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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

High-Risk Anti-Seizure Medication Use in Childbearing-Age People with Epilepsy in a Taenia solium Endemic Region

Background: People of childbearing potential with epilepsy in regions endemic for Taenia solium, where neurocysticercosis (NCC) is highly prevalent, represent a vulnerable population due to the elevated burden of epilepsy and resource limitations. Clinical practice in these settings remains poorly characterized. This study characterized anti-seizure medication (ASM) prescribing patterns by medication risk profiles among people of childbearing potential with epilepsy in Northern Peru, a region highly endemic for T. solium. Methods: Participants were drawn from a prospective, population-based epilepsy cohort in Tumbes, Peru (2006 to 2020). The analytic population included females with epilepsy aged 15 to 49 years. The primary outcome was pregnancy-associated ASM risk of congenital malformations and adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes. ASMs were classified as ''Established Low Risk'' (lamotrigine, levetiracetam), ''Possible Risk/Inadequate Data'' (carbamazepine, phenobarbital, phenytoin), and ''Established High Risk'' (valproic acid). Prescription patterns were examined in relation to demographic and clinical characteristics. Results: Among 1,975 individuals with epilepsy, 685 were people of childbearing potential. Approximately 34.9% met criteria for probable or definite NCC. Most ASM prescriptions were in the ''Possible Risk/Inadequate Data'' category (87.0%), and 12.8% received ''Established High Risk'' medications. In multivariable analysis, high-risk prescribing was associated with prior ASM use and polytherapy. Discussion: People of childbearing potential with epilepsy were predominantly treated with carbamazepine, phenytoin, phenobarbital, and valproate, reflecting local ASM availability. Despite evidence supporting lamotrigine and levetiracetam in pregnancy, prescribing patterns reflect local formulary constraints. These findings highlight a gap between guideline recommendations and real-world prescribing in resource-limited settings, underscoring the need for context-specific treatment strategies.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Improved Amenability Bounds for Local Coordination Games

arXiv:2606.01963v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study local pure coordination games on finite social networks, continuing the framework of Hutchcroft, Rospuskova, and Tamuz. They showed that low inefficiency in local coordination forces the underlying graph to be amenable, with a square-root loss in the amenability parameter. We improve this loss in the binary unbiased setting. Using Shapley values of a mutual-information game associated with the players' local outputs, we prove that if the average disagreement is at most $\varepsilon$, then the graph is $(O(\varepsilon\log(1/\varepsilon)),r)$-amenable. This gives a sharper quantitative converse between local coordination and graph amenability.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Depth-Width tradeoffs in Algorithmic Reasoning of Graph Tasks with Transformers

Transformers have revolutionized the field of machine learning. In particular, they can be used to solve complex algorithmic problems, including graph-based tasks. In such algorithmic tasks a key question is what is the minimal size of a transformer that can implement the task. Recent work has begun to explore this problem for graph-based tasks, showing that for sub-linear embedding dimension (i.e., model width) logarithmic depth suffices. However, an open question, which we address here, is what happens if width is allowed to grow linearly, while depth is kept fixed. Here we analyze this setting, and provide the surprising result that with linear width, constant depth suffices for solving a host of graph-based problems. This suggests that a moderate increase in width can allow much shallower models, which are advantageous in terms of inference and train time. For other problems, we show that quadratic width is required. Our results demonstrate the complex and intriguing landscape of transformer implementations of graph-based algorithms. We empirically investigate these trade-offs between the relative powers of depth and width and find tasks where wider models have the same accuracy as deep models, while having much faster train and inference time due to parallelizable hardware.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Actionable Interpretability Must Be Defined in Terms of Symmetries

arXiv:2601.12913v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper argues that interpretability research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fundamentally ill-posed as existing definitions of interpretability fail to describe how interpretability can be formally tested or designed for. We posit that actionable definitions of interpretability must be formulated in terms of *symmetries* that inform model design and lead to testable conditions. Under a probabilistic view, we hypothesise that four symmetries (inference equivariance, information invariance, concept-closure invariance, and structural invariance) suffice to (i) formalise interpretable models as a subclass of probabilistic models, (ii) yield a unified formulation of interpretable inference (e.g., alignment, interventions, and counterfactuals) as a form of Bayesian inversion, and (iii) provide a formal framework to verify compliance with safety standards and regulations.

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

D2H-AD: A Hybrid Model Utilizing Hyperdimensional Computing for Advanced Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2606.13754v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Anomaly detection is a fundamental component of intelligent systems with applications in healthcare, cybersecurity, smart grids, and IoT environments. Although conventional machine learning and deep learning methods have demonstrated effectiveness in identifying anomalies, they often rely on large labeled datasets, incur high computational costs, and face scalability challenges in edge and high-dimensional settings. This paper presents D2H-AD, a novel anomaly detection framework based on Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC), a brain-inspired paradigm that represents information using high-dimensional distributed vectors. Unlike existing HDC-based methods, D2H-AD integrates distance-based similarity and density-aware encoding within a unified framework, improving anomaly representation and detection performance. Ablation studies show that hyperdimensional encoding alone yields up to 5.4% higher ROC-AUC than applying the same density-distance scoring directly in the original feature space. Furthermore, D2H-AD consistently outperforms five established baselines, namely HDAD, ODHD, One-Class SVM, Isolation Forest, and Autoencoders, across all evaluated datasets. The framework is lightweight, interpretable, and computationally efficient, making it suitable for resource-constrained and real-time applications. We validate D2H-AD on five benchmark datasets and demonstrate superior F1-score and ROC-AUC performance, together with robustness to class imbalance, noise, and data complexity. In addition to improved accuracy, D2H-AD offers scalability, a small memory footprint, and low-latency operation enabled by binary computations and a compact design. These properties make it particularly attractive for TinyML and edge AI deployments. The proposed framework highlights the potential of HDC for accurate, interpretable, and energy-efficient anomaly detection in dynamic environments.

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

ADaPT: Token-Level Decoupling for Efficient Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606.19919v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large reasoning models rely on long chain-of-thought to achieve strong performance, but applying such reasoning uniformly incurs high computational cost. Existing efficiency-oriented methods attempt to shorten or mix reasoning strategies, yet often degrade reasoning capability. We identify the root cause as sequence-level coupling between efficiency incentives and correctness optimization, which implicitly penalizes long but correct reasoning trajectories. To address this issue, we propose Adaptive Dual-Process Thinking (ADaPT), a token-level dual-process framework that explicitly decouples efficiency and correctness signals during training. ADaPT introduces a mode-selection token to control fast and slow reasoning, applying efficiency-related rewards exclusively to this token to avoid penalizing correct long reasoning while encouraging efficiency when appropriate. Moreover, ADaPT enables precise and continuous control over the efficiency-performance trade-off at inference time: by adjusting the generation probability of the mode-selection token, a single trained model can smoothly move along the efficiency-performance Pareto frontier. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ADaPT significantly reduces inference cost while maintaining strong reasoning performance across multiple benchmarks.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

GRACE-DS: a Guarded Reward-guided Agent Correction Environment in Data Science

We introduce GRACE-DS, a Guarded Reward-guided Agent Correction Environment in Data Science for pre-deployment evaluation of LLM-powered AutoML agents. GRACE-DS is a set of evaluation metrics in an isolated environment that can be applied to tabular ML tasks specific to a particular organization. It exposes agents to realistic workflow stages, from planning and data inspection through feature engineering, model development, validation, and code repair to final submission, while hidden executable validators measure not only final predictive performance but also leakage avoidance, reproducibility, protocol validity, correction behavior, and reward alignment. The strongest structured regime, flexible iterative interaction (our approach), achieves higher end-to-end normalized hidden-test quality than single-shot generation, unstructured interaction, and restart-based baselines, while also improving protocol-valid completion. Validated across more than 7,000 episodes, these results establish GRACE-DS as a robust platform for assessing the capacity of LLM-based AutoML agents to execute machine learning workflows under production-like conditions and in accordance with organization-specific requirements.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Silent Failures in Federated Personalization of Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.00947v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models are increasingly personalized on decentralized private data through federated learning and are now deployed at scale under growing regulatory requirements for post-market monitoring. We argue that this convergence creates a distinct and under-recognized class of trustworthiness failures, which we term "Silent Failures." These include amplified bias, fairness collapse, and alignment erosion that may remain difficult to detect because federated learning's privacy constraints limit visibility into model behavior. A landscape analysis of existing benchmarks reveals a structural divide. Federated benchmarks evaluate system performance but provide limited insight into model behavior, whereas centralized trustworthiness benchmarks assess behavior but require model access incompatible with federated privacy. We introduce a taxonomy of six silent failure modes arising from the interaction of foundation model personalization, dataset shift, and core federated constraints. Our analysis shows that privacy-preserving training alone is insufficient for trustworthy deployment. We conclude with a research agenda for privacy-preserving behavioral evaluation and propose that silent failures become a standard diagnostic category for trustworthy federated artificial intelligence.

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

Beyond the Blood Draw: Explainable Machine Learning for Non-Invasive Dysglycemia Risk Screening

arXiv:2606.16056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dysglycemia, encompassing both prediabetes and diabetes, affects huge numbers of adults worldwide, yet many of them remain undiagnosed. We developed and validated machine-learning (ML) models for non-invasive screening of dysglycemia risk that require no laboratory tests. Pooling data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2017–2023 (n=14,352), we trained six ML models with stratified 5-fold cross-validation and compared them with two established clinical risk scores. LightGBM achieved the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC=0.820, 95% CI: 0.806–0.835), outperforming the Finnish Diabetes Risk Score (0.745) and American Diabetes Association Risk Test (0.783). SHAP analysis identified age, race/ethnicity, and waist-to-height ratio as the most influential predictors. Subgroup analyses confirmed consistent performance across demographic strata (AUC: 0.735–0.832). These results demonstrate the feasibility of explainable, laboratory-free dysglycemia screening for deployment in community settings and self-tracking health applications.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CASHEW: Stabilizing Multimodal Reasoning via Iterative Trajectory Aggregation

Vision-language models achieve strong performance across a wide range of multimodal understanding and reasoning tasks, yet their multi-step reasoning remains unstable. Repeated sampling over the same input often produces divergent reasoning trajectories and inconsistent final predictions. To address this, we introduce two complementary approaches inspired by test-time scaling: (1) CASHEW, an inference-time framework that stabilizes reasoning by iteratively aggregating multiple candidate trajectories into higher-quality reasoning traces, with explicit visual verification filtering hallucinated steps and grounding reasoning in visual evidence, and (2) CASHEW-RL, a learned variant that internalizes this aggregation behavior within a single model. CASHEW-RL is trained using Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) with a composite reward that encourages correct answers grounded in minimal yet sufficient visual evidence, while adaptively allocating reasoning effort based on task difficulty. This training objective enables robust self-aggregation at inference. Extensive experiments on 13 image understanding, video understanding, and video reasoning benchmarks show significant performance improvements, including gains of up to +26.2 percentage points on ScienceQA and +9.1 percentage points on EgoSchema.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

FedBiCross: Personalized One-Shot Federated Learning on Medical Images

arXiv:2601.01901v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data-free knowledge distillation-based one-shot federated learning (OSFL) trains a model in a single communication round without sharing raw data, making OSFL attractive for privacy-sensitive medical applications. However, existing methods aggregate predictions from all clients to form a global teacher. Under non-IID data, conflicting predictions dilute each other during averaging, yielding less informative soft labels that weaken distillation. We propose FedBiCross, a personalized OSFL framework with three stages: (1) clustering clients by model output similarity to form coherent sub-ensembles, (2) bi-level cross-cluster optimization that learns adaptive weights to selectively leverage beneficial cross-cluster knowledge while suppressing negative transfer, and (3) personalized distillation for client-specific adaptation. Experiments on four medical image datasets demonstrate that FedBiCross consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across different non-IID degrees.

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

How Much Capacity Does EEG Denoising Need? Ultra-Compact Networks reveal Benchmark Saturation and Metric-Utility Gap

arXiv:2606.08594v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep learning EEG denoising architectures have scaled from tens of thousands to tens of millions of parameters, yet no prior study has isolated model capacity as the experimental variable or tested whether reconstruction metrics predict downstream neural-signal utility. We address both gaps by fixing architecture, loss, data split, and training recipe while sweeping only channel width from 1.05K to 40.26K parameters in a minimal depthwise-separable convolutional U-Net. Models were evaluated on the EEGDenoiseNet benchmark, cross-dataset BCI transfer tests, controlled baseline retraining, and downstream motor-imagery classification with five decoder families across all nine BCI Competition IV-2a subjects. Reconstruction performance saturated by 3-6.5K parameters, with post-elbow gains of at most 0.015 correlation coefficient per log10-parameter unit. An 8.46M-parameter baseline retrained under the same pipeline matched the 40.26K compact variant on EOG–a 200x parameter gap yielding no advantage–while a Patch-Transformer control reproduced the same diminishing-return shape. Downstream evaluation exposed a classifier-dependent metric-utility gap: reconstruction-optimized denoising significantly degraded CSP+LDA classification across all nine subjects and three artifact types (best denoised accuracy 0.547 vs. 0.612 noisy baseline; Bonferroni p=0.0488), persisting on naturally recorded trials (Delta=-0.047; BH-FDR q=0.0049). End-to-end neural decoders showed variable or neutral effects. Standard EEG denoising benchmarks are saturated far below current model capacity, and reconstruction metrics do not predict BCI utility. Ultra-compact models at 33-46 KB and 1.27-2.61M FLOPs/segment are practical for edge deployment. These findings argue for capacity-controlled evaluation, harder task-aware benchmarks, and mandatory downstream validation.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

U$^2$Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection

Mamba-based models have emerged as a promising alternative for salient object detection (SOD), offering significant advantages in modeling long sequences. However, existing models often fail to explore contextual information and the depth of the entire architecture. This paper introduces U$^2$Mamba, a powerful and innovative U-structured network for salient object detection. We propose multiscale Mamba U-blocks (MMUBs) that enhance the model depth to improve local feature extraction capabilities. Our newly developed nested U-structure, incorporating MMUBs, enables the network to integrate various receptive fields from shallow and deep layers, thereby collecting richer contextual information and longer-range data without being constrained by resolution. Instead of using the traditional deep supervision scheme and top-level supervised training, we propose a hierarchical training supervision method where the loss is computed at each level during the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U$^2$Mamba achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/JL021/U2Mamba}.

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

Metacognitive Myopia in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit potentially harmful biases that reinforce culturally embedded stereotypes, influence moral judgments, or amplify positive evaluations of majority groups. We propose metacognitive myopia as a cognitive-ecological framework accounting for a conglomerate of established and emerging LLM biases. Our theoretical framework posits that biased samples in the information environment cause five symptoms of metacognitive myopia in LLMs: integration of invalid embeddings, susceptibility to redundant information, neglect of base rates in conditional computation, decision rules based on frequency, and inappropriate higher-order statistical inference for nested data structures. Moreover, it posits that the two main components of metacognition, monitoring and control, could account for these five symptoms. Accordingly, we further outline how monitoring and control could be approximated technically, for instance, through hidden parallel reasoning histories that allow interactive LLMs to evaluate risks of myopic inference before generating overt responses. Our theoretical framework provides a novel perspective on flawed human-machine interactions and agentic AI and raises significant ethical concerns regarding the implementation of LLMs in organizational structures and high-stakes decisions.

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

EIBench: A Simulator-Based Benchmark and Turn-Credit RL for Emotion Management

Emotional intelligence (EI) in Large Language Models (LLMs) is often evaluated through static understanding tasks or single-response dialogue generation. However, emotion management is interactive: a good model should not only recognize a user's emotion, but also improve the user's emotional and relational state over several turns. We introduce EIBench, a simulator-based benchmark for interactive emotion management. EIBench contains 2,222 scenarios, with 2,009 for training and 213 for held-out testing. The scenarios are organized by a 2x2 taxonomy covering Support, Defense, Repair, and Charm, which together capture different forms of support, boundary maintenance, trust repair, and rapport building. In each scenario, an LLM simulator plays the user, updates an emotion-relation state after each turn, and maps the final state to an anchor-based score. This design makes EIBench both an evaluation benchmark and a training environment: the final state gives the outcome reward, while the per-turn state updates provide dense feedback for RL. We evaluate 15 open- and closed-source LLMs. Current models perform well on support and rapport-building scenes, but struggle with boundary maintenance under user pressure. To improve the EI ability of LLMs, we propose Centered Turn-Credit GRPO (CTC-GRPO), a GRPO extension that reuses the simulator's per-turn state updates as dense turn-level feedback while preserving the final outcome reward. CTC-GRPO improves Qwen3-8B from -22.4 to +22.4 on EIBench and also improves on out-of-distribution evaluations including SAGE (+12.4) and EQBench3 (+20.9%). Our results show that simulator-tracked user states can support both evaluation and training for multi-turn emotion management.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

The Effectiveness of aromatherapy and its supportive Interventions on anxiety and pain among breast cancer patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Introduction: Breast cancer treatments are often associated with pain and anxiety, which can hinder physical functioning and overall quality of life, even after treatment. Complementary therapies, such as aromatherapy, can be used to alleviate pain and reduce anxiety in breast cancer patients. This project aimed to synthesize current global evidence on the effectiveness of aromatherapy. Method: This systematic review followed the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, with a comprehensive, systematic search conducted in PubMed, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, and SCOPUS for randomized controlled trials (RCTS) published from 2015 to 2025. Eligible studies included adult women breast cancer surgery patients who received aromatherapy during various periods of breast cancer. Where possible, data from the included studies were pooled using meta-analysis. GRADE approach was used to assess certainty of findings. Results: The search yielded 84 studies. Out of these, six were included in this review. On average, aromatherapy reduces pain and anxiety scores by 0.79 (standard mean difference (SMD)=-0.79, 95% CI -1.42, -0.16) and 0.53 (SMD=-0.53, 95 CI=-0.90, -0.16) units, respectively, compared to control condition [Low-quality of evidence]. The combination of aromatherapy with music reduces pain and anxiety by 1.26 (SMD= -1.26, 95 CI=-1.65, -0.87) and 1.08 (SMD = -1.08, 95 % CI: -1.45, -0.70) units respectively compared to standard care [Low-quality of evidence]. Conclusion: There is a potential role for the use of aromatherapy and music therapy, to alleviate anxiety and pain, especially for non-preoperative anxiety and pain. Further research is needed to inform the integration of aromatherapy into the management of anxiety and pain.

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

Understanding Latent Diffusability via Fisher Geometry

arXiv:2604.02751v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion models often degrade in latent spaces, yet the formal causes remain poorly understood. We quantify latent-space diffusability via the rate of change of the Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) along the diffusion trajectory. Our framework decomposes this MMSE rate into contributions from Fisher Information (FI) and Fisher Information Rate (FIR). We demonstrate that while global isometry ensures FI alignment, FIR is governed by the interplay between encoder and data geometries. Our analysis decouples diffusion degradation into four penalties: dimensional compression, tangential distortion, high-frequency encoder curvature, and intrinsic data curvature. We derive theoretical conditions for FIR preservation to ensure stable diffusability. Experiments across diverse autoencoding architectures demonstrate the implications of our theoretical bounds. We establish FI and FIR as a comprehensive analytical framework for understanding latent diffusability.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

NaturalFlow: Reducing Disruptive Pauses for Natural Speech Flow in Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation

Simultaneous speech-to-speech translation aims to enable near-real-time communication by minimizing latency, offering a compelling, real-time alternative to the high latency of consecutive translation. However, the excessive pursuit of low latency often results in fragmented chunk-wise speech. Consequently, listeners are subjected to an unnatural acoustic flow punctuated by frequent pauses, which could increase their cognitive load. To bridge this gap, we introduce a fluency-aware optimization framework designed to discover the sweet spot between the low-latency benefits of simultaneous translation and the natural flow of consecutive translation. Our framework minimizes inter-chunk silences by leveraging model-internal signals, including linguistic diversity and induced temporal variability in speech durations. Experiments on short- and long-form benchmarks show that our framework produces natural speech flow while maintaining competitive latency and translation quality.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Provable quantum speedups for computing persistence in topological data analysis

arXiv:2410.21258v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Topological data analysis (TDA) aims to extract noise-robust features from a data set by examining the number and persistence of holes in its topology. We provide an efficient quantum algorithm for a computational problem closely related to a core task in TDA – determining whether a given hole persists across different length scales. Further, we prove the problem itself is $\mathsf{BQP}_1$-hard, implying that a classical solution is extremely unlikely; this stands in contrast to all previous quantum approaches to TDA, where the problems were also intractable for quantum computers, or where a rigorous proof of classical hardness still remains open. This result implies an {exponential} quantum speedup for this problem under standard complexity-theoretic assumptions. Our approach relies on encoding the persistence of a hole in a variant of the guided sparse Hamiltonian problem, where the guiding state is constructed from a harmonic representative of the hole.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Efficient Image-to-Image Schrödinger Bridge for CT Field of View Extension

Computed tomography (CT) is a cornerstone imaging modality for non-invasive, high-resolution visualization of internal anatomical structures. However, when the scanned object exceeds the scanner's field of view (FOV), projection data are truncated, resulting in incomplete reconstructions and pronounced artifacts near FOV boundaries. Conventional reconstruction algorithms struggle to recover accurate anatomy from such data, limiting clinical reliability. Deep learning approaches have been explored for FOV extension, with diffusion generative models representing the latest advances in image synthesis. Yet, conventional diffusion models are computationally demanding and slow at inference due to their iterative sampling process. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient CT FOV extension framework based on the image-to-image Schrödinger Bridge (I$^2$SB) diffusion model. Unlike traditional diffusion models that synthesize images from pure Gaussian noise, I$^2$SB learns a direct stochastic mapping between paired limited-FOV and extended-FOV images. This direct correspondence yields a more interpretable and traceable generative process, enhancing anatomical consistency and structural fidelity in reconstructions. I$^2$SB achieves superior quantitative performance, with root-mean-square error (RMSE) values of 49.8 HU on simulated noisy data and 152.0 HU on real data, outperforming state-of-the-art diffusion models such as conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic models (cDDPM) and patch-based diffusion methods. Moreover, its one-step inference enables reconstruction in just 0.19 s per 2D slice, representing over a 700-fold speedup compared to cDDPM (135 s) and surpassing DiffusionGAN (0.58 s), the second fastest. This combination of accuracy and efficiency indicates that I$^2$SB has potential for real-time or clinical deployment.

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

Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retrieval

arXiv:2606.17664v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unsupervised dense retrievers offer scalability by learning semantic similarity from unlabeled documents via contrastive learning, but they struggle to capture the temporal relevance, retrieving semantically related but temporally misaligned documents-an important aspect when a document collection spans multiple time periods (e.g., retrieving documents from 2018-2025 for "Who is the president in 2019?" introduces temporal ambiguity). Existing methods rely on supervised training with explicit timestamps, which are not always feasible. We propose TPOUR (Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retriever), which uses our novel training method Temporal Retrieval Preference Optimization (TRPO). TRPO reinterprets preference learning in the temporal dimension, guiding the retriever to favor temporally aligned documents. TPOUR further generalizes to unseen time periods via interpolation in a learned time embedding, enabling continuous temporal alignment. Experiments on temporal information retrieval (T-IR), TPOUR outperforms both unsupervised and supervised baselines. Compared to Qwen-Embedding-8B, despite being about 72.7x smaller, TPOUR Contriever improves average nDCG@5 by +4.04 (+12.15%) on explicit and +4.98 (+15.21%) on implicit queries. We provide our code at https://github.com/agwaBom/TPOUR.

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

Quantifying Consistency in LLM Logical Reasoning via Structural Uncertainty

arXiv:2606.17312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can arrive at the same answer through reasoning paths that are unstable, contradictory, or difficult to rank consistently – a failure mode especially prevalent in multi-step deductive reasoning. Existing methods assess reliability primarily through output dispersion – measuring how much sampled answers differ – but this discards a complementary signal: whether the model can consistently rank competing reasoning candidates. We propose structural uncertainty, a consistency-aware framework derived from the stability of self-preference-induced rankings over sampled reasoning solutions. Given a query, we generate multiple candidate solutions and ask the model to judge pairwise preferences among its own outputs. We aggregate self-preferences into ranking distributions via Bradley-Terry modeling with PageRank, and decompose the signal into two entropy-based components: across-trial ranking instability and within-trial candidate ambiguity. Across five LLMs and eight benchmarks, structural signals provide information complementary to answer dispersion: on logical and mathematical reasoning tasks, the combination improves identification of unreliable instances, while on factual retrieval the structural signal collapses toward uniformity, diagnosing a regime boundary where reasoning-level consistency evaluation is uninformative. The two components relate differently to accuracy: within-trial ambiguity correlates positively with correctness – consistent with settings where multiple plausible solution paths remain competitive – while across-trial instability correlates negatively, signaling unreliable reasoning. Structural uncertainty is best understood not as a universal confidence estimator, but as a regime-sensitive evaluator of logical reasoning consistency.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

GraphWorld: Long-Horizon Planning with World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving has made significant progress by unifying perception, prediction, and planning within a single learning framework, achieving strong performance in short-horizon decision making. However, most existing E2E-AD methods remain confined to short-horizon planning and lack the ability to model long-term temporal dependencies, which severely limits their generalization and security in complex and highly interactive driving scenarios. In this work, we propose GraphWorld, an E2E-AD framework that explicitly enhances long-horizon planning through latent world modeling. We introduce an Ego-Centric Interaction Graph, which adaptively models critical neighboring agents based on spatial proximity, and propagates relational context to planning queries via cross-node cross-attention. We present a World-State-Conditioned Planning that learns ego-centric latent world representations by modeling interactions between an ego vehicle and surrounding agents. This latent world state captures key interaction dynamics and safety-relevant semantics, and serves as a conditioning signal to guide long-horizon, safety-aware trajectory planning. Extensive experiments on Bench2Drive, NAVSIMv1/2, and nuScenes demonstrate that GraphWorld significantly reduces collision rates and improves long-horizon planning performance, validating its effectiveness in complex driving environments.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

MedAgent: A Retrieval-Augmented Clinical Decision Support Agent with Verifiable Evidence Grounding for Evidence-Based Medicine

Evidence-based medicine demands clinical answers that are not only fluent and medically plausible, but also anchored in traceable evidence, tailored to patient-specific clinical questions, sensitive to the hierarchy of evidence, and respectful of clinical safety boundaries. While general-purpose large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong medical language generation ability, they tend to lean on parametric memory, underuse retrieved evidence, hallucinate citations, conflate evidence levels, and draw conclusions that are not fully supported by the underlying literature. Such limitations pose particular risks in clinical decision support, where answer reliability, evidence traceability, and reasoning consistency are paramount. To address these issues, we present MedAgent, an evidence-based medical agent trained through an end-to-end pipeline that integrates supervised fine-tuning (SFT) cold start, reward modeling, and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). The agent is designed to execute a structured workflow encompassing clinical question understanding, PICO extraction, evidence retrieval, evidence stratification, citation-grounded answer generation, and quality evaluation. Specifically, a Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct backbone is first cold-started on 200 human-verified agent trajectories, equipping it with tool invocation, PICO parsing, structured response generation, and citation faithfulness. Next, a Qwen2.5-7B reward model is trained on 2{,}099 pairwise preference samples to provide semantic-level quality signals for evidence-based responses. Finally, GRPO reinforcement learning is conducted in a retrieval-augmented agent environment, where every rollout involves real evidence retrieval and is scored jointly by rule-based rewards and reward-model signals. To avoid over-reliance on training rewards, we further construct an independent evidence-based medical evaluation benchmark, MedTrustBench, which contains 200 clinical questions spanning 10 specialties and four difficulty levels. Each question is annotated with standardized PICO elements and rubric-based scoring criteria. The benchmark includes 1{,}187 rubrics across seven dimensions: question relevance, evidence hierarchy, evidence quality and timeliness, evidence-answer consistency, completeness and depth, logical rigor, and medical terminology. Under an identical RAG pipeline, retrieval tool, retrieval configuration, and evaluation protocol, MedAgentv17 attains 78.6 points, outperforming GPT-4.1 (75.3) and approaching GPT-5.4 (80.3). These results show that a 14B domain-aligned model can surpass strong general-purpose baselines on specialized evidence-based medical reasoning, while delivering practical advantages in cost, privacy, controllability, and hospital-oriented private deployment. The model and associated datasets are publicly released at https://www.modelscope.cn/profile/InfoxmedModel