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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Folded Transport MCMC: Eliminating Label Switching by Sampling on a Fundamental Domain

Authors:
Jun Hu↗

arXiv:2606.04307v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In Bayesian mixture models and other exchangeable-component models, the posterior is invariant under permutation of component labels, creating m! equivalent modes-the label-switching problem. Standard MCMC methods either mix poorly across these modes or rely on post-hoc relabelling that cannot guarantee the sampler has converged. We propose Folded Transport MCMC (FolT-MCMC), which eliminates label switching before sampling by restricting the Markov chain to a fundamental domain-a sorted or reflected subspace containing exactly one representative from each symmetric mode. The proposal is a learned normalising flow whose density is symmetrised over the group orbits, ensuring correct targeting on the reduced space. We show that this construction preserves a computable convergence diagnostic based on the oscillation of the log-density ratio, and that the diagnostic becomes sharper on the fundamental domain whenever the original-space flow under-covers one or more symmetric modes. Experiments on Gaussian mixtures (d=2-20), label-switching targets (up to 24 equivalent modes), a standard Bayesian three-component mixture posterior, and real accelerometer data from a supertall building show improvement ratios of 2x to 145x, with the folded diagnostic stable across dimensions while the unfolded diagnostic collapses.

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02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Structural basis for chaperone-guided assembly of RNA-induced silencing complex

Authors:
Young-Yoon Lee↗

The RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC), comprising an Argonaute (AGO) protein and a small RNA, is the central effector in RNA silencing. Small RNAs are loaded onto AGO as bulky duplexes in an HSP70- and HSP90-dependent process1–3, but the molecular mechanism remains poorly understood. Here we identify the human AGO–HSP90–p23 complex, which captures AGO in an RNA-free state, termed the AGO maturation complex (AMC). The purified AMC enables RNA loading and AGO folding, faithfully recapitulating de novo RISC assembly. Using cryogenic electron microscopy, we determined the structure of AMC bound to a microRNA duplex. In contrast to its conformation in the RISC, AGO adopts a highly open conformation in the AMC: the N domain and the RNA-binding module (PAZ–MID–PIWI) are fully detached and anchored to opposite sides of the HSP90 dimer, connected solely by the unfolded L1 linker. This arrangement exposes a positively charged cleft that accommodates an RNA duplex. AGO folding is facilitated by a small RNA duplex containing a 5′-terminal phosphate—but not by single-stranded RNAs—revealing a role for the RNA duplex as a chaperone-like cofactor that directs AGO domain assembly. These findings elucidate the RISC assembly mechanism and establish the AMC as a molecular tool for probing optimal RNA features and chemical modifications for the rational design of small interfering RNA therapeutics. Our study also sheds light on how chaperones, together with ligands, can guide the folding of client proteins. Structures of the AGO maturation complex reveal how chaperones and an RNA duplex drive assembly of the RNA-induced silencing complex.

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

Agentic Retrieval and Reinforcement Learned Equation Chains: A Controlled Generation Framework for Complex and Novel Physics Word Problems

Authors:
Tirthankar Mittra↗

Generating high-quality Physics Word Problems (PWPs) that are novel, complex, and solvable remains a challenging and underexplored problem in educational content generation. Existing approaches, many adapted from Math Word Problem (MWP) generation, often produce ambiguous, unsolvable, or structurally simple questions with limited linguistic diversity. We introduce ARVRE (Agentic Retrieval Value Reinforced Equation-chain), a two-stage framework for generating diverse and mathematically valid PWPs. In the first stage, a form of offline temporal-difference learning is used to construct valid chains of physics equations, while an agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework dynamically selects topic-specific concepts and vocabulary. This design enables explicit control over problem structure and difficulty. In the second stage, a Large Language Model (LLM) converts the equation chain and retrieved concepts into a natural-language physics question. By grounding generation in valid equation chains, our method preserves mathematical correctness while promoting linguistic diversity and contextual richness. Human and automated evaluations demonstrate that ARVRE generates PWPs that are more complex, novel, and solvable than those produced by existing approaches. These results highlight the potential of combining reinforcement learning, retrieval, and LLMs for reliable generation of educational physics content.

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

Debiasing Without Protected Attributes: Latent Concept Erasure from Textual Profiles

Authors:
Shun Shao↗Zheng Zhao↗Anna Korhonen↗Yftah Ziser↗Shay B. Cohen↗

Most fairness research in NLP assumes direct access to protected attributes such as gender, race, or nationality. In practice, however, such information is often unavailable due to privacy constraints, missing metadata, or legal restrictions, even though models may infer it from indirect textual cues. This raises a key question: can debiasing succeed without direct access to sensitive attributes? We propose H-SAL, which performs post-hoc concept and attribute erasure using self-description text as an implicit debiasing signal. To support this setting, we introduce a multi-domain Stack Exchange-based fairness benchmark for helpfulness prediction that includes both explicit and implicit signals, enabling comparison between standard debiasing with protected labels and debiasing without access to sensitive information. Across encoder and decoder-only language models, we find that implicit self-description often matches or outperforms explicit-label-based debiasing. Our results broaden representation-level fairness research and provide a new benchmark for studying debiasing under realistic data constraints.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Who Pays the Price? Stakeholder-Centric Prompt Injection Benchmarking for Real-world Web Agents

Authors:
Zihao Wang↗Yiming Li↗Yutong Wu↗Zheyu Liu↗Kangjie Chen↗Fok Kar Wai↗Pin-Yu Chen↗Vrizlynn L. L. Thing↗Bo Li↗Dacheng Tao↗Tianwei Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.13385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Web agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world environments, where they operate over untrusted web content and execute actions with direct consequences. This makes them vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks, in which seemingly benign content embeds adversarial instructions that manipulate agent behaviour. Existing security benchmarks adopt an attack-centric perspective, focusing on the technical feasibility of injections while overlooking the nuanced distribution of resulting harms. In practice, however, prompt-injection risk is victim-dependent: a single exploit can produce asymmetric consequences for different stakeholders, and the same attack pattern may exhibit substantially different effectiveness depending on whom it targets. To capture these properties, we introduce \sysname, a stakeholder-centric benchmark to systematically categorize and attribute harm in real-world web agent systems. It distinguishes between affected entities (e.g., user, seller, platform), decomposes the attacks into concrete objectives, and evaluates each case with complementary outcome- and process-level metrics. Our results reveal substantial and heterogeneous vulnerabilities: not a single attack objective is reliably resisted by current agents, and failures distribute across qualitatively distinct modes ranging from stealthy parasitism (attack succeeds without disrupting the user's delegated task) to misaligned disruption (task disrupted without attack success) and compounded failure (both adversarial objective and task integrity simultaneously violated). These patterns are missed by conventional evaluation, highlighting the need for stakeholder-aware assessment of LLM-based agents in real-world deployments. Benchmark is available at https://github.com/StakeBench/SBC.

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

RankVR: Low-Rank Structure Perception and Value Recalibration for Robust Composed Image Retrieval

Authors:
Jiale Huang↗Zixu Li↗Zhiheng Fu↗Zhiwei Chen↗Qinlei Huang↗Yupeng Hu↗

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) constitutes a pivotal paradigm requiring models to perform joint reasoning on reference images and modification texts. However, the prevalence of Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) in large-scale datasets severely constrains model performance. Existing denoising methods either target binary mismatches or rely on scalar-based point-wise estimation, neglecting rich global structural correlations among sample populations and dynamic value variations during training, thereby yielding suboptimal results. This paper identifies two critical unresolved challenges: Global Structural Inconsistency of Semantic Correlations and Hard Sample Discrimination Uncertainty. To address these, we propose RankVR, a framework designed to construct a robust CIR model via global structure consistency and dynamic value perception. Specifically, we introduce the Global Structure Consistency Perception (GSCP) module, which utilizes the Effective Rank of the Correlation Matrix to decouple clean samples from structural noise. By measuring rank difference, GSCP identifies samples disrupting macroscopic semantic symmetry. Furthermore, we develop the Adaptive Semantic Value Calibration (ASVC) module to distinguish high-value hard clean samples. By integrating training potential and reliability, it dynamically quantifies the semantic value of each triplet, ensuring effective utilization of hard samples while suppressing noise characterized by logical conflicts. Extensive experiments on the FashionIQ and CIRR benchmark datasets demonstrate that RankVR significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, validating its superior robustness in noisy environments.

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

OmniTraffic: A Controllable Generation Pipeline and Benchmark for Spatio-Temporal Traffic Reasoning

Authors:
Maonan Wang↗Zhengyan Huang↗Kemou Jiang↗Yuhang Fu↗Jiayue Zhu↗Yuxin Cai↗Xingchen Zou↗Qiaosheng Zhang↗Yi Yu↗Ding Wang↗Xi Chen↗Ben M. Chen↗…

Traffic scene understanding requires models to reason beyond object recognition, including lane topology, multi-view geometry, temporal evolution, and signal-phase semantics. However, existing traffic-oriented multimodal benchmarks largely emphasize passive visual recognition or isolated video understanding, offering limited support for evaluating structure-aware traffic reasoning under controlled conditions. We introduce OmniTraffic, a controllable generation pipeline and benchmark for spatio-temporal traffic reasoning. Built around 12 real-world intersections reconstructed into editable 3D traffic environments and complemented by surveillance footage from two countries, OmniTraffic supports both controlled and natural-condition evaluation. It defines a three-level task hierarchy spanning scene perception, multi-view and temporal reasoning, and decision support. Using structured traffic metadata, OmniTraffic generates synchronized multi-view VQA samples covering vehicle states, lane functions, view–BEV correspondence, temporal dynamics, and signal-phase analysis, resulting in 8M VQA samples and a 3K human-verified test set. Evaluation of eleven frontier MLLMs reveals a large human–model gap, with the most pronounced failures in topology-grounded and spatio-temporal reasoning tasks. Fine-tuning a lightweight MLLM on simulated OmniTraffic data further improves performance on real-world traffic scenes, demonstrating the value of simulation-generated supervision for traffic-specific multimodal reasoning. Beyond a fixed dataset, OmniTraffic provides an extensible pipeline with configurable intersections, camera views, traffic demands, signal phases, visual conditions, and rare events.

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

Measuring Semantic Progress in Multi-turn Dialogue via Information Gain

Authors:
Paul He↗Shiva Kasiviswanathan↗Dominik Janzing↗

Evaluating multi-turn dialogue is challenging because quality emerges across turns rather than within individual responses. We focus on a key dimension of information-seeking dialogue: semantic progress, defined as the accumulation of new, question-relevant, and non-redundant information over the course of a conversation. We formalize semantic progress as question-conditioned uncertainty reduction and introduce an information-theoretic metric that approximates it in embedding space. Our main estimator uses a tractable Gaussian formulation with closed-form updates, while a complementary maximum-entropy argument shows why log-determinant structure arises more broadly when only second-order embedding information is retained. This formulation yields desirable theoretical properties, including monotonicity, additive decomposition of total information gain across turns, and diminishing returns for redundant evidence. Unlike LLM-as-a-judge approaches, our metric requires no autoregressive inference at evaluation time and is fully reproducible for a fixed embedding model. Experiments on MT-Bench, Chatbot Arena, and UltraFeedback show that the proposed metric achieves competitive agreement with human judgments despite targeting only semantic progress, with improved alignment on MT-Bench and UltraFeedback compared to several LLM-based judges. Notably, the method remains effective with lightweight embedding models under CPU-only execution, indicating that semantic progress can be captured without reliance on large model capacity.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

When Generic Prompt Improvements Hurt: Evaluation-Driven Iteration for LLM Applications

Authors:
Daniel Commey↗

Evaluating Large Language Model (LLM) applications differs from conventional software testing because outputs are probabilistic, semantically variable, and sensitive to prompt and model changes. This technical report proposes the Minimum Viable Evaluation Suite (MVES), an audit-oriented structure for application-level LLM evaluation. MVES links application categories to failure modes, metrics, required artifacts, and validation evidence across general LLM applications, retrieval-augmented systems, and agentic workflows. We pair the framework with a reproducible local evaluation harness covering structured extraction, RAG citation/content-compliance, and instruction-following checks. Using Ollama with Llama 3 8B Instruct and Qwen 2.5 7B Instruct, we evaluate five prompt conditions over expanded 30-case-per-suite ablations. The results show that, in the tested local conditions, generic prompt additions do not produce monotonic improvements: stronger output-contract prompts improve strict extraction for both models, while RAG citation/content-compliance declines under some generic-rule conditions. The largest observed decline occurs for Qwen 2.5 on RAG when generic rules are appended to the user prompt, from 26/30 to 9/30. These findings support evaluation-driven prompt iteration: prompt changes should be treated as potential regression risks and tested against task-specific suites before deployment. The accompanying repository contains the test suites, prompt variants, evaluation harness, raw result logs, and scripts needed to reproduce the reported local ablations.

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

SproutRAG: Attention-Guided Tree Search with Progressive Embeddings for Long-Document RAG

Authors:
Amirhossein Abaskohi↗Issam H. Laradji↗Peter West↗Giuseppe Carenini↗

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems must balance retrieval granularity with contextual coherence, a challenge that existing methods address through LLM-guided chunking, single-level context expansion, or hierarchical summarization. These approaches variously depend on costly LLM calls during indexing or retrieval, limit context aggregation to a single granularity level, or introduce information loss through summarization. We present SproutRAG, an attention-guided hierarchical RAG framework that addresses this trade-off by organizing sentence-level chunks into progressively larger but semantically coherent units, using learned inter-sentence attention to construct a binary chunking tree. Unlike prior approaches that rely on external LLMs, fixed context expansion, or lossy summarization, SproutRAG learns which attention heads and layers best capture semantic document structure, enabling multi-granularity retrieval without additional LLM calls or compressed summaries. At retrieval time, SproutRAG uses hierarchical beam search to retrieve candidates at multiple granularities, capturing multi-sentence relevance beyond flat retrieval. The framework is trained end-to-end with a joint objective that improves both embeddings and tree structure. Experiments across four benchmarks spanning scientific, legal, and open-domain settings demonstrate that SproutRAG improves information efficiency (IE) by 6.1% on average over the strongest baseline. Code is available on https://github.com/AmirAbaskohi/SproutRAG.

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

Beyond Models: Reflections on Engineering AI-enabled Systems in a Project-Based Course

Authors:
Amir Mashmool↗Kishan Ravindra Sawant↗Mojtaba Shahin↗Nico Hochgeschwender↗Rainer Koschke↗

arXiv:2606.16842v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Teaching Software Engineering for AI-enabled systems entails addressing the integration of AI components within full-scale software architectures under realistic constraints. While machine learning courses emphasize model development, students often lack experience in architectural design, deployment, and monitoring of AI-enabled systems. Empirical evaluations of such system-oriented AI courses remain limited. This paper reflects on the design and implementation of a project-based master's-level course titled AI Algorithms: Theory and Engineering, at the University of Bremen, in which students developed a movie recommendation system while making architectural design decisions to address challenges related to scalability, deployment, and evolving requirements. We conducted a mixed-methods study combining analyses of student submissions and questionnaire responses to investigate integration challenges, learning outcomes, and opportunities for improvement. Our results indicate persistent difficulties in early architectural decisions, heterogeneous ML integration, evolving requirements, and data management, largely due to uneven ML and software engineering expertise. From the educator's perspective, the course fostered system-level reasoning and strengthened awareness of data-centric ML practices in AI-enabled systems.

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

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

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

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

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

On the Position Bias of On-Policy Distillation

Authors:
Yan Xie↗Sijie Zhu↗Tiansheng Wen↗Bo Chen↗Yifei Wang↗

arXiv:2606.22600v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) improves the learning efficiency of standard reinforcement learning through dense, token-level supervision from teachers. In the standard KL objective of OPD, token-level losses are uniformly averaged, implying equal weights for all tokens. However, we discover that not all tokens are created equal: as student rollouts grow longer, they deviate further from the teacher's distribution, leading to degraded supervision quality at later positions. As a result, OPD using only the first 30% of tokens can perform comparably to using all tokens, whereas OPD using only the last 30% of tokens barely learns anything. In this work, we provide a principled understanding of this issue through the lens of constrained optimization. Based on these insights, we derive Importance-Weighted On-Policy Distillation (IW-OPD), in which the weight assigned to each token depends on the accumulated discrepancy between the student's and teacher's distributions, naturally upweighting earlier tokens and downweighting later ones with larger deviations. We show that IW-OPD converges significantly faster than OPD, with better learning efficiency, and achieves better final performance than standard OPD in both same-size and cross-scale settings, improving performance up to 6.9 points on AIME-2025.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Self-Attention as Transport: Limits of Symmetric Spectral Diagnostics

Authors:
Dominik Dahlem↗Diego Maniloff↗Mac Misiura↗

When a language model processes a hallucinated response, its attention routing tends to fail in one of two shapes: over-concentrating on a narrow set of positions, or spreading so diffusely that relevance is diluted, and the shape of the failure carries diagnostic signal. We study these shapes as a diagnostic characterization, computed from attention matrices under forced scoring of benchmark-labeled responses rather than during live generation. A widely used family of spectral methods analyzes the symmetric component of the degree-normalized attention operator, which governs transport capacity; we prove that every transpose-invariant spectral diagnostic of this operator is structurally orientation-blind (it cannot distinguish an operator from its transpose, and therefore cannot detect information-flow direction), with a converse to the blindness theorem bounding any Lipschitz diagnostic's transpose sensitivity by the asymmetry coefficient $G$. Pairing this with a closed-form bipartite-Cheeger landscape for canonical causal architectures, we show that uniform causal attention satisfies an $n$-independent floor $\phi \ge 1/5$, while window attention pierces the floor as $O(w/n)$; failure modes are shape-different, not just value-different. This floor is an idealized-architecture benchmark, not an empirical attractor: the fraction of real attention heads that pierce it is itself an architectural signature. The resulting two-axis diagnostic ($\phi$ for capacity, $G$ for direction) yields a falsifiable polarity prediction: bottleneck- and diffuse-dominated benchmarks should exhibit opposite polarity. Under length-controlled evaluation, transport features retain interpretable signal (0.62-0.84 LC-AUROC) across the tested decoder-only, encoder-only, and encoder-decoder models, with polarity reversing as predicted between HaluEval and MedHallu.

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15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Combating Data Laundering in LLM Training

Authors:
Muxing Li↗Zesheng Ye↗Sharon Li↗Feng Liu↗

arXiv:2604.01904v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-hoc unauthorized-training data detection for large language models (LLMs) typically assumes a query-with-originals regime: rights holders query a target LLM with raw proprietary data and assess whether the model assigns them stronger memorization-based detection signals, e.g., higher confidence or lower loss, than held-out non-training reference texts. We show that this regime becomes brittle under data laundering, where the target LLM is trained on semantics-preserving but stylistically or structurally transformed surrogates of proprietary data to obfuscate provenance. Since training-time exposure occurs in the laundered form, memorization signals may no longer appear on the originals, collapsing the candidate-reference signal separation that standard detectors rely on. We counter this threat by studying laundering-aware detection with raw proprietary data, a held-out reference corpus, and query access to the target LLM, while the laundering transformation is undisclosed. Since exact recovery of the laundered corpus is infeasible, we infer a detection-useful synthesis process via an auxiliary LLM that maps originals into training-like queries. To make this search tractable, we introduce Synthesis Data Reversion (SDR), which constrains the unbounded space of natural-language transformations through a goal-details abstraction: a high-level transformation goal, e.g., "lyrical rewriting", and fine-grained details, e.g., "with vivid imagery". SDR identifies the most likely goal and iteratively refines details so synthesized queries elicit stronger target-model detection signals. Evaluated on the MIMIR benchmark against diverse laundering practices and target LLM families (Pythia, Llama2, and Falcon), SDR consistently restores detection signals, offering a practical auditing layer against data laundering.

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

Toward Autonomous O-RAN: A Multi-Scale Agentic AI Framework for Real-Time Network Control and Management

Authors:
Hojjat Navidan↗Mohammad Cheraghinia↗Jaron Fontaine↗Mohamed Seif↗Eli De Poorter↗H. Vincent Poor↗Ingrid Moerman↗Adnan Shahid↗

arXiv:2602.14117v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN) promise flexible 6G network access through disaggregated, software-driven components and open interfaces, but this programmability also increases operational complexity. Multiple control loops coexist across the service management layer and RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), while independently developed control applications can interact in unintended ways. In parallel, recent advances in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) are enabling a shift from isolated AI models toward agentic AI systems that can interpret goals, coordinate multiple models and control functions, and adapt their behavior over time. This article proposes a multi-scale agentic AI framework for O-RAN that organizes RAN intelligence as a coordinated hierarchy across the Non-Real-Time (Non-RT), Near-Real-Time (Near-RT), and Real-Time (RT) control loops: (i) A Large Language Model (LLM) agent in the Non-RT RIC translates operator intent into policies and governs model lifecycles. (ii) Small Language Model (SLM) agents in the Near-RT RIC execute low-latency optimization and can activate, tune, or disable existing control applications; and (iii) Wireless Physical-layer Foundation Model (WPFM) agents near the distributed unit provide fast inference close to the air interface. We describe how these agents cooperate through standardized O-RAN interfaces and telemetry. Using a proof-of-concept implementation built on open-source models, software, and datasets, we demonstrate the proposed agentic approach in two representative scenarios: robust operation under non-stationary conditions and intent-driven slice resource control.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Natively Unlearnable Large Language Models

Authors:
Gaurav R. Ghosal↗Pratyush Maini↗Aditi Raghunathan↗

Unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific training data sources, but this has proved challenging because the contributions of different sources are entangled within the model. Isolating source contributions to disjoint parameters makes removal easier, though it obstructs joint learning across sources. We propose NULLs (Natively Unlearnable LLMs), a model class that satisfies the two opposing goals of isolating source-specific contributions and learning jointly across sources, by training a set of shared backbone neurons alongside a pool of sparsely activated sinks. During training, information specific to a source naturally concentrates in its sinks while information shared across sources accumulates in the backbone. A source is then unlearned at deployment by disabling its corresponding sinks, with no gradient updates and no access to the retained data. We show that NULLs scales to Wikipedia's ~6M articles, isolating each as an independent source. Unlearning a single article removes knowledge specific to it while preserving facts shared with semantically related articles, closely matching retraining from scratch. We note that unlearning with NULLs is also robust: in a case study of unlearning the Harry Potter books, NULLs resists both adversarial extraction and relearning that reverses post-hoc unlearning. Finally, NULLs preserves general language capabilities, matching a standard transformer on downstream benchmarks. Together, these results suggest that source-level unlearning need not be an afterthought. It can be built natively into LLM training while retaining the benefits of shared representation learning.

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

Current World Models Lack a Persistent State Core

Authors:
Jinpeng Lu↗Dexu Zhu↗Haoyuan Shi↗Linghan Cai↗Guo Tang↗Yinda Chen↗Jie Cao↗Duyu Tang↗Yi Zhang↗Yong Dai↗Xiaozhu Ju↗

World models are increasingly regarded as a decisive step toward artificial general intelligence, yet modeling the physical world demands more than rendering convincing frames on demand: it requires an internal world state that keeps evolving over time, decoupled from observation, so that objects endure and events run to their conclusions whether or not a camera is watching, much as the moon holds to its orbit when no one is looking. This requirement is a blind spot of existing benchmarks, which reward surface properties such as fidelity, motion, and camera controllability while never asking whether a generated world keeps evolving once it is unobserved. We introduce WRBench, the first systematic diagnostic benchmark that treats camera motion as an intervention on observability and resolves evaluation into a human-calibrated chain that asks whether the camera executes the requested interaction, whether the scene stays continuous and identifiable while in view, and whether a returning target remains consistent with the event that was set in motion. Across 9{,}600 videos from 23 models spanning four control paradigms, one finding proves stubborn: current systems maintain the observed world as a tracking shot, resuming a returning target in the state at which it was abandoned rather than advancing the event while it went unseen. Because this failure recurs across control paradigms, model families, and increments of scale, robust world-state evolution does not follow from cleaner imagery, tighter control, richer geometric priors, or sheer parameter count We therefore argue that the stability of the physical state kernel and the consistency of worldlines under viewpoint intervention should become first-class objectives of world-model design, so that a world model captures how the world will unfold rather than how the next frame appears.

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19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

OmniPlan: An Adaptive Framework for Timely and Near-Optimal Network Planning Optimization

Authors:
Longlong Zhu↗Jiashuo Yu↗Zedi Chen↗Yuhan Wu↗Zhifan Jiang↗Yuchen Xian↗Yimeng Liu↗Jiajie Su↗Shaopeng Zhou↗Xingyuan Li↗Hongyan Liu↗Xuan Liu↗…

arXiv:2606.18105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Network planning optimization is a fundamental problem across diverse domains, including transportation systems, communication networks, and power grids. It requires simultaneous optimization of multiple competing objectives under complex constraints. Existing network planning optimization frameworks rely on mixed integer programming (MIP) solvers, heuristics, and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) models to compute planning decisions. However, they lack effective adaptability to diverse and dynamic user intents, thus leading to the trade-off between execution time and optimality. In this paper, we propose OmniPlan, an adaptive framework that achieves both timeliness and near-optimality in network planning optimization. To achieve the adaptability lacking in existing solutions, OmniPlan employs a large language model (LLM)-based interpreter to convert heterogeneous natural-language intents into a unified and quantifiable user-preference vector. Then it employs a mixture-of-experts architecture that integrates MIP solvers, heuristics, and DRL models as specialized experts, where OmniPlan adapts to diverse intents by dynamically selecting timely and near-optimal experts. Finally, it incorporates a DRL-based expert configuration module that fine-tunes optimization objective weights to align planning decisions with user-specific preferences. We evaluate OmniPlan with a representative real-world workload, i.e., distributed machine learning (ML), where we leverage OmniPlan to offload a wide spectrum of ML inference tasks, e.g., decision trees, SVM, naive Bayes, XGBoost, and random forests, onto a network of hardware devices. Our experiments on a real-world testbed indicate that OmniPlan achieves near-optimal and low-execution-time offloading for real-world ML inference tasks, reducing latency by up to 97.8\% and network device resource consumption by up to 11.5\%.

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20.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

Authors:
Erkison Ewomazino Odih↗

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

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

ConsistencyPlanner: Real-time Planning with Fast-Sampling Consistency Models

Authors:
Qichao Zhang↗Xing Fang↗Jiaqi Fang↗Zhenwen Cai↗Jie Ling↗Qiankun Yu↗Dongbin Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.11569v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Closed-loop planning in complex, real-world driving scenarios presents a critical challenge for autonomous driving systems. While traditional rule-based methods are interpretable, their predefined heuristics lack the adaptability for dynamic traffic environments. Learning-based approaches have shown considerable promise. Conversely, learning-based approaches, despite their promise, struggle to balance the modeling diverse and multimodal driving behaviors and real-time planning, often leading to indecisive or unsafe actions. To address this limitation, we propose Consistency Planner, a real-time planning framework with fast-sampling consistency models. Our approach is built upon two key technical contributions. Efficient Multimodal Sampling: We employ fast-sampling consistency models to generate a diverse set of plausible future trajectories. This enables efficient, real-time exploration of multimodal actions, overcoming the computational bottlenecks of previous iterative generative methods. Heterogeneous Feature Fusion: We introduce an attention-enhanced decoder that dynamically integrates heterogeneous input features (including scene feature and action token) into a cohesive representation for robust planning. Extensive evaluation in the Waymax simulator demonstrates superior performance in safety metrics compared to existing methods, with particularly strong results in challenging dynamic scenarios.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

From Open Waters to Enclosed Cabins: ProteusVPR for Cross-Scene Visual Place Recognition in Maritime Perception and Cabin Inspection

Authors:
Zexi Chena↗Zitai Huang↗Qiwen Gu↗Zhiqi Li↗Shengli Dong↗Chenlei Wang↗Junqiao Zhao↗Hongdong Wang↗Bing Han↗

Autonomous robotic inspection in maritime environments presents unique challenges for Visual Place Recognition (VPR) due to cross-scene perceptual shifts. Robots navigating ship-borne environments must transition between visually distinct domains: open decks with sparse textures and severe illumination changes, and enclosed cabins with repetitive structures and high visual ambiguity. Existing VPR methods, designed primarily for urban or indoor scenes, fail to generalize reliably across these starkly different scenarios. To address this, we propose ProteusVPR, a two-stage retrieval-refinement framework. The first stage employs any standard VPR model for initial image retrieval. The second stage introduces a geometric-visual estimation network that fuses the retrieved image with two temporally preceding frames, incorporating geometric descriptors, a local affine coordinate system, and camera azimuth encoding to achieve precise localization. To support this task, we introduce the XHZ dataset, an 8K-panoramic ship-borne dataset collected from an operational vessel, featuring multi-floor cabin structures, deck transition zones, and strict query-database separation for rigorous evaluation. Extensive experiments on the XHZ dataset demonstrate that ProteusVPR consistently improves the localization accuracy across multiple VPR backbones, reducing mean localization error by over 60\% on average and that ProteusVPR offers an effective and robust solution for precise visual localization in challenging, cross-scene maritime environments.

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23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

On Injectivity of Phase Retrieval

Authors:
Zhangsong Li↗

arXiv:2606.17922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this short note, we prove that if $A \in \mathbb C^{N \times M}$ with $N=4M-5$ has i.i.d.\ standard complex Gaussian entries, then the probability that the phase retrieval map generated by $A$ is not injective is positive. This proves Part (1) of a conjecture of Cynthia Vinzant, which was later restated by Afonso S. Bandeira in [BDL+26]. The main result of this paper was obtained using generative AI, in particular the Rethlas system.

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24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Children's DNA Methylation and Family Dynamics in a Congo Basin Subsistence Community: Links with Parental Conflict and Fathers' Caregiving

Authors:
Chan↗M. H.-M↗Merrill↗S. S↗Zhuang↗B. C↗Lin↗D. T. S↗Macisaac↗J. L↗Miegakanda↗Lew-Levy↗…

Family environments may contribute to children's long-term health through biological processes, including epigenetic regulation such as DNA methylation (DNAm). However, most studies in this area focus on Euro-American populations while also rarely including fathering data. The current study investigated children's blood DNAm associations with positive (father caregiving) and negative (parental conflict) family dynamics in a smaller-scale subsistence society living in the Congo Basin rainforest. We measured DNAm from dried blood spots of 54 children (mean age=8.48 years) and conducted three epigenome-wide association studies aimed at discovering differential co-methylated regions (CMRs) associated with family dynamics. Via path models, we investigated the health implications and shared contribution of family factors of the identified CMRs. Differential DNAm associated with family dynamics was localized to genes related to stress, immunology, development, and aging, thus possibly linking to children's physical health and were simultaneously connected to other family factors such as number of siblings. Our findings suggested similarities in biological embedding of family factors across socio-ecologically diverse contexts.

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25.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-23

CARGO: A cytometry analysis framework via Regularized graph optimal-transport

Authors:
Abida Sanjana Shemonti↗

by Abida Sanjana Shemonti, Grzegorz B. Gmyrek, Katrien L. A. Quintelier, Sofie Van Gassen, Yvan Saeys, Marcella Willemsen, Joachim G. J. V. Aerts, Eva V. E. Madsen, J. Paul Robinson, Alex Pothen, Bartek Rajwa Conventional data visualization techniques in single-cell analysis (such as two-dimensional dot plots, SPADE, PCA, t-SNE, or UMAP) often fall short in enabling an intuitive understanding of high-parameter flow cytometry data. These methods tend to oversimplify complex biological relationships, lack biologically meaningful interpretations, and offer no principled framework for downstream quantitative analysis. To address these limitations, we present a graph-based (network-based) visualization framework grounded in optimal transport theory. In this framework, cell populations are defined by their marker-expression profiles, and inter-population similarity is quantified using an efficiently computable optimal transport formulation known as the Sinkhorn distance. Our approach produces biologically consistent two-dimensional graph layouts using a phenotype-aware Hamming distance. Structural differences between sample graphs are characterized through a customized graph-edit distance that captures changes in population size, marker expression, and relationships between populations. We demonstrate our methods on two flow cytometry datasets: one from a clinical trial of dendritic cell-based immunotherapy in malignant peritoneal mesothelioma, involving 14 patients sampled at three time points with 14-color panels, and another from FlowCAP-II, which involved 43 acute myeloid leukemia patient samples analyzed with 7-color panels. Our framework produces robust, quantitative visual summaries of cell populations and supports statistical analysis based on graph edit distances, thereby offering new insights into disease progression and treatment response. Ultimately, our method bridges the gap between flow cytometry data visualization and biological interpretation.

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