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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Capital Asset Pricing Model with Size Factor and Normalizing by Volatility Index

Authors:
Abraham Atsiwo↗Andrey Sarantsev↗

arXiv:2411.19444v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) relates a well-diversified stock portfolio to a benchmark portfolio. We insert size effect in CAPM, capturing the observation that small stocks have higher risk and return than large stocks, on average. For some size-based stock portfolios, dividing their returns by the Volatility Index makes them closer to independent and normal. In this article, we combine these ideas to create a new discrete-time model, which includes volatility, relative size, and CAPM. We fit this model using real-world data, prove the long-term stability, and connect this research to Stochastic Portfolio Theory. We fill important gaps in our previous article on CAPM with the size factor.

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

ThinkJEPA: Empowering Latent World Models with Large Vision-Language Reasoning Model

Authors:
Haichao Zhang↗Yijiang Li↗Shwai He↗Tushar Nagarajan↗Mingfei Chen↗Jianglin Lu↗Ang Li↗Yun Fu↗

Recent progress in latent world models (e.g., V-JEPA2) has shown promising capability in forecasting future world states from video observations. Nevertheless, dense prediction from a short observation window limits temporal context and can bias predictors toward local, low-level extrapolation, making it difficult to capture long-horizon semantics and reducing downstream utility. Vision–language models (VLMs), in contrast, provide strong semantic grounding and general knowledge by reasoning over uniformly sampled frames, but they are not ideal as standalone dense predictors due to compute-driven sparse sampling, a language-output bottleneck that compresses fine-grained interaction states into text-oriented representations, and a data-regime mismatch when adapting to small action-conditioned datasets. We propose a VLM-guided JEPA-style latent world modeling framework that combines dense-frame dynamics modeling with long-horizon semantic guidance via a dual-temporal pathway: a dense JEPA branch for fine-grained motion and interaction cues, and a uniformly sampled VLM thinker branch with a larger temporal stride for knowledge-rich guidance. To transfer the VLM's progressive reasoning signals effectively, we introduce a hierarchical pyramid representation extraction module that aggregates multi-layer VLM representations into guidance features compatible with latent prediction. Experiments on hand-manipulation trajectory prediction show that our method outperforms both a strong VLM-only baseline and a JEPA-predictor baseline, and yields more robust long-horizon rollout behavior.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Grids Often Outperform Implicit Neural Representations at Compressing Dense Signals

Authors:
Namhoon Kim↗Sara Fridovich-Keil↗

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have recently shown impressive results, but their fundamental capacity, implicit biases, and scaling behavior remain poorly understood. We investigate the performance of diverse INRs across a suite of 2D and 3D real and synthetic signals with varying effective bandwidth, as well as both overfitting and generalization tasks including tomography, super-resolution, and denoising. By stratifying performance according to model size as well as signal type and bandwidth, our results shed light on how different INR and grid representations allocate their capacity. We find that, for many tasks involving dense signals, a simple regularized grid with interpolation trains faster and to higher or comparable quality than any INR with the same number of parameters. We also find limited settings – namely fitting binary signals such as shape contours – where INRs outperform grids, to guide future development and use of INRs towards the most advantageous applications.

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04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Pathwise structure of the three-dimensional attractive one-point interaction diffusion

Authors:
Barkat Mian↗

arXiv:2606.08008v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the pathwise behavior of the three-dimensional attractive one-point interaction diffusion whose law was constructed by Cranston, Koralov, Molchanov and Vainberg, corresponding to the singular Schrödinger Hamiltonian \[ \frac12\Delta+\frac{\beta}{2}\delta_0, \qquad \beta>0. \] We identify a local stochastic differential equation satisfied by the process away from the origin and use it to construct a natural submartingale whose increasing component in the Doob-Meyer decomposition is supported on the set of times at which the process visits the origin. In particular, we show that the process visits the origin with positive probability and that the law conditioned on avoiding the origin is three-dimensional Wiener measure.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Self-Adaptive Scale Handling for Forecasting Time Series with Scale Heterogeneity

Authors:
Xu Zhang↗Zhengang Huang↗Yunzhi Wu↗Xun Lu↗Erpeng Qi↗Yunkai Chen↗Zhongya Xue↗Peng Wang↗Wei Wang↗

arXiv:2606.20010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current time series forecasting (TSF) research predominantly focuses on scale-homogeneous data, where different time series share similar numerical magnitude ranges. However, in real-world industrial scenarios such as financial product sales, different time series often differ by orders of magnitude (scale heterogeneity). Since these series share similar temporal patterns, joint modeling is desirable for better data utilization, yet existing scaling methods either compress low-scale signals (global normalization) or destroy semantic discriminability and amplify inverse-scaling errors (window-based scaling). This paper proposes a self-Adaptive Scale-handling (AS) module that learns adaptive scale factors tailored to each input, preserving semantic discriminability while reducing inverse-scaling errors. AS consists of Scale Calibrating (SC), which calibrates prior mean scaling factors through neural networks, and Scaling Selection (SS), which decides whether to apply calibration or retain the original factor, avoiding over-calibration. Experiments on real-world fund sales datasets from Ant Fortune and Alipay show that AS seamlessly integrates into popular TSF models and consistently improves their performance. The code and dataset are available at the link https://github.com/Meteor-Stars/ASTSF.

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

MCompassRAG: Topic Metadata as a Semantic Compass for Paragraph-Level Retrieval

Authors:
Amirhossein Abaskohi↗Raymond Li↗Gaetano Cimino↗Peter West↗Giuseppe Carenini↗Issam H. Laradji↗

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems depend critically on how documents are chunked and searched. Fine-grained chunks can improve retrieval precision but expand the search space, increasing latency and cost; larger chunks reduce the number of candidates but make dense similarity less reliable, as the representation for each chunk mixes multiple topics and introduces more semantic noise. This trade-off becomes especially limiting in deep research tasks, where retrieval must be both fast and precise across large, heterogeneous corpora. We introduce MCompassRAG, a metadata-guided retrieval framework that uses topic-level signals as a semantic compass for selecting relevant evidence. Instead of relying only on cosine similarity between queries and noisy chunk embeddings, MCompassRAG enriches chunk representations with topic metadata in the same embedding space and trains a lightweight retriever through LLM-teacher distillation. At inference time, MCompassRAG performs topic-aware retrieval without additional LLM calls, improving both efficiency and evidence quality. Across six complex retrieval benchmarks, MCompassRAG improves information efficiency (IE) by 8.24% on average with over 5 times lower latency than the strongest efficient RAG baselines. Code is available on https://github.com/AmirAbaskohi/MCompassRAG.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

MOSAIC: Modality-Specific Adaptation for Incremental Continual Learning in Parkinson's Disease Gait Assessment

Authors:
Minlin Zeng↗Zhipeng Zhou↗Yang Qiu↗Martin J. McKeown↗Zhiqi Shen↗

arXiv:2606.13258v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gait-based Parkinson's disease assessment increasingly relies on heterogeneous sensors, but clinical systems rarely collect all modalities simultaneously. New sensors may arrive through device upgrades, protocol changes, or multi-center deployment, while historical patient data are often unavailable because of privacy and storage constraints. This modality-incremental setting faces three challenges: unreliable cross-modal distillation, modality-specific statistical shifts, and reduced plasticity after preservation. We propose MOSAIC, a compact continual learning framework. First, we identify the Toxic Teacher phenomenon and introduce Modality-Specific Warm-Up to stabilize newly learned modality representations before distillation. Second, we propose a statistics-decoupled MSBN architecture that isolates sensor statistics while maintaining a shared semantic backbone. Third, we design a curriculum-guided repulsive objective for Plasticity Recovery, preserving legacy knowledge while recovering modality-specific capacity. Experiments on three multimodal Parkinson's gait datasets show that MOSAIC improves final performance and mitigates forgetting. Project code is available at: https://github.com/minlinzeng/MOSAIC_Modality-Specific-Adaptation-for-Incremental-Continual-Learning-in-PD-Gait-Assessment.git

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08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

When Probing Accuracy Saturates, Fragility Resolves: A Complementary Metric for LLM Pre-Training Analysis

Authors:
Orion Reblitz-Richardson↗

Standard linear probing declares a property "encoded" when a classifier on hidden states achieves high accuracy. The protocol works well on a snapshot but breaks across pre-training: probe accuracy saturates within the first few thousand steps, leaving most of training invisible to the instrument. We introduce fragility, a complementary per-layer metric defined as the activation-noise level at which probe accuracy collapses. Fragility is sensitive to both the margin of separability and the redundancy of representation, both of which keep evolving long after accuracy plateaus. Applied to open-checkpoint language models, fragility recovers structure that accuracy alone cannot see. Moralized representations emerge along a lexical $\to$ compositional gradient: lexical moral detection first, compositional moral encoding later. Because probe accuracy on its own tracks how lexically separable a dataset is, we establish the compositional encoding directly, by showing it transfers across construction types that share no contrast tokens. A layer-depth robustness gradient develops monotonically across training while accuracy stays flat. And matched fine-tuning corpora that produce identical probing accuracy leave distinct fragility fingerprints, showing that data curation reshapes probe robustness without changing probe accuracy. In every comparison we test, where probing accuracy returns a flat answer, fragility returns a structured one.

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

CAP: Towards PPG Universal Representation Learning with Patient-level Supervision

Authors:
Chenyang He↗Xinyi Shao↗Shun Huang↗Bosong Huang↗Daoqiang Zhang↗Ming Jing↗Cheng Ding↗

arXiv:2606.15284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Photoplethysmography (PPG) plays a central role in wearable health monitoring and clinical decision support. Yet existing approaches to universal PPG representation learning largely focus on signal-level objectives and often overlook patient-level health context, which limits generalization to complex clinical tasks and heterogeneous cohorts. To address this gap, we construct a large-scale paired PPG-EHR multimodal dataset by distilling fragmented medical histories and clinical records into cohesive, patient-level electronic health records (EHR). Building on this resource, we propose Clinical Anchored Pretraining for PPG (CAP). During pretraining, CAP performs cross-modal contrastive alignment that anchors PPG representations to patient-level clinical semantics, guiding the encoder beyond waveform fitting toward modeling consistency in a patient's overall physiological state. During downstream adaptation, the pretrained PPG encoder provides clinically grounded representations that strengthen inductive bias and improve robustness and transferability. Experiments demonstrate that CAP consistently outperforms strong baselines on four diverse downstream tasks. CAP achieves a particularly large gain on respiratory rate prediction (up to +87.6% relative improvement over the state-of-the-art baseline) and delivers an average relative +26.7% across all tasks. We further enhance the interpretability of our approach through comprehensive analyses, including ablations and multiple complementary visualizations of the learned representations. The code for our experiments is available at: https://github.com/gody123gody/CAP .

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

The Urysohn Ladder: Recursive Metric Contraction for Scalable Continual Learning

Authors:
Xin Li↗

arXiv:2512.18471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continual learning systems face a fundamental geometric obstacle: as experience accumulates on a fixed-capacity manifold, covering numbers grow linearly with time, eventually forcing representational overlap and catastrophic interference. Prevailing approaches attack this problem by expansion - projecting into higher-dimensional spaces via kernels, overparameterization, or replay. We argue the solution is the opposite: contraction. We formalize abstraction as the Urysohn Ladder, a hierarchy of quotient maps that recursively collapse validated metric neighborhoods into compact tokens, converting unbounded ambient-space search into bounded navigation on a low-dimensional intrinsic scaffold. Geometrically, each collapsed token acts as a shortcut - a region of extreme metric contraction that bridges distant experiences, much like a wormhole in the representational manifold. We establish four results that collectively guarantee separability (metric contraction renders nonlinearly entangled structure linearly separable at each quotient level, and this separability propagates faithfully through the entire hierarchy), bounded capacity (covering numbers remain $O(1)$ per quotient level, independent of stream length), stability (parity-partitioned flow/scaffold subspaces enable unbounded plasticity without catastrophic interference), and scalability (inference cost scales with quotient distance, not ambient distance). We validate each claim empirically with pretrained models and real-world datasets. Moreover, we demonstrate the potential of Urysohn Ladder for scalable continual learning via scaffold amortization.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

What Do Flow-Based Inverse Solvers Approximate? A Posterior-Transport View

Authors:
Jian Xu↗Delu Zeng↗John Paisley↗Qibin Zhao↗

A growing family of training-free solvers – FlowDPS, FLOWER, PnP-Flow and their diffusion ancestors (DPS, DAPS) – repurpose a pretrained flow-matching prior to solve imaging inverse problems by adding a measurement-guidance term to the deterministic probability-flow ODE. Despite strong empirical results, what these per-step corrections actually approximate – and how far the resulting samples are from the true posterior $p(x\mid y)$ – has not been characterized. We give a posterior-transport account of flow-based inverse problem solving. Our starting point is a simple but consequential fact: for a deterministic flow prior, Bayesian conditioning is realized entirely by a reweighting of the source distribution, not by a drift correction; pushing the reweighted source through the unmodified velocity field yields exact posterior samples. From this we show that trajectory-guidance solvers can be read as the minimum-kinetic-energy correction field needed to morph the unconditional source into the posterior, and that FlowDPS / FLOWER / PnP-Flow correspond to distinct zeroth-order / Gaussian / proximal approximations of this single object; we bound the resulting posterior bias in Wasserstein distance. A controlled $2$D study with a closed-form posterior confirms the theory decisively: source reweighting matches the true posterior to the Monte-Carlo floor on every metric, whereas trajectory guidance incurs $200$–$800\times$ larger error and collapses posterior modes, regardless of guidance strength. Guided by the analysis we propose a cheap, principled velocity-correction solver that is competitive across two in-domain priors (AFHQ, CelebA) and two out-of-distribution settings while, unlike point-estimate source-space optimizers, producing diverse posterior samples with uncertainty that correlates with reconstruction error.

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12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Identifying the risk profile of anemia subtypes and hemodynamic obstetric complications in relation to peripartum cardiomyopathy

Authors:
Sompel↗Shalowitz↗Davis↗Kudron↗Son↗S. L↗Kao↗D. P↗

Background: Peripartum cardiomyopathy (PPCM) is a leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide, with worse outcomes associated with African Ancestry and delayed presentation. However, the mechanisms underlying PPCM are incompletely understood. Objective: Use a large, nationwide cohort to explore associations between PPCM and underexplored perinatal risk factors and complications of childbirth. Methods: Public hospital discharge data were obtained from eleven U.S. states between 2003-2019. Delivery hospitalizations, patient characteristics and obstetric complications were identified using ICD-9 and -10 CM codes. Only cases with unique patient identifiers enabling readmission analysis were included. The primary outcome was incident PPCM coded between 30 days antepartum and 150 days postpartum. Results: Of 7,424,916 delivering patients, 5,488 patients were diagnosed with PPCM. Patients with PPCM had higher rates of anemia, anemia of chronic disease (ACD), iron deficiency anemia (IDA), sickle cell disease (SCD), sickle cell trait (SCT), red blood cell (RBC) transfusion, and postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) (p

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Grid-state deformation in a no-jump non-Hermitian bosonic dimer

Authors:
B. M. Rodriguez-Lara↗H. Ghaemi-Dizicheh↗S. Dehdashti↗A. Hanke↗A. Touhami↗J. N\"otzel↗

arXiv:2606.17036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the no-jump evolution of ideal grid states in a lossy bosonic dimer with differential decay. The effective non-Hermitian quadratic dynamics induces a complex symplectic flow in phase space that deforms both the primitive lattice vectors and the origin seed. The average decay rate controls common attenuation, while coherent hopping and differential decay control the reduced dimer deformation. The reduced sector contains elliptic, parabolic, and hyperbolic regimes with imaginary spectra, an exceptional point, and real spectra, producing oscillatory, linear, and exponential lattice deformations. Although projected lattice areas can change, the deformation comes from a determinant-one complex symplectic flow on the full four-dimensional phase space. For a Gaussian regularization of the origin seed, we derive the associated complex width matrix and identify the positivity conditions that preserve Gaussian form. For an initial two-mode qunaught product state, the lossless limit recovers the standard beam-splitter generation of a square GKP$+$ Bell pair, while the no-jump dynamics produces its non-Hermitian deformation with a postselection cost set by the no-jump probability.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

BiPACE: Bisimulation-Guided Policy Optimization with Action Counterfactual Estimation for LLM Agents

Authors:
Hanyang Wang↗Weijieying Ren↗Yuxiang Zhang↗Ding Cao↗Zhizhao Zeng↗Ke Zeng↗Tianxiang Zhao↗

Stepwise group-based RL is an attractive way to train long-horizon LLM agents without a learned critic: it reuses multiple sampled rollouts to estimate local advantages. Its weakness is less visible but more fundamental: every group-relative estimator assumes that the steps it compares are equivalent for credit assignment. We show that current agentic variants violate this assumption through a state-action credit mismatch. The observation-hash partition is overly fine on the state side, creating singleton groups with zero step-level signal, while a single within-group mean is too coarse on the action side, mixing state-value estimation with action-specific credit. We introduce BiPACE (Bisimulation-Guided Policy Optimization with Action Counterfactual Estimation), a drop-in advantage estimator that fixes both sides without adding a critic, auxiliary loss, or extra rollouts. BiGPO clusters steps by cosine distance in the actor's own hidden-state geometry, an empirical policy-induced proxy for bisimulation that substantially lowers the singleton rate left by observation hashing. PACE then recenters returns within each behavioral cluster using action-conditioned peer baselines; its Q-style instance estimates a local Q(s,a)-V(s) nonparametrically. On ALFWorld/Qwen2.5-7B, BiPACE_Q raises overall validation success from GiGPO's 90.8 to $97.1\pm0.9$ over three seeds, and crosses the 95% threshold on every seed, which GiGPO never does within the same budget. On Qwen2.5-1.5B it reaches $93.5\pm1.2$ versus GiGPO's 86.7, and on WebShop and TextCraft it improves over GRPO and GiGPO at both model scales. The measured BiPACE-specific overhead is 11.3% of a single training-step wall time. Yet it changes the estimator's comparison unit from surface identity to approximate behavioral equivalence plus action-side counterfactuals. The code is available at https://github.com/TianxiangZhao/BiPACE.

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

Towards Truly Multilingual ASR: Generalizing Code-Switching ASR to Unseen Language Pairs

Authors:
Gio Paik↗Hyunseo Shin↗Soungmin Lee↗

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has become a key technology for human–AI interaction. However, code-switching ASR (CS-ASR) remains particularly challenging due to the severe scarcity of multilingual CS speech resources across diverse language pairs. Existing approaches primarily improve CS-ASR performance through synthetic CS speech generation or pair-specific fine-tuning on limited bilingual datasets. Nevertheless, these approaches face an inherent scalability limitation, as support for CS must be developed separately for language pairs whose number grows combinatorially with the number of supported languages. In this work, we investigate whether CS capabilities learned from a limited set of seen language pairs can generalize to unseen language pairs through model merging and domain generalization methods. Our experiments show that merged bilingual CS-ASR models modestly generalize to unseen language pairs, suggesting limited transfer of bilingual CS capabilities across language pairs.

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

LegalHalluLens: Typed Hallucination Auditing and Calibrated Multi-Agent Debate for Trustworthy Legal AI

Authors:
Lalit Yadav↗Akshaj Gurugubelli↗

AI systems deployed in legal workflows hallucinate at rates that aggregate metrics report at ~52%, but this average conceals where errors concentrate and in which direction they run, leaving compliance officers without an actionable signal for trustworthy deployment. We present LegalHalluLens, an auditing framework with three components: typed hallucination profiles across four legally-motivated claim categories (numeric, temporal, obligation/entitlement, factual) over CUAD (Hendrycks et al., 2021); a Risk Direction Index (RDI) that reduces omission-versus-invention bias to a single deployment-comparable scalar; and a typed debate pipeline calibrated to both magnitudes and directions. Across 510 contracts and 249,252 clause-level instances we measure a within-model gap of approximately 38-40 pp between obligation/numeric and temporal claims that aggregate reporting hides, and show that two systems with matched 52% rates can carry opposite RDIs. The debate pipeline reduces fabricated detections by 45% with per-category gains tracking the diagnosis, matching commercial APIs with a substantially smaller backbone (4B active parameters). Typed profiles and RDI surface failure modes that aggregate metrics hide; we further show these diagnostics serve as calibration inputs for multi-agent debate pipelines, where Skeptic challenges and asymmetric gates targeted at measured failure modes outperform generically-tuned debate. The framework supports direction-aware procurement, accountability, and agent design for legal AI deployed in the wild.

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

Few-shot Class-variable Incremental Audio Classification via Prototype Adaptation and Pseudo Class-variable Training

Authors:
Yanxiong Li↗Guoqing Chen↗Qianqian Li↗Sen Huang↗

arXiv:2606.08898v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the task of few-shot class-incremental audio classification, the number of classes is assumed to always increase without considering the possibility of decrease. However, the number of classes generally increases or decreases in practice. In this paper, we investigate a problem of Few-shot Class-variable Incremental Audio Classification (FCIAC), in which the number of classes increases or decreases. We propose a FCIAC method using prototype adaptation and pseudo class-variable training. The model in our method consists of an encoder and a classifier. The classifier is initialized by a class-variable prototype adaptation network, whose structure dynamically changes with the change of classes. In addition, we design a pseudo class-variable training strategy to enhance the model's adaptability to changing classes. Experiments on three public datasets show that our method exceeds previous methods in average accuracy. The code is at: https://github.com/cgq2971-afk/FCIAC.

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

Treatment Response Optimized Clinical Decision Support AI System via Digital Twin Simulation

Authors:
Xinyu Qin↗Anil K. Sood↗Ruiheng Yu↗Sara Corvigno↗Elaine Stur↗Lu Wang↗

arXiv:2606.17405v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clinical decision support AI systems (CDSASs) must adapt to evolving patient conditions in real-time while adhering to strict safety constraints. We present an online adaptive framework that integrates Treatment Effect (TE) estimation to quantify clinical benefits, a patient Digital Twin (DT) to simulate treatment trajectories, and Reinforcement Learning (RL) for sequential decision-making. The AI system is initially trained on historical medical records and operates in a continuous learning loop. To ensure safety, a rule-based module monitors vital signs and blocks contraindicated treatments. Cases with strong internal model disagreement are flagged for clinician review, simulated in our experiments via a pre-trained outcome model. We validate our framework using both a synthetic clinical simulator and a real-world ovarian cancer dataset from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). In both simulated and clinical settings, our method demonstrated superior effectiveness and stability in recommending treatments compared to standard computational baselines. Furthermore, the AI system maintains low latency and requires expert consultation for only a minority of cases in our experimental validation, demonstrating its potential as a safe, clinician-supervised tool for personalized medicine that continuously improves through practical use.

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

The Correctness Illusion in LLM-Generated GPU Kernels

Authors:
Dipankar Sarkar↗

arXiv:2606.20128v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmarks for LLM-generated GPU kernels (KernelBench, TritonBench, GEAK) score correctness through fixed-shape, small-sample allclose-style checks. The number of inputs varies between benchmarks. The shape, dtype, and tolerance are fixed for each kernel. We test that oracle empirically. We construct a controlled corpus of 24 Triton and CPU stand-in kernels (15 correct controls and 9 LLM-style buggy variants seeded with documented transcription errors) and re-evaluate it under op-schema-aware seeded fuzzing with a high-precision (fp64) CPU reference and per-(op, dtype) absolute tolerances. The seeded oracle flags 9 of 9 buggy kernels and passes 15 of 15 correct controls, at zero precision cost on controls. We extend the corpus to 26 ops (adding a flash-attention pair) and re-run the same protocol on five GPU classes (RTX 3060, A10, L40S, A100 SXM4, H100 NVL). The verdicts are identical across all five GPUs: 10 of 10 illusions caught and 16 of 16 controls clean. The corpus result is about LLM-style transcription bugs that the allclose-on-one-shape oracle certifies as correct, not about the bug rate of any specific deployed LLM. Every flagged failure replays byte-for-byte from a stored seed.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Stochastic Linear Contextual Bandits with Bounded Noise: A Set-Membership Approach

Authors:
Haonan Xu↗Yingying Li↗

arXiv:2606.20022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper considers stochastic linear contextual bandits (SLCB) with bounded reward noise. Existing works typically assume sub-Gaussian reward noise and bounded expected rewards, under which the optimal regret bound scales as $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ in terms of horizon $T$. However, in many applications, realized/observed rewards are also naturally bounded, implying bounded reward noise. Bounded noise is more informative than the sub-Gaussian condition but has not been leveraged explicitly in the SLCB literature. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm SME-OFU by utilizing an uncertainty quantification method called set-membership estimation (SME) and applying the principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty (OFU). Our algorithm enjoys an improved regret bound $O(\log T)$. Notice that this does not contradict the existing optimal bound $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ for sub-Gaussian noise because bounded noise is a stronger condition. Finally, simulations show empirical improvements of SME-OFU over a benchmark algorithm designed for sub-Gaussian noise when the reward noise is bounded.

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

The Wrong Kind of Right: Quantifying and Localizing Misfired Alignment in LLMs

Authors:
Naihao Deng↗Yiming Feng↗Chimaobi Okite↗Kaijian Zou↗Lu Wang↗Rada Mihalcea↗Yulong Chen↗

Warning: This paper studies stereotypes and biases, and contains potentially disturbing examples, used for illustration purposes only. Our findings should not be interpreted as an argument against alignment. Instead, this paper highlights the need for principled approaches to more advanced alignment. Alignment aims to ensure that large language models (LLMs) behave safely and reliably, including by avoiding unsafe inferences. However, we show that such safety-oriented behaviors can misfire: models may reject warranted conclusions even when they are explicitly supported by context. We call this failure mode misfired alignment, where alignment-induced changes cause LLMs to override explicit evidence. To quantify this phenomenon, specifically on stereotype-related alignment, we introduce VETO, a benchmark consisting of 2,032 BBQ-derived contrastive pairs, and define a new metric, Misfired Alignment Rate (MAR), which measures on a 0 to 100 scale how often a model fails on a stereotype-related question but succeeds on its contrastive counterpart. We benchmark 25 LLMs on VETO, and show that all LLMs, including the most recent ones, exhibit non-trivial (4.7 to 18.9%) MARs while all human participants achieve 0.0% MAR. Controlled priming experiments further show that alignment-induced cues can substantially amplify MAR across LLMs, indicating that these failures are not merely artifacts of individual examples but can be induced by safety-related framing. Mechanistic analyses on open-weight LLMs reveal late-layer suppression of evidence-supported answers, and comparisons between instruct and base LLMs suggest that this suppression emerges after instruction training. These findings show that current alignment methods can overgeneralize surface-level safety cues, to the point of overriding objective evidence, motivating more work on alignment objectives that better preserve contextual grounding.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Neural Phase Correlation

Authors:
Cole Reynolds↗

Correspondence is fundamentally relational: it seeks the unknown transformation between two observations of a common scene, not the content of either. Yet the dominant learning-based methods do not represent the transformation as a first-class object in the architecture. They encode each image independently and let a learned similarity function or a deep decoder discover the mapping implicitly. Phase correlation is the canonical exception, measuring the inter-image relationship directly in the Fourier domain, but the rigidity of its fixed basis confines it to global translation. We introduce a learned generalization of phase correlation that lifts this restriction by learning the basis on which the transformation decomposes. The same algebraic primitive extends to dense non-rigid deformations and to unitary dynamics. On the ACDC cardiac-MRI benchmark the framework matches or exceeds prior published baselines on both registration directions. On CAMUS echocardiography it matches state-of-the-art without auxiliary scoring or adaptive-smoothness mechanisms. Applied to time-evolved wavefunction pairs of the 1-D quantum harmonic oscillator, the same framework recovers the Hermite-function eigenstates and the quantized energy levels of the unknown Hamiltonian from observation pairs alone.

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

Decoupling Reconnaissance and Exploitation: Measuring the Capability Boundaries of LLM-Based Web Penetration Testing

Authors:
Liwei Yu↗Shuo Li↗Ming Zhou↗Ge Chu↗Yan Guo↗

arXiv:2606.25332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for automated penetration testing, yet existing end-to-end black-box evaluations are highly susceptible to error cascading: failures in early reconnaissance can mask an agent's actual ability to exploit vulnerabilities. To more accurately characterize these capabilities, we propose a two-stage decoupled evaluation framework that separates exploit execution from reconnaissance. Using ground-truth injection and knowledge-driven ablation across 70 high-fidelity web vulnerability testbeds, our framework isolates exploitation performance from reconnaissance noise. We empirically evaluate five open-source penetration-testing agents, covering multiagent, monolithic, and graph-driven architectures, on a strictly aligned subset of 50 representative vulnerabilities. The results reveal a substantial capability gap. With accurate vulnerability context, agents achieve a functional success rate of up to 90.0%, whereas autonomous reconnaissance, measured by targeted vulnerability recall, plateaus at approximately 50.0%, primarily due to failures in parsing unstructured telemetry. Cross-architectural analysis further reveals distinct capability niches: multi-agent isolation is more effective for long-sequence interactions such as de-serialization, while monolithic and graph-driven designs perform better on short-chain injections and cross-session access-control vulnerabilities, respectively. This decoupled evaluation work provides a fine-grained benchmarking protocol and an empirical basis for designing next-generation automated offensive security agents.

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

Large Language Models as Optimizers: A Survey of Direct vs. Tool-Augmented Approaches and Their Performance Frontiers

Authors:
Roko Peran↗Luka Hobor↗Mihael Kovac↗Mario Brcic↗

arXiv:2606.15577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in complex mathematical optimization, even if the pragmatic user who triggers them is unaware of it. After all, many real-world problems reduce to the search for better or the best solutions. The field of LLM-as-optimizer has three paradigms: direct optimization, tool-augmented optimization, and tool-creating optimization. Direct optimization uses iterative prompting and heuristic generation to navigate solution spaces. Tool-augmented optimization translates natural language problems into formal specifications and orchestrates external solvers. Tool-creating optimization goes further, using LLMs to discover reusable algorithms or heuristics that can be deployed at zero marginal LLM cost. We describe current performance frontiers based on the benchmarks from the literature. We identify the critical reasoning gap in current architectures and argue for trade-offs between the future potential of direct optimization and the auditability of tool-augmented optimization. Even future, more powerful models might opt for tool-making to improve operational efficiency for repetitive families of problems.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

AI Tokenomics: The Economics of Tokens, Computation, and Pricing in Foundation Models

Authors:
Quanyan Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.24616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tokens have become the practical accounting unit for modern foundation model services, linking information processing, computation, memory use, energy expenditure, pricing, and economic value. This paper develops a framework for AI tokenomics: the study of how tokens are generated, consumed, priced, allocated, and optimized across AI systems. We connect token-level technical costs to workflow-level production functions, enterprise resource allocation, measurement and instrumentation methods, and emerging market-design questions. The framework shows that token expenditure and economic value are distinct: value depends on marginal productivity, workflow position, hidden reasoning activity, risk, and downstream propagation effects. The paper concludes by identifying open research directions in hidden-token measurement, empirical calibration, token productivity, dynamic allocation, and token-based markets.

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