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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A Conservation Law for Equilibrium Propagation and Coupled Learning

Authors:
Joshua A. McGinnis↗Adam G. Kline↗Yoichiro Mori↗

arXiv:2606.15444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper we show that the physical learning methods known as coupled learning (CL) and equilibrium propagation (EP) conserve a mass-like quantity in the trainable parameters in the continuous-time, small-nudging limit. We prove that this conservation holds in a broad range of physically relevant settings. We then show that the conservation law constrains the training dynamics in a way that makes convergence reliable in important settings for linear circuits. We conclude by discussing some practical implications of this conservation law.

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

Adaptive Turn-Taking for Real-time Multi-Party Voice Agents

Authors:
Soumyajit Mitra↗Prabhat Pandey↗Abhinav Jain↗Shanmukha Sahith↗K V Vijay Girish↗

Turn-taking in multi-party spoken conversations remains a fundamental challenge for voice-based agents, particularly under dynamic floor competition and varying user expectations. We propose ModeratorLM, a role-playing voice agent that conditions turn-taking behavior on an explicitly assigned role in multi-party settings. The system is built on a speech large language model operating in chunk-wise streaming manner. We further introduce a reasoning-augmented variant that incorporates chain-of-thought reasoning over conversational context and the assigned role. We construct RolePlayConv, a large-scale synthetic dataset of spoken multi-party conversations with diverse assistant roles. Experiments on real-world meeting data and RolePlayConv show improved turn-taking precision by over 40% and recall by more than 70%, while substantially reducing false-positive interruptions compared to non-role-conditioned baselines.

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Unassigned Agents in Compilation-based Multi-agent Path Finding

Authors:
Pavel Surynek↗

arXiv:2606.15797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compilation-based techniques represent an important stream of solvers for multi-agent path finding (MAPF) due to their modularity and adaptability for non-standard variants of the problem. While in the standard MAPF the task is to navigate all agents from their initial positions to given individual goal positions without any collision, variants where a different requirement for agents is used are also relevant. Such a variant is MAPF with unassigned agents (UA-MAPF) where some agents have the same setting as in the standard MAPF with initial positions and goals while the remaining agents have the initial position but have no goal - unassigned agents. Despite unassigned agent do not need to reach any goal position they have to be moved out of the way of the standard agents if needed which represent a specific challenge. We show in this paper that UA-MAPF can be expressed in recent compilation-based techniques for MAPF based on formulating the problem as Boolean satisfiability, namely we adapt SMT-CBS and NRF-SAT, the recent solvers based on counterexample guided abstraction refinement and non-refined abstractions.

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04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Interpreting Bohm-like quantum potentials in "Computing quantum waves exactly from classical action"

Authors:
Winfried Lohmiller↗Jean-Jacques Slotine↗

arXiv:2605.20443v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The recent posting arXiv:2605.02621 [14], commenting on the article rspa.2025.0413 [7], argues that the proof of Lemma 3.1 in [7] is missing the spatial derivative of the density, which would lead to a Bohm-like quantum potential. This technical note shows why the propagated density is independent of space in the Feynman propagator construction of Lemma 3.1. This is done by extending the proof of Lemma 3.1 explicitly with Bohm-like quantum potential terms along the stationary action paths, and then showing that these terms are exactly zero. In [7], this property can also be verified directly on most examples (double slit, Aharonov-Bohm, potential well, harmonic oscillator, tunneling, EPR, QED), as well as in the derivations of the Pauli, Dirac, and Maxwell equations. For more general nonlinear actions, a time rescaling may be required to guarantee this space independence along stationary paths. In the hydrogen atom example, this time rescaling can be computed in closed form. In contrast to the general wave of the Madelung solution [9] Lemma 3.1 of [7] is defined first for a propagator, and a general wave is then constructed in a second step. Recall that a propagator is a specific quantum wave, which is initialized at $t=0$ with a Dirac impulse at a given initial position or momentum. In turn, a general wave is constructed in a second step by superposing a distribution of initial conditions using the propagator. This key difference is why the Bohm-like quantum potential terms disappear in the construction [7] (specifically, in the first step) while the Bohm potential in the Madelung analysis does not. This fundamental difference is also consistent with the fact that the wave construction in [7] extends naturally to relativistic contexts, while Bohmian non-locality notoriously prevents such extensions. Keywords - Response to arXiv:2605.02621, in relation to rspa.2025.0413

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

AI Sandboxes: A Threat Model, Taxonomy, and Measurement Framework

Authors:
Inderjeet Singh↗Haitham Mahmoud↗Andr\'es Murillo↗

arXiv:2606.18532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI systems are increasingly evaluated in bounded environments that combine isolation, simulation, instrumentation, supervision, and evidence capture. For physical AI, AIoT, and cyber-physical systems, this shift is not a matter of terminology: the system under test may sense, decide, actuate, communicate, and fail through physical processes, networked devices, and human operators. This article develops an assurance-oriented account of AI sandboxes as controlled environments for testing, evaluation, verification, and validation across digital AI, embodied autonomy, and cyber-physical deployments. We formalize the sandbox boundary and a weakest-link rule for composing per-dimension evidence into a bounded deployment claim; separate major sandbox archetypes; define a cyber-physical threat model that includes attacks on the assurance apparatus itself; and introduce a measurement framework spanning fidelity, controllability, observability, containment, reproducibility, and governance artifacts, instantiated on three worked case studies of real sandboxes. The resulting threat model, taxonomy, and measurement framework clarify what a sandbox can validly test, which risks it can contain, and what forms of evidence it can support for safety, security, and regulatory assurance.

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06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Coupling-Grouped XY-QAOA for Joint Anomaly-Feature Selection

Authors:
Pauli Taipale↗

arXiv:2606.13244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selecting anomalous samples and explanatory features under fixed budgets defines a coupled constrained-optimization problem. Sequential feature-first selection ranks features before choosing samples, which can overlook features whose utility depends on which samples are selected, especially when scores are calibrated from reference data that may be limited, noisy, or drifting. We instead formulate the task as joint sample-feature selection under the same fixed counts. In the analyzed formal model, calibration-error sensitivity grows linearly with the number of samples for feature-first ordering but stays constant for joint selection. We introduce Coupling-Grouped XY-QAOA, a constraint-preserving grouped-angle variant for the resulting optimization problem. On matched sparse IBM Heron R3 benchmarks, a hardware-aware implementation reduces circuit depth by 45.9%-61.3% and two-qubit gates by 2.6%-5.2% relative to Qiskit optimization level 3 on the CZ-basis target. It enables, to our knowledge, the largest reported width-depth configurations for constraint-preserving bipartite-selection QAOA hardware executions with feasible-sector retention: 64 qubits at p=2 and 36 qubits at p=3. The 20-qubit p=5 runs retain 63% valid samples. Across 36-64 qubits, fixed-angle runs yield lower-energy feasible samples than matched random-feasible sampling. Warm starts reduce the gap to strict-feasible classical references by 57.5%-80.5%, and near-budget repair matches the sparse classical reference at 36 qubits. Benchmarks show gains in balanced fixed-budget regimes, and noiseless simulations show that problem-structured angle grouping improves over same-depth XY-QAOA and matched-parameter, type-preserving randomization controls. Overall, the results support calibrated joint selection and hardware-realizable constrained-mixer execution in the tested regimes.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Navigating Distribution Shifts in Medical Image Analysis: A Survey

Authors:
Zixian Su↗Jingwei Guo↗Xi Yang↗Qiufeng Wang↗Frans Coenen↗Amir Hussain↗Kaizhu Huang↗

Medical Image Analysis (MedIA) has become indispensable in modern healthcare, enhancing clinical diagnostics and personalized treatment. Despite the remarkable advancements supported by deep learning (DL) technologies, their practical deployment faces challenges posed by distribution shifts, where models trained on specific datasets underperform on others from varying hospitals, or patient populations. To address this issue, researchers have been actively developing strategies to increase the adaptability of DL models, enabling their effective use in unfamiliar environments. This paper systematically reviews approaches that apply DL techniques to MedIA systems affected by distribution shifts. Rather than organizing existing methods by technical characteristics, we explicitly bridge real-world clinical constraints – such as limited data accessibility, strict privacy requirements, and heterogeneous collaboration protocols – with the technical paradigms able to address them. By establishing this connection between operational constraints and methodological evolution, we categorize existing works into Joint Training, Federated Learning, Fine-tuning, and Domain Generalization, each aligned with specific healthcare scenarios. Beyond this taxonomy, our empirical analysis suggests that, as domain information becomes progressively less accessible across these paradigms, performance improvements become increasingly constrained, and further uncovers a gradual shift in methodological focus from explicit distribution alignment toward uncertainty-aware modeling, ultimately pointing to the need for more deployability-aware design in real-world MedIA.

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08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Antimicrobial-resistant E. coli in human, animal and environmental reservoirs in rural Bangladeshi households with young children

Authors:
Tazin↗Hossain↗M. S↗Haque↗Rahman↗M. H↗Tabassum↗Anderson↗Hanif↗Barratt Heitmann↗G. R↗Miah↗…

In low-income countries, ESBL-producing Escherichia coli (ESBL-EC) is frequently detected in humans, animals and household environments, indicating widespread exposure to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Established risk factors such as antibiotic use do not explain the high community carriage of AMR in all settings; identifying the dominant exposure pathways can inform interventions against AMR. We aimed to investigate (i) animal-human-environment sharing of AMR by assessing associations between the abundance of ESBL-EC in the household environment, domestic animal feces and young children's stool and (ii) household factors associated with ESBL-EC abundance in these reservoirs. We enrolled 112 households from the CRADLE trial in rural Bangladesh. We enumerated ESBL-EC in drinking water, food, child hand rinses, outdoor soil, indoor floor swabs, chicken and cow feces, and stool from children aged 6 months. We recorded indicators of sanitation, animal ownership/management, human and animal antibiotic use, and child exposure behaviors using structured questionnaires and spot checks. The highest prevalence of ESBL-EC was in child stool (95.6%) and animal feces (82.3-96.9%), followed by soil (48.2%) and floors (36.6%); < 10% of food, child hands and drinking water harbored ESBL-EC. The abundance of ESBL-EC in child stool was not associated with its abundance in any sampled matrix; the abundance in chicken but not cow feces showed positive correlations with soil, floors, child hands, and drinking water (correlation coefficients: 0.19-0.39, p-values < 0.05). Higher-quality latrines (improved, pour-flush, with slab) were associated with lower ESBL-EC abundance across matrices; unsafe animal management (animals roaming or spending the night inside the home) was associated with higher abundance. Child antibiotic use and exposure behaviors (soil ingestion, time spent on floor) were not associated with ESBL-EC abundance in child stool. We observed high AMR colonization among young children and domestic animals in rural Bangladesh not explained by traditional fecal-oral exposure pathways. Future studies should explore additional pathways and assess whether sanitation and animal management improvements can reduce AMR.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Relativistic Locality from Electromagnetism to Quantum Field Theory

Authors:
Eugene Y. S. Chua↗Charles T. Sebens↗

arXiv:2412.11532v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Electromagnetism is the paradigm case of a theory that satisfies relativistic locality. This can be proven by demonstrating that, once the theory's laws are imposed, what is happening within a region fixes what will happen in the contracting light-cone with that region as its base. The Klein-Gordon and Dirac equations meet the same standard. We show that this standard can also be applied to quantum field theory (without collapse), examining two different ways of assigning reduced density matrix states to regions of space. Our preferred method begins from field wave functionals and judges quantum field theory to be local. Another method begins from particle wave functions (states in Fock space) and leads to either non-locality or an inability to assign states to regions, depending on the choice of creation operators. We take this analysis of quantum field theory (without collapse) to show that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics is local at the fundamental level. We argue that this fundamental locality is compatible with either local or global accounts of the non-fundamental branching of worlds, countering an objection that has been raised to the Sebens-Carroll derivation of the Born Rule from self-locating uncertainty.

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

Enhanced Low-Density Region Exploration in Classifier-Guided Diffusion Models Through Modified Reverse Diffusion Sampling

Authors:
Jagriti Singh↗Shekhar Verma↗Muneendra Ojha↗

arXiv:2606.13347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as state-of-the-art generative models for high-fidelity image synthesis, particularly in their classifier-free guided and classifier-guided forms. However, standard classifier guidance concentrates probability mass around high-density class mean, leading to poor coverage of rare samples in the tails of the class-conditional distributions. Recent work on diffusion-based tail sampling mitigates this by training an additional low-density-seeking classifier with a synthetic-vs-real discriminator, at the cost of additional networks and training. In parallel, a number of samplers and distillation techniques accelerate or refine diffusion sampling, but do not explicitly address long-tail coverage. We propose a purely sampling-time, density-aware extension of classifier-guided conditional diffusion model that targets low-density regions without any additional training. We have applied guidance at noisy images not on predicted noise like most diffusion models. Starting from a pretrained conditional diffusion model and classifier on ImageNet, we modify the guided reverse dynamics by steering trajectories toward low-confidence regions via the modified classifier gradient, and at each time step, we also guide the sampling process toward the predicted real image. 1st guidance helps explore low-probability samples, and 2nd guidance helps to generate samples to be close to the real data manifold. The proposed sampler consistently improves ADM model recall at 64x64 resolution while maintaining a comparable FID, and with a 256x256 ADM model, we showed the results visually with different combinations of both guidance. We also showed that standard ADM classifier guidance, combined with predicted real image guidance, helps generate high perceptual quality samples with a 256x256 ADM model on ImageNet.

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

Multi-User Dueling Bandits: A Fair Approach using Nash Social Welfare

Authors:
Maheed H. Ahmed↗Mahsa Ghasemi↗

arXiv:2605.01961v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning from human preference data is becoming a useful tool, from fine-tuning large language models to training reinforcement learning agents. However, in most scenarios, the model is trained on the average preference of all human evaluators, which, under large variations of preferences, can be unfair to minority groups. In this work, we consider fairness in dueling bandits, a standard framework for online learning from preference data. We assume that each user has a (potentially distinct) Condorcet winner, which is an arm preferred to every other arm. Using these user-specific Condorcet winners as reference points, we evaluate and score arms according to their performance relative to the corresponding winner. To promote fairness across heterogeneous users, we adopt the well-established Nash Social Welfare objective, which maximizes the product of user utilities, thereby inherently penalizing inequality and preventing the marginalization of any single user. Within this framework, we construct a hard instance to establish a regret lower bound of $\Omega(T^{2/3}\min(K,D)^\frac{1}{3})$ for a time horizon $T$, $K$ arms, and $D$ users, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first result quantifying the cost of fairness in dueling bandits with heterogeneous preferences. We then present the Fair-Explore-Then-Commit and Fair-$\epsilon$-Greedy algorithms with a Condorcet winner identification phase. We further derive their regret upper bounds that match the lower-bound dependence on $T$ up to logarithmic factors.

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

PISA: A Pragmatic Psych-Inspired Unified Memory System for Enhanced AI Agency

Authors:
Shian Jia↗Ziyang Huang↗Xinbo Wang↗Haofei Zhang↗Mingli Song↗

arXiv:2510.15966v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Memory systems are fundamental to AI agents, yet existing work often lacks adaptability to diverse tasks and overlooks the constructive and task-oriented role of AI agent memory. Drawing from Piaget's theory of cognitive development, we propose PISA, a pragmatic, psych-inspired unified memory system that addresses these limitations by treating memory as a constructive and adaptive process. To enable continuous learning and adaptability, PISA introduces a trimodal adaptation mechanism (i.e., schema updation, schema evolution, and schema creation) that preserves coherent organization while supporting flexible memory updates. Building on these schema-grounded structures, we further design a hybrid memory access architecture that seamlessly integrates symbolic reasoning with neural retrieval, significantly improving retrieval accuracy and efficiency. Our empirical evaluation, conducted on the existing LOCOMO benchmark and our newly proposed AggQA benchmark for data analysis tasks, confirms that PISA sets a new state-of-the-art by significantly enhancing adaptability and long-term knowledge retention.

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13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Wearable-Grade Lead Reduction Disproportionately Degrades ECG AI Performance in Elderly Patients: Evidence from PTB-XL and MIT-BIH

Authors:
Tiruwa↗K. R↗Ghimire↗

Consumer wearable devices increasingly use single-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs) for cardiac monitoring, but these signals contain substantially less spatial information than the clinical 12-lead standard. Whether this reduction dispro- portionately affects older adults, who often present with more complex cardiac conditions, remains poorly understood. In this study, we evaluated the impact of lead reduction on AI-ECG diagnostic performance across age groups. A 1D resid- ual neural network was trained on 21,091 PTB-XL ECG recordings spanning five diagnostic superclasses and assessed using 12-, 6-, 2-, and 1-lead configurations. Under the full 12-lead setting, model accuracy declined from 84.5% in patients younger than 40 years to 66.2% in patients aged 75 years or older. Progressive lead reduction further widened this gap. Under the 1-lead configuration, accuracy decreased by 14.1 percentage points in the 75+ group but by only 0.4 percent- age points in the

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

Co-PLNet: A Collaborative Point-Line Network for Prompt-Guided Wireframe Parsing

Authors:
Chao Wang↗Xuanying Li↗Cheng Dai↗Jinglei Feng↗Yuxiang Luo↗Hao Qin↗Yuqi Ouyang↗

Wireframe parsing aims to recover line segments and their junctions to form a structured geometric representation useful for downstream tasks such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Existing methods predict lines and junctions separately and reconcile them post-hoc, causing mismatches and reduced robustness. We present Co-PLNet, a point-line collaborative framework that exchanges spatial cues between the two tasks, where early detections are converted into spatial prompts via a Point-Line Prompt Encoder (PLP-Encoder), which encodes geometric attributes into compact and spatially aligned maps. A Cross-Guidance Line Decoder (CGL-Decoder) then refines predictions with sparse attention conditioned on complementary prompts, enforcing point-line consistency and efficiency. Experiments on Wireframe and YorkUrban show consistent improvements in accuracy and robustness, together with favorable real-time efficiency, demonstrating our effectiveness for structured geometry perception. Our code is available at https://github.com/GalacticHogrider/Co-PLNet.

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

Mirage Probes: How Vision Models Fake Visual Understanding

Authors:
Daniel Ben-Levi↗Judah Goldfeder↗Weiliang Zhao↗Raz Lapid↗Amit LeVi↗Allen G. Roush↗Ravid Shwartz-Ziv↗Hod Lipson↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer image-based questions confidently, and often correctly, even when no image is provided. This mirage behavior inflates benchmark scores without reflecting visual grounding. Prior work treats this as a single failure mode. We argue it is two. Using Mirage Probes, a contrastive probing framework that pairs paraphrased question variants with matched mirage and non-mirage labels on the same image, we show that mirage behavior is linearly decodable from internal activations across residual stream, MLP, post-attention, and attention-head sites in two open-source VLMs. We demonstrate that a Naive Bayes text baseline cannot recover this signal, ruling out surface lexical confounds. Cross-benchmark separability patterns, together with a novel Prior Harnessing Index (PHI) measuring how much a model can answer from text alone, expose two distinct regimes: textual biases, where the model answers from language priors without engaging visual representations, and spurious images, where it constructs false visual content in latent space and answers as if grounded. The distinction has direct mitigation consequences: text-distribution cleaning can address the first regime but cannot reach the second, since spurious-image mirages live in the model's visual representations rather than its text. Faithful visual grounding will require interventions at the representational level.

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

Runtime Skill Audit: Targeted Runtime Probing for Agent Skill Security

Authors:
Tu Lan↗Chaowei Xiao↗

arXiv:2606.11671v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent skills let LLM agents reuse instructions, resources, tools, and workflows, but they also create a new place for malicious behavior to hide. A skill may look benign in its documentation or code while becoming harmful only when it is invoked with particular user requests, local assets, persistent state, or multi-step tool interactions. This makes purely static vetting brittle. We present Runtime Skill Audit (RSA), a dynamic analysis method that audits skills by asking what the skill-mediated agent actually does under targeted runtime conditions. Instead of testing every skill with the same generic tasks, RSA profiles risk-relevant interfaces, prepares the execution context needed to exercise them, and assigns security labels from the resulting trace evidence. We instantiate RSA on OpenClaw and evaluate it on 100 skills against representative static baselines. RSA achieves 90.0\% accuracy with an 88.0\% true positive rate and an 8.0\% false positive rate, improving accuracy by 13.0 percentage points over the best static baseline. Under self-evolving attacks, static detectors collapse after one or two rounds, while RSA continues to detect 19–20 out of 20 malicious skills across rounds.

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17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Preregistration for Experiments with AI Agents

Authors:
Michelle Vaccaro↗

arXiv:2606.11217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and autonomous AI agents has given rise to a rapidly growing methodological paradigm: "in silico" behavioral experiments. Originally conceived as a way to use AI agents as proxies for human participants in studies of cognition, decision-making, and social dynamics, this approach has taken on new significance – as AI agents increasingly negotiate, transact, and make consequential decisions on behalf of people and organizations, understanding their behavior has become a research priority in its own right. While these experiments with AI agents offer unprecedented advantages in terms of scalability, cost efficiency, and experimental control, they also inherit, and in some cases amplify, methodological vulnerabilities that have long plagued human subjects research. To address these issues, this paper argues that preregistration practices – central to improving the credibility of human subjects experiments – should now be extended to experiments with AI agents. We systematically catalog the researcher degrees of freedom that experiments with AI agents introduce – model selection, prompt wording, settings, and outcome-contingent redesign, for example – and show how the low cost of iteration and lack of reporting norms make these choices both easy to exploit and difficult to detect. We propose a preregistration template tailored to experiments with AI agents and call on conferences, journals, and funding agencies to make preregistration standard practice for this emerging research paradigm.

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

Recurrent Reasoning on Symbolic Puzzles with Sequence Models

Authors:
Gowrav Mannem↗Chowdhury Marzia Mahjabin↗Jason Chen↗Shivank Garg↗Kevin Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.15686v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models often appear strong on symbolic and algorithmic tasks, yet this apparent strength can hide brittle behaviour when problems become longer, harder, or slightly out of distribution. A major limitation of current reasoning benchmarks is that many primarily test whether a model can produce a valid answer, while paying less attention to whether the solution is minimal, robust, and stable under controlled difficulty scaling. We introduce RecurrReason, a difficulty-controlled benchmark of four recurrent logic puzzles (Tower of Hanoi, River Crossing, Block World, and Checkers Jumping) with BFS-optimal trajectories and a single interpretable difficulty parameter $N \in \{1,\dots,10\}$, totalling 10{,}817 unique puzzles and 285{,}933 moves. We benchmark two Transformer families, an encoder-decoder model (T5-style) and a decoder-only model (GPT-2-style), under consistent data splits and evaluation criteria, training on $N{=}1$ to $7$ and evaluating on both held-out in-distribution instances and harder out-of-distribution instances at $N{=}8$ to $10$. Fine-tuned pre-trained T5 achieves 97.27\% validation and 81.00\% OOD accuracy on Block World; all models score 0.00\% on River Crossing under all conditions. Failure mode analysis reveals that architecture is a stronger determinant of success than scale. Pre-training transfers only to puzzles with locally structured transition functions. Our code and dataset will be open-sourced upon acceptance.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

LLM-Powered Virtual Population for Demand Simulation and Pricing

Authors:
Chengpiao Huang↗Kaizheng Wang↗

We develop an LLM-powered virtual population model that simulates demand for pricing decisions, in settings where products are described by rich unstructured information, such as text descriptions and images, and where decision makers need not only mean-demand predictions but also uncertainty estimates for counterfactual prices. Our model represents exposed customers as draws from a finite mixture of customer personas. For each persona, product, and candidate price, an LLM elicits a persona-level purchase probability using both structured persona information and unstructured product information. These probabilities are aggregated through calibrated mixture weights to form a predictive distribution of aggregate demand. The resulting simulator can evaluate counterfactual prices under various pricing objectives, including expected revenue and risk-aware criteria such as conditional value at risk. We test the framework on an online H&M fashion dataset with product descriptions and images. The calibrated LLM-based simulator achieves the best overall predictive performance among the models considered, and supports sample-efficient pricing decisions. Our framework provides a practical way to use LLMs as demand simulators for products with limited historical demand data but rich product information. By producing a full predictive demand distribution rather than only a point forecast, it enables managers to compare candidate prices, quantify demand uncertainty, and choose prices that target either average-case revenue or risk-aware objectives.

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20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Complete Relational Description of Spin in a Quantum Background

Authors:
Hannah Troger↗Ofek Bengyat↗Thomas D. Galley↗Marios Christodoulou↗

arXiv:2606.15873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The standard description of the state of a spin in quantum mechanics presupposes externally fixed directions – a classical background. Can a spin be fully described instead in relation to other quantum mechanical systems? Poulin suggested twenty years ago group averaging over rotations the joint state of a fundamental spin and a reference spin with large angular momentum which, however, yields a classical bit in a probabilistic mixture. We revisit this idea and show that when the quantum reference system is augmented to two large spins, the standard quantum mechanical description of a spin is recovered in the limit of large quantum numbers for the reference system.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Probing, Fusion, and Trustworthiness: A Systematic Evaluation of Foundation Model Representations for Multimodal Cancer Analysis

Authors:
Jingyu Hu↗Giuseppe Tripodi↗Reed Naidoo↗Sarah F. McGough↗Tapabrata Chakraborti↗

arXiv:2606.17115v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models (FMs) have emerged as powerful representation extractors for medical data, yet their generalizability to datasets under distribution shift remains underexplored. This work systematically evaluates FM-based representations on a suite of computational pathology tasks across two real-world commercial cohorts, IH-BC and IH-NSCLC, drawn from the licensed in-house (IH) oncology dataset. The analysis focuses on two modalities, whole-slide images and transcriptomic profiles, drawn from the IH multimodal data. We first benchmark unimodal probing performance across five FMs on eight downstream classification tasks, and find that image and omics representations carry complementary predictive signals. Then we investigate whether multimodal fusion can yield additional gains over unimodal baselines by comparing three image-omics fusion strategies built on paired representations. The trustworthiness of selected unimodal and multimodal pipelines is further assessed through conformal prediction. Our results show that FM representations achieve competitive performance on out-of-distribution data and that multimodal fusion helps mainly when no single modality dominates the signal. Conformal prediction reveals that in the majority of cases where a point prediction fails, the true diagnosis remains recoverable within the prediction set, reinforcing the value of uncertainty-aware inference for clinical support.

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

Iterative Visual Thinking: Teaching Vision-Language Models Spatial Self-Correction through Visual Feedback

Authors:
Animesh Tripathy↗Aswanth Krishnan↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong singleshot spatial grounding, yet lack any mechanism to observe and correct their own predictions. We find that naively prompting a VLM to iterate over rendered visualizations of its predictions causes catastrophic failure: Acc@0.5 on referring expression comprehension collapses from 79.6% to 48.7% (a 31 percentage point drop), revealing a fundamental gap between grounding capability and self-correction ability. We propose Iterative Visual Thinking (IVT), a closed-loop framework in which the model predicts a bounding box, observes the prediction rendered on the image, and iteratively refines through visual feedback. A two-phase training recipe closes the self-correction gap: first, we exploit the base model's own predictions as realistic errors and prompt a teacher VLM to generate corrective reasoning traces, yielding supervised data without human annotation; second, we apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a simple IoU reward to stabilize multi-step refinement. On a mixed benchmark spanning RefCOCOg, Ref-Adv, and Ref-L4 (505 test samples), SFT warm-up with IVT surpasses the single-shot base model on every metric: Acc@0.5 rises to 82.0% (+2.4pp), Acc@0.7 to 74.1% (+3.2pp), and Acc@0.9 to 48.3% (+2.8pp). GRPO further reduces per-step IoU degradation by 5x, stabilizing the refinement trajectory. All training uses only 2,400 samples on a single GPU, demonstrating that spatial self-correction is a learnable capability that can be instilled at modest scale.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Progress on the Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner Conjecture

Authors:
Frederik vom Ende↗

arXiv:2308.15389v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given any pair of quantum channels $\Phi_1,\Phi_2$ such that at least one of them has Kraus rank one, as well as any respective Stinespring isometries $V_1,V_2$, we prove that there exists a unitary $U$ on the environment such that $\|V_1-({\bf1}\otimes U)V_2\|_\infty\leq\sqrt{2\|\Phi_1-\Phi_2\|_\diamond}$. Moreover, we provide a simple example which shows that the factor $\sqrt2$ on the right-hand side is optimal, and we conjecture that this inequality holds for every pair of channels.

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24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Note on the local calculation of decoherence of quantum superposition in the static black holes

Authors:
Ran Li↗Zhong-Xiao Man↗Jin Wang↗

arXiv:2606.14178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the decoherence of a quantum spatial superposition of a static particle in Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m black holes. By treating the particle as a localized classical source coupled to a quantum scalar field, we reformulate the decoherence process in the Danielson-Satishchandran-Wald (DSW) gedankenexperiment through coherent state generation and derive the local expression for the decoherence functional in terms of the Wightman function. In the long-time limit, the decoherence rate is shown to be characterized by the low-frequency behavior of the Wightman function. We then employ the asymptotic matching method to calculate the analytical expressions of the Wightman functions in the Boulware, Unruh, and Hartle-Hawking vacua. We show that the decoherence behavior depends on the quantum state of the environmental field. While the Boulware vacuum gives vanishing decoherence for a static superposition, the thermal effects associated with Hawking radiation in the Unruh and Hartle-Hawking vacua can induce nonvanishing decoherence.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

The Dynamics of Human and AI-Generated Language: How Semantics Fluctuates across Different Timescales

Authors:
Han-Jen Chang↗Yasir \c{C}atal↗Angelika Wolman↗Agust\'in Ib\'a\~nez↗David Smith↗I-Wen Su↗Kai-Yuan Cheng↗Georg Northoff↗

Spoken language, whether produced by humans or large language models (LLM), unfolds over time with varying semantic content. However, we still lack simple, interpretable time-series features that capture how generic versus specific content is distributed over time, and that can be used to compare human and AI-generated speech. We introduce a semantic-timescale analysis pipeline that turns word-level transcripts with timestamps into semantic time-series. For each spoken narrative, we compute (i) semantic specificity using WordNet-based word depth and (ii) contextual similarity using SBERT embeddings and quantify their temporal dependence using autocorrelation-window measures (ACW-0 and related metrics). We then compare original speech to multiple shuffled controls that selectively disrupt lexical identity, temporal order, and word duration. Across human-read autobiographical narratives, TTS readings, and LLM-generated texts rendered with TTS, we find that segments with longer ACW-0 in the semantic time-series tend to contain more generic vocabulary, whereas segments with shorter ACW-0 are enriched in more specific words. These associations are strongly attenuated or abolished when word order and timing are randomized, indicating that ACW-based measures capture non-trivial temporal organization of semantic content beyond static lexical distributions. Our results suggest that ACW-based semantic timescales are a useful family of features for analyzing and comparing the temporal structure of human and AI-generated speech.

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