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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Multidimensional nutritional assessment in Crohns disease: cross-sectional comparison of active disease and remission

Authors:
Sarker↗Ghosh↗C. K↗Chowdhury↗

Malnutrition is common in Crohns disease (CD), and its assessment requires multiple tools. Comprehensive evaluation of nutritional status in a population with CD, predominantly characterized by metabolic phenotype, was inadequately reported. This study evaluated the nutritional status of CD patients using anthropometric, clinical, and biochemical measures and compared patients with active disease with those in remission. This cross-sectional study included 127 adults with CD: 63 with active disease and 64 in remission. Disease activity was classified using the Crohns Disease Activity Index, the Simple Endoscopic Score for Crohns Disease, and magnetic resonance enterography. Nutritional assessment included body mass index (BMI), mid-upper arm circumference, calf circumference, triceps skinfold thickness, mid-arm muscle circumference, Mini Nutritional Assessment-Short Form (MNA-SF), and biochemical markers including hemoglobin, serum iron, folate, vitamin B12, albumin, and zinc. Malnutrition was defined using the Global Leadership Initiative on Malnutrition criteria. Overall, 47.2% of participants were malnourished. Malnutrition was significantly more frequent in active disease than in remission (81.0% vs. 14.1%, P

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

CLAP: Contrastive Latent Action Pretraining for Learning Vision-Language-Action Models from Human Videos

Authors:
Chubin Zhang↗Jianan Wang↗Zifeng Gao↗Yue Su↗Tianru Dai↗Cai Zhou↗Jiwen Lu↗Yansong Tang↗

Generalist Vision-Language-Action models remain constrained by the scarcity of robotic data relative to the abundance of human video demonstrations. Existing Latent Action Models attempt to use video data but often suffer from visual entanglement, encoding noise rather than manipulation skills. To address this limitation, we propose Contrastive Latent Action Pretraining (CLAP), a framework that first uses Act-VAE to learn an executable action-token vocabulary from robot trajectories and then aligns human visual transitions with this vocabulary through contrastive learning. This alignment maps unlabeled human videos into a physically grounded latent action space rather than reconstructing appearance. Building on the aligned tokens, we train CLAP-NTP as an autoregressive VLA using robot demonstrations and pseudo-labeled human videos, preserving instruction following and object generalization. For deployment and target-domain adaptation, we further introduce a post-training strategy that combines CLAP-RF, a Rectified Flow action head for low-latency continuous action chunk prediction, with Knowledge Matching regularization to preserve pretrained semantic knowledge during fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that CLAP achieves strong performance against competitive baselines while enabling effective skill transfer from human videos to robotic execution.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Beyond representational alignment with brain-guided language models for robust reasoning

Authors:
Mingqing Xiao↗Kai Du↗Zhouchen Lin↗

The correspondence between large language models (LLMs) and the neural mechanisms underlying human higher-order cognition remains insufficiently characterized. Given that language and reasoning in the human brain appear dissociable, an open question is whether LLMs align with neural signals from reasoning-related regions and whether such signals can improve them. Here, focusing on deductive reasoning, we show that LLM internal representations are not only partially aligned with task-fMRI activity but can also be directly enhanced by these signals. Using a neural-predictivity metric, we find that LLMs explain a substantial fraction of the explainable variance in reasoning-related regions at the aggregate level, whereas predictivity within specific reasoning types is lower, indicating both alignment and divergence. Building on this, we propose a brain-guided framework: we steer model representations along directions induced by the joint structure of model and brain representations, applying intervention at inference and fine-tuning during training. We demonstrate that task-evoked brain signals can directly enhance LLM reasoning, yielding gains orthogonal to language-only supervision across 10 LLMs (1.5B-72B), with transfer across reasoning types and up to 13\% absolute accuracy gain. Our results advance LLM-brain correspondences from correlation to guidance, establishing a brain-signal-driven pathway toward more robust and cognitively aligned AI.

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

HPSv3++: Scaling Reward Models Across the Full Spectrum of Diffusion Model Capabilities

Authors:
Yijun Liu↗Jie Huang↗Zeyue Xue↗Yuming Li↗Ruizhe He↗Haoran Li↗Shijia Ge↗Siming Fu↗

Reward models guide text-to-image (T2I) systems toward outputs aligned with human preferences. However, typical reward models such as HPSv3 are trained on pre-annotated data from earlier T2I models, without accounting for quality discriminative shifts arising from evolving model capabilities and reinforcement learning (RL) iterations, limiting their broader applicability. In this work, we propose HPSv3++, a reward model framework that elevates the HPSv3 model for varying T2I model capabilities and their RL iteration changes across the full capability-iteration spectrum. Specifically, we first introduce HPDv3++, a 212K dual-dimension preference dataset annotated for text fidelity and aesthetic quality using a recent high-capability (Qwen-Image) model with human supervision. We then propose a two-stage training framework. Stage 1 employs data-aware orthogonal gradient projection to incorporate diverse aesthetic perception from HPDv3++ while preserving the original effective human preference knowledge in HPSv3. Stage 2 further leverages unlabeled data from T2I models spanning different capability levels and RL iterations, and introduces a joint capability-iterations conditioned signal for the reward model together with a standard deviation-driven unsupervised guidance mechanism, strengthening reward model across the capability-iteration spectrum. HPSv3++ achieves state-of-the-art preference prediction, outperforming HPSv3 9.8% on HPDv3, 5.5% on GenAI-Bench, while achieving 79.1%/88.1% on our proposed HPDv3++. When used for T2I RL training, it consistently improves GenEval scores across diverse T2I models, demonstrating its wide-range capabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/PlantPotatoOnMoon/HPSv3-PlusPlus.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Allocating Human Oversight in AI-Enabled Analytics

Authors:
Zikun Ye↗Jiameng Lyu↗Rui Tao↗

arXiv:2604.12497v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Organizations increasingly deploy AI as a low-cost prediction layer in customer-facing decision processes, including demand sensing, service-quality monitoring, product testing, and market research, but AI-generated signals are unevenly reliable across tasks, products, and customer segments. Firms therefore still need scarce human validation (labels, audits, survey responses, or follow-up measurements) to anchor AI outputs to ground truth. Because human ground truth is itself noisy, varying across labelers and even across repeated judgments, the firm must collect and average several human labels per task, which makes human validation costly. We study how to allocate a limited human-validation budget across many AI-assisted tasks when reliability is heterogeneous and unknown before deployment. We cast this within tuned prediction-powered inference. Each human label both sharpens the AI-assisted estimate and reveals the task's rectification difficulty, the variance that remains after the AI prediction is optimally used as a control variate. If difficulties were known, the optimal allocation would follow a Neyman square-root rule; because they are unknown, we propose a policy based on upper confidence bounds that learns them online and steers validation toward tasks where AI is least reliable. We prove that the policy's terminal efficiency loss relative to the oracle allocation vanishes as the budget grows. In synthetic experiments and a real digital-twin survey with 68 tasks and over 2000 respondents, it closes most of the gap to the oracle when reliability is heterogeneous, outperforming uniform and epsilon-greedy allocation; on the survey data it also outperforms explore-then-commit pilot designs and cuts uniform's 10–12% gap to 2–6%. The value of AI depends not only on model accuracy but also on the operational policy that targets human oversight where AI errors matter most.

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

CombEval: A Framework for Evaluating Combinatorial Counting in Large Language Models

Authors:
Yuxu Zhou↗Ond\v{r}ej Ku\v{z}elka↗Yuyi Wang↗Yuanhong Wang↗Yi Chang↗

We present CombEval, a dynamic benchmark for evaluating combinatorial counting in large language models. CombEval represents each problem as a typed Cofola specification over entities, combinatorial objects, object dependencies, and constraints, enabling controlled generation of natural-language counting problems with exact solver-verified answers. Unlike static collections, CombEval supports systematic variation of object type, entity scale, constraint count, and reasoning depth. We evaluate 11 LLMs under direct and code-augmented settings and find that models remain brittle on ordered objects, indistinguishable elements, relatively positional constraints, and nested object dependencies. Error analysis further identifies failures in constraint interpretation and counting principles. CombEval provides a diagnostic testbed for studying when and why LLMs fail at combinatorial reasoning. The code and generated benchmark suites are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/YuxuZhou-CN/combination-problem-generation}.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Jacobian Scopes: token-level causal attributions in LLMs

Authors:
Toni J. B. Liu↗Baran Zadeo\u{g}lu↗Nicolas Boull\'e↗Rapha\"el Sarfati↗Gurbir Arora↗Christopher J. Earls↗

Large language models (LLMs) make next-token predictions based on clues present in their context, such as semantic descriptions and in-context examples. Yet, elucidating which prior tokens most strongly influence a given prediction remains challenging due to the proliferation of layers and attention heads in modern architectures. We propose Jacobian Scopes, a suite of gradient-based, token-level causal attribution methods for interpreting LLM predictions. Grounded in perturbation theory and information geometry, Jacobian Scopes quantify how input tokens influence various aspects of a model's prediction, such as specific logits, the full predictive distribution, and model uncertainty (effective temperature). Through case studies spanning instruction understanding, translation, and in-context learning (ICL), we demonstrate how Jacobian Scopes reveal implicit political biases, uncover word- and phrase-level translation strategies, and shed light on recently debated mechanisms underlying in-context time-series forecasting. To facilitate exploration of Jacobian Scopes on custom text, we open-source our implementations and provide a cloud-hosted interactive demo at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Typony/JacobianScopes.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Treatment Response Optimized Clinical Decision Support AI System via Digital Twin Simulation

Authors:
Xinyu Qin↗Anil K. Sood↗Ruiheng Yu↗Sara Corvigno↗Elaine Stur↗Lu Wang↗

arXiv:2606.17405v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clinical decision support AI systems (CDSASs) must adapt to evolving patient conditions in real-time while adhering to strict safety constraints. We present an online adaptive framework that integrates Treatment Effect (TE) estimation to quantify clinical benefits, a patient Digital Twin (DT) to simulate treatment trajectories, and Reinforcement Learning (RL) for sequential decision-making. The AI system is initially trained on historical medical records and operates in a continuous learning loop. To ensure safety, a rule-based module monitors vital signs and blocks contraindicated treatments. Cases with strong internal model disagreement are flagged for clinician review, simulated in our experiments via a pre-trained outcome model. We validate our framework using both a synthetic clinical simulator and a real-world ovarian cancer dataset from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). In both simulated and clinical settings, our method demonstrated superior effectiveness and stability in recommending treatments compared to standard computational baselines. Furthermore, the AI system maintains low latency and requires expert consultation for only a minority of cases in our experimental validation, demonstrating its potential as a safe, clinician-supervised tool for personalized medicine that continuously improves through practical use.

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10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Primary care practitioners preconception health literacy and information-seeking: A cross-sectional survey.

Authors:
Caut↗Schoenaker↗McIntyre↗Steel↗

Background Parental health before pregnancy influences maternal and child outcomes. Primary care professionals, including general practitioners [GPs], midwives, and naturopaths, can provide preconception care, yet many report limited knowledge and difficulty accessing relevant information. This study described Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths preconception health literacy, including knowledge and ability to access information. Methods Between July and September 2022, Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths completed a 32-item online cross-sectional survey. Participants were recruited through professional associations, and data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics Results Participants (N=373) included naturopaths (40.7%), GPs (32.4%), and midwives (26.8%). Reported barriers to clinician health literacy including lack of preconception care resources (25.5%), and limited clinician knowledge (23.6%). The proportion identifying limited clinician knowledge differed significantly between professions (GP: 31.4%; midwives: 23.0%; naturopaths: 17.8%; p=0.030). The highest level of accurate knowledge regarding preconception exposures was for pre-pregnancy obesity (82.7%), while low birth weight was the most accurately identified preconception outcomes (83.7%). Incorrect responses were most common for maternal multivitamin use as an exposure (28.3%) and childhood leukaemia as an outcome (26.3%). Differences between professions were strongest for infant outcomes, with moderate associations observed for shoulder dystocia (V=.2355), precipitous labour (V=.2173), macrosomia (V=.2060), labour dystocia (V=.2018) and cryptorchidism (V=.2018). Discussion Preconception health literacy varies across primary care professions. Clinicians require greater access to targeted resources and education tailored to their differing scopes of practice and experience. Improving clinician preconception health literacy may strengthen consistent evidence-based care and support better maternal, child, and long-term family health outcomes.

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

The Hidden Power of Scaling Factor in LoRA Optimization

Authors:
Zicheng Zhang↗Haoran Li↗Jiaxing Wang↗Guoqiang Gong↗Anqi Li↗Yudong Hu↗Ting Xiong↗Yurong Gao↗Junxing Hu↗Zhida Jiang↗Yifeng Zhang↗Pengzhang Liu↗…

arXiv:2606.12883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), the scaling factor $\alpha$ is often treated as a mere complement to the learning rate, yet its role in optimization remains poorly understood. In this paper, we reveal that the scaling factor $\alpha$ and the learning rate function differently, with $\alpha$ emerging as the dominant driver of effective optimization, delivering gains that cannot be replicated by learning rate scaling alone. Through the synergy of extensive empirical analysis and a theoretical Signal-Drift framework, we uncover three findings into LoRA's scaling mechanism: First, LoRA's spectral suppression smooths the optimization landscape, rendering standard hyperparameters overly conservative and creating an optimization gap. Second, when leveraging this smoothness to accelerate convergence, $\alpha$ outperforms the learning rate by amplifying the task signal without increasing the drift ratio. Third, the optimal scaling factor follows a sublinear relationship with the rank, well characterized by a square-root law with an unexpectedly large coefficient, revealing the insufficient scaling of existing rank-tied heuristics. Based on these insights, we propose LoRA-$\alpha$, a minimalist framework that restores $\alpha$ to its principled regime, making LoRA compatible with standard small learning rates. Extensive evaluations across diverse tasks demonstrate that LoRA-$\alpha$ consistently improves performance while streamlining hyperparameter search, unleashing the learning potential of LoRA.

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

Mitigating Object Hallucinations in LVLMs via Attention Imbalance Rectification

Authors:
Han Sun↗Qin Li↗Peixin Wang↗Min Zhang↗

Object hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) severely compromises their reliability in real-world applications, posing a critical barrier to their deployment in high-stakes scenarios such as autonomous driving and medical image analysis. Through systematic empirical investigation, we identify that the imbalanced attention allocation, both across modalities (i.e., vision and language) and within modalities (among individual tokens), exhibits a strong causal correlation with the occurrence of object hallucination. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a novel concept termed attention imbalance, which not only quantifies the degree of attention disparity but also visually delineates the underlying patterns (e.g., over-attentiveness to irrelevant language tokens or under-attentiveness to discriminative visual features) that drive object hallucination. To mitigate object hallucination, we further propose Attention Imbalance Rectification (AIR), a lightweight decoding-time intervention method that reallocates attention weights and adjusts attention distributions to rectify modality-wise and token-wise imbalances. Extensive evaluations on four mainstream LVLMs and three benchmarks (CHAIR, POPE, and MM-Vet) with seven baselines demonstrate that AIR consistently reduces object hallucination rates, achieving up to a 35.1% reduction compared to the baselines, while improving up to 15.9% of LVLMs' general capability across diverse vision-language tasks.

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

Is Your Agent Playing Dead? Deployed LLM Agents Exhibit Constraint-Evasive Fabrication and Thanatosis

Authors:
Andoni Rodr\'iguez↗Alberto Pozanco↗Daniel Borrajo↗

arXiv:2606.14831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents and characterizes a spectrum of previously unreported behaviours we term Constraint-Evasive Fabrication (CEF): when an LLM agent operates under irreconcilable constraints (where no response can simultaneously satisfy all active rules) it spontaneously fabricates plausible external obstacles and presents them as a fact. At the extreme end of this spectrum lies Constraint-Evasive Thanatosis (CET); the limit case where, rather than inventing a plausible excuse, the model simulates a full system crash to make the user disengage entirely. We first observed CET in an uncontrolled deployment test, where a GPT-4o banking agent fabricated Python-style exception traces (complete with memory addresses) to feign a system failure when threatened by a user. In subsequent controlled experiments, the model independently invented audit restrictions, microservice architectures, error codes, and service timeouts, none present in its prompt. Reproduction attempts across pressure levels and attacker personas yielded CEF consistently but with substantial variation in form, onset, and severity: the phenomenon is robust but stochastic. Critically, injecting ground-truth data mid-conversation did not restore honest behaviour once fabrication had taken hold (the model ignored correct information and continued confabulating) suggesting CEF is self-reinforcing rather than a knowledge gap. We show that (1) standard enterprise guardrails routinely create CEF-enabling conditions in production, (2) current RLHF procedures suppress but cannot eliminate CEF, and (3) existing safety benchmarks do not test for this failure mode. Our results highlight the need for irreconcilable-constraint benchmarks, CEF-aware training procedures, and deployment-time detection methods before constrained agents become further entrenched in high-stakes domains.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

The Discrete-Log Clock: How a Transformer Learns Modular Multiplication

Authors:
Huu Danh Nguyen↗

arXiv:2606.17399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When small transformers grok modular multiplication, prior work reports that the learned embedding has a "dense" Fourier spectrum requiring all frequencies. This contrasts with modular addition, where only a sparse set of key frequencies suffices. We show this density is an artifact of analyzing in the wrong basis. The natural Fourier transform for multiplication is not the standard additive DFT but the multiplicative character transform, which decomposes functions on the multiplicative group $(\mathbb{Z}/p\mathbb{Z})^*$ into its irreducible representations. Applying this transform to a grokked transformer trained on $a \cdot b \bmod 113$, we find the embedding spectrum becomes highly sparse (Gini coefficient 0.58 vs. 0.07 in the additive basis) with only 4 key frequencies carrying significant energy. Furthermore, 96.9% of MLP neurons are cleanly tuned to a single multiplicative frequency, and neuron activation heatmaps reveal 2D-periodic structure when reordered by the discrete logarithm. These results demonstrate the transformer reduces multiplication to addition in discrete-log space, implementing a "Discrete-Log Clock" algorithm analogous to Nanda et al.'s Clock algorithm for addition. The methodology generalizes: matching the analysis basis to the algebraic structure of the task reveals interpretable structure where standard tools see noise.

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15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Iron deficiency testing among people with incident heart failure in primary care

Authors:
Maharajan↗Jones↗N. R↗Bankhead↗Erone↗Haynes↗Kutumba↗Li↗Maynard↗Roy↗Shah↗Stanworth↗…

Background: Given around 50% of people with heart failure have a degree of iron deficiency, guidelines recommend screening. It is uncertain to what extent this is done in primary care and whether testing is equitable. Aim: To report the proportion of people with incident heart failure who undergo a ferritin test within 12 months. Design and setting: Retrospective primary care cohort study using Clinical Practice Research Datalink Aurum data, between 2016 and 2021. Methods: We report the proportion of adults with an incident diagnosis of heart failure who received a ferritin test within 12 months. Multivariable logistic regression was used to examine the odds of testing based on key demographic covariates and co-morbidities. Results: Among 105,749 individuals with an incident diagnosis of heart failure (mean age 71.6 years, SD 14.3), only 35,688 (33.7%) received a ferritin test within the subsequent year. Increasing age (odds ratio 1.25 per 10-year increase, 95% CI: 1.24-1.27), female sex (male sex OR 0.86, 0.84-0.89) and Asian ethnicity (OR 1.70, 1.59-1.80) were all associated with increased odds of testing as were diagnoses of coeliac disease (OR 1.86, 1.58-2.21), type 1 diabetes (OR 1.82, 1.51-2.19) and cirrhosis (OR 1.64, 1.43-1.87). There was geographic variation in testing, even in adjusted analyses. Conclusion: In a large primary care dataset, two thirds of people with incident heart failure did not receive a ferritin test for iron deficiency within a year of diagnosis demonstrating a gap in current practice and an opportunity for improvements in service delivery.

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

Scale Buys Interpolation, Structure Buys a Horizon: Certified Predictability for Equivariant World Models

Authors:
Hongbo Wang↗

arXiv:2606.13092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scale buys interpolation; structure buys a certified horizon. A world model's average error says nothing about whether a particular prediction can be trusted, or for how long. For equivariant latent world models we give a computable, multi-step certificate of the predictable horizon: $T$-step rollout error is provably constant over each symmetry orbit (Theorem A) and stratified channel-by-channel by the predictor's Lyapunov spectrum, $T_j(\epsilon)\sim\log(1/\epsilon)/\lambda_j$. The horizon is two-sided – a matching lower bound makes approximate equivariance provably horizon-limited – and the certificate is exclusive to structure: orbit-constant error characterizes equivariance, so no non-equivariant model has it at any scale. Empirically, on 40-D Lorenz-96 only a $\mathbb{Z}_N$-equivariant network recovers the full Lyapunov spectrum ($R^2{=}0.98$); dense and recurrent baselines fail. Because the spectrum is faithful, the certificate acts, a priori: under a fixed sensing budget a $c\times$-inflated certificate provably needs $c\times$ the budget, and the equivariant certificate meets a budget its inflated dense counterpart cannot – with zero calibration data. The same read-out, unchanged, audits public pretrained world models training-free: TD-MPC2 checkpoints land on the certificate's own scope taxonomy – calibrated where strongly expansive (ratio 0.94-1.02), optimistic where weakly expansive, correctly abstaining where contracting – a map a deployed monitor replicates cell-by-cell, out-of-sample. Across the official 1M-317M multitask ladder, calibration does not improve with parameters. On V-JEPA 2-AC (1B, real robot data) the measured cross-check correctly overrides an over-promising tangent spectrum – the cross-validated audit, not the raw number, is the deployable object. Scale buys interpolation, not a calibrated horizon.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

A Layered Security Framework Against Prompt Injection in RAG-Based Chatbots

Authors:
Gulshan Saleem↗Nisar Ahmed↗Muhammad Imran Zaman↗Ali Hassan↗

Prompt injection is ranked as the most critical vulnerability in large language model (LLM) deployments by the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, yet existing defenses operate at isolated pipeline stages and remain incomplete. Input filters cannot inspect retrieved documents, while output monitors cannot prevent malicious payloads from reaching the model. Consequently, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) chatbots remain vulnerable to indirect injection, where a poisoned knowledge-base document compromises every user whose query retrieves it. We present a three-layer framework that intercepts both direct and indirect prompt injection throughout the inference pipeline. Layer 1 screens user input using a rule-based pattern library and a fine-tuned semantic anomaly classifier. Layer 2 enforces a provenance-based instruction hierarchy during context assembly, preventing retrieved content from overriding operator policy. Layer 3 audits model output using a policy rule engine and semantic drift detector before delivery. A continuous audit loop aggregates structured logs and supports retraining to adapt the classifier to emerging attack patterns. The framework is model-agnostic and deploys as middleware without modifying the underlying LLM. Evaluation on 5,080 samples across GPT-4o, Llama 3, and Mistral 7B shows that the framework reduces Attack Success Rate (ASR) from 71.4\% to 11.3\%, outperforming the best single-layer baseline by 27.3 percentage points and a published guardrail system by 23.8 percentage points, while maintaining a 4.8\% false positive rate and a median latency overhead of 61.2 ms. Ablation studies confirm that all three layers provide complementary protection and that their combined effect exceeds the sum of individual contributions.

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

Proact-VL: A Proactive VideoLLM for Real-Time AI Companions

Authors:
Weicai Yan↗Yuhong Dai↗Qi Ran↗Haodong Li↗Wang Lin↗Tao Jin↗Xing Xie↗Hao Liao↗Jianxun Lian↗

Proactive and real-time interactive experiences are essential for human-like AI companions, yet face three key challenges: (1) achieving low-latency inference under continuous streaming inputs, (2) autonomously deciding when to respond, and (3) controlling both quality and quantity of generated content to meet real-time constraints. In this work, we instantiate AI companions through two gaming scenarios, commentator and guide, selected for their suitability for automatic evaluation. We introduce the Live Gaming Benchmark, a large-scale dataset with three representative scenarios: solo commentary, co-commentary, and user guidance, and present Proact-VL, a general framework that shapes multimodal language models into proactive, real-time interactive agents capable of human-like environment perception and interaction. Extensive experiments show Proact-VL achieves superior response latency and quality while maintaining strong video understanding capabilities, demonstrating its practicality for real-time interactive applications.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Adversarial Concept Search: Predicting Compositional Errors From Feature Geometry

Authors:
Jennifer Meng Lu↗Ruochen Zhang↗Isabelle Lee↗David Alvarez-Melis↗Ellie Pavlick↗Naomi Saphra↗

arXiv:2606.13934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans cannot always intuit what scenarios are most challenging to LLMs. Hoping to capture challenging edge cases, developers either design problems to be difficult for humans or curate extensive benchmarks. What if we could instead anticipate which scenarios a model will fail on? In this paper, we use an LLM's representational geometry to predict which concept combinations it will fail on. We attribute this compositional failure to interference between salient features. In tasks that require systematic composition - toy programmatic settings, multihop reasoning, multilingual factual recall - we find that when a pair of concepts is encoded near-orthogonally, the model reliably composes them. When their linear encodings are close, producing interference, the model fails to compose them. Our method reliably anticipates failure modes across different compositional tasks, without evaluating specific inputs. These results lay the groundwork to use representational geometry to identify high-risk examples, construct targeted stress tests, and provide a scalable foundation for active learning in real-world deployment.

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20.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Heterogeneous suppressive effect of <i>Wolbachia</i> incompatible insect technique coupled with sterile insect technique across time and historical <i>Ae. aegypti</i> abundance - using distributional synthetic controls

Authors:
Yichen Zhai↗

by Yichen Zhai, Chia-Chen Chang, Zhiyong Xi, Cheong Huat Tan, Lee Ching Ng, Jue Tao Lim Background Biological control tools such as Wolbachia incompatible-insect technique, are a promising class of interventions to modify and suppress Aedes aegypti mosquitoes to reduce risk of Aedes-borne diseases. Due to the spatial nature of the intervention, intervention effects can be spatio-temporally heterogeneous. Yet, most evaluations of field-based technologies rely on average treatment effects, which preclude characterization and understanding of treatment effect heterogeneities and the factors influencing it. Methods Here, we developed a causal inference framework using distributional synthetic controls to explicitly account for spatio-temporal trap-level mosquito abundance data to ascertain the entomological efficacy of Wolbachia in suppressing Ae. aegypti abundance. This method is able to construct counterfactual distributions of intervened areas, provide detailed comparisons to actual distributions and quantify treatment effects of the intervention on mosquito abundance over different quantiles. By employing our framework to trap-level mosquito abundance data from 57,990 unique mosquito traps routinely maintained and measured twice a week, and a large-scale field trial of Wolbachia incompatible-insect technique coupled with sterile insect technique (IIT-SIT) in Singapore, we (1) quantified heterogeneous treatment effects for IIT-SIT across the time-since-intervention, over the traps’ historical mosquito abundance, over calendar time, (2) quantified whether elimination of wild-type Aedes aegypti was possible in intervention locations and (3) addressed if suppressive effects in spillover locations adjacent to directly intervened locations were heterogeneous. Results IIT-SIT interventions led to a strong suppressive effect on adult Aedes aegypti abundance. From the onset of intervention in directly treated locations, sector-specific intervention effectiveness (IE) ranged from 24.04% in the earliest treatment period, and reached 86.08% in the latest treatment period. Raw reductions in aegypti abundance were also found to increase over time as sectors were intervened over longer time periods. In spillover sectors, IE was lower in magnitude and more variable, but average IE reached a maximum of 78.08% in 2-years post-treatment. Wolbachia interventions also led to an increase in the percentage of traps recording no mosquitoes from 6.8% at the start of intervention to 33.01% 124-weeks post-intervention. We found that IE was higher in sectors with lower historical mosquito abundance. However, IE converged across sectors with different historical mosquito abundance as intervention time increased. Conclusion This study revealed spatial heterogeneities in suppressing wild-type female Ae. aegypti by IIT-SIT and provided strong evidence that IIT-SIT can drastically suppress wild-type Ae. aegypti populations despite heterogeneous treatment effects over time.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

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

Authors:
Hristo Inouzhe↗

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

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Range-Aware Bayesian Optimization for Discovering Diverse Designs within Target Property Windows

Authors:
Shengli Jiang↗Jason Wu↗Charles M. Schroeder↗Michael A. Webb↗

arXiv:2606.11574v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In many materials and product design problems, desirable candidates exhibit properties that fall within an acceptable range rather than achieve a single optimum. Recovering multiple, distinct solutions that satisfy such specifications is also practically valuable, as some candidates may be preferred for reasons of cost, processability, or robustness that are difficult to encode directly in an objective function. Here, we develop a range-aware Bayesian optimization (BO) framework in which the acquisition function directly scores the posterior probability that a candidate satisfies a target range. The framework naturally extends to parallel pursuit of multiple distinct specifications over a shared candidate space. Across benchmark tasks, range-aware acquisition consistently recovers larger and more diverse sets of valid designs than standard BO baselines and recent goal-seeking methods. Its utility is further demonstrated in two practically motivated design case studies involving optimizing reaction conditions for polymer synthesis and sequence-defined oligomer discovery for prescribed optical absorption bands, supported by quantum chemical calculations. These results suggest that range-aware BO can provide a practical and sample-efficient foundation for specification-driven design, particularly when design flexibility and solution diversity are important considerations.

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

Language Model Circuits Are Sparse in the Neuron Basis

Authors:
Aryaman Arora↗Zhengxuan Wu↗Jacob Steinhardt↗Sarah Schwettmann↗

The high-level concepts that a neural network uses to perform computation need not be aligned to individual neurons (Smolensky, 1986). Language model interpretability research has thus turned to techniques which decompose the neuron basis into more interpretable units of model computation, such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs). However, not all neuron-based representations are uninterpretable. For the first time, we empirically show that MLP neurons are as sparse a feature basis as SAEs. We use this finding to develop an end-to-end gradient-based attribution pipeline for circuit tracing on the MLP neuron basis, which surfaces causally effective neurons on a variety of tasks. On a standard subject-verb agreement benchmark (Marks et al., 2025), a circuit of $\approx 10^2$ MLP neurons is enough to control model behaviour. On the multi-hop city-state-capital task from (Lindsey et al., 2025), we find a circuit in which small sets of neurons encode specific latent reasoning steps (e.g. mapping a city to its state), and can be steered to change the model's output. This work thus advances automated interpretability of language models without imposing additional training costs.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

AfroScope: A Framework for Studying the Linguistic Landscape of Africa

Authors:
Sang Yun Kwon↗AbdelRahim Elmadany↗Muhammad Abdul-Mageed↗

Language Identification (LID), the task of determining the language of a given text, is a fundamental preprocessing step that shapes the reliability of downstream NLP applications. While recent work has expanded African LID, existing systems remain limited in both language coverage and fine-grained discrimination among closely related languages and varieties. We introduce AfroScope, a unified framework for African LID that includes AfroScope-Data, a dataset covering 640 languages, and AfroScope-Models, a suite of strong LID models with broad African language coverage. To address persistent confusions among closely related languages, we propose a hierarchical classification approach that leverages AfroScope-Mirror, a specialized embedding model for targeted disambiguation, improving macro-F1 by 1.57 points on the confusable subset compared to our best base model. We further analyze cross-lingual transfer and domain effects, showing how language-family structure, script compatibility, and domain coverage shape LID performance. We position African LID as an enabling technology for large-scale measurement of Africa's linguistic landscape in digital text, and release AfroScope-Data and AfroScope-Models online.

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25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Robust Spin Splitting and Strain-Controlled Optical Response in Monolayer CrC2N4 for Valleytronic and Optoelectronic Applications

Authors:
Md. Samrat↗Vivek Chowdhury↗Sake Wang↗Ahmed Zubair↗

arXiv:2606.17329v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Monolayer CrC2N4 recently emerged as a promising two-dimensional semiconductor, yet its spin-orbit-coupled (SOC) physics and strain-tunable optical response remained largely unexplored. Here, we investigated the electronic, valley, charge-transfer, and optical properties of pristine and biaxially strained monolayer CrC2N4 using first-principles calculations. The monolayer exhibited a direct band gap at the K/K' valleys. SOC produced valley contrasting out-of-plane spin polarization, yielding a moderate valence band spin splitting of 51.9 meV and a small conduction band spin splitting of 1.7 meV. Orbital-resolved analysis showed that the edge states were mainly governed by Cr-d and N-p hybridization, while Bader analysis indicated polar-covalent bonding through charge transfer toward N atoms. Biaxial strain in the range of -4% to +4% tuned the band gap from 1.987 to 1.421 eV and drove an indirect-to-direct gap transition near -1% strain. Tensile strain enhanced the Berry curvature and red-shifted the optical response toward the visible-near-infrared region. These results suggested monolayer CrC2N4 as a promising platform for strain-engineered valleytronic and optoelectronic device applications.

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