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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Promise and challenges of heart chamber segmentation from non-contrast CT scans using contrastive unpaired image translation: a feasibility study

arXiv:2606.23879v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Purpose: To evaluate the feasibility and challenges of heart chamber segmentation from non-contrast CT scans using contrastive unpaired image translation and deep learning-based segmentation. Approach: We developed ChameleonNet, a framework utilizing the Contrastive Unpaired Translation (CUT) network with decoupled contrastive learning (DCL) loss to synthesize non-contrast CT from contrast CT scans. Using annotations of four heart chambers (left atrium (LA), left ventricle (LV), right atrium (RA), and right ventricle (RV)) from contrast scans, we trained a Hausdorff distance loss-enhanced nnU-Net on synthesized non-contrast images. The translation model was trained with 35,538 contrast-enhanced and 37,197 non-contrast CT slices. The segmentation model was trained with 292 synthesized non-contrast scans. Performance was evaluated using Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and 95th Hausdorff distance (HD95) on 36 synthesized non-contrast scans, and volume agreement on 36 real non-contrast CT scans was assessed using Pearson correlation, mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and mean percentage error (MPE). Results: The segmentation model achieved DSC of 0.94 (0.01), 0.91 (0.04), 0.92 (0.03), 0.93 (0.02), and HD95 of 3.63 (1.49), 5.74 (4.08), 5.18 (1.77), 5.51 (3.21) mm on synthesized non-contrast images for LA, LV, RA, and RV, respectively. On real non-contrast CT scans, Pearson correlations were 0.93, 0.82, 0.87, and 0.89 (all p

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Complexity Measure for Active Learning in Multi-group Mean Estimation

arXiv:2606.14690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a max-risk objective for active learning in a multi-group mean estimation $d$-armed bandits: a learner adaptively allocates a budget of $T$ samples across $d$ groups to minimize the worst-case uncertainty index $\max_{k\in[d]}\sigma_k^2/n_k$, where $\sigma_k$ is the standard deviation of the distribution of arm $d$, and $n_k$ is the number of times arm $d$ is sampled. We develop a local minimax framework and prove the first general lower bound for this objective, valid for any finite-variance hypothesis class. The bound separates difficulty into three orthogonal factors: a budget term, a heteroscedasticity index measuring how unevenly the uncertainty is spread across arms, and a model-dependent complexity measure, the Variance Local Curvature ($\mathrm{VLC}$), which captures how much information a local change of variance creates inside the hypothesis class. For smooth classes, the $\mathrm{VLC}$ is a reparametrization of a variance–Fisher information, with closed-form values for common families. Benchmarking against the strongest available upper bound shows near-optimality up to logarithmic factors in broad regimes, and pinpoints a systematic gap in highly heterogeneous instances. Our proof introduces two key ingredients: a loss-induced $\ell_1$ geometry on the decision space, and a representation-based instance generator that reduces hard-instance construction to an explicit random matrix calculation.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Ultrastrongly coupled open systems and fine grained time

arXiv:2606.16634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the dynamics of a d-level quantum system coupled to a bosonic reservoir when the coupling constant is large. It is known that in the limit of infinite coupling strength, the system undergoes an instantaneous nonselective measurement, resulting in the immediate decoherence in the measurement basis, followed by a unitary Zeno dynamics. Here we resolve this dynamical process by introducing a fine grained scaling regime of short times proportional to the inverse coupling. We provide a rigorous derivation of the open system dynamics in this regime of ultrastrong coupling and demonstrate how decoherence unfolds continuously in the new time scale. We show that Markovian dynamics which are not given by semigroups arise naturally, in contrast to what happens in the weak coupling theory.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

TimeLAVA: Learning-Agnostic Data Valuation for Time Series

arXiv:2606.18729v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data valuation quantifies the intrinsic quality of individual samples to enable principled data curation, quality control, and robust learning. For time series in critical domains such as healthcare, finance, and industrial monitoring, effective valuation methods are essential yet fundamentally lacking. Existing approaches are either model-dependent, limiting their generalizability, or designed for i.i.d. data and thus fail to capture temporal dependencies, multi-scale patterns, and non-stationary dynamics inherent to sequential data. We introduce TimeLAVA, a learning-agnostic framework that values temporal segments by their marginal contribution to minimizing distributional discrepancy between evaluated and reference data. At its core is a novel Selective Wavelet-based Wasserstein discrepancy combining multi-scale wavelet transforms for temporal localization with unbalanced optimal transport for robustness to distributional shifts. Segment values are efficiently computed via sensitivity analysis without requiring model training and aggregated into point-wise scores. We provide theoretical guarantees linking valuation to model-agnostic generalization and prove bounded sensitivity to outlier contamination. Extensive experiments across anomaly detection, data pruning, and label noise detection demonstrate that TimeLAVA produces significantly more informative value scores than existing methods on diverse real-world datasets.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

When AI Meets Finance (StockAgent): Large Language Model-based Stock Trading in Simulated Real-world Environments

arXiv:2407.18957v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Can AI Agents simulate real-world trading environments to investigate the impact of external factors on stock trading activities (e.g., macroeconomics, policy changes, company fundamentals, and global events)? These factors, which frequently influence trading behaviors, are critical elements in the quest for maximizing investors' profits. Our work attempts to solve this problem through large language model based agents. We have developed a multi-agent AI system called StockAgent, driven by LLMs, designed to simulate investors' trading behaviors in response to the real stock market. The StockAgent allows users to evaluate the impact of different external factors on investor trading and to analyze trading behavior and profitability effects. Additionally, StockAgent avoids the test set leakage issue present in existing trading simulation systems based on AI Agents. Specifically, it prevents the model from leveraging prior knowledge it may have acquired related to the test data. We evaluate different LLMs under the framework of StockAgent in a stock trading environment that closely resembles real-world conditions. The experimental results demonstrate the impact of key external factors on stock market trading, including trading behavior and stock price fluctuation rules. This research explores the study of agents' free trading gaps in the context of no prior knowledge related to market data. The patterns identified through StockAgent simulations provide valuable insights for LLM-based investment advice and stock recommendation. The code is available at https://github.com/MingyuJ666/Stockagent.

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

Uncertainty Quantification of Engineering Structures by Polynomial Chaos Expansion and Multivariate Active Learning

arXiv:2606.17233v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In many engineering applications, a single high-fidelity model produces multiple quantities of interest (QoIs) under the same input parameters, e.g. finite element models of complex physical systems. To alleviate the high computational cost of direct model evaluations, surrogate models are widely used to construct efficient approximations of model responses. Naturally, the accuracy of surrogates strongly depends on the quality of the experimental design (ED). However, a single ED may not provide an adequate representation for all outputs simultaneously, especially when different outputs exhibit varying sensitivities to the input variables. A straightforward solution is to perform separate sampling for each output, but this results in increased sampling complexity and computational cost. From a statistical perspective, such an approach also ignores potential correlations among all outputs and may compromise data consistency. To address this issue, an adaptive sequential sampling method for constructing polynomial chaos expansion surrogate models is generalized for vector valued QoIs. The method sequentially selects new samples from a candidate pool based on their local contribution to the output variance, while balancing distance-based exploration of the input space and exploitation of aggregated variance information across all outputs. Its performance is compared with non-sequential Latin Hypercube Sampling through several numerical examples from engineering problems. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed strategy improves both surrogate accuracy and stability, and provides a more reliable estimation of second-order statistics.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Aerial-ground LiDAR place recognition with patch-level self-supervised learning and expanded reciprocal re-ranking

LiDAR place recognition determines one's position on a prior point cloud map. The most studied ground-level LiDAR place recognition suffers from pre-visit requirements, incomplete coverage, and limited perspectives. Using pre-acquired, full-coverage Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data as an aerial prior map overcomes these drawbacks, making cross-view place recognition necessary and advantageous. However, aerial-ground LiDAR place recognition faces significant challenges, including the domain gap between aerial and ground point clouds, and false positives during initial retrieval. To address these challenges, we present a novel retrieval and re-ranking framework for aerial-ground LiDAR place recognition. Based on the priors that neighboring point cloud patches share similar semantics with anchor patch, our retrieval network introduces patch-level self-supervised learning modules at multiple scales and integrates with scene-level learning to improve global feature discriminativeness between aerial and ground point clouds. Furthermore, leveraging the structured spatial distribution of ALS point clouds, we introduce an Expanded Reciprocal (ER) re-ranking algorithm to exploit neighborhood information maximally and refine each feature based on neighbor features, which are then used to update the similarity matrix for final ranking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our retrieval network outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, achieving a 9.8\% improvement in average Recall@1 and a 3.2\% improvement in average Recall@1\% on the CS-Urban-Scenes, while also showing the best performance on the CS-Campus3D dataset. Additionally, our ER re-ranking algorithm further boosts the average Recall@1 by 4.9\% on CS-Campus3D and 10.2\% on CS-Urban-Scenes without additional training.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Variable-Length Tokenization via Learnable Global Merging for Diffusion Transformers

arXiv:2606.20076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have become dominant in visual synthesis, but their quality-compute trade-off is largely constrained by the tokenizer's fixed compression ratio. Variable-length tokenizers (VLTs) promise adaptive compression by varying token counts, allowing diffusion models to flexibly balance quality and compute. However, conventional VLTs modulate length by truncating ordered token sequences, which makes token semantics depend on token position and breaks representational alignment across lengths. This leads to a cross-length shift in the latent distribution that hinders a single variable-length diffusion model from operating effectively. To address this, we propose a novel variable-length tokenizer that modulates length by merging tokens. We show that encouraging similar tokens to merge enables direct cross-length representation alignment when the diffusion transformer operates according to the merging pattern. Since conventional merging methods are data-dependent, making the merging pattern inaccessible during generation, we introduce learnable global merging, which is data-independent, to ensure compatibility with diffusion transformers. On ImageNet 256$\times$256 generation, our merging-based variable-length tokenizer integrated with a diffusion transformer achieves a superior gFID-compute trade-off compared to prior VLT methods. Code is available at [this https URL](https://github.com/movinghoon/lgm)

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Towards Provably Fair Machine Learning: Bayesian Approaches For Consistent and Transparent Predictions

arXiv:2606.12615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: ML classifiers deployed in high-stakes domains produce predictions whose quality varies systematically across subgroups. For granular subgroups defined by intersections of multiple features, predictions are often inconsistent with the observed data: the model's outputs contradict the evidence available for that subgroup. This problem is exacerbated by regularisation, which improves aggregate performance by collapsing small subgroups into larger groups, disproportionately affecting demographic minorities. We define two requirements for consistent prediction: determinism (identical individuals receive identical predictions) and statistical consistency (we cannot reject, at significance level alpha, the hypothesis that the predictions for a subgroup were drawn from the Bayesian optimal target distribution inferred for that subgroup). From these requirements we derive the Fair Bayesian classifier, which enforces both across every group and subgroup simultaneously and abstains whenever no consistent deterministic prediction is possible. On three benchmark datasets (Adult, COMPAS, and Bank Marketing), standard classifiers produce statistically inconsistent predictions for a substantial proportion of subgroups. Our classifier achieves zero consistency error by construction while exceeding baseline accuracy and multicalibration on every dataset tested. Statistical consistency provides a principled foundation for prediction quality with direct implications for algorithmic fairness. Minority demographics are disproportionately concentrated in small subgroups, precisely where frequentist inference is least reliable; addressing this inference problem is therefore a necessary step toward fair ML. By enforcing Bayesian consistency at the finest resolution the data supports, the our classifier demonstrates that exhaustive subgroup fairness with principled abstention is achievable in practice.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Test-Time Training for Robust Text-Guided Open-Vocabulary Object Counting

Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting (TOOC) enables counting arbitrary object categories specified by text prompts, offering substantially greater flexibility than conventional closed-set counting. However, existing TOOC methods are developed and evaluated primarily on ideal images, while real-world scenes often suffer from adverse conditions such as rain, fog, darkness, and sensor noise, which severely degrade visual quality and impair vision-language alignment. To bridge this gap, we introduce Robust-TOOC, the first benchmark for evaluating TOOC under diverse corruption conditions, which covers six representative degradation types: rain, fog, darkness, Gaussian noise, salt-and-pepper noise, and mixed corruption. To improve robustness while preserving the original counting architecture, we propose Dual-TTT, a dual-architecture test-time training framework for TOOC. Specifically, during test-time training, Dual-TTT updates only the Text-guided Lightweight Denoising module (TL-Denoiser), while keeping the original counting network frozen. Inspired by diffusion models, the TL-Denoiser is optimized to remove corruption-aware noise from image representations under degraded conditions. Since only the TL-Denoiser is trained at test time, Dual-TTT is annotation-free and can be seamlessly integrated into existing TOOC models without modifying their original architecture. Extensive experiments on multiple recent TOOC baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

From Isolation to Entanglement: When Do Interpretability Methods Identify and Disentangle Known Concepts?

A goal of interpretability is to recover disentangled representations of latent concepts (features) from the activations of neural networks. The quality of features is typically evaluated in isolation, and under implicit independence assumptions that may not hold in practice. Thus, it is unclear to what extent common featurization methods such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and probes disentangle one concept from another. We propose a multi-concept evaluation setting using concepts including sentiment, domain, voice, and tense. We evaluate how well featurizers produce disentangled representations of each concept, observing that features are typically sensitive to only one concept, but also that concepts are distributed across many features. Then, we steer these features, measuring whether each concept is independently manipulable, and whether features interact. Even in idealized settings, steering a feature often affects many concepts, despite a near absence of interaction effects. These results suggest that correlational metrics are insufficient to establish steering selectivity, and that demonstrating that two features operate in separate spaces is insufficient to claim that they will be selective for one concept. These results underscore the importance of multi-concept evaluations in interpretability research.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Canonical regularization of the stationary Coulomb problem and an Aufbau-like spectral ordering

arXiv:2606.17359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The stationary hydrogen atom has Coulomb degeneracy across orbital levels, whereas the Aufbau/Madelung ordering is an empirical, many-electron rule established in atomic physics. We examine the hydrogen atom through a regularized de Broglie–Bohm representation, in which stationary amplitude current constraints generate separable Sturm–Liouville branches. In this formulation, the radial, orbital, and magnetic sectors acquire canonical Langer-like inverse square corrections. The modified boundary value problems allow analytical solutions and produce a hydrogen-like spectrum with regularized radial and angular indices. Consequently, radial Coulomb quantization acquires an orbital dependent shift, lifting the Coulomb degeneracy and producing a spectral ordering that follows the Aufbau/Madelung sequence. On this basis, we construct the ordering of the regularized de Broglie–Bohm states and show that the spectral structure retains the standard degenerate Rydberg sequence in the l=0 sector. The separated amplitudes are represented by generalized special function branches, including the associated Laguerre, Legendre, and Bessel functions with non-integral parameters arising from regularized separation. Therefore, the treatment is intended as an analytical examination of spectral ordering in a regularized one center Coulomb problem rather than as a replacement for the many electron atomic structure theory. Keywords: de Broglie–Bohm representation; Coulomb spectrum; canonical regularization; Langer correction; Sturm–Liouville equations; Aufbau principle; Madelung ordering; associated Legendre functions; associated Laguerre functions; Bessel functions.

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

EquiDexFlow: Contact-Grounded SE(3)-Equivariant Dexterous Grasp Generative Flows

Most learned dexterous grasp generators relegate contact forces to a downstream verification step, so a kinematically-plausible pose can still violate the conditions for a stable physical grasp. We address this with EquiDexFlow, an SE(3)-equivariant flow-matching model that jointly predicts wrist pose, joint angles, fingertip contacts, surface normals, and contact forces from an object point cloud. Our architecture projects contacts onto the object surface and forces into the Coulomb friction cone by construction, so placement and friction compliance hold without loss penalties. We prove end-to-end SE(3) equivariance and verify it empirically over 200 rotations, with wrist residuals below $0.04^\circ$ and exactly zero joint deviation. Trained on 8,100 force-closure grasps across 81 objects for the 16-DoF Allegro Hand, our model achieves zero friction violations, the best composite score, and the lowest wrench residual among all ablation variants. We retarget decoded fingertip contacts to a 16-DoF LEAP Hand via per-finger inverse kinematics, and our hardware-feasible refinement places every joint at least 5% inside its actuator envelope while preserving wrench balance. On the physical robot, retargeted EquiDexFlow-decoded grasps complete open-loop pick-and-hold trials on all six test objects, with every asymmetric object succeeding at both the canonical pose and a $120^\circ$ co-rotation. Videos, code, and checkpoints are available at https://equidexflow.github.io.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

HarnessX: A Composable, Adaptive, and Evolvable Agent Harness Foundry

arXiv:2606.14249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agent performance depends critically on the runtime harness, comprising the prompts, tools, memory, and control flow that mediate how a model observes, reasons, and acts. Yet today's harnesses remain largely hand-crafted and static: each new model or task still demands bespoke scaffolding, and the rich traces produced during execution are rarely distilled back into systematic improvement. We introduce HarnessX, a foundry for composable, adaptive, and evolvable agent harnesses. HarnessX assembles typed harness primitives via a substitution algebra, adapts them through AEGIS, a trace-driven multi-agent evolution engine grounded in an operational mirror between symbolic adaptation and reinforcement learning, and closes the harness-model loop by turning trajectories into both harness updates and model training signal. Across five benchmarks (ALFWorld, GAIA, WebShop, tau^3-Bench, and SWE-bench Verified), HarnessX yields an average gain of +14.5% (up to +44.0%), with gains largest where baselines are lowest. These results suggest that agent progress need not come from model scaling alone: composing and evolving runtime interfaces from execution feedback is an actionable and complementary lever. The complete codebase will be open-sourced in a future release.

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

FragFuse: Bypassing Access Control of Large Language Model Agents via Memory-Based Query Fragmentation and Fusion

arXiv:2606.15609v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on long-term memory to support complex task execution, user personalization, and domain adaptation. Meanwhile, emerging access-control mechanisms for LLM agents are being explored to block policy-violating requests and prevent misuse. We reveal a novel attack surface arising from agent memory operations: prohibited content that would trigger access control can be fragmented across interactions, stored in long-term memory in benign-appearing form, and later reconstructed through memory retrieval without appearing explicitly in the final user query. We propose FragFuse, the first attack that enables unprivileged users to bypass agent access control by exploiting this temporal channel introduced by long-term memory. FragFuse operates in three stages: (1) identifying rejection-responsive fragments via black-box adaptive querying with fragment masking; (2) injecting these fragments into memory using marker carrier queries; and (3) retrieving and fusing the stored fragments through a follow-up attack query. Although FragFuse can be instantiated manually for individual agents, we further develop a surrogate-based optimization scheme that tunes fusion instructions and marker designs, enabling automated attack generation without violating the attacker's threat-model assumptions. We evaluate FragFuse across four representative agent settings and task domains, covering three state-of-the-art agent access-control mechanisms. FragFuse achieves an average bypass success rate of 86.3% and an average end-to-end harmful task success rate of 41.1% across all settings, with only 4.4% average task-success degradation compared with configurations without access control. We also show that alternative defenses, including state-of-the-art prompt-injection detectors and perplexity detectors, do not effectively address this attack.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Prediction of immunotherapy response using live tumor fragments from routine clinical biopsies

Functional ex vivo assays using live tumor tissues have demonstrated strong predictive accuracy for response to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) but are not scalable, requiring manual processing of large resections collected at academic centers. Here, an ex vivo live tumor fragment (LTF) platform was developed using standard-of-care biopsies from 228 patients with suspected malignancy collected across prospective, multicenter observational trials and biobanks. Hierarchical clustering of ICI-mediated changes in cytokine production identified two groups: responders and nonresponders. A binary classifier (elive index) using 8 cytokines achieved an AUC of 0.99 for cluster prediction. elive index correctly predicted clinical benefit in 93% (26/28) of patients (P = 3.2x10-5) and accurately identified 83% (10/12) of objective responders. Critically, elive responders were identified among biomarker-negative patients, highlighting the platform as a scalable approach that complements existing companion diagnostics and expands the population of patients identified to benefit from ICI therapy.

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

Bayesian Inference and Decision Audits for Public Archives of Frontier AI Evaluations

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Public AI evaluations are often read as terminal leaderboards, yet the underlying evidence is a selective time series shaped by reporting rules, benchmark revisions, and missingness. Repeated public archives for LiveBench and Open LLM Leaderboard v2 serve as the primary longitudinal record; LMArena provides a preference stress test; and GAIA and tau-bench contribute limited agentic pilots. Together, these archives instantiate a Bayesian inference problem: under a fixed reporting convention, one constructed terminal-only example over $1{,}000$ systems is compatible with two pre-terminal histories, yielding times of $23.03$ or $75.13$ to reach within $0.05$ of the ceiling under the same terminal-tail model. In synthetic posterior comparisons, action-facing diagnostics differ across observation regimes. The candidate selection-aware frontier model fails synthetic recovery, objective-archive prediction, preference transfer, and uncertainty calibration; correspondingly, fixed audit gates reject its stronger claims. An archive-and-adjudication protocol reconstructs public evaluation histories, isolates a verified timing boundary, and falsifies unsupported frontier claims.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Three-Layer Framework for AI in Scientific Discovery

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13566v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current discussions of AI in scientific discovery are often dominated by two visible capabilities: search over existing knowledge and execution through optimization, simulation, and automation. Both are important, but neither fully captures the central act of discovery: the formation and evolution of models. This paper proposes a three-layer view of AI in discovery. Layer 1 is search and retrieval by large language models. Layer 2, as the main innovation of this paper, is model formation through qualitative reasoning: the capacity to recognize when a current framework is structurally inadequate and to understand the problem within a broader representational space, not through trial and error, but through structural insight into what is missing and where it can be found. Layer 3 is execution, optimization, and refinement. The main claim is that Layer 2 is both the most important and the least developed. Search without model formation remains confined to inherited frameworks, while execution without conceptual revision only amplifies an existing formulation. We illustrate Layer 2 reasoning through three case studies: S. S. Chern's intrinsic proof of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, the resolution of the Nesterov Accelerated Gradient convergence problem via Lyapunov functions, and the autonomous disproof of the Erdos unit distance conjecture by OpenAI in 2026. Each case exhibits the same structural signature: a framework that had become inadequate, a missing conceptual object, and a resolution found in an unexpected neighboring field.

19.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-08

Single-cell spatial pharmacobiology for imaging antibody-based therapies in solid tumors

Authors: Unknown Author

We have developed single-cell spatial pharmacobiology (SSP), which combines in situ imaging of a systemically infused fluorescent therapeutic antibody with high-plex spatial proteomics. Applied to head and neck and pancreatic tumors from patients treated in phase 1 trials, SSP revealed marked spatial heterogeneity in antibody delivery and target engagement, which was shaped by conserved stromal barriers.

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

Using Cognitive Models to Improve Language Model Simulation of Human Persuasion Games

arXiv:2606.17657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People make decisions differently in strategic interactions. Some update beliefs like a Bayesian; others exhibit biases like motivated reasoning. Although creators of large language models use simulated humans for safety evaluations and training, they often fail to cover this breadth of human behavior. We argue that cognitive science and economics provide a convenient tool for doing so, making use of mathematical models of human decision-making. We propose an approach that we call Equation-to-Behavior Prompting for guiding large language models to match cognitive models, and evaluate this approach on persuasion games based on legal decision-making. We find that large models can approximate equation-based specifications – Bayesian updating, affine distortion, motivated updating, and Grether's $\alpha$-$\beta$ model – using prompting, but small models fail to do so. However, training small models with reinforcement learning to adhere to mathematical rules, Equation-to-Behavior RL, reduces belief error by 26.5% in out-of-distribution parameterizations. We show that these simulations can help create diverse training environments; training small models to consider different kinds of decision-makers improves average belief change by 2.5%–12% over Bayesian-only training, even when persuading GPT-5-mini. Our work could improve human simulations for training and evaluation in increasingly realistic settings, and could also enable novel research into more complicated mathematical models of human decision-making.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

X-OPD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation for Capability Alignment in Speech LLMs

While the shift from cascaded dialogue systems to end-to-end (E2E) speech Large Language Models (LLMs) improves latency and paralinguistic modeling, E2E models often exhibit a significant performance degradation compared to their text-based counterparts. The standard Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) training methods fail to close this gap. To address this, we propose X-OPD, a novel Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation framework designed to systematically align the capabilities of Speech LLMs to their text-based counterparts. X-OPD enables the Speech LLM to explore its own distribution via on-policy rollouts, where a text-based teacher model evaluates these trajectories and provides token-level feedback, effectively distilling teacher's capabilities into student's multi-modal representations. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that X-OPD significantly narrows the gap in complex tasks while preserving the model's inherent capabilities.

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

Evolving Programmatic Skill Networks

arXiv:2601.03509v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study continual skill acquisition in open-ended embodied environments where an agent must construct, refine, and reuse an expanding library of executable skills. We introduce the Programmatic Skill Network (PSN), a framework in which skills are executable symbolic programs forming a compositional network that evolves through experience. PSN defines three core mechanisms instantiated via large language models: (1)~\opreflect for structured fault localization over skill compositions, (2)~progressive optimization with maturity-aware update gating that stabilizes reliable skills while maintaining plasticity for uncertain ones, and (3)~canonical structural refactoring under rollback validation that maintains network compactness. We further show that PSN's learning dynamics exhibit structural parallels to neural network training. Experiments on MineDojo and Crafter demonstrate robust skill reuse, rapid adaptation, and strong generalization across open-ended task distributions.

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

DRIFT: Refining Instruction Data via On-Policy Data Attribution

arXiv:2606.18307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizing the training data distribution for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) dictates the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing data curation methods excel at accelerating training under constrained budgets, they are less suited to elevating the capability upper bound. The challenge here is no longer to identify a smaller subset that preserves performance, but to refine the data distribution toward instances most capable of improving the final model. To address this problem, we explore instance-level data attribution using Influence Functions (IF). We identify that standard IF formulations struggle in this setting due to two structural limitations: a proximity gap caused by off-policy validation targets, and a severe bias towards gradient norm. We propose DRIFT (Data Refinement via On-Policy Influence Functions for Supervised Fine-Tuning). Instead of relying on external reference data, DRIFT utilizes the model's on-policy rollouts as validation targets, which empirically minimizes the parameter proximity gap and better aligns with the local neighborhood assumption of IF. It further applies signed weighting based on trajectory correctness and debiases influence scores against the gradient hacking issue, allowing a small set of validation queries to act as reliable anchors for attributing the full dataset. Experiments on 7B-parameter instruction and reasoning models show that DRIFT consistently raises the performance ceiling on both, outperforming existing data curation baselines.

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

SMEPilot: Characterizing and Optimizing LLM Inference with Scalable Matrix Extensions

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