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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Augmentation techniques for video surveillance in the visible and thermal spectral range

In intelligent video surveillance, cameras record image sequences during day and night. Commonly, this demands different sensors. To achieve a better performance it is not unusual to combine them. We focus on the case that a long-wave infrared camera records continuously and in addition to this, another camera records in the visible spectral range during daytime and an intelligent algorithm supervises the picked up imagery. More accurate, our task is multispectral CNN-based object detection. At first glance, images originating from the visible spectral range differ between thermal infrared ones in the presence of color and distinct texture information on the one hand and in not containing information about thermal radiation that emits from objects on the other hand. Although color can provide valuable information for classification tasks, effects such as varying illumination and specialties of different sensors still represent significant problems. Anyway, obtaining sufficient and practical thermal infrared datasets for training a deep neural network poses still a challenge. That is the reason why training with the help of data from the visible spectral range could be advantageous, particularly if the data, which has to be evaluated contains both visible and infrared data. However, there is no clear evidence of how strongly variations in thermal radiation, shape, or color information influence classification accuracy. To gain deeper insight into how Convolutional Neural Networks make decisions and what they learn from different sensor input data, we investigate the suitability and robustness of different augmentation techniques...

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

A Recipe for Long-Context Reasoning in Large Language Models via On-Policy Optimization and Distillation

Existing approaches to post-train models for long-context tasks face complementary limitations: (i) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) provides stable supervision but suffers from exposure bias; (ii) reinforcement learning methods such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) train on model-generated trajectories but struggle with long-horizon credit assignment and sparse rewards; and (iii) on-policy distillation (OPD) provides dense token-level guidance but does not directly optimize task rewards. We study these complementary strategies for long-context alignment and derive a recipe that combines GRPO with OPD-style teacher guidance: the student learns from its own rollouts using outcome-level rewards, while a stronger teacher provides dense token-level regularization in place of the standard reference policy. This is especially useful when process-level supervision is difficult to obtain. To support this study, we introduce LongBlocks, a synthetic multilingual dataset spanning multi-hop reasoning, contextual grounding, and long-form generation. Through controlled ablations, we isolate the roles of cold-start initialization, teacher anchoring, and data mixing, showing that our recipe yields a more stable and effective path to long-context reasoning than GRPO or OPD while preserving short-context capabilities.

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Revealing competitive interfacial reactions in high-energy Li–S batteries

Authors:

Charge transfer at solid–liquid interfaces plays a critical role in various energy-storage systems1, particularly under dynamically varying reactant concentrations. Deciphering these intricate reaction pathways remains a substantial challenge, notably in lithium–sulfur (Li–S) batteries, in which achieving high energy density requires efficient conversion of highly concentrated lithium polysulfides (LiPSs)2,3. However, the mechanisms governing lithium sulfide (Li2S) deposition and dissolution under lean electrolyte conditions remain poorly understood. Here, using in situ liquid-cell electron microscopy, we directly visualize concentration-driven phase segregation at the electrode–electrolyte interface. Within these high-concentration interfacial layers (HCILs), competitive surface and solution dictate the charge-transfer dynamics and ultimately govern Li2S deposition at different phase boundaries. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that the aggregation of LiPSs alters molecular geometry, electronic properties and orbital hybridization, collectively facilitating charge transfer through highly concentrated LiPSs clusters. Guided by these insights, we design optimized electrodes that balance interfacial reaction pathways, enabling fast charging (4 C, 26.8 mA cm−2) and achieving high energy densities exceeding 400 Wh kg−1. These findings provide mechanistic understanding of interfacial reactions under practical working conditions and offer a design strategy to advance Li–S batteries. Visualization of concentration-driven phase segregation within high-concentration interfacial layers in the context of high-energy lithium–sulfur batteries using liquid-cell electrochemical transmission electron microscopy reveals competitive interfacial reactions under lean electrolyte conditions at different phase boundaries.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Which Models Are Our Models Built On? Auditing Invisible Dependencies in Modern LLMs

Modern LLM training pipelines increasingly rely on other models to generate data, filter corpora, judge outputs, and guide development decisions. These dependencies are recursive: a model may depend on an upstream artifact whose own dependencies are documented only in separate releases and artifacts. As a result, the full dependency structure is fragmented across heterogeneous public artifacts, with complexity and recursive depth far outpacing humans' ability to trace. We introduce ModSleuth, an agentic system that recursively reconstructs LLM dependency graphs from public artifacts with source-grounded evidence. We find that the primary challenge is no longer information extraction, but defining what constitutes a dependency and reconciling artifact references across inconsistent documentation. We address these challenges through a formalization that distinguishes direct and indirect dependencies, represents heterogeneous pipeline roles through operation-centered relationships, and resolves artifact identities across names, versions, and repositories. Applying ModSleuth to four public-artifact-rich LLM releases, we recover 1,060 source-verified dependencies and construct large-scale dependency graphs of modern LLM development. These graphs reveal multi-hop license obligations, train-evaluation coupling, discrepancies between released and training-time artifacts, and documentation inconsistencies that would otherwise be difficult to uncover. We release ModSleuth and the resulting dependency graphs to support transparent analysis of the increasingly complex ecosystems underlying modern LLMs.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Understanding LLMs in Title-Abstract Screening: From Disagreements to Recommendations

arXiv:2606.17588v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Several studies have examined the use of large language models (LLMs) for title-abstract screening in systematic reviews (SRs), reporting mixed accuracy. However, questions of reliability remain largely unaddressed. In this study, we go beyond quantitative LLM-human agreement metrics and qualitatively investigate how and why LLMs fail. We also propose actionable recommendations. We analyzed disagreements between LLMs and researchers across six software engineering SRs and over 1,000 primary study papers. For each SR, papers were screened independently by human experts and LLMs in zero-shot mode, resulting in Kappa values ranging from 0.52 to 0.77. Qualitative analysis suggests that human-LLM disagreement results from recurring, identifiable causes, such as boundary ambiguity in key terms, keyword overemphasization, and incorrect topic inference. Based on these findings, we propose recommendations such as validating semantic understanding before deployment, running multiple LLMs, and focusing validation efforts on borderline cases. Future studies are needed to validate the impact of our recommendations, and community efforts are needed to develop normative guidelines on LLM usage in SRs.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Human Intuition vs. Computational Precision: Neurologists, Feature-based Models, and Deep Learning for Stroke Prognosis

Background: Prognostication in large vessel occlusion (LVO) stroke remains challenging. Although several prognostic models exist, their comparison to clinician performance, human-model interaction, and specific sources of human bias remain poorly understood. Methods: Using pre-treatment clinical and CT data from the MR CLEAN trial (n=500), six neurologists predicted three-month modified Rankin Scale (mRS) scores for 40 patients, both unaided and assisted by a validated feature-based model (MR PREDICTS). Human performance was benchmarked against MR PREDICTS and a multimodal, interpretable deep learning (DL) approach using raw imaging data. We explicitly assessed neurologists? ability to estimate model-required imaging features and identified systematic human biases. Models were additionally validated in a larger MR CLEAN trial cohort (n=404). Results: For predicting the full mRS distribution, standalone models achieved good ordinal agreement (MR PREDICTS quadratic weighted kappa (QWK) 0.51 [0.24 to 0.70]; DL model 0.49 [0.25 to 0.67]), significantly outperforming unaided neurologists (QWK 0.27 [0.10, 0.42]). Neurologists showed systematic overoptimism, predicting lower mRS scores than observed. Furthermore, there was poor accuracy in extracting imaging features. Raters? ASPECTS predictions deviated by 3.4 points from the confirmed scores, and collateral score accuracy was 44.6%. However, for predicting binary mRS (0-2 vs. 3-6), accuracy was comparable between unaided neurologists (64.17% [55.42% to 72.92%]) and models (MR PREDICTS 67.50% [52.50% to 82.50%]; DL model 63.16% [47.37% to 78.95%]). Model-assistance modestly improved and harmonized neurologists? predictions (QWK 0.41 [0.22 to 0.55]; binary accuracy 68.75% [58.33% to 78.34%]. Model performance remained robust in the larger cohort. Conclusions: Multimodal prognostic models outperform clinicians in predicting the full range of mRS outcomes, while human error in imaging assessment and systematic optimism bias are primary drivers of prognostic inaccuracy. End-to-end DL models eliminate human-input variability and hold strong potential as an automated second opinion to support prognostication and decision-making in acute LVO stroke.

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

Discrete optimal transport is a strong audio adversarial attack

arXiv:2509.14959v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we investigate discrete optimal transport (DOT) as a black-box attack against modern automatic speaker verification (ASV) and anti-spoofing countermeasure (CM) systems. Our attack operates as a post-processing distribution-alignment step. Frame-level WavLM embeddings of generated speech (or another person speech) are aligned to an unpaired bona fide speech pool using entropic optimal transport and a top-k barycentric projection, followed by neural vocoding. Unlike gradient-based attacks, the proposed method requires no access to model parameters, gradients, or training data. Experiments on ASVspoof2019 and ASVspoof5 demonstrate that DOT attack substantially increases CM EER and substantially degrades ASV performance across multiple spoofing attacks. The attack transfers across datasets and remains effective after CM fine-tuning. Analysis using speaker similarity, Fréchet Audio Distance, and visualization of embedding distributions suggests that DOT succeeds by shifting source speech toward bona fide regions of the representation space rather than by maximizing speaker similarity. These results indicate that optimal-transport-based distribution alignment represents a previously underexplored attack vector for contemporary ASV and anti-spoofing systems.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Statistical Learning from Attribution Sets

arXiv:2602.06276v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We address the problem of training conversion prediction models in advertising domains under privacy constraints, where direct links between ad clicks and conversions are unavailable. Motivated by privacy-preserving browser APIs and the deprecation of third-party cookies, we study a setting where the learner observes a sequence of clicks and a sequence of conversions, but can only link a conversion to a set of candidate clicks (an attribution set) rather than a unique source. We formalize this as learning from attribution sets generated by an oblivious adversary equipped with a prior distribution over the candidates. Despite the lack of explicit labels, we construct an unbiased estimator of the population loss from these coarse signals via a novel approach. Leveraging this estimator, we show that Empirical Risk Minimization achieves generalization guarantees that scale with the informativeness of the prior and is also robust against estimation errors in the prior, despite complex dependencies among attribution sets. Simple empirical evaluations on standard datasets suggest our unbiased approach significantly outperforms common industry heuristics, particularly in regimes where attribution sets are large or overlapping.

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

Retrieval-Augmented Foundation Models for Water Level Prediction in the Everglades

arXiv:2508.04888v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate water level forecasting in the Everglades is essential for flood mitigation, drought management, water resource planning, and biodiversity conservation. While recent time-series foundation models have shown strong performance on generic tasks (represented in their pre-training), their effectiveness in domain-specific applications remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we curate a domain-specific dataset for water-level forecasting in the Everglades and observe that the performance of current state-of-the-art models remains limited. To address this gap, we leverage a retrieval-augmented mechanism that retrieves analogous multivariate hydrological episodes from an external archive of historical observations to enrich the input context of those pre-trained models. We study two retrieval strategies, statistical similarity-based retrieval and mutual information-based retrieval, and analyze how incorporating retrieved historical contexts affects predictive performance. Extensive experiments show that retrieval augmentation consistently improves long-horizon water level forecasts and yields disproportionately larger gains during extreme events, which is particularly critical for environmental decision-making. Our study provides empirical evidence that analog-based retrieval can benefit pretrained time-series foundation models in environmental science, offering practical insights into their strengths, limitations, and failure modes when applied to hydrological forecasting in the Everglades. Although evaluated in the Everglades, the proposed framework is general and can be applied to other hydrological systems given time series data. The code and data have been made publicly available at https://github.com/rahuul2992000/WaterRAF.

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

SMEPilot: Characterizing and Optimizing LLM Inference with Scalable Matrix Extensions

arXiv:2606.16332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern CPUs increasingly integrate matrix extensions, such as Arm Scalable Matrix Extension (SME), that provide high-throughput matrix execution within the CPU. For LLM inference, however, these units are not a universal replacement for conventional CPU cores: prefill, decode, attention, and KV-cache operations expose different arithmetic intensities, vector behavior, and layout requirements, while SME units and CPU cores still compete for shared memory bandwidth. This paper studies this mismatch through a roofline-based characterization of SME-enabled CPUs and uses the resulting model to guide operator-level execution choices. We present SMEPilot, an LLM inference engine that selects CPU-only, SME-only, or cooperative SME+CPU execution for each operator shape. SMEPilot partitions matrix work across SME and CPU cores at tile granularity, overlaps SME-suitable matrix stages with CPU-suitable vector stages in attention, and maintains layout state so packed tensor representations are reused rather than repeatedly rebuilt on critical paths. Across Llama-3.2-3B, Qwen3-4B, and Qwen3-30BA3B on phone, PC, and server platforms, SMEPilot improves end-to-end inference performance by up to 3.94$\times$.

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

Policy-aware Vector Search: A Vision for Fine Grained Access Control in Vector Databases

arXiv:2606.19803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vector databases are increasingly used in security sensitive contexts with Retrieval Augmented Generation and organizational AI pipelines; however, their security capabilities remain limited. Specifically, Fine-grained Access Control (FGAC) which is required to ensure that data access adheres to user-specific policies is not fully supported in modern vector databases. Unlike relational databases, vector databases combine structured and unstructured attributes to provide semantic, approximate query results, which complicates FGAC implementation. This creates an inherent tension between enforcing FGAC policies correctly, achieving high ANN search recall and maintaining low query latency. In this paper, we present a vision for Policy-aware Vector Search by formalizing the FGAC policy model in vector databases as well as the enforcement problem. We compare various enforcement strategies, present preliminary findings, and identify key open challenges for future research in policy-aware vector search.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

ANCHOR: haplotype-aware allelic and isoform inference from single-cell long-read RNA sequencing with de novo variant calling

Long-read RNA sequencing enables haplotype- and isoform-resolved allelic analysis of transcriptomes, yet extending this capability to single cells and distinct cell types remains computationally challenging due to sparse coverage, sequencing errors, incomplete variant information, and reference-biased transcript assignment. Here we present ANCHOR, a haplotype-aware framework for single-cell long-read RNA sequencing that performs de novo expressed-variant discovery, molecule-level haplotype assignment and isoform-resolved allelic quantification. ANCHOR combines a signed-graph variant caller, pair hidden Markov modelling and beta-binomial UMI aggregation to infer parental allele counts for genes and splice-resolved isoforms, without requiring a pre-existing phased genotype or deep learning. In human single-cell long-read RNA benchmarks, ANCHOR improved variant-calling performance over tested long-read RNA callers at single-cell and low-to-moderate coverage, and its beta-binomial model reduced depth-driven false positives in allele-specific expression testing. Applied to newly generated single-cell long-read RNA-seq data from reciprocal mouse crosses during gastrulation, ANCHOR resolved cell-type- and isoform-specific parent-of-origin imprinting and identified an antagonistic maternally biased Sgce isoform. ANCHOR provides a general framework for allele- and isoform-resolved analysis of diploid single-cell long-read transcriptomes.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

X-MADAM-RAG: Diagnosing and Handling Chinese-English Evidence Conflict in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems may receive evidence that is not merely noisy but mutually contradictory. This issue becomes particularly salient in multilingual settings, where retrieved Chinese and English evidence may support incompatible answer candidates. We study this problem through X-RAMDocs-ZHEN, a controlled Chinese-English benchmark derived from RAMDocs for diagnosing evidence conflict in RAG. The benchmark contains 300 examples across six balanced conditions, including monolingual support, bilingual agreement, reversed conflict directions, and conflict with optional noise. We further examine X-MADAM-RAG, an interpretable pipeline that decomposes evidence handling into per-document candidate extraction, visible-evidence repair, deterministic candidate grouping, and conflict-aware aggregation. On the original controlled benchmark with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, X-MADAM-RAG achieves 0.9667 strict accuracy and 0.9767 conflict-aware success, outperforming an evidence-normalized single-call baseline. However, a zero-call rule-only extractor reaches 1.0000 on the same benchmark, revealing strong template regularity. To probe this limitation, we construct a deterministic naturalized stress test that removes explicit answer templates while preserving candidate strings. On its 100-sample subset, rule-only extraction falls to 0.0000, but X-MADAM-RAG also drops to 0.3000 strict accuracy, below both naive and evidence-normalized baselines. A privileged oracle remains perfect, indicating that document-level extraction is the main bottleneck. These findings position X-RAMDocs-ZHEN and X-MADAM-RAG as diagnostic tools for controlled evidence conflict rather than as evidence of general hallucination detection or robustness to natural retrieval.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp connectivity bounds for the vacant set of random interlacements

arXiv:2504.02777v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider percolation of the vacant set of random interlacements at intensity $u$ in dimensions three and higher, and derive lower bounds on the truncated two-point function for all values of $u>0$. These bounds are sharp up to principal exponential order for all $u$ in dimension three and all $u \neq u_\ast$ in higher dimensions, where $u_*$ refers to the critical parameter of the model, and they match the upper bounds derived in the article arXiv:2503.14497. In dimension three, our results further imply that the truncated two-point function grows at large distances $x$ at a rate that depends on $x$ only through its Euclidean norm, which offers a glimpse of the expected (Euclidean) invariance of the scaling limit at criticality. The rate function is atypical, it incurs a logarithmic correction and comes with an explicit pre-factor that converges to $0$ as the parameter $u$ approaches the critical point $u_*$ from either side. A particular challenge stems from the combined effects of lack of monotonicity due to the truncation in the super-critical phase, and the precise (rotationally invariant) controls we seek, that measure the effects of a certain "harmonic humpback" function. Among others, their derivation relies on rather fine estimates for hitting probabilities of the random walk in arbitrary direction $e$, which witness this invariance at the discrete level, and preclude straightforward applications of projection arguments.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

CoRe-MoE: Contrastive Reweighted Mixture of Experts for Multi-Terrain Humanoid Locomotion with Gait Adaptation

arXiv:2606.04718v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humans primarily rely on walking and running to traverse complex terrains. Similarly, humanoid robots should be able to smoothly transition between walking and running while maintaining natural and stable locomotion. However, unifying gait transition and multi-terrain adaptation within a single policy remains challenging due to gradient interference between tasks and the distribution shift caused by terrain variations. Although Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures can mitigate multi-skill interference, direct joint training often fails to achieve clear expert specialization. To address these challenges, we propose CoRe-MoE, a two-stage reinforcement learning framework that decouples gait generation from terrain adaptation. In the first stage, a stable locomotion policy is learned to produce natural walking and running behaviors with smooth transitions. In the second stage, a terrain-aware MoE branch is introduced, and the gating network is trained with a contrastive objective to learn structured terrain representations and promote expert specialization. The final action is obtained through weighted fusion of the base gait policy and the terrain-aware branch, enabling the policy to preserve stable locomotion while adapting to complex terrains. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms baseline approaches in terms of success rate, locomotion stability, and multi-terrain adaptability. Furthermore, zero-shot deployment on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot validates the effectiveness of our framework, achieving robust walking and running across stairs, slopes, steps, obstacles, and unstructured outdoor terrains while maintaining accurate foothold control and dynamic stability.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

The Mathematics of AI Winters: The mathematical Taxonomy of Paradigm Fragility in AI Winter

arXiv:2606.12610v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two major periods of reduced funding and confidence in artificial intelligence research, commonly called the first and second AI winters, are usually explained through engineering failure, commercial disappointment, and inflated expectations. This article develops a complementary thesis: that the dominant paradigms of those periods also met genuine formal barriers, including limitations of representation, optimisation, computational complexity, statistical learnability, and high-dimensional approximation. The contribution is synthetic rather than archival. We do not claim that particular theorems mechanically caused the winters; rather, we show that several central disappointments of early AI were aligned with mathematically precise bottlenecks. We analyse these bottlenecks through the perceptron impossibility results of Minsky and Papert, the complexity-theoretic hardness of exact neural-network training established by Blum and Rivest, minimax rates for nonparametric estimation in high dimension due to Stone, vanishing-gradient analyses by Hochreiter and by Bengio and collaborators, and classical statistical learning theory in the tradition of Vapnik and Chervonenkis, Valiant, and Blumer and collaborators. We then relate these barriers to the later breakthroughs that mitigated, rather than eliminated, them.

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

Brownian Kernel Ladders

arXiv:2606.15812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constructing mathematically tractable function spaces that capture hierarchical compositional representations remains a central challenge in statistical learning theory. We introduce Brownian kernel ladders (BKLs), a recursively defined hierarchy of integral reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces generated through Brownian-kernel integral constructions. Starting from linear functionals, each layer is obtained by integrating Brownian kernels over probability measures supported on subsets of the previous layer, yielding a recursive function-space model in which depth is encoded directly through the hierarchy. Based on this framework, we define canonical BKL spaces together with an associated complexity functional. We establish several analytical and statistical properties of these spaces. In particular, we show that BKL spaces form quasi-Banach spaces, satisfy depth-dependent Hölder regularity estimates, and exhibit strict monotonicity with respect to depth. We further prove existence results for regularized empirical risk minimization and derive Gaussian complexity bounds that remain uniformly controlled with respect to both the ambient dimension and the hierarchy depth. A key ingredient of the analysis is a combinatorial proof technique based on recursive subset decompositions and Brownian-kernel threshold representations. These estimates yield excess-risk guarantees of near-parametric order for regularized empirical risk minimization over BKL spaces. Our results provide a mathematically tractable hierarchical function-space framework for studying compositional representations in deep learning.

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

TS-Fault: Benchmarking Time Series Forecasters Against Structural Faults

arXiv:2606.18539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting (TSF) underpins consequential decisions in energy, transportation, finance, and healthcare, yet TSF models are almost universally ranked by a single number (e.g., average error) on clean held-out data, under the implicit assumption that it predicts deployed reliability. However, real faults are not i.i.d noise but structured events with temporal shape, broken cross-variable dependencies, regime change coupled with missingness, and causal propagation across a sensing pipeline. Treating TSF robustness as a data-quality problem, we present TS-Fault, a benchmark that evaluates forecasting models under explicit, parameterized fault scenarios with controllable semantic difficulty. TS-Fault organizes recurring failures into four modes along two orthogonal axes (observation- vs mechanism-level; univariate vs multivariate) and injects each fault into the most prediction-critical window via a unified importance score. This design enables robustness to be tested against the structures models actually rely on, rather than reduced to generic noise sensitivity. We evaluate 21 models across 6 datasets, 4 modes, and 5 difficulty levels under a paired clean/corrupt protocol. The results reveal three findings that contradict common leaderboard intuition: (i) clean-data accuracy anti-correlates with robustness; (ii) clean rankings are preserved under observation-level faults but reshuffled under mechanism-level faults; and (iii) all catastrophic failures occur under mechanism-level faults, with foundation models achieving the highest clean-data accuracy yet exhibiting the greatest fragility. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Ray-zyy/TS-Fault.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Maximin Relative Improvement: Fair Learning as a Bargaining Problem

arXiv:2602.04155v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When deploying a single predictor across multiple subpopulations, we propose a fundamentally different approach: interpreting group fairness as a bargaining problem among subpopulations. This game-theoretic perspective reveals that existing robust optimization methods such as minimizing worst-group loss or regret correspond to classical bargaining solutions and embody different fairness principles. We propose relative improvement, the ratio of actual risk reduction to potential reduction from a baseline predictor, which recovers the Kalai-Smorodinsky solution. Unlike absolute-scale methods that may not be comparable when groups have different potential predictability, relative improvement provides axiomatic justification including scale invariance and individual monotonicity. We establish finite-sample convergence guarantees under mild conditions.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ClawEnvKit: Automatic Environment Generation for Claw-Like Agents

Constructing environments for training and evaluating claw-like agents remains a manual, human-intensive process that does not scale. We argue that what is needed is not just a dataset, but an automated pipeline capable of generating diverse, verified environments on demand. To this end, we introduce ClawEnvKit, an autonomous generation pipeline that instantiates this formalism from natural language descriptions. The pipeline comprises three modules: (1) a parser that extracts structured generation parameters from natural language input; (2) a generator that produces the task specification, tool interface, and scoring configuration; and (3) a validator that enforces feasibility, diversity, structural validity, and internal consistency across the generated environments. Using ClawEnvKit, we construct Auto-ClawEval, the first large-scale benchmark for claw-like agents, comprising 1,040 environments across 24 categories. Empirically, Auto-ClawEval matches or exceeds human-curated environments on coherence and clarity at 13,800x lower cost. Evaluated across 4 model families and 8 agent harness frameworks, we find that harness engineering boosts performance by up to 15.7 percentage points over a bare ReAct baseline, completion remains the primary axis of variation with no model saturating the benchmark, and automated generation enables evaluation at a scale previously infeasible. Beyond static benchmarking, ClawEnvKit enables live evaluation: users describe a desired capability in natural language and obtain a verified environment on demand, turning evaluation into a continuous, user-driven process. The same mechanism serves as an on-demand training environment generator, producing task distributions that adapt to an agent's current weaknesses rather than being bounded by existing user logs.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Securing the Future of IoMT in the Post-Quantum Era: An Edge-Native Federated Learning Approach

arXiv:2606.14515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices operate under strict resource constraints while handling highly sensitive health data, making security and privacy critical concerns. Federated learning (FL) further complicates this landscape, as model updates exchanged during training may unintentionally expose private medical information. Emerging quantum computing capabilities threaten the long-term viability of conventional lightweight cryptographic mechanisms, motivating the integration of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) into IoMT systems. This article discusses key enabling technologies for quantum-resilient IoMT, including post-quantum key establishment, lightweight encryption, and edge-native orchestration. We propose a scalable Kubernetes-based framework that integrates PQC into FL-enabled IoMT environments and validate it on a Raspberry Pi testbed. Results demonstrate that distributed cryptographic processing significantly reduces latency compared to sequential designs while maintaining feasible resource overhead. The primary contribution of this work lies in the design and validation of a secure orchestration and communication framework for FL-enabled IoMT systems. We conclude by outlining future directions toward energy-aware architectures, intelligent security optimization, and resilient next-generation Intelligent Internet of Medical Things (IIoMT) ecosystems.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

TopBench: A Benchmark for Implicit Predictive Reasoning in Tabular Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced Table Question Answering, where most queries can be answered by extracting information or simple aggregation. However, a common class of real-world queries is implicitly predictive, requiring the inference of unobserved answers from historical patterns rather than mere retrieval. These queries introduce two challenges: recognizing latent intent and reliable predictive reasoning over massive tables. To assess LLMs in such Tabular questiOn answering with implicit Prediction tasks, we introduce TopBench, a benchmark consisting of 779 samples across four sub-tasks, ranging from single-point prediction to decision making, treatment effect analysis, and complex filtering, requiring models to generate outputs spanning reasoning text and structured tables. We evaluate diverse models under both text-based and agentic workflows. Experiments reveal that current models often struggle with intent recognition, defaulting to just lookups. Deeper analysis identifies that accurate intent disambiguation serves as the prerequisite for leading these predictive behaviors. Furthermore, elevating the upper bound of prediction precision requires the integration of more sophisticated modeling or reasoning capabilities.

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

A Systematic Evaluation of Black-Box Uncertainty Estimation Methods for Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.19868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks, their outputs often remain unreliable and may contain hallucinations, making uncertainty estimation (UE) essential for building trustworthy LLMs. In practice, many mainstream LLMs are only accessible through restricted APIs, where internal signals such as logits and hidden states are unavailable, making black-box UE especially important. However, existing work on black-box UE for LLMs remains fragmented in methodology and lacks a unified empirical comparison. To address this gap, we present a systematic review of black-box UE methods and organize them into five categories: verbalization-based, sampling-based, explanation-based, multi-agent, and hybrid methods. We further build a unified evaluation framework and benchmark 24 representative methods across 4 models and 4 dataset settings. Our results show that no single method consistently dominates across all settings. Nevertheless, methods that reason over and compare candidates in the answer space are generally effective, and hybrid methods that combine multiple uncertainty signals perform well under most conditions. By releasing the benchmark data and a unified evaluation framework, we aim to facilitate reproducible comparisons and support future research, while our empirical findings provide practical guidance for developing future black-box UE methods for LLMs.