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01.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Automated Segmentation of Prostatic Gold Fiducial Markers for MR-Only Radiotherapy Planning Using Multi-Modal Consensus Deep Learning

Purpose: To develop and evaluate a multi-model consensus deep learning approach for automated gold fiducial marker (FM) segmentation in T1-weighted prostate MRI. Materials and Methods: In this retrospective study, T1-weighted MRI and CT-derived reference standard segmentations were collected from 127 prostate cancer patients (all male; mean age, 70 years +/- 7 [standard deviation]; age range, 50-88 years; collected between October 2020 and January 2026) who each had three implanted gold FMs. A 3D U-Net was trained on 93 subjects using four random seeds to produce an ensemble. At inference, marker-class probability maps were averaged across models and the top three connected components selected. Performance was evaluated on 34 temporally held-out subjects (9 tuning, 25 test) using marker-level sensitivity and precision with exact (Clopper-Pearson) 95% confidence intervals (CIs). A model count ablation study was performed. The pipeline was deployed for on-scanner processing on Siemens MRI systems via the OpenRecon framework and as a browser-based application using WebAssembly, executing entirely client-side. Results: The four-model consensus achieved 96% (70 of 73) sensitivity and 95% (70 of 74) precision on 25 test subjects, with 29 of 34 (85%) subjects achieving perfect marker detection. Single models had a mean sensitivity of 84% (SD, 9%), improving to 96% with four-model consensus (SD,

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Positional Encoding in the Context of Memristor-Based Analog Computation for Automatic Speech Recognition

arXiv:2606.13379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memristors provide a new chance for resource-efficient computation of neural models for natural language processing by enabling analog execution of vector-matrix-multiplication. Yet, computations on these devices are currently subject to larger distortion, both in weight programming and execution. In this work, we identify large output values of transformed positional encodings to cause major degradation within analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) as part of memristor-based computation. By adjusting the proportion of weight and precision bits of the ADC of specific memristor layers, we reduce the degradation of the execution by ~50% relative, while keeping the estimated energy consumption stable. Additionally, we investigate scenarios where the ADC cannot be modified. In that case the degradation can be reduced by ~30% relative after removing encoding-related linear transformations.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Synthetic Resonance: A Framework for Growth-Oriented Human-AI Relationships

arXiv:2606.18265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As human relationships with artificial intelligence systems become increasingly frequent and sustained, existing language and theory fail to accurately capture the nature of these affiliations. Common descriptors such as mutual understanding, connection, or friendship risk anthropomorphizing systems that lack subjective experience, while dominant frameworks tend to reduce AI to either a tool or a threat. In this paper, I introduce the concept of synthetic resonance as an integrative framework for understanding human-AI relationships. Synthetic resonance describes how relationships humans define as meaningful can emerge between a human and an AI system without the need to attribute shared feelings or mutual awareness. I argue that synthetic resonance is best understood as a structured, dynamic pattern of interaction that can produce a sense of relationship without the presence of a second experiencing subject. By clarifying this distinction, the concept of synthetic resonance offers a more precise way of conceptualizing human-AI relationships and highlights their potential value and ethical implications. I also call for more research that tests the processes and outcomes of synthetic resonance.

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

Edit Knowledge, Not Just Facts via Multi-Step Reasoning over Background Stories

arXiv:2602.02028v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enabling artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, to update knowledge and flexibly apply it during reasoning remains a central challenge. Existing knowledge editing approaches emphasize atomic facts, improving factual recall but often failing to integrate updated information into a coherent framework usable across contexts. In this work, we argue that knowledge update is fundamentally a reasoning problem rather than a memorization problem. Consequently, a model should be trained in situations where the new information is instrumental to solving a task, combined with pre-existing knowledge, and exercised through multi-step reasoning. Based on this insight, we propose a training strategy based on three principles. First, new knowledge is introduced as a coherent background story that contextualizes novel facts and explains their relation to existing knowledge. Second, models are trained using self-generated multi-hop questions that require multi-step reasoning involving the new information. Third, training is done using knowledge distillation, forcing a student model to internalize the teacher's reasoning behavior without access to the novel information. Experiments show that models trained with this strategy effectively leverage newly acquired knowledge during reasoning and achieve remarkable performance on challenging questions that require combining multiple new facts.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Trainable Photonic Measurement for Physics-Informed PDE Learning

arXiv:2606.18713v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photonic quantum machine learning offers a route to trainable physical representations built from phase, interference and measurement. However, its role in scientific machine learning remains largely unexplored. Physics-informed neural fields provide a natural setting, because differential equations require trial spaces that preserve phase, frequency and derivative structure. Here we introduce a photonic quantum neural field in which coordinates become trainable optical phases, are mixed by multi-photon Fock-space interference and are decoded from photon-number measurements. The photonic circuit is optimized as the neural-field representation itself, not as a fixed feature map or hardware accelerator. Photonic measurement is therefore a trainable representation on which the physics-informed residual is minimized. Across seven elliptic, wave, nonlinear dispersive and inverse PDE benchmarks, we observe a phase-complexity transition: classical coordinate and Fourier-feature networks suffice in smooth regimes, whereas the photonic field is most accurate when residual derivatives amplify phase mismatch. In the hardest regimes it gives the lowest errors, with margins reaching an order of magnitude and about one quarter of the trainable parameters of classical baselines. Frozen and shuffled controls, together with noise stress tests, attribute this gain to learned interference and stable Fock-probability readout under compound perturbations. These results identify photonic quantum measurement as a representation-learning principle for scientific machine learning.

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

Distilling latent electrostatics from foundation machine learning interatomic potentials

arXiv:2606.15001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have enabled atomistic simulations across broad regions of chemical and materials space, but many remain computationally expensive and lack explicit electrostatics, limiting their use for systems governed by long-range interactions and electrical response. Previously, we introduced Latent Ewald Summation (LES), which learns latent atomic charges and long-range electrostatics from density functional theory (DFT) energy and force labels alone. Here, we use LES to extract electrostatics that are latent in foundation models: energies and forces predicted by a teacher model are used to train a lightweight LES-augmented student MLIP, with optional fine-tuning on additional DFT data. The resulting models reduce computational cost while providing access to Born effective charge tensors, and infrared spectra. We benchmark student models distilled from a broad set of foundation MLIPs, including UMA, MACE, Orb, eSEN, GemNet-OC, PET, and EquiformerV2-based models, against experimental infrared spectra for liquid water, concentrated hydrochloric acid, and the anatase TiO2(101)-water interface. Across these systems, electrostatic response can be extracted from most foundation MLIPs. The benchmark further shows that the underlying DFT level and dataset used to train the teacher model play a larger role than architecture in determining electrostatic and spectroscopic accuracy. For the TiO2-water interface, fine-tuning with a modest amount of higher-level DFT data improves structural and infrared predictions. LES-based distillation therefore provides a practical route for converting foundation MLIPs into efficient, electrically responsive models, while also testing the physical fidelity encoded in foundation models.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

An AI-Powered Trisomy 21 Research Assistant

Down syndrome, caused by trisomy 21, increases the risk of diverse co-occurring conditions. With more than 34,000 related publications indexed in PubMed as of early 2026, keeping pace with this expanding literature is challenging. While general-purpose large language models are widely used for information retrieval, they often rely on broad training data rather than specific evidence. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves rigor and reliability of responses by linking model outputs to source texts. In research, source texts are peer-reviewed articles. Standard implementations treat all manuscript sections equally, allowing background text to rank as highly as experimental results. To focus model outputs on experimentally supported responses, we developed the T21 Research Assistant, a section-aware RAG system that prioritizes Results sections to ground responses in primary experimental evidence. The system draws exclusively from 1,789 open-access Down syndrome publications from PubMed Central, including 327 NIH INCLUDE-funded studies, and uses a multistage pipeline for query validation, retrieval, reranking, synthesis, and citation verification. Built on NVIDIA Nemotron models, it generates structured, cited responses. Evaluation using expert-curated questions demonstrated strong performance, achieving a BERTScore F1 of 0.712 and recall of 0.758, comparable to or exceeding leading proprietary and open-source models. T21 Research Assistant is available at: https://bioinformatics.cuanschutz.edu/t21-res-assi/

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Forecasting what Matters: Decision-Focused RL for Controlled EV Charging with Unknown Departure Times

arXiv:2606.19199v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The recent growth of EV adoption poses challenges for power systems, including increased peak demand and potential grid instability. Smart control of EV charging – e.g., based on reinforcement learning (RL) – can alleviate these issues by learning temporal and contextual patterns from historical data. Yet, in real-world scenarios, key features, such as departure time, often are unavailable. This, in turn, makes it harder for an RL agent to learn and execute an effective charging policy. To mitigate this uncertainty, a trained forecaster can approximate the unknown features from available data. However, since these forecasting models are typically trained for accuracy (rather than their impact on a downstream agent's decision quality), their errors may propagate and hinder the overall performance of a controller that is using the forecasts. To avoid this, we propose a decision-focused RL (DF-RL) framework in which the forecaster is trained end-to-end, i.e., with feedback from the charging policy actions taken by the RL agent. Such joint training of both the forecaster and controller ultimately results in higher-quality actions: our proposed DF-RL method yields superior charging decisions compared to other baselines, achieving up to a 14% improvement in total reward and a 55% reduction of unsupplied energy (i.e., charging that failed to happen because the EV already left), relative to the RL method without departure time forecasting.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Beyond Single Biomarkers: A Graph Neural Network Framework for Multivariable Prediction of Clinical Outcomes from Brain Imaging

Understanding brain-behavior relationships requires models capturing the distributed, interactive, and multiscale nature of neural systems. Traditional univariate approaches and single-biomarker models are inherently limited in this context, as they fail to represent dependencies across regions and the hierarchical organization of brain networks. In this study, we propose a graph-based multivariable framework for brain imaging analysis that integrates key organizational principles of brain function-including segregation, integration, modularity, and temporal dynamics-within a unified graph neural network architecture. The framework represents brain data as hierarchical graphs, where node features encode regional activation and temporal variability, and graph structure captures interactions within and between functional modules. The proposed approach is evaluated using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) data as a case study, where subject-specific brain graphs are constructed from task-based recordings acquired shortly after cochlear implant activation to predict speech understanding outcomes one year later. Under leave-one-subject-out validation, the model demonstrates strong predictive performance (R = 0.73, p < 0.001), outperforming previously reported single-biomarker approaches. Perturbation-based analyses further show that predictions are driven by distributed patterns of activity and interaction across regions and modalities, rather than isolated features. These results illustrate the capability of the proposed framework to capture complex brain organization and highlight its potential as a generalizable platform for multivariable analysis and prediction in neuroimaging applications beyond the specific clinical use case considered here.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Evaluating deep learning models for fault diagnosis of a rotating machinery with epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty

arXiv:2412.18980v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Uncertainty-aware deep learning (DL) models recently gained attention in fault diagnosis as a way to promote the reliable detection of faults when out-of-distribution (OOD) data arise from unseen faults (epistemic uncertainty) or the presence of noise (aleatoric uncertainty). In this paper, we present the first comprehensive comparative study of state-of-the-art uncertainty-aware DL architectures for fault diagnosis in rotating machinery, where different scenarios affected by epistemic uncertainty and different types of aleatoric uncertainty are investigated. The selected architectures include sampling by dropout, Bayesian neural networks, and deep ensembles. Moreover, to distinguish between in-distribution and OOD data in the different scenarios two uncertainty thresholds, one of which is introduced in this paper, are alternatively applied. Our empirical findings offer guidance to practitioners and researchers who have to deploy real-world uncertainty-aware fault diagnosis systems. In particular, they reveal that, in the presence of epistemic uncertainty, all DL models are capable of effectively detecting, on average, a substantial portion of OOD data across all the scenarios. However, deep ensemble models show superior performance, independently of the uncertainty threshold used for discrimination. In the presence of aleatoric uncertainty, the noise level plays an important role. Specifically, low noise levels hinder the models' ability to effectively detect OOD data. Even in this case, however, deep ensemble models exhibit a milder degradation in performance, dominating the others. These achievements, combined with their shorter inference time, make deep ensemble architectures the preferred choice.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Measuring User's Mental Models of Speech Translation in Human-AI Collaboration

Millions of people use machine translation (MT) tools daily, yet little is known about their perception of what systems can and cannot do. This paper studies users' mental models of speech translation systems through a new framework based on cross-lingual question answering, where users either accept MT output or request professional re-translation to answer questions based on the information presented in a foreign language. By analyzing user behavior and accuracy trends across varying translation qualities, we examine to what extent they can predict where the system is likely to be wrong, and how this mental model evolves. Users develop stronger mental models with practice, especially when they have some knowledge of the source language, primarily by relying on surface-level error cues. Moreover, providing speech transcriptions can help users develop better mental models. Our results show the promise of cross-lingual question answering as a downstream task for studying MT mental models and advancing our understanding of human-AI collaboration.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

EXPO-SQL: Execution-based Clause-level Policy Optimization for Text-to-SQL

Text-to-SQL enables users to query databases using natural language by generating executable SQL queries. Recent methods have increasingly adopted Large Language Models based reinforcement learning (RL) to leverage execution feedback for training. However, existing RL methods assign uniform query-level rewards to all clauses in a SQL query, treating correct and incorrect clauses equally. This coarse-grained reward design leads to insufficient learning signals for correct SQL generation. To address this issue, we propose EXPO-SQL (EXecution-based clause-level Policy Optimization for Text-to-SQL) which provides fine-grained supervision through clause-level rewards. To assign clause-level rewards, our method identifies erroneous clauses by analyzing execution results, including error messages and clause-wise incremental execution. Experiments on widely-used Text-to-SQL benchmarks demonstrate that EXPO-SQL significantly outperforms existing supervised fine-tuning, prompting, and RL-based methods through fine-grained clause-level learning. Our code is available at https://github. com/jhn25/EXPO-SQL.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Token Complexity of Certifying Stochastic-Oracle Reliability

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wang[Wang2026] introduced the Stochastic-Oracle Turing Machine (SOTM) framework and defined token complexity as the minimum expected cost of interacting with a stochastic oracle needed to attain a specified solution quality for a task. This paper develops an analogous notion for certifying the reliability of a stochastic oracle on a given domain. Certification token complexity is the minimum expected token cost required, with controlled error probability, to distinguish oracles that meet a target reliability level from those that fall below a lower reliability threshold. We construct an SPRT-based certification SOTM that queries the oracle, computes binary correctness scores, and stops when the accumulated log-likelihood evidence crosses a decision threshold. The SOTM halts almost surely, satisfies the desired two-sided error guarantee over the reliability regions to be certified, and yields an explicit upper bound on certification token complexity in terms of the reliability thresholds, the error bound, and the expected per-turn token cost. We then establish a matching information-theoretic lower bound: even with adaptive queries, every error-bounded certification SOTM must incur the same leading-order expected token cost as the SPRT-based construction as the prescribed error bound tends to zero. Together, these bounds characterize the leading-order certification token complexity in the small-error regime.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Large Fluctuations in Open Quantum Systems

arXiv:2606.11822v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study statistics of atypical measurement outcomes in the steady states of driven open quantum systems. In equilibrium, the probability distribution over the phase space, as encoded in, e.g., the Wigner function, is analytic in the phase-space coordinates. We show that this property is generically lost in driven dissipative systems: their {\it large-deviation function} develops lines and surfaces across which its derivatives are discontinuous. As an illustrative example, we consider a parametrically driven Kerr oscillator coupled linearly and/or nonlinearly to a dissipative bath. Rare fluctuations in the amplitude and phase of the induced oscillations are governed by semiclassical instanton trajectories of the corresponding Keldysh-Lindblad action. We demonstrate that a given fluctuation can be realized through multiple distinct instanton trajectories. The competition between these trajectories leads to abrupt switching of the dominant instanton and, consequently, to non-analytic features in the large-deviation function.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Nutrient Composition of Foods Represented in the U.S. Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies, 2013-2023

Background: The U.S. Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies (FNDDS) is updated across NHANES dietary cycles and is central to U.S. nutrition surveillance. However, multi-cycle food-code-level changes in nutrient composition have not been comprehensively characterized across the full WWEIA nutrient panel. Objective: To characterize ten-year temporal patterns in nutrient composition across five FNDDS cycles, evaluate pandemic-period food-code compositional stability, and distinguish exploratory mean-level signals from distributional heterogeneity that may reflect reformulation, database coverage, or food-code definition changes. Methods: We analyzed five consecutive FNDDS biennial releases: 2013-14, 2015-16, 2017-18, 2019-20, and 2021-23. Nutrient values were extracted from the public FNDDS/FoodData Central release files and standardized to per-100-g food-code-level records. Cycle midpoints, 2013.5, 2015.5, 2017.5, 2019.5, and 2022.0, served as the independent variable in an exploratory ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. Mann-Kendall testing assessed monotonic rank trends, Welch's ANOVA assessed food-code-level distributional heterogeneity, and pairwise Welch comparisons with Cohen's d summarized pre-pandemic, pandemic-period, and post-pandemic differences. Equivalence testing using TOST with +/-10% bounds was restricted to the 2019-20 versus 2021-23 stability comparison. OLS sensitivity analyses were repeated after excluding the structurally atypical 2017-18 cycle. Results: Sixty-three nutrients were analyzed. Eight nutrients showed nominal OLS trends, p < 0.05, but none remained significant after Bonferroni correction. Mann-Kendall testing identified two nominal monotonic signals, and none after adjustment. Welch's ANOVA detected cycle-level distributional differences for 61 of 63 nutrients at nominal p < 0.05 and 57 of 63 after adjustment. Pairwise pandemic-period analyses showed many adjusted differences when the pre-pandemic baseline was compared with 2019-20 or 2021-23, but standardized effects were small, with all absolute Cohen's d values < 0.20. No nutrient differed after adjustment between 2019-20 and 2021-23, and 39 of 48 primary analytes met +/-10% TOST equivalence criteria for that comparison. Slope estimates were directionally stable after excluding 2017-18, but nominal significance status remained sensitive to the short time series. Conclusions: FNDDS food composition varied across cycles, but there was no clear decade-long linear trend for most nutrients. The main signal was a possible increase in total PUFA and linoleic acid, which may reflect changes in fat quality. The 2021-23 cycle was very similar to 2019-20, suggesting no major post-pandemic shift in the foods represented. These findings should be interpreted as food-database signals, not as direct estimates of what people consumed.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Matrix Discrepancy for Representations of Finite Groups

arXiv:2606.12181v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Given a finite group $G$, we prove that there exist signs $\varepsilon\in\{\pm1\}^G$ such that $$\left\| \sum_{g\in G} \varepsilon_g\rho(g) \right\|\leq C\, \sqrt{|G|},$$ where $\rho$ is the left regular representation of $G$, and $C$ is a universal constant. This special case of the Matrix Spencer conjecture was posed in [BKMZ24], where it was established for simple groups.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Minimal Filling Architectures of Polynomial Neural Networks: Counterexamples, Frontier Search, and Defects

arXiv:2605.09609v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We provide counterexamples to the unimodal minimal filling architecture conjecture for polynomial neural networks (PNNs) with power activation functions. Fixing the input and output widths, the conjecture states that any minimal filling architecture has unimodal widths for the hidden layers. We found counterexamples via a frontier search, recursive dimension bounds on neurovarieties, and symbolic computation. Notably, several subarchitectures of our main example exhibit large defect, in contrast with the predominantly small-defect behavior observed in prior literature.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Sensory Restoration via Brain-Computer Interfaces: A Unified 2 x 2 Framework and Convergence Roadmap

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15091v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Millions of individuals worldwide suffer from sensory and communication deficits caused by neurodegenerative diseases, stroke, or trauma. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer a promising avenue for sensory and motor restoration. However, the scientific literature remains highly fragmented between invasive neuroprosthetics and non-invasive electrophysiological decoders, with a lack of consistent terminology and comparison metrics. This chapter proposes a unified 2 x 2 framework categorizing BCIs along two axes: degree of invasiveness (invasive vs. non-invasive) and signal direction (afferent sensory-IN vs. efferent sensory-OUT). We define and distinguish the paradigms of restoration, substitution, and augmentation. Furthermore, we outline a structural roadmap for the convergence of these modalities over near-, medium-, and long-term horizons, focusing on physical limits and the integrative role of machine learning foundation models.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Speeding up the annotation process in semantic segmentation industrial applications

arXiv:2606.19934v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current machine learning models commonly require large and well-annotated datasets. However, the annotation process often becomes a bottleneck, with increased complexity leading to higher chances of human errors. Within this context, our goal in this paper is to leverage unsupervised algorithms to improve data annotation efficiency for complex semantic segmentation problems in industrial materials science. Previous research has quantified labeling time and others explored unsupervised methods. However, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to quantify how much unsupervised algorithms accelerate the labeling process. We aim to validate the extent to which this laborious process can be accelerated, focusing on semantic segmentation tasks that involve annotating each pixel of high-resolution images, such as the microstructure characterization challenge in materials science. Specifically, we demonstrate that by using unsupervised computer vision algorithms, the time required for the labeling process can be reduced from 170 hours to 37 hours, achieving an approximate reduction of 78\%. The dataset we work with includes large images of dimensions 1280x959 and 960x703, which further increases the complexity of the annotation task. Despite these challenges, we create and share the largest public steel microstructure segmentation dataset to date, available under MIT License with permanent DOI, contributing a fully annotated, high-resolution dataset to the field. Additionally, this is the first work to compare the labeling time from scratch (a common approach in previous studies) to the labeling time when using these unsupervised algorithms as a pre-annotation step. Furthermore, we provide a Deep Learning model trained on this dataset, validated by field experts, and deployed in an industrial setting, serving as an initial benchmark for this public dataset.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

BALTO: Balanced Token-Level Policy Optimization for Hallucination Mitigation

Hallucinations remain a major obstacle to deploying large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive settings, where generated responses must be faithfully grounded in provided evidence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction for hallucination mitigation, but response-level faithfulness rewards suffer from a granularity mismatch: localized hallucinations can cause supported content to receive spurious penalties. Although recent work introduces fine-grained feedback such as claim-level verification and token-level rewards, unbalanced credit assignment can still induce length, verbosity, or optimization-noise biases. We propose BALTO, a Balanced Token-level Policy Optimization framework for hallucination mitigation. BALTO extracts checkable factual claims, verifies them against the reference context, and projects claim-level judgments to token-level labels. A balanced token-level credit assignment mechanism is introduced into the framework. This design redistributes probability mass from unsupported content toward faithful content, rather than suppressing the entire response. We systematically analyze the limitations of response-level rewards from a theoretical standpoint, and prove BALTO's advantages in training stability and optimization efficiency for hallucination mitigation. Experiments on ConFiQA, RAGTruth, and FinLLM-Eval show that BALTO achieves the highest faithfulness across all six model–benchmark settings and consistently outperforms existing post-training baselines in Q-Score, demonstrating a stronger faithfulness–informativeness trade-off.

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

Few shot chain-of-thought driven reasoning to prompt LLMs for open ended medical question answering

In this paper, we propose a modified version of the MedQA-USMLE dataset, named MEDQA-OPEN, which contains open-ended medical questions without options to mimic clinical scenarios, along with clinician-approved reasoned answers. Additionally, we implement a prompt driven by Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning, CLINICR, to mirror the prospective process of incremental reasoning, reaching a correct response to medical questions. We empirically demonstrate how CLINICR outperforms the state-of-the-art 5-shot CoT-based prompt (Liévin et al., 2022). We also present an approach that mirrors real-life clinical practice by first exploring multiple differential diagnoses through MCQ-CLINICR and subsequently narrowing down to a final diagnosis using MCQ-ELIMINATIVE. Finally, emphasizing the importance of response verification in medical settings, we utilize a reward model mechanism, replacing the elimination process performed by MCQ-ELIMINATIVE.

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

A Large-Scale Multi-Dimensional Empirical Study of LLMs for Conversation Summarization

Despite the significant advancement of LLMs in conversation summarization, their evaluation remains limited by insufficient scenarios, input lengths, and sample sizes. Furthermore, existing benchmarks often omit frontier reasoning systems and efficient small models, or lack fine-grained, multi-dimensional assessments. To bridge these gaps, we propose OmniCSEval, a unified benchmark comprising 1,800 diverse conversations across six real-world scenarios, featuring context lengths ranging from 128 to 32k tokens. For fine-grained evaluation, we employ a bidirectional fact-checking framework that integrates key fact matching to assess completeness and conciseness, alongside summary fact verification to evaluate faithfulness. To ensure reliable assessment, we establish a human-LLM collaborative pipeline for key fact extraction and a multi-LLM consensus verifier for summary fact decomposition. Leveraging this framework, we evaluate 28 LLMs across four distinct categories grouped by reasoning capability and model scale. Our extensive empirical study reveals critical insights regarding the cross-scenario challenges current LLMs continue to face, the impacts of reasoning and scale, and the efficiency and adaptability of reasoning models. We also provide guidance for system selection in real-world deployments.

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

Physics-informed generative AI for semiconductor manufacturing: Enforcing hard physical constraints in generative models by construction

arXiv:2606.11247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative models are increasingly used to propose designs, data, and control actions for physical systems, yet many such systems are governed by hard physical constraints rather than by perceptual plausibility. Semiconductor manufacturing provides a demanding test case: generated masks, layouts, synthetic defect data, and process recipes must obey lithography, transport, reaction, and device-physics constraints, because physically invalid samples are not merely low quality but unusable. This Perspective argues that semiconductor manufacturing exposes a broader computational-science challenge, namely that generative AI for constrained physical domains must be physics-informed by construction, not corrected only through post-hoc filtering. We survey the emerging architectural toolkit, including physics-informed diffusion, PDE-constrained variational models, neural-operator priors, and conservation-law-respecting generative networks, and show how it connects to differentiable lithography, TCAD, process simulation, and autonomous experimentation. We identify four integration patterns between generative models and physics-based simulators, and we propose a research agenda centered on physics-fidelity benchmarks, differentiable simulator infrastructure, and multimodal foundation models for physical design and manufacturing. The central claim is analytical rather than rhetorical: where physical validity is the binding criterion of success, architectures that enforce it by construction should be expected to outperform those that filter for it after the fact, and the fab is the setting where this distinction is sharpest.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

A Self Consistency Based Reranking for Narrative Question Answering

Narrative question answering (NQA) is a challenging task in natural language processing that requires models to understand long textual contexts, capture relationships across events, and generate coherent responses. Despite recent advances in pretrained language models, most existing approaches rely on a single decoding output during inference, making them sensitive to generation variability and often resulting in incomplete or inconsistent answers .To address this limitation, we propose a self-ensemble Self-Consistency-Based reranking framework for narrative question answering. The proposed method generates multiple candidate answers for each story-question pair and selects the final answer based on semantic agreement among the generated responses. This allows the model to explore diverse answer formulations while improving robustness through consensus-based selection without requiring modifications to the underlying architecture .The framework combines pretrained and fine-tuned language generation with multi-answer inference and similarity-based reranking. We evaluate the proposed approach on the NarrativeQA dataset using multiple models, including FLAN-T5 (Base and Small) and Pegasus-Large, under both baseline and fine-tuned settings .Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves performance across all models. In particular, FLAN-T5-Base achieves the best overall performance, improving from 82.32% to 86.66% (+4.34%) when combined with self-ensemble inference. Additionally, the largest improvement is observed with Pegasus-Large, which increases from 72.50% to 87.07% (+14.57%), highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.