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01.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-17

Why large-scale randomized trials of live-attenuated shingles vaccination for dementia prevention are urgently needed

In my view, we have never had as robust a body of evidence from observational data on an intervention for dementia as we do for live-attenuated shingles vaccination. Both a recent US National Institutes of Health expert workshop and an international expert consensus on Alzheimer’s disease drug repurposing identified large-scale randomized trials of shingles vaccination for dementia prevention as the crucial next step for the field.

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

Towards Data-Efficient Cross-Device Generalization of Grad-Shafranov Equilibria via Transfer Learning Neural Operator

arXiv:2606.15512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time reconstruction of magnetohydrodynamic equilibria is essential for plasma shaping, stability assessment and feedback control in magnetic confinement fusion. However, Grad-Shafranov equilibrium calculations remain largely device-specific and iterative, limiting their use in latency-constrained control settings. Existing neural approaches can accelerate individual equilibrium predictions, but they do not generally provide reusable models across changing plasma boundaries or tokamak geometries. Here we show that equilibrium reconstruction can be recast as a cross-device operator learning problem. We develop a domain-specific neural operator framework that maps geometry and profile parameters directly to the poloidal flux field, replacing repeated solve-on-demand computation with amortized operator inference. Using the analytically tractable Solov'ev family as a controlled Grad-Shafranov testbed, we generate equilibria across eight geometrically distinct tokamak-like configurations and benchmark five neural operator architectures under four transfer-learning strategies. Single-geometry pretraining gives poor transfer to unseen devices, whereas multi-geometry pretraining enables data-efficient adaptation. The Wavelet Neural Operator gives the strongest cross-geometry performance, reaching mean relative L2 errors below 4% with 100 labelled target equilibria and below 2% with full fine-tuning. The predicted magnetic fields satisfy the divergence-free constraint to numerical precision, and four architectures achieve millisecond or sub-millisecond inference. These results identify neural operator pretraining as a route towards reusable, real-time equilibrium inference across fusion device configurations.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

GeneralVLA-2: Geometry-Aware Reconstruction and Governed Memory for Robot Planning

Generalist vision-language-action systems need object-centric 3D evidence and reusable manipulation experience to plan reliable robot trajectories. GeneralVLA provides a hierarchical interface for converting language and RGB-D observations into 3D end-effector paths, but two bottlenecks remain. First, monocular SAM3D-style object reconstruction can hallucinate pose and unseen geometry, while manipulation benefits from stable object shape when calibrated multi-view observations are available. Second, the original KnowledgeBank mainly retrieves semantically similar snippets and appends new knowledge, which makes it difficult to control memory quality, conflicts, confidence, and geometric relevance. To address the first challenge, we introduce GeoFuse-MV3D, a geometry-prior-guided MV-SAM3D reconstruction branch that verifies external geometry cues with input-view masks, applies soft visual-hull support, performs axis-wise refinement, and fuses only geometry while preserving appearance. To address the second challenge, we upgrade KnowledgeBank into a governed long-term memory system with explicit quality, confidence, lifecycle, verifier, and conflict metadata, together with precision-oriented retrieval. Finally, we evaluate the reconstruction branch on GSO-30 and the memory module on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and SWE-Bench Verified; GeoFuse-MV3D improves over the MV-SAM3D baseline by reducing CD and LPIPS by 2.20% and 2.02% while increasing PSNR and SSIM by 2.36% and 1.03%, and KnowledgeBank improves over ReasoningBank by 4.53% on Terminal-Bench SR and 3.73% on SWE-Bench resolve rate, while reducing AS by 4.95% and 5.65%, respectively. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/GeneralVLA-2. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/GeneralVLA-2.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

PLaID++: A Preference Aligned Language Model for Targeted Inorganic Materials Design

arXiv:2509.07150v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising approach to improve correctness in LLMs, however, in many scientific problems, the objective is not necessarily to produce the correct answer, but instead to produce a diverse array of candidates which satisfy a set of constraints. We study this challenge in the context of materials generation. To this end, we introduce PLaID++, an LLM post-trained for stable and property-guided crystal generation. We find that performance hinges on our crystallographic representation and reward formulation. First, we introduce a compact, symmetry-informed Wyckoff text representation which improves computational efficiency and encourages generalization from physical priors. Second, we demonstrate that temperature scaling acts as an entropy regularizer which counteracts mode collapse and encourages exploration. By encoding symmetry constraints directly into text and guiding model outputs towards desirable chemical space, PLaID++ generates structures that are thermodynamically stable, unique, and novel at a $\sim$50\% greater rate than prior methods and conditionally generates structures with desired space group properties. Our work demonstrates the potential of adapting post-training techniques from natural language processing to materials design, paving the way for targeted and efficient discovery of novel materials.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

ForecastBench-Sim: A Simulated-World Forecasting Benchmark

Forecasting benchmarks for general-purpose AI systems usually inherit the constraints of the real world: outcomes resolve slowly, tail events are rare, and counterfactual questions are difficult to score. We introduce ForecastBench-Sim, a simulated-world forecasting benchmark built on game rollouts from Freeciv, a turn-based strategy game modelled on the Civilization series. Forecasters receive a fixed world report (a structured snapshot of the current game state) and answer questions about hidden future states; the benchmark then continues the simulation and scores forecasts. Because the world is simulated, the same setup can generate continuous or binary forecasting questions at arbitrary time horizons, paired intervention worlds for conditional or causal questions, and resolved examples of rare or disruptive outcomes. We describe the benchmark pipeline, question families, scoring protocol, and release artifacts, and report validation slices from model evaluations and an anonymized human pilot. ForecastBench-Sim is intended to complement real-world forecasting benchmarks by providing controlled, immediately resolvable tasks for studying probabilistic reasoning under dynamic world states.

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

Pricing Excess-of-Loss Reinsurance and CAT Bonds under Climate Uncertainty: A Cox Process Framework with Temperature-Dependent Stochastic Intensity

arXiv:2606.14830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a climate-aware pricing framework for excess-of-loss (XL) reinsurance contracts and catastrophe (CAT) bonds under non-stationary catastrophe risk. Catastrophe arrivals are modeled as a Cox process whose stochastic intensity depends exponentially on a temperature-related climate index. To represent climate dynamics, the index is modeled as a mean-reverting Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process around a time-dependent warming trend. Within this setting, aggregate losses follow a compound Cox structure with lognormal severities. Pricing is performed under a reduced-form risk-adjusted measure, which provides a tractable valuation approach for XL reinsurance layers and binary zero-coupon CAT bond payoffs in an incomplete market setting. Because catastrophe losses are not dynamically replicable, the framework emphasizes scenario-based valuation rather than model-independent no-arbitrage bounds. A Monte Carlo valuation scheme is implemented to quantify the economic implications of climate-dependent catastrophe intensity. The numerical results show that climate dependence materially changes the loss-generation mechanism and affects the valuation of catastrophe-linked contracts. In the baseline calibration, the climate-aware model increases the excess-of-loss reinsurance premium and lowers the CAT bond price relative to the stationary benchmark. Furthermore, our analysis of the 99.5\% Tail Value-at-Risk (TVaR) indicates that stationary benchmarks may underestimate economic capital requirements by approximately 13.7\% compared to the climate-aware framework, highlighting the potential regulatory relevance of the proposed model. This finding highlights that benchmark design is critical for interpreting climate-pricing effects.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Dissipative ground-state preparation of a quantum spin chain on a trapped-ion quantum computer

arXiv:2601.08137v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate a dissipative protocol for ground-state preparation of a quantum spin chain on a trapped-ion quantum computer. As a first step, we derive a Kraus representation of a dissipation channel for the protocol recently proposed by Ding et al. [Phys. Rev. Res. 6, 033147 (2024)] that still holds for arbitrary temporal discretization steps, extending the analysis beyond the Lindblad dynamics regime. The protocol guarantees that the fidelity with the ground state monotonically increases (or remains unchanged) under repeated applications of the channel to an arbitrary initial state, provided that the ground state is the unique steady state of the dissipation channel. Using this framework, we implement dissipative ground-state preparation of a transverse-field Ising chain for up to 19 spins on the trapped-ion quantum computer Reimei provided by Quantinuum. Despite the presence of hardware noise, the dynamics consistently converges to a low-energy state far away from the maximally mixed state even when the corresponding quantum circuits contain as many as 4110 entangling gates, demonstrating the intrinsic robustness of the protocol. By applying zero-noise extrapolation, the resulting energy expectation values are systematically improved to agree with noiseless simulations within statistical uncertainties.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

LAST: Bridging Vision-Language and Action Manifolds via Gromov-Wasserstein Alignment

We take a Gromov-Wasserstein perspective on Vision-Language-Action (VLA) learning, where the goal is to make the relational geometry of action representations compatible with the semantic geometry of VL embeddings. However, this alignment is non-trivial due to the mathematical heterogeneity between the domains: the semantic space of vision-language is topologically linear and isotropic, whereas the physical manifold of robotic action is non-Euclidean and anisotropic. Their disjoint metric structures render direct regression ill-posed. To resolve this incompatibility, we introduce LAST (Lie-algebraic Action Space Tokenizer), which reconstructs the action space to establish local metric compatibility with the VL modality via a two-stage transformation: (1) Global Topological Linearization: linearizing the action manifold via Lie-algebraic mapping, converting trajectories into a fixed-length, physically additive representation. (2) Local Metric Discretization: hierarchically discretizing the representation into schemas and whitened residuals, yielding approximately isotropic local charts that are statistically aligned with the semantic metric. By resolving the structural mismatch at both global and local levels, LAST enables VLA models with superior convergence and generalizability.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

A BART-based approach with hierarchical strategy for Vietnamese abstractive multi-document summarization

In this technical report, we focus on solving the challenge of Vietnamese multi-document abstractive summarization, introduced in the International Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP) 2022. We choose to follow the popular hierarchical approach, i.e. condensing each document followed by aggregation and summarization. We propose a novel yet simple strategy to shorten documents that is driven by the golden summary, thus ensuring high correlation between stages of the hierarchical approach. Our method achieves a ROUGE2-F1 score of 0.2468 on the VLSP's public test set, and can produce fluent and concise summaries. Additionally, we utilize external sources for extra data, which greatly enhances the quantity of data for Vietnamese multi-document summarization. The additional data is made available for the community.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Unveiling the Awareness of Private Health Insurance Coverage among Healthcare Professionals in Freetown, Sierra Leone: Insights Extracted from Their Perspectives.

Our study is an assessment of the knowledge, personal coverage, and related determinants of private health insurance as revealed by healthcare professionals in Freetown, the urban capital of Sierra Leone. This study stands as a precursor for Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), like Sierra Leone, seeking to establish Universal Health Coverage (UHC) to provide healthcare access and coverage through publicly arranged risk pooling, designed to help protect against unmanageable medical costs. In parallel, such countries face significant challenges with achieving sustainable universal coverage due to limited public resources, inefficient allocation systems, uneasy reliance on out-of-pocket payments, and large struggling populations. Our research sheds particular light on how healthcare professionals view their own participation with private healthcare options. A cross-sectional, analytical study was conducted, openly recruiting individuals from various facilities in Freetown. Using the Yamane Formula, a sample size of 109 participants was calculated. STATA 14.0 was used for data analysis. Our findings revealed that 96 (88.9%) participants did not have private health insurance, while 12 (11.1%) did have private coverage. However, 105 (97.2%) reported other modes of health insurance, with only 3 (2.8%) uninsured. Notably, 97.2% expressed willingness to join a private health insurance scheme. Our study found no statistically significant associations between selected indicators (demographic or socioeconomic fac tors) and current insurance coverage among study participants. These results highlight a low prevalence and understanding of private health insurance among healthcare professionals in a representative urban center in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), while acknowledging high willingness to enroll. The lack of any significant determinants suggests other unexamined factors, such as cost, accessibility, or awareness, capable of influencing the adoption and implementation of a universal health program.

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

Event-Aligned Analysis of Multi-Rater Pain Assessments Using Continuous Wearable Physiology

arXiv:2606.23705v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pain is assessed differently by patients, nurses, and clinicians, yet most computational approaches assume a single ground-truth label - effectively ignoring who is doing the rating. We introduce a rater-aware, event-aligned framework that converts sparse, rater-specific pain ratings into discrete pain-change events and aligns continuous wearable physiological signals to these events, preserving rater identity throughout. Applied to multimodal wearable data collected during spine-related pain procedures, the framework identifies substantial disagreement across rater groups and provides preliminary, exploratory evidence of rater-dependent physiological differences preceding reported pain increases. These findings suggest that pain-physiology relationships may not be rater-invariant, and that aggregating assessments across raters may mask meaningful physiological patterns. A rater-aware, event-aligned perspective is therefore a promising direction for interpreting wearable data in real-world clinical pain assessment.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

VibeThinker-3B: Exploring the Frontier of Verifiable Reasoning in Small Language Models

This technical report introduces VibeThinker-3B, a compact dense model with 3B parameters developed to investigate how far verifiable reasoning can be pushed within a strictly small-model regime. Building upon the Spectrum-to-Signal post-training paradigm, we systematically enhance the model through an optimized pipeline that includes curriculum-based supervised fine-tuning, multi-domain reinforcement learning, and offline self-distillation. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that VibeThinker-3B achieves frontier-level performance on highly demanding verifiable tasks. Specifically, it attains a score of 94.3 on AIME26 (improving to 97.1 with claim-level test-time scaling), an 80.2 Pass@1 on LiveCodeBench v6, and exhibits strong out-of-distribution generalization with a 96.1\% acceptance rate on recent unseen LeetCode contests. This effectively places it in the performance band of first-tier reasoning systems, matching or exceeding flagship models that are orders of magnitude larger, such as DeepSeek V3.2, GLM-5, and Gemini 3 Pro. Furthermore, a score of 93.4 on IFEval confirms that this extreme reasoning enhancement does not compromise strict instruction controllability. Extending our previous 1.5B work, these findings motivate the Parametric Compression-Coverage Hypothesis, which views verifiable reasoning as compressible into compact reasoning cores, while open-domain knowledge and general-purpose competence require broad parameter coverage over facts, concepts, and long-tail scenarios. This perspective suggests that compact models are not merely deployment-efficient substitutes, but a complementary path toward frontier-level performance in parameter-dense capability regimes.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

The Urysohn Machine: A Metric-Topological Model of Computation

Authors:

arXiv:2508.14143v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce the Urysohn Machine, an effective model of classification-oriented computation in which metric separation, frontier structure, and contraction are explicit parts of the computational state. Its basic object is a Urysohn Triple: a support region, a target partition, and a separating classifier stored in a reusable Metric Library. The topological foundation is a constructive Urysohn Realization theorem for finite simplicial settings. It builds separators from dyadic ladders of nested polyhedral regions and equips their frontiers with a chain-level calculus: frontiers are cycles, and shells between levels have boundaries given by differences of frontiers. This construction yields two related complexity measures: decision-boundary width, the geometric measure of a single classifier's boundary, and Urysohn width, the total frontier mass represented by a library or realization. We prove an Amortized Separation Theorem showing that approximating a boundary of width to accuracy requires a number of simple basis triples proportional to boundary width and inversely proportional to resolution, under explicit boundary-footprint assumptions. We also introduce a contrastive separation operator whose graph-cut functional consistently estimates decision-boundary width from sampled metric data, while its Laplacian spectrum certifies class-component structure and conductance. Finally, we analyze the dynamic Urysohn ladder and prove four guarantees: separability under quotient collapse, stability of committed frontiers, bounded capacity under contraction, and scalability with quotient distance. Together, these results give a metric-topological account of classification complexity, amortized inference, and compositional reuse that preserves classical computability while exposing geometric structure hidden by purely symbolic descriptions.

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

Better Adherence, Richer Context: A Field Evaluation of LLM-Powered Conversational Voice Diaries for Sleep

arXiv:2606.18596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sleep diaries are central to behavioral sleep medicine and cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, yet daily completion is difficult to sustain, and static forms often provide limited context for interpreting night-to-night sleep variation. We designed an LLM-powered conversational voice diary that delivers clinically grounded morning and evening sleep diary questions through proactive smart-speaker prompts, structured conversational intake, and adaptive follow-up dialogue. We evaluated the system in a four-week between-subjects field study with 30 university students, comparing it with a text-based mobile diary using matched diary items, reporting windows, and reminder intervals. Compared with the text-based diary, the conversational voice diary showed higher adherence and elicited more detailed contextual self-report about routines, stressors, environmental conditions, and other sleep-related factors. Participants also described the voice diary as easier to integrate into daily routines, despite longer perceived completion time. However, voice-based conversational intake produced lower completeness for some structured diary fields, revealing a trade-off between expressive richness and structured precision. These findings show both the promise and the challenge of using LLM-powered conversational voice assistants for longitudinal health self-report.

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

SinGeo: Unlock Single Model's Potential for Robust Cross-View Geo-Localization

Robust cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) remains challenging despite the surge in recent progress. Existing methods still rely on field-of-view (FoV)-specific training paradigms, where models are optimized under a fixed FoV but collapse when tested on unseen FoVs and unknown orientations. This limitation necessitates deploying multiple models to cover diverse variations. Although studies have explored dynamic FoV training by simply randomizing FoVs, they failed to achieve robustness across diverse conditions – implicitly assuming all FoVs are equally difficult. To address this gap, we present SinGeo, a simple yet powerful framework that enables a single model to realize robust cross-view geo-localization without additional modules or explicit transformations. SinGeo employs a dual discriminative learning architecture that enhances intra-view discriminability within both ground and satellite branches, and is the first to introduce a curriculum learning strategy to achieve robust CVGL. Extensive evaluations on four benchmark datasets reveal that SinGeo sets state-of-the-art (SOTA) results under diverse conditions, and notably outperforms methods specifically trained for extreme FoVs. Beyond superior performance, SinGeo also exhibits cross-architecture transferability. Furthermore, we propose a consistency evaluation method to quantitatively assess model stability under varying views, providing an explainable perspective for understanding and advancing robustness in future CVGL research. Codes will be available upon acceptance.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Corticospinal tract risk modifies motor recovery after minimally invasive surgery for intracerebral hemorrhage: a secondary analysis of MISTIE-III

Objective: Outcome after surgical hematoma evacuation for intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) depends on hematoma location. As corticospinal tract (CST) integrity affects motor recovery after stroke, we hypothesized that CST integrity drives heterogeneity in surgical outcomes and investigated this in a secondary analysis of MISTIE-III participants. Methods: Risk of CST injury was categorized into four levels, based on the interaction between the CST, the hematoma, and perihematomal edema (PHE) on automatically segmented stability CT: no risk, PHE infiltration, hematoma infiltration, and complete interruption of the CST. Associations with outcome were tested using multivariable linear regression for motor National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) at day 180 and ordinal regression for modified Rankin Scale (mRS) at day 365, introducing an interaction term between CST risk and treatment group. Results: Day 180 motor NIHSS was significantly lower for 'no risk' ({beta}:-3.77, [95% confidence interval [CI]: -5.8 to -1.70], p=0.0003) and 'PHE infiltration' ({beta}:-2.3, [95%CI: -3.5 to -1.1]; p=0.0002) vs. 'complete interruption'. Surgery was associated with lower Day 180 motor NIHSS in participants with hematoma infiltration ({beta}:-2.07, [95%CI: -3.8 to -0.4], p=0.016). Compared to complete interruption, 'no risk' (adjusted odds ratio [aOR]:0.27, [95%CI: 0.10 to 0.74], p=0.01) and 'PHE infiltration' (aOR:0.41, [95%CI: 0.23 to 0.74]; p=0.003) were associated with lower odds of unfavorable day 365 mRS. Surgery was associated with lower mRS in participants with no risk (aOR:0.23, [95%CI: 0.05 to 0.97, p=0.045). Interpretation: Increasing CST risk is associated with worse motor recovery (day 180) and disability (day 365). CST risk modifies the effect of the MISTIE-III procedure on motor recovery and disability.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

LandslideAgent with Multimodal LandslideBench: A Domain-Rule-Augmented Agent for Autonomous Landslide Identification and Analysis

Intelligent landslide hazard interpretation is critical for disaster prevention, yet current paradigms struggle to simultaneously extract visual features and high-level geoscientific semantics, while general-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) suffer from perceptual limitations and domain hallucinations in complex geological scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose an instruction-driven agentic framework comprising three components. First, LandslideBench, a multimodal fine-grained dataset with seven subtype labels, high-resolution imagery, pixel-level masks, and high-quality textual descriptions, is constructed via multi-VLM cross-validation and interactive annotation. Then, LandslideVLM, a landslide-oriented VLM, is fine-tuned via LoRA on LandslideBench to enhance geological semantic understanding. Finally, LandslideAgent, a domain rule-enhanced agent taking LandslideVLM as its cognitive backbone, employs a dual-rule controller incorporating structured report metadata constraints and cross-validation identification constraints to regulate automated tool invocation. Experiments demonstrate that LandslideBench provides effective baselines across five mainstream models on fine-grained classification and semantic segmentation. LandslideVLM achieves accuracy improvements of 10.96%, 32.87%, and 15.91% on landslide discrimination, fine-grained classification, and semantic description quality, respectively. LandslideAgent further enables autonomous multi-source spatial data inference, realizing full-process intelligence for landslide identification and analysis.

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

A Unifying Lens on Reward Uncertainty in RLHF

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is bottlenecked by reward hacking, where the policy exploits errors in a proxy reward model (RM) and produces high RM scores without genuine quality gains. A natural mitigation is pessimism: lowering rewards in regions where the RM is uncertain. However, standard scalar RMs provide no principled notion of uncertainty. We argue that the right object is a distributional reward model $p(r\mid x,y)$. Under either a Bayesian inference or a KL-distributionally robust optimization (KL-DRO) lens, the KL-regularized RLHF objective admits a closed-form effective reward $\tilde r(x,y) = \pm\beta\log\mathbb{E}_p[e^{\pm r/\beta}]$. The pessimistic branch unifies the prior heuristics for RM ensemble aggregation: mean aggregation, worst-case optimization (WCO), and uncertainty-weighted optimization (UWO) all emerge as limits or truncations of this single expression. This also clarifies the implicit assumptions of each existing rule.

19.
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.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Uplift Modeling under Structural Biases: Insights into Metric Stability and Model Robustness

arXiv:2603.20775v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In personalized marketing, uplift models estimate the incremental effect of an intervention by modeling how customer behavior would change under alternative treatments using counterfactual analysis. However, real-world marketing data often exhibit various biases, such as selection bias, spillover effects, measurement error, and unobserved confounding. These biases can adversely affect both the accuracy of uplift estimation and the validity of evaluation metrics. Despite the importance of bias-aware assessment, there remains a lack of systematic studies evaluating how different models and metrics perform under such biased conditions. To bridge this gap, we design a systematic benchmarking framework. Unlike standard predictive tasks, real-world uplift datasets inherently lack counterfactual ground truth. This limitation renders the direct validation of evaluation metrics infeasible and prevents the precise quantification of biases. Therefore, a semi-synthetic approach serves as a critical enabler for systematic benchmarking. This approach effectively bridges the gap by retaining real-world feature dependencies while providing the ground truth needed to isolate structural biases. Our investigations reveal that (i) uplift targeting and prediction can manifest as distinct objectives, where proficiency in one does not ensure efficacy in the other; (ii) while many models exhibit inconsistent performance under diverse biases, TARNet shows notable robustness, providing insights for subsequent model design; (iii) the stability of evaluation metrics is linked to their mathematical alignment with the ATE, suggesting that ATE-approximating metrics yield more consistent model rankings under structural data imperfections. These findings suggest the need for more robust uplift models and evaluation metrics under real-world data imperfections.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Default Handling of the Non-Assessable Verbal Glasgow Coma Scale Misclassifies Illness Severity in Mechanically Ventilated Patients: A Retrospective Analysis

Background: The Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) is a universal neurologic severity score in the intensive care unit and is incorporated into APACHE, SOFA, mortality prediction models, ICU benchmarking, and quality metrics. In mechanically ventilated patients, however, the verbal component cannot be assessed. Common conventions, including assigning a normal total GCS of 15 or excluding patients with missing verbal scores, may misclassify the sickest patients as neurologically normal or remove them from analysis. Objective: To quantify non-assessable verbal GCS examinations after acute brain injury and determine how different handling conventions affect severity scoring and mortality-model performance across two independent critical care databases. Materials and Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study of adults with acute brain injury during their first ICU stay in MIMIC-IV, with replication in eICU-CRD. A verbal examination was considered non-assessable when documented as No Response-ETT. We measured the burden and determinants of non-assessability, compared the MIMIC-IV derived GCS convention with a component-aware GCS, and evaluated mortality-model handling strategies. Results: Among 14,230 patients, 45.2% had a non-assessable verbal examination, and 47.5% of ventilated patients had no assessable verbal score in the first 24 hours. Non-assessability was strongly associated with mechanical ventilation and mortality. The MIMIC-IV derived GCS assigned a score of 15 to 42.9% of patients and placed 11.6% in the lowest severity category despite eye and motor findings consistent with GCS [≤]9. Complete-case handling excluded 28.5% of patients, who accounted for 50.2% of deaths. Similar distortions were observed in eICU-CRD/APACHE across 171 hospitals. Discussion: Default-to-normal scoring can make severely ill intubated patients appear neurologically normal, while complete-case analysis removes the highest-risk patients. Conclusion: Non-assessable verbal GCS in mechanically ventilated patients should be explicitly flagged and reported in ICU severity scores, risk-adjusted mortality models, and benchmarking systems.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

From Shield to Target: Denial-of-Service Attacks on LLM-Based Agent Guardrails

arXiv:2606.14517v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based guardrails have emerged as a highly effective defense against prompt injection and jailbreak attacks in autonomous agents. However, we reveal that the very reasoning and task-following capabilities enabling this protection introduce a novel vulnerability: attackers can inject crafted data to trap the guardrail in extended reasoning loops, effectuating a systematic denial-of-service (DoS) attack. To systematically expose this threat, we design a beam-search optimization framework that crafts natural-language payloads to maximize guardrail reasoning length, utilizing an LLM proposer guided by a strategy bank. Based on the observation of guardrail's schema-following nature, we also provide another attack framework driven by mechanism-aware structural mutations with less computational load. The attack efficacy is systematically evaluated in two parts. First, in standalone evaluations, the attack generalizes across diverse guardrail architectures, safety templates, and agent benchmarks. Payloads optimized on a single open-source surrogate successfully transfer to eight leading model backbones (e.g., Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Qwen), achieving a 13–63$\times$ token amplification. Second, in end-to-end real-world agent deployments (web, desktop, code, and multi-agent systems), the attack reveals up to a 148$\times$ latency amplification. We show that a single poisoned document can saturate shared guardrail infrastructures, effectively starving co-located agents and paralyzing the entire system. By uncovering this availability flaw, our work underscores the urgent need to develop cost-bounded, reasoning-robust guardrails.

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

EqCollide: Equivariant and Collision-Aware Deformable Objects Neural Simulator

arXiv:2506.05797v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Simulating collisions of deformable objects is a fundamental yet challenging task due to the complexity of modeling solid mechanics and multi-body interactions. Existing data-driven methods often suffer from lack of equivariance to physical symmetries, inadequate handling of collisions, and limited scalability. Here we introduce \name, the first end-to-end equivariant neural fields simulator for deformable objects and their collisions. We propose an equivariant encoder to map object geometry and velocity into latent control points. A subsequent equivariant Graph Neural Network-based Neural Ordinary Differential Equation models the interactions among control points via collision-aware message passing. To reconstruct velocity fields, we query a neural field conditioned on control point features, enabling continuous and resolution-independent motion predictions. Experimental results on 2D and 3D scenarios show that \name achieves accurate, stable, and scalable simulations across diverse object configurations. It achieves $24.34\%$ to $57.62\%$ lower rollout MSE, even compared with the best-performing baseline model. Furthermore, \name could generalize to more colliding objects and extended temporal horizons, and stay robust to input transformed with group action. Code is available at: https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/EqCollide

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Can LLMs Be CEOs? Benchmarking Strategic Resource Reallocation with Multi-Role Agent Simulation

arXiv:2606.17459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the decision-making capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is a growing research priority, yet existing benchmarks focus on isolated cognitive tasks such as reasoning, knowledge retrieval, and economic rationality in stylized settings. These evaluations overlook the defining challenge of real executive decision-making: integrating conflicting recommendations from specialized stakeholders under information asymmetry, organizational constraints, and temporal dependencies. We introduce \textsc{CEO-Bench}, a multi-agent benchmark that evaluates LLMs on CEO-level strategic resource reallocation – the process of redirecting capital across business units in a multi-round, constraint-rich organizational environment. In \textsc{CEO-Bench}, LLM agents receive conflicting advice from four role-conditioned C-suite advisors (CFO, CTO, COO, CMO), each with private signals and distinct priorities, and must synthesize these into a concrete allocation plan evaluated along four dimensions: role integration, conditional boldness, history-sensitive judgment, and plan validity. Experiments across five frontier models on 13 scenarios reveal that all models achieve high structural validity but diverge sharply on strategic calibration – the hardest capability layer. We identify systematic failure modes including single-advisor capture, conservative default under ambiguity, and historical amnesia, and uncover a structural integration-boldness tradeoff: models that engage more deeply with conflicting perspectives tend to produce less decisive action. These findings delineate the current capability boundary of LLMs as organizational decision-makers and inform the design of future AI-assisted executive systems.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

SurgVista: Long-Horizon Surgical World Modeling with Plausible Instrument-Tissue Dynamics

Scaling robot policy learning for autonomous surgery is challenging, as expert demonstrations are expensive and in vivo exploration poses substantial safety risks. Surgical world models address this by generating realistic, action-conditioned future frames from an initial observation, but existing methods exhibit two persistent failure modes: spatial interaction incoherence, where visible instrument contact fails to induce spatially consistent tissue deformation, and temporal fidelity collapse, where prediction errors compound across autoregressive rollouts and progressively corrupt visual quality. We present SurgVista, a surgical world model that mitigates both failures through two training recipes. Deformation Consistency Regularization extracts scene-point trajectories from training videos and enforces cross-frame coherence through latent contrastive learning, strengthening physically consistent instrument-tissue dynamics. Drift Adaptation Training mitigates long-horizon drift by perturbing conditioning frames with online prediction residuals and photometric augmentations calibrated to long-horizon drift statistics, sustaining visual fidelity over extended rollouts. To enable rigorous evaluation, we further introduce SurgWorld-Bench, featuring diverse procedure types, long-range rollouts, and decoupled metrics for instrument-motion accuracy and tissue-response fidelity. Extensive experiments show that SurgVista consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across visual quality, temporal consistency, and interaction fidelity, with gains widening as the prediction horizon grows.