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

The Register Gap: A Meaning Intelligence Framework for Nigerian Public Discourse

Authors:
Celestine Achi↗

We introduce the Meaning Intelligence Framework (MIF), a nine-dimension annotation and evaluation schema for Nigerian public discourse that separates surface sentiment from true communicative intent. Existing benchmarks for Nigerian languages, including NaijaSenti and AfriSenti, treat sentiment classification as a three-way polarity task (positive, negative, neutral). We argue that the dominant failure mode of AI systems on Nigerian discourse is not translation failure but context failure: the same utterance carries opposite pragmatic force depending on speaker, audience, and situation. The MIF operationalises this insight across nine scored dimensions: register, surface sentiment, true intent, irony, coded subtext, risk tier, annotator confidence, speaker emotion, and recommended communications action. We construct a 30-item calibration dataset spanning Standard English, Nigerian English, Nigerian Pidgin, and code-mixed registers, and evaluate a frontier language model (Gemini 2.5 Flash) under zero-shot and schema-informed prompting conditions. The headline finding is the Register Gap: zero-shot register classification accuracy is 33.3%, rising to 73.3% (+40 points) when the model receives the MIF schema in-context. The composite Meaning Intelligence Score increases by 5.4 points (73.2 to 78.6) under schema-informed prompting, with the largest practical gains in register identification, coded-subtext detection (+10 points), and strategic action recommendation (+10.3 points). We release the framework specification, annotation guidelines, and the 30-item public calibration set to support reproducibility, while retaining a private holdout corpus for contamination-protected evaluation.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

GRACE: Step-Level Benchmark for Faithful Reasoning over Context

Authors:
Hoang Pham↗Dong Le↗Anh Tuan Luu↗

Many reasoning tasks require models to reason over input context, from document-grounded question answering to rule-based deduction. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting produces traces that appear transparent, yet individual steps can silently deviate from the source evidence, even when the final answer is correct. Existing methods detect hallucinations at the response level but fail to identify where in the chain a failure occurs or what type it is. We introduce GRACE, the first human-annotated step-level faithfulness benchmark with a data-driven error taxonomy for context-grounded textual reasoning. GRACE covers CoT traces from 10 models across 4 source datasets, with each step annotated for faithfulness, error category, and natural language explanation. A data-driven taxonomy, discovered bottom-up via unsupervised clustering, organizes failures into two tracks: GRACE-Inference (deductive errors) and GRACE-Grounding (factual grounding errors), with four categories each. The evaluation set is human-annotated and challenging by design. Our experiments reveal substantial headroom for current models. In addition, integrating step-level faithfulness signals into reinforcement learning pipelines improves both downstream accuracy and reasoning reliability.

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03.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-09

Prediction of hospitalisation in young children with pneumonia in Malawi: A machine learning-based approach

Authors:
Patrick Staunton↗

by Patrick Staunton, Mohammad Adib Makrooni, Master Chisale, Billy Nyambolo, Joseph Wu, Damien McCarthy, Mark Ledwidge, Yasir Bin Nisar, Chris Watson, Balwani Mbakaya, Cathal Seoighe, Joe Gallagher Background Globally, pneumonia remains the single biggest cause of mortality in children under 5 years of age. This study sought to train and test a prediction model for hospitalisation within 7 days after initial presentation in 2- to 59-month-old Malawian children with WHO-defined pneumonia in primary care and compare its performance to existing risk prediction models. Methods and findings BIOTOPE is a cohort study of children with pneumonia in a primary healthcare setting in Malawi. The training cohort involved nine primary care centres and the testing cohort involved two primary care centres in Northern Malawi. The training cohort was recruited between December 2022 and April 2023 while the testing cohort was recruited in 2016. Participants were consecutive children aged 2–59 months presenting with cough and/or difficulty breathing and who were diagnosed as WHO-defined pneumonia in primary care of any severity. The training cohort was used to train and validate a machine learning model with a prespecified primary outcome defined as hospitalisation and/or death within 7 days as the outcome. This model was then further evaluated in the testing cohort.Median age was 15 months (interquartile range 8−27) in the training and 17 months (interquartile range 9−29) in the external testing cohort (52.1% and 54.4% male, respectively). Hospitalisation occurred in 14.3% (294) of the training cohort and 12.1% (55) of the testing cohort. There was one death in the training cohort only. WHO danger signs were present in 17.6% (360) and 15.9% (70) of children in the training and testing cohorts, respectively. The optimal machine learning model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic and precision recall curves of 0.87 and 0.57, respectively, in the testing cohort outperforming existing risk prediction models; furthermore, this model produced an expected calibration error of 0.16 (a logistic regression model using severity status as the response variable and the log odds of the machine learning model’s calibrated probabilities produced an intercept estimate of −0.32 and a slope estimate of 1.13). Key limitations include the use of hospitalisation and/or death as a severity outcome, which may reflect health system factors rather than true disease severity, that mortality-based comparisons were not possible due to low mortality in these primary care cohorts, and that comparator tools were developed for hospital populations rather than primary care populations. Conclusion This machine learning score outperformed traditional pneumonia risk scores in predicting hospitalisation within 7 days in Malawian children presenting to primary care. Traditional pneumonia risk scores diminish in performance when externally applied to new datasets suggesting they may not generalise well beyond their original derivation settings. Mortality-related findings are not applicable as there was only one death in this cohort. Overall these findings support the potential of machine learning to meaningfully improve early identification of children at risk of severe pneumonia in low-resource primary care settings. Further external validation and clinical impact studies are needed to confirm these results.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Beyond Logprobs: A Multi-Signal Confidence Engine for LLM-Based Document Field Extraction

Authors:
Nitesh Kumar↗

In high-stakes document processing pipelines, including financial reconciliation, compliance verification, and procurement automation, an LLM extraction that is silently wrong is more dangerous than one that is visibly absent. The central challenge is not extraction accuracy alone but reliable confidence estimation: knowing, field by field, whether an extraction can be trusted for automation or deferred to human review. Token-level log-probabilities, verbalized confidence, and multi-sample self-consistency all collapse toward all-positive behaviour at practical thresholds, offering no reliable separation between trustworthy and untrustworthy extractions. We present ExtractConf, a cross-domain, field-agnostic confidence engine that grounds confidence estimation in two structurally different readings of the same document. A field-guided Hunter call extracts each field under schema-slot completion pressure; a document-guided Mapper call scans holistically and surfaces values grounded in document content. This asymmetry yields different failure modes: Hunter hallucinates values for absent fields, while Mapper misses visually non-salient ones. Their disagreement is independently informative. ExtractConf fuses cross-call disagreement, LLM-internal uncertainty, OCR, image quality, and spatial layout into a classifier requiring no domain-specific rules or retraining. On DocILE (55-field invoices, 26% failure rate), it achieves 0.928 ROC AUC and reduces selective prediction risk by 70% over logprob-mean. At 80% coverage, accuracy reaches 99.1%, enabling a practical human-in-the-loop workflow. Zero-shot transfer to CORD receipts achieves 0.858 AUC; lightweight Lasso recalibration reduces ECE by 89% and Brier by 43%, confirming the signals generalise across document domains.

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

GeoCFNet: Geometry-Aware Confidence Field Network for Robot-Assisted Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection

Authors:
Rui Tang↗Guankun Wang↗Long Bai↗Haochen Yin↗Huxin Gao↗Jiewen Lai↗Jiazheng Wang↗Hongliang Ren↗

Advanced surgical robotics has made robot-assisted endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) a promising approach for the en-bloc resection of large lesions, with the potential to reduce recurrence and improve long-term outcomes. However, the technical complexity and risk of complications in ESD demand stable and precise visual guidance to maintain an accurate dissection corridor and a safe tissue margin. Dense confidence fields provide an effective representation for this purpose by describing both the preferred dissection region and its spatial transition to surrounding tissue. However, reliable confidence field estimation remains challenging in dynamic endoscopic scenes due to smoke, specular highlights, tissue deformation, weak texture, and the thin geometric structure of the target region. To address these challenges, we formulate dissection guidance as a geometry-aware confidence field estimation problem and propose GeoCFNet, a geometry-aware confidence field network built on a pretrained DINOv3 backbone. GeoCFNet integrates a Token-Differentiated Fusion module to aggregate class-token context with dense patch representations, a SegFormer decoder for confidence regression, and Geometry-Aware Spatial Regularization (GASR) to preserve spatial coherence and local geometric transitions. Experimental results show that GeoCFNet achieves RMSE 0.0480, PSNR 27.1995, SSIM 0.3397, and CC 0.2466, indicating accurate and geometrically stable confidence field estimation for robot-assisted ESD guidance.

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06.
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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08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

The Holistic Storage of Verb+Up Phrases in Text-based and Audio-based Language Models

Authors:
Zachary Nicholas Houghton↗Yu Zhou↗Dan Pluth↗Vijay K. Gurbani↗

A crucial aspect of linguistic capability is the ability to trade off between stored representations and abstract knowledge: one must retrieve learned representations, but also generate novel ones by applying productive rules. While recent work has examined abstract knowledge in language models, holistic storage of multi-word units has received far less attention. We probe internal representations in text-based LLMs and an ASR model, testing whether V+up phrasal verbs develop distinct representations as a function of frequency and predictability. All models show evidence of holistic storage driven by frequency and predictability, further supporting usage-based theories of language.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Semiclassical Gravity Efficiently Solves $\mathsf{NP}$-Complete Problems

Authors:
Matthew Fox↗Chaitanya Karamchedu↗Sotirios Mygdalas↗

arXiv:2606.14806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Assuming the gravitational field is classical and that it couples to quantum fields via the semiclassical Einstein field equations, we show that the weak-field dynamics of a massive and non-relativistic qubit can in principle be used to solve an $\mathsf{NP}$-complete problem in polynomial time. We attribute this vast computational power to the non-linear dynamics afforded by the semiclassical Einstein field equations. Consequently, the above two assumptions entail a violation of the Physical Extended Church–Turing Thesis, which we regard as evidence for the quantization of gravity.

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

High-Fidelity 3D Geometric Reconstruction of Pelvic Organs from MRI: A Hybrid Deep Learning and Iterative Optimization Approach

Authors:
Hui Wang↗Xiaowei Li↗Chenxin Zhang↗Yifan Feng↗Jianwei Zuo↗Yumeng Tang↗Xiuli Sun↗Jianliu Wang↗Bing Xie↗Jiajia Luo↗

Patient-specific 3D reconstruction of pelvic organ geometry from MRI is important for pelvic floor modeling and downstream patient-specific analysis. However, while previous studies have focused primarily on either image segmentation or downstream use of 3D models, the reconstruction of high-fidelity, high-quality geometries remains labor-intensive and poorly standardized. The study introduced a hybrid deformable shape modeling framework that integrates deep learning prediction with iterative optimization for the reconstruction of the bladder, uterus, and rectum. The framework consists of three core components: a geometry-aware multi-level deep learning architecture that preserves topological consistency of pelvic organs; a two-stage amortized optimization training strategy that balances global shape capture and local surface refinement; and a holistic synergy mechanism–where iterative optimization provides supervision for deep learning during the training phase, and during inference, deep learning rapidly predicts the global organ morphology, followed by iterative optimization to refine local surfaces and mesh quality. This framework demonstrated marked superiority in geometric fidelity than current mainstream deep learning-based organ reconstruction models. For individual anatomical structures, the reconstructed 3D geometries for the bladder, rectum, and uterus achieved significantly lower Chamfer Distance values and higher Dice Similarity Coefficient scores. In addition, while maintaining high computational efficiency, the proposed architecture yielded superior overall volumetric mesh quality. At the patient level, the framework achieved higher mean values for the 10 worst elements for both minSICN and minSIGE compared to traditional geometric post-processing algorithms.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MM++: Unsupervised Scale-Invariant Multilayer OOD Detection via Top-K Gated Feature Fusion

Authors:
Rahim Hossain↗Md Tawheedul Islam Bhuian↗Md Farhan Shadiq↗Kyoung-Don Kang↗

We introduce MM++ (Multilayer Mahalanobis++), a fully unsupervised, strictly post-hoc, and scale-invariant framework for Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection. To address the trade-off between scale invariance and hierarchical expressivity, MM++ constructs a principled joint feature space. It first identifies discriminative intermediate layers by measuring entropy density drops, which mark the boundaries of sharp semantic compression. By fusing these selected layers with the terminal representation, the framework captures latent cross-layer correlations while mitigating early-layer noise. Crucially, a Ledoit-Wolf regularized tied covariance matrix stabilizes this unified space, enabling reliable distance estimation. Requiring no auxiliary OOD data, classifier fine-tuning, or architectural modifications, MM++ delivers robust performance across distinct architectures for both near- and far-OOD detection.

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12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Pixels to Proofs: Probabilistically-Safe Latent World Model Control via Parallel Conformal Robust MPC

Authors:
Devesh Nath↗Anutam Srinivasan↗Haoran Yin↗Ruitong Jiang↗Jeffrey Fang↗Glen Chou↗

We present SLS^2, a framework for safe feedback motion planning from pixels using robust model predictive control (MPC) in learned latent world models. Our approach trains an action-conditioned joint-embedding world model with compact Markovian latent states, enabling efficient gradient-based trajectory optimization through learned latent dynamics. To enforce safety for the true system despite imperfect latent predictions, we inform a GPU-accelerated system level synthesis (SLS) robust MPC scheme with conformal prediction to obtain calibrated latent error bounds and robust latent-space constraint sets. We further learn and conformalize a latent constraint checker, allowing the SLS planner to impose probabilistic safety constraints during closed-loop execution. We evaluate our method on vision-based control tasks, where it improves both goal-reaching performance and safety over latent world-model and safe-planning baselines.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

When AI Says "I have been in similar situations": Synthetic Lived Experience in Peer-Like Caregiver Support

Authors:
Drishti Goel↗Violeta J. Rodriguez↗Daniel S. Brown↗Ravi Karkar↗Dong Whi Yoo↗Koustuv Saha↗

Caregivers often turn to online communities for informational and emotional support. In these spaces, peer supporters frequently draw on personal narratives to respond to emotionally complex caregiving situations. As LLMs are increasingly designed as peer-like sources of support, they introduce a critical tension: AI can provide immediate, private, and nonjudgmental support, but it cannot authentically possess the lived experiences that make human peer support meaningful. Yet, when prompted to sound peer-like, LLMs may generate language that implies lived experience. This creates a synthetic lived experience paradox: the same experiential language that may make AI support feel warm, relatable, and peer-like can also falsely position the system as someone with lived experience. We examine this paradox in the context of family caregivers of people living with Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD). Drawing on caregiver support exchanges from online communities and prompted peer-like responses from three LLMs – LLaMA, GPT-4o-mini, and MedGemma – we analyze how human peers use personal narratives and how AI incorporates similar narrative forms. Psycholinguistic analysis shows that peer responses used significantly more first-person and past-focused language than peer-like AI responses. Qualitatively, we identify seven types of personal narratives in human peer support and show that AI often captures their emotional work, but can fabricate experiential grounding. These findings reveal a narrative authenticity gap: peer-like AI can generate synthetic lived experience without the real experience that makes peer support meaningful. We argue that caregiver-support AI systems need mechanisms to distinguish supportive peer-like framing from fabricated lived experience, ensuring that models can offer warmth and validation without falsely positioning themselves as experiential peers.

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

i1: A Simple and Fully Open Recipe for Strong Text-to-Image Models

Authors:
Boya Zeng↗Tianze Luo↗Shu Pu↗Jucheng Shen↗Taiming Lu↗Gabriel Sarch↗Zhuang Liu↗

Diffusion models have consistently driven progress in text-to-image generation. However, it is challenging to attribute recent progress to specific modeling and data choices: state-of-the-art open-weight models provide limited ablations, and do not disclose their training data and full training details. The research community needs fully open (weights, data, and code) models as a foundation for further research; yet existing fully open models still fall significantly short of leading models in performance. In this project, we conduct a systematic investigation of the modeling and data design choices in text-to-image diffusion training and inference with 300+ controlled experiments totaling 700K+ TPU v6e hours. Our experiments highlight several empirical findings (e.g., equal weighting is a strong default for mixing curated datasets) and simple design decisions (e.g., larger text encoder adapters improve performance with minimal added parameters) for training strong models. Guided by these insights, we train i1, a 3B-parameter text-to-image diffusion model using only publicly available datasets. i1 is competitive with leading models on five representative benchmarks (GenEval, DPG, PRISM, CVTG-2K, and LongText), and outperforms the best existing fully open model by 29.5 absolute percentage points on average. We provide the i1 checkpoints, training and inference code, and the data processing pipeline. Together, our findings and the i1 recipe establish a practical foundation for future open research in text-to-image diffusion models. Our code is available at https://github.com/zlab-princeton/i1.

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

Do Large Language Models Always Tell The Same Stories?

Authors:
Thennal DK↗Hans Ole Hatzel↗

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the generation of high-quality prose, yet the question of whether these models are capable of generating diverse outputs remains contested. In this work, we investigate the diversity of LLM-generated stories through the framework of narrative similarity. Using a contrastive framework and a dataset of human-written stories and prompts from r/WritingPrompts, we collect narrative similarity judgments across 10 representative LLMs, utilizing both human evaluations and three different automatic annotation methods. Our findings reveal a consistent trend: LLM-generated narratives are consistently more similar to each other than human-written stories are. We demonstrate that frontier models in particular converge on a ``mean'' generic narrative that approximates individual human stories but lacks the collective diversity of human authors. Finally, we show that common mitigation strategies, including negative prompting and temperature scaling, fail to meaningfully address this homogeneity.

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

CyberEvolver: Structured Self-Evolution for Cybersecurity Agents On the Fly

Authors:
Yihe Fan↗Changyi Li↗Lichen Xu↗Xudong Pan↗Jiarun Dai↗Hong Geng↗Min Yang↗

arXiv:2605.26195v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based agents are increasingly used for cybersecurity tasks, but most existing systems rely on fixed, human-designed scaffolds that struggle to adapt across diverse targets and failure modes. We introduce \textsc{CyberEvolver}, a self-evolving cybersecurity agent framework that iteratively revises its own scaffold based on experience from failed execution attempts. Self-evolution in cybersecurity is challenging because the space of possible scaffold changes is largely unstructured, execution feedback is sparse and often obscured by the environment, and low-diversity updates can cause errors to compound over repeated iterations. \textsc{CyberEvolver} addresses these challenges with a four-layer evolvable agent architecture that decomposes scaffold optimization into structured components, a trace-to-diagnosis mechanism that converts noisy execution logs into actionable revision signals, and a population-based beam search strategy that preserves diverse agent variants during evolution. We evaluate \textsc{CyberEvolver} on CTF challenges, vulnerability exploitation, and penetration-testing tasks using four open-source LLMs. Across these settings, \textsc{CyberEvolver} improves the seed agent's success rate by $13.6$\,\% on average, and outperforms six human-designed cybersecurity agents as well as two self-improvement methods adapted from other domains. These results suggest that scaffold self-evolution is a promising direction for building adaptive LLM agents for security testing.

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17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Deployment-readiness audit of calibration, clinical utility, and fairness in perioperative infection prediction

Authors:
Guillen-Ramirez↗Lucas↗K. L↗Wintsch↗Y. M↗Blatter↗T. U↗Triep↗Endrich↗Beldi↗

Objective: Clinical risk scores intended to guide patient-level decisions can show strong average performance. However, predicted probabilities can be systematically too high or too low in specific subgroups even when overall performance is strong. We audited deployment readiness of a strong end-of-surgery postoperative infection model across clinically relevant subgroups and tested mitigation strategies in miscalibrated subgroups. Materials and Methods: We analyzed out-of-fold predictions for 10,719 surgical procedures at a Swiss tertiary hospital, with 504 postoperative bacterial infection events. Prespecified axes were recorded sex, age stratum, and an EHR-derived physiological-reserve proxy. Within subgroups and pairwise intersections, we evaluated discrimination, calibration, threshold-specific errors, and decision-curve net benefit at the prespecified operating threshold. We compared group-specific isotonic recalibration with Wasserstein-barycenter postprocessing and demonstrated portability in SUPPORT2. Results: Overall AUROC was 0.876. While sex-marginal discrimination was similar in women and men (0.878 vs 0.875), age and reserve stratification revealed deployment-readiness failures. Calibration-in-the-large ranged from -0.86 in frail patients to -2.47 in non-frail patients. At the 0.10 operating threshold, decision-curve net benefit was positive in frail patients but negative in pre-frail and non-frail patients. Isotonic recalibration corrected average physiological-reserve-stratified calibration without worsening Brier scores, whereas Wasserstein postprocessing worsened calibration in most procedure clusters. Discussion: Discrimination-only or sex-marginal evaluation would have missed subgroup failures with clinical-utility implications. Conclusion: Subgroup fairness audits for clinical deployment should jointly evaluate discrimination, calibration, and utility. We implemented the audit as the open-source isitfair framework for identifying deployment-relevant subgroup failures, comparing mitigation strategies, and generating structured reports.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

The Interplay of Harness Design and Post-Training in LLM Agents

Authors:
Kyungmin Kim↗Youngbin Choi↗Seoyeon Lee↗Suhyeon Jun↗Dongwoo Kim↗Sangdon Park↗

Tool-integrated LLM agents are often wrapped within a harness: the scaffolding that determines which tools are exposed, how they are described, and what auxiliary information accompanies each per-step observation. While agents are routinely post-trained, this scaffolding is typically treated as a fixed engineering detail, with design effort limited to the training-free regime. Moreover, existing post-training algorithms assume a static environment, even though tool environments and tasks often shift upon deployment. To address this gap, we extend $\texttt{ALFWorld}$ (i) to treat the harness as a controllable design dimension and (ii) to support evaluation under task and tool environment shifts. Building on this, we systematically analyze how the harness design influences post-training in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. We empirically show that harness-aware post-training not only improves in-distribution performance but also enables agents to robustly adapt to OOD settings. Under a harness with minimal design effort, post-training suffers a drastic performance drop under stronger tool environment shifts, further highlighting the importance of harness-aware post-training under such shifts.

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

Two-Layer Linear Auto-Regressive Models Estimate Latent States

Authors:
Yahya Sattar↗Sunmook Choi↗Leo Maynard-Zhang↗Yassir Jedra↗Maryam Fazel↗Sarah Dean↗

arXiv:2606.12691v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Auto-regressive models have emerged as powerful tools for sequential data, from language to video. Understanding how and why these models learn latent representations remains an open theoretical question. In this work, we demonstrate that when trained by empirical risk minimization on data from partially observed linear dynamical systems, two-layer linear auto-regressive models naturally learn to approximate Kalman filtering. In particular, we show that the learned hidden representation coincides, up to a similarity transformation, with the state estimates produced by the optimal (Kalman) filter, even though the model has no explicit knowledge of the underlying dynamics or state. The result follows from three main insights. First, we establish that the Kalman filter is well approximated by an auto-regressive model with bounded truncation error. Second, we show that despite non-convexity, the two-layer optimization landscape is benign, i.e., all stationary points are either strict saddles or global minima. Finally, as our main contributions, we provide finite-sample guarantees on prediction error, parameter estimation error, and latent state recovery. Numerical simulations support the theoretical results and demonstrate that the latent representations of auto-regressive models recover state estimates.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A Convex Route to Thermoelasticity: Learning Internal Energy and Dissipation

Authors:
Hagen Holthusen↗Paul Steinmann↗Ellen Kuhl↗

arXiv:2603.28707v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present a physics-based neural network framework for the discovery of constitutive models in fully coupled thermomechanics. In contrast to classical formulations based on the Helmholtz energy, we adopt the internal energy and a dissipation potential as primary constitutive functions, expressed in terms of deformation and entropy. This choice avoids the need to enforce mixed convexity–concavity conditions and facilitates a consistent incorporation of thermodynamic principles. In this contribution, we focus on materials without preferred directions or internal variables. While the formulation is posed in terms of entropy, the temperature is treated as the independent observable, and the entropy is inferred internally through the constitutive relation, enabling thermodynamically consistent modeling without requiring entropy data. Thermodynamic admissibility of the networks is guaranteed by construction. The internal energy and dissipation potential are represented by input convex neural networks, ensuring convexity and compliance with the second law. Objectivity, material symmetry, and normalization are embedded directly into the architecture through invariant-based representations and zero-anchored formulations. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed framework on synthetic and experimental datasets, including purely thermal problems and fully coupled thermomechanical responses of soft tissues and filled rubbers. The results show that the learned models accurately capture the underlying constitutive behavior. All code, data, and trained models are made publicly available via https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19248596.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

How Robust is OCR-Reasoning? Evaluating OCR-Reasoning Robustness of Vision-Language Models under Visual Perturbations

Authors:
Yuxing Cheng↗Yuan Wu↗Yi Chang↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on OCR-based benchmarks and increasingly focused on text-rich understanding, but their robustness under controlled visual degradation remains insufficiently understood. This gap is critical for OCR reasoning, where visual corruption can induce OCR errors and structural distortions, thereby introducing uncertainty into the reasoning task. To systematically study this problem, we introduce OCR-Robust, a benchmark designed for evaluating OCR reasoning robustness under visual perturbations. It contains 812 samples across two complementary subsets: OCR1.0, covering documents, scene text, receipts, handwriting, and mathematical content, and OCR2.0, focusing on charts, geometry diagrams, and tables. To enable efficient yet informative evaluation, we conduct a pilot study over 18 candidate perturbations and select 5 representative types at 3 severity levels each based on their impact and cross-model discriminability. We evaluate robustness using clean accuracy, Relative Corruption Retention (RCR), Worst-Case Retention (WCR), and a composite Corruption Robustness Index (CRI), and benchmark 18 models spanning proprietary systems, open-source VLMs, and OCR+LLM pipelines. Our results show that higher clean accuracy does not necessarily imply stronger robustness, and that models can suffer pronounced degradation in the worst case on OCR tasks that are sensitive to structure, and charts and tables are substantially more fragile than document-like inputs under perturbation.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Time-Varying Audio Effect Modeling by End-to-End Adversarial Training

Authors:
Yann Bourdin↗Pierrick Legrand↗Fanny Roche↗

arXiv:2512.15313v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has become a standard approach for the modeling of audio effects, yet strictly black-box modeling remains problematic for time-varying systems. Unlike time-invariant effects, training models on devices with internal modulation typically requires the recording or extraction of control signals to ensure the time-alignment required by standard loss functions. This paper introduces a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework to model such effects using only input-output audio recordings, without requiring a modulation signal extraction. We propose a convolutional-recurrent architecture trained via a two-stage strategy: an initial adversarial phase allows the model to learn the distribution of the modulation behavior without strict phase constraints, followed by a supervised fine-tuning phase where a State Prediction Network (SPN) estimates the initial internal states required to synchronize the model with the target. Additionally, a new metric based on chirp-train signals is developed to quantify modulation accuracy. Experiments modeling a vintage hardware phaser demonstrate the method's ability to capture time-varying dynamics in a fully black-box context.

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24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Free-Space CV-QKD with Single-Mode Fiber Reception: Effective Coupling Statistics and Protocol-Dependent Reference Noise

Authors:
Hesham S. Ibrahim↗Arnaud Coatanhay↗

arXiv:2606.24431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study free-space continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) with single-mode fiber (SMF) reception under atmospheric turbulence. The optical channel is modeled by split-step propagation through random phase screens, followed by finite-aperture collection and projection onto the guided receiving mode. We first examine the standard GG02 setting and ask which receiver-side observable is sufficient for effective key-rate prediction. We show that a mean-loss description is generally too optimistic, whereas a scalar effective law for the SMF coupling efficiency provides an accurate downstream Gaussian-channel description within the effective model considered here. We then extend the optical model to a pilot-assisted architecture in which the signal and pilot propagate through correlated but non-identical turbulent realizations generated by a frozen-flow construction. In this case, the signal coupling law alone is no longer sufficient: signal–pilot phase mismatch and loss of post-coupling coherence produce an additional protocol-dependent reference-noise penalty. The results distinguish two regimes: a scalar coupling description is largely adequate for GG02, while transmitted-reference architectures require an additional differential reference observable beyond the signal coupling statistics.

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

Improving Factuality of 3D Brain MRI Report Generation with Paired Image-domain Retrieval and Text-domain Augmentation

Authors:
Junhyeok Lee↗Yujin Oh↗Dahyoun Lee↗Hyon Keun Joh↗Chul-Ho Sohn↗Sung Hyun Baik↗Cheol Kyu Jung↗Jung Hyun Park↗Kyu Sung Choi↗Byung-Hoon Kim↗Jong Chul Ye↗

Acute ischemic stroke (AIS) requires time-critical decision-making, where inaccurate interpretation of neuroimaging findings can lead to irreversible disability. Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) maps from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are central to detecting acute infarction, yet generating factually reliable radiology reports directly from 3D MRI remains challenging due to the difficulty of learning robust cross-modal alignments between volumetric images and clinical text. We propose paired image-domain retrieval and text-domain augmentation (PIRTA), a retrieval-augmented generation framework that improves report factuality by avoiding explicit image-text alignment. PIRTA retrieves clinically similar 3D DWI/ADC volumes using a pretrained 3D vision encoder and leverages their paired clinician-authored reports to ground large language model (LLM)-based report generation. Experiments on multi-institutional in-house data, a held-out external privacy-preserving cohort, and the public ISLES benchmark demonstrate that PIRTA achieves strong image-domain retrieval performance and consistently improves ischemic-territory accuracy, a clinically grounded surrogate for report factuality, compared to direct image-to-text baselines. These results indicate that retrieval-grounded generation provides a scalable and reliable paradigm for producing factually consistent radiology reports from complex 3D brain MRI. Source code is available at https://github.com/jhlee0619/PIRTA.

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