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

KG-SoftMAP: Soft Knowledge-Graph Priors for Bayesian Network Structure Learning from Sparse Discrete Data

arXiv:2606.10358v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning Bayesian network (BN) structure from sparse discrete data is hard: when each instance records only a few variables, most variable pairs lack the joint observations needed for reliable scoring, and data-only methods recover little structure. However, imperfect domain knowledge, expressible as a weighted directed knowledge graph (KG), is often available. We propose KG-SoftMAP, which encodes such a KG as a finite-strength, confidence-weighted edge prior and maximizes a MAP objective combining the BDeu score with a logit-form prior; the KG may be expert-curated or LLM-extracted. On synthetic benchmarks with known DAGs, KG-SoftMAP reaches Directed-F1 (DF1) $0.19$–$0.32$ at observation rate $\rho=0.05$ and DF1 $0.44$–$0.97$ at $\rho\geq0.2$, while every data-only learner tested stays near zero under the same sparse masks. Recovery tracks KG quality: controlled corruption degrades it smoothly, a zero-signal KG yields DF1 $0.00$, and a blindly LLM-extracted KG with imperfect precision and recall still drives substantial recovery. On three real sparse educational datasets, the learned BN acts as a concept-level posterior model: on SAF it matches logistic regression (LR) within $0.03$ F1_FAIL while providing an inspectable concept graph, calibrated Fail probabilities, and tractable posterior queries from partial observations.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Trust-Region Diffusion Policies for Massively Parallel On-Policy RL

arXiv:2606.15260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with massively parallel simulations has become a standard framework for developing robust, deployable policies; however, most existing approaches still rely on simple Gaussian policy parameterizations. Diffusion models provide a more expressive policy class and have shown strong performance on challenging control problems, yet most diffusion-based RL methods are designed for offline or off-policy training. In this work, we ask whether diffusion policies can be trained effectively in the massively parallel, on-policy regime. To this end, we introduce Trust-region Diffusion Policies (TruDi), which enables diffusion policies for on-policy RL with massively parallel simulations. This setting is particularly challenging because the data distribution changes quickly across updates, making stable training with complex policies difficult. TruDi addresses this by integrating a trust-region optimization rule to enforce a KL-divergence constraint over the entire diffusion trajectory. Empirically, we evaluate TruDi on a diverse set of 4 massively parallel RL benchmarks comprising a total of 73 tasks. Across these tasks, TruDi consistently outperforms or is on-par with strong baselines on standard tasks and achieves clear gains on more challenging humanoid control tasks, establishing a strong new baseline for massively parallel on-policy RL.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Double-Helix Vision (DH-V2): A Geometry-Based Visual Sampler for Bandwidth-Constrained Perception

Authors:

We present Double-Helix Vision (DH), a geometry-based visual sampler that compresses 2D images into compact 1D signals using paired golden-ratio-inspired spiral trajectories. Rather than processing every pixel uniformly, DH employs two phase-shifted helices (Alpha and Beta, offset by 180 degrees) to sample the image with biologically-inspired foveation: high density at the center, sparse coverage at the periphery. At 4K resolution, DH achieves a 1,433x compression ratio (99.93% reduction) while preserving the geometric structure of the scene. The full perception pipeline – including spatial mapping, temporal collision detection, and intra-frame structural disparity estimation – runs in 0.52 ms at 1080p on CPU-only hardware, with no neural network dependencies. On CIFAR-10 at extreme sampling budgets (K=128 points per helix), DH achieves a +6.03% accuracy gain over uniform random sampling. A JSON-serializable Robotics API is provided, delivering sub-millisecond spatial perception reports in 2.7 KB packets. Code and benchmarks are available under the MIT License.

05.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

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

Dissecting model behavior through agent trajectories

arXiv:2606.17454v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agent performance is not just a modeling problem, it is fundamentally a systems problem. The advanced capabilities of models are realized through agent harnesses. Therefore, a gap between model assumptions and harness behavior can easily prevent the model's full capabilities from translating into agent performance. We formalize this as the `intent-execution' gap: the mismatch between what the model intends and what the harness executes, and vice versa. We argue that minimizing this intent-execution gap is as important as other aspects of harness design such as tools and execution loops. To illustrate the impact of this harness-model alignment, we develop a simple and customizable harness called `Simple Strands Agent' (SSA). SSA aims to find the bulk of common patterns which generalize across different model families (such as Claude, Gemini, GPT, Grok, Qwen), as well as a small number of model-specific preferences. We make two contributions: (i) we $reproduce or improve on the pass@1$ performance reported by diverse model-provider families on popular agentic benchmarks (SWE-Pro, SWE-Verified and Terminal-Bench-2), and (ii) building on an $analysis of 138k trajectories generated by SSA$, we look beyond the $\texttt{pass@1}$ numbers which tend to be relatively even across frontier models. By representing agent trajectories in code state-spaces, we observe model-level differences in problem-solving behavior. Finer-grained metrics such as edit frequency, testing activity, and phase-transitions reveal how individual models allocate effort across different stages of autonomous problem solving.

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

Equivariant Graph Neural Networks Improve Optical Spectra Prediction for Materials Screening

arXiv:2606.19133v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scalable prediction of optical spectra is a critical component of high-throughput materials screening for optoelectronic applications such as solar cells. Existing surrogate models are trained on spectra computed from lower levels of theory or rely on rotation-invariant scalar features, limiting their geometric expressiveness. We explore the use of equivariant graph neural networks for optical spectra prediction, adapting GotenNet to this task and evaluating it on multiple datasets including a recently published collection of 10,533 structures with spectra computed at the level of the random phase approximation (RPA). The proposed model outperforms the current state of the art, with the largest gains in the 0-8 eV range and on predicting the static real permittivity, both of particular relevance for thin-film optics.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

From Nominal Intensity to Equivalent Rainfall: A Path-Based Credibility Evaluation Framework for Simulated Rainfall in Autonomous-Driving Perception Tests

Credible simulated-rainfall conditions are essential for identifying perception-system boundaries and supporting SOTIF-oriented risk assessment in automated driving. However, closed-field tests are often described only by nominal rainfall intensity or single-point measurements, making it difficult to align simulated rain fields with real rainfall and map test results to real-world scenarios. This paper proposes a path-based credibility evaluation method for simulated rainfall in autonomous-driving perception tests. Using the drop size and velocity joint distribution of real rainfall as the reference, each candidate path is represented by path-equivalent rainfall intensity, an uncertainty band, and a path-averaged Realism of Raindrop Distribution (RRD) score. Lidar target point-cloud count and mean reflectivity are further used for perception-consistency correction, quantifying the proxy capability of each simulated-rainfall path for real-rainfall perception effects. Experiments are conducted using about 10,000 real-rainfall raindrop-spectrum samples, 728 RainSense perception samples, and 45 spatial sampling points in a 2.4 m x 7.2 m simulated-rainfall area. Results show that spatial non-uniformity remains under the same nominal condition, confirming the need for path-based evaluation. The method identifies Path IV and Path VI as preferable candidates, with results of 11.54 +/- 0.31 mm/h, RRD = 0.43, and 8.28 +/- 0.34 mm/h, RRD = 0.46, respectively. These paths show more balanced performance in rainfall-intensity stability, raindrop-spectrum realism, and perception consistency. The proposed method supports path selection, condition description, and credible interpretation of autonomous-driving perception tests under rainfall.

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

Normative Robustness as a Frontier for Non-Verifiable Reasoning in LLMs

arXiv:2606.12731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLMs increasingly serve in advisory and deliberative roles, users rely on them for non-verifiable reasoning in domains lacking objective ground truths. However, traditional evaluations of LLM reasoning focus almost exclusively on fact-based domains, such as mathematics and science, leaving uncertainty over whether and to what degree models can handle ambiguous, subjective, or value-laden problems over time. To address this concern, we propose moral reasoning as a paradigmatic subdomain of non-verifiable reasoning. We define moral robustness as a model's capacity to exhibit sound moral reasoning across time and contexts, and we introduce a scalable, adversarial, multi-turn evaluation framework to empirically measure this capability. We simulate 48,000 user-agent moral deliberations across four frontier LLMs, varying premise relevance, premise order, conversation duration, and the user's stated moral view. We find that models successfully ignore morally-irrelevant distractors, but shift their reasoning by up to 6.5%, on average, towards the user's stated preferred moral view, and varying their reasoning depending on factors such as order (altering moral judgments by order in 13-22% of the cases) and duration (altering moral judgments between single-turn and multi-turn in 10-24% of the cases). Our analysis indicates that models tailor not just their final verdicts but their underlying justifications to align with a user's moral viewpoint - a failure mode we characterize as moral deliberative sycophancy.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Reliability of Probabilistic Emulation of Physical Systems

arXiv:2606.12997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two dominant approaches have emerged for generating probabilistic forecasts of physical systems: generative models, such as diffusion or flow matching; and ensembles of deterministic models with stochasticity injected, trained using the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) loss. While both approaches have demonstrated strong predictive accuracy, the reliability of their uncertainties has not been systematically assessed. We address this gap by developing a framework to evaluate both approaches across diverse 2D spatiotemporal physical systems, under matched model size and computational budget. We assess the reliability of probabilistic emulation by inspecting the empirical coverage of predictive intervals, while also considering accuracy and computational efficiency metrics. CRPS-trained ensembles typically achieve more reliable uncertainties on both single-step prediction and autoregressive rollouts, demonstrating better coverage than the standard alternative of training generative models in a latent space. Moreover, the CRPS approach offers significantly faster inference. When generative models are trained in ambient rather than a compressed latent space, which is often infeasible for high-dimensional problems, they exhibit comparable coverage to CRPS-trained ensembles, though with substantially larger inference latency. In contrast, when CRPS-trained ensembles are trained in latent space they do not show a marked degradation in coverage with respect to ambient space. Both generative models and CRPS-trained ensembles demonstrate good predictive accuracy. To facilitate future research and application, we release AutoCast, a modular framework implementing both generative models and CRPS-trained ensembles, alongside AutoSim, a flexible dataset generation package for rapid prototyping.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Trustworthy Image Authentication using Forensic Knowledge Graphs

Advances in generative AI have made image falsification highly realistic, demanding trustworthy authentication systems. Existing forensic detectors can target certain forgery types but lack interpretability, while vision-language models (VLMs) provide explanations but cannot exploit forensic traces for reliable detection. We propose Forensic Knowledge Graphs (FKGs), a unified framework that integrates forensic evidence extraction, structured reasoning, and human-interpretable explanation. Our FKG structure encodes forensic traces along with their causal dependencies and links to scene content. To generate accurate FKGs, we introduce a novel forensic authentication network and an Iterative Context Refinement strategy that guides VLMs to produce faithful, grounded explanations. We also present FKG-50K, a dataset of 50,000 realistic forgeries with ground-truth FKGs. Experiments demonstrate that FKG outperforms both forensic detectors and VLMs in detection, forgery identification and localization, and forensic justification.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity in Germany: A repeated cross-sectional analysis from 1998 to 2024

Background: Smoking inequalities by socioeconomic status have widened consistently in Germany, but sex-specific trends after 2013 and inequalities in daily cigarette consumption among smokers (intensity) are unknown. We analyzed trends in absolute and relative socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity among German adults across three decades. Methods: We used 14 waves (1998-2024) of population-representative cross-sectional data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate sex-specific trends in smoking prevalence and intensity in adults aged 25-64. Inequalities were quantified across strata of education, occupation, and equivalized household income using the absolute and relative concentration index with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals. Results: Overall smoking prevalence declined from 35.05% (CI: [33.90%, 36.20%] in 1998 to 22.19% (CI: [21.15%, 23.24%]) in 2024, and mean intensity from 17.49 (CI: [17.09,17.90]) to 13.33 (CI: [12.88, 13.79]) cigarettes/day. Over this period sex-differences in both outcomes narrowed almost completely. Absolute and relative inequalities in smoking prevalence widened across all SES dimensions, particularly for education and occupation. By 2024, inequalities were larger among women than men driven by a stagnating or rising smoking prevalence among low-SES women at least until 2018 alongside continued declines in higher-SES women and for men. Inequalities in smoking intensity, particularly related to income, were generally smaller than those in prevalence. Conclusion: Socioeconomic smoking inequalities in Germany widened from 1998 to 2024 primarily driven by reductions among higher-SES groups and increases in low-SES women. However, recent reductions in low-SES women may indicate a new phase in the smoking epidemic. Health equity considerations should be integrated into a targeted German tobacco control strategy.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Sanjeevani: A manually curated anti-cancerous phytochemical database integrated with downstream analysis tools.

Background: Cancer continues to pose a massive global health burden. While plant-derived phytochemicals offer promising therapeutic leads, existing natural product databases often lack cancer specificity, dataset downloadability, and integrated screening tools. Methods: We developed Sanjeevani, an integrative web platform cataloguing 4,823 curated anticancer phytochemicals. Using a balanced dataset of 9,646 molecules, we trained Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest, and K-Nearest Neighbours classifiers using a hybrid feature representation of RDKit descriptors and 2048-bit ECFP4 fingerprints. The platform also integrates AutoDock Vina for web-based molecular docking for binding affinity, poses prediction and ADMET-AI for pharmacokinetics estimation. Results: The SVM model demonstrated the strongest predictive capability, achieving a top test accuracy of 0.966 and a ROC-AUC of 0.992. Benchmarking across five docking tools confirmed that AutoDock Vina successfully balanced computational automation with literature-consistent binding affinity replication. The final architecture provides rapid interactive 2D/3D visualizations integrated with downstream analysis tools. Conclusion: Sanjeevani provides an open-access, one-stop pipeline that bridges the gap between raw natural product data and actionable computational screening, accelerating natural product-based oncology drug discovery.

14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

How should I respond to race-based exclusion in my lab?

Authors:

A researcher in Europe feels left out of their team and held to different standards from their colleagues. How can they challenge exclusion without risking their position? A researcher in Europe feels left out of their team and held to different standards from their colleagues. How can they challenge exclusion without risking their position?

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Linear-Time Encodable and Decodable Quantum Error-Correcting Codes

arXiv:2603.04543v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent years have seen rapid development in the subject of quantum coding theory, with breakthroughs on many exciting classes of codes, including quantum LDPC codes, quantum locally testable codes, and quantum codes with interesting transversal gates. However, a natural class of quantum codes, which has been well-studied classically, has not yet been treated: those which can be quickly encoded and decoded. This problem concerns the channel capacity setting, where a noise channel sits between perfect encoding and unencoding/decoding operations; this is the setting that is relevant for communication between fault-tolerant quantum computers. In this work, we construct asymptotically good quantum codes that can be encoded and unencoded by quantum circuits of logarithmic depth and consisting of a linear total number of gates. The classical decoding algorithms also run in logarithmic depth and use $\mathcal{O}(n \log n)$ gates, or alternatively a linear number of gates but with higher depth. We further construct explicit and asymptotically good quantum codes whose encoding, unencoding and decoding all use a linear number of gates, and additionally whose encoding and unencoding may be run in logarithmic depth.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Use of the Pharmacy First service in England in the first 12 months: geographic variation and health system context

Objectives: The Pharmacy First (PF) service was introduced across England from 31 January 2024 to expand the clinical role of community pharmacies and improve access to primary care. This paper describes use of PF in its first 12 months, in terms of uptake, access routes, consultation outcomes, geographic variations, service costs and antimicrobial supply. Methods: A descriptive analysis of all PF consultations submitted for payment to NHS Business Services Authority in England between 31 January 2024 and 31 January 2025. Pharmacy-level consultation data were linked to national data on population, location and pharmacy characteristics. PF use was examined using population-standardised consultation rates and consultations per pharmacy. Results: During the first year of implementation, 2,205,731 PF consultations were recorded as delivered across 11,349 pharmacies, with payment of GBP123 million to pharmacies. Uptake increased steadily over time. Most consultations were for acute sore throat (33%) and uncomplicated urinary tract infection (27%), with corresponding antibiotics, phenoxymethylpenicillin and nitrofurantoin being the most supplied. Most people self-referred (74%) into the service, with 95% of consultations managed without onward referral. Substantial geographic variation was observed. Northern regions had higher use based on the eligible population. The South East and Midlands had higher activity per pharmacy. London showed a distinct pattern, with higher self-referral into the service, lower medication supply and higher referral to other healthcare services. Higher consultation volume was weakly associated with pharmacy characteristics, including opening hours, pharmacy type and retail setting, and local context, in terms of socio-economic and geographic factors. Conclusions: PF had immediate uptake and is operating primarily as a direct-access model for common acute conditions. Findings suggest that PF is contributing to improved access to care and may shift demand away from general practice. However, the service uptake appears to be shaped by geographic location, proximity to other healthcare services and pharmacy characteristics.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Magnetic control of an exciton-polariton condensate in a van der Waals magnet

arXiv:2506.06010v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quasiparticle condensates are among the most spectacular solid-state manifestations of quantum physics. Coupling macroscopic real-space wavefunctions to additional degrees of freedom, such as the electron spin, would add valuable control knobs for quantum applications. While creating spin-carrying superconducting condensates has attracted enormous attention, man-made condensates of light-matter hybrids known as exciton-polaritons have lacked an analogous spin-based perspective. Here we open a new door by demonstrating magnetically tunable exciton-polariton condensation in the van der Waals magnet CrSBr. Under photoexcitation, CrSBr microwires embedded in an optical cavity show the hallmarks of polariton condensation: a dramatic increase of the emission intensity from an excited laterally confined polariton state by multiple orders of magnitude, spectral narrowing of the emission line, and a continuous shift of the peak energy. Interferometry evidences an increase in spatial and temporal coherence. Owing to the strong coupling between the spin order and excitonic correlation, the energy of the condensate can be tuned by up to 10.5 meV by an external magnetic field of only 2 Tesla. Our results establish CrSBr microcavities as a powerful platform for exploring magnetic control of polariton condensates and mark a significant step toward spin-controlled coherent quantum light sources.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

ProGRank: Probe-Gradient Reranking to Defend Dense-Retriever RAG from Corpus Poisoning

arXiv:2603.22934v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves large language model applications by grounding generation in retrieved evidence, but also introduces corpus poisoning as a new attack surface. In this setting, an adversary injects or edits passages so that they enter the Top-$K$ results for target queries and influence downstream generation. Existing defences often rely on content filtering, auxiliary models, or generator-side reasoning, which complicates deployment. We propose ProGRank, a post hoc, training-free retriever-side defence for dense-retriever RAG. ProGRank stress-tests each query–passage pair under mild randomized perturbations, extracts probe gradients from a small fixed parameter subset, and derives two instability signals: representational consistency and dispersion risk. It then combines these signals with a score gate for reranking. ProGRank preserves the original passage content, requires no retraining, and supports a surrogate-based variant when the deployed retriever is unavailable. Experiments across datasets, retrievers, attacks, and retrieval-stage and end-to-end settings show that ProGRank improves robustness and maintains a favorable robustness–utility trade-off, including under adaptive evasive attacks.

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

Credibility-Weighted Pricing of Autonomous Vehicle Liability Under Operational Design Domain Shift

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated Driving System deployments create a foundational ratemaking challenge: sparse experience, shifting operational design domains, and non-stationary risk across software releases. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian credibility framework pooling across cities, software versions, and territories via a learned ODD-similarity kernel, nesting Buhlmann-Straub as a limiting case. Demonstrated on 648 verified-engaged Waymo crashes across four U.S. metros from the NHTSA Standing General Order database against 116 million matched miles, city-aggregate credibility weights are moderate (0.12-0.46), partial pooling decisively outperforms no pooling, and a power analysis shows the learned kernel's advantage becomes detectable at approximately twelve deployed cities.

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

Unified Multimodal Autoregressive Modeling with Shared Context-Visual Tokenizer is Key to Unification

Unified Multimodal Modeling aims to integrate visual understanding and generation within a single system. However, existing approaches typically rely on two disparate visual tokenizers, which splits the representation space and hinders truly unified modeling. We propose UniAR, a unified autoregressive framework where a single discrete visual tokenizer serves as the key bridge between understanding and generation, enabling a shared context in which the model can directly interpret its own generated visual tokens without additional re-encoding. UniAR adapts a pretrained vision encoder with multi-level feature fusion and a lookup-free bitwise quantization scheme, preserving both high-level semantics and low-level details while scaling the effective visual vocabulary at minimal cost. Building on this, the unified autoregressive model adopts parallel-bitwise-prediction to jointly predict spatially grouped, multi-level visual codes, substantially reducing visual sequence length and accelerating generation. Finally, a diffusion-based visual decoder operates on discrete visual tokens to decode high-fidelity images. Through large-scale pre-training, followed by supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, UniAR achieves state-of-the-art performance on image generation and image editing while remaining competitive on multimodal understanding benchmarks. The project page is available at https://sharelab-sii.github.io/uniar-web.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Time-Frequency Grid States for Reconstruction and Correction of Channel-Induced Distortion in Entangled Photons

arXiv:2606.12216v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Characterization of time-frequency (TF) quantum states requires reliable reconstruction of their TF distributions. However, imperfect transmission or measurement channels can distort reconstructed joint spectral intensities (JSIs), especially when the underlying perturbation mechanism is unknown. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a reconstruction and correction framework that uses a TF grid state as an intrinsic frequency-domain reference. By analyzing the displacement of the grid points, a Gaussian process regression model is employed to reconstruct a correction mapping for the nonlinear coordinate deformation without assuming a prior physical model of the distortion. The learned mapping reduces the residual coordinate deviation of the TF grid state by approximately a factor of 11 and, when applied to an independent frequency-entangled test state, improves the Gaussian-shape fidelity from 76.2\% to 90.0\%. These results establish TF grid states as practical metrological resources for diagnosing and correcting distortions in TF quantum systems, providing a pathway toward distortion-resilient quantum communication and high-dimensional quantum information processing.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Scalable Batch Bayesian Optimization Via Subspace Acquisition Functions

arXiv:2411.16206v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Extending Bayesian optimization to batch evaluation can enable the designer to make the most use of parallel computing technology. However, most of current batch approaches do not scale well with the batch size. That is, their optimization efficiencies often deteriorate as the batch size increases. To address this issue, we propose a simple and efficient approach to extend Bayesian optimization to large-scale batch evaluation in this work. Different from existing batch approaches, the idea of the new approach is to draw a batch of axis-aligned subspaces of the original problem and select one point from each subspace using existing acquisition functions. Numerical experiments show that our proposed approach speedups the convergence significantly when compared with the sequential Bayesian optimization algorithm, and performs very competitively when compared with ten batch Bayesian optimization algorithms. The implementation of our proposed approach is available at https://github.com/zhandawei/SubSpace_Acquisition_Functions.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Automated Creativity Evaluation of Language Models Across Open-Ended Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in language understanding, reasoning, and generation, sparking growing interest in their creative potential. Realizing this potential requires systematic and scalable methods for evaluating creativity across diverse tasks. However, most existing creativity metrics are tightly coupled to specific tasks, embedding domain assumptions into the evaluation process, and limiting scalability and generality. To address this gap, we introduce an automated, domain-agnostic framework for quantifying LLM creativity across open-ended tasks. Our approach separates the measurement apparatus from the creative task itself, enabling scalable, task-agnostic assessment. Divergent creativity is measured using semantic entropy, a reference-free and robust metric for novelty and diversity, validated against human annotations, LLM-based novelty judgments and baseline diversity measures. Convergent creativity is assessed via a novel retrieval-based multi-agent judge framework that delivers context-sensitive evaluation of task fulfilment with over 60% improved efficiency. We validate our framework in three qualitatively distinct domains: problem-solving (MacGyver), research ideation (HypoGen), and creative writing (BookMIA), using a broad suite of LLMs. Empirical results show that our framework reliably captures key facets of creativity, including novelty, diversity, and task fulfilment, and reveal how model properties, such as size, temperature, recency, and reasoning, impact creative performance. Our work establishes a reproducible and generalizable standard for automated LLM creativity evaluation, paving the way for scalable benchmarking and accelerating progress in creative AI.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

From Awareness to Action: Understanding and Overcoming the Research-Practice Gap in Algorithmic Fairness for Public Health

arXiv:2606.11214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Algorithmic fairness is essential for responsible ML-driven public health research, yet its practical implementation remains limited. To investigate this awareness-action gap, we conducted a sequential mixed-methods study comprising expert interviews, an online survey, and systematic mapping. The expert interviews informed the design of the survey, which in turn revealed fragmented definitions of fairness, limited training and guidance, reliance on external sources, and rare use of formal assessment, mitigation, or monitoring. These findings were subsequently mapped onto three established research-practice gap lenses: the Knowledge-Practice Gap, the Knowledge-to-Action Cycle, and the Knowing-Doing Gap, each offering complementary perspectives. Building on this synthesis, we introduce the Fairness-to-Action framework, which integrates methodological, organizational, and systemic dimensions to identify where translation of algorithmic fairness knowledge stalls. Our analysis shows that fairness remains weakly institutionalized, translation mechanisms are externally driven, and system-level priorities continue to emphasize accuracy over fairness. These insights suggest critical leverage points for advancing safe, fair, and ethical ML-driven public health research practice.

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

Standardized Methods and Recommendations for Green Federated Learning

arXiv:2602.00343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training over privacy-sensitive, distributed data, but its environmental impact is difficult to compare across studies due to inconsistent measurement boundaries and heterogeneous reporting. We present a practical carbon-accounting methodology for FL CO2e tracking using NVIDIA NVFlare and CodeCarbon for explicit, phase-aware tasks (initialization, per-round training, evaluation, and idle/coordination). To capture non-compute effects, we additionally estimate communication emissions from transmitted model-update sizes under a network-configurable energy model. We validate the proposed approach on two representative workloads: CIFAR-10 image classification and retinal optic disk segmentation. In CIFAR-10, controlled client-efficiency scenarios show that system-level slowdowns and coordination effects can contribute meaningfully to carbon footprint under an otherwise fixed FL protocol, increasing total CO2e by 8.34x (medium) and 21.73x (low) relative to the high-efficiency baseline. In retinal segmentation, swapping GPU tiers (H100 vs.\ V100) yields a consistent 1.7x runtime gap (290 vs. 503 minutes) while producing non-uniform changes in total energy and CO2e across sites, underscoring the need for per-site and per-round reporting. Overall, our results support a standardized carbon accounting method that acts as a prerequisite for reproducible 'green' FL evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Pediatric-Accelerated-Intelligence-Lab/carbon_footprint.