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

GroupToM-Bench: Benchmarking Group Theory of Mind and Nonlinear Social Emergence in MLLMs

Authors:
Weidong Tang↗Jierui Li↗Yueling Hou↗Zihan Mei↗Can Zhang↗Xinyan Wan↗Zhiyuan Liang↗Pengfei Zhou↗Yang You↗Wangbo Zhao↗

True general intelligence requires not only a model of the physical world but also a social world model: the capacity to infer how individual mental states interact and crystallize into group-level outcomes. Despite notable progress in individual-level Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning, existing multimodal large language models fail at this broader task. Collective behavior emerges non-linearly from social tensions, conformity dynamics, and structural constraints, meaning it cannot be recovered by merely summing individual intentions. We present GroupToM-Bench, the first multimodal benchmark for group-level ToM, built around a causal chain spanning micro-level BDI states (belief, desire, intention), meso-level group tension and structural constraints, and macro-level outcome prediction and mechanistic attribution. To probe this full arc, we develop a seven-level cognitive audit framework. Experiments reveal a gap between current models and human baselines, highlighting a failure to process social structures and non-linear collective dynamics.

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

IAPO: Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization for Tool Use in Small Multimodal Agents

Authors:
Yifan Yang↗Zhen Zhang↗Jiayi Tian↗Liyan Tan↗Zheng Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.11652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates reinforcement learning (RL) methods for improving tool-calling capabilities in multimodal small language model (SLM) agents. While existing works have explored various reward designs to improve agentic tool-calling ability, these approaches face inherent limitations for SLM training, especially under multimodal scenarios. First, many existing methods evaluate tool use correctness through exact matching against certain ground-truth or predefined formats. However, this assumption is often unsuitable for multimodal tasks, where multiple tool use paths may be valid and annotated tool trajectories are typically unavailable. Second, such sparse and brittle binary rewards provide little guidance on how to improve the underlying decision process, making them particularly difficult for multimodal SLM to learn from. To address these issues, we propose Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization (IAPO), an RL algorithm for improving tool use in multimodal SLM by aligning the model's attribution across input components with that of a stronger teacher. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-3B show that the proposed method improves visual question answering accuracy by an average of 3% across six test sets compared with existing visual tool use work, by helping the model attend to the most relevant input evidence.

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Ambient Diffusion Policy: Imitation Learning from Suboptimal Data in Robotics

Authors:
Adam Wei↗Nicholas Pfaff↗Thomas Cohn↗Arif Kerem Day{\i}↗Constantinos Daskalakis↗Giannis Daras↗Russ Tedrake↗

arXiv:2606.12365v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose Ambient Diffusion Policy, a simple and principled method for imitation learning from suboptimal data in robotics. High-quality, task-specific robot data is expensive and time-consuming to collect, while suboptimal datasets with lower-quality or out-of-distribution demonstrations are abundant. Existing methods that co-train on both data sources in robotics often fail to separate the meaningful and the harmful features in the suboptimal samples. In contrast, our method extracts only the useful features by introducing a new axis to co-training in robotics: noise-dependent data usage. Ambient Diffusion Policy restricts the contribution of suboptimal data during training to only the high and low diffusion times. To rigorously justify our approach, we first observe that robot action data exhibits a spectral power law. This induces two important properties on the optimal Diffusion Policy that we exploit: a global-to-local hierarchy and locality. We theoretically formalize this discussion using a simplified model. Our experiments validate Ambient Diffusion Policy on four types of suboptimal action data (noisy trajectories, sim-to-real gap, task mismatch, and large-scale data mixtures) across six tasks. The results show that it effectively learns from arbitrary sources of suboptimal data. Notably, it outperforms existing co-training baselines by up to 33% when scaled to Open X-Embodiment - a large dataset with heterogeneous data quality and unstructured distribution shifts. Overall, Ambient Diffusion Policy increases the utility of suboptimal demonstrations and expands the set of usable data sources in robotics.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

When Errors Become Narratives: A Longitudinal Taxonomy of Silent Failures in a Production LLM Agent Runtime

Authors:
Wei Wu↗

arXiv:2606.14589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agent systems increasingly run as long-lived autonomous runtimes: scheduling jobs, calling tools, maintaining memory, and pushing results to humans. We present a longitudinal study of silent failures in one such system: a personal-assistant agent runtime in continuous production since March 2026, with roughly 40 scheduled jobs, 8 LLM providers, a tool-governance proxy, and a knowledge-base memory plane, defended by 4,286 unit tests and 827 governance checks. Over eight weeks we documented 22 incidents with full root-cause postmortems, in which one meta-pattern – a failure whose error signal never reaches a human in actionable form – manifested at least 28 times. We derive a five-class, mechanism-oriented taxonomy: (A) environment and platform quirks, (B) design-assumption mismatches, (C) error swallowing and dilution, (D) chained hallucination and fabrication, (E) operational omission and forensic blind spots. Class D is unique to LLM systems and the most dangerous: the system does not merely fail to report an error – the LLM transforms it into fluent, plausible narrative delivered to the user. We term this fail-plausible: gray failure's differential observability escalated – the observer is not just blind, it is convincingly lied to by the failure itself. Three findings: about 70% of silent failures were caught by human user-view observation, not tests or audits; a retrospective audit of 15 incidents found 0% ex-ante prevention but 87% regression blocking – audits are regression engines, not prediction engines; incident latency (13 hours to 60 days) tracks failure mechanism, not code complexity – the longest-lived failures lived in the seams between components, where no test runs. We describe the resulting defense framework and distill design principles for agent systems whose failures are loud, attributable, and boring. All postmortems and artifacts are public.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Information-Theoretic Decomposition for Multimodal Interaction Learning

Authors:
Zequn Yang↗Yake Wei↗Haotian Ni↗Zhihao Xu↗Di Hu↗

Multimodal learning hinges on capturing redundant, unique, and synergistic information across modalities, which collectively constitute multimodal interactions. A critical yet underexplored challenge is that these implicit interactions vary dynamically across samples. In this work, we present the first systematic, information-theoretic analysis highlighting why learning these dynamic, sample-specific interactions is critical for effective multimodal learning. Our analysis further reveals deficits in conventional paradigms at learning these distinct interaction types: modality ensemble approaches struggle to capture synergy, while joint learning paradigms often under-utilize redundant information. This highlights the need for an approach that can adaptively learn from different interaction types on a per-sample basis. To this end, we propose Decomposition-based Multimodal Interaction Learning (DMIL), a novel paradigm that explicitly models and learns from sample-specific interactions. First, we design a variational decomposition architecture to isolate the constituent interaction components. Second, we employ a new learning strategy that leverages these explicit interaction components in a fine-tuning process to achieve comprehensive interaction learning. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks and architectures demonstrate that DMIL consistently achieves superior performance by adapting to holistic sample-specific interactions. Our framework is flexible and broadly applicable, establishing an interaction-centric paradigm for multimodal learning. The code is available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/DMIL.

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

Multi-Modal Contrastive Learning for Implicit Earth Embeddings via Location Tying

Authors:
Jonathan Hecht↗Lukas Arzoumanidis↗Ziyue Li↗Youness Dehbi↗

arXiv:2606.20167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial prediction tasks are often limited by a lack of high-quality labelled ground-truth observations. To overcome this challenge, self-supervised pre-training is a possible solution, with contrastive learning dominant for location encoders. Those approaches usually align geographic coordinates with just one additional modality. We propose two multimodal contrastive learning architectures: Multimodal Embedding via Location Tying (MELT) and Sequential Alternating Location Training (SALT). These architectures expand this framework beyond two modalities by utilising unpaired geospatial data. Both methods are technically viable and match the performance of the strongest two-modality baseline (SATCLIP) across four downstream tasks. However, increasing the number of modalities does not consistently improve performance, suggesting that the chosen location encoder is the main limitation - the contrastive objective reaches its peak early, regardless of modality diversity or pre-training volume. MELT provides more stable training than SALT and presents a stronger foundation for future scaling.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

UniMM: A Unified Mixture Model Framework for Multi-Agent Simulation

Authors:
Longzhong Lin↗Xuewu Lin↗Kechun Xu↗Haojian Lu↗Lichao Huang↗Rong Xiong↗Yue Wang↗

arXiv:2501.17015v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Simulation plays a crucial role in assessing autonomous driving systems, where the generation of realistic multi-agent behaviors is a key aspect. In multi-agent simulation, the primary challenges include behavioral multimodality and closed-loop distributional shifts. In this study, we formulate a unified mixture model (UniMM) framework for generating multimodal agent behaviors, which can cover the mainstream methods including regression-based mixture models and discrete NTP models. Furthermore, we introduce a closed-loop sample generation approach tailored for mixture models to mitigate distributional shifts. Within the UniMM framework, we recognize critical configurations from both the model and data perspectives. We conduct a systematic examination of various model configurations, and comprehensively characterize their effects. Moreover, our investigation into the data configuration highlights the pivotal role of closed-loop samples in achieving realistic simulations. To extend the benefits of closed-loop samples across a broader range of mixture models, we further introduce a temporal disentanglement-and-alignment mechanism to address the shortcut learning and off-policy learning issues. Leveraging insights from our exploration, the distinct variants proposed within the UniMM framework, including discrete, anchor-free, and anchor-based models, all achieve state-of-the-art performance on the WOSAC benchmark.

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

VikingMem: A Memory Base Management System for Stateful LLM-based Applications

Authors:
Jiajie Fu↗Junwen Chen↗Mengzhao Wang↗Aoxiang He↗Maojia Sheng↗Xiangyu Ke↗Yifan Zhu↗Yunjun Gao↗

arXiv:2605.29640v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models have revolutionized interactive applications; however, their finite context windows pose a critical data management challenge for maintaining stateful, long-term interactions. Existing memory approaches often rely on simplistic extraction methods that lead to incomplete memories or use rigid, single-purpose memory extraction prompts tailored to a single use case, such as chatbots. Consequently, they lack generalizability and perform poorly across diverse downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Memory Base, a novel data management paradigm for managing the persistent state of long-term interactions. It is characterized by three core principles: selective extraction of high-value memories from raw information streams; inherent statefulness and evolution, where memory content is progressively summarized, corrected, and temporally weighted to prioritize recent interactions; and a generalizable abstraction paradigm designed for robust transferability across diverse applications, including education, recommendation, and agent memory. Building on this foundation, we present VikingMem, an end-to-end Memory Base Management System implemented on the VikingDB vector engine. VikingMem materializes this paradigm through interconnected event and entity abstractions. It features event-centric memory extraction to selectively handle complex information streams, while entities are dynamically updated by events to achieve stateful evolution. Using temporal compression via a topic-wise timeline and time-weighted recall, the system progressively produces high-level summary memories, prioritizes recent items, and compresses and fades older ones. Extensive evaluations on long-term memory benchmarks demonstrate that VikingMem outperformes baselines by up to 30% in memory retrieval effectiveness while maintaining the low latency essential for interactive applications.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

E2Vec: Feature Embedding with Temporal Information for Analyzing Student Actions in E-Book Systems

Authors:
Yuma Miyazaki↗Valdemar \v{S}v\'abensk\'y↗Yuta Taniguchi↗Fumiya Okubo↗Tsubasa Minematsu↗Atsushi Shimada↗

Digital textbook (e-book) systems record student interactions with textbooks as a sequence of events called EventStream data. In the past, researchers extracted meaningful features from EventStream, and utilized them as inputs for downstream tasks such as grade prediction and modeling of student behavior. Previous research evaluated models that mainly used statistical-based features derived from EventStream logs, such as the number of operation types or access frequencies. While these features are useful for providing certain insights, they lack temporal information that captures fine-grained differences in learning behaviors among different students. This study proposes E2Vec, a novel feature representation method based on word embeddings. The proposed method regards operation logs and their time intervals for each student as a string sequence of characters and generates a student vector of learning activity features that incorporates time information. We applied fastText to generate an embedding vector for each of 305 students in a dataset from two years of computer science courses. Then, we investigated the effectiveness of E2Vec in an at-risk detection task, demonstrating potential for generalizability and performance.

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10.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-11

Daily briefing: Deep-sea whale graveyard is a treasure trove of fossils

Authors:
Jacob Smith↗

Researchers have uncovered more than 400 fossilized whale bones in an ocean-floor chasm. Plus, the working lives of scientists, in pictures, and how AI could slow the pace of research publication for the better. Researchers have uncovered more than 400 fossilized whale bones in an ocean-floor chasm. Plus, the working lives of scientists, in pictures, and how AI could slow the pace of research publication for the better.

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

Cross-Lingual Learning within Arabic Script for Low-Resource HTR

Authors:
Sana Al-azzawi↗Elisa Barney↗Marcus Liwicki↗

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) with limited labeled data remains a challenging problem, particularly for Arabic-script languages. Although modern sequence-based recognizers perform well in high-resource settings, their accuracy degrades sharply as training data becomes scarce. Arabic-script languages share a common writing system with substantial character overlap, motivating cross-lingual learning as a strategy to mitigate data scarcity. We conduct a controlled line-level study of cross-lingual joint training for Arabic-script HTR under low-resource regimes (number of samples K = 100, 500, 1000 labeled lines) on Arabic (KHATT), Urdu (NUST-UHWR) and Persian (PHTD). CRNN and Vision Transformer-based HTR-VT models are trained on the union of multiple related Arabic-script datasets to mitigate the data scarcity and are evaluated on individual target languages. Both architectures benefit from cross-language training under low-resource conditions. CRNN remains more effective under extremely limited target-language data, whereas the benefits of cross-language training for HTR-VT become less consistent as larger amounts of target-language data become available. On Persian (PHTD), joint training achieves a Character Error Rate (CER) of 9.99 , surpassing previously reported results despite not using the full available training data. On an additional Urdu dataset (UNHD), joint training reduces CER from 17.20 to 14.45.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

BigPower: Hierarchical Source-Level Module Power Estimation for CPUs with Large Language Models

Authors:
Honghua Zhu↗Chunjie Luo↗Jianfeng Zhan↗

arXiv:2606.13747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate power estimation is important for understanding and optimizing CPU power behavior, yet practical workflows often rely on simulation-derived information or post-silicon analysis. In this work, we present BigPower, a hierarchical source-level surrogate model for fine-grained module-level power estimation during CPU design. BigPower leverages large language model-based representations together with architectural hierarchy, module connectivity, configuration parameters, and workload context to estimate module-level power consumption directly from source-level design information, without requiring additional simulation during inference. Experimental results in the open-source XiangShan processor family demonstrate practical fine-grained power estimation across diverse configurations and workloads, offering an efficient alternative to conventional simulation-based workflows.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

BRIDGE: Biological Evidence Refinement and Heterogeneous Dynamic Gating for Gene Regulatory Networks

Authors:
Ziyang Dong↗Shanwen Tan↗Hengchuang Yin↗Wei Liu↗Yifan Wang↗Siyu Yi↗Jiancheng Lv↗Wei Ju↗

arXiv:2606.14734v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivation: Gene regulatory network inference from single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data is important for uncovering cell-state-specific transcriptional programs. However, scRNA-seq measurements are sparse and noisy, and experimentally validated TF-target interactions remain limited, making reliable inference challenging. Although graph neural networks have advanced GRN prediction, existing methods often rely on biologically unconstrained graph augmentation, such as random edge perturbation, and insufficiently control information transfer between genes and cells. These limitations may distort regulatory structures and weaken robustness under noisy and weakly supervised settings. Results: To address these issues, we propose an innovative framework named Biological Evidence Refinement and Heterogeneous Dynamic Gating for Gene Regulatory Networks (BRIDGE). BRIDGE extracts gene and cell representations from the expression matrix and its matrix dual, and performs contrastive learning in the gene space and cell space between self and neighbors across the co-expression-refined regulatory view and the original graph. It then applies heterogeneous gated encoding to adaptively regulate information transfer between genes and cells, enabling robust transcription factor-to-target gene prediction. Experiments on benchmark datasets spanning three network types and seven cell types show that BRIDGE achieves state-of-the-art AUROC and AUPRC in most settings. In particular, on Specific networks, BRIDGE improves average AUPRC by 5% over the second-best baseline, GCLink. In cross-cell-type few-shot transfer, BRIDGE consistently outperforms GCLink and GENELink across all six target cell types. A case study on hESC further supports the biological relevance of the predictions, with 9 of the top 10 and 46 of the top 100 novel TF-target interactions validated by ChIPBase.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Muse Spark Safety & Preparedness Report

Authors:
Cristina Menghini↗Peter Ney↗Hamza Kwisaba↗Zifan↗Wang↗Miles Turpin↗Felix Binder↗Jean-Christophe Testud↗Aidan Boyd↗Nathaniel Li↗Ivan Evtimov↗Klaudia Krawiecka↗…

arXiv:2606.12429v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muse Spark is the latest large language model developed by Meta. In this report, we first present evaluations for catastrophic risk domains under Meta's Advanced AI Scaling Framework, along with the evidence that informed our launch decision. We then discuss additional considerations, such as Muse Spark's broader content safety and behavioral profile, that are relevant to overall safety but fall outside the catastrophic risk domains governed by the Framework. Our preparedness results covering Chemical and Biological, Cybersecurity, and Loss of Control risks assess Muse Spark's deployment within Meta AI as presenting acceptable levels of residual risks under our Advanced AI Scaling Framework. We conducted a broad set of evaluations targeting dual-use and high-risk capabilities across these catastrophic risk domains. Those evaluations identified elevated risks prior to mitigations, with Chemical and Biological capabilities assessed as likely reaching the "high risk" category under the Advanced AI Scaling Framework before safeguards were applied. We have implemented a multi-layered set of mitigations that address the identified risks, and Muse Spark demonstrates state-of-the-art refusal across a range of benchmarks related to hazardous workflows in chemistry and biology. We therefore release Muse Spark as the underlying model of Meta AI.

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15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Fusion Learning from Dynamic Functional Connectivity: Combining the Amplitude and Phase of fMRI Signals to Identify Brain Disorders

Authors:
Jinlong Hu↗Jiatong Huang↗Zijian Cai↗

arXiv:2603.24603v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) derived from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been extensively utilized in brain science research. The sliding window correlation (SWC) method is a widely used approach for constructing dFC by computing correlation coefficients between amplitude time series of signals from pairs of brain regions. In this study, we propose an integrated approach that incorporates both amplitude and phase information of fMRI signals to improve the detection of brain disorders. Specifically, we introduce a multi-scale fusion learning framework, namely MSFL, which leverages two complementary dFC features derived from SWC and phase synchronization (PS). Here, SWC captures amplitude correlations, while PS measures phase coherence within dFC. We evaluated the efficacy of MSFL in classifying autism spectrum disorder and major depressive disorder using two publicly available datasets: ABIDE I and REST-meta-MDD, respectively. The results indicate that MSFL significantly outperforms existing comparative models. Moreover, we performed model explanation analysis using the SHAP framework, which showed that both types of dFC features from SWC and PS contribute to detecting brain disorders.

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

Dummy Backdoor as a Defense: Removing Unknown Backdoors via Shared Internal Mechanisms for Generative LLMs

Authors:
Kazuki Iwahana↗Masaru Matsubayashi↗Takuma Koyama↗Toshiki Shibahara↗Kenichiro Omintato↗Akira Ito↗

Backdoor attacks pose a serious threat to the safety and reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs), as they cause models to behave normally on clean inputs while producing attacker-specified responses when hidden triggers are present. Removing such unknown backdoors is particularly challenging when the defender does not know the backdoor attack types or the internal mechanisms formed through backdoor training. In this work, we propose a simple but effective backdoor removal method based on shared internal mechanisms across different backdoors. First, we show that different backdoors with the same task (attack objective) induce similar trigger-activated changes in the internal activations. Motivated by this observation, our method intentionally embeds a backdoor with a known trigger (dummy backdoor) and then removes it through further fine-tuning on dummy-triggered inputs paired with clean responses. Since the dummy backdoor and the unknown backdoor can rely on shared internal mechanisms, removing the dummy backdoor also reduces the effect of the unknown backdoor. We evaluate our method on three backdoor attack types across multiple model families. Experimental results show that our method substantially reduces the attack success rate of the unknown backdoor while preserving model utility, outperforming representative existing defense methods in both backdoor removal effectiveness and utility preservation. These findings suggest that a defender-controllable backdoor can serve as a helpful proxy for mitigating unknown backdoors in generative LLMs.

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

Divination by Prompt: LLM-Mediated Xuanxue on Chinese Social Media

Authors:
Chuang Li↗Lixuan Wang↗Yuqi Chen↗Ze Hong↗

arXiv:2606.12418v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has produced a striking cultural practice: using conversational AI for divination. This paper offers one of the first systematic studies of LLM-mediated divination in the context of Xuanxue, an internet-native umbrella term for mystical and spiritual practices on Chinese social media. Using a mixed-methods design, we analyze 23000+ posts and comments from Xiaohongshu and conduct 32 semi-structured interviews with users and professional diviners. Users primarily consult LLMs about pragmatic concerns - romantic relationships, careers, exams, and in-game gacha draws - via two intersecting pathways: trend-driven curiosity enabled by viral visibility and zero-cost access, and event-driven anxiety under conditions of uncertainty. A defining feature is collaborative prompt refinement, which turns users into active prompt engineers. Among commenters expressing a clear stance, perceived efficacy skews positive, with "accuracy" often justified through biographical fit and retrospective confirmation, consistent with Barnum and confirmation bias. Users also develop verification practices such as repeated trials and cross-model comparison. Professional diviners, by contrast, portray LLMs as lacking the "spiritual power" required for genuine divination, reflecting both ontological commitments and economic boundary-work. We also show how participants navigate tensions between scientific and metaphysical frames when interpreting AI-generated readings. Situating these findings in anthropological and cognitive-evolutionary theories of divination, we argue that LLM divination preserves core functions of traditional practice while introducing scalability, repeatability, and prompt-driven co-production that reshape how divinatory authority is constructed and evaluated.

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

A Multifaceted Analysis of Social Biases in Large Language Models

Authors:
Xulang Zhang↗Rui Mao↗Erik Cambria↗

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly become indispensable tools for acquiring information and supporting human decision-making. However, ensuring that these models uphold fairness across varied contexts is critical to their safe and responsible deployment. In this study, we undertake a comprehensive examination of four widely adopted LLMs, probing their underlying biases and inclinations across the dimensions of politics, ideology, alliance, language, and gender. Through a series of carefully designed experiments, we investigate their political neutrality using news summarization, ideological biases through news stance classification, tendencies toward specific geopolitical alliances via United Nations voting patterns, language bias in the context of multilingual story completion, and gender-related affinities as revealed by responses to the World Values Survey. Results indicate that while the LLMs are aligned to be neutral and impartial, they still show biases and affinities of different types.

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

Variable-Width Transformers

Authors:
Zhaofeng Wu↗Oliver Sieberling↗Shawn Tan↗Rameswar Panda↗Yury Polyanskiy↗Yoon Kim↗

Scaling model size, specifically depth and width, has driven significant progress in transformer-based language models. However, most architectures maintain a constant width across all layers, allocating a fixed parameter and computation budget evenly despite different layers potentially playing distinct computational roles. In this work, we empirically investigate nonuniform capacity allocation across network depth by proposing a $\times$-shaped >

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

XFlow: An Executable Protocol Programming System for Reliable Multi-Agent Workflows

Authors:
Hanqi Li↗Jing Peng↗Zijian Wang↗Lu Chen↗Kai Yu↗

arXiv:2606.14790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent systems increasingly coordinate planning, reasoning, tool use, and human interaction, yet their reliability remains limited. A central source of this limitation is the underspecified prompt–harness boundary. Current systems lack a principled way to decide which workflow commitments should remain in prompts and which should become harness structure. We present XFlow, an executable protocol programming system for reliable multi-agent workflows, and XPF (XFlow Protocol Format), its domain-specific protocol programming language. XFlow occupies a middle position between prompt-only orchestration and markup-like workflow descriptions. XPF remains readable as a literate protocol, but it is compiled and executed as a program. Its design keeps informal semantic work inside actors while moving selected commitments into harness structure that can be checked, preserved, and enforced. At runtime, XFlow stages uncertainty through lifecycle-governed symbols, which are typed state cells with validation and commit states. Actor outputs are mediated before they become shared state, instead of spreading through prompts, transcripts, or implicit memory. Our experiments cover Constrained Interaction, Long-Context Reasoning, and Agentic Software Engineering. They show that XFlow improves reliability by making constraints, evidence handling, and process requirements explicit and enforceable.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

ArogyaSutra: A Multi-Agent Framework for Multimodal Medical Reasoning in Indic Languages

Authors:
Tanmoy Kanti Halder↗Akash Ghosh↗Subhadip Baidya↗Arijit Roy↗Sriparna Saha↗

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promising reasoning capabilities in general domains, yet their performance remains limited in specialized settings such as healthcare, especially in multilingual and low-resource scenarios. This gap is critical in regions like rural India, where patients often express complex medical queries in native Indic languages and rely on multimodal inputs such as medical images. Existing English-centric MLLMs struggle to support such use cases, limiting equitable access to AI-driven healthcare assistance. To address this challenge, we introduce ArogyaBodha, a large-scale multilingual multimodal medical question-answer dataset constructed from eight heterogeneous sources, covering 31 body systems, six imaging modalities, and 21 clinical domains across English and seven major Indian languages. We further propose ArogyaSutra, an actor-critic-based multi-agent framework that integrates tool grounding with dual-memory mechanisms for step-wise, reasoning-aware decision making, and uses stored actor-critic simulation trajectories for distillation. Experiments show that our dataset and framework improve multilingual medical reasoning accuracy across all Indic languages, with ablations validating the contribution of each component. The source code and dataset are available at: https://iitp-cse.github.io/ ArogyaSutra/

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

An Attention Mechanism for Robust Multimodal Integration in a Global Workspace Architecture

Authors:
Roland Bertin-Johannet↗Lara Scipio↗Leopold Mayti\'e↗Rufin VanRullen↗

arXiv:2602.08597v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robust multimodal systems must remain effective when some modalities are noisy, degraded, or unreliable. Existing multimodal fusion methods often learn modality selection jointly with representation learning, making it difficult to determine whether robustness comes from the selector itself or from full end-to-end co-adaptation. Motivated by Global Workspace Theory (GWT), we study this question using a lightweight top-down modality selector operating on top of a frozen multimodal global workspace. We evaluate our method on two multimodal datasets of increasing complexity: Simple Shapes and MM-IMDb 1.0, under structured modality corruptions. The selector improves robustness while using far fewer trainable parameters than end-to-end attention baselines, and the learned selection strategy transfers better across downstream tasks, corruption regimes, and even to a previously unseen modality. Beyond explicit corruption settings, on the MM-IMDb 1.0 benchmark, we show that the same mechanism improves the global workspace over its no-attention counterpart and yields decent benchmark performance.

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

SDVDiag: Multimodal Causal Discovery for Online Diagnosis in Software-defined Vehicles

Authors:
Matthias Wei{\ss}↗Athreya Hosahalli Prakash↗Falk Dettinger↗Nasser Jazdi↗Michael Weyrich↗

arXiv:2606.15559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The transition toward software-defined vehicles concentrates an increasing share of vehicle functionality into distributed software services, where failures propagate through service dependencies and the surface symptom is often several causal hops away from the underlying defect. Existing approaches to causal root-cause analysis in such systems address this only partially: they typically reason over a single observability modality and operate in an offline, operator-driven mode that does not match the demands of continuous vehicle operation. This paper presents SDVDiag, a multimodal causal-discovery pipeline that fuses log-based and metric-based service representations into a shared embedding space before graph construction, coupled with an anomaly-driven trigger that converts the diagnostic platform from a manually operated batch tool into a continuously running online system. Evaluation on an Autonomous Valet Parking testbed shows that the multimodal pipeline produces sparser causal graphs than a metrics-only baseline (134 vs. 182 edges on average) and consistently outperforms it in edge-weighted reward against an expert knowledge graph at every stage of human-feedback refinement, showing a 2.4-fold improvement over the baseline after 60 feedback queries. An end-to-end fault-injection scenario further demonstrates that the integrated trigger correctly recovers a true root cause located two causal hops upstream of the observable symptom.

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

Investigating Inductive Biases for Machine Learning Emulation of Sudden Stratospheric Warmings in Idealised Isca Simulations

Authors:
Oskar Bohn Lassen↗Simon Driscoll↗Stephen I. Thomson↗Sebastian Schemm↗Francisco C. Pereira↗

arXiv:2606.18857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine-learning emulators are increasingly used for weather prediction and have the potential to extend skill on subseasonal-to-seasonal timescales by learning dynamically important sources of predictability. A key challenge is whether the models can exploit predictability anchors, such as stratospheric variability, that influence tropospheric circulation beyond short lead times. We test how architectural inductive bias affects emulation of sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) dynamics using paired idealised Isca simulations that differ only in an imposed wave-2 heating perturbation. Across convolutional, transformer, and graph-based architectures trained for one-step prediction, model differences are modest when the stratosphere is dynamically quiet but widen substantially when SSW-like variability is active. Our results identify explicit three-dimensional vertical coupling as a key inductive bias for machine-learning emulation of stratospheric dynamics. However, Eliassen-Palm flux diagnostics show that low forecast error does not guarantee physically faithful wave-mean-flow interaction, with coherent errors remaining in stratospheric wave-driving structure.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

S2D2: Fast Decoding for Diffusion LLMs via Training-Free Self-Speculation

Authors:
Ligong Han↗Hao Wang↗Han Gao↗Kai Xu↗Akash Srivastava↗

Block-diffusion language models offer a promising path toward faster-than-autoregressive generation by combining block-wise autoregressive decoding with within-block parallel denoising. However, in the few-step regime needed for practical acceleration, standard confidence-thresholded decoding is often brittle: aggressive thresholds hurt quality, while conservative thresholds require unnecessary denoising steps. Existing approaches that address this issue either require additional training or incur extra test-time compute. We present S2D2, a training-free self-speculative decoding framework for block-diffusion language models. Our key observation is that a block-diffusion model becomes autoregressive when the block size is reduced to one, allowing the same pretrained model to act as both drafter and verifier. S2D2 inserts a speculative verification step into standard block-diffusion decoding and uses lightweight routing policies to decide when verification is worth its cost. This yields a hybrid decoding trajectory in which diffusion proposes tokens in parallel, while the autoregressive mode acts as a local sequence-level critic. Across three mainstream block-diffusion families, S2D2 consistently improves the accuracy-speed tradeoff over strong confidence-thresholding baselines. On SDAR, we observe up to $4.7\times$ speedup over autoregressive decoding, and up to $1.57\times$ over a tuned dynamic decoding baseline while improving accuracy by up to $4.5$ points. On LLaDA2.1-Mini, S2D2 remains complementary to built-in self-correction, including a conservative setting where it is $4.4\times$ faster than the static baseline with slightly higher accuracy.

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