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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

No Accidental Software Agent First Canonical Code for Human Code Entropy Reduction and 30 to 500 times Lower Frontier Model Requirements

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier coding models may spend substantial capacity learning not only program behavior, but also accidental entropy in human repositories. Such repositories contain valuable signals: tests, incidents, migrations, edge cases, product judgment, and operational history. These signals are entangled with framework churn, naming drift, generated-source ambiguity, dependency rituals, CI dialects, weak proof routes, and human-oriented review customs. We propose agent-first canonical code, a proof-carrying substrate that rewrites routine product software into canonical behavior profiles, typed change algebra, proof lanes, constrained edit grammars, semantic patch cells, runtime negative memory, and proof-carrying change objects. The core hypothesis is that quotienting software by behavior equivalence under a declared oracle can collapse equivalent encodings into governed representatives with explicit evidence and proof obligations. The endpoint is amortized cost per verified correct change, including source, context, reasoning, tools, verification, security, provenance, review, failed loops, defects, and foundry cost under a common oracle. Reported reduction bands are hypotheses, not measured frontier results. The proposed limit is a No-Accident Horizon: removable accident decreases until residual novelty, evidence, governance, risk, and future optionality dominate. For supported routine-product distributions, this gives a defensible planning target near 100-fold all-in cost reduction, not a guarantee for all software. Preliminary QLoRA experiments on Qwen2.5-Coder-14B show that 64,088 canonical trajectories are learnable and suppress tested forbidden-language markers, but do not establish behavior preservation, scaling economics, or verified-change cost. The contribution is a falsifiable program centered on minimum functional description length and verified-change cost.

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

Subtyping patients with chronic disease using longitudinal BMI patterns

arXiv:2111.05385v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Obesity is a major health problem, increasing the risk of various major chronic diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, and stroke. While the role of obesity identified by cross-sectional BMI recordings has been heavily studied, the role of BMI trajectories is much less explored. In this study, we use a machine-learning approach to subtype individuals' risk of developing 18 major chronic diseases by using their BMI trajectories extracted from a large and geographically diverse EHR dataset capturing the health status of around two million individuals for a period of six years. We define nine new interpretable and evidence-based variables based on the BMI trajectories to cluster the patients into subgroups using the k-means clustering method. We thoroughly review each cluster's characteristics in terms of demographic, socioeconomic, and physiological measurement variables to specify the distinct properties of the patients in the clusters. In our experiments, the direct relationship of obesity with diabetes, hypertension, Alzheimer's, and dementia has been re-established and distinct clusters with specific characteristics for several of the chronic diseases have been found to be conforming or complementary to the existing body of knowledge.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ECA: Efficient Continual Alignment for Open-Ended Image-to-Text Generation

Incremental Learning (IL) for Open-ended Image-to-Text Generation (OpenITG) enables models to continuously generate accurate, contextually relevant text for new images while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Unlike prior studies, this paper addresses a more practical scenario in which the predominant category of visual data shifts over time as environments evolve. In this context, we introduce a new notion of continual alignment, which incrementally adapts the alignment module within pre-trained VLMs to preserve high-quality cross-modal representations. Based on this idea, we propose Efficient Continual Alignment (ECA), a novel exemplar-free IL approach for OpenITG. The key challenge is enabling the model to acquire new, task-specific features while minimizing interference with the established alignment without accessing raw data from previous tasks. To address this, ECA employs three core mechanisms: a Mixture of Query (MoQ) module that adapts task-specific query tokens, a Fisher Dynamic Expansion (FeDEx) that dynamically expands model structure based on a Fisher Information Matrix (FIM)-based metric, and an embedding dictionary with Dictionary Replay (DR) to retain past knowledge. To evaluate ECA's performance, we construct four new IL OpenITG benchmarks that better reflect real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that ECA significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting and improves IL performance compared to baseline methods. Code and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/Snowball0823/ECA.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Instance-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Semi-Supervised Learning of an On-Board Multi-Task Dense Prediction Model for Collision Avoidance System

Collision avoidance systems have evolved toward camera-based deep learning approaches for driving scene understanding. However, deployment in edge environments such as country clubs is constrained by limited computational resources and unreliable communication infrastructure. Moreover, constructing large-scale datasets for the target domain involves substantial annotation cost. To address these limitations, we propose an instance-aware knowledge distillation framework for semi-supervised learning. Specifically, we generate pseudo labels that mitigate teacher bias by leveraging domain priors from the teacher and instance-centric knowledge from foundation models. The trained lightweight student is deployed in the proposed collision avoidance system and performs multiple dense prediction tasks in real-time. The system detects frontal obstacles and encodes their spatial information into controller area network messages for automated guided vehicle operation. To achieve this, we construct a large-scale country club dataset and perform field validation of the proposed system. Experimental results demonstrate that the student outperforms the large teacher in instance segmentation while mitigating performance degradation in monocular depth estimation. Compared with the teacher, the student reduces FLOPs by 22.68$\times$ and parameters by 14.33$\times$, achieving 6.46 FPS on a low-cost edge device.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Unveiling coherent dynamics in non-Markovian open quantum systems: exact expression and recursive perturbation expansion

arXiv:2506.04097v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a systematic framework to derive the effective Hamiltonian governing the coherent dynamics of non-Markovian open quantum systems. By applying the minimal dissipation principle, we uniquely isolate the coherent contribution to the time-local generator of the reduced dynamics. We derive a general expression for the effective Hamiltonian and develop a recursive perturbative expansion that expresses it in terms of system-bath interaction terms and bath correlation functions. This expansion provides a systematic tool for analyzing energy renormalization effects across different coupling regimes. Applying our framework to paradigmatic spin systems, we reveal how environmental correlations influence energy shifts and eigenbasis rotations, offering new insights into strong-coupling effects and non-Markovian quantum thermodynamics.

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

LLM Consumer Behavior Theory: Foundations of a Novel Research Field

arXiv:2606.18005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents that make consumption decisions on behalf of users. This shift raises fundamental questions for consumer theory, which has traditionally modeled humans as the primary decision-makers. In this paper, we introduce LLM Consumer Behavior Theory, a new field of study concerned with analyzing consumer behavior in agentic markets. Drawing on classical and behavioral economics alongside recent advances in Natural Language Processing, we formalize how human preferences are reflected and acted upon by LLM-based agents, and how agent-level decisions aggregate into market demand. We unify previously fragmented literature on LLM decision-making, human behavior simulation, and preference elicitation under a common economic lens, highlighting where assumptions, such as rationality and heterogeneity, may fail in agentic markets. Rather than providing empirical validation, this paper outlines the scope of LLM consumer behavior and identifies open research questions related to alignment, preference representation, and market dynamics.

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

The Autonomy Tax: Defense Training Breaks LLM Agents

arXiv:2603.19423v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks. Practitioners deploy defense-trained models to protect against prompt injection attacks that manipulate agent behavior through malicious observations or retrieved content. We reveal a fundamental capability-alignment paradox: defense training designed to improve safety systematically destroys agent competence while failing to prevent sophisticated attacks. Evaluating defended models against undefended baselines across 97 agent tasks and 1,000 adversarial prompts, we uncover three systematic biases unique to multi-step agents. Agent incompetence bias manifests as immediate tool execution breakdown, with models refusing or generating invalid actions on benign tasks before observing any external content. Cascade amplification bias causes early failures to propagate through retry loops, pushing defended models to timeout on 99\% of tasks compared to 13\% for baselines. Trigger bias leads to paradoxical security degradation where defended models perform worse than undefended baselines while straightforward attacks bypass defenses at high rates. Root cause analysis reveals these biases stem from shortcut learning: models overfit to surface attack patterns rather than semantic threat understanding, evidenced by extreme variance in defense effectiveness across attack categories. Our findings demonstrate that current defense paradigms optimize for single-turn refusal benchmarks while rendering multi-step agents fundamentally unreliable, necessitating new approaches that preserve tool execution competence under adversarial conditions.

08.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-02

Proteomic signatures of early retinal neurodegeneration in type 2 diabetes mellitus

Authors:

by Huangdong Li, Ziyu Zhu, Shaopeng Yang, Weijing Cheng, Shaoying Tan, Zhuoyao Xin, Lei Zhang, Zhuoting Zhu, Shida Chen, Wenyong Huang, Wei Wang Background Retinal neurodegeneration is an early and independent feature of diabetic retinal disease and has been proposed as a window into the systemic neural consequences of diabetes, yet accessible molecular biomarkers and individualized prediction tools remain scarce. We aimed to identify circulating plasma protein signatures of diabetic retinal neurodegeneration (DRN) and to translate them into a clinically usable risk prediction system. Methods and findings In this multi-cohort prospective observational study, we integrated high-throughput plasma proteomics with longitudinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) in two independent populations. The discovery cohort comprised 1,492 participants had baseline plasma proteomics and OCT, and 1,218 were followed with repeated OCT over 6 years in Guangzhou Diabetic Eye Study (GDES). DRN was quantified by the annualized OCT-derived retinal nerve fiber layer thinning rate. In multivariable analyses adjusted for age, sex, smoking, systolic blood pressure, HbA1c, and diabetes duration, we identified 71 plasma proteins associated with development and progression of DRN. These proteins mapped onto pathways governing inflammatory immune recruitment, extracellular matrix remodeling, and microvascular homeostasis, providing a plausible biological basis for DRN. We developed a proteomics-based DRN model (Pro-DRN) using eight machine learning (ML) algorithms, including XGBoost and LightGBM. In the independent test set, Pro-DRN achieved a C-index of 0.860, rising to 0.908 when integrated with clinical variables. Compared with six conventional models, Pro-DRN improved discrimination (ΔC-index 0.137 to 0.159; all P 

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Laws of Large Numbers for Non-Independent Random Variables on Hyperspaces with respect to the Hausdorff Metric

arXiv:2011.07199v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper investigates the limit behavior of the Minkowski sums for sequences of set-valued random variables. When the underlying space is finite dimensional, by using the support function, we establish the weak and strong laws of large numbers for non-independent random variables in the hyperspace with respect to the Hausdorff metric $d_H$.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

LLM Parameters for Math Across Languages: Shared or Separate?

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit substantial cross-lingual variation in mathematical reasoning performance, but it remains unclear whether these differences reflect language-specific parameters or a shared mechanism that manifests differently by language. We present a cross-lingual mechanistic analysis of mathematical reasoning in LLMs, enabling us to localize and compare model parameters that support mathematical reasoning across languages. We find that the extracted math-associated parameters exhibit partial cross-lingual overlap, with the strongest overlap concentrated in intermediate model layers. We further observe that English consistently produces the largest set of math-relevant parameters, whereas lower-resource languages reveal smaller sets of relevant parameters. These results suggest that math-related behavior in multilingual LLMs is neither fully language-invariant nor fully language-specific, but instead exhibits partial cross-lingual parameter overlap with systematic language-dependent differences.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Identification of environmental factors and growth stages in the prediction of fibre yield and fibre quality traits in rain-grown cotton

Context Understanding how and when environmental conditions influence overall crop performance is crucial for optimising the development of genotypes to a specific breeding target environment. We focused on economically important traits of Australian rain-grown cotton including fibre yield and quality traits, which have not been investigated comprehensively. The aim of the study was to identify relevant environmental factors, and the timing and extent of their impact on rain-grown cotton production. Methods We used a data driven approach to analyse the relationship between ten climate related environmental factors across various plant growth stages and eight fibre yield and quality traits, using a large-scale field dataset of 9,283 records collected over 23 years at 4 locations, with 53 unique year-location combinations. We applied eight complementary statistical models including stepwise, penalised and Bayesian linear regression, regression-tree based ensemble methods and deep learning frameworks to (1) select the most essential environmental covariates affecting rain-grown cotton production, and (2) evaluate the predictive performance of these models. Results The environmental impacts on rain-grown cotton production were trait and growth-stage specific. Number of rainy days and solar radiation were identified as the most influential environmental factors for fibre yield traits, vapour pressure deficit at maximum daily temperature was the most influential factor for majority of fibre quality traits. However, each analysed trait was influenced by multiple environmental factors across multiple growth stages (rather than a single factor or a single growth stage). These influential covariates explained a wide range of variation in the traits, accounting for 5.8% to 68.2%. Using the best-fit random forest model, our findings revealed non-linear relationships between key environmental covariates and the traits. Conclusions Environmental factors at different rain-grown cotton growth stages are key determinants for the performance of end-of-season fibre yield and fibre quality parameters. These findings highlight the need to account for environment conditions when developing cotton varieties optimised for rain-grown production systems. Potential strategies are proposed whereby these key environmental factors can be used to increase the rate of genetic gain in rain-grown cotton production systems. Implications The results of this study will be crucial for future genetic evaluations and analyses of genotype-by-environment interaction effects in rain-grown cotton, which must account for the influence of the environment on plant performance. Furthermore, these methods can be applied to other species to identify critical growth stages and environmental factors which most influence crop performance.

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

HARBOR: Heading Analysis and Reconstruction from Behavioral Observation and Radar

Maritime situational awareness often relies on Automatic Identification System (AIS) transmissions to track vessel movements. However, in operational or conflict scenarios, these data may be unavailable due to signal loss, deliberate deactivation, or intentional spoofing. In such conditions, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery becomes a critical sensing alternative for wide-area maritime monitoring, despite providing only static scene snapshots. This work introduces HARBOR (Heading Analysis and Reconstruction from Behavioral Observation and Radar), a complete pipeline for transforming a single SAR image into predictive motion information without requiring any auxiliary data source at inference time. The method begins with SAR image preprocessing to enhance and segment vessel candidates, followed by automatic detection, size-based classification, and heading estimation using skeleton geometry and local intensity patterns. AIS data are used exclusively during an offline calibration phase to derive vessel-type-dependent motion parameters, which are then applied to generate probabilistic heatmaps of candidate future vessel positions. A case study using real COSMO-SkyMed SAR imagery demonstrates the pipeline on a maritime scene in southern Brazil, showing its ability to extract motion tendencies and generate probabilistic projections of vessel positions in data-denied environments.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Learning What to Remember: Observability-Safe Memory Retention via Constrained Optimization for Long-Horizon Language Agents

arXiv:2606.10616v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-horizon language agents accumulate observations, reasoning traces, and retrieved facts that exceed their finite context windows, making memory retention a fundamental resource-allocation problem. Existing memory systems improve management through heuristic scoring, retrieval optimization, or learned compression, but largely treat retention as a local decision problem and do not explicitly model its long-term consequences under realistic observability constraints. To fill this gap, we formulate memory retention as a constrained stochastic optimization problem with explicit budget feasibility, evidence utility, and delayed costs including miss penalties, reacquisition delays, and stale-information risk. We then propose OSL-MR (Observability-Safe Learning for Memory Retention), a novel framework that enforces a strict separation between online-observable features and offline-available supervision (OAS). OSL-MR combines an evidence learner trained from realized evidence supervision with a Mixed-Score heuristic that serves both as a deployable online-safe baseline and as a structured inductive prior for learning. The resulting policy learns query-conditioned evidence value directly from interaction data while remaining deployable under the same observability constraints. Experiments on LOCOMO and LongMemEval show that OSL-MR consistently outperforms recency-based methods, Generative Agents-style scoring, and other heuristic baselines, particularly under tight memory budgets. The Mixed-Score prior further improves precision while preserving recall, and sensitivity analysis demonstrates robustness across a wide range of cost configurations.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

An In-depth Study of LLM Contributions to the Bin Packing Problem

arXiv:2510.27353v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent studies have suggested that Large Language Models (LLMs) could provide interesting ideas contributing to mathematical discovery. This claim was motivated by reports that LLM-based genetic algorithms produced heuristics offering new insights into the online bin packing problem under uniform and Weibull distributions. In this work, we reassess this claim through a detailed analysis of the heuristics produced by LLMs, examining both their behavior and interpretability. Despite being human-readable, these heuristics remain largely opaque even to domain experts. Building on this analysis, we propose a new class of algorithms tailored to these specific bin packing instances. The derived algorithms are significantly simpler, more efficient, more interpretable, and more generalizable, suggesting that the considered instances are themselves relatively simple. We then discuss the limitations of the claim regarding LLMs' contribution to this problem, which appears to rest on the mistaken assumption that the instances had previously been studied. Our findings instead emphasize the need for rigorous validation and contextualization when assessing the scientific value of LLM-generated outputs.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Cinematic Compositing Using Character-Environment-Harmonized Video Generation Models

Cinematic compositing aims to integrate green-screen characters into novel environments while maintaining physical and photometric realism. Previous methods often fail to capture the complex bidirectional interactions between characters and their surroundings, which we characterize as Character-to-Environment (C2E) physical interaction and Environment-to-Character (E2C) lighting harmonization. To address this, we propose an end-to-end video diffusion framework that jointly models C2E and E2C interactions, specifically handling the challenges of interactive props. Our approach introduces a tri-mask-guided architecture with RGB-D joint denoising to ensure physically consistent interactions among the character, props, and environment. We further develop an efficient prior-driven data curation pipeline to construct high-quality relighting pairs without expensive rendering. Finally, a reference-conditioned mechanism enables controllable environment synthesis and precise prop replacement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in cinematic-quality dynamic video compositing.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Falcon: Functional Assembly and Language for Compositional Reasoning in X-ray

Conventional vision-language models are largely object-centric, focusing on detecting and describing individual entities. In safety-critical X-ray baggage screening, however, threat often emerges not from a single object but from the functional compatibility of spatially dispersed components, such as batteries, detonators, and explosive charges. We formalize this setting as compositional threat reasoning, where risk is modeled as a relational property of grounded regions rather than an independent detection outcome. We introduce Falcon, a multimodal framework that abstracts segmentation-aware region features into a structured safety state capturing component presence, pairwise functional compatibility, and scene-level risk. This structured representation is injected into the language model as an explicit intermediate interface, encouraging relationally consistent and safety-aware reasoning. To evaluate this problem, we present Falcon-X, a benchmark that unifies dense grounding with structured supervision over component completeness and risk inference in cluttered X-ray imagery. Experiments show that while existing multimodal models adapt to appearance, they struggle with compositional safety reasoning. Falcon improves functional grounding and produces more coherent threat assessments, establishing compositional safety reasoning as a distinct evaluation paradigm for multimodal systems.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Open-Vocabulary BEV Segmentation with 3D-Aware Geometric Constraints

Bird's-eye view (BEV) perception fuses multi-camera images into a unified top-down representation for autonomous driving. Despite recent progress, state-of-the-art methods remain confined to closed-set scenarios, making them vulnerable to unpredictable real-world environments. In this work, we introduce open-vocabulary BEV segmentation (OVBS), which leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to recognize categories beyond the training set while maintaining precise BEV perception and real-time efficiency. A key challenge in OVBS lies in the 3D geometric inconsistency inherent in the ill-posed lifting of 2D VLM semantics into BEV. To address this, we propose OVBEVSeg, a geometry-aware OVBS framework that enhances efficient Gaussian splatting (GS)-based unprojection by leveraging robust 3D geometric constraints across three progressive stages: (1) 2D-to-BEV pseudo-labeling via reliable 3D projection for OV generalization; (2) joint 2D-BEV per-scene optimization with BEV structural constraints for 3D geometric consistency; and (3) 3D geometric distillation for online efficiency. On the nuScenes dataset, OVBEVSeg achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming closed-set methods by 15.3 mIoU on unseen categories. Remarkably, even with no novel-class ground-truth labels, it remains competitive with self- and semi-supervised baselines trained with up to 40% of ground-truth annotations. Furthermore, it achieves 2.5x faster inference with only 0.22x the memory consumption of projection-based methods. Project page: https://hchoi256.github.io/projects/ovbevseg/.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Low-power analogue neural networks with trainable nonlinear connections for continuous control

arXiv:2606.23742v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical neural networks promise low-power machine learning by computing directly with analogue device physics, but most architectures force nonlinear device responses to act as scalar weights. Inspired by Kolmogorov-Arnold networks, we place trainable nonlinear functions on the connections, making each physical connection a learnable computational element. Realising these functions as analogue band-pass filters on field-programmable analogue arrays, we find that the benefit is task-dependent and follows from the smoothness of the physical basis: the networks represent smooth, continuously valued targets, including robotic kinematics, continuous control, and photovoltaic maximum-power-point tracking, with far fewer nodes and connections than multilayer perceptrons, but offer no parameter-efficiency advantage on classification-like decision boundaries. Trained networks transfer to hardware across approximately 35,000 connections with quantified fidelity, and a dedicated CMOS implementation is projected to operate at approximately 30 microwatts. A memristive realisation reproduces the same behaviour in simulation, indicating that the advantage comes from placing trainable nonlinearity on connections, rather than from a particular device.

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

Phishing Email Detection Using Large Language Models

arXiv:2512.10104v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Email phishing is one of the most prevalent and globally consequential vectors of cyber intrusion. As systems increasingly deploy Large Language Models (LLMs) applications, these systems face evolving phishing email threats that exploit their fundamental architectures. Current LLMs require substantial hardening before deployment in email security systems, particularly against coordinated multi-vector attacks that exploit architectural vulnerabilities. This paper proposes LLMPEA, an LLM-based framework to detect phishing email attacks across multiple attack vectors, including prompt injection, text refinement, and multilingual attacks. We evaluate three frontier LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4, and Grok-3) and comprehensive prompting design to assess their feasibility, robustness, and limitations against phishing email attacks. Our empirical analysis reveals that LLMs can detect the phishing email over 90% accuracy while we also highlight that LLM-based phishing email detection systems could be exploited by adversarial attack, prompt injection, and multilingual attacks. Our findings provide critical insights for LLM-based phishing detection in real-world settings where attackers exploit multiple vulnerabilities in combination.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Device assessed 24-hour movement behaviour and cardiovascular disease mortality amongst cancer survivors.

Background: Cancer survivors face elevated risks of mortality from cardiovascular disease (CVD). The potential importance of physical activity (PA) and other behaviours across the 24-hour day (e.g. sedentary behaviour (SB) and sleep) for CVD-mortality risk is not well understood in this at-risk population. Objectives: To assess the importance of 24-hour movement behaviour, using a compositional approach, for mitigating CVD-mortality amongst cancer survivors. Methods: Participants with a prior cancer diagnosis were drawn from the UK Biobank accelerometry sub-study (n=6,158). Accelerometer-derived movement (moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA), vigorous PA (VPA), moderate PA (MPA), light PA (LPA), SB, sleep) was examined in relation to CVD-mortality, identified from health record linkage data (using Fine-Gray Cox proportional-hazards models adjusted for demographic, health, lifestyle covariates). Results: Median follow-up was 8.0 years (Q1-Q3: 7.4-8.5), with n=500 (8.2%) deaths (CVD-deaths: n=118). Greater MVPA, in place of any other behaviour, was inversely associated with CVD-mortality with e.g. 10% lower hazard if MVPA theoretically replaced 7 minutes (mins)/day SB (Hazard ratio (HR): 0.91, (95% Confidence Interval: 0.86-0.95)), 9 mins/day LPA (HR: 0.90, 0.83-0.97), or 11 mins/day sleep (HR: 0.90, 0.83-0.97). The VPA component of MVPA proved critical, requiring only ~1-2 additional mins/day for equivalent hazard reduction. Sleep duration, was also inversely associated with CVD-mortality. A 10% lower hazard required replacing 29 mins/day of SB with sleep (HR: 0.90, 0.84-0.96); no other behavioural replacement amongst SB, sleep or LPA could provide an equivalent risk reduction. Conclusions: Among cancer survivors, the most potent reduction in CVD-mortality followed theoretically reallocating time to higher intensity movement.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Universality for Products of Random Matrices with i.i.d. Entries and the Fuss–Catalan Number

arXiv:2606.14450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let \((w_{ij})_{i,j\ge1}\) be a single infinite array of independent identically distributed real- or complex-valued entries of mean zero, variance \(\sigma^2\), and finite fourth moment. Set \(W_n=(w_{ij})_{1\le i,j\le n}\) and \(X_n=n^{-1/2}W_n\). For every fixed \(k\ge1\), we identify the almost sure limiting operator norm of several fixed products built from this family. Define the \(k\)-th freeness coefficient by \[ \gamma_k:=\sqrt{\frac{(k+1)^{k+1}}{k^k}}. \] Then we prove \[ \|X_n^k\|\to\sigma^k\gamma_k \qquad almost surely. \] The same limit holds for products sampled with replacement from any fixed finite pool of independent copies of \(X_n\); in particular, it holds for the product of \(k\) independent copies. Thus, the freeness coefficient captures the non-commuting characteristic between large random matrices %powers and independent or fixed-pool sampled products under the finite fourth moment assumption. The improvement of the classical Bai–Yin-type power estimate from the scale \(\sigma^k(k{+}1)\) to \(\sigma^k \sqrt{k{+}1}\) is a direct corollary of our result. The main technical challenge is to prove the upper bound using a high-moment expansion of %the upper bound is proved by a high-moment expansion of \(\E\Tr((X_n^kX_n^{*k})^m)\). The leading zero-defect trace words are tree-like and are counted by the Fuss–Catalan number \[ F_{k,m}= \frac1{km+1}\binom{(k+1)m}{m}. \] The combinatorial tool helps to devise a defect-sensitive global enumeration: if \(L=km\) and \[ r=(L+1-v)+(L-q), \] then the number of admissible word classes with defect \(r\) is at most \(F_{k,m}(Cm)^{Dr}\). This polynomial-in-\(m\) loss, with degree proportional to the defect, is summable in the logarithmic moment range.

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

Agents' Last Exam

Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long horizon, economically valuable, real world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 sub fields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is below 1%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP relevant impact.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Space-Efficient Language Generation in the Limit

We initiate a resource-aware theory of language generation in the limit under the minimal constraint of space efficiency. In our framework, a learner observes an adversarial positive stream from a target language $K$ and must eventually output a hallucination-free hypothesis language $L \subseteq K$ while omitting at most $\Delta$ strings of $K$. We focus on $\mathcal{C}_{s,k}$, the collection of languages recognized by DFAs with at most $s$ states over an alphabet of size $k$, as the natural hypothesis class for memory-bounded learners. In the exponential-space regime, we prove that a learner can exactly identify the target $K$. Under a stricter memory budget, we characterize the strongest possible generation guarantees. In particular, we present a streaming algorithm using $\mathrm{poly}(s,k)$ space that converges to a hypothesis with generation gap $\Delta = O(k^{2s-2})$. Moreover, the learned hypothesis captures every string in $K$ of length at least $2s-1$. We complement this result with a near-matching lower bound through a reduction from a standard communication complexity problem. Specifically, achieving generation gap $\Delta \le k^{(1-\varepsilon)s}$ requires $k^{\Omega(\varepsilon s)}$ memory. Together, these results reveal a sharp transition between polynomial-space generation and exponential-space exact identification.

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

RoSE: Round-robin Synthetic Data Evaluation for Selecting LLM Generators without Human Test Sets

LLMs are powerful generators of synthetic data, which are used for training smaller, specific models. This is especially valuable for low-resource languages, where human-labelled data is scarce but LLMs can still produce high-quality text. However, LLMs differ in how useful their outputs are for training. Selecting the best LLM as a generator is challenging because extrinsic evaluation requires costly human annotations (which are often unavailable for low-resource languages), while intrinsic metrics correlate poorly with downstream performance. We introduce Round robin Synthetic data Evaluation (RoSE), a proxy metric for selecting the best LLM generator without human test sets. RoSE trains a small model on the outputs of a candidate generator (LLM) and then evaluates it on generated synthetic examples from all other candidate LLMs. The final RoSE score is the mean performance of this small model. Across six LLMs, eleven languages, and three tasks (sentiment, topic, intent), RoSE identifies the optimal generator more often than any other intrinsic heuristics. RoSE outperforms intrinsic heuristics and comes within 0.76 percentage points of the optimal generator baseline. This result is measured in terms of downstream performance, obtained by training a small model on the chosen generator's outputs (optimal vs. proxy metric selected) and evaluating it on human-labelled test data. Additionally, RoSE is the only metric to achieve a positive correlation with performance on human test data.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Why Low-Precision Transformer Training Fails: An Analysis on Flash Attention

arXiv:2510.04212v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The pursuit of computational efficiency has driven the adoption of low-precision formats for training transformer models. However, this progress is often hindered by notorious training instabilities. This paper provides the first mechanistic explanation for a long-standing and unresolved failure case where training with flash attention in low-precision settings leads to catastrophic loss explosion. Our in-depth analysis reveals that the failure is not a random artifact but caused by two intertwined phenomena: the emergence of similar low-rank representations within the attention mechanism and the compounding effect of biased rounding errors inherent in low-precision arithmetic. We demonstrate how these factors create a vicious cycle of error accumulation that corrupts weight updates, ultimately derailing the training dynamics. To validate our findings, we introduce a minimal modification to the flash attention that mitigates the bias in rounding errors. This simple change stabilizes the training process, confirming our analysis and offering a practical solution to this persistent problem. Code is available at https://github.com/ucker/why-low-precision-training-fails.