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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

On the Stability of Prompt Ranking in Large Language Model Evaluation

Authors:
Shaoshuai Du↗Penghao Liang↗Yixian Shen↗Chuanqi Shi↗Hang Zhang↗Lun Wang↗

Prompt-based interaction has become a dominant paradigm for using large language models (LLMs), where multiple candidate prompts are evaluated and the top-ranked one is selected for downstream use. This workflow implicitly assumes that prompt rankings are stable under minor variations in evaluation conditions. In this paper, we systematically study prompt ranking stability under common sources of variability, including random seeds and limited evaluation subsets. Across three open-weight LLMs and two benchmark tasks, we find that while overall rank correlations are often moderate to high, the identity of the top-performing prompt frequently changes, leading to unreliable selection decisions. To address this issue, we propose a simple stability-aware selection strategy based on a lower confidence bound, which accounts for both performance and variance. Our results show that this approach improves robustness in unstable settings while remaining competitive in more stable regimes. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for evaluation uncertainty in prompt selection and LLM benchmarking.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

FATE: Pillar Encoding and Frequency-Aware Training for Event-Based Object Detection

Authors:
Md Tawheedul Islam Bhuian↗Kyoung-Don Kang↗

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that asynchronously capture logarithmic intensity changes, offering inherent advantages in high-speed and high-dynamic-range scenarios. However, the sparse and asynchronous nature of event streams poses a fundamental challenge for modern deep learning architectures. To enable compatibility with standard models, most existing approaches partition the accumulation window into fixed temporal sub-bins. While effective for spatial processing, this internal discretization discards fine-grained temporal structure and constrains inference to the low temporal frequencies imposed by training supervision. To address this limitation, we propose FATE, a unified framework built upon a novel Pillar Encoding (PE). While operating over discrete macro-accumulation windows dictated by the target frequency, PE avoids internal temporal sub-binning. It organizes events into spatial pillars and approximates their intra-window evolution via projection onto a continuous-time orthogonal polynomial basis. This formulation yields an L2-optimal representation that retains rich temporal dynamics in a dense pseudo-image, mitigating information loss under sparse event conditions. To fully leverage this representation, we introduce Frequency-Aware Training (FAT), a soft mean-teacher curriculum that generates temporally dense pseudo-labels, effectively bridging the mismatch between low-frequency supervision and high-frequency inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FATE generalizes across architectural paradigms and consistently outperforms strong baselines. It enables robust object detection at high temporal resolutions up to 200 Hz, while incurring minimal overhead in parameter count and inference latency

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

TelcoAgent: A Scalable 5G Multi-KPM Forecasting With 3GPP-Grounded Explainability

Authors:
Geon Kim↗Dara Ron↗Sukhdeep Singh↗Suyog Moogi↗Pranshav Gajjar↗V V N K Someswara Rao Koduri↗Een Kee Hong↗Vijay K. Shah↗

arXiv:2606.19821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Key Performance Measurement (KPM) forecasting is essential for proactive network management of 5G and next-generation telecom networks. However, existing machine learning (ML) approaches face significant limitations in scalability and explainability, restricting their effectiveness in real-world deployments. We propose TelcoAgent, a foundation model-based framework that enables accurate, scalable, and explainable forecasting of multiple KPMs across diverse network cells without the need for site-specific training. Specifically, the framework comprises three key components: (i) an automated three-agent pipeline that constructs a 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) knowledge graph directly from specification documents, (ii) a scalable, time-series foundation model (TSFM)-based prediction pipeline to deliver accurate, zero-shot forecasting, and finally (iii) a reasoning and explanation pipeline that provides actionable, domain-grounded diagnostics. Evaluated using a 3-month, real-world, city-scale 5G KPM dataset from a U.S.-based network operator, TelcoAgent demonstrates high forecasting accuracy for all 7 considered KPMs per cell across 200 cells, while delivering explainable insights and actionable instructions to address network degradations.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

A Collective-Spin Derivation of the Uniform Magnon Hamiltonian in Cavity Magnonics

Authors:
Tomas Aguiar↗Marcos Cesar de Oliveira↗

arXiv:2606.13830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a direct collective-spin derivation of the effective uniform-mode Hamiltonian used in cavity magnonics. Starting from a nearest-neighbor Heisenberg ferromagnet coupled to long-wavelength magnetic fields, we show that the relevant dynamics can be restricted to the fully symmetric spin sector, where the exchange interaction contributes only a constant energy shift and the ferromagnet behaves as a macrospin of length $Ns$. Applying the Holstein–Primakoff transformation directly to this total spin yields the usual uniform magnon mode and its leading nonlinear corrections without first introducing site-resolved bosonic operators. This collective formulation makes explicit the interpretation of the ferromagnet as a synthetic large-spin atom and provides a compact route to the effective Hamiltonians used in driven and Floquet cavity magnonics. As a physical consequence, the leading nonlinear correction produces an occupation-dependent reduction of the effective magnon–photon coupling, providing a simple signature of finite-spin saturation under strong uniform-mode driving.

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

Service-Induced Congestion in Memory-Constrained LLM Serving

Authors:
Ruicheng Ao↗Jing Dong↗Gan Luo↗David Simchi-Levi↗

arXiv:2606.15555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In large language model (LLM) serving, each request accumulates persistent graphics processing unit (GPU) memory during service as its key-value cache grows with every generated token. Under high concurrency, aggregate memory usage therefore increases endogenously over time: the service process itself creates future capacity pressure. When memory capacity is exceeded, systems evict active requests, discarding cached state and restarting them later, which wastes computation and reduces throughput. We develop a discrete-time dynamical model of memory-constrained LLM inference that captures admission, memory growth, and eviction under continuous batching. In the saturated-input regime, the system admits both eviction-free fixed points and limit cycles with evictions. For homogeneous workloads, we show that the eviction-free equilibrium is unstable and that, except for a Lebesgue-measure-zero exact-capture set, the system converges to a unique worst-case limit cycle that is asymptotically stable outside this exceptional set, with throughput losses as large as 50%. For heterogeneous workloads, we prove a stability criterion in the two-class common-input setting and explain how the survival-polynomial mechanism generalizes to multiple classes and heterogeneous-input lengths. Under an input-dominated scaling regime, coprime decoding lengths stabilize the eviction-free equilibrium, while non-coprime lengths create synchronized modes that drive instability. These results characterize when workload heterogeneity desynchronizes completions and helps stabilize memory-constrained serving. More broadly, we identify service-induced congestion as a structural instability mechanism and derive scheduling design principles for sustaining high throughput.

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

FAIRVAR: Fair Federated Learning via Variance Regularization

Authors:
Zahra Kharaghani↗Ali Dadras↗Tommy L\"ofstedt↗

arXiv:2508.12042v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) allows collaborative training of machine learning models across multiple parties without sharing raw data. However, heterogeneous data can cause some clients to have disproportionate influence on the global model, leading to disparities in their performance. Fairness, understood as reducing these disparities, is therefore a crucial concern in FL and has been addressed in various ways. We studied performance equitable fairness in FL, where the goal is to minimize performance disparities across clients. We evaluated several existing fairness-aware methods and introduce here a new gradient-variance-regularized method, implemented in two variants: FairGrad (approximate) and FairGrad* (exact). We theoretically characterize the connections between these methods and, empirically, on heterogeneous benchmarks, show that FairGrad and FairGrad* consistently improve fairness by reducing variance in client accuracies, while maintaining competitive or improved mean performance compared to existing fairness-aware baselines.

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08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

CAREPath: Semantic Context-Aware Reasoning Paths with Mechanism-Augmented Embeddings for Drug Repurposing

Authors:
song↗bang↗koo↗Kim↗lee↗

Biomedical knowledge graphs (BKGs) that include drugs, genes, and diseases support drug repurposing by connecting drugs to diseases through gene-mediated multi-hop paths, thereby enabling mechanism-of-action reasoning. However, deeper traversal does not necessarily improve mechanistic reasoning: long paths grow combinatorially and frequently pass through hub genes, producing irrelevant gene regulatory signals, whereas overly constrained or sparse paths may miss broader biological context. We propose CAREPath, a KG-LLM framework inspired by depth-first search (DFS)-like and breadth-first search (BFS)-like reasoning to balance mechanistic specificity, scalability, and context recovery. The DFS-like module constrains traversal to short disease-gene-drug paths, converts each path into a structured prompt, and encodes it with a biomedical language model to generate semantic path embeddings. Complementarily, the BFS-like module constructs entity-level mechanism-context embeddings from one-hop gene neighborhoods and enriches them through similarity-guided augmentation using pharmacologically related drugs and gene-signature-similar diseases. Across five biomedical KGs, CAREPath achieves the best overall AUPRC among 18 baselines, improving performance by up to 3.8%. Additional analyses show that semantic short-path encoding contributes most to performance, while mechanism-context augmentation improves robustness under sparse evidence and strengthens Gene Ontology functional agreement. Case studies and recently FDAapproved indications further demonstrate its practical relevance, positioning CAREPath as an interpretable framework for scalable and mechanism-aware drug repurposing. Source code is available at https://github.com/hamppy-song/CAREPath.

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09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-19

Daily briefing: Human detritus remakes geology

Authors:
Flora Graham↗

What, exactly, is a rock? Plus, a stem-cell success for a severe autoimmune disease and evidence that ‘AI deskilling’ is real. Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

The Perceived Fragility of Explanations in Audio Models: Manipulation of Attribution with Unchanged Predictions

Authors:
Piotr Kit{\l}owski↗Dominik Wi\k{a}cek↗Mateusz Modrzejewski↗

arXiv:2606.14466v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates the fragility of post-hoc explanation methods in audio deepfake detection. While previous work on explanation manipulation focused on images using standard $L_p$ metrics, we introduce a psychoacoustic framework that optimizes inaudible perturbations to decouple model attributions from final classifications. We evaluate this vulnerability across state-of-the-art architectures under strict prediction-preserving constraints. By evaluating the manipulation cost through domain-specific perceptual audio quality metrics alongside explanation alignment criteria, our framework demonstrates that an adversary can systematically distort automated explanation heatmaps while preserving the predicted deepfake label. Full code available at: https://github.com/cncPomper/Audio-XAI

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11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Entanglement structure of the dynamical phases in the sub-Ohmic spin-boson model

Authors:
Cunxi Gong↗Zirui Sheng↗Weitang Li↗

arXiv:2606.20313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The sub-Ohmic spin-boson model exhibits three distinct dynamical regimes in its spin population dynamics, classified as coherent, incoherent, and pseudo-coherent. Whether these regimes correspond to distinct spin-bath entanglement structures remains an open question. Here we address this using tree tensor network states with projector-splitting time evolution (TTN-TDVP-PS), scanning a broad grid in the sub-Ohmic $(s, \alpha)$ plane. We find that the spin entanglement entropy $S_\mathrm{spin}(t)$ reaches a stationary plateau on a timescale shorter than the polarization relaxation, enabling construction of a stationary entropy landscape from the stationary value $S_\mathrm{stable}$. Within this scalar entropy landscape, the entropy ridge broadly follows the population-based phase boundary at small $s$, but does not reproduce the two-branch structure at large $s$. The ridge remains single-valued within the incoherent region rather than separately tracking both population-based transitions. The Bloch-sphere representation provides a geometric interpretation of this behavior. The entropy plateau corresponds to trajectories settling onto constant-radius shells, with the ridge marking the parameters of smallest stationary Bloch radius. Mode-resolved bath entanglement shows that low-frequency modes dominate the environmental entropy scale and that coherent dynamics enhance bath-mode correlations beyond direct spin–mode correlations. These results establish the stationary spin entanglement entropy as a physically informative observable that complements population-based classifications of dissipative quantum dynamics.

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

Exit-and-Join Dynamics for Decentralized Coalition Formation

Authors:
Quanyan Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.19683v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper studies coalition formation as a decentralized dynamical process driven by unilateral exit-and-join decisions. Agents evaluate local moves using the Aumann-Dreze value, so payoffs are computed within the agent's current coalition rather than through a globally negotiated coalition structure. The resulting model links cooperative payoff allocation with noncooperative best-response behavior: a terminal partition is precisely a coalition structure with no admissible, individually profitable exit-and-join deviation. We establish equilibrium characterizations, identify conditions under which the dynamics admit scalar Lyapunov or exact-potential representations, and analyze how switching and acceptance costs shape local stability. Numerical experiments test finite-time stabilization, cost sensitivity, and a special convex-game benchmark.

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Random Projections for Multi-Copy Quantum Algorithms

Authors:
Xiaoyu Liu↗Jordi Tura↗Johannes Kn\"orzer↗

arXiv:2606.20238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating nonlinear properties of quantum states is a central task in quantum information science. Multivariate traces, $\mathrm{tr}(\rho_1 \cdots \rho_K)$, and nonlinear observables such as $\mathrm{tr}(\rho^K)$, for integer $K$, can be accessed through collective measurements on multiple state copies, but standard protocols based on swap tests require coherent operations on the full Hilbert space and become experimentally unfeasible for large systems. In this work, we introduce a framework for multi-copy measurements based on random projections onto lower-dimensional subspaces prior to the collective measurement, which is then performed only on the reduced Hilbert space. This procedure yields a tunable tradeoff between coherent quantum resources and statistical sampling overhead, allowing the amount of coherent processing to be matched to the capabilities of the underlying hardware. We derive explicit formulas relating the Haar-averaged projected moments to multivariate traces of the original states and analyze the sampling overhead induced by the projection procedure. Specifically, after compressing an $n$-qubit state to a reduced $q$-qubit subspace, estimating $\mathrm{tr}(\rho^K)$ requires approximately $O(2^{(n-q)(K-1)})$ copies of $\rho$, with each qubit projected out increasing the sampling cost by a factor of $2^{K-1}$. Our results establish how coherent multi-copy operations can be traded for additional state copies, enabling multi-copy quantum protocols to be optimized for the available hardware resources.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

THEIA: Learning Complete Kleene Three-Valued Logic in a Pure-Neural Modular Architecture

Authors:
Augustus Haoyang Li↗

arXiv:2604.11284v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present THEIA, a 2.75M-parameter modular neural architecture that learns the complete Kleene three-valued logic (K3) truth table from task data without external symbolic inference or hand-encoded K3 gate primitives. Across 5 seeds it passes all 39 K3 rules at >99% per-rule accuracy. K3 learnability is not the central finding: Transformer baselines also pass all 39 rules, and flat MLPs match THEIA on Phase-1 accuracy within 0.04pp. The contributions are two properties of the learned system. (1) Uncertainty-verdict asymmetric propagation. THEIA preserves Has-Unknown at every upstream boundary (80.0/91.1/90.8/99.7% across Arith/Order/Set/Logic vs. ~52% majority) while final-verdict decodability stays at or below a 73.4% U-vs-non-U oracle reference under linear and nonlinear probes. Activation patching on non-absorbent T->U cases flips 4,898/4,898 OR and 4,719/4,719 AND pairs across 5 seeds, ruling out residual shortcuts. (2) Reliability spectrum under discretized end-to-end training, on tasks decomposable along the engine boundaries. A mod-3 sequential composition task generalizes from 5- to 500-step evaluation at 99.96+-0.04% (5 seeds). Under identical Gumbel-softmax training, flat MLPs collapse to chance by 50 steps; a 2x2 ResMLP grid reaches >=99% on only 3/20 (config, seed) trials; a pre-LN Transformer reaches 99.24+-0.34%. Straight-through discretization prevents 0.999^500 compounding; the architectural separator is sustaining Phase-1 accuracy under Phase-3 training, where flat MLPs fail. Auxiliary: under per-architecture development defaults (not optimizer-controlled), THEIA reaches 12/12 Kleene coverage 6.5x faster than a parameter-comparable 8L Transformer; this narrows to ~3.6x with Transformer-standard tuning and 4.93x with the same recipe on both. Ratios are config-specific, not asymptotic.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

A Dual Edge Spatial Jacobian Image Graph for Interpretable Diabetic Retinopathy Grading

Authors:
Inam Ullah↗Imran Razzak↗Shoaib Jameel↗

Automated diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading from colour fundus photographs can achieve strong predictive performance, but clinical interpretation requires more than an image-level label. It requires understanding how lesion evidence is distributed around retinal vessels and how this evidence relates to quantitative vascular biomarkers. We present a dual-edge spatial-Jacobian image graph for interpretable DR grading. Each fundus image is represented as a graph node with four aligned evidence streams: AutoMorph vessel information ($X_1$), DR-XAI-style lesion evidence maps ($X_2$), a 128-dimensional lesion-based contrastive image embedding ($X_3$), and AutoMorph morphometric biomarkers ($X_4$). The spatial edge branch ($X_{12}$) encodes vessel-lesion geometry, while the Jacobian branch ($X_{34}$) models embedding-biomarker sensitivity. Lightweight two-token attention fuses both edge families into a final image graph. On 2,910 matched non-augmented APTOS images, the full graph achieves 0.8076 accuracy, 0.8312 quadratic weighted kappa, 0.5915 macro-F1, and 0.9330 adjacent-grade accuracy; referable DR reaches 0.9055 accuracy and 0.9711 AUROC. The framework is positioned as an explainable representation-learning tool for lesion-biomarker hypothesis generation, rather than as a deployment-ready clinical classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/Inamullah-Colab/dual-edge-dr-graph-xai.

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16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Belief-Space Control for Personalized Cancer Treatment via Active Inference

Authors:
Deniz Sargun↗H. Bugra Tulay↗C. Emre Koksal↗

arXiv:2606.10376v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cancer treatment is at the core a sequential decision-making problem with partial observability, latent patient heterogeneity, and explicit constraints on the budget for medical measurements. Unlike standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches that control state trajectories, cancer treatments permanently modify patients' transition dynamics, changing how states evolve over time. We model cancer treatment as a belief-space planning problem using active inference, deriving an expected free-energy objective that unifies goal-directed control and information acquisition under measurement budgets without. We implement this framework using real clinical cancer data from the AACR Project GENIE Biopharma Collaborative dataset. Results on clinical data demonstrate a simultaneous patient categorization and high treatment efficacy, under real measurement and treatment constraints.

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

MiniFool – Physics-Constraint-Aware Minimizer-Based Adversarial Attacks in Deep Neural Networks

Authors:
Lucie Flek↗Oliver Janik↗Philipp Alexander Jung↗Akbar Karimi↗Timo Saala↗Alexander Schmidt↗Matthias Schott↗Philipp Soldin↗Matthias Thiesmeyer↗Christopher Wiebusch↗Ulrich Willemsen↗

arXiv:2511.01352v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we present a new algorithm, MiniFool, that implements physics-inspired adversarial attacks for testing neural network-based classification tasks in particle and astroparticle physics. While we initially developed the algorithm for the search for astrophysical tau neutrinos with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, we apply it to further data from other science domains, thus demonstrating its general applicability. Here, we apply the algorithm to the well-known MNIST data set and furthermore, to Open Data data from the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. The algorithm is based on minimizing a cost function that combines a $\chi^2$ based test-statistic with the deviation from the desired target score. The test statistic quantifies the probability of the perturbations applied to the data based on the experimental uncertainties. For our studied use cases, we find that the likelihood of a flipped classification differs for both the initially correctly and incorrectly classified events. When testing changes of the classifications as a function of an attack parameter that scales the experimental uncertainties, the robustness of the network decision can be quantified. Furthermore, this allows testing the robustness of the classification of unlabeled experimental data.

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

SL-S4Wave: Self-Supervised Learning of Physiological Waveforms with Structured State Space Models

Authors:
Feng Wu↗Harsh Deep↗Eric Lehman↗Sanyam Kapoor↗Guoshuai Zhao↗Rahul Krishnan↗Gari Clifford↗Li-wei H Lehman↗

arXiv:2606.19888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modeling long-sequence medical time series data, such as electrocardiograms (ECG), poses significant challenges due to high sampling rates, multichannel signal complexity, inherent noise, and limited labeled data. While recent self-supervised learning (SSL) methods, based on various encoder architectures such as convolutional neural networks, have been proposed to learn representations from unlabeled data, they often fall short in capturing long-range dependencies and noise-invariant features. Structured state space models (S4) excel at long-sequence modeling, but existing S4 architectures fail to capture the unique characteristics of multichannel physiological waveforms. In this work, we propose SL-S4Wave, a self-supervised learning framework that combines contrastive learning with a tailored encoder built on structured state space models. The encoder incorporates multi-layer global convolution using multiscale subkernels, enabling the capture of both fine-grained local patterns and long-range temporal dependencies in noisy, high-resolution multichannel waveforms. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that SL-S4Wave (1) consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised baselines in a challenging arrhythmia detection task, (2) achieves high performance with significantly fewer labeled examples, showcasing strong label efficiency, and (3) maintains robust performance on long waveform segments, highlighting its capacity to model complex temporal dynamics in long sequences that most existing approaches fail to efficiently model, and (4) transfers effectively to unseen arrhythmia types, underscoring its robust cross-domain generalization. We additionally evaluate SL-S4Wave on multiple EEG tasks, achieving superior performance over strong baselines, demonstrating generalizability of our approach beyond cardiac waveforms.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Policies Permitting LLM Use for Polishing Peer Reviews Are Currently Not Enforceable

Authors:
Rounak Saha↗Gurusha Juneja↗Dayita Chaudhuri↗Naveeja Sajeevan↗Nihar B Shah↗Danish Pruthi↗

A number of scientific conferences and journals have recently enacted policies that prohibit LLM usage by peer reviewers, except for polishing, paraphrasing, and grammar correction of otherwise human-written reviews. But, are these policies enforceable? To answer this question, we assemble a dataset of peer reviews simulating multiple levels of human-AI collaboration, and evaluate five state-of-the-art detectors, including two commercial systems. Our analysis shows that all detectors misclassify a non-trivial fraction of LLM-polished reviews as AI-generated, thereby risking false accusations of academic misconduct. We further investigate whether peer-review-specific signals, including access to the paper manuscript and the constrained domain of scientific writing, can be leveraged to improve detection. While incorporating such signals yields measurable gains in some settings, we identify limitations in each approach and find that none meets the accuracy standards required for identifying AI use in peer reviews. Importantly, our results suggest that recent public estimates of AI use in peer reviews through the use of AI-text detectors should be interpreted with caution, as current detectors misclassify mixed reviews (collaborative human-AI outputs) as fully AI generated, potentially overstating the extent of policy violations.

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

Design and Scheduling of an AI-based Queueing System

Authors:
Jiung Lee↗Hongseok Namkoong↗Yibo Zeng↗

arXiv:2406.06855v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: To leverage prediction models to make optimal scheduling decisions in service systems, we must understand how predictive errors impact congestion due to externalities on the delay of other jobs. Motivated by applications where prediction models interact with human servers (e.g., content moderation), we consider a large queueing system comprising of many single server queues where the class of a job is estimated using a prediction model. By characterizing the impact of mispredictions on congestion cost in heavy traffic, we design an index-based policy that incorporates the predicted class information in a near-optimal manner. Our theoretical results guide the design of predictive models by providing a simple model selection procedure with downstream queueing performance as a central concern, and offer novel insights on how to design queueing systems with AI-based triage. We illustrate our framework on a content moderation task based on real online comments, where we construct toxicity classifiers by finetuning large language models.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SAMTok: Representing Any Mask with Two Words

Authors:
Yikang Zhou↗Tao Zhang↗Dengxian Gong↗Yuanzheng Wu↗Ye Tian↗Haochen Wang↗Haobo Yuan↗Jiacong Wang↗Lu Qi↗Hao Fei↗Anran Wang↗Zhuochen Wang↗…

Pixel-wise capabilities are essential for building interactive intelligent systems. However, pixel-wise multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) remain difficult to scale due to complex region-level encoders, specialized segmentation decoders, and incompatible training objectives. To address these challenges, we present SAMTok, a discrete mask tokenizer that converts any region mask into two special tokens and reconstructs the mask using these tokens with high fidelity. By treating masks as new language tokens, SAMTok enables base MLLMs (such as the QwenVL series) to learn pixel-wise capabilities through standard next-token prediction and simple reinforcement learning, without architectural modifications and specialized loss design. SAMTok builds on SAM2 and is trained on 209M diverse masks using a mask encoder and residual vector quantizer to produce discrete, compact, and information-rich tokens. With 5M SAMTok-formatted mask understanding and generation data samples, QwenVL-SAMTok attains state-of-the-art or comparable results on region captioning, region VQA, grounded conversation, referring segmentation, scene graph parsing, and multi-round interactive segmentation. We further introduce a textual answer-matching reward that enables efficient reinforcement learning for mask generation, delivering substantial improvements on GRES and GCG benchmarks. Our results demonstrate a scalable and straightforward paradigm for equipping MLLMs with strong pixel-wise capabilities. Our code and models are available.

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

Learning What to Say to Your VLA: Mostly Harmless Vision Language Action Model Steering

Authors:
Hyun Joe Jeong↗Gokul Swamy↗Andrea Bajcsy↗

arXiv:2606.12299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a natural language interface to robot control, but the mapping from language to behavior is often brittle and unintuitive: semantically similar instructions can induce drastically different behaviors, while some capabilities may not be elicitable through prompting alone. As a result, both human instructions and zero-shot language models can fail to reliably steer VLAs toward successful task execution. In this work, we propose a framework that interactively searches for language sequences that improve closed-loop VLA task performance, distills these sequences into a test-time language feedback policy (LFP), and learns an improvement head that predicts when language steering will improve performance. We conformalize this improvement head to prevent harmful steering interventions, where the LFP decreases task performance relative to the original instruction on out-of-distribution scenarios. Crucially, our approach operates on arbitrary frozen pre-trained VLAs, requiring neither access to the original training distribution nor fine-tuning of the underlying model. On seen environments, our conformalized LFP improves base VLA performance by 24.7% in simulation and 65.0% in hardware. On visual and semantic perturbations, our conformalized LFP has strong harmlessness guarantees, and produces recovery behaviors not observed with open-loop prompting.

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23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Midwifery Practice in Conflict Contexts: Lived Experiences from Somalia and Nigeria

Authors:
Elnakib↗Ngozi Iwu↗Mohammed↗H. A↗Mary↗Tappis↗Charity↗Rejoice Helma↗Israel-Isah↗Kazeem Olalekan↗Odonye↗Ahmed↗…

Background: Midwives are a central cadre in the health system, particularly in conflict-affected settings where they are sometimes the primary or even only skilled providers available. Yet, despite their critical role, there is limited qualitative evidence capturing their lived experiences and how these shape workforce entry, retention, and overall well-being. Methods: Drawing on a phenomenological research methodology, this qualitative study was embedded within a larger prospective longitudinal cohort of midwifery students and graduates in Somalia and Nigeria. We conducted focus group discussions with graduate midwives (n=48 in Nigeria; n=63 in Somalia) to explore their experiences transitioning into the workforce and their realities working in health systems impacted by conflict and violent insecurity. Data were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Results: Five themes emerged from the data: (1) job search and workforce entry, which was described as fraught with challenges and shaped by a set of formal systems in Nigeria but informal networks and structural barriers in Somalia (2) working conditions that were marked by resource scarcity, infrastructural challenges, and heavy and unreasonable workloads, (3) safety, security and coping strategies that differed across the two contexts but reflected persistent exposure to violence and a reliance on ad hoc and personal coping in lieu of systematic protection, (4) community perceptions of midwives, shaped and constrained by social and gender norms and (5) mental health and emotional wellbeing, highlighting stress, burnout and moral injury experienced by this cadre. Conclusion: Our findings highlight the profound challenges faced by midwives working in conflict-affected settings, and they shine a light on the urgent need to support and invest in this critical and predominantly female health workforce.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SafeSpec: Fast and Safe LLM via Dynamic Reflective Sampling

Authors:
Haotian Xu↗Zeyang Zhang↗Linbao Li↗Huadi Zheng↗Yu Li↗Cheng Zhuo↗

arXiv:2606.19755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative inference accelerates large language model (LLM) decoding but provides no inherent safety guarantees. Existing safety defenses are largely incompatible with speculative inference: they either introduce additional computation or disrupt the draft-verify mechanism, negating acceleration benefits. This reveals a fundamental incompatibility between current safety methods and speculative decoding. We propose SafeSpec, a safety-aware speculative inference framework that integrates risk estimation directly into the verification process. SafeSpec attaches a lightweight latent safety head to the target model to jointly evaluate semantic validity and safety in a single forward pass. When unsafe generations are detected, SafeSpec applies rollback and safety-guided reflective multi-sampling to recover safe continuations rather than terminating generation. We model jailbreak attacks as distributional shifts over generative trajectories, where adversarial prompts increase the probability of harmful continuations without eliminating safe ones. Under this model, SafeSpec performs risk-aware trajectory recovery within the speculative decoding process. Across multiple models and adversarial benchmarks, SafeSpec achieves a substantially improved safety-efficiency trade-off. On Qwen3-32B, SafeSpec reduces attack success rates by 15% while preserving a 2.06x inference speedup on benign workloads, demonstrating that speculative acceleration and inference-time safety can be jointly optimized.

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

Telenor Nordics Customer Service self-help corpus

Authors:
Mike Riess↗

This paper presents a multilingual customer service self-help corpus comprising 1,122 manually validated documents in Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, totaling 274,599 words and 1,884,833 characters. The documents have been sourced from the public self-help pages of four Nordic telecommunications operators and subsequently filtered for person-identifiable information and relevance through a combined LLM and human annotation pipeline. Domain-specific datasets for Nordic languages remain scarce, particularly in customer service: a domain of growing importance for retrieval-augmented generation, cross-lingual transfer learning, and emerging agent-based service architectures. An analysis of the corpus reveals substantial variation in document length and structure across operators, reflecting distinct editorial strategies, as well as broad topical coverage spanning network hardware, mobile services, TV and streaming, billing, and account management. The dataset is publicly available under a CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 license at https://zenodo.org/records/20732652, intended to support reproducible research in Nordic NLP and information retrieval.

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