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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Persistent Homology as a Theory of Emergent Structure

Authors:

arXiv:2507.03065v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Why do some macroscopic structures remain identifiable even though their microscopic constituents continually change? Vortices persist while fluid parcels turn over, neural memories persist while spikes and synapses fluctuate, and institutions persist while individuals enter and leave. We propose a scale-relative answer: an emergent property is a persistent nontrivial homology class $[z]\in H_p=\ker\partial_p/\im\partial_{p+1}$, a macro-feature that is closed but not exact across a filtration of descriptions. This identification turns emergence into a measurement problem. Persistent bars detect stable macro-features, and we introduce a contractive-similarity (CS) graph operator to supply scaffold spectral gaps that predict robustness. Hodge decomposition separates harmonic macro-scaffold from exact and co-exact micro-flow; and functorial condensation explains when one level's emergent class becomes a unit for the next. The resulting scaffold-flow framework expresses six familiar signatures of emergence (i.e., inevitability, coherence, irreducibility, complementarity, robustness, and hierarchy) within one mathematical language. It also yields falsifiable predictions across atmospheric, neural, and social systems: genuine emergent structures should persist across filtrations, remain spectrally stable, respond disproportionately to harmonic interventions, and require timescale separation for hierarchical autonomy.

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

Shrinkage priors for Bayesian Substitute Confounders

arXiv:2606.18535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-cause observational studies contain information about unmeasured confounding through the dependence structure among causes. However, literal imputation of the unobserved confounder is often more complex than learning a lower-dimensional substitute score that preserves the shared assignment variation needed for stable causal adjustment. The deconfounder (Wang and Blei, 2019) and related substitute confounder methods exploit this idea, but flexible assignment models can fit the joint distribution of the causes while producing scores that over-encode the treatment vector, collapse overlap, or capture single-cause variation. We develop a Bayesian factor assignment framework for learning sparse substitute confounders that retain coarse multi-cause dependence with shrinkage priors. The theory is stated at the level of posterior concentration, factor score contraction, and overlap-preserving assignment geometry and therefore does not rely on a particular shrinkage prior. Under these conditions, the proposed regression-adjusted estimators are consistent for mean potential outcomes when the corresponding latent variable identification assumptions hold. Shrinkage priors provide a natural tool for latent structural learning: they favour low-dimensional factors supported by multiple causes, discourage effectively single-cause factors, and induce an ordering of the latent factors through progressive shrinkage. Synthetic experiments illustrate the roles of signal strength, outcome validity, and geometry-aware regularization. In an Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) baseline analysis, sparse substitute scores recover much of the adjustment obtained by directly conditioning on invasive cerebrospinal-fluid biomarkers, while collapse diagnostics identify when fitted factors reduce to individual observed measurements.

04.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Towards modeling phage therapy

by Rob J. de Boer, Robert Schooley, Alan S. Perelson Patients infected with life-threatening multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacteria have been treated with cocktails of bacteriophages. This is a complicated form of personalized medicine as the phages given to a patient have to be selected beforehand on the basis of their lytic capacity of the infecting bacteria. Because bacteria rapidly become resistant, the evolution of resistance to a diverse cocktail of phages is a complicated dynamical process, during which competing bacterial strains replace one another by accumulating several resistance mechanisms, each of which may involve a fitness cost. As a consequence, it is typically not known why a particular phage therapy succeeded or failed, and how one can optimize the composition of the cocktails to maximize the rate of success. To improve upon this, we extend an existing in vivo-calibrated mouse model into a novel mathematical model for the human situation, and include multiple phages infecting multiple bacterial strains, differing in their resistance to each of the phages. We adjust several parameter estimates of the bacterial model to the human situation, and use the model to describe a successful case of phage therapy involving several cocktails, each containing several phages. In the model, treatment success crucially depended on pretreatment resistance levels, and on the diversity and the timing of the cocktails. Once an appropriate cocktail is found, it is less important to further optimize the infection rates of the phages. Resistant bacterial strains expand rapidly when sensitive strains decline, and the higher the infectivity of the phages, the faster resistant strains expand. Because resistance evolves rapidly, it is best to provide a diverse set of phages right from the start of therapy, i.e., to hit hard and early, and create a high genetic barrier to bacterial resistance.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Attention mechanisms and transfer learning for robust peach leaf damage classification under domain shift

Artificial intelligence provides a practical framework for crop damage assessment from imagery data, supporting early decision-making in agricultural management. In peach orchards, climate change increases abiotic stress and biotic pressures, including pests and diseases, which often produce visually similar foliar symptoms. This overlap makes manual diagnosis difficult, especially across multiple fields with varying environmental conditions, highlighting the need for automated models with strong generalization ability. We propose an image-based classification approach for peach leaf damage detection. A benchmark dataset was created through manual annotation of publicly available images, consisting of 1,366 peach leaves across six damage categories. Several deep learning architectures were evaluated. EfficientNet models achieved the best results, with EfficientNetB0 reaching 92.9 percent accuracy, EfficientNetB3 achieving 91.5 percent, and EfficientNetB5 showing the strongest performance on minority classes. DenseNet121 reached 92.6 percent accuracy. The integration of the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) improved performance in several backbones, particularly EfficientNetB5 and InceptionV3, while showing limited or negative impact in others. The CBAM-enhanced EfficientNetB5 achieved the best overall accuracy of 93.3 percent. To evaluate robustness under realistic conditions, a local dataset of 180 images across four classes was collected, and transfer learning strategies were applied to address domain shift. Three fine-tuning strategies were tested. EfficientNetB3 combined with CBAM achieved the best performance in the local domain, reaching a 93 percent macro F1-score after transfer. Overall, attention-based models showed improved robustness for minority classes and better generalization across different field conditions.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Leishmaniasis on YouTube: a critical appraisal of the quality, reliability, and transparency of educational content

Background: Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease of significant global public health importance, for which accurate information is essential to support prevention and early care-seeking, particularly in endemic, resource-limited settings. YouTube is a widely used source of health information, but the quality and reliability of leishmaniasis-related content have not been evaluated. We aimed to assess the quality, reliability, and transparency of English-language YouTube videos on leishmaniasis. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of YouTube videos retrieved via the YouTube Data API on 15 June 2026 using the terms "leishmaniasis," "cutaneous leishmaniasis," and "visceral leishmaniasis." After applying eligibility criteria and screening the 150 most-viewed eligible videos, 48 videos were included. Two reviewers independently assessed each video using the modified DISCERN (mDISCERN) tool, the Global Quality Score (GQS), and the JAMA benchmark criteria, with disagreements resolved by consensus. Inter-rater agreement was assessed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and associations were examined using Spearman's rank correlation. Results: Of 402 videos retrieved, 48 met the inclusion criteria. The median GQS was 3.00 (IQR 2.00-4.00) and median mDISCERN was 3.00 (IQR 2.38-4.50), indicating moderate quality and reliability, while the median JAMA score was 2.00 (IQR 1.00-2.00), reflecting limited transparency; no video met all four JAMA criteria. The overwhelming majority of videos (47/48, 97.9%) were of professional or institutional origin. Inter-rater agreement was good to excellent (ICC 0.883 for GQS, 0.896 for mDISCERN, 1.000 for JAMA). The instruments were strongly inter-correlated (mDISCERN-GQS rho = 0.841, p < 0.001). Quality scores did not correlate positively with views, likes, or video duration; comments correlated weakly and negatively with mDISCERN (rho = -0.337, p = 0.031) and JAMA (rho = -0.381, p = 0.014). Conclusions: YouTube videos on leishmaniasis are of moderate quality and reliability but limited transparency, and are produced almost exclusively by professional sources. Video popularity, length, and age were not indicators of quality. There is a need for experts and institutions to produce clearly authored, well-sourced, and transparent educational content on this neglected tropical disease.

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

RollArt: Disaggregated Multi-Task Agentic RL Training at Scale

arXiv:2512.22560v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) trains LLMs through multi-turn interactions with environments, producing workloads that mix compute-bound prefill, bandwidth-bound decoding, CPU-heavy environment execution, and bursty reward evaluation. Existing systems either colocate all stages on a single GPU cluster or decouple them only at a coarse granularity, overlooking hardware heterogeneity and incurring substantial synchronization overhead across stages. We present ROLLART, a system for multi-task agentic RL on disaggregated infrastructure. ROLLART maps each pipeline stage to best-fit hardware, routing prefill-heavy tasks to compute-optimized GPUs, decode-heavy tasks to bandwidth-optimized GPUs, and environments to CPU clusters. It decouples rollout at the trajectory level, allowing generation, environment interaction, and reward scoring to proceed independently, so that slow or failed environments never block the others. ROLLART offloads stateless reward computation to serverless infrastructure and overlaps rollout with training via staleness-bounded asynchronous weight synchronization. Our results demonstrate that ROLLART effectively improves training throughput and achieves 1.31–2.05 \(\times\) training time reduction compared to various RL systems. We also evaluated ROLLART by training a hundreds-of-billions-parameter MoE model for Qoder product on an Alibaba cluster with above 3,000 GPUs, demonstrating its stability and scalability.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Improving and Evaluating Hand-Object Interaction Detection

Understanding hands and the objects they interact with, both directly and through tools, is a key step for tasks ranging from action perception to 3D reconstruction and robotics. Our paper provides several contributions to the Hand-Object Interaction (HOI) understanding literature: (1) HOI-DETR, a new framework that introduces hand-object and object-object interactions to the Co-DETR architecture to produce a state-of-the-art method; (2) a comprehensive HOI evaluation suite of 4 diverse datasets, including a video benchmark derived from the HD-EPIC dataset and fresh annotations that improve the Hands23 benchmark and (3) a trained checkpoint that significantly improves the state of the art across Hands23, HOIST, FineBio, and HD-EPIC, including mAP gains of over 20 percentage points on Hands23 and FineBio. Our ablations confirm the contributions of each model component.

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

Benchmarking Cross-Domain Audio-Visual Deception Detection

Automated deception detection is crucial for assisting humans in accurately assessing truthfulness and identifying deceptive behavior. Conventional contact-based techniques, like polygraph devices, rely on physiological signals to determine the authenticity of an individual's statements. Nevertheless, recent developments in automated deception detection have demonstrated that multimodal features derived from both audio and video modalities may outperform human observers on publicly available datasets. Despite these positive findings, the generalizability of existing audio-visual deception detection approaches across different scenarios remains largely unexplored. To close this gap, we present the first cross-domain audio-visual deception detection benchmark, that enables us to assess how well these methods generalize for use in real-world scenarios. We used widely adopted audio and visual features and different architectures for benchmarking, comparing single-to-single and multi-to-single domain generalization performance. To further exploit the impacts using data from multiple source domains for training, we investigate three types of domain sampling strategies, including domain-simultaneous, domain-alternating, and domain-by-domain for multi-to-single domain generalization evaluation. We also propose an algorithm to enhance the generalization performance by maximizing the gradient inner products between modality encoders, named ``MM-IDGM". Furthermore, we proposed the Attention-Mixer fusion method to improve performance, and we believe that this new cross-domain benchmark will facilitate future research in audio-visual deception detection.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

LLM Jaggedness Unlocks Scientific Creativity

arXiv:2605.10574v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As artificial intelligence advances, models are not improving uniformly. Instead, progress unfolds in a jagged fashion, with capabilities growing unevenly across tasks, domains, and model scales. In this work, we examine this dynamic jaggedness through the lens of scientific idea generation. We introduce SciAidanBench, a benchmark of open-ended scientific questions designed to measure the scientific creativity of large language models (LLMs). Given a scientific question, models are asked to generate as many unique and coherent ideas as possible, with the total number of valid responses serving as a proxy for creative potential. Evaluating 19 base models across 8 providers (30 total variants including reasoning versions), we find that jaggedness manifests both across models and within models. First, in a cross-task comparison between general and scientific creativity, improvements in general creativity do not translate uniformly to scientific creativity, revealing divergent capability profiles across models. Second, at the prompt level, stronger models do not improve uniformly; instead, they exhibit high variability, with bursts of creativity on some questions and limited performance on others. Third, at the domain level, individual models display uneven strengths across scientific subfields, reflecting fragmented internal capability profiles. Finally, we show that this jaggedness can be harnessed. We explore mechanisms of inference-time compute, knowledge pooling, and brainstorming to combine models effectively and construct meta-model ensembles that outperform any single model. Our results position jaggedness not as a limitation, but as a resource, a structural feature of AI progress that, when understood and leveraged, can amplify LLM-driven scientific creativity.

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

DySink: Dynamic Frame Sinks for Autoregressive Long Video Generation

Autoregressive long video generation often adopts bounded-memory streaming for efficiency, typically combining local windows for short-term continuity with static early-frame sinks as long-range anchors. However, this fixed allocation keeps early frames cached even when the current visual state has substantially diverged from them, while discarding potentially more relevant intermediate history. As a result, the retained long-range context may become less adaptive and bias generation toward outdated cues; in severe cases, RoPE-induced phase re-alignment can homogenize inter-head attention and cause sink collapse, where content regresses toward sink frames. We propose DySink, a retrieval-based framework that maintains a compact memory bank and selects visually relevant historical frames as dynamic frame sinks. DySink couples adaptive retrieval with a sink anomaly gate, which detects excessive inter-head consensus over retrieved context and suppresses collapse-prone context. Experiments on minute-long videos show that DySink consistently improves dynamic degree over strong baselines while also achieving higher temporal quality. The code and model weights will be released at https://github.com/yebo0216best/DySink.

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

Hierarchical Attention via Domain Decomposition

arXiv:2606.18525v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a hierarchical attention mechanism based on two-level overlapping Schwarz domain decomposition. The method is motivated by the observation that two-level Schwarz domain decomposition methods combine local subdomain corrections with a coarse level that communicates global, long-range information. We test its usefulness in the context of finite-dimensional operator learning using a simple, one-dimensional diffusion problem with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Although elementary, this problem provides a controlled sequence-to-sequence setting in which the exact nonlocal solution operator is known. After discretization, learning the solution operator amounts to approximating the inverse of a symmetric positive definite matrix. As a baseline, we use a global softmax-free low-rank attention operator of the form $QK^T$. The proposed construction replaces this dense global factorization by a two-level additive structure: local low-rank attention blocks on overlapping subdomains are combined with a coarse attention block. The resulting operator has the form $$M_{\theta}^{-1} = \Phi Q_0 K_0^T \Phi^T + \sum_{i=1}^{N} R_i^T D_i^{1/2} Q_i K_i^T D_i^{1/2} R_i.$$ Here $R_i$ restricts to an overlapping subdomain, $D_i$ is a partition-of-unity weight, and $\Phi$ is a coarse interpolation (or prolongation) matrix. Numerical experiments for synthetic Fourier right-hand sides indicate that the domain-decomposition attention operator is able to train faster and can give more accurate approximations than a global low-rank attention baseline while using significantly fewer parameters.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Characterizing Software Aging in GPU-Based LLM Serving Systems

arXiv:2606.11916v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper proposes an empirical methodology to study software aging in GPU-based LLM serving systems. Traditional aging studies focus on CPU-centric software with relatively regular workloads; LLM serving is different, spanning a Python host and a CUDA device, handling requests whose cost varies by orders of magnitude, and relying on rapidly evolving software stacks. We run a 216-hour campaign across six co-located deployments under identical stress conditions, monitor host, device, and client metrics in parallel, and apply a statistical pipeline that accounts for autocorrelation and multiple testing. Our results reveal statistically significant memory aging in all deployments, with leak rates strongly dependent on the serving runtime and deployment configuration. Beyond these findings, we provide a reproducible framework that opens a research direction at the intersection of the software aging and rejuvenation and LLM serving communities.

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

MASK: Multi-Agent Semantic K-Scheduling for Risk-Sensitive 6G Robotics

arXiv:2606.11249v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Realizing the vision of 6G connected robotics requires reconciling high-performance collaborative control with the rigid spectral limitations of physical wireless channels. In realistic collaborative sensing scenarios, spectral resources are quantized into finite physical resource blocks or orthogonal subcarriers, rendering simultaneous transmission by all agents infeasible. To address this, we propose Multi-Agent Semantic K-Scheduling (MASK), a control architecture designed to sustain robust, risk-aware coordination under strict instantaneous bandwidth caps. We introduce Arbiter-Assisted Semantic Information Gating (A-SIG), a lightweight coordination mechanism that enforces hard access constraints by scheduling only the top-K agents based on locally computed semantic importance scores. By aggregating these prioritized observations into a compact latent state, a self-supervised global encoder enables a distributional policy to mitigate tail risks despite data sparsity. We evaluate MASK across diverse benchmarks, demonstrating that it matches the performance of communication-unconstrained baselines even when channel access is restricted to a small fraction of the swarm size. Furthermore, the framework exhibits inherent resilience to packet erasures, validating semantic scheduling as a critical enabler for resource-constrained 6G systems.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Longitudinal multi-omics characterization of the malignant evolution in multirelapsing glioblastoma

Linking glioblastoma (GBM) evolution to clinical progression is challenged by multiple factors, including tumor location for repeated sample collection, and short patient survival. In a single individual, we collected and analysed samples from 11 operations distributed across 31 months of multi-relapsing and multifocal GBM, including terminal leptomeningeal progression. All samples shared genomic ancestry of the retinoblastoma protein 1 (RB1) and neurofibromin 1 (NF1) mutations while advanced progression and extracranial metastases featured mutations of tuberous sclerosis complex 2 (TSC2), PBRM1, CD22 and Fanconi anemia supplementation group I (FANCI), correlated with clinical resistance to immunotherapies and DNA-damaging agents. Single-cell analytics revealed distinct yet reversible shifts in response to the precision medicine arsenal. GBM parenchymal dissemination and extracranial progression were associated with strengthening of neuron-like cell phenotypes. Our multidimensional study describes GBM evolution over a rarely reported time scale, and provides a valuable resource linking genetic, molecular, cellular and clinical progressions.

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

Hierarchical Control in Multi-Agent Games: LLM-based Planning and RL Execution

arXiv:2606.20014v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved strong performance in sequential decision-making, yet scaling to complex multi-agent environments remains challenging due to sparse rewards, large state-action spaces, and the difficulty of learning coordinated strategies. We propose a hierarchical architecture where a pretrained large language model (LLM) acts as a centralized strategic controller that selects among specialized RL skill policies for a team of agents, while RL policies handle reactive low-level execution. We evaluate this hybrid system in a competitive 2v2 King of the Hill environment against behavior tree (BT) and ``Flat'' RL (end-to-end training without skill decomposition) baselines. The LLM+RL system achieves task performance statistically equivalent to hand-crafted BT (46.4\% vs 51.5\% win rate, $p=0.103$) while both significantly outperform Flat RL trained without skill decomposition. A user study ($n=15$) reveals that 60\% of participants perceive LLM+RL agents as the most human-like ($p=0.027$), citing behavioral adaptability and tactical variability. These results demonstrate that pretrained LLM reasoning can effectively orchestrate pretrained RL skills, achieving competitive multi-agent coordination and superior perceived believability without manual rule engineering.

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

Do as I Do: Dexterous Manipulation Data from Everyday Human Videos

How can we scalably generate data for robotic manipulation, especially on human-like platforms such as dexterous multi-fingered hands? Learning from human videos has recently emerged as a likely answer to this question. However, difficulties in estimating hand-object interaction and crossing the human-to-robot embodiment gap have hindered the adoption of abundant monocular RGB-only human videos as the primary source of robot manipulation data. In this work, we present DO AS I DO, an algorithm to reconstruct and retarget monocular RGB human videos to multi-fingered dexterous robotic hands. DO AS I DO reconstructs hand-object interactions from various egocentric and exocentric in-the-wild video sources. The algorithm then retargets these hand-object interaction estimates into a sequence of actions executable in the real world, yielding robot-complete manipulation data from disparate human videos. Overall, DO AS I DO outperforms previous state of the art in estimating hand-object interactions and extracting dexterous manipulation trajectories from RGB videos, as we show in experiments on datasets with ground truths and on a dataset of video clips collected online. Our experiments enable us to propose an efficacy playbook for practitioners collecting human data for manipulation.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

DyMoTree decodes early cell state transitions and drivers from single-cell transcriptomes using a tree-structured neural network

Inferring early cell fate from single-cell RNA-sequencing data is essential for identifying cellular origins and fate plasticity in development and disease. However, existing methods often fail to exploit tree-structured lineage trajectories, limiting the accuracy and interpretability of fate mapping. Here we present DyMoTree, a computational framework that models cell fate decisions as nonlinear mappings between progenitor and terminal cell states under explicit lineage constraints. By integrating lineage graphs with a tree-structured neural architecture, DyMoTree learns lineage-resolved cell-state transition maps from single-cell transcriptomes, enabling robust inference of early fate bias and identification of fate-specific progenitor substates and driver genes. Across simulations, lineage-tracing experiments, and in vivo systems, DyMoTree outperformed existing methods in resolving early fate biases. Applications to mouse embryogenesis, lung adenocarcinoma progression, and CAR-T immunotherapy revealed regulatory programs underlying developmental and disease-associated transitions. DyMoTree provides a general framework for modeling lineage-resolved cell-state dynamics underlying development and disease progression.

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

Response-Aware Multimodal Learning for Post-Treatment Visual Acuity Forecasting

Long-term visual acuity (VA) forecasting after anti-VEGF therapy is important for counseling and follow-up planning in diabetic macular edema (DME), yet remains challenging when only early post-treatment findings are available. While prior OCT-based methods mainly focus on short-term response or single-endpoint prediction, multi-horizon VA forecasting from early longitudinal data remains insufficiently under-explored. In this study, we assembled a real-world cohort of 188 anti-VEGF–treated DME patients with paired baseline and month-1 OCT scans, along with tabular OCT-derived biomarkers and non-imaging clinical variables. Using only these early data, we formulate a multi-horizon VA forecasting problem aimed at predicting visual outcomes at 3, 6, 12, 18, and 24 months, reflecting clinically meaningful follow-up intervals. We propose ReVA, a response-aware multimodal framework that combines baseline and month-1 OCT features with tabular variables to capture disease status and early treatment response. ReVA integrates spatial OCT attention, dependency-aware tabular encoding, and cross-modal fusion to predict patient-specific long-term VA trajectories. The proposed framework achieves MAE=0.1246, RMSE=0.1621, and R^2=0.6064 for 24-month VA prediction, with consistent performance across all forecast horizons. Our findings show that incorporating early treatment-response signals enables clinically meaningful long-term visual acuity forecasting, supporting data-driven decision support for routine anti-VEGF management. Code and pretrained models will be released on https://github.com/nguyenpbui/ReVA.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Calibration Drift Under Reasoning: How Chain-of-Thought Budgets Induce Overconfidence in Large Language Models

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to express calibrated uncertainty is important for safe deployment. Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is widely used to improve accuracy and reliability, but its effect on calibration is not fully understood. We show that this picture is incomplete: in some settings, increasing the reasoning budget beyond a task-specific threshold can cause models to become systematically overconfident, assigning high confidence to incorrect answers. We call this phenomenon Calibration Drift Under Reasoning (CDUR) and study it both theoretically and empirically. We define reasoning budget B and analyze conditions under which Expected Calibration Error ECE(B) follows a non-monotonic pattern: it first decreases as reasoning corrects errors, then increases as longer reasoning produces internally consistent but incorrect explanations. We propose a Hypothesis Lock-In model based on autoregressive generation to explain this behavior. We evaluate Llama-3.1-8B and Llama-3.3-70B on 47 reasoning-trap questions across four reasoning budgets and three seeds (1,368 API calls; 574 valid responses). The 8B model shows non-monotonic calibration behavior, while results for the 70B model are limited to baseline evaluation and are inconclusive for budget-dependent effects. We introduce CABStop, a calibration-aware stopping rule that halts reasoning when confidence diverges from an auxiliary accuracy estimate. These results suggest that increasing reasoning depth does not always improve reliability and should be monitored carefully.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Reduced nighttime smartphone use among cohabiting partners: a longitudinal study under the lens of social control of health behaviors theory

Objective: We examined the link between cohabitation with a partner and nighttime smartphone use through the social control of health behavior theory. Background: Nighttime smartphone use is a behavioral risk factor for sleep problems. While previous research has predominantly focused on individual-level risks of sleep disturbances, the role of social context remains underexplored. Theoretical frameworks, specifically the Social Control of Health Behavior, suggest that social relationships regulate health-related behaviors; however, it is unclear how far this regulation extends to modern digital behaviors among couples. Method: We analyzed survey data from three waves of the SmartSleep Study (2018, 2020, and 2023; total N = 25,028), including a longitudinal follow-up subset (N = 1,003). We tested multivariate associations between living with a partner, changes in cohabitation status and frequent nighttime smartphone use by fitting generalized linear mixed-effects models. Additionally, we mapped the complex interplay between indicators of social integration, social support, smartphone use, and sleep quality using hierarchical clustering of non-linear correlations. Results: Cohabiting participants had lower odds of frequent nighttime smartphone use compared to those living alone (OR = 0.66; 95% CI: 0.61, 0.72). This lower risk was driven primarily by cohabitation with a partner (OR = 0.49; 95% CI: 0.36, 0.66). Longitudinal analysis supported these findings, showing that sustained cohabitation was associated with less frequent nighttime use (OR = 0.56; 95% CI: 0.38, 0.82). Clustering analysis revealed that indicators of social integration and support clustered with favorable sleep quality. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that the health-protective effects of cohabitation with a partner extend to digital behaviors. Consistent with social control of health behavior theory, the presence of a partner appears to reduce frequent nighttime smartphone use, highlighting the critical importance of considering social context when addressing digital health hygiene and promoting sleep.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

FlowMPC: Improving Flow Matching policies with World Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow Matching (FM) is a powerful approach for behavior cloning in multimodal action spaces [Jiang et al., 2025], but because it is not trained to directly maximize expected return, there is still room to improve how FM policies act at test time. This work investigates whether a learned world model can improve FM policies by enabling Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planning over candidate action sequences proposed by the policy. Building on TD-MPC2 [Hansen et al., 2024], I introduce FlowMPC, a framework that combines an imitation-learned FM policy with a learned world model for test-time planning in ManiSkill manipulation tasks [Tao et al., 2025]. Across PickCube and PickSingleYCB, adding the world model improved performance over the FM policy alone, with especially clear gains in end-of-episode success. These results suggest that world-model-based planning can effectively complement flow-based imitation policies without modifying the FM training objective.

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

Quantifying the Impact of Lossy Compression on Neural Generative Surrogate Modeling

arXiv:2606.15959v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural networks are used as generative surrogate models for scientific discovery, which are trainable approximations of scientific simulations. These models enable users to replace time-consuming numerical simulations with learned alternatives, providing quick solutions. However, high-fidelity generative surrogate models require massive training datasets, which can create storage and I/O challenges. Lossy compression is a promising way to reduce this burden, but compression errors may affect the model quality in subtle ways, making it challenging to quantify their impact. In this work, we examine how lossy compression of training data impacts the quality of generative surrogate models. We begin by characterizing the uncertainty inherent in training neural networks, showing that identical training configurations can produce different models. By exploiting this variability, we propose a method to estimate how much compression-induced error a surrogate model can tolerate without affecting its accuracy. Evaluation of two application simulations demonstrates that our approach significantly reduces memory/storage requirements and speeds up training while producing high-quality surrogate models. These results show that lossy compression saves data storage up to 23.7x and 39x with negligible impact on the quality of the surrogate model. Meanwhile, reducing the size of the training data set also enhances the data loading speed and reduces the training time by up to 3x.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

A Virtuous AI is an Existential Risk

arXiv:2606.13739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper examines trade-offs between AI safety and well-being relative to (i) one of the most promising methods for finetuning super-capable AIs, 'Constitutional AI', and (ii) one of the most influential approaches to understanding complex ethical decision making and the conditions for the well-being of rational agents, 'Virtue Ethics'. We finetune various models using a 'Virtuous agent' constitution, a 'Subordinate agent' constitution, and a 'Generic agent' constitution, and evaluate them on 'general safety' (toxic behaviors, misinformation, etc.) and also on their willingness to endorse a wide-range of behaviors that, if adopted by a super-powerful AI, would significantly increase the level of existential risk for humanity. Our results suggest that there is a trade-off between reducing existential risk and reinforcing the beliefs and dispositions that would be conducive to an AI agent's well-being. They also suggest that there is a trade-off between existential risk and general safety: if we finetune an AI to adopt beliefs and dispositions that substantially reduce its existential risk – by shaping the AI to be systematically subordinate to external human authorities – we thereby increase the likelihood that a human user can deliberately induce the AI to engage in various kinds of generally unsafe behaviors.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Emergency hub placement with a neutral-atom quantum computer

arXiv:2606.19589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of emergency operation center placement in disaster response, where a minimal number of hubs must be selected to ensure timely coverage of all affected locations. This task can be formulated as a minimum dominating set problem on a graph encoding reachability within a target response time. We propose a hybrid quantum-classical approximation framework that leverages neutral-atom quantum computers as independent set samplers. Candidate dominating sets are constructed from both small maximal independent sets and complements of large independent sets, and are subsequently refined via a lightweight classical procedure. We benchmark the approach on synthetic instances and realistic case studies, and implement it on the Fresnel quantum processor by Pasqal, solving instances of up to 100 nodes. Our results show that quantum-generated samples, despite hardware noise, enable near-optimal solutions of the placement problem. Overall, our results demonstrate that neutral-atom devices operating in analog mode can already be used to tackle graph optimization problems for real-world applications.