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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Estimating COVID-19 Cumulative Incidence from Seroprevalence Surveys accounting for Time-Varying Seroreversion: A Fully Bayesian Methodology

Seroprevalence surveys reveal the extent of humoral immunity against pathogens such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and under some circumstances represent cumulative incidence of prior infection. However, antibody waning - or seroreversion - biases these estimates by reducing assay sensitivity in a time-varying manner. Because assay sensitivity decays over time, naively using serosurveys can substantially bias estimates of SARS-CoV-2 cumulative incidence and fatality rates. The Bayesian assay-specific, time-varying sensitivity adjustment developed in this paper can reliably correct for this bias and account for the delay between infection and serosurvey. In seroprevalence studies conducted in the United States in 2020, adjusting for time-varying sensitivity increased cumulative incidence by up to 1.4-fold, with an adjustment of 1.08 for a national study. Our estimates contrast with a previously published 2-fold adjustment that did not account for assay design. This suggests that previous analyses overestimated cumulative incidence by applying seroreversion corrections that did not account for assay-specific effects, or underestimated cumulative incidence by not applying seroreversion corrections. These biases imply fatality rate underestimation and overestimation, respectively. Our model provides a framework for design-specific time-varying sensitivity corrections in seroprevalence surveys for other pathogens.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Algorithmic Constitutionalism

arXiv:2606.12437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The increasing encroachment of artificial intelligence (AI) on social life raises significant risks for society, particularly within the infospheres created and controlled by companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. This article examines these risks through an in-depth analysis of Facebook's content moderation regime, which is already partially governed by algorithms. We argue that the idea of ethical engineering, often proposed in the literature as a solution to the governance challenges posed by AI, is inadequate for several reasons. In response, we develop an alternative framework, which we term "algorithmic constitutionalism." Our approach rests on three pillars: (a) a layered architecture consisting of two levels of code: (i) an operative or object level and (ii) a meta level designed to protect the system's core principles from algorithmically initiated change; (b) algorithmic meta-reasoning, which enables the system to operate simultaneously at both levels so that it can monitor, verify, and potentially correct in real time operations at the object level that depart from principles protected at the meta-code level; and (c) correction through deliberation. The article elaborates the concept of algorithmic constitutionalism and demonstrates how it may be applied to Facebook's content moderation regime. As part of this analysis, we examine the tension between societal constitutionalism and algorithmic constitutionalism. Paradoxically, attempts to subject AI systems to external deliberative control may also enable AI agents to intervene in that process, potentially undermining its purpose. The article concludes by considering the implications of this argument for the European Digital Services Act, which entered into force in October 2022.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Classical representation of the dynamics of quantum spin chains

Authors:

arXiv:2502.10502v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Since the advent of quantum mechanics, classical probability interpretations have faced significant challenges. A notable issue arises with the emergence of negative probabilities when attempting to define the joint probability of non-commutative observables. In this work, we propose a resolution to this dilemma for quantum spin chains, by introducing an exact representation of their dynamics in terms of classical continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs). These CTMCs effectively model the creation, annihilation, and propagation of pairs of classical particles and antiparticles. The quantum dynamics then emerges by averaging over various realizations of this classical process.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Effects of sparsity and superposition on loss in simple autoencoders

arXiv:2606.18538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One of the major difficulties in the mechanistic interpretability of neural networks is the occurrence of polysemanticity, which suggests that each neuron is typically responsible for multiple different tasks, impeding a clean interpretation of their function. The seminal paper of Elhage et al. (2022) argues that this occurs due to superposition, a phenomenon where the neural network represents distinct features as non-orthogonal directions in a lower-dimensional space, a strategy that allows much greater compression of the data without sacrificing fidelity due to the feature sparsity of input vectors. Elhage et al. (2022) empirically validates these hypotheses in a rather natural and simple autoencoder with sparse inputs. The contribution of the present work is to analyze the mathematical basis for the occurrence and optimality of superposition, while rigorously corroborating some of their findings. In particular, we provide upper and lower bounds for the L2 reconstruction loss, tight in the very sparse regime, for power activation functions. A short list of interesting open problems are also included at the end.

06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

The Inference-Compute Frontier and a Latency-Efficient Architecture for Limit Order Book Prediction

arXiv:2606.25986v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study whether a scaling-law-style inference-compute frontier appears in limit order book prediction. Using FI-2010 and a suite of models ranging from small decision trees to neural LOB architectures, we find that the realized empirical frontier of predictive loss versus structural forward work is well summarized by a power law. In particular, with MLPLOB held out as an architecture family, a power-law fit to the low- and mid-compute non-MLPLOB frontier extrapolates across multiple orders of magnitude and attains $R^2=0.941$ on the excluded high-compute MLPLOB target frontier. A similar exercise in latency space gives substantially weaker results, showing that latency is not merely noisy compute. We use this gap to motivate FastBiNLOB, a dense axis-separable LOB mixer built from hardware-friendly temporal and feature mixing operations. In a five-seed experiment, FastBiNLOB exceeds the published $y_{10}$ and $y_{100}$ macro-F1 targets at notably lower latency than existing published SOTA architectures.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

What Type of Inference is Active Inference?

arXiv:2606.04935v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Active inference casts decision-making as inference, with the Expected Free Energy (EFE) unifying goal-directed and information-seeking behavior. Recent work showed that EFE minimization can be written as Variational Free Energy (VFE) minimization on a generative model augmented with epistemic priors. We prove that the VFE of the augmented model can be rewritten as the VFE of the predictive model plus explicit entropy-correction terms, making the EFE contribution transparent. We then show that proper EFE-based planning requires combining these epistemic corrections with a planning correction that turns marginal inference into policy optimization, yielding a full variational characterization of EFE-based planning. This clarifies which corrections are needed for cross-entropy planning and for full EFE-based planning. The same entropy-corrected formulation leads to a detailed message-passing scheme for EFE-based planning together with simpler ablations. Experiments on three grid-world environments show that full EFE-based planning outperforms ablations that omit either the planning correction or the epistemic corrections.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Transformers Learn the Mestre-Nagao Heuristic

arXiv:2606.15036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We train a two-layer transformer encoder to classify rational elliptic curves $E/\mathbb{Q}$ of conductor $\leq 10000$ as either rank 0 or rank 1 from the first 128 normalized Frobenius traces. We achieve >99% accuracy on both classes, and accuracy is essentially unchanged on test curves with no isogeny or quadratic-twist relative in the training set. We then apply techniques from mechanistic interpretability such as attention analysis, linear probing, activation patching, logit attribution, and neuron-level circuit analysis to reverse-engineer the algorithm the (centroid in function space) model learned. We find that a sparse circuit of 20 out of 512 layer-1 MLP neurons is sufficient for rank prediction under a linear probe with an AUROC of 0.992 at plateau, implementing a push-pull detector architecture of rank-0 and rank-1 detectors with a one-sided readout. However, we notice that the model has sub-optimal readout problems indicating a mismatch in rank-order between the readout pathway and the discriminative circuit. Critically, the learned input weights of the top discriminating neuron match the Mestre-Nagao sum heuristic weights $\log(p)/(p\cdot \log{B})$ with a Spearman coefficient $r = 0.997$ and Pearson coefficient $r = 0.952$: the model has learnt a result from analytic number theory from the Frobenius trace data alone. We additionally find that all 50 independently trained models concentrate CLS attention on prime positions at 2-50$\times$ the rate of composite positions. The CLS embedding encodes $\log{L(E,1)}$ with $R^2 = 0.962\pm 0.011$ across the 50 models (after controlling for the conductor). Activation patching analysis reveals that attention weights are dissociated from causal information flow. Additionally, the 50 solutions from training are near-identical in function space (with pairwise agreement $>$98.8%) despite large weight space barriers.

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

BusterX++: Towards Unified Cross-Modal AI-Generated Content Detection and Explanation with MLLM

The rapid advancement of generative AI has substantially improved image and video synthesis, amplifying the risk of multimodal visual misinformation. Recent MLLMs have shown promise for transparent AI-generated content detection through reasoning and explanation, yet existing approaches largely treat image and video forensics as isolated tasks, leaving cross-modal synergies underexplored. To address this, we present BusterX++, a unified MLLM for joint image and video detection with interpretable reasoning. We also introduce GenBuster-Bench++, a meticulously curated, difficulty-aligned benchmark containing balanced image and video samples spanning recent generation models and diverse real-world scenarios. Using this controlled setting, we revisit the widely adopted $SFT \rightarrow RL$ post-training paradigm. Notably, our findings demonstrate that a single-stage, pure RL strategy driven strictly by sparse outcome rewards consistently matches or surpasses a strong SFT+RL baseline across both unified and single-modality settings. Our key insight reveals that SFT imposes lower policy entropy, which restricts the policy search space and dampens exploratory freedom. In contrast, single-stage pure RL maintains higher policy entropy throughout training, effectively unlocking the spontaneous emergence of cross-modal capability transfer between image and video forensics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BusterX++ achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the powerful potential of RL for unified cross-modal visual reasoning.

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

Optimizing resource allocation for accuracy in noisy variational quantum algorithms

arXiv:2606.20153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For quantum algorithms to achieve their full potential, we need methodologies to optimize them, such as reaching a given output accuracy with minimal resource costs. Here, we develop such a methodology for a class of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) algorithms. We leverage simulations of a Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) to propose a phenomenological model of such algorithms that captures the complex relationship between algorithmic accuracy, algorithmic resource costs, and the noise that exists in realistic quantum hardware. For this, we take the algorithmic resource cost to be the total number of quantum gate-operations in the algorithm; minimizing this cost typically makes the algorithm faster and more energy-efficient. We consider the subtle trade-off between quantum circuit size (small circuits are too imprecise, but large ones are too noisy), and the number of iterations of that quantum circuit for the full algorithm to sufficiently converge. Using a noise-metric-resource methodology, we identify the sweet spot (of circuit size versus iterations) that minimizes the algorithmic resource costs for a desired algorithm accuracy. It also gives the circuit size that maximizes algorithm accuracy for a fixed resource cost. Our methodology provides a practical guideline for near-term deployment of variational algorithms on realistic noisy hardware, including hardware that uses error mitigation.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

WebSP-Eval: Evaluating Web Agents on Website Security and Privacy Tasks

arXiv:2604.06367v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Web agents automate browser tasks, ranging from simple form completion to complex workflows like ordering groceries. While current benchmarks evaluate general-purpose performance~(e.g., WebArena) or safety against malicious actions~(e.g., SafeArena), no existing framework assesses an agent's ability to successfully execute user-facing website security and privacy tasks, such as managing cookie preferences, configuring privacy-sensitive account settings, or revoking inactive sessions. To address this gap, we introduce WebSP-Eval, an evaluation framework for measuring web agent performance on website security and privacy tasks. WebSP-Eval comprises 1) a manually crafted task dataset of 200 task instances across 28 websites; 2) a robust agentic system supporting account and initial state management across runs using a custom Google Chrome extension; and 3) an automated evaluator. We evaluate a total of 8 web agent instantiations using state-of-the-art multimodal large language models, conducting a fine-grained analysis across websites, task categories, and UI elements. Our evaluation reveals that current models suffer from limited autonomous exploration capabilities to reliably solve website security and privacy tasks, and struggle with specific task categories and websites. Crucially, we identify stateful UI elements are a primary reason for agent failure, with toggles causing more than 45% task failure across many models.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Estimating vaccine-prevented disease outcomes when vaccination has only direct effects

Vaccination can be a useful intervention for reducing infectious disease burden. Estimating numbers of vaccine-prevented health outcomes is one approach to quantifying the benefits of vaccination. Here we improve a method described by Foppa et al. (1) that assumes vaccination has only direct effects, that is, it cannot prevent infection or onward transmission of the disease. We rederive this method and derive an improved method that increases estimation accuracy with minimal additional analytical complexity. To evaluate the improved method, we simulated disease outbreaks and compared the accuracy of the two methods for estimating prevented disease outcomes. In 84% of simulations performed over a wide parameter space, the improved method had an equal or smaller estimation error compared to the original Foppa method, with 7.9-fold smaller mean error and 44-fold smaller standard deviation of errors. Our study improves a method for estimating prevented burden when assuming vaccination has only direct effects.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

FedSteer: Taming Extreme Gradient Staleness in Federated Learning with Corrective Projections and Caching

arXiv:2606.10124v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is often subject to aggregation variance if clients do not consistently participate in training rounds. While reusing stale model updates from inactive clients is a common technique to reduce this variance, we find that with skewed client participation, the resulting update staleness can become severe enough to destabilize training. To remedy this, we propose FedSteer, a novel method that constructs a gradient subspace from a cache of recent client gradients to serve as a low-dimensional representation of the current optimization landscape. FedSteer projects an active client's true gradient onto this subspace to find a set of optimal coordinates. For an inactive client, FedSteer reuses these coordinates with the now-evolved subspace drifted by other active clients. This process effectively "steers" outdated gradients toward the current global objective. This is complemented by a selective caching strategy that identifies a representative client subset to form the subspace, reducing server memory. Experiments demonstrate that FedSteer significantly outperforms baselines, preventing performance collapse in challenging scenarios while delivering accuracy gains of over 7% in others.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Point Cloud Diffusion with Global and Local Reconstruction for Instance-Level 3D Anomaly Detection

3D anomaly detection in point clouds is critical for high-precision industrial manufacturing. Reconstruction-based methods have laid a strong foundation by detecting 3D anomalies through comparisons between defective inputs and their reconstructed normal counterparts. However, existing methods still suffer from two challenges: 1) the foreground weak defective regions such as scratches are hard to reconstruct and detect, where the anomaly deviations in normalized point clouds can be as small as $10^{-3}$; 2) the background non-defective regions are prone to get positional bias in reconstruction, which leads to false positives. To address these challenges, we propose PCDiff, a point cloud diffusion framework for instance-level 3D anomaly generation and detection. In the generation phase, an instance-level multi-modal attention is embedded into the generation framework, where anomalies are conditioned with texture gradient, image patch, text and mask. The instance-level condition enables the high-quality generation of weak-defective anomalies. In the detection phase, a joint local-global reconstruction algorithm is introduced to ensure local anomaly restoration and global geometric consistency, which preserves background normal structure while restoring the foreground defect. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed PCDiff significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both 3D anomaly generation fidelity and reconstruction quality, leading to substantial improvements in anomaly detection accuracy.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Sp(2N, R) interferometry in multi-mode Gaussian bosonic systems for optimal metrology and quantum control

arXiv:2606.25768v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-mode interferometers for bosons in Gaussian states are important systems for quantum metrology with precision beyond the standard quantum limit and for bosonic quantum computing. However, there is a lack of theoretical foundation for generic $N$-mode Gaussian interferometry. In this work, we study quantum metrology and quantum control in multi-mode bosonic systems with quadratic Hamiltonians, exploiting the fundamental Sp$(2N,R)$ symmetry of such interferometers. We show that the optimal quantum control to maximize sensitivity requires aligning squeezing and displacement in the same direction. We propose Sp$(2N,R)$ echo, a multi-mode generalization of the SU$(1,1)$ interferometry, to achieve the sensitivity of phase estimation set by the quantum Fisher information. In addition, we introduce a geometrical means for reversing many-body dynamics with Sp$(2N,R)$ dynamical symmetry, such as dynamics of the bosonic Kitaev chain. Our schemes are readily realizable in optical, atomic, and mechanical platforms.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Analysis of the asymmetric shelf shuffle

arXiv:2606.18047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In an asymmetric shelf shuffle, a deck of $n$ cards is dealt sequentially from the bottom and assigned one of the $m$ shelves uniformly at random. The card is placed at the top of the assigned shelf with probability $p$, and at the bottom of the assigned shelf with probability $(1-p)$. Analysis of the shelf shuffle has gained much attention recently, and the case $p=1/2$ was first treated by Diaconis–Fulman–Holmes [Ann. Appl. Prob. 23 (2013), no. 4, 1692–1720]. In this paper, we extend the analysis of the shelf shuffle to general $p\in (0, 1)$. In particular, we study the distribution of cycles, cycle lengths, number of descents, number of valleys, number of inversions, and the RSK shape of a permutation obtained from an asymmetric shelf shuffle. Our results extend the analysis of Diaconis–Fulman–Holmes to arbitrary $p$. Furthermore, our analysis of the distribution of descents and inversions is new even for $p=1/2$.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Healthy Heart Actions Right Time (HHART): Co-design priorities to connect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community and clinic activities for healthy hearts

Aim: Healthy Heart Actions Right Time (HHART) is a multi-phased research project that seeks to identify, implement and evaluate strategies to connect community and clinical activities to reduce the burden of heart disease for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The aim in Phase One was to identify priority activities for two participating services. Background: The ongoing effects of colonisation drive a disproportionate burden of heart disease for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Clinical and community groups both have established strengths in reducing the risk of heart disease, but these are not always well connected. Methods: Using a case study methodology in two locations we partnered in a 12-month co-design process to identify priority activities to connect clinical and community activities. Findings: Three priorities emerged from the Phase One co-design process: (i) community-led gardening as a strategy to promote heart health through connection and healthy lifestyles; (ii) community days to increase engagement in heart checks and strengthen community-clinic relationship; and (iii) clinic-led development of culturally relevant education resources to promote clinician confidence and community heart health knowledge.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Better data, better trees: GenBank-GISAID deduplication and source-specific artifact masking in viral genomics

GenBank and GISAID are the primary repositories for viral genomic data, but integrating records across them remains a challenge. The same sequence could be made available in both databases without any cross-reference linking the two entries. Consequently, there is no systematic way to identify this redundancy, which compromises the compilation of representative, non-redundant large-scale datasets. In parallel, the growth of viral genomic data has increased the risk of systematic technical artifacts introduced during sequencing or assembly. These artifacts can inflate substitution rate estimates and degrade temporal signal, biasing evolutionary rate estimates. To address both challenges, here we present a formal, reproducible workflow integrating two newly developed complementary tools: G2G matcher for cross-repository harmonization and Lab-Specific Bias FILTer (LSBFILT) for masking of laboratory-specific artifacts. Using the Eastern/Central/South African (ECSA) chikungunya virus lineage as a proof-of-concept, we demonstrate that our integrated workflow restores temporal signal and provides a robust, curated dataset for downstream phylodynamic analyses. Critically, restricting masking of homoplastic sites to specific sequences reduces the substitution rate estimate from an inflated 8.517 x 10e-4; to 5.078 x 10e-4; substitutions/site/year and increases the coefficient of determination (R2) of the root-to-tip regression analysis from 0.353 to 0.677. By enabling systematic cross-repository harmonization and source-specific artifact masking, we provide the molecular epidemiological community with scalable tools to reconcile fragmented genomic data and reduce technical biases, fostering more accurate and reproducible phylogenetic analysis. G2G matcher is available at https://github.com/andrezaleite/G2G-Matcher, and LSBFILT at https://github.com/khourious/LSBFILT.

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

Specifying AI-SDLC Processes: A Protocol Language for Human-Agent Boundaries

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20615v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI agents now participate as first-class team members across the software development lifecycle, yet no specification language exists for expressing the human-agent responsibility boundaries, approval gates, and governance constraints this collaboration requires. Existing approaches encode process in agent prompts (subject to drift), target adjacent domains (workflow management, business processes), or address only fragments (access control, approval gates). We propose a domain-specific language for specifying AI-SDLC processes as protocols, with formal syntax, well-formedness conditions, operational semantics, and enforcement invariants. The language distinguishes policy (declared intent) from mechanism (structural enforcement), enabling implementations to bound process non-determinism through primitives such as validation tokens and capability boundaries. Three results follow. A failure rate analysis shows that structural enforcement bounds system failure rates at a weighted product of agent and validator rates, while behavioral compliance permits cumulative or near-saturating growth. The 2+N team pattern (two human-in-control roles plus N specialized agent members) formalizes classical Separation of Duties for AI-SDLC. Kleene closure of orchestration loops and reflexive protocol-adherence validation emerge as design properties rather than special-case constructs. We position the contribution against multi-agent frameworks (MetaGPT), workflow specification (FlowAgent, BPMN extensions), and capability-based security (SAGA): the novelty lies in the specific integration, not any single primitive. A working implementation demonstrates feasibility; empirical evaluation is future work.

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

Structured Testbench Generation for LLM-Driven HDL Design and Verification-Oriented Data Curation

arXiv:2606.12983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated testbench generation has become a critical bottleneck in large language model (LLM)-driven Register Transfer Level (RTL) workflows, where large numbers of candidate designs must be verified rapidly and reliably. Existing prompt-based approaches treat testbench generation as unconstrained code synthesis, yielding stochastic outputs with high token cost, low reproducibility, and insufficient coverage. To address this gap, we present STG, a Structured Testbench Generation framework that exploits the inherent structure of hardware designs to generate deterministic testbenches. As a direct verification tool, STG runs 720x faster than an iterative LLM-based testbench generation flow and higher rate of successful compilation, achieves higher coverage, and reduces false-pass verdicts on incorrect DUTs. STG also helps identify errors in RTL generation benchmarks by exposing faulty benchmark testbenches. As a data curation engine, it is 11x faster than LLM-based filtering on a single CPU core with 127x less energy, and the resulting distilled models provide state-of-the-art performance in our multi-benchmark evaluation. As a test-time scaling oracle, it reduces node count by 14-47\%. Our models are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/AS-SiliconMind/siliconmind-v12.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Average Rankings Mask Per-Subject Optimality: A Friedman-Nemenyi Benchmark of EEG Motor-Imagery BCI Decoders

arXiv:2606.24394v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) is the dominant non-invasive modality for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), yet reliable decoding of motor imagery is hampered by inter- and intra-individual variability. A recurring claim is that one decoding pipeline, most often a spatial or Riemannian method, is broadly preferable. We test the weakest version of that claim under the most favourable conditions. Using the Mother of All BCI Benchmarks (MOABB) framework, we evaluated 1,056 decoding configurations (feature extractor x scaler x classifier), >340,000 subject-level model fits, across three public left-versus-right motor-imagery datasets (PhysionetMI, 109 participants; Cho2017, 52; Zhou2016, 4) and two frequency bands (8-15 Hz, 8-30 Hz). Every model is fit and tested within a single session of a single participant, the easiest regime, giving every pipeline its best chance. We apply the statistics standard for multi-classifier comparison: Friedman omnibus tests, Nemenyi critical-difference analysis and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with effect sizes. Covariance tangent-space projection (cov-tgsp) and Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) are the strongest families, but their ordering is dataset-dependent and, on the largest and most heterogeneous cohort (PhysionetMI), statistically indistinguishable (Nemenyi p = 0.27; Kendall's W = 0.11). At the individual level the single best pipeline is optimal for only 35% of PhysionetMI participants, and nonlinear descriptors are best for roughly one third; matching pipeline to participant adds about seven accuracy points over the best fixed choice. The ranking is not an artefact of dimensionality, and classifier and scaler choices are secondary to the feature representation. Even in the easiest regime, no single pipeline dominates: a lower bound on the personalization problem and a quantitative case for participant-aware model selection rather than a universal decoder.

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

Ouroboros-Spatial: Closing the Data-Model Loop for Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning remains a persistent challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Existing approaches largely rely on large-scale, statically curated datasets, where all training samples are treated uniformly regardless of the model's evolving capabilities. This static paradigm is inherently data-inefficient: training capacity is often spent on samples that are either trivial or overly difficult for the model at its current stage. To address this limitation, we propose Ouroboros-Spatial, a self-evolving training framework in which the model plays dual roles as a proposer and a solver. In each iteration, a frozen proposer generates spatial question-answer (QA) pairs from 3D scene metadata and raw video frames, together with executable code for deriving reliable ground truth. A learnable solver is then fine-tuned on the accepted samples, and its per-sample prediction confidence is used as a difficulty signal. This signal is fed back to the proposer in the next iteration, guiding it to generate questions better matched to the solver's current capabilities. Through this closed-loop design, the training distribution co-evolves with model ability, reducing redundant trivial examples while filtering out ambiguous or uninformative samples with limited learning value. Across six spatial reasoning benchmarks, Ouroboros-Spatial substantially improves Qwen3-VL-4B and Qwen3-VL-8B while using an order of magnitude fewer training examples than recent large-scale curated datasets. On VSI-Bench, it yields absolute gains of 9.9 and 6.8 points for the 4B and 8B models, respectively, enabling both to outperform a wide range of strong open-source and proprietary baselines.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Flexible Catalysis

arXiv:2510.01065v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In quantum information and computation, a central challenge is to determine which quantum states can be transformed into which others under restricted sets of free operations. While many transformations are impossible directly, catalytic processes can enable otherwise forbidden conversions: an auxiliary quantum state (the catalyst) facilitates the transformation while remaining unchanged. In this work, we introduce flexible catalysis, a generalization in which the catalyst is allowed to transform into a different auxiliary state, provided it remains a valid catalyst. We show that this framework subsumes both standard catalytic and multicopy transformations, and we analyse its advantages across several classes of free operations. In particular, we prove that when the free operations are local unitaries or permutation matrices, flexible catalysis enables state extractions that are unattainable with standard catalysis alone.

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

PhoneHarness: Harnessing Phone-Use Agents through Mixed GUI, CLI, and Tool Actions

Phone agents are increasingly expected to complete real mobile workflows rather than merely predict the next screen action. However, much of the current mobile-agent literature still evaluates agents primarily as GUI controllers that observe a screen, emit taps and swipes, and are scored by target app state. Real phone-use tasks are broader: they require deciding when to use app GUIs, device-side commands, or structured tools, while leaving evidence that the intended side effect actually occurred. We introduce PhoneHarness, a mixed-action benchmark and execution harness for studying phone-use agents on verifiable mobile workflows. PhoneHarness runs a device-side agent loop over GUI, CLI, and host-side tool actions, combining deterministic action routing with bounded GUI delegation and auditable execution traces. Its benchmark, PhoneHarness Bench, evaluates whether agents complete tasks with observable side effects, not only whether they produce plausible final answers. On the annotated evaluation split, PhoneHarness reaches a 75.0% pass rate, outperforming the strongest non-PhoneHarness settings by 12.9 percentage points. PhoneHarness and PhoneHarness Bench therefore play distinct but mutually dependent roles: the harness makes mixed phone workflows executable, while the benchmark measures whether agents can use that harness reliably and safely. Our findings suggest that reliable phone automation depends on action-surface routing and verifiable execution, not only visual GUI control.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Once-for-All: Scalable Simultaneous Forecasting via Equilibrium State Estimation

arXiv:2606.13285v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Equilibrium State Estimation (ESE), a novel paradigm for simultaneous prediction, where multiple interacting systems require separate yet coordinated forecasts. Such scenarios often arise in real-world settings such as economics and healthcare modeling. Unlike existing approaches that predict one system at a time, ESE forecasts all systems in a single pass. It first estimates the equilibrium state across systems, then generates holistic forecasts based on the difference between the current state and the estimated equilibrium. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, including currency exchange and COVID-19 spread modeling, demonstrate that ESE is at least as accurate as state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods while being significantly faster. In addition, ESE integrates seamlessly with conventional predictors, combining their accuracy with its exceptional efficiency and delivering a 10-70x speedup. With linear-time complexity, ESE scales far better than SOTA methods as the number of systems increases. Moreover, it remains accurate under diverse perturbations, establishing ESE as a fast, generalizable, robust, and scalable multi-prediction method.