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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Characterizing Software Aging in GPU-Based LLM Serving Systems

arXiv:2606.11916v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper proposes an empirical methodology to study software aging in GPU-based LLM serving systems. Traditional aging studies focus on CPU-centric software with relatively regular workloads; LLM serving is different, spanning a Python host and a CUDA device, handling requests whose cost varies by orders of magnitude, and relying on rapidly evolving software stacks. We run a 216-hour campaign across six co-located deployments under identical stress conditions, monitor host, device, and client metrics in parallel, and apply a statistical pipeline that accounts for autocorrelation and multiple testing. Our results reveal statistically significant memory aging in all deployments, with leak rates strongly dependent on the serving runtime and deployment configuration. Beyond these findings, we provide a reproducible framework that opens a research direction at the intersection of the software aging and rejuvenation and LLM serving communities.

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

Agent trajectories as programs: fingerprinting and programming coding-agent behavior

arXiv:2606.16988v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark scores tell you what an agent got right; they do not tell you how it got there. In this work, we introduce methods for comparing agents procedurally in different contexts, where the model, tasks, and approaches vary. We compare ten agents and find that they are identifiable by their behavioral habits, which we define as fingerprints: a probe over these procedural signatures attributes an unseen trajectory to the correct agent at 85.7% accuracy, controlling for leakage across tasks. We develop procedural representations for agent problem-solving procedures with an emergent vocabulary induction technique that is meant to be maximally compressive to avoid surface-level variation while being expressive enough to unveil the quirks of the models' patterns. We apply our framework to the software engineering evaluation dataset SWE-Bench to study the structural distinctness of agent trajectories and find that behavior is most similar between models from similar release periods and those that are distilled from one another (e.g., a distilled student model and its teacher have a Jensen-Shannon divergence of 0.25, about half the distance between other model pairs). As more models saturate evaluations, we believe that it will be important to probe model behavior along more holistic dimensions than success rates alone. We introduce ProcGrep, a library for auditing and evaluating agents for how they approach tasks at a procedural level given their traces in a top-down fashion. We believe this work has a range of applications to help developers work with and program coding agents, such as task-aware model routing, agent monitoring, and finer-grained cost analysis.

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

PT-WNO: Point Transformer with Wavelet Neural Operator for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

Point cloud semantic segmentation requires architectures that capture both fine-grained local geometry and broad global scene structure. Transformer-based networks have demonstrated strong performance by focusing on detailed local feature aggregation; however, global context is conveyed primarily through skip connections across encoder-decoder stages, which we argue is insufficient for full scene understanding. We hypothesize that augmenting skip connections with a learnable global feature extraction module allows the network to acquire scene-level knowledge before descending into local detail, leading to richer and more contextually grounded representations. To this end, we propose Point Transformer with Wavelet Neural Operato (PT-WNO), which integrates a shared Wavelet Neural Operator (WNO) branch alongside the skip connections of a point cloud transformer backbone. At each encoder-decoder transition, point features are projected onto a dense 3D volumetric grid where the WNO captures multi-scale global spectral context through learnable wavelet decomposition and reconstruction. These global features are fused back into the network via lightweight adapters, complementing rather than replacing the existing skip connections. Experiments on four large-scale 3D point cloud benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of PT-WNO. On S3DIS (Area 5), PT-WNO achieves 71.59% mIoU, outperforming the Point Transformer v3 (PTv3) baseline by +1.03 points. On DALES it achieves 81.05% mIoU (+1.47 over the baseline). On ScanNet~v2, PT-WNO obtains 76.19% mIoU, remaining competitive with the baseline (76.36%).

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Performance of family history-based colorectal cancer screening criteria by race and age at diagnosis in the Disparities and Cancer Epidemiology (DANCE) study

Importance: Family history (FH) and age are the primary criteria employed for early colorectal cancer (CRC) risk stratification. We evaluated how well these criteria identify individuals diagnosed with CRC across age and racial groups. Objective: To evaluate the performance of FH and age based screening criteria for identifying individuals with CRC, with attention to differences by race and age at diagnosis. Design, Setting, and Participants: This case control and case only analysis used data from the Disparities and Cancer Epidemiology (DANCE) cohort, a population based study of invasive CRC cases diagnosed from 2013 to 2022, recruited through the Metropolitan Detroit Cancer Surveillance System and the Louisiana Tumor Registry. Analyses included 1,158 non-Hispanic Black (NHB) and non-Hispanic White (NHW) CRC cases and 1,434 cancer-free controls from the Inflammation Health and Lung Epidemiology (INHALE) study, enrolled from the same Detroit catchment area. Data were analyzed in 2025. Exposures: Self reported cancer FH among first-degree (FD) relatives and grandparents, summarized into three FH-based screening criteria: at least one FD relative with CRC (colon early-screening criterion), any FH of Lynch syndrome related cancers, and meeting NCCN criteria for Lynch syndrome genetic testing. Main Outcomes and Measures: Proportion of cases meeting each FH based screening criterion stratified by race and age at diagnosis (

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Task-guided cross-subject latent alignment: a multi-encoder-decoder VAE

arXiv:2606.15989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aligning neural activity across subjects offers the promise of discovering shared computational principles and generalizable decoders. However, traditional alignment methods require shared stimuli across subjects, a constraint that limits applicability to naturalistic paradigms with limited or non-overlapping data. We introduce a Multi-Encoder-Decoder Variational Autoencoder (MED-VAE) that achieves cross-subject alignment without shared stimuli by anchoring representations to a common scaffold provided by a pretrained ANN. Using the Natural Scenes Dataset, we show that MED-VAE creates common latent spaces with superior semantic organisation, achieving higher cross-subject alignment than common methods while maintaining robust generalisation to held-out stimuli where traditional methods degrade. Reconstructing from these common spaces back to each subject's original neural space, MED-VAE preserves equal stimulus-driven signal in its cross-subject latent space. Finally, we show that this superior alignment directly enables cross-subject neural prediction, as demonstrated via cross-subject image decoding. In summary, we introduce a framework to identify generalisable common subspaces for cross-subject predictions and downstream tasks, demonstrated here for visual cortex responses to static images.

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

Capability Minimization as a Safety Primitive: Risk-Aware Causal Gating for Least-Privilege LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.13884v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern decision systems increasingly rely on learned components whose outputs may be confident yet wrong, exposing downstream actions to costly errors. We introduce Risk-Aware Causal Gating (RACG), a framework that decides whether to act on, defer, or abstain from a model's prediction by combining causal effect estimation with calibrated risk control. RACG models the causal pathway from candidate actions to outcomes and gates each decision according to an estimated counterfactual risk rather than raw predictive confidence. To make gating reliable, we derive distribution-free bounds on the probability of acting under high-risk conditions and show how these bounds translate into operating thresholds that satisfy user-specified safety constraints. We further propose an adaptive gating policy that adjusts to distribution shift by monitoring discrepancies between predicted and realized outcomes, tightening the gate when causal assumptions appear violated. Across simulated interventions and real-world decision benchmarks, RACG reduces high-cost errors substantially while preserving most of the utility of an ungated policy, and it outperforms confidence-based and selective-prediction baselines at matched abstention rates. Our results indicate that explicitly separating causal risk from predictive uncertainty yields decision systems that are both safer and more transparent, offering a principled mechanism for trustworthy automation in high-stakes settings.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

EQPO: Equitable Group Relative Policy Optimization for Clinical Reasoning

arXiv:2510.19893v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Medical AI systems demonstrated impressive diagnostic performance, yet they routinely show uneven accuracy across demographic groups, disadvantaging underrepresented populations. Although multimodal reasoning foundation models have pushed clinical diagnosis forward, reinforcement learning-based post-training tends to absorb and magnify the biases present in majority-dominated training corpora. We propose Equitable Group Relative Policy Optimization (EQPO), a hierarchical reinforcement learning method that encourages balanced learning across heterogeneous clinical populations by adaptively reweighting samples according to subgroup representation, task difficulty, and data source. As demographic annotations are frequently missing in real-world clinical data, EQPO additionally applies unsupervised clustering to recover latent subpopulations when they are unavailable. On 7 diagnostic benchmarks covering 5 modalities (X-ray, CT, dermoscopy, mammography, ultrasound), EQPO reduces F1 standard deviation by 43.9% and the maximum cross-group F1 gap by 42.7% on QoQ-Med3-8B over vanilla GRPO, and narrows predictive parity gaps by 27.2% on MedGemma-4B over bias-mitigated RL baselines while raising F1 by 12.5% even without any demographic labels. Examining the training trajectory shows that EQPO steadily improves fairness over the course of optimization, in contrast to baseline methods whose fairness degrades as training proceeds, and the discovered implicit groups remain stable and align with masked demographic attributes. We further release EquiMedGemma-4B and EquiQoQ-Med3-8B, equitability-aware clinical VLLMs that attain state-of-the-art accuracy with markedly smaller demographic gaps.

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

Benchmarking Instance-Dependent Label Noise with Controlled Corruptions

arXiv:2606.14965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic instance-dependent label noise (IDN) benchmarks are widely used to evaluate noisy-label learning methods, yet existing approaches typically generate noise through imperfect annotators or classifier raters, leaving the source of ambiguity implicit. We introduce CILN, a benchmark generation framework that creates IDN through controlled input corruptions. A diverse voter pool labels corrupted instances, producing benchmark datasets in which both the source and severity of ambiguity are explicit and controllable. Using CIFAR10, MNIST, and Adult, we construct 90 benchmark settings spanning multiple corruption families and severity levels. Our experiments show that the resulting benchmarks exhibit genuine instance-dependent noise, provide diverse confusion structures, and, on CIFAR-10, can produce label distributions that are closer to human uncertainty than an existing synthetic IDN benchmark. We further demonstrate that corruption-mediated IDN can expose failure modes of popular noisy-label learning methods, including Co-Teaching and DivideMix, that are not observed under comparable levels of rater-fallibility noise. These findings suggest that noise structure, not only noise rate, plays an important role in benchmark difficulty and algorithm behavior. By making ambiguity generation explicit and controllable, CILN provides a complementary benchmarking framework for studying noisy-label learning under diverse sources of instance difficulty.

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

Control-Plane Placement Shapes Forgetting: An Architectural Study of Agent Memory Across Thirteen System Configurations

Authors:

Where an LLM sits in an agent memory pipeline – between the recall plane that retrieves stored facts (extensively benchmarked) and the control plane that mutates them via supersede, release, purge (largely untested) – shapes which forgetting failure modes the system recovers. Comparing thirteen system configurations on a 385-case adversarial surface, we observe three placement regimes with partly complementary coverage: deterministic primitives suffice for lexical/temporal categories but fail canonicalization (5% on identifier-obfuscation, 0% on cross-lingual); inscribe-time LLM recovers canonicalization (100%) but cannot help intent-aware deletion (0% on prefix-collision and compound-fact); a mutation-time hook recovers intent-aware deletion (78-85%) and brightens nearly all categories simultaneously (91.7-93.2% overall, $0.17 per 385-case run, 2.3s/case mutation latency vs. 64-191ms/case deterministic, recall path unchanged). We expose the trade-off via ForgetEval, a 1000-case templated suite plus a 385-case adversarial layer (132 hand-crafted + 253 LLM-drafted oracle-validated) scored by deterministic substring match, paired with a six-method Adapter Protocol with honest N/A scoring that lets heterogeneous memory stores enter in 130 lines. Admission is corroborated by 10-annotator IAA (Fleiss' kappa = 0.958) and a 77-case external-authored subset (four blind contributors) that replicates the canonicalization asymmetry and amplifies the joint-placement lift (+27.8 pt). Production failures are predominantly forgetting failures rather than recall failures, yet existing benchmarks measure only recall. ForgetEval and all adapters are released under MIT.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Prefill Awareness in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.12747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety-relevant studies of language models, including alignment and jailbreaking evaluations and AI control protocols, often rely on prefilling model outputs. If AI models can recognize and act on the fact their prior assistant messages have been inserted or edited, the effectiveness and validity of these methods could be compromised. We investigate whether frontier language models can distinguish between tampered and untampered assistant-side context, a capability we call prefill awareness. To do so, we construct a binary preference benchmark across three prefill mechanisms, filtering for cases where models show consistent stances. We find that frontier models show substantial prefill awareness: Claude Opus 4.5 detects prefills opposing its preferences in 9-35% of cases with a 0% false positive rate when prompted; additionally, models often revert towards baseline behavior without explicitly reporting that the prefill was foreign. Controlled ablations later also show that detection and resistance rely on different cues, where stylistic mismatch mainly affects whether models flag a prefill as foreign, while preference mismatch mainly affects whether they revert toward their baseline answer. We also examine more realistic agentic settings such as misalignment-continuation evaluations and SWE-bench trajectories, where frontier models sometimes disavow prefilled assistant turns in ways that depend strongly on dataset, task success, and hidden formatting artifacts. Our results indicate that prefill awareness is already a substantial confound for some prefill-based methods. We recommend that model developers track this capability in frontier systems.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

The Representational Limit of Scalar Interactions: An Interventional Decomposition

arXiv:2606.19410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Signed pairwise interaction scores fundamentally conflate uniqueness (U), redundancy (R), and synergy (S). We prove this on a minimal 3-way XOR structural causal model: faithful indices such as Shapley-Taylor return zero per pair, whereas projective indices such as Shapley Interaction spread the third-order effect into pair scalars that conflate the three mechanisms. We introduce Stochastic Hi-Fi, a post-hoc, retraining-free predictability decomposition that estimates per-feature U/R/S profiles by interventional masked inference. The estimator provides exact interventional semantics, finite-sample Monte Carlo bounds, strict variance reduction from coupled diamond sampling, and uniform finite-vocabulary convergence. Across tabular SCMs, Stochastic Hi-Fi recovers structure missed by scalar baselines (up to 411x larger interaction-magnitude recovery ratios). It also separates redundant and synergistic heads in the GPT-2 IOI circuit. On NIH ChestX-ray14, Stochastic Hi-Fi matches GradCAM on Pointing Game and improves substantially on Deletion AUC.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Hermite trace polynomials and chaos decompositions for the Hermitian Brownian motion

arXiv:2207.13180v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: For a non-zero parameter $q$, we define Hermite trace polynomials, which are multivariate polynomials indexed by permutations. We prove several combinatorial properties for them, such as expansions and product formulas. The linear functional determined by these trace polynomials is a state for $q = \frac{1}{N}$ for $N$ a non-zero integer. For such $q$, Hermite trace polynomials of different degrees are orthogonal. The product formulas extend to the closure with respect to the state. The state can be identified with the expectation induced by the $N \times N$ Hermitian Brownian motion. Hermite trace polynomials are martingales for this Brownian motion, while the elements in the closure can be interpreted as stochastic integrals with respect to it. Using the grading on the algebra, we prove several chaos decompositions for such integrals, as well as analyze corresponding creation and annihilation operators. In the univariate, pure trace polynomial case, trace Hermite polynomials can be identified with the Hermite polynomials of matrix argument.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

TopoMIL: Topology Improves Multiple Instance Learning in Diagnostic Microscopic Images

Microscopic images of cells and tissues are central to disease diagnosis. In computational pathology, multiple instance learning (MIL) has emerged as a key paradigm for analyzing numerous images within a single patient sample. While the representative distribution of cells in a sample is important for diagnosis, existing MIL frameworks largely overlook it. We introduce TopoMIL, a framework that extracts the representative topological structure of the sample and integrates it into the MIL classifier. Three topological representations are assessed, each with distinct advantages and computational costs. We evaluate TopoMIL on four histopathology and cytomorphology datasets, each presenting unique challenges. Integrating the sample's topological information into MIL enhances classification across average, max, attention-based, and transformer pooling, yielding AUCROC gains of 3.3%, 4.2%, 5.9%, and 0.5%, respectively, with moderate computational cost. Our work underscores the potential of TopoMIL as a scalable extension to existing morphology-based models in computational pathology.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Ellipse Meets Bit-Planes: A Novel Approach to RNFL based Glaucoma Detection Using Advanced Image Processing and Deep Learning

This work proposes an integrated pipeline for automatic glaucoma detection method from easily available colour fundas images based on an adaptive algorithm for ellipse-based polar transformation, to enhance the analysis of the Retinal Nerve Fiber Layer (RNFL) as the primary biomarker for observing glaucomatous changes, regardless of optic disc and macula position. Utilizing this transformation, we introduce two distinct frameworks tailored to different operational needs. The first framework, a deep learning-inspired feature fusion approach, achieves a 99.3% detection rate, ideal for settings where high precision is essential, despite higher computational demands. The second framework employs a novel image-processing algorithm based on bit-plane slicing, offering 92.31% accuracy and optimized for environments requiring rapid inference with minimal resource consumption. Both frameworks provide scalable and cost-effective solutions for early glaucoma detection. This study highlights the potential of RNFL-based diagnostic tools in addressing the global challenge of glaucoma, particularly in underserved regions.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Democracy in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.13026v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interfacing Artificial Intelligence (AI) with democracy is one of the most profound challenges of our times. On the one hand, AI comes with opportunities to overcome long-standing challenges in democracy, such as low participation in deliberative and voting processes with poor representation of people. On the other hand, new risks arise from AI algorithms that are privacy-intrusive, biased, manipulative, spread misinformation and influence election results. Moving beyond the over-simplistic question of whether AI is good or bad for democracy, the Handbook on Democracy in the Era of Artificial Intelligence asks instead: how to upgrade democracies and the principles they are built on, using AI? How to engage with AI and on what terms? Which new values and design principles are required to build democratic resilience? In 34 chapters by 59 authors across the world from different disciplines, we explore how AI can empower collective intelligence for democracy (Part 1) and what is the future of deliberative democracy using large language models and social media (Part 2). We also illustrate the role of AI for building resilient self-governance systems (Part 3) and the challenges of transforming democracy in the age of AI (Part 4). We conclude with broader perspectives (Part 5) that re-imagine the interplay of democracy and AI.

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

A Hybrid LSTM–Vision Transformer Architecture for Predicting HRRR Forecast Errors

arXiv:2606.19026v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Forecast errors in high-resolution numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems are often linked to unresolved planetary boundary layer (PBL) processes, convection, terrain-induced circulations, and other vertically structured atmospheric phenomena. Previous work demonstrated that Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks can successfully predict forecast errors in the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) model using mesonet observations, but we believe performance degradation is linked to periods of complex vertical atmospheric evolution. To address this limitation, we develop a hybrid LSTM-Vision Transformer (LSTM-ViT) framework that combines temporal sequence learning from surface observations with atmospheric profiles from the New York State Mesonet profiler network. The LSTM-ViT framework is trained to predict HRRR hourly precipitation, 10 m wind speed, and 2 m temperature forecast errors at individual mesonet stations. Across all three predictors, incorporation of profiler-derived atmospheric structure improves forecast error prediction skill relative to the baseline LSTM architecture, with the largest gains occurring at shorter forecast lead times and during periods of enhanced PBL activity. Improvements are particularly pronounced for precipitation forecast error, where the LSTM-ViT framework achieves approximately a twofold increase in predictive skill relative to the baseline LSTM while better capturing convectively driven error evolution and reducing degradation associated with PBL processes. These results demonstrate that combining temporal sequence learning with vertically informed attention mechanisms provides a physically meaningful pathway for improving forecast error prediction in operational NWP systems. Our research offers forecasters enhanced guidance regarding model bias and forecast confidence.

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

Bi-Anchor Interpolation Solver for Accelerating Generative Modeling

arXiv:2601.21542v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Flow Matching (FM) models have emerged as a leading paradigm for high-fidelity synthesis. However, their reliance on iterative Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solving creates a significant latency bottleneck. Existing solutions face a dichotomy: training-free solvers suffer from significant performance degradation at low Neural Function Evaluations (NFEs), while training-based one- or few-steps generation methods incur prohibitive training costs and lack plug-and-play versatility. To bridge this gap, we propose the Bi-Anchor Interpolation Solver (BA-solver). BA-solver retains the versatility of standard training-free solvers while achieving significant acceleration by introducing a lightweight SideNet (1-2% backbone size) alongside the frozen backbone. Specifically, our method is founded on two synergistic components: 1) Bidirectional Temporal Perception, where the SideNet learns to approximate both future and historical velocities without retraining the heavy backbone; and 2) Bi-Anchor Velocity Integration, which utilizes the SideNet with two anchor velocities to efficiently approximate intermediate velocities for batched high-order integration. By utilizing the backbone to establish high-precision ``anchors'' and the SideNet to densify the trajectory, BA-solver enables large interval sizes with minimized error. Empirical results on ImageNet-256^2 demonstrate that BA-solver achieves generation quality comparable to 100+ NFEs Euler solver in just 10 NFEs and maintains high fidelity in as few as 5 NFEs, incurring negligible training costs. Furthermore, BA-solver ensures seamless integration with existing generative pipelines, facilitating downstream tasks such as image editing.

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

Precision Is Not Faithfulness: Coverage-Aware Evaluation of Grounded Generation with a Complete Oracle

Reference-free faithfulness metrics verify each atomic claim a model makes against ground truth, and are increasingly used to evaluate grounded generation. We show they share a blind spot: they measure only precision – are the stated claims supported? – and therefore reward abstention, since a model can score near-perfect faithfulness by saying almost nothing. We make this measurable using Formula 1 telemetry, a domain where strategic ground truth is derived deterministically and, crucially, completely: for each decision we know the full set of facts that mattered. This completeness – absent in open-domain faithfulness benchmarks – lets us measure recall (coverage of the relevant facts) exactly, alongside precision. On a multilingual (EN/ES/PT) benchmark of 7,253 decision instances spanning 157 races, the most precise frontier model covers under half of the relevant facts and ranks last by F1, so requiring coverage reorders the systems; the same effect reappears in a second complete-oracle domain (NOAA weather forecasts). Fine-tuning small models (1B-7B) on the complete oracle closes the precision-recall gap entirely (F1 ~0.98), beating every zero-shot frontier system regardless of scale. We pair faithfulness with coverage into a single score, validate the metric (controlled perturbation; agreement across a model-free regex extractor and a cross-family LLM extractor, system-level Spearman 1.0), and give a verifier-guided generation method that improves precision and recall without references. We release the benchmark, structured annotations, metric, baselines, and an interactive demo.

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

An LLM System for Autonomous Variational Quantum Circuit Design

arXiv:2606.13380v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The design of high performing quantum circuits remains largely dependent on human expertise. We introduce an autonomous agentic framework that employs large language models (LLMs) to conduct iterative quantum circuit designs under explicit design constraints. Our system integrates seven components: Exploration, Generation, Discussion, Validation, Storage, Evaluation, and Review. These components form a closed-loop workflow that combines web-based knowledge acquisition, literature-grounded critique, executable code generation, and experimental feedback. We evaluate the framework on two tasks: quantum feature map construction for quantum machine learning and ansatz generation for variational quantum eigensolver applications in quantum chemistry. In image classification benchmarks, the best generated feature map outperforms representative quantum feature maps and, when scaled to larger qubit counts, surpasses the classical radial basis function kernel. In molecular ground state estimation across seven molecules, the generated ansatz attains competitive accuracy with widely used chemically inspired and hardware-efficient constructions while satisfying the imposed scaling constraints. These results establish LLM driven agentic system as a viable paradigm for automated quantum circuit design and illustrate how AI systems can participate in iterative scientific optimization workflows across scientific domains.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

S-SPPO: Semantic-Calibrated Self-Play Preference Optimization

arXiv:2606.01561v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is often formulated via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). However, the standard Bradley-Terry instantiation of DPO is limited in modeling common departures from transitivity in human preferences. To address this, recent work has introduced Self-Play Preference Optimization (SPPO), which iteratively refines the policy by training on self-generated win-lose pairs. Our investigation, however, reveals a critical instability in SPPO: the optimization is prone to policy degeneration when the preference oracle assigns overly confident wins to semantically indistinguishable responses. To mitigate this, we propose S-SPPO, a dual-space semantic calibration framework comprising: i) Supervision Calibration via semantic gating, which anneals win rate targets toward the maximum-entropy baseline as semantic overlap increases; and ii) Representation Calibration via latent repulsion to enforce geometric diversity to prevent manifold collapse and maintain latent diversity between chosen and rejected samples. Theoretically, we show that the calibration preserves the constant-sum game structure, facilitating convergence to a Nash Equilibrium. Empirically, S-SPPO avoids the performance degradation seen in prior methods, achieving 52.19% win rate and 47.46% length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 with Llama-3-8B, without using additional human-annotated preferences during training. The code will be available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/s-sppo.

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

Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI

We introduce Cosmos 3, a family of omnimodal world models designed to jointly process and generate language, image, video, audio, and action sequences within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. By supporting highly flexible input-output configurations, Cosmos 3 seamlessly unifies critical modalities for Physical AI – effectively subsuming vision-language models, video generators, world simulators, and world-action models into a single framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that Cosmos 3 establishes a new state-of-the-art across a diverse suite of understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating omnimodal world models as scalable, general-purpose backbones for embodied agents. Our post-trained Cosmos 3 models were ranked as the best open-source Text-to-Image and Image-to-Video models by Artificial Analysis, and the best policy model by RoboArena at the time the technical report was written. To accelerate open research and deployment in Physical AI, we make our code, model checkpoints, curated synthetic datasets, and evaluation benchmark available under the Linux Foundation's OpenMDW-1.1 License at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3. The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3.

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

An expressivity analysis of hierarchical modelling in deep transformers via bounded-depth grammars

Deep neural networks are widely believed to derive their expressive power from their ability to form hierarchical representations, capturing progressively more abstract and compositional features across layers. In language modeling, transformers have emerged as the dominant architecture, with early layers capturing local syntactic patterns and later layers encoding more complex clause-level dependencies. While this intuition has shaped model design, there remains a lack of rigorous theoretical work demonstrating how deep transformers represent such hierarchical structures. In this work, we analyze the expressiveness of deep transformer models through the formal lens of bounded-depth, non-recursive context-free grammars. For this class of grammars, we explicitly construct transformers with positional attention whose depth grows linearly with grammar depth, while the neuron count scales with the number of derivation-tree shapes and quadratically with the number of production rules. Our theoretical results support the linear representation hypothesis by demonstrating that these architectures possess the structural capacity to encode abstract grammatical states into low-dimensional, linearly separable subspaces within the residual stream.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

When RAG Hurts: Diagnosing and Mitigating Attention Distraction in Retrieval-Augmented LVLMs

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is one of the dominant paradigms for enhancing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on knowledge-based VQA tasks, recent work attributes RAG failures to insufficient attention towards the retrieved context, proposing to reduce the attention allocated to image tokens. In this work, we identify a distinct failure mode that previous study overlooked: Attention Distraction (AD). When the retrieved context is sufficient (highly relevant or including the correct answer), the retrieved text suppresses the visual attention globally, and the attention on image tokens shifts away from question-relevant regions. This leads to failures on questions the model could originally answer correctly without the retrieved text. To mitigate this issue, we propose MAD-RAG, a training-free intervention that decouples visual grounding from context integration through a dual-question formulation, combined with attention mixing to preserve image-conditioned evidence. Extensive experiments on OK-VQA, E-VQA, and InfoSeek demonstrate that MAD-RAG consistently outperforms existing baselines across different model families, yielding absolute gains of up to 4.76%, 9.20%, and 6.18% over the vanilla RAG baseline. Notably, MAD-RAG rectifies up to 74.68% of failure cases with negligible computational overhead.

24.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-17

Combining machine learning and iterative experiments to keep pace with emerging viral variants of concern

by Thomas Sheffield, Ryan C. Bruneau, Stephen Won, Kenneth L. Sale, Brooke Harmon, Le Thanh Mai Pham Modeling and predicting viral mutations before they emerge plays a crucial role in pandemic preparedness, enabling the early identification of emerging variants of concern (VOCs) and guiding timely updates to vaccines, diagnostic tests, and therapeutic strategies. However, existing machine learning models and large-scale experiments lose their predictive power as viral variants evolve further from the original strains in sequence space. Here, we present a scalable framework that integrates random forest and neural network machine learning models with targeted high-throughput experimentation to anticipate and evaluate emerging SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain (RBD) variants. Using public datasets, we trained predictive models for binding to human Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), RBD expression, and antibody escape, and refined these models through iterative integration of experimental data focused on over 200 variants derived from wild-type (WT) and Omicron strains. Through an indirect transfer learning approach, our machine learning models achieved high accuracy having correlation coefficients of up to 0.79 for antibody binding. The models were also generalizable across diverse antibody types including heavy-chain-only antibodies (HCAbs) by encoding complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) as input features. This dynamic approach enables rapid assessment of emerging variants, facilities prioritization of the therapeutic strategies, and supports a proactive, data-driven response to evolving viral threats.

25.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-10

Dual-target gene therapy in Parkinson’s disease: a multicenter phase 1 trial

Authors:

Restoring striatal dopamine synthesis is a promising gene therapy strategy for Parkinson’s disease. Previous adeno-associated virus-mediated aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase (AADC) monotherapies remain dependent on exogenous levodopa, whereas multigene delivery is constrained by strict adeno-associated virus packaging limits. A ‘dual approach’ targeting the two rate-limiting enzymes, tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) and AADC, offers the potential for autonomous dopamine synthesis. We report the 12-month primary safety and tolerability outcomes of a multicenter, open-label, dose-escalation, phase 1 trial evaluating BBM-P002, a new adeno-associated virus vector—AAVT42—codelivering constitutively active TH and AADC. Ten participants with moderate-to-advanced Parkinson’s disease were enrolled and received bilateral intraputaminal infusions across doses of 4.0 × 1011 vg (Cohort 1; n = 1), 6.0 × 1011 vg (Cohort 2; n = 2), 1.0 × 1012 vg (Cohort 3; n = 2) and 1.2 × 1012 vg (Cohort 4; n = 5). The trial achieved its primary outcome, as BBM-P002 demonstrated a favorable safety and tolerability profile within 12 months post-treatment. No dose-limiting toxicities or drug-related serious adverse events occurred. A total of 23 adverse events were reported, all judged unrelated to BBM-P002 and primarily mild and transient. Systemic toxicity and clinically meaningful immunogenicity were absent. In conclusion, intraputaminal delivery of BBM-P002 was safe and well tolerated in this phase 1 trial, supporting continued clinical development. ClinicalTrials.gov registration: NCT05822739 . Phase 1 results reveal that BBM-P002, a dual-target gene therapy co-delivering TH and DDC, is safe and well tolerated in Parkinson’s disease, with 12-month motor improvements signaling therapeutic potential.