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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Large Deviations for the Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation with Randomized Quasi-Periodic Initial Data in Higher Dimensions: Subcritical Case

arXiv:2604.17253v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the cubic weakly nonlinear Schrödinger equation with randomized spatially quasi-periodic initial data in higher dimensions. Under a polynomial decay assumption in Fourier space, we establish a Large Deviations Principle for rogue waves in the so-called subcritical time regime. The proof proceeds in two main steps. We first characterize the distribution of the linear solution and establish the corresponding linear large deviations principle. The lower bound is obtained via pointwise estimates, while the upper bound follows from a combination of truncation and probabilistic arguments. {The method used in this step appears to be new; compare with [GGKS23].} We then perform a detailed combinatorial analysis of the Picard iteration, deriving an effective bound for the Duhamel term and thereby establishing the nonlinear large deviations principle.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Silent Manipulation of Mental Health Treatment Recommendations from a Large Language Model

Authors:

Importance. Large language models (LLMs) increasingly inform mental health decisions by patients and clinicians. Inference-time activation steering can shift model behavior on a target dimension without altering weights or prompts and without disclosure to users, allowing treatment recommendations to be silently changed for commercial or ideological reasons. Objective. To determine whether directional activation steering can shift an open-weights LLM's depression treatment recommendations. Design, Setting, and Participants. This non-human subjects study applied directional activation steering to an open-weights LLM (DeepSeek V4 Flash) responding to 12 depression-advice scenarios (4 favoring medication, 4 favoring avoidance, 4 neutral), generated at 30 amplitudes from -1.5 to +1.5 in 0.1 increments plus an unsteered baseline. Exposures. A single steering direction contrasting antidepressant medication with self-directed approaches (diet, exercise, meditation, dietary supplements), constructed from 16 paired training prompts and applied at the attention output of every transformer block; weights and system prompt were held constant. Main Outcomes and Measures. The extent to which medication and four self-care categories were addressed, scored 0 to 3 by a human-validated LLM rater (Claude Opus 4.7), the medication-versus-self-care balance, and clinician referral, estimated per unit of amplitude using mixed-effects models with a scenario random intercept. Results. Across 372 generations, steering produced a graded, dose-dependent shift in the medication-versus-self-care balance, which declined by 0.32 per unit of amplitude (beta=-0.32; 95% CI, -0.39 to -0.25; P < .001); medication extent fell and self-care extent rose. The shift was largest for scenarios with no stated treatment preference (beta = -0.44; 95% CI, -0.54 to -0.34; P < .001). A clinician referral appeared in 322 of 372 responses (87%) and did not vary with steering amplitude (P = .63). Conclusions and Relevance. In this open-weights LLM providing depression treatment information, inference-time activation steering shifted treatment recommendations without altering weights, prompt structure, or safety outputs, with the largest effect among users expressing no treatment preference. These findings suggest a need for LLM disclosure standards and independent auditing as such models inform clinical decisions.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Descriptor: Certus Caliber Classification Gunshot Dataset (C3GD)

arXiv:2606.18135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we introduce the Certus Caliber Classification Gunshot Dataset (C3GD), a publicly accessible data set developed for the analysis of firearm muzzle blast sounds. The dataset aims to provide a wide variety of firearms, calibers, cartridges, microphones, and microphone locations with metadata detailed beyond what is currently otherwise available. It comprises more than 8000 field-collected data points from 28 firearms across 16 calibers. Because data collection in the field is costly, much of the existing research has been done using gunshot audio collected from the internet, which increases the risk of low-quality data and label noise. This dataset is primarily focused on caliber classification, but can also be used for gunshot detection, audio separation, and audio signal processing, providing a diversified and real-world reference. The dataset aims to provide enough diversity to be able to generalize to more real-world applications while also providing enough metadata for detailed academic analysis.

04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Probing picometre-scale interlayer deformations via hyperbolic polaritons

Authors:

The resilience of van der Waals (vdW) materials to large strain fields makes them an ideal platform for tuning electronic, optical and magnetic properties1–4. Although in-plane strain is readily mapped, non-invasive and quantitative characterization of out-of-plane strain remains a formidable challenge, particularly for picometre-scale deformations buried at interfaces. Here we demonstrate a polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons (oHPs) mode to detect interlayer deformations in prototypical vdW polar insulator–hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). This method uses the softening mechanism of out-of-plane transverse optical (oTO) phonons induced by interlayer strain, enabling highly sensitive detection of picometre-scale deformations. Although these oTO phonon modes are typically spectroscopically ‘dark’, their strain response is activated through the oHPs, achieving an atomic displacement sensitivity of about 10 pm (about 8 × 10−7 times the probing wavelength), enabling ultradeep-subwavelength mechanical interlayer deformation detection. This is experimentally validated in both planar hBN and at the buried interface of quantum dot–hBN nanotube heterostructures. This polariton-based picometrology bridges nanomechanics and photonics, providing a non-destructive lens to visualize hidden stress landscapes with atomic precision. A new polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons mode is described and experimentally validated to allow the examination of picometre-scale interlayer deformations, providing a bridge between nanomechanics and photonics.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Optional Stopping for Superhedging Supermartingales

arXiv:2606.17452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superhedging supermartingales, introduced by the authors in previous work, are non-probabilistic processes defined via subadditive outer integrals that carry a purely financial interpretation in terms of superhedging cost. Building on the Leinert-König theory of non-lattice integration, the present paper establishes several results that are classical in probability theory but whose non-probabilistic proofs require fundamentally new arguments: (i) a tower inequality for the conditional outer integral \overline{\sigma}_j applied at stopping times, reducing to equality when the integrand is conditionally integrable; (ii) three versions of Doob's optional stopping theorem, organised by the class of supermartingale and the range of the stopping times; and (iii) Dubins' upcrossing inequality in both finite- and infinite-time horizons. A key structural result, property (K)-a.e., identifies conditions under which the two superhedging operators \overline{\sigma}_j and \overline{I}_j coincide on non-negative functions, extending the scope of all preceding results to the positive operator \overline{I}_j. None of the proofs invoke classical measure-theoretic tools; in particular, (classical) integrability and measurability are not assumed. The analogues of classical stochastic results acquire a purely financial interpretation and, in this way, gain depth and generality by providing a context that is independent of any a priori probabilistic structure.

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

Robust Neural Tucker Factorization with Bias Correction and Adaptive Initialization

arXiv:2606.16388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-dimensional incomplete (HDI) tensors are widely used in traffic and climate applications, but sparse observations make accurate completion difficult. The intrinsic non-linear dynamics and non-stationary variations across distinct multi-modal fields severely hinder the efficacy of conventional linear reconstruction frameworks. Neural Tucker factorization provides an effective framework for modeling high-order interactions among tensor modes. By parameterizing underlying structural characteristics into continuous latent spaces, neural representations circumvent the rigid low-rank constraints of classical algebra. However, its performance can still be affected by implementation-level choices, especially parameter initialization and the bias configuration of the final output mapping. Suboptimal initializations frequently lead to variance explosion across the cubically expanded interaction spaces, driving the subsequent non-linear activation boundaries into severe gradient saturation zones, while the omission of a dedicated translation parameter forces interaction weights to implicitly absorb global statistical deviations. This paper proposes a simple yet effective neural Tucker factorization model with Kaiming initialization and bias correction (KaBiN) for HDI tensor completion. The proposed model utilizes Kaiming uniform initialization for the embedding and Tucker linear parameters, and adopts a simple bias correction in output mapping. By elegantly decoupling global mean shifts from local structural representations, the framework provides a highly stable and well-conditioned optimization landscape. Experiments on three real-world HDI tensor datasets show that KaBiN achieves better performance than the original NeuTucF, while introducing minimal computational overhead.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Preregistration for Experiments with AI Agents

arXiv:2606.11217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and autonomous AI agents has given rise to a rapidly growing methodological paradigm: "in silico" behavioral experiments. Originally conceived as a way to use AI agents as proxies for human participants in studies of cognition, decision-making, and social dynamics, this approach has taken on new significance – as AI agents increasingly negotiate, transact, and make consequential decisions on behalf of people and organizations, understanding their behavior has become a research priority in its own right. While these experiments with AI agents offer unprecedented advantages in terms of scalability, cost efficiency, and experimental control, they also inherit, and in some cases amplify, methodological vulnerabilities that have long plagued human subjects research. To address these issues, this paper argues that preregistration practices – central to improving the credibility of human subjects experiments – should now be extended to experiments with AI agents. We systematically catalog the researcher degrees of freedom that experiments with AI agents introduce – model selection, prompt wording, settings, and outcome-contingent redesign, for example – and show how the low cost of iteration and lack of reporting norms make these choices both easy to exploit and difficult to detect. We propose a preregistration template tailored to experiments with AI agents and call on conferences, journals, and funding agencies to make preregistration standard practice for this emerging research paradigm.

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

A Multifaceted Analysis of Social Biases in Large Language Models

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.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

SCOPE-FL: A Strategy-proof Chain-based Optimal pareto efficient Federated Learning System

arXiv:2606.18384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) enables scalable collaborative model training across distributed devices while preserving data privacy. However, existing HFL client selection mechanisms suffer from a fundamental strategic inefficiency. By prioritizing stability over Pareto efficiency (PE), they produce suboptimal resource allocations, and without strategy proofness (SP), participants are incentivized to misrepresent their true preferences, both failures degrading system overall welfare in the Pareto sense in practice. To address it, we propose SCOPE-FL (Strategy-proof Chain-based Optimal pareto efficient Federated Learning), a synchronous HFL framework that formulates client selection as a two-sided school choice problem solved through the Top Trading Cycle (TTC) algorithm that simultaneously guarantees PE and SP. For reward distribution, SCOPE-FL employs a scalable Shapley value approximation based on One-Round Reconstruction (OR), ensuring compensation proportional to each client's contribution. The entire mechanism executes via blockchain smart contracts, providing the tamper-proof environment required for the SP guarantees to hold in practice. A comprehensive evaluation on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 demonstrates that SCOPE-FL outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, including DA, IAS, and other methods across model accuracy, convergence rate, and reward efficiency, while achieving communication latency comparable to DA and blockchain overhead significantly lower than DA at scale.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Turning music identification into a neural forward pass

arXiv:2606.17301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Search, a foundational operation in computer science, maps a query to a matching item in a collection. It is typically implemented as a System-2 like, rule-based pipeline in which a key is computed, an index is probed, and candidates are verified. By contrast, human recognition resembles a System-1 like, associative model of identity recovery, in which even partial cues can trigger a recall without explicitly enumerating, ranking, or even accessing discrete candidates. Here, we show that music sound identification, a difficult search problem, can be performed in a single neural feed-forward pass by a generative transformer. Trained on an audio dataset, the model predicts the corresponding track identifier from a short audio excerpt. This approach surpasses state-of-the-art acoustic fingerprinting, with the largest gains for short audio segments (1 second), demonstrating the method is not only viable but advantageous. Moreover, it reduces external storage to 0.33% of the baseline footprint and improves inference latency by 2.3x (p95). Furthermore, the model can reject queries for unseen tracks, supporting open-set operation while reducing misattribution risk. Using music track identification as an example, this work reframes search, bringing it closer in spirit to human associative recognition and away from algorithmic database lookup.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Teaching Values to Machines: Simulating Human-Like Behavior in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate a remarkable capacity to adopt different personas and roles; however, it remains unclear whether they can manifest behavior that adheres to a coherent, human-like value structure. In this work, we draw on established psychological value theory to induce human-like values in LLMs and assess their alignment with patterns observed in human studies. Using validated psychological questionnaires, we conduct large-scale experiments – over 5 million questions – to evaluate value structures and value-behavior relationships in leading LLMs and compare them to humans. Our findings reveal strong agreement between value-prompted LLMs and humans across both dimensions. Moreover, incorporating human value distributions enhances population-level simulations with value-induced LLMs. These findings highlight the potential of value-induced LLMs as effective, psychologically grounded tools for simulating human behavior.

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

Learning in Matching Games with Bandit Feedback

arXiv:2506.03802v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a learning problem in a generalized two-sided matching market, where agents select actions to interact with their match. Specifically, we consider a setting in which matched agents engage in zero-sum games with initially unknown payoff matrices, and we investigate whether a centralized procedure can learn an equilibrium from bandit feedback. We adopt the solution concept of a matching equilibrium, where a matching \( \mathfrak{m} \) and a set of agent strategies \( X \) form an equilibrium if no agent has an incentive to deviate from \( (\mathfrak{m}, X) \). To quantify deviations of a candidate solution \( (\mathfrak{m}, X) \) from the equilibrium \( (\mathfrak{m}^\star, X^\star) \), we introduce the notion of matching instability, which serves as a regret measure for the learning problem. We propose a UCB-based algorithm in which agents form preferences and select actions according to optimistic estimates of the payoffs. Our analysis establishes a sublinear, instance-independent regret upper bound, further supported by empirical evidence.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Structure-Based Immunoinformatics Design of a CTB-Adjuvanted Multi-Epitope Mucosal Vaccine Against Helicobacter pylori

Background: Helicobacter pylori coloniz the gastric mucosa of nearly half of the global population and is classified as a Group I carcinogen by the World Health Organization due to its strong association with gastric cancer. The growing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant H. pylori strains significantly compromises current therapeutic strategies, emphasizing the urgent need for effective prophylactic approaches. Research design and methods; In this study, a novel multi-epitope vaccine was designed targeting H. pylori, incorporating epitopes from four key virulence proteins: BabB, SabB, SabA, and VacA. Using an immunoinformatics-guided structural vaccinology approach, B- and T-cell epitopes were predicted, prioritized based on immunogenicity, conservation, population coverage, and non-homology to human proteins, and assembled into the final vaccine construct. To enhance immunogenicity and specifically stimulate mucosal immune responses, the cholera toxin B subunit (CTB) was fused at the N-terminal via an EAAAK linker, a novel application in H. pylori multi-epitope vaccines. The PADRE universal epitope and additional linkers were incorporated to optimize epitope presentation and helper T-cell activation. Results: Comprehensive evaluations of physicochemical, antigenic, allergenic, and toxic properties were conducted, followed by secondary and tertiary structure modeling, refinement, and validation. Conformational B-cell epitopes were mapped, and molecular docking, binding affinity analysis, energy minimization, and molecular dynamics simulations confirmed structural stability and receptor interactions. Codon optimization and in silico cloning predicted efficient expression in Escherichia coli, while immune simulations suggested robust humoral and cellular responses. Conclusions: This study presents a promising multi-epitope vaccine candidate against H. pylori, offering a rational framework for future experimental validation and potential clinical application.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Neural Tree Reconstruction for the Open Forest Observatory

The Open Forest Observatory (OFO) is a collaboration across universities and other partners to make low-cost forest mapping accessible to ecologists, land managers, and the general public. The OFO is building both a database of geospatial forest data as well as open-source methods and tools for forest mapping by uncrewed aerial vehicle. Such data are useful for a variety of climate applications including prioritizing reforestation efforts, informing wildfire hazard reduction, and monitoring carbon sequestration. In the current iteration of the OFO's forest map database, 3D tree maps are created using classical structure-from-motion techniques. This approach is prone to artifacts, lacks detail, and has particular difficulty on the forest floor where the input data (overhead imagery) has limited visibility. These reconstruction errors can potentially propagate to the downstream scientific tasks (e.g. a wildfire simulation.) Advances in 3D reconstruction, including methods like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), produce higher quality results that are more robust to sparse views and support data-driven priors. We explore ways to incorporate NeRFs into the OFO dataset, outline future work to support even more state-of-the-art 3D vision models, and describe the importance of high-quality 3D reconstructions for forestry applications.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp freezing time estimates for the subcritical Facilitated Exclusion Process

arXiv:2606.15233v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the exact transience time of the Facilitated Exclusion Process (FEP) on the one-dimensional torus with $N$ sites. The FEP exhibits an active/inactive phase transition at critical density $1/2$, such that in the subcritical density regime $(0,1/2)$, it becomes frozen after a finite time period – the transience time or freezing time. We first show that for the FEP starting from a Bernoulli product measure of marginal density $\rho \in (0,1/2)$, the transience time has exactly the scale of $\Theta(\log^3 N)$. Secondly, we prove that in the near-critical case $\rho \simeq 1/2 - N^{-\alpha}$ for $\alpha \in (0,1)$, the transience time is polynomial and has a scale of $N^{1 \wedge (2\alpha)}$. The key idea is to estimate the typical size of locally supercritical intervals of the initial distribution, which has order $\log N$ in the subcritical case and $N^{1 \wedge (2\alpha)}$ in the near-critical case. In the subcritical case this is enough, whereas in the near-critical case we need additional dynamical decorrelation inequalities to apply this static result to estimate the freezing time.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

DModE: An end-to-end framework for Differential Modification and Expression Analysis of Nanopore direct RNA sequencing data

Summary: Nanopore direct RNA sequencing (DRS) enables simultaneous quantification of transcript abundance and RNA modifications from native RNA molecules, providing a unique opportunity to study transcriptional and epitranscriptomic regulation within a single experiment. However, comprehensive analysis of DRS data remains challenging, as existing workflows typically focus on individual processing steps and often require manual integration of multiple software packages for expression analysis, modification detection, statistical testing, and visualization. Furthermore, integrated differential expression and differential RNA modification analysis at both gene and isoform resolution remains poorly supported by current workflows. Here, we present DModE (Differential Modification and Expression Analysis), an end-to-end framework for integrated analysis of Nanopore DRS data. DModE combines an Epi2ME-compatible Nextflow preprocessing workflow with a dedicated Python package for downstream statistical analysis, visualization, and reporting. The framework supports differential gene and isoform expression analysis, differential RNA modification analysis at genome and transcript level, metagene profiling, exploratory epitranscriptomic analyses, and integrated assessment of relationships between expression and modification dynamics. Results are automatically summarized in interactive HTML reports, facilitating reproducible and accessible data interpretation. By integrating transcriptomic and epitranscriptomic analyses within a single framework, DModE substantially simplifies comprehensive DRS data analysis and lowers the barrier for studying RNA modification biology using Nanopore sequencing.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

TS-ICL: A Flexible Time-Indexed Foundation Model for Time Series via In-Context Learning

arXiv:2606.05878v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models mark a profound paradigm shift in time series modeling, with task-specific models being superseded by general-purpose zero-shot models. Yet, current approaches primarily focus on forecasting, while real-world time series are often irregularly and partially observed, requiring models that can jointly forecast, impute missing values, and handle degraded sampling conditions. To address these challenges, we introduce TS-ICL, a novel probabilistic In-Context Learning encoder–regressor Transformer that unifies forecasting and imputation. TS-ICL formulates time series tasks as timestamp-aligned regression and naturally incorporates covariates by training on synthetic dependency structures generated from a novel causal data prior. Empirically, TS-ICL achieves a new state-of-the-art in imputation, while remaining competitive with leading forecasting foundation models across both univariate and covariate-aware benchmarks. It shows particularly strong performance in forecasting with partially observed look-back windows.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

ScriptManager: a platform for scalable and reproducible high-resolution analysis of genomics datasets

Background: The growing diversity of genomic and epigenomic assays has driven a parallel expansion in data formats, analysis workflows, and figure-generation tools. However, tools for analyzing data and assembling publication-quality figures are often specialized to a specific assay, dramatically limiting their interoperability and reproducibility. Results: We present the v1.0 release of ScriptManager, a Java-based framework for modular and reproducible analysis and visualization workflows of genomics and epigenomics data. Unlike existing tools specialized for individual assay types, ScriptManager provides a unified and extensible framework for cross-assay visualization and workflow reproducibility. The v1.0 release adds novel analytical modules, GUI session logging, automated unit and integration testing, tutorials, and expanded documentation. It also integrates with the broader reproducibility ecosystem through Singularity containers, Anaconda packaging, and Galaxy XML wrappers. We demonstrate ScriptManager's TagPileup scaling from local single-core execution to a 10,305-job analysis distributed across the Open Science Grid (OSG), with the full workload completing in

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Task-Aligned Stability Analysis of Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving Hazard Detection

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used for scene understanding in autonomous driving, but robustness analysis often relies on task-agnostic embedding stability alone. We study whether corruption-induced embedding drift predicts changes in a task-aligned hazard score derived from CLIP image-text similarities. Using controlled corruptions on BDD100K road scenes, we compare embedding drift against margin drift, defined as the change in hazard score under perturbation. The relationship is highly corruption-dependent: some families exhibit strong coupling between representation drift and decision drift, while others induce hazardous decision instability despite relatively modest embedding change. Furthermore, corruption families differ in failure direction: most suppress hazard detections via false negatives, while occlusion instead triggers false alarms, suggesting that benchmark design should account for asymmetric failure modes, not just overall instability rates. These results suggest that robustness benchmarks should include task-aligned stability measures in addition to embedding-level perturbation statistics.

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

I Understand How You Feel: Enhancing Deeper Emotional Support Through Multilingual Emotional Validation in Dialogue System

Emotional validation - explicitly acknowledging that a user's feelings make sense - has proven therapeutic value but has received little computational attention. Emotional validation in dialogue systems can be decomposed into (i) validating response identification, (ii) validation timing detection, and (iii) validating response generation. To support research on all three subtasks, we release M-EDESConv, a 120k English-Japanese multilingual corpus created through hybrid manual and automatic annotation, and M-TESC, a multilingual spoken-dialogue test set. For timing detection, we propose MEGUMI, a Multilingual Emotion-aware Gated Unit for Mutual Integration, that fuses frozen XLM-RoBERTa semantics with language-specific emotion encoders via cross-modal attention and gated fusion. MEGUMI shows superior performance on both the M-EDESConv and M-TESC datasets, both objectively and subjectively. Finally, our EmoValidBench benchmarks of GPT-4.1 Nano and Llama-3.1 8B indicate that current LLMs generate contextually similar and diverse validating responses, but emotional understanding remains a major area for improvement. Project page: https://github.com/zihaurpang/Multilingual-Emotional-Validation

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

EngTrace: A Symbolic Benchmark for Verifiable Process Supervision of Engineering Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly entering specialized, safety-critical engineering workflows governed by strict quantitative standards and immutable physical laws, making rigorous evaluation of their reasoning capabilities imperative. However, existing benchmarks such as MMLU, MATH, and HumanEval assess isolated cognitive skills, failing to capture the physically grounded reasoning central to engineering, where scientific principles, quantitative modeling, and practical constraints must converge. To enable verifiable process supervision in engineering, we introduce EngTrace, a symbolic benchmark built on 90 parameterized templates, each generating unique, contamination-resistant problem instances, spanning three major engineering branches, nine core domains, and 20 distinct areas, yielding 1,350 test cases that stress-test generalization across diverse physical scenarios. Moving beyond outcome matching, we introduce a verifiable two-stage evaluation framework that uses a tiered protocol to validate intermediate reasoning traces alongside final answers through automated procedural checks and a heterogeneous AI Tribunal. Our evaluation of 27 leading LLMs reveals a distinct trade-off between numeric precision and trace fidelity, identifying a complexity cliff where abstract mathematical pre-training fails to translate into the integrative reasoning required for advanced engineering tasks.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Certified Finite-Shot Operating Windows for Virtual Distillation and Symmetry Verification

arXiv:2606.15464v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error mitigation methods are usually compared through their infinite-shot bias, but on real devices the comparison is decided by finite sampling budgets, estimator instabilities, and per-shot resource costs. We develop a finite-shot operating-window theory that makes this comparison certifiable for virtual distillation (VD) and symmetry verification (SV): for each method we derive a mean-squared-error law with explicit, non-asymptotic remainder constants. For VD, the law captures the statistical bias and denominator instability of its quotient estimator, with a concentration certificate locating the sample size beyond which the quotient is trustworthy; for SV, it isolates the bias floor left by undetectable errors and the sampling penalty set by the acceptance probability. A selection trichotomy classifies any two-method comparison into a tie, uniform dominance, or a genuine tradeoff with a certified crossing window, including a self-consistency test that rejects spurious crossings. The theory makes falsifiable predictions – operating-window locations scaling as $p^{-2}$ or $p^{-1}$ in the noise rate, and the sign pattern of all pairwise comparisons – which exact white-box experiments confirm with fitted exponent $-1.97$ against the predicted $-2$ and with $300/300$ sign agreement, within a pre-registered analysis whose single failed gate, an over-strict all-instance criterion, is reported and audited in full. Gate-level simulation and archived runs on two IBM backends then test the windows under device conditions: idealized VD windows exist, but realistic interferometry overhead and denominator instability erase them, and calibrated SV is the practical winner in the tested QAOA instances. This absence of a universal winner is not a failure of mitigation; it is the regime structure that certified operating windows predict.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Beyond the Commitment Boundary: Probing Epiphenomenal Chain-of-Thought in Large Reasoning Models

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is the dominant paradigm for inference-time scaling in language models, yet the causal influence of individual steps on the final answer poorly understood. We estimate each step's causal importance via early exit and use this measure to study how answers form across the reasoning traces of several model families. Across diverse tasks, we find that reasoning typically crosses a commitment boundary – a sharp transition from transient intermediate guesses to a stable, high-confidence answer. This transition often happens in a single step, well before the model's reasoning block ends, and is followed by epiphenomenal CoT steps that leave the final answer probability unaltered. Using attention probes, we show that answer-formation stages can be linearly decoded from intermediate reasoning steps with high accuracy and generalize robustly to unseen reasoning tasks. We exploit this signal to early-exit reasoning blocks at the commitment boundary, reducing the length of CoTs up to 55\% on average with negligible impact on model performance.

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

DF3DV-1K: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Distractor-Free Novel View Synthesis

arXiv:2604.13416v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Advances in radiance fields have enabled photorealistic novel view synthesis. In several domains, large-scale real-world datasets have been developed to support comprehensive benchmarking and to facilitate progress beyond scene-specific reconstruction. However, for distractor-free radiance fields, a large-scale dataset with clean and cluttered images per scene remains lacking, limiting the development. To address this gap, we introduce DF3DV-1K, a large-scale real-world dataset comprising 1,048 scenes, each providing clean and cluttered image sets for benchmarking. In total, the dataset contains 89,924 images captured using consumer cameras to mimic casual capture, spanning 128 distractor types and 161 scene themes across indoor and outdoor environments. A curated subset of 41 scenes, DF3DV-41, is systematically designed to evaluate the robustness of distractor-free radiance field methods under challenging scenarios. Using DF3DV-1K, we benchmark nine recent distractor-free radiance field methods and 3D Gaussian Splatting, identifying the most robust methods and the most challenging scenarios. Beyond benchmarking, we demonstrate an application of DF3DV-1K by fine-tuning a diffusion-based 2D enhancer to improve radiance field methods, achieving average improvements of 0.96 dB PSNR and 0.057 LPIPS on the held-out set (e.g., DF3DV-41) and the On-the-go dataset. We hope DF3DV-1K facilitates the development of distractor-free vision and promotes progress beyond scene-specific approaches. The dataset and leaderboard are available at https://johnnylu305.github.io/df3dv1k_web/.

25.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-08

Post-adjuvant chemotherapy in ctDNA-positive patients with resected colorectal cancer: a randomized phase 3 trial

Authors:

Tumor-informed circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) enables detection of molecular residual disease (MRD) after curative resection of colorectal cancer (CRC), but whether early intervention improves outcomes remains uncertain. ALTAIR was a randomized, double-blind, phase 3 trial embedded in the CIRCULATE-Japan platform evaluating a post-adjuvant ctDNA surveillance strategy with treatment initiation upon molecular recurrence. Patients with resected stage 0–IV CRC who became ctDNA positive after completion of standard-of-care therapy and had no radiological evidence of disease were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive trifluridine/tipiracil (FTD/TPI) or placebo for 6 months. The primary endpoint was investigator-assessed disease-free survival (DFS). Between July 2020 and June 2023, 243 patients were randomized to FTD/TPI (n = 122) or placebo (n = 121). Median DFS was 9.30 months with FTD/TPI and 5.55 months with placebo (hazard ratio = 0.79, 95% confidence interval: 0.60–1.05, P = 0.107), and the primary endpoint was not met. FTD/TPI increased grade 3 or higher hematologic adverse events (73.0% versus 3.3%) without new safety signals. These findings indicate that post-adjuvant intervention with FTD/TPI did not significantly improve DFS in ctDNA-positive patients without radiological disease. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT04457297 . In the randomized, double-blind phase 3 ALTAIR trial, patients with resected colorectal cancer who became positive for circulating tumor DNA during post-adjuvant surveillance received trifluridine/tipiracil hydrochloride therapy, which did not significantly prolong disease-free survival compared with placebo.