a lightweight speech-text retriever that produces chunkwise terminology hints for the Speech LLM via multi-scale retrieval. To use these hints correctly, we synthesize training data that teaches the Speech LLM to decide whether and when to apply each retrieved term. Experiments on ACL 60/60 dev set and the ESO test set show that RASST improves terminology accuracy by nearly 40% and overall translation quality by up to 3 BLEU points, with negligible computational overhead.

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

MBABench: Evaluating LLM Agents on End-to-End Spreadsheet Tasks in Finance

Authors:
Thomson Yen↗Julian Poeltl↗Harshith Srinivas Gear↗Yilin Meng↗Joshua Fan↗Adam Shen↗Yili Liu↗Ali Bauyrzhan↗Siri Du↗Haoyang Liu↗Daniel Guetta↗Hongseok Namkoong↗…

arXiv:2605.22664v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly expected to carry out end-to-end workflows, producing complete artifacts from high-level user instructions. To meet enterprise needs, frontier AI labs have developed agents that can construct entire spreadsheets from scratch. This is especially relevant in finance, where core workflows such as financial modeling, forecasting, and scenario analysis are commonly conducted through spreadsheets. Yet, existing spreadsheet benchmarks do not measure this advanced capability, focusing instead on question-answering or single-formula edits. To address this gap, we provide one of the first evaluations of agents on end-to-end spreadsheet tasks, focusing on economically critical financial workflows such as modeling and scenario analysis. Since deliverables therein are routinely reviewed and revised by multiple stakeholders, judging their quality necessarily involves high-level criteria such as readability or ease of modification. To reflect the multidimensional nature of solution quality, we develop an evaluation taxonomy comprising three dimensions: Accuracy, Formula, and Format, each comprising fine-grained criteria that reflect professional standards. The Claude family leads the benchmark and produces the most professional-looking outputs in our qualitative review, but even the strongest agents frequently fall short of professional finance standards and degrade sharply as the difficulty increases beyond a few chained calculations. This suggests that current agents are not yet able to reliably produce professional-quality spreadsheets at the level of complexity real-world workflows demand.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Self-Questioning Vision-Language Models: Reinforcement Learning for Compositional Visual Reasoning

Authors:
Saraswathy Amjith↗

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are AI systems that process both images and text, yet they often struggle with compositional visual reasoning questions that require chaining multiple steps together, such as identifying objects, counting them, and comparing the results. Existing approaches improve this reasoning by training models on human-written step-by-step explanations, but creating these annotations is expensive and difficult to scale. We propose a self-questioning framework that trains a VLM to break visual questions into smaller sub-questions and answer each one before producing a final response, using a reinforcement learning algorithm called Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). The model is never shown examples of how to decompose questions, it discovers this behavior on its own, guided by a reward signal that scores whether the output contains sub-questions and whether the final answer is correct. We apply this framework to a 3-billion-parameter model, training on both synthetic scenes of geometric shapes (CLEVR) and real-world photographs (A-OKVQA). On A-OKVQA, both self-questioning and standard reinforcement learning substantially improve accuracy over the untrained model (52.2% and 51.6% vs. 46.8%). We introduce the first self-questioning VLM by rewarding not only the final answer like standard RL but additionally for generating intermediate sub-questions, enabling it to discover compositional decomposition strategies. These results suggest that teaching AI systems to ask themselves intermediate questions is a promising strategy for complex visual reasoning, particularly when the difficulty of a question warrants explicit step-by-step decomposition.

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19.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-08

Climate change and non-communicable diseases: An invisible syndemic

Authors:
Gokul Parameswaran↗

by Gokul Parameswaran, Sadeer Al-Kindi, Sanjay Rajagopalan Climate change accelerates non-communicable diseases (NCDs) through cascading environmental disruptions and is attributed to driving increased NCD-related mortality. Yet this syndemic remains invisible and underfunded. We detail why addressing the climate-NCD intersection is critical for improving health. In this Perspective, Sanjay Rajagopalan and colleagues discusses how climate change accelerates non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and exacerbates NCD-related mortality, and calls for greater visibility and funding to address this syndemic and improve human health.

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

EvoBrowseComp: Benchmarking Search Agents on Evolving Knowledge

Authors:
Yunhan Wang↗Jiaan Wang↗Lianzhe Huang↗Xianfeng Zeng↗Fandong Meng↗

Search Agents – large language models augmented with search tools – have intensified the need for future-proof evaluation benchmarks. Existing benchmarks such as BrowseComp rely on static knowledge, making them vulnerable to test-set contamination and parametric memorization. Consequently, models can achieve high scores through fact recall rather than genuine retrieval, obscuring true browsing competence via reasoning shortcuts. In this paper, we introduce EvoBrowseComp, an evolving benchmark of 400 English and 400 Chinese contamination-free complex questions synthesized via live-web traversal. To collect these questions, we design a three-agent collaborative framework: (1) a QA synthesis agent that retrieves fresh knowledge from the live web to synthesize QA pairs; (2) an information filtering agent that filters retrieved knowledge in terms of credibility and popularity to block parametric shortcuts; and (3) a high-level guidance agent that formalizes questions into reasoning graphs to reduce logical redundancy and shortcuts in synthesized QA pairs. Because the framework supports fully automated synthesis, EvoBrowseComp can be regularly updated to prevent data contamination and maintain temporal freshness. Extensive experiments confirm its great difficulty, requiring broad horizontal search. It establishes a scalable paradigm for auto-updatable, high-difficulty benchmarking that keeps pace with both evolving world knowledge and advancing agent capabilities.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Spatial-Aware Reduction Framework: Towards Efficient and Faithful Visual State Space Models

Authors:
Jindi Lv↗Aoyu Li↗Yuhao Zhou↗Zheng Zhu↗Xiaofeng Wang↗Qing Ye↗Yueqi Duan↗Wentao Feng↗Jiancheng Lv↗

arXiv:2606.19932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mamba demonstrates strong efficiency in modeling long visual sequences. However, when token reduction is applied to structurally enhanced Mamba variants, these models exhibit a severe performance collapse. We attribute this degradation to the spatially agnostic nature of existing reduction methods, which violate the two-dimensional structural premise required by the selective scanning mechanism. In this work, we propose STORM, a spatial-aware token reduction framework designed to maintain structural integrity throughout the compression process. STORM reformulates reduction into a structured operation on spatial units, enforcing localized constraints to maintain both grid topology and neighborhood coherence. As a plug-and-play module, STORM equips existing reduction pipelines with explicit spatial awareness without any training. Empirical results demonstrate that STORM achieves state-of-the-art pruning accuracy across diverse vision Mamba backbones under training-free settings. Notably, STORM delivers a substantial accuracy recovery on VMamba, outperforming prior methods by up to 63.3\% in top-1 accuracy. Meanwhile, STORM incurs only a 1.0\% accuracy drop on PlainMamba, achieving performance comparable to ViT.

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22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Poisson approximation by coupling

Authors:
Rinaldo B. Schinazi↗

arXiv:2605.01894v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: It is well known that a binomial $(n,p)$ can be approximated by a Poisson distribution with parameter $np$. The typical approach in undergraduate probability texts is to show a convergence result for the distribution of the binomial as $n$ goes to infinity and $np$ converges to some $\lambda$. In this note we use instead the coupling technique to show a much more general result. Moreover, we only use elementary results from probability.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

MoDiCoL: A Modular Diagnostic Continual Learning Dataset for Robust Speech Recognition

Authors:
Theresa Pekarek Rosin↗Matthias Kerzel↗Stefan Wermter↗

Modern Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have made remarkable progress on standard benchmarks, yet performance gaps have emerged under real-world distribution shifts, caused by recording conditions, accents, speech impairments, and noise. Existing datasets and benchmarks typically isolate these factors, which overlooks their co-occurrence in real-world applications. In this paper, we argue that model robustness can be treated as a dynamic capability that continually develops, and we introduce MoDiCoL, a Modular Diagnostic Continual Learning dataset designed for controlled analysis of linguistic content, speaker characteristics, and acoustic environments. Furthermore, we propose a real-world-inspired continual learning curriculum to simulate incremental updates and study how robustness is acquired, transferred, and forgotten. We evaluate three continual learning strategies and provide detailed insights into robustness under evolving conditions.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

From Specification to Execution: AI Assisted Scientific Workflow Management

Authors:
Komal Thareja↗Hamza Safri↗Rajiv Mayani↗Anirban Mandal↗Ewa Deelman↗

arXiv:2606.18425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific workflow management systems (WMS) support scalable and reproducible execution of complex pipelines, but workflow design, implementation, and debugging remain largely manual and require significant expertise. Recent approaches using large language models (LLMs) show promise for workflow generation from natural language, but often rely on direct code synthesis, which limits transparency, reproducibility, and integration with workflow systems. We present an AI-assisted approach to scientific workflow management that combines specification-driven workflow generation, automated debugging, and distributed execution. The method introduces a structured specification phase that separates workflow intent, design, and implementation, allowing validation prior to code generation. We also develop an LLM-based debugging agent that diagnoses and resolves failures across multiple system layers. To support distributed execution and user interaction, we integrate Pegasus, a widely used WMS, with a Model Context Protocol (MCP) layer, providing a unified interface for workflow submission, monitoring, and control. We evaluate the approach using a federated learning workflow for medical imaging, chosen for its parallel, iterative, and dependency-intensive structure. The system generated and executed large-scale workflows with thousands of jobs, reduced debugging effort, and allowed non-expert users to construct workflows with expert-level design patterns. These results indicate that end-to-end AI-assisted workflow generation and execution is feasible, and point toward AI-driven platforms for managing the scientific workflow lifecycle.

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25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A Low-Regularity Semigroup Sewing Lemma via Quotient Structures

Authors:
Nannan Li↗Xing Gao↗

arXiv:2606.16164v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a low-regularity Sewing theory for the semigroup coboundary $\hat\delta=\delta-a$ associated with a strongly continuous semigroup $S$. Unlike the ordinary low-regularity Sewing problem, the semigroup setting has an intrinsic algebraic non-uniqueness below the threshold $1$, in the sense that solutions are canonical only modulo semigroup cocycles. Accordingly, the natural target is a quotient space rather than an increment space. We identify this quotient structure and construct the corresponding semigroup Sewing map. The construction uses a frozen terminal-time transform, which rewrites semigroup defects, for each terminal time, as ordinary low-regularity Sewing problems on a frozen simplex. This reduction, however, does not by itself produce a genuine semigroup increment; the main additional step is to prove that the frozen solution classes are compatible as the terminal time varies and hence assemble into a canonical quotient class for $\hat\delta$. This yields canonical classes for $0

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