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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

ReMMD: Realistic Multilingual Multi-Image Agentic Verification for Multimodal Misinformation Detection

arXiv:2606.24112v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal misinformation detection is increasingly important because viral posts now combine long multilingual narratives, several images, mixed provenance, and subtle text–image framing errors. Existing benchmarks and methods remain poorly matched to this setting: they usually isolate short captions, single images, binary labels, or one manipulation source, while agentic verification remains costly under realistic evidence search. We present ReMMD, a realistic multilingual multi-image agentic verification framework for multimodal misinformation detection. ReMMD includes ReMMDBench, a real-world multimodal misinformation detection benchmark with 500 samples, 2,756 images, five monolingual languages, two cross-lingual settings, three text-length tiers, multi-image posts, five-way veracity labels, eight distortion labels, evidence provenance, and rationales. It also includes ReMMD-Agent, a persistent-memory verifier that decomposes posts into atomic points, builds a reusable evidence set, and predicts structured L1/L2/L3 outputs. Across proprietary systems, open LVLMs, MMD-Agent, and T2-Agent, ReMMD-Agent obtains the best five-way veracity performance, with 41.80% accuracy and 39.12% macro-F1 using GPT-5.2, while reducing cost by 17.5% relative to MMD-Agent and 79.9% relative to T2-Agent. The project is available at https://dang-ai.github.io/ReMMD.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Prompt2Effect: Training-Free Image-to-Video Model Specialization via LoRA Generation

Personalizing Image-to-Video (I2V) diffusion models with specific visual effects is increasingly demanded for high-end video generation. Current practice requires training a separate Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module for each effect, incurring substantial data curation and iterative optimization costs that hinder interactive control. We present Prompt2Effect, a weight-driven hypernetwork that amortizes per-effect training by directly synthesizing effect-specific LoRA weights in a single forward pass. Unlike prior hypernetworks that regress adapter weights purely from semantics, Prompt2Effect is explicitly conditioned on the frozen base model weights, grounding weight prediction in the structural geometry of each layer. Furthermore, instead of predicting raw LoRA matrices, we introduce an SVD-canonicalized parameterization that resolves factorization ambiguity and stabilizes large-scale weight synthesis. Together, these design principles enable accurate and scalable LoRA prediction for high-dimensional I2V diffusion models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Prompt2Effect achieves on-par or superior video quality and effect alignment compared to conventional LoRA fine-tuning, while reducing the computational cost from 56 GPU training hours to 3.3 seconds of hypernetwork inference. When used as initialization for subsequent fine-tuning, our predicted weights further improve final performance and accelerate optimization by approximately 10x.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Variational Tail Bounds for Norms of Random Vectors and Matrices

arXiv:2503.17300v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a variational tail bound for norms of random vectors and matrices under moment assumptions on their one-dimensional marginals. A simplified version of the bound that parametrizes the ``aggregating distribution'' using a certain pushforward of the Gaussian distribution is also provided. We apply the proposed method to reproduce some of the well-known bounds on norms of Gaussian random vectors, and also obtain dimension-free tail bounds for the Euclidean norm of random vectors with arbitrary moment profiles. Furthermore, we reproduce a dimension-free concentration inequality for sum of independent and identically distributed positive semidefinite matrices with sub-exponential marginals, and obtain a concentration inequality for the sample covariance matrix of sub-exponential random vectors. We also obtain a tail bound for the operator norm of a random matrix series whose random coefficients may have arbitrary moment profiles. Furthermore, we use coupling to formulate an abstraction of the proposed approach that applies more broadly. As a corollary, we derive a PAC-Bayesian-style bound in terms of a certain combination of the KL and R\'{e}nyi divergences between the prior and posterior distributions.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Amortized Probabilistic Retrieval of Atmospheric CO2 from OCO-2 Spectra Using Deep Learning with Laplace Approximations and Normalizing Flows

arXiv:2606.17413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Space-based monitoring of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is essential for constraining the global carbon budget. NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) estimates column-averaged dry-air mole fractions of CO2 (XCO2) using high-resolution spectra. However, current operational retrieval algorithms are computationally expensive and do not properly quantify uncertainties. We present a novel deep learning framework that addresses these challenges. Due to the difficulties of ground-truth data for real satellite observations, we develop and validate our approach using a high-fidelity simulation dataset. This dataset, created to support OCO-2 uncertainty quantification (UQ), incorporates realistic forward model errors. Our architecture encodes spectral bands using a multi-branch neural network and estimates posteriors of the full CO2 column or desired summaries thereof using two scalable UQ methods: Laplace approximations and normalizing flows. Our approach has five key advantages relative to operational "full-physics" solvers: (1) Amortization: Inference is orders of magnitude faster, enabling real-time processing of massive data streams; (2) Model error robustness: By training on simulations that explicitly include model discrepancies, our method accounts for systematic errors often neglected by standard inversions; (3) Point estimate accuracy: We achieve superior predictive accuracy compared to baseline methods; (4) Improved UQ: The probabilistic outputs yield better-calibrated uncertainty estimates; and (5) Non-Gaussian posteriors: When utilizing normalizing flows, our framework successfully models complex, asymmetric posterior distributions, overcoming the limitations of the Gaussian assumption. These results suggest that simulation-based deep learning is a viable path toward next-generation operational processing systems.

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

P$^2$CE: Model-Agnostic Plausible Pareto-Optimal Counterfactual Explanations

arXiv:2606.18418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The increasing use of machine learning algorithms in social applications has raised concerns about fairness and transparency, leading to the development of counterfactual explanations. These explanations supports individuals to understand and potentially alter unfavorable decisions in areas such as loan applications, job selections, and more, by providing actionable changes to input features that would lead to a desired outcome. Existing methods often struggle to balance feasibility, plausibility, and computational efficiency. To address this, we introduce P$^2$CE, an algorithm for generating plausible Pareto-optimal counterfactual explanations, offering users a diverse set of optimal trade-offs between different notions of feasibility. P$^2$CE employs an auxiliary isolation forest outlier detector to ensure that explanations are in accordance with the data distribution and leverages SHAP values to obtain optimal results with short computing times, regardless of the underlying model. Our algorithm was empirically evaluated on three datasets, demonstrating superior performance in terms of both solution quality and computational efficiency compared to related techniques.

06.
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.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Modeling light-matter coupled systems with neural quantum states

arXiv:2606.14352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in cold atom manipulation enable the study of many-body systems where short-range interactions between neighboring atoms coexist with long-range interactions mediated by photons. Such a combination of interactions makes a theoretical approach challenging beyond mean-field methods. In this work, we develop a neural quantum state based approach to study these systems numerically. We introduce a neural-network architecture capable of handling hybrid Hilbert spaces with large local bosonic dimensions in strongly interacting spin-photon systems. We benchmark this approach on a model of a two-dimensional lattice of Rydberg atoms coupled to a photon mode. The superradiant ground states found in the large spin-photon coupling regime allow us to demonstrate the efficiency of the method in the presence of high photon occupation. Furthermore, the ability to capture spin-spin and spin-photon correlations leads us to observe quantitative deviations in the ground state phase boundaries with respect to mean-field theory. The method extends to other systems with a similar hybrid Hilbert space structure, such as spin-phonon systems, and provides a scalable framework for investigating their ground state properties.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Indexed Bellman Information Complexity

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11171v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop indexed Bellman information complexity, a representation-level theory of interactive decision making centered on information indices and reference histories. The representation strips away problem-specific syntax and retains only the ingredients needed for dynamic programming and information accounting, thereby unifying the earlier framework of indexed algorithmic information ratios (AIR). On the upper-bound side, regret is controlled by Bellman supersolutions or potential identities whose gradient bracket is paid for by indexed information. Upper-confidence-bound (UCB), estimation-to-decision/decision-estimation-coefficient (E2D/DEC), and adaptive-minimax-sampling or exploration-by-optimization (AMS/EBO) methods appear as three relaxations of this same identity. On the lower-bound side, the posterior-reference trajectory supplies both the information telescope and the ghost quantile of small-regret trajectories. The resulting critical radius in the lower bound is an effective-dimension-scale quantity, as in Fano and local-prior-mass lower bounds, rather than the constant radius of a two-point Le Cam argument. The examples show that DEC is best viewed as a one-step relaxation of indexed Bellman information complexity, not as a universally tight conversion mechanism. We illustrate the framework through several applications, with particular emphasis on kernel bandits. In this setting, the active action marginal provides a concrete basis for comparing UCB, E2D, and AMS/EBO.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Shadowing Program for Medical Students in the Basic Sciences Phase

Introduction Shadowing, as an educational method based on active observation, can foster a realistic understanding of professional roles and enhance the communication skills of medical students. This study aimed to design, implement, and evaluate a shadowing program for basic sciences medical students. Methods This development study was conducted based on the ADDIE model in five phases. The study population consisted of 799 medical students in semesters 2 to 5. The stages included Analysis (determining needs through literature review and expert panels), Design (specifying learning environments and evaluation methods), Development (preparing guides and educational tools), Implementation (within the Medical Ethics course), and Evaluation (using questionnaires and reflection forms). Findings This study aimed to design and evaluate an educational shadowing program based on the ADDIE model. In the Analysis phase, the profiles of 799 students and learning objectives were determined. In the Design phase, a structured program for four types of shadowing was designed. In the Development phase, all guides and educational tools were prepared. In the Implementation phase, the program was carried out with complete coverage and adherence to ethical considerations. Finally, the program evaluation showed that "Motivation to become a good physician" (3.75-3.95) and "Enhancing empathy" (3.50-3.94) received the highest scores, while "Increasing understanding of the basic science-clinical connection" (2.53-2.89) and "Willingness to attend on holidays" (1.87-2.31) received the lowest scores. Conclusion The findings indicate that implementing the shadowing program is an effective method for strengthening the professional attitudes and academic motivation of medical students. However, the program did not significantly improve students perception of the basic science-clinical connection, indicating a need for curricular refinement. The continuation and extension of this program to other levels and fields of medical sciences are recommended.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Computing Applications for Flight Trajectory Optimization

arXiv:2304.14445v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Major players in the global aerospace industry are shifting their focus toward achieving net carbon-neutral operations by 2050. A considerable portion of the overall carbon emission reduction is expected to come from new aircraft technologies, such as flight path optimization. In pursuing these sustainability objectives, we delve into the capacity of quantum computing to tackle computational challenges associated with flight path optimization, an essential operation within the aerospace engineering domain with important ecological and economic considerations. In recent years, the quantum computing field has made significant strides, paving the way for improved performance over classical algorithms. In order to effectively apply quantum algorithms in real-world scenarios, it is crucial to thoroughly examine and tackle the intrinsic overheads and constraints that exist in the present implementations of these algorithms. Our study delves into the application of quantum computers in flight path optimization problems and introduces a customizable modular framework designed to accommodate specific simulation requirements. We examine the running time of a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm across various quantum architectures and their simulations on CPUs and GPUs. A temporal comparison between the conventional classical algorithm and its quantum-improved counterpart indicates that achieving the theoretical speedup in practice may necessitate further innovation. We present our results from running the quantum algorithms on IBM hardware and discuss potential approaches to accelerate the incorporation of quantum algorithms within the problem domain.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Efficient Simulation of Szegedy Quantum Walk Formulations and Algorithms

arXiv:2606.14226v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum walks provide a versatile framework for quantum algorithms across a wide range of applications. We develop efficient classical simulation methods for Szegedy quantum walks that avoid explicit construction of the full unitary evolution operator. Unlike previous approaches restricted to a particular walk formulation, our framework is built from fundamental update and reflection operators, enabling the simulation of a broader class of Szegedy walk formulations. We further extend these methods to phase-estimation-based algorithms coupled to the walk, including implementations suitable for large sparse graphs. The resulting methods achieve optimal $O(N^2)$ complexity for dense graphs with $N$ nodes. For sparse graphs, the computational cost scales linearly with the number of edges, which is $O(N)$ in many cases. We implement the framework in the Python package SQWLib and illustrate its capabilities through simulations of representative algorithms, including quantum simulated annealing and quantum search on graphs. These results provide a practical tool for studying Szegedy-walk-based algorithms numerically beyond purely analytical treatments.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Genome-wide colocalization of body fat distribution GWAS and subcutaneous adipose eQTLs identifies SNX10, DGKQ, and CBX3 as candidate causal genes for cardiometabolic disease

Authors:

Background: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified hundreds of loci associated with body fat distribution, yet the causal genes and regulatory mechanisms through which these variants exert their effects remain largely unknown. Expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) colocalization provides a powerful framework for identifying genes whose expression is genetically coregulated with complex traits. Methods: We performed a genome-wide colocalization analysis integrating waist-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (WHRadjBMI) GWAS summary statistics from 694,649 individuals (Pulit et al., 2019) with subcutaneous adipose tissue eQTLs from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) Project v8 (N = 581 donors). GWAS coordinates were lifted from GRCh37 to GRCh38 to enable direct alignment with GTEx data. We incorporated CAVIAR fine-mapping results to overcome the limitation of FDR-significant eQTL filtering. Colocalization was assessed using the approximate Bayes factor framework (coloc.abf) across 335 independent genome-wide significant loci. Results: Of 2,897 locus-gene pairs tested, 489 (16.9%) showed strong colocalization (PP.H4 > 0.8) and 618 (21.3%) showed moderate evidence (PP.H4 > 0.5). The strongest colocalization was observed for SNX10 (sorting nexin 10; PP.H4 = 1.000), a recently characterized regulator of adipocyte differentiation and female-specific diet-induced obesity. Other top hits included DGKQ (diacylglycerol kinase theta; PP.H4 = 0.9999999), an emerging pharmacological target for insulin resistance, and CBX3 (chromobox 3; PP.H4 = 0.9999974), an epigenetic regulator linked to cardiovascular disease. Established adiposity genes including GRB14 (PP.H4 = 0.681) and KLF14 (PP.H4 = 0.590) were recovered, validating our approach. Several loci exhibited extensive allelic heterogeneity, with 50 genes colocalizing at a single chromosome 3 locus. Conclusions: Our analysis provides a comprehensive map of adipose tissue gene regulatory mechanisms underlying genetic risk for body fat distribution. The identification of SNX10, DGKQ, and CBX3 as high-confidence candidate causal genes advances the translation of GWAS associations into mechanistic understanding and therapeutic targets for obesity-related cardiometabolic disease.

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

When Similar Means Different: Evaluating LLMs on Arabic–Hebrew Cognates

Arabic and Hebrew, as closely related Semitic languages, share a substantial lexicon of true cognates, misleading false friends, and modern loanwords. This overlap poses a challenge for cross-lingual semantic understanding in large language models (LLMs). To evaluate this capability, we introduce SemCog Bench, a curated benchmark of 1,858 Arabic–Hebrew word pairs with sentence-level annotations for cognate identification and semantic disambiguation. We evaluate open-source and commercial LLMs across multiple input representations (raw, diacritized, Romanized, and phonetic) and reveal a critical gap in cross-lingual reasoning. While models achieve high accuracy on true cognates, performance drops sharply on false friends and loanwords, reflecting a strong reliance on surface-form similarity. Furthermore, sentence-level context yields only modest improvements, suggesting that contextual cues alone are insufficient to overcome misleading form-based signals. These findings reveal a fundamental limitation of current LLMs in resolving cross-lingual form–meaning conflicts and establish SemCog Bench as a rigorous benchmark for multilingual semantic reasoning. Our code and data are publicly available.

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

SPOT-E: Test-Time Entropy Shaping with Visual Spotlights for Frozen VLMs

arXiv:2606.20244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often underperform on evidence intensive tasks because decisive visual evidence are small, localized, and easy to overlook, leading to failures in evidence readout even when high-level reasoning is intact. Prior inference-time visual interventions can improve grounding without retraining, but they are largely open-loop and lack a mechanism to verify whether highlighted evidence is actually used. We study answer-span prediction entropy as a model-internal feedback signal and show that naive entropy minimization is ambiguous, since low entropy may arise from evidence-grounded confidence or shortcut collapse. To resolve this ambiguity, we introduce low-entropy anchors and an entropy-shaping objective that reduces answer uncertainty while preserving baseline high-confidence tokens. We instantiate this principle in SPOT-E, a plug-and-play test-time method that produces question-conditioned spotlights, optimized per instance via light-weight tuning based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Across all benchmarks and different VLM families, SPOT-E yields consistent gains and improved robustness under visual corruptions. Code is publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/YinBo0927/SPOT-E}

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

WeaveBench: A Long-Horizon, Real-World Benchmark for Computer-Use Agents with Hybrid Interfaces

arXiv:2606.09426v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Computer-use agents (CUAs) increasingly operate in runtimes that combine visual desktop control, command-line execution, code editing, browsers, and external tools. Existing benchmarks, however, often evaluate these interfaces as separable capabilities, leaving long-horizon cross-interface orchestration under-tested. Thus, we introduce WeaveBench, a long-horizon hybrid-interface benchmark with 114 tasks across 8 real-world work domains, grounded in real user requests and publicly verifiable artifacts. Each task requires agents to combine GUI observations/actions with CLI/code operations within a single trajectory. We evaluate these tasks on a real Ubuntu desktop inside deployed CLI-agent runtimes, augmented with a minimal desktop-control plugin. We also propose a companion trajectory-aware judge that inspects deliverables, files, screenshots, logs, and action traces, while detecting shortcut behaviors such as fabricated visual evidence or hard-coded metrics. Across frontier model-runtime pairings, the best PassRate reaches only 41.2%, showing the benchmark remains far from saturated. The trajectory-aware judge further reveals that outcome-only grading substantially overestimates agent performance. Overall, WeaveBench exposes a critical gap in CUA evaluation and provides an effective testbed to measure whether agents can orchestrate GUI, CLI, and code operations across long-horizon real-world tasks.

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

Right Regions, Wrong Labels: Semantic Label Flips in Segmentation under Correlation Shift

The robustness of machine learning models can be compromised by spurious correlations between non-causal features in the input data and target labels. A common way to test for such correlations is to train on data where the label is strongly tied to some non-causal cue, then evaluate on examples where that tie no longer holds. This idea is well established for classification tasks, but for semantic segmentation the specific failure modes are not well understood. We show that a model may achieve reasonable overlap while assigning the wrong semantic label, swapping one plausible foreground class for another, even when object boundaries are largely correct. We focus on this semantic label-flip behaviour and quantify it with a simple diagnostic (Flip) that counts how often ground truth foreground pixels are assigned the wrong foreground identity while remaining predicted as foreground. In a setting where category and scene are correlated during training, increasing the correlation consistently widens the gap between common and rare test conditions and increases these within-object label swaps on counterfactual groups. Overall, our results motivate assessing segmentation robustness under distribution shift beyond overlap by decomposing foreground errors into correct pixels, flipped-identity pixels, and missed-to-background pixels. We also propose an entropy-based, ground truth label-free `flip-risk' score, which is computed from foreground identity uncertainty, and show that it can flag flip-prone cases at inference time. Code is available at https://github.com/acharaakshit/label-flips.

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

Do LLM Attribution Metrics Transfer? Auditing Retrieval-Augmented Generation Evaluation Across Datasets and Constructs

Practice often treats automatic metrics for attribution in LLM retrieval-augmented generation as interchangeable. We audit eight automatic scorers – lexical, embedding, and BERTScore baselines alongside entailment/grounding-trained models (clean and FEVER NLI, the checker MiniCheck) – across three evaluation constructs (provenance/topicality, generated-answer attribution, and fact-check entailment), asking whether any scorer transfers: stays within the 95% confidence interval of the best audited scorer on every dataset of a multi-dataset construct. In the construct with the most multi-dataset human-labeled coverage – generated-answer attribution (AttributionBench's four source datasets, n = 1,610, with independent HAGRID, n = 2,150) – none does: the per-dataset metric rankings invert (Kendall tau = -0.64, p = 0.031 on AttributedQA vs. LFQA), and an off-the-shelf NLI scorer that is best on short-claim AttributedQA (AUROC 0.90) collapses to AUROC 0.53 (chance) on long-form LFQA, where BERTScore wins (0.91); the flip is not a length or truncation artifact. This instability has a concrete decision cost: a naive "best-on-average" rule for choosing an evaluator fails leave-one-dataset-out (mean held-out regret 0.172 AUROC, worse than fixing one scorer), so metric choice must be validated on the target dataset rather than learned from others. A prompt-based LLM judge avoids the chance-level collapses the automatic scorers suffer (no LFQA collapse) but is not uniformly best, ~100x costlier, and non-deterministic – relocating, not removing, the validation burden.

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

MoReBench: Evaluating Procedural and Pluralistic Moral Reasoning in Language Models, More than Outcomes

As AI systems progress, we rely more on them to make decisions with us and for us. To ensure that such decisions are aligned with human values, it is imperative for us to understand not only what decisions they make but also how they come to those decisions. Reasoning language models, which provide both final responses and (partially transparent) intermediate thinking traces, present a timely opportunity to study AI procedural reasoning. Unlike math and code problems which often have objectively correct answers, moral dilemmas are an excellent testbed for process-focused evaluation because they allow for multiple defensible conclusions. To do so, we present MoReBench: 1,000 moral scenarios, each paired with a set of rubric criteria that experts consider essential to include (or avoid) when reasoning about the scenarios. MoReBench contains over 23 thousand criteria including identifying moral considerations, weighing trade-offs, and giving actionable recommendations to cover cases on AI advising humans moral decisions as well as making moral decisions autonomously. Separately, we curate MoReBench-Theory: 150 examples to test whether AI can reason under five major frameworks in normative ethics. Our results show that scaling laws and existing benchmarks on math, code, and scientific reasoning tasks fail to predict models' abilities to perform moral reasoning. Models also show partiality towards specific moral frameworks (e.g., Benthamite Act Utilitarianism and Kantian Deontology), which might be side effects of popular training paradigms. Together, these benchmarks advance process-focused reasoning evaluation towards safer and more transparent AI.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Improving Human-Robot Teamwork in Urban Search and Rescue Through Episodic Memory of Prior Collaboration

arXiv:2606.18836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective human-robot teamwork requires robots to adapt to partners, situations, and task dynamics from the start of an interaction. In the MATRX Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) environment, people can externalize collaboration patterns (CPs) they discover during teamwork through a chat and reflection interface. We study whether a robot can use such prior team experience to become a better teammate in future interactions. To this end, we represent historical CPs as knowledge-graph episodic memories and use graph representation learning with a node-classification objective to identify a representative and effective memory for reuse. We then initialize the robot with this memory before a new collaboration episode begins. Across 20 participants and 160 round-level observations, initializing the robot with a single automatically selected prior CP increases rescue success from 25.7% to 41.3% and reduces average task time by 283 seconds. The strongest gains appear at the beginning of interaction, suggesting that reusable episodic memory can help robots enter collaboration with more effective task knowledge and support smoother early teamwork.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Controlled Comparison of Machine Learning Models for Fault Classification and Localization in Power System Protection

arXiv:2510.00831v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The increasing complexity of modern power systems, driven by the integration of inverter-based and distributed energy resources, challenges the reliability of conventional protection schemes and motivates the use of machine learning for protection tasks. However, published results are often difficult to compare because datasets, sensing assumptions, and decision horizons vary across studies. This paper presents a controlled comparison of machine learning models for fault classification (FC) and fault localization (FL) under identical sensing, timing, and validation conditions on a common electromagnetic transient dataset, using decision windows of 10-50 ms to reflect protection-relevant time scales. For FC, the best-performing nonlinear models achieve F1 scores above 0.98 already at 10 ms, while lower-capacity models degrade at shorter horizons but improve with longer windows, indicating that relevant fault-type information is already present in the earliest transient. For FL, the top-performing models reach a stable localization error of about 10 % of normalized line length across all evaluated horizons, while weaker models form a clearly separated second performance tier. Line-resolved analysis shows that localization accuracy varies across grid segments, indicating topology-dependent difficulty rather than insufficient temporal context alone. These findings provide a controlled reference for comparing machine learning models across two protection tasks with fundamentally different information requirements.

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

Quantum ergodicity and semiclassical measures: mathematical results

arXiv:2606.12098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this chapter we review some results describing the high-frequency eigenmodes of the Laplacian on compact manifolds, or Euclidean domains, for which the geodesic flow is chaotic. We focus on the macroscopic distribution of these eigenmodes, which is described by the concept of semiclassical measure. The main result on the question is the Quantum Ergodicity theorem, originally due to Schnirelman. We provide the detailed proof of this theorem, including the adjustments necessary to treat the case of manifolds with boundary. We also discuss the Quantum Unique Ergodicity conjecture, and some progress towards this conjecture for strongly chaotic (Anosov) systems. In particular, we describe the constraints on admissible semiclassical measures, in terms of their Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy, as well as more recent delocalization results.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A unified complexity bound for logconcave sampling

arXiv:2606.12694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We give a simple, unified, and nearly tight bound for sampling arbitrary logconcave distributions from a warm start using the In-and-Out algorithm along with exponential lifting. The main new ingredient in the analysis is an improved bound on the Poincaré constant of a lifted distribution. As a consequence, the resulting convergence rate is nearly tight for both constrained settings (e.g., Gaussian restricted to a convex body) and well-conditioned settings (e.g., strongly logconcave and smooth densities).

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Diffuse Interface Energies with Microscopic Heterogeneities II: Rare Events

arXiv:2606.17968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze Allen-Cahn functionals with stationary ergodic coefficients in the regime where the length scale $\delta$ of the heterogeneities is much smaller (microscopic) than the interface width $\epsilon$ (mesoscopic). In a companion paper, we show that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta$ vanishes fast enough as $\epsilon \to 0$, then the functionals converge to an effective surface energy where the energy density is determined by homogenization effects originating at microscopic scales. Here we prove that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta $ vanishes too slowly, the limit of the functional may actually be smaller than this homogenized energy. We refer to this as the rare events regime. In the case of the random checkerboard in dimension one, we use large deviations techniques to give a complete description of the rare events regime, showing that the limiting energy depends in a nontrivial way on the limit of $\epsilon^{-1} \delta | \log \epsilon |$. We further construct, in any dimension, examples of random media in which rare events become relevant at algebraic scales $\delta \approx \epsilon^{1 + \alpha}$ for an arbitrary $\alpha > 0$, as well as almost periodic examples in which atypical configurations play the same role as rare events.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

Correcting spatial transcriptomics data affected by a prevalent transcript leakage problem across platforms, species, and tissues

Spatial transcriptomics has been widely applied to study the spatial distribution of cell types, cell states, and specific gene expression in tissue samples. However, we show that there is a prevalent transcript leakage problem in spatial transcriptomics data, where transcripts expressed by a cell diffuse to its neighborhood and are recurrently detected in the nearby cells. By analyzing published data sets, we show that this problem is general across data produced from different tissues and different species using different imaging-based and sequencing-based spatial transcriptomics platforms. It affects both upstream tasks such as expression quantification as well as downstream tasks such as cell-type annotation and detection of spatially-dependent gene expression. To tackle the transcript leakage problem, we propose a reference-free Bayesian model-based method, DeLeakage, which cleans up the data much more effectively than existing denoising methods. DeLeakage also improves cell-type annotation and avoids false detection of spatially dependent expression.

25.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Prescribed hormonal contraceptive use trends in the Estonian Biobank: A longitudinal observational study

by Jelisaveta Džigurski, Märt Möls, Kristi Läll, Hannah Currant, Mall Eltermaa, Estonian Biobank Research Team , Reedik Mägi, Lili Milani, Triin Laisk Background Hormonal contraceptives (HCs) are widely used and have well-documented population-level statistics. Previous studies with short follow-ups have focussed on individual HC use and side effects. However, the same aspects over longer periods, HC formulation switching, and the impact of genetic factors on HC side effects remain understudied due to the limited availability of suitable datasets. We investigated whether the Estonian Biobank (EstBB) is suitable for studying genetic risk for HC side effects. Methods and findings This is a longitudinal descriptive study combining prescribed HC purchase data collected from 2004 to 2022 with genetic and health data from 73,071 female EstBB HC users aged 15–55 at the time of purchase. HC usage was defined by the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) codes G02B, G03A, and G03HB01. Methods included calculating age-stratified annual user prevalence, inferring usage periods from purchases, assessing formulation switching, identifying the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10)-based side effect-related diagnoses and thromboembolism risk factors, and assessing carrier status for Factor V Leiden (FVL, rs6025) and prothrombin G20210A (PTM, rs1799963) genetic variants as proof-of-concept. Over 19 years, 20 HC formulations with five administration routes (oral pills, transdermal patches, vaginal rings, subdermal implants, intrauterine devices) were used. In the EstBB, combined HCs were the most commonly used among users aged 15–29, while progestin-only HC use increased with age and over time, comparable to the Estonian population. Overall, 64.2% (n = 46,920) of users switched formulations at least once, with 17.7% (n = 12,929) being rapid switchers. Side effect-related diagnoses were observed in 23.1% (n = 2,982) of rapid switchers, with excessive/irregular menstrual bleeding being the most common. Genetic analysis revealed that 5.3% (n = 3,886) of users carried at least one variant previously associated with increased thrombosis risk (3.5% (n = 2,556) carried FVL only, 1.8% (n = 1,276) PTM only, and 0.07% (n = 54) both). Carriers of thrombosis-associated variants had a significantly higher percentage of thrombosis (6.5%) than non-carriers (4.2%; OR = 1.61, 95% CI [1.40, 1.84], p