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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Estimating the effectiveness of syndromic screening at airports for Bundibugyo ebolavirus disease

Authors:
Quilty↗B. J↗

We used a stochastic simulation model to estimate the effectiveness of combined exit and entry airport screening for Bundibugyo ebolavirus disease (BVD), using natural-history parameters from a Bayesian re-analysis of the 2012 Isiro outbreak. For a 12-hour international flight from DRC or Uganda at 86% screening sensitivity, we estimate 65% of infected travellers would arrive undetected (95% CrI: 38 - 76%). The main driver of this outcome is the relative duration of the the incubation period (approximately 7.7 days) and the onset-to-severe-disease interval (approximately 4 days): most infected travellers board before symptom onset and are undetectable by any syndromic screen, whilst those who are symptomatic progress rapidly to illness severe enough to preclude travel. This is compounded during active epidemic growth, when recently exposed (and therefore pre-symptomatic) cases are overrepresented among travellers. Syndromic airport screening offers limited protection against BVD spread via air travel, and should be complemented by outbreak control at source and strengthened clinical surveillance in receiving countries with high travel connectivity to affected areas.

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02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Distributional Statistical Models: Weak Moments, Cumulants, and a Central Limit Theorem

Authors:
R. Labouriau↗

arXiv:2604.20634v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many important statistical models fall outside classical moment-based methods due to the non-existence of moments or moment generating functions. We propose a generalised probabilistic framework in which a probability law is represented by a tempered distribution $T \in \mathcal{S}'$, on the same footing as a density, a distribution function, or a characteristic function. Information about the law is extracted by evaluating $T$ on test functions regularised by a given positive Schwartz kernel $\varphi \in \mathcal{S}$ – the kernel serving as a probe, not as part of the law. Expectations are defined via the action of distributions on regularised test functions, yielding well-defined weak moments, weak characteristic functions, and weak cumulants of all orders. These extend classical quantities and retain key algebraic properties such as additivity under independence and natural affine transformation rules. The main results are: (i) a systematic algebra of weak cumulants; (ii) a weak moment problem where existence of all moments holds unconditionally and uniqueness depends on the kernel, with uniqueness results under Gaussian kernels (via Hermite completeness), positive Schwartz kernels with an exponential tail bound and square-integrable densities (via a Carleman-type criterion), and kernels with exponential decay (via Denjoy-Carleman quasi-analyticity); and (iii) a weak central limit theorem formulated as convergence of weak characteristic functions to a Gaussian limit, covering cases where the classical theorem fails. The framework is illustrated with Student's $t$, stable, and hyperbolic distributions. As a statistical consequence, the weak first moment yields a consistent estimator of the location parameter in the Cauchy model, where no classical moment-based estimator exists. A full statistical treatment is given in a companion paper.

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

Function-Vector Heads Are Two Populations: Writers and Cancellers in In-Context Learning

Authors:
Han-yu Wang↗

Function-vector (FV) heads are identified by the magnitude of their causal contribution to in-context rule tasks, and the resulting top set is treated as a single functional class. We show this hides a sign structure. Under a sign-preserving criterion (refined direct logit attribution, validated head by head with path patching) the FV population splits into two opposing groups: writers push the rule-correct logit up, cancellers push it down, and ablating both together moves the readout less than the sum of the two. The split is causal and reproducible. It holds in all but two of the fifteen (model, task) cells we test, spanning three architectures and six Pythia scales, and a sign-shuffle null rejects the single-class account in all but one of the six main cells. It is also invisible to magnitude-only ranking, which surfaces whichever group locally dominates and misses the other, so any function vector or ablation built that way silently averages a promoting and a suppressing mechanism. Cancellers are not attention sinks, induction heads, or copy-suppression heads, and their causal effect is larger than that of magnitude-matched non-FV controls. Zero-ablating them recovers $+0.13$ to $+0.29$ nats on the correct label in every main cell, and shifts accuracy by $+2$ to $+7$ pp in the same direction.

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05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Model-independent upper bounds for the prices of Bermudan options with convex payoffs

Authors:
David Hobson↗Dominykas Norgilas↗

arXiv:2503.13328v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Suppose $\mu$ and $\nu$ are probability measures on $\mathbb{R}$ satisfying $\mu \leq_{cx} \nu$. Let $a$ and $b$ be convex functions on $\mathbb{R}$ with $a \geq b \geq 0$. We are interested in finding $$\sup_{\mathbf{M}} \sup_{\tau} \mathbb{E}^{\mathbf{M}} \left[ a(X) I_{ \{ \tau = 1 \} } + b(Y) I_{ \{ \tau = 2 \} } \right] $$ where the first supremum is taken over consistent models $\mathbf{M}$ (i.e., filtered probability spaces $(\Omega, \mathbf{F}, \mathbb{F}, \mathbb{P})$ such that $Z=(z,Z_1,Z_2)=(\int_{\mathbb{R}} x \mu(dx) = \int_{\mathbb{R}} y \nu(dy), X, Y)$ is a $(\mathbb{F},\mathbb{P})$ martingale, where $X$ has law $\mu$ and $Y$ has law $\nu$ under $\mathbb{P}$) and $\tau$ in the second supremum is a $(\mathbb{F},\mathbb{P})$-stopping time taking values in $\{1,2\}$. Our contributions are first to characterise and simplify the dual problem, and second to completely solve the problem under some structural assumptions on the measures $\mu$ and $\nu$ (namely that $\mu$ and $\nu$ are absolutely continuous probability measures that satisfy the Dispersion Assumption). A key finding is that the canonical set-up in which the filtration is that generated by $Z$ is not rich enough to define an optimal model and additional randomisation is required. This holds even though the marginal laws $\mu$ and $\nu$ are atom-free. The problem has an interpretation of finding the robust, or model-free, no-arbitrage bound on the price of a Bermudan option with two possible exercise dates, given the prices of co-maturing European options.

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

Characterizing Admissible Objective Functions for Hierarchical Clustering

Authors:
Ryuki Tsukuba↗Kazutoshi Ando↗

arXiv:2604.23628v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hierarchical clustering is a fundamental task in data analysis, but classical methods have long lacked a principled objective function. Dasgupta [STOC~2016] took an important step toward addressing this gap by proposing a well-motivated objective function for cluster trees. Cohen-Addad et al. [J. ACM 2019] subsequently introduced the notion of admissibility: an objective function is admissible if, whenever the input similarity matrix admits generating trees, its minimizers are precisely those generating trees.They also gave a necessary and sufficient condition for admissibility within a family of objective functions based on aggregate intercluster similarity. We refer to this family as sum-type objective functions. However, apart from Dasgupta's original objective function, no explicit admissible objective functions in this family were provided. In this paper, we study admissible objective functions for hierarchical clustering in two directions. For sum-type objective functions, we give a complete characterization when the scaling function is a symmetric polynomial of degree at most two, and we derive sufficient conditions for degree-three polynomials. We also show that the recursive sparsest cut algorithm achieves an O$(\phi)$-approximation ratio for the admissible objective functions covered by our characterization, where $\phi$ is the approximation factor of the sparsest cut subroutine. We then introduce max-type objective functions, where cluster interaction is measured by maximum, rather than aggregate, intercluster similarity. For this class, we characterize which objective functions are admissible for arbitrary symmetric scaling functions and give a complete characterization when the scaling function is a symmetric polynomial of degree at most two.

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

LapidaryEngine: Fully Conversational Crystal Generation

Authors:
Yusei Ito↗Yuta Suzuki↗Tomoya Murata↗Masaki Adachi↗

arXiv:2606.14215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has inspired the vision of generating bespoke crystal materials directly from natural-language instructions, enabling users to design materials through intuitive, conversational interaction. Existing text-to-crystal generative models represent important early steps toward this goal, but they suffer from two critical limitations: (i) restricted input formats that require highly structured descriptions (e.g., chemical formulas), and (ii) one-directional generation, where models can map text to crystal but cannot perform the inverse. These limitations prevent fully conversational workflows and hinder alignment with users' inherently ambiguous and evolving desiderata. We address these challenges with LapidaryEngine, the first model to support fully conversational crystal generation. LapidaryEngine accepts free-form natural-language requests and performs iterative refinement and editing in a dialogue-like manner. The key innovation is a pivot representation, a third, intermediate form that enables bidirectional translation between text and crystal structures despite the absence of direct paired datasets. Leveraging this pivot allows robust interpretation of user feedback and precise structural control. We demonstrate LapidaryEngine across diverse tasks, including insulator discovery, stability optimization, compositional modification, and structural editing, showcasing its ability to align generated materials with user intent in an interactive manner.

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

Rethinking the Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Penghui Qi↗Xiangxin Zhou↗Zichen Liu↗Tianyu Pang↗Chao Du↗Min Lin↗Wee Sun Lee↗

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio clipping mechanism in PPO is structurally ill-suited for the large vocabularies inherent to LLMs. PPO constrains policy updates based on the probability ratio of sampled tokens, which serves as a noisy single-sample Monte Carlo estimate of the true policy divergence. This creates a sub-optimal learning dynamic: updates to low-probability tokens are aggressively over-penalized, while potentially catastrophic shifts in high-probability tokens are under-constrained, leading to training inefficiency and instability. To address this, we propose Divergence Proximal Policy Optimization (DPPO), which substitutes heuristic clipping with a more principled constraint based on a direct estimate of policy divergence (e.g., Total Variation or KL). To avoid huge memory footprint, we introduce the efficient Binary and Top-K approximations to capture the essential divergence with negligible overhead. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that DPPO achieves superior training stability and efficiency compared to existing methods, offering a more robust foundation for RL-based LLM fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Stable-RL.

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09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Changes in hierarchical brain dynamics of rumination following mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression

Authors:
Dagnino↗P. C↗van der Velden↗A. M↗Ruhe↗H. G↗Kuyken↗Kringelbach↗M. L↗Vohryzek↗Deco↗

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a leading cause of disability worldwide with risk of onset and recurrence linked to depressive ruminative thought patterns. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is an evidence-based treatment for depression that targets the ability to recognise, decenter, and disengage from ruminative thought patterns. Elucidating how MBCT impacts hierarchical brain organisation may be key to understanding the processes by which MBCT can modulate ruminative tendencies. In a randomised controlled functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) trial on individuals with MDD (N=80) before and after MBCT in addition to treatment as usual (TAU), we investigated changes in hierarchical brain organisation during resting-state and rumination. We built whole-brain models to obtain generative connectivity (GEC) matrices per patient and quantified brain hierarchy by measuring the global directedness and regional trophic levels in each GEC, in which greater directedness reflects more directional information flow and less recurrence. Global directedness in MBCT+TAU compared to TAU increased during rumination, with no changes during resting-state. Furthermore, increased regional breadth of hierarchy during rumination was related to improvements in clinical and behavioural outcomes following MBCT+TAU. Increased brain hierarchy during rumination following mindfulness training may be consistent with a shift away from self-reinforcing negative mental loops towards more differentiated and less coupled cognitive and bodily cycles, supporting MBCT's ability to interrupt ruminative processes. Hierarchical brain dynamics may hold promise as a treatment-sensitive marker and a potential mechanism of therapeutic change in MBCT for depression.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Evaluating Factual Density in Multi-Source RAG: A Study in Medical AI Accuracy

Authors:
Michael R. DeMarco↗

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the current industry standard for grounding AI in real-world facts. Traditional retrieval methods rely on keyword matching and topic proximity, ranking content based on how closely it sounds like the user's query. What they do not measure is how many verified facts the content actually contains. This structural gap, termed the Expert Blindness Effect, causes standard RAG pipelines to consistently bury high-density factual evidence in favor of lexically dominant text on the same topic. To address this gap, this paper introduces Factual Density (FD*), a novel retrieval optimization signal that measures the proportion of verified atomic claims relative to total token count. Using the NexusAgentics Ghost Audit preprocessing pipeline, raw text is scored for factual specificity using probabilistic factuality analysis to filter content before corpus ingestion. An initial formulation introduced a severe document-length confound (Pearson R = -0.8636, p = 2.27e-07). Implementing Z-score normalization within length bins resolved this bias, validating FD* as a length-independent density signal (p = 0.0749). Evaluated against the HealthFC benchmark (750 health claims labeled Supported, Refuted, or No Evidence by medical experts), FD*-optimized retrieval was the only condition to achieve 100% systematic review saturation in top-5 results, surfacing Cochrane evidence that standard cosine similarity ranked outside the top ten. Ground truth verification confirmed 25 mappings across seven HealthFC-supported claims. While full statistical validation across n=50 queries remains future work due to constraints on corpus-benchmark alignment, these findings establish factual density reranking as a low-cost, high-impact intervention for improving factual precision in health RAG architectures.

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11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Blood-brain barrier dysfunction in cerebral amyloid angiopathy is associated with disseminated cortical superficial siderosis

Authors:
Bay↗Pfister↗Mattern↗Bernal↗Neumann↗Doerner↗Meuth↗S. G↗Schreiber↗Arndt↗

Background: Blood-brain barrier (BBB) dysfunction is increasingly recognized as a feature of cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) and has been linked to hemorrhagic imaging manifestations such as cortical superficial siderosis. However, it remains unclear whether neurovascular barrier dysfunction can be captured by routinely available fluid biomarkers and whether such markers identify clinically relevant hemorrhage-prone CAA phenotypes. The CSF/serum albumin quotient (QAlb) is an established marker of neurovascular barrier dysfunction. We investigated QAlb levels in CAA and their association with imaging markers of disease severity. Methods: We included 225 participants (115 with CAA, 72 with Alzheimers disease [AD], 38 healthy controls) with CSF biomarkers and standardized MRI evaluation. Pathologic QAlb levels were identified via the age-corrected Reiber-formula. Group differences and determinants of pathological QAlb were assessed using uni- and multivariable regression analyses. The diagnostic relevance was assessed by receiver operating characteristic analysis. Results: QAlb levels were higher in CAA than in controls (ratio of means [RoM] 1.43, 95% CI 1.28-1.58) and patients with AD (RoM 1.22, 95% CI 1.10-1.35; both p

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

Training LLMs with Reinforcement Learning over Digital Twin Representations for Reasoning-Intensive Surgical VideoQA

Authors:
Yiqing Shen↗Han Zhang↗Mathias Unberath↗

Surgical video question answering requires multi-step reasoning across semantic, spatial, and temporal dimensions. Existing methods architecturally compress videos into discrete token representations and couple visual perception with reasoning. This approach fragments continuous spatial-temporal relationships and has been shown to restrict multi-step reasoning capabilities. We introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that trains large language models (LLMs) to decouple perception from reasoning by operating over digital twin representations constructed from surgical foundation models. Additionally, we introduce hierarchical representations across frame, temporal window, and procedure levels with probabilistic uncertainty estimates. Finally, we propose a novel reward that combines format validation with accuracy assessment through clinical plausibility evaluation and uncertainty-aware calibration for training. To demonstrate the capabilities of this approach, we introduce REAL-Colon-Reason, a colonoscopic benchmark with 2000 question-answer pairs across three complexity levels. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on REAL-Colon-Reason and two existing surgical VideoQA benchmarks REAL-Colon-VQA and EndoVis18-VQA.

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

Attention Sinks in Diffusion Transformers: A Causal Analysis

Authors:
Fangzheng Wu↗Brian Summa↗

Attention sinks – tokens that receive disproportionate attention mass – are assumed to be functionally important in autoregressive language models, but their role in diffusion transformers remains unclear. We present a causal analysis in text-to-image diffusion, dynamically identifying dominant attention recipients per timestep and suppressing them via paired, training-free interventions on the score and value paths. Across 553 GenEval prompts on Stable Diffusion~3 (with SDXL corroboration), removing these sinks does not degrade text-image alignment (CLIP-T) or preference proxies (ImageReward, HPS-v2) at $k{=}1$; only under stronger interventions ($k\!\geq\!10$) does HPS-v2 exhibit a metric-dependent boundary, while CLIP-T remains robust throughout. The perceptual shifts induced by suppression are nonetheless sink-specific – $\sim\!6\times$ larger than equal-budget random masking – revealing an empirical dissociation between trajectory-level perturbation and semantic alignment in diffusion transformers. \footnote{Code available at https://github.com/wfz666/ICML26-attention-sink.}

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

TopoCap: Learning Topology-Agnostic Motion Priors for Monocular Video-to-Animation

Authors:
Cheng-Feng Pu↗Jia-Peng Zhang↗Meng-Hao Guo↗Yan-Pei Cao↗Shi-Min Hu↗

The explosion of generative 3D assets has created a massive demand for animation, yet current motion capture methods remain brittle, restricted to species-specific templates (e.g., SMPL) or requiring labor-intensive manual rigging. We introduce TopoCap, the first unified framework capable of extracting motion from monocular video and retargeting it onto characters with arbitrary, unseen skeletal topologies, i.e., from bipeds to hexapods and inanimate objects, without test-time optimization. Our key insight is that while skeletal structures are combinatorial and discrete, the underlying physics of motion occupy a continuous, low-dimensional manifold. We materialize this insight via a two-stage generative pipeline. First, we learn a Universal Motion Manifold using a Graph CVAE that compresses heterogeneous kinematic chains into a shared, fixed-length latent code. By explicitly conditioning the decoder on a structural embedding of the target rig, we disentangle motion dynamics from skeletal topology. Second, we treat video-to-animation as a conditional flow matching problem, predicting these topology-agnostic codes from visual features. To learn this generalized prior, we introduce Mobjaverse, a massive-scale dataset curated from Objaverse-XL. Comprising over 5,000 unique skeletal topologies and 2 million frames, it exceeds the structural diversity of existing datasets by two orders of magnitude. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \MethodMotion outperforms specialist models on human and quadruped benchmarks while enabling zero-shot retargeting for the long tail of 3D creatures. Dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/duckduckplz/Mobjaverse.

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15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

AI-Driven Assessment of Human Tutors: Linking Training Performance to Real-Life Practice

Authors:
Danielle R. Thomas↗Marie Cynthia Abijuru Kamikazi↗Clara Brandt↗Conrad Borchers↗Kenneth R. Koedinger↗

arXiv:2606.18617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: There exist numerous tutor training platforms. However, few provide AI-driven training and evaluation for human tutors based on real-life performance. We present an AI-driven system that assesses both open responses during training and authentic real-life tutoring. Unlike platforms that only assess learning through online training or simulations, our system utilizes Generative AI (Gemini-2.5-pro) to analyze transcriptions of authentic tutoring, measuring the transfer of tutor skills to real-life application. Human tutors instructing students remotely in math (N=86) completed six scenario-based lessons, averaging a significant 7.4% learning gain. Using mixed-effects models across 405 session-to-lesson pairs, we found that training performance significantly predicted real-life transcript scores with an effect size of 0.25 SD. Model comparison (AIC/BIC) indicated averaging open response and multiple choice performance during training predicted real-life tutor performance best, although open responses were comparatively more predictive. Exploratory analysis showed that after training, tutors were significantly more likely to encounter pedagogical opportunities to apply their skills (61.1% to 68.9%) and demonstrated higher execution quality within those opportunities (65.5% to 68.1%). Interrupted time series analysis suggested that these tutor improvements were part of a gradual trend over time rather than an immediate intervention effect of training. We illustrate an AI-driven method to link tutor training with real-life assessment. In doing so, we contribute open datasets, AI prompts, and scoring rubrics to support transparency and reproducibility.

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

The Urysohn Machine: A Metric-Topological Model of Computation

Authors:
Xin Li↗

arXiv:2508.14143v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce the Urysohn Machine, an effective model of classification-oriented computation in which metric separation, frontier structure, and contraction are explicit parts of the computational state. Its basic object is a Urysohn Triple: a support region, a target partition, and a separating classifier stored in a reusable Metric Library. The topological foundation is a constructive Urysohn Realization theorem for finite simplicial settings. It builds separators from dyadic ladders of nested polyhedral regions and equips their frontiers with a chain-level calculus: frontiers are cycles, and shells between levels have boundaries given by differences of frontiers. This construction yields two related complexity measures: decision-boundary width, the geometric measure of a single classifier's boundary, and Urysohn width, the total frontier mass represented by a library or realization. We prove an Amortized Separation Theorem showing that approximating a boundary of width to accuracy requires a number of simple basis triples proportional to boundary width and inversely proportional to resolution, under explicit boundary-footprint assumptions. We also introduce a contrastive separation operator whose graph-cut functional consistently estimates decision-boundary width from sampled metric data, while its Laplacian spectrum certifies class-component structure and conductance. Finally, we analyze the dynamic Urysohn ladder and prove four guarantees: separability under quotient collapse, stability of committed frontiers, bounded capacity under contraction, and scalability with quotient distance. Together, these results give a metric-topological account of classification complexity, amortized inference, and compositional reuse that preserves classical computability while exposing geometric structure hidden by purely symbolic descriptions.

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

Verified Detection and Prevention of Concurrency Anomalies in Multi-Agent Large Language Model Systems

Authors:
Sajjad Khan↗

arXiv:2606.17182v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems share state through memory stores, vector indices, and tool registries. We model such sharing as long-running read-generate-write operations under deterministic-generation semantics – the regime durable-execution engines enforce by deterministic replay – and formalize four concurrency anomalies in TLA+: stale-generation, phantom-tool, causal-cascade, and tool-effect reordering, structural analogues of classical isolation anomalies, each with a TLC counter-example. The exclusion lattice over these anomalies is trivial; the contribution is the mechanically verified realizability and strict separation of one maximal chain within it, $L_0 \subsetneq \cdots \subsetneq L_4$, to our knowledge the first machine-checked consistency hierarchy for such runtimes. A development of 274 Verus obligations (zero assume, zero admit; trust base: two structural axioms and a mutex correspondence) proves the detectors sound and complete against the specifications and each runtime its avoidance set. Three deployed Rust runtimes realize L0-L1 (pessimistic locking, serializable snapshot isolation, default-SI), each verified against stale-generation and refined to its state machine; L2-L4 are exec-mode-verified with dependency-free prevention twins (A3, A6, A2: 0/1000 versus 1000/1000), and L2 is run live across three model families (A3 prevented in all 120 retracted sessions). We reproduce a silent lost update in ByteDance's deer-flow, formalizing its fix as a verified $L_0 \to L_1$ refinement, and exhibit tool-effect reordering in LangGraph's ToolNode on unmodified output, removed by an L3 commit-order sequencer. The verified detector, refinements, and realizability artifacts are the contribution; the phenomena and lattice are classical.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Can professional translators identify machine-generated text?

Authors:
Michael Farrell↗

This study investigates whether professional translators without prior specialized training can reliably identify short stories generated in Italian by artificial intelligence (AI). Sixty-nine translators took part in an in-person experiment, where they assessed three anonymized short stories - two written by ChatGPT-4o and one by a human author. For each story, participants rated the likelihood of AI authorship and provided justifications for their choices. While average results were inconclusive, a statistically significant subset (16.2%) successfully distinguished the synthetic texts from the human text, suggesting that their judgements were informed by analytical skill rather than chance. However, a nearly equal number misclassified the texts in the opposite direction, often relying on subjective impressions rather than objective markers, possibly reflecting a reader preference for AI-generated texts. Low burstiness and narrative contradiction emerged as the most reliable indicators of synthetic authorship, with unexpected calques, semantic loans and syntactic transfer from English also reported. In contrast, features such as grammatical accuracy and emotional tone frequently led to misclassification. These findings raise questions about the role and scope of synthetic-text editing in professional contexts.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

CORE-Bench: Fostering the Credibility of Published Research Through a Computational Reproducibility Agent Benchmark

Authors:
Zachary S. Siegel↗Sayash Kapoor↗Nitya Nadgir↗Benedikt Stroebl↗Arvind Narayanan↗

AI agents have the potential to aid users on a variety of consequential tasks, including conducting scientific research. To spur the development of useful agents, we need benchmarks that are challenging, but more crucially, directly correspond to real-world tasks of interest. This paper introduces such a benchmark, designed to measure the accuracy of AI agents in tackling a crucial yet surprisingly challenging aspect of scientific research: computational reproducibility. This task, fundamental to the scientific process, involves reproducing the results of a study using the provided code and data. We introduce CORE-Bench (Computational Reproducibility Agent Benchmark), a benchmark consisting of 270 tasks based on 90 scientific papers across three disciplines (computer science, social science, and medicine). Tasks in CORE-Bench consist of three difficulty levels and include both language-only and vision-language tasks. We provide an evaluation system to measure the accuracy of agents in a fast and parallelizable way, saving days of evaluation time for each run compared to a sequential implementation. We evaluated two baseline agents: the general-purpose AutoGPT and a task-specific agent called CORE-Agent. We tested both variants using two underlying language models: GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. The best agent achieved an accuracy of 21% on the hardest task, showing the vast scope for improvement in automating routine scientific tasks. Having agents that can reproduce existing work is a necessary step towards building agents that can conduct novel research and could verify and improve the performance of other research agents. We hope that CORE-Bench can improve the state of reproducibility and spur the development of future research agents.

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

Encode Errors: Representational Retrieval of In-Context Demonstrations for Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction

Authors:
Guangyue Peng↗Wei Li↗Wen Luo↗Houfeng Wang↗

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) involves detecting and correcting the wrong usage of grammar. While large language models (LLMs) with in-context learning (ICL) capabilities have shown significant progress on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, their few-shot performance on GEC remains suboptimal. This is mainly due to the challenge of retrieving suitable in-context demonstrations that capture error patterns instead of semantic similarity. In this paper, we demonstrate that LLMs can inherently capture information related to grammatical errors through their internal states. From these states, we extract the Grammatical Error Representation (GER), an informative and semantically neutral encoding of grammatical errors. Our novel GER-based retrieval method significantly boosts performance in ICL settings on multilingual GEC datasets, improving the precision of correction. For high-resource languages, our results on 8B-sized open-source models match those of closed-source models such as Deepseek2.5 and GPT-4o-mini. For low-resource languages, our $F_{0.5}$ scores surpass the baseline by up to a factor of 1.20. This method provides a more precise and resource-efficient solution for multilingual GEC, offering a promising direction for interpretable GEC research.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

VOiLA: Vectorized Online Planning with Learned Diffusion Model for POMDP Agents

Authors:
Marcus Hoerger↗Rishikesh Joshi↗Rahul Shome↗Ian Manchester↗Hanna Kurniawati↗

arXiv:2606.19729v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Planning under uncertainty is an essential capability for autonomous robots. The Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) provides a powerful framework for such a capability. Although POMDP-based planning has advanced significantly, its application to real-world problems is often limited by the difficulty of obtaining faithful POMDP models. We present Vectorized Online planning wIth Learned diffusion model for POMDP Agents (VOiLA), a framework that learns task-agnostic POMDP models for online planning under uncertainty. VOiLA learns transition and observation samplers using conditional diffusion models and learns observation-likelihood models for particle-based belief updates. To enable efficient online planning, the diffusion samplers are distilled into compact feedforward generators and integrated with Vectorized Online POMDP Planner (VOPP), an online POMDP planner designed to leverage GPU parallelization. Experimental results indicate the distillation strategy reduces sampling cost by up to nearly three orders of magnitude, making learned generative POMDP models practical for online planning. Evaluation of VOiLA on three benchmark problems indicate that VOiLA achieves equal or better performance than Recurrent Soft Actor Critic while using less than 10% training data, and generalizes much better to unseen environment configurations. Physical robot evaluation indicates VOiLA uses the models learned using only simulated data and generates a policy that successfully accomplish the task in 10 of 10 runs.

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

TechRAG: Evidence-Gated Multimodal Agentic RAG for Technical Literature Reasoning

Authors:
Kanwar Bharat Singh↗

arXiv:2606.01613v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents an agentic multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for domain-specific literature reasoning, instantiated on a curated corpus of several thousand papers in intelligent tires, vehicle dynamics, vehicle control, sensing, estimation, and machine learning. Unlike conventional single-pass RAG systems, the proposed architecture uses an autonomous, evidence-gated pipeline that classifies query intent, generates separate text and visual query rewrites, performs hybrid text retrieval with FAISS and BM25 followed by cross-encoder reranking, expands evidence through graph-guided chunk traversal over a Neo4j knowledge graph, and retrieves visual document evidence using ColSmol late-interaction embeddings with MUVERA fixed-dimensional encoding, approximate nearest-neighbor search, and MaxSim reranking. The framework scores evidence sufficiency using a 100-point rubric with hybrid rule-based/LLM review, retries retrieval through drift-guarded reformulation, searches external academic databases through optimize–search–vet loops, merges and deduplicates multimodal evidence, verifies citation integrity, and generates cited answers through Planner, Researcher, Writer, and Critic agents with self-correcting revision. Key contributions include: (i) a scalable multimodal retrieval architecture combining text, graph, and visual evidence over 40,000 document pages; (ii) an interpretable evidence sufficiency and retry mechanism; (iii) a multi-agent generation pipeline with evidence mapping and critic-driven revision; (iv) a domain knowledge graph with LLM-based entity extraction, OpenAlex author validation, and intra-corpus citation resolution; and (v) a route-dependent external search architecture for targeted literature expansion. The result is a practical, evidence-gated, multimodal agentic RAG architecture for technical reasoning over specialized research corpora.

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

CAMEO: A Conditional and Quality-Aware Multi-Agent Image Editing Orchestrator

Authors:
Yuhan Pu↗Hao Zheng↗Ziqian Mo↗Zirui Pang↗Hill Zhang↗Tianyi Fan↗Shuhong Wu↗Jiaheng Wei↗

Conditional image editing aims to modify a source image according to textual prompts and optional reference guidance. Such editing is crucial in scenarios requiring strict structural control (i.e., anomaly insertion in driving scenes and complex human pose transformation). Despite recent advances in large-scale editing models (i.e., Seedream, Nano Banana, etc), most approaches rely on single-step generation. This paradigm often lacks explicit quality control, may introduce excessive deviation from the original image, and frequently produces structural artifacts or environment-inconsistent modifications, typically requiring manual prompt tuning to achieve acceptable results. We propose CAMEO, a structured multi-agent framework that reformulates conditional editing as a quality-aware, feedback-driven process rather than a one-shot generation task. CAMEO decomposes editing into coordinated stages of planning, structured prompting, hypothesis generation, and adaptive reference grounding, where external guidance is invoked only when task complexity requires it. To overcome the lack of intrinsic quality control in existing methods, evaluation is embedded directly within the editing loop. Intermediate results are iteratively refined through structured feedback, forming a closed-loop process that progressively corrects structural and contextual inconsistencies. We evaluate CAMEO on anomaly insertion and human pose switching tasks. Across multiple strong editing backbones and independent evaluation models, CAMEO consistently achieves 20\% more win rate on average compared to multiple state-of-the-art models, demonstrating improved robustness, controllability, and structural reliability in conditional image editing.

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

Steering Emotional Dynamics for Art Therapy: Controllable Narrative Script Generation through Hierarchically Guided LLM Agents

Authors:
Suqing Wang↗Qinghai Miao↗Chao Guo↗Yisheng Lv↗

arXiv:2606.16481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Art therapy plays a vital role in emotional healing, in which narrative creation acts as the primary vehicle for emotional expression. Given the inherently dynamic nature of emotions during healing, narratives with finely controlled emotional fluctuations enable individuals to safely project inner conflicts and achieve emotional catharsis. Recently, with the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), automated narrative generation technology has provided a new pathway to support such artistic designs. However, while existing methods can produce fluent texts, they struggle to generate narratives that adhere to specified affective trajectories, failing to meet the demands of emotion-oriented psychological healing. To address these issues, this paper proposes EC-Script, an LLM agent-based framework that enables hierarchical control of the affective trajectory in narrative generation for emotional healing. To ensure that the generated narratives strictly follow the given emotional patterns, EC-Script establishes overall narrative direction through Emotion-Trajectory Planning, propels scene-level plot development with Character-Driven Scene Generation, and regulates local emotional changes of characters via Emotion-Controlled Script Writing. Ultimately, it outputs scene-by-scene script content that remains highly consistent with the preset affective trajectory. Experimental results demonstrate that EC-Script significantly outperforms baseline methods in affective trajectory adherence, exhibiting excellent and reliable emotional controllability, thereby providing effective technical support for AI-assisted emotional healing scenarios.

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25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Shadowing Program for Medical Students in the Basic Sciences Phase

Authors:
Omid↗Changiz↗ghasemi↗Khodadoustan↗Heshmat↗Arefan↗Fazel Harandi↗M. H↗Yousefi↗

Introduction Shadowing, as an educational method based on active observation, can foster a realistic understanding of professional roles and enhance the communication skills of medical students. This study aimed to design, implement, and evaluate a shadowing program for basic sciences medical students. Methods This development study was conducted based on the ADDIE model in five phases. The study population consisted of 799 medical students in semesters 2 to 5. The stages included Analysis (determining needs through literature review and expert panels), Design (specifying learning environments and evaluation methods), Development (preparing guides and educational tools), Implementation (within the Medical Ethics course), and Evaluation (using questionnaires and reflection forms). Findings This study aimed to design and evaluate an educational shadowing program based on the ADDIE model. In the Analysis phase, the profiles of 799 students and learning objectives were determined. In the Design phase, a structured program for four types of shadowing was designed. In the Development phase, all guides and educational tools were prepared. In the Implementation phase, the program was carried out with complete coverage and adherence to ethical considerations. Finally, the program evaluation showed that "Motivation to become a good physician" (3.75-3.95) and "Enhancing empathy" (3.50-3.94) received the highest scores, while "Increasing understanding of the basic science-clinical connection" (2.53-2.89) and "Willingness to attend on holidays" (1.87-2.31) received the lowest scores. Conclusion The findings indicate that implementing the shadowing program is an effective method for strengthening the professional attitudes and academic motivation of medical students. However, the program did not significantly improve students perception of the basic science-clinical connection, indicating a need for curricular refinement. The continuation and extension of this program to other levels and fields of medical sciences are recommended.

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