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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Feature Attribution in Directed Acyclic Graphs Using Edge Intervention

arXiv:2606.15273v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shapley value-based feature attribution methods face challenges in scenarios involving complex feature interactions and causal relationships, even when a causal structure is provided. Existing methods typically adopt a node-centric view, attributing importance solely to individual features. Consequently, they often fail to simultaneously capture the externality and exogenous influence of features, leading to unreasonable interpretations. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel feature attribution method called DAG-SHAP, which is based on edge intervention. DAG-SHAP treats each feature edge as an individual attribution object, ensuring that both externality and exogenous contributions of features are appropriately captured. Additionally, we introduce an approximation method for efficiently computing DAG-SHAP. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets validate the effectiveness of DAG-SHAP. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZJU-DIVER/DAG-SHAP.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Unscreenable: The Burden, Structure, and Analytic Consequences of "Unable to Assess" Delirium Documentation in the Intensive Care Unit

Objective: To quantify the burden, structure, and downstream analytic consequences of "Unable to Assess" (UTA) delirium documentation in the intensive care unit (ICU). Design: Retrospective cross-sectional and repeated-measures study. Setting: A single US academic medical center (Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care IV [MIMIC-IV], 2008-2019). Patients: 72,944 adult ICU stays with at least 1 delirium screen. Interventions: None. Measurements and Main Results: Among 610,632 screens, 130,455 (21.4%; 95% CI, 21.0%-21.8%) were recorded as UTA, exceeding the 119,052 (19.5%) scored positive. The UTA fraction rose from 2.0% at a Richmond Agitation-Sedation Scale (RASS) score of 0 to 97.8% at RASS -4; 22.0% of UTA screens occurred in arousable patients, where UTA was associated with mechanical ventilation (odds ratio [OR], 3.43; 95% CI, 3.17-3.71) and non-English primary language (OR, 3.74; 95% CI, 3.43-4.08). Building the delirium label three ways from the same patients shifted prevalence modestly (32.1% to 30.8%) and prediction (area under the curve, 0.737 to 0.719) but most affected the delirium-mortality association: in a baseline-adjusted model the OR was 4.12 (95% CI, 3.88-4.36) under complete-case handling and fell to 2.16 (95% CI, 2.06-2.27) when UTA was recoded as negative. UTA was recoverable from the observed clinical state (area under the curve, 0.95). Conclusions: In this ICU cohort, Unable to Assess was the most common recorded delirium result other than Negative, exceeding positive screens; recoding it as negative roughly halved the apparent delirium-mortality association by relabeling deeply sedated, high-mortality patients. Delirium datasets should preserve and report UTA, whose concentration among arousable non-English-speaking patients is a measurable equity target.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Holographic Complexity, Extremality, and Cosmic Censorship

arXiv:2604.20170v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a holographic complexity origin for the third law of black-hole mechanics and weak cosmic censorship. In both complexity equals action and complexity equals volume prescriptions, the relative complexity between subextremal and extremal AdS black holes diverges logarithmically. For overcharged RN-AdS, explicit calculations in both prescriptions show that the near-singularity action terms are power-law divergent or finite, while the maximal-volume contribution is finite. Thus, the extremal-to-naked relative complexity also diverges, obstructing finite-time transitions.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

TACOMORE: Exploring a replicable prompting protocol for LLM-assisted corpus analysis

As corpus linguistics continues to scale, researchers are facing a growing methodological bottleneck: while computational tools can easily count billions of words, the qualitative interpretation of these data remains a slow and labor-intensive human task. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising way to automate this process, yet their integration into the field is often hindered by concerns over black-box unpredictability and a lack of replicability. This study introduces TACOMORE, a structured prompting framework designed to transform ad-hoc AI interactions into a standardized linguistic protocol. Built upon four foundational principles (Task, Context, Model, and Replicability), the framework guides LLMs to move beyond generic probability prediction to anchoring their reasoning in the specific co-occurrence patterns of a target corpus. We applied this framework to three core corpus tasks, i.e., the analysis of keywords, collocates, and concordances, using an open corpus of COVID-19 research abstracts. After testing three LLMs, we found that while structured prompting improves accuracy and replicability, inherent limitations regarding hallucination persist. This research offers a critical lens into the role of LLMs in corpus linguistics, highlighting their potential as complementary tools while emphasizing the irreplaceable role of human validation.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Phase transitions for contact processes on sparse random graphs via metastability and local limits

arXiv:2505.22471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a new perspective on the asymptotic regimes of fast and slow extinction in the contact process on locally converging sequences of sparse finite graphs. We characterise the phase boundary by the existence of a metastable density, which makes the study of the phase transition particularly amenable to local-convergence techniques. We use this approach to derive general conditions for the coincidence of the critical threshold with the survival/extinction threshold in the local limit. We further argue that the correct time scale to separate fast extinction from slow extinction in sparse graphs is, in general, the exponential scale, by showing that fast extinction may occur on stretched exponential time scales in sparse scale-free spatial networks. Together with {the results of} Nam, Nguyen and Sly (Trans.\ Am.\ Math.\ Soc.\ 375, 2022), our methods can be applied to deduce that the fast/slow threshold in sparse configuration models coincides with the survival/extinction threshold on the limiting Galton-Watson tree.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

High-performance gates on trapped ion qubits using counterpropagating pulse-shaped laser beams

arXiv:2606.15672v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Highly-localized light-matter interactions are necessary for scaling trapped-ion architectures. In hyperfine qubits, counterpropagating beams generate entangling gates by coupling with motion, but this effect is undesirable during single-qubit operations. For that reason, single-qubit gates are traditionally implemented with copropagating beams, and the coexistence of two beam geometries adds hardware and computational overhead. In an effort towards collective performance improvement with minimal overhead, we design and implement pulse-amplitude and dephasing robust dynamically corrected gates using Space Curve Quantum Control (SCQC) and compare them against the constant-amplitude gate implementation. We perform gate set tomography on a four-qubit trapped-ion register, and we discover more than 50% error reduction when robust pulses are used. We find that counterpropagating robust gates often outperform their copropagating counterparts and reach error rates as low as $(3.59 \pm 1.25)\cdot 10^{-3}$, using diamond distance as a metric. This value establishes a laser-driven-gate error reference and is merely an order of magnitude higher than the best reported $microwave$ gate on a $single$ ion. Additional experiments reveal that robust pulses can effectively suppress non-Markovian errors that grow during runtime. Our work challenges the widely accepted belief that copropagating gates should be preferred for their weak motional coupling and invites the adoption of high-performance robust pulses that suppress multiple noise sources of the trapped-ion error budget.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Global Control with the Tavis-Cummings Interaction

arXiv:2606.12906v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the controllability of a system of qubits under global control, where control pulses act identically on all qubits. Specifically, we consider a collection of qubits identically coupled to a single bosonic mode, or harmonic oscillator, via the Jaynes-Cummings interaction. This collective coupling, known as the Tavis-Cummings (TC) interaction, has been realized in several quantum computing platforms, including superconducting and atomic qubit systems. Although the qubits do not interact directly with one another, they can become entangled through their common coupling to the bosonic mode. We characterize the group of unitaries that can be implemented on the joint Hilbert space of the qubits and bosonic mode using the TC interaction together with a global $z$ field $J_z$, corresponding to identical z rotations on all qubits. We show that for n>2 qubits the set of realizable unitaries is restricted by an "accidental" symmetry of the TC Hamiltonian, distinct from its "standard" U(1) and permutational symmetries. On the other hand, we find that the Hamiltonian $J_z^2$ breaks this accidental symmetry and, together with the TC interaction and $J_z$, achieves semi-universality: it allows the implementation of arbitrary unitaries that respect permutational and U(1) symmetry, up to certain constraints on the center of the group. In a companion paper, we further analyze this remarkable accidental symmetry and show that it can be understood through Schwinger's bosonic model of angular momentum.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

ImageWAM: Do World Action Models Really Need Video Generation, or Just Image Editing?

World Action Models (WAMs) commonly rely on video generation to bridge visual world modeling and robot control. However, video-based WAMs face three coupled limitations: dense multi-frame future tokens make inference costly, full video prediction spends capacity on action-irrelevant temporal and appearance details, and long-horizon future imagination may introduce errors that mislead action prediction. These issues raise a simple question: Does world action model really need video generation? We propose ImageWAM, a simple WAM framework that repurposes pretrained image editing models for robot action prediction. In contrast to video generation, image editing provides a better-matched prior: it only needs to model a target-frame transformation, focuses on action-relevant current-to-target visual differences, and grounds task instructions to localized visual changes through edit pretraining. In practice, ImageWAM does not decode the target frame at inference time; instead, it conditions a flow-matching action expert on the KV caches produced by image-editing denoising, using them as a compact world-action context. ImageWAM outperforms standard VLA baselines and matching competitive WAMs without additional policy pretraining across different simulator and real-world experiments. It also reduces FLOPs to 1/6 and latency to 1/4 of video-based WAMs. Attention analysis further shows that editing caches focus on task-relevant change regions, supporting image editing as an effective alternative to video-based world-action modeling.

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

Quality Perceptions and Intended Engagement in Response to AI-Generated and AI-Assisted News

arXiv:2409.03500v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in news production raises important questions about how audiences perceive and respond to AI-generated journalism. This preregistered survey experiment (N = 599, German-speaking Switzerland) examines (i) perceptions of article quality (measured as credibility, readability, and expertise) across news excerpts that were human-written, AI-assisted, or fully AI-generated, and (ii) self-reported intentions to engage following disclosure of AI involvement. Participants rated two short news excerpts before learning how they had been produced. Articles across all conditions were evaluated similarly in perceived quality. After disclosure, participants in the AI-assisted and AI-generated conditions reported a higher willingness to continue reading their assigned articles compared to the control group, but future willingness to read AI-generated news did not differ across conditions. Overall, the findings suggest that readers assess AI-generated and human-written news comparably in quality, while disclosure of AI use can momentarily increase curiosity or interest without yet changing longer-term reading intentions.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Nearest-neighbour gates are all you need: High-rate quantum low-density parity-check codes on a planar grid

arXiv:2606.19482v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-performance quantum low-density parity-check codes promise substantial reductions in the overhead of fault-tolerant quantum computation, but most constructions require long-range connectivity or qubit shuttling, both of which are difficult to realise in superconducting architectures. Here we introduce a family of quantum low-density parity-check codes that, for the first time, combines planar open-boundary layouts, finite-size advantages over surface codes, and syndrome extraction using only nearest-neighbour gates on a square grid of qubits. The key idea is to generate check-data connectivity dynamically: nearest-neighbour iSWAP walks both define the stabiliser supports and implement their measurement, avoiding the need for a long-range hardware graph. The resulting circuits achieve optimal constant-depth stabiliser measurement, independent of code size, and naturally remove leakage from the system by exchanging the role of check and data qubits at each syndrome extraction round. We find finite-size instances such as a [[323,14,15]] code, whose code-efficiency ratio is nearly an order of magnitude larger than that of rotated surface-code patches. At around 30 circuit qubits per logical qubit, the best directional tile-code layouts reduce the per-logical per-round logical error rate by up to a factor of 1000 relative to rotated surface-code memories. These results show that the advantages of quantum low-density parity-check codes can survive compilation into strictly planar nearest-neighbour circuits, bringing low-overhead fault-tolerant memories closer to near-term hardware.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Factor Analysing Predictive Processing: No Evidence for a General Factor Across Tasks

Background & Hypothesis: Dysfunctional predictive processing (PP), specifically the aberrant weighting of priors, is a frequently-proposed mechanism for psychosis and psychosis-like phenomena (schizotypy). Evidence for this theory mostly originates from single-task studies, which assume that all tasks load onto a single latent construct of PP performance, but the underlying factor structure of PP tasks is unknown. PP deficits in psychosis may be better described by a two-factor, hierarchical model: weakened lower-level (perceptual) priors compensated by higher-level (cognitive) priors. Study Design: This study implements a multi-paradigm approach in healthy participants to investigate latent constructs underlying PP and their relationship to schizotypy. Participants (N = 73) completed 6 tasks measuring reliance on priors across language, memory, visual, and auditory domains. A factor analysis investigated whether performance across tasks is captured by a single or two-factor model. Study Results: Although a two-factor model best described performance, factors reflected within-task correlations rather than a PP hierarchy. Cross-task PP measures were poorly correlated, suggesting that individuals' weighting of priors was task-specific. A full model including all task outcomes (not factors) significantly predicted the severity of schizotypal aberrant beliefs but no other schizotypal measures. Conclusions: These results do not evidence a single factor underpinning PP performance. It is therefore inappropriate to use results from single tasks to propose a generalised PP deficit in psychosis. Variation was also not captured by a two-factor hierarchical model of priors. Further multi-paradigm research is required to evaluate alternative models or additional variables that describe aberrant PP in psychosis.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Unveiling Hierarchical Invariants in Multiphoton Linear Optics

arXiv:2506.12857v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Linear optical networks driven by quantum states of light are important building blocks of photonic quantum technologies. They access large bosonic Hilbert spaces through multiphoton interference. At the same time, their dynamics are generated by single-particle mode transformations, thereby defining a highly structured subset of multiphoton unitaries and setting boundary on linear optics capability. To elucidate this boundary, we reveal an underlying fine-grained symmetry structure that partitions the multiphoton operator space into invariant subspaces and generates a hierarchy of invariants. We experimentally confirm the conservation of high-order invariants and demonstrate their operational utility in characterizing state reachability and the metrological capability of multiphoton probes. Our framework provides a symmetry-based perspective for understanding and harnessing structured multiphoton dynamics across photonic quantum technologies.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Preparing multi-qudit states in a definite-weight subspace

arXiv:2606.24659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We formulate a deterministic algorithm for preparing arbitrary multi-qudit states in a definite-weight subspace. By ordering the corresponding computational basis states according to a Gray code for multiset permutations, the state-preparation task is reduced to performing a sequence of controlled 2-qudit Gray rotations. We use this algorithm to prepare exact eigenstates of the SU(3)-invariant Heisenberg Hamiltonian, whose Bethe ansatz is nested. In particular, we describe the preparation of the Bethe states, which are SU(3) highest-weight states, as well as their lower-weight descendants. We also consider the preparation of $SU(d)$ Dicke states and their q-deformations.

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

iTRIALSPACE: Programmable Virtual Lesion Trials for Controlled Evaluation of Lung CT Models

We introduce iTRIALSPACE, a programmable evaluation framework for controlled assessment of lung CT models. Standard benchmarks are static retrospective collections that entangle lesion size, lobe prevalence, anatomy, and acquisition context, making it difficult to determine what structurally drives model accuracy. iTRIALSPACE addresses this limitation by composing real clinical CTs and lesion profiles into controlled virtual lesion trials through a four-stage pipeline: multidataset nodule profiling, explicit trial specification, anatomy-aware mask insertion, and ControlNet-conditioned CT synthesis. The framework is built on a unified 54-attribute nodule-profile dataset spanning 13,140 annotated nodules from seven public CT sources and instantiated as 13 trial modes. We evaluate iTRIALSPACE in a 55,469-sample Virtual Lesion Study spanning three medical VLMs, four spatialguidance conditions, and three clinical tasks. Across all 13 modes, the synthetic substrate remains within the real-to-real FID baseline, and synthetic performance rankings transfer strongly to real clinical data ($\rho$ = 0.93, p < 10$^{-15}$). Controlled trial modes expose findings unavailable to fixed-distribution benchmarks, including shortcut-driven size prediction collapse under lobe-equalized sampling and hostto-donor variance ratios of 8.9x and 3.3x in twin-cross analysis. These results position iTRIALSPACE as an auditable evaluation infrastructure for controlled, falsifiable testing beyond static retrospective benchmarks.

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

UniDrive: A Unified Vision-Language and Grounding Framework for Interpretable Risk Understanding in Autonomous Driving

arXiv:2606.24759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for autonomous driving scene understanding, yet existing methods still face a fundamental trade-off between temporal reasoning and spatial precision. Models that rely on single-frame or low-resolution inputs often miss small, distant, or partially occluded hazards, while language-centric driving models frequently provide limited grounded evidence for their explanations. To address this gap, we propose UniDrive, a unified visual-language and grounding framework for interpretable risk understanding in autonomous driving. UniDrive combines a temporal reasoning branch that models scene dynamics from multi-frame visual input with a high-resolution perception branch that preserves fine-grained spatial details from the latest frame. The two branches are integrated through a gated cross-attention fusion module, enabling dynamic context to be aligned with precise spatial evidence. Based on the fused representation, UniDrive jointly generates natural-language risk descriptions and grounded bounding-box outputs for risk objects. Experiments on the DRAMA-Reasoning benchmark show that UniDrive outperforms representative image-based and video-based baselines in both captioning and risk-object grounding. In particular, UniDrive achieves the best overall performance on the validation split and demonstrates clear advantages in small-object localization, zero-shot generalization to NuScenes and BDD100K, and human-rated interpretability and trustworthiness. These results suggest that explicitly combining temporal semantics and high-resolution perception provides a stronger foundation for interpretable and safety-oriented autonomous driving systems. The code is available at https://github.com/pixeli99/unidrive-dev.

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

Characterizing Cultural Localization in AI-Generated Stories

The global use of artificial intelligence has increased interest in assessing the ability to generate culturally localized content, including stories. Cultural localization in stories often occurs through either templated localization – the use of cultural markers (e.g., names, locations) in a generic narrative – or holistic localization – the variation of plots, values, and themes, in addition to cultural markers. We propose a method to measure the degree to which content was generated through templated localization. Specifically, we identify the lexical tokens that distinguish stories across nationalities and measure the similarity of the narratives that remain after removing them. In stories generated by five models on 125 topics for 193 nationalities, our method is able to detect that only a small subset (9-17%) of the vocabulary accounts for the variation across nationalities and that the narratives that remain after removing them contain repeated multi-word sequences, suggesting the presence of a shared culturally-agnostic narrative template. Finally, we characterize the cultural markers for their stereotypicality and offensiveness, finding that markers from 19 countries, mostly located in the Global South, are on average offensive.

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

ProPlay: Procedural World Models for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

Self-evolving agents are expected to improve through interaction without external supervision, but this remains difficult in partially observable environments where agents must explore actively, learn from limited feedback, and decide when to trust prior experience. Existing LLM-agent methods often rely on memory or planning modules, yet they rarely close the loop between them to continually refine an internal understanding of environment dynamics. We introduce ProPlay, a procedural world model that supports procedure-level preplay, where agents can rehearse future procedural paths using the learned world knowledge. Rather than representing experience as isolated rules or low-level action constraints, ProPlay abstracts successful trajectories into procedures and organizes them in a procedure graph that captures causal transitions among task stages. Each transition is associated with a reliability record embedding to estimate its task-specific contribution from past outcomes. Before each episode, ProPlay simulates future procedural trajectories over known graph structures as structured soft guidance; after execution, it refines the graph using environment feedback. Experiments on public benchmarks show that ProPlay consistently improves environment understanding and self-evolution capability over strong baselines. Our code has been released in https://github.com/antman9914/proplay.

19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Towards Conversational AI for Disease Management

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in diagnostic dialogue1, their capabilities for effective management reasoning—including disease progression, therapeutic response, and safe medication prescription—remain under-explored. We advance the previously demonstrated diagnostic capabilities of the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE)1−3 through a new LLM-based agentic system optimized for multi-visit clinical management and dialogue. To ground its reasoning in authoritative clinical knowledge, AMIE leverages Gemini’s long-context capabilities4, combining in-context retrieval with structured reasoning to align its output with up-to-date clinical practice guidelines and drug formularies. In a randomized, blinded virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) study, AMIE was compared to 21 primary care physicians (PCPs) across 100 multi-visit case scenarios designed to reflect UK NICE Guidance and BMJ Best Practice guidelines. AMIE was non-inferior to PCPs in management reasoning as assessed by specialists and scored better in both preciseness of treatments and investigations, and in its alignment with and grounding in clinical guidelines. To benchmark medication reasoning, we developed RxQA, a multiple-choice question benchmark derived from two national drug formularies (US, UK) and validated by board-certified pharmacists. Though AMIE and PCPs both benefited from the ability to access external drug information, AMIE outperformed PCPs on higher difficulty questions. While further research would be needed before real-world translation, AMIE’s strong performance across evaluations marks a significant step towards conversational AI as a tool in disease management.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

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

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

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LATTEArena: An Evaluation Framework for LLM-powered Tabular Feature Engineering (Extended Version)

arXiv:2606.09004v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Feature engineering remains a cornerstone of tabular data analysis, and Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for its automation, giving rise to LLM-powered Automated Tabular Feature Engineering (LATTE). However, the field lacks standardized, cost-aware evaluation platforms, and the combinatorial explosion of design choices obscures true algorithmic progress. To bridge these gaps, we systematically deconstruct 15 representative LATTE methods into a unified 6-dimensional taxonomy. Based on this abstraction, we introduce LATTEArena, a standardized, modular, and extensible benchmarking framework that decouples monolithic pipelines into reusable execution blocks. By distilling the massive combinatorial space, we evaluate 24 core LATTE configurations across 7 research questions. Our head-to-head benchmarking goes beyond predictive accuracy to quantify token efficiency and execution robustness, yielding 17 empirical findings on cost-effectiveness trade-offs. Furthermore, we provide 3 concrete recommendations for optimal real-world deployment. By enabling controlled component-level comparisons, LATTEArena shifts the paradigm from ad-hoc prompt engineering to systematic context management. All code, datasets, and over 4,000 execution logs are publicly available to foster a dynamic, community-driven benchmark. Our framework, leaderboard, and all artifacts are hosted on the LATTEArena project website at https://goodenhak.github.io/LATTEArena.

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

EG-VQA: Benchmarking Verifiable Video Question Answering with Grounded Temporal Evidence

arXiv:2606.24797v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have yielded promising performance on video question answering (VideoQA). Nevertheless, existing benchmarks are predominantly evaluated through answer correctness, while the grounding of predictions in relevant video evidence remains largely unexamined. This disconnect between answer generation and evidence understanding motivates the construction of the Evidence-Grounded Video Question Answering Benchmark (EG-VQA), an open-ended evaluation protocol in which each QA pair is explicitly annotated with supporting temporal evidence, thereby requiring joint reasoning and precise evidence localization. EG-VQA is comprised of 2,067 videos and 11,838 QA pairs with fine-grained evidence annotations. To evaluate predicted evidence, Evidence-Grounded F1 (EG-F1) is introduced as a unified metric in which temporal alignment and semantic consistency against ground-truth evidence are jointly measured. Experimental evaluation reveals that even strong proprietary models struggle to accurately ground their predictions, exposing a fundamental discrepancy between answer correctness and faithful evidence localization. To bridge this gap, EG-Reasoner, an evidence-grounded reasoning model trained with explicit supervision, is proposed. State-of-the-art performance is achieved among open-source models, with results competitive against proprietary systems, particularly pronounced gains are observed on reasoning-intensive tasks such as counterfactual questions. These findings demonstrate that scaling alone is insufficient for robust video understanding and that structured evidence supervision is essential for the development of more reliable and interpretable VideoQA systems.

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

Graph Learning Should Move Beyond Restrictive Views of Spectral and Message-Passing GNNs

arXiv:2602.10031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) are commonly divided into message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) and spectral GNNs, reflecting two largely separate research traditions in machine learning and signal processing. While MPNNs have a precise definition, there is no widely accepted criterion for what makes a mapping a spectral GNN. Most existing work restricts spectral GNNs to layered architectures based on linear spectral filters. Under this restriction, we show that spectral and spatial GNNs have largely equivalent expressive power. To promote progress in the field, we propose a precise definition of spectral GNNs based on eigenbasis symmetries, in contrast to the definition of MPNNs via neighborhood permutation symmetries. We further argue that the two perspectives offer complementary strengths. MPNNs provide a natural language for discrete structure and expressivity analysis through tools from logic and graph isomorphism, while the spectral perspective offers principled tools for understanding smoothing, bottlenecks, stability, and community structure. Overall, we argue that progress in graph learning will be accelerated by clarifying the similarities and differences between these perspectives and by moving toward a unified theoretical framework.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Toward Simultaneously Optimal Regret in U-Calibration

arXiv:2606.18527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: U-calibration studies online forecasting algorithms whose predictions can be consumed by any unknown downstream agent, guaranteeing sublinear regret simultaneously for all proper loss functions. Existing U-calibration algorithms achieve worst-case optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for every bounded proper loss, but they fail to adapt to easier losses: as we show, even for smooth losses such as squared loss, they incur $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ regret instead of the optimal $O(\log T)$ regret. In this work, we show that this limitation is not inherent. Specifically, we design a single forecast algorithm that simultaneously achieves $\tilde O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for every bounded proper loss and $O(\log T)$ regret for every bounded smooth proper loss. More generally, our algorithm also attains logarithmic regret for losses that are smooth relative to the log-barrier, which include several non-Lipschitz examples. Our approach is based on a novel variant of Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader (FTPL) in which perturbations are applied directly in the prediction space using self-concordant noise. The resulting analysis also departs substantially from prior FTPL analyses due to the complex nature of this noise and may be of independent interest.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Scale Buys Interpolation, Structure Buys a Horizon: Certified Predictability for Equivariant World Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scale buys interpolation; structure buys a certified horizon. A world model's average error says nothing about whether a particular prediction can be trusted, or for how long. For equivariant latent world models we give a computable, multi-step certificate of the predictable horizon: $T$-step rollout error is provably constant over each symmetry orbit (Theorem A) and stratified channel-by-channel by the predictor's Lyapunov spectrum, $T_j(\epsilon)\sim\log(1/\epsilon)/\lambda_j$. The horizon is two-sided – a matching lower bound makes approximate equivariance provably horizon-limited – and the certificate is exclusive to structure: orbit-constant error characterizes equivariance, so no non-equivariant model has it at any scale. Empirically, on 40-D Lorenz-96 only a $\mathbb{Z}_N$-equivariant network recovers the full Lyapunov spectrum ($R^2{=}0.98$); dense and recurrent baselines fail. Because the spectrum is faithful, the certificate acts, a priori: under a fixed sensing budget a $c\times$-inflated certificate provably needs $c\times$ the budget, and the equivariant certificate meets a budget its inflated dense counterpart cannot – with zero calibration data. The same read-out, unchanged, audits public pretrained world models training-free: TD-MPC2 checkpoints land on the certificate's own scope taxonomy – calibrated where strongly expansive (ratio 0.94-1.02), optimistic where weakly expansive, correctly abstaining where contracting – a map a deployed monitor replicates cell-by-cell, out-of-sample. Across the official 1M-317M multitask ladder, calibration does not improve with parameters. On V-JEPA 2-AC (1B, real robot data) the measured cross-check correctly overrides an over-promising tangent spectrum – the cross-validated audit, not the raw number, is the deployable object. Scale buys interpolation, not a calibrated horizon.