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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

GarmentSketch: Large-scale Sketch-to-Fashion Benchmark

Fashion sketching is a cornerstone of design workflows, allowing rapid visualization of creative concepts prior to physical prototyping. Yet, progress in sketch-based fashion image synthesis has been hindered by the absence of large-scale, high-quality paired resources. To bridge this gap, we present GarmentSketch, a novel dataset comprising 26,249 fashion sketches across 21 garment categories, each paired with detailed textual descriptions. Captions were produced through a multi-stage pipeline that integrates multiple multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with human-in-the-loop refinement, ensuring both semantic accuracy and descriptive richness. We benchmark GarmentSketch on state-of-the-art generative models, providing baseline performance for sketch-guided text-to-image generation. Our experiments reveal both the promise and the current limitations of existing methods. By offering a comprehensive and richly annotated resource, GarmentSketch establishes a foundation for advancing sketch understanding, fine-grained fashion image generation, and creative human-AI collaboration in design. The dataset will be available at: https://khangbdd.github.io/garmentsketch.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Beyond Scalars: Evaluating and Understanding LLM Reasoning via Geometric Progress and Stability

arXiv:2603.10384v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating LLM reliability via scalar probabilities often fails to capture the structural dynamics of reasoning. We introduce TRACED, a framework that assesses reasoning quality through theoretically grounded geometric kinematics. By decomposing reasoning traces into Progress (displacement) and Stability (curvature), we reveal a distinct topological divergence: correct reasoning manifests as high-progress, stable trajectories, whereas hallucinations are characterized by low-progress, unstable patterns (stalled displacement with high curvature fluctuations). Leveraging these signatures, our probabilistic framework achieves competitive performance and superior robustness across diverse benchmarks. Crucially, TRACED bridges geometry and cognition by mapping high curvature to ''Hesitation Loops'' and displacement to ''Certainty Accumulation'', offering a physical lens to decode the internal dynamics of machine thought.

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

Using Cognitive Models to Improve Language Model Simulation of Human Persuasion Games

arXiv:2606.17657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People make decisions differently in strategic interactions. Some update beliefs like a Bayesian; others exhibit biases like motivated reasoning. Although creators of large language models use simulated humans for safety evaluations and training, they often fail to cover this breadth of human behavior. We argue that cognitive science and economics provide a convenient tool for doing so, making use of mathematical models of human decision-making. We propose an approach that we call Equation-to-Behavior Prompting for guiding large language models to match cognitive models, and evaluate this approach on persuasion games based on legal decision-making. We find that large models can approximate equation-based specifications – Bayesian updating, affine distortion, motivated updating, and Grether's $\alpha$-$\beta$ model – using prompting, but small models fail to do so. However, training small models with reinforcement learning to adhere to mathematical rules, Equation-to-Behavior RL, reduces belief error by 26.5% in out-of-distribution parameterizations. We show that these simulations can help create diverse training environments; training small models to consider different kinds of decision-makers improves average belief change by 2.5%–12% over Bayesian-only training, even when persuading GPT-5-mini. Our work could improve human simulations for training and evaluation in increasingly realistic settings, and could also enable novel research into more complicated mathematical models of human decision-making.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Spiking Pyramid Wavelet Transformation for High-efficient and Low-energy Image Restoration

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have garnered significant interest in computer vision due to their potential for efficiency and biological inspiration. While spiking CNN-based methods have shown promise for image restoration (IR) tasks, their performance is constrained by the inherent receptive field limitations of CNN operations. In the paper, we explore the benefits of discrete wavelet transformation and propose a spiking pyramid wavelet-based model (SPWM) for high-efficient and low-energy target. Specifically, we develop a spiking dual pyramid wavelet (SDPW) block to model long-range dependency and exploit the properties of the degradation in the wavelet domain. Experimental results on several benchmarks demonstrate that SPWM significantly lowers computational costs and energy consumption while maintaining image quality. Our method showcases the potential of SNNs in the field of IR, offering new insights for future applications of resource-limited devices.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

HOLO-MPPI: Multi-Scenario Motion Planning via Hierarchical Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.16480v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world must plan motions across diverse scenarios without per-scenario retuning. End-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) can generalize across scenarios but often becomes brittle under distribution shift, reward misspecification, and stochastic interactions. Model predictive path integral (MPPI) control enables strong real-time refinement without gradients, but its performance depends on a well-shaped sampling prior, while manually designing the priors does not scale to multi-scenario deployment. We present HOLO-MPPI (High-level Offline, Low-level Online MPPI), a multi-scenario motion planning framework that combines high-level policy learning with low-level stochastic optimal control. Offline, we learn a high-level policy that proposes scenario-robust plans in an abstract action space, with a learned world model for online rollout. Online, the policy serves as a data-driven prior generator that parameterizes MPPI's sampling distribution conditioned on the current observation and goal. MPPI then optimizes low-level control sequences around this prior in real time to adapt to local disturbances. We instantiate HOLO-MPPI in autonomous driving by designing an effective high-level action space and tailored model architectures. Our evaluation across diverse driving scenarios shows that HOLO-MPPI improves upon MPPI and end-to-end RL baselines while maintaining real-time control.

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

Learning on a Razor's Edge: Identifiability and Singularity of Polynomial Neural Networks

arXiv:2505.11846v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study function spaces parametrized by neural networks, referred to as neuromanifolds. Specifically, we focus on deep Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with an activation function that is a sufficiently generic polynomial. First, we address the identifiability problem, showing that, for almost all functions in the neuromanifold of an MLP, there exist only finitely many parameter choices yielding that function. For CNNs, the parametrization is generically one-to-one. As a consequence, we compute the dimension of the neuromanifold. Second, we describe singular points of neuromanifolds. We characterize singularities completely for CNNs, and partially for MLPs. In both cases, they arise from sparse subnetworks. For MLPs, we prove that these singularities often correspond to critical points of the mean-squared error loss, which does not hold for CNNs. This provides a geometric explanation of the sparsity bias of MLPs. All of our results leverage tools from algebraic geometry.

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

Independent-Component-Based Encoding Models of Brain Activity During Story Comprehension

Encoding models provide a powerful framework for linking continuous stimulus features to neural activity; however, traditional voxelwise approaches are limited by measurement noise, inter-subject variability, and redundancy arising from spatially correlated voxels encoding overlapping neural signals. Here, we propose an independent component (IC)-based encoding framework that dissociates stimulus-driven and noise-driven signals in fMRI data. We decompose continuous fMRI data from naturalistic story listening into ICs using one subset of the data, and train encoding models on independent data to predict IC time series from large language model representations of linguistic input. Across subjects, a subset of ICs exhibited consistently high predictivity. These ICs were spatially and temporally consistent across subjects and included cognitive networks known to respond during story listening (auditory and language). Auditory component time series were strongly correlated with acoustic stimulus features, highlighting the interpretability of identified component time series. Components identified as noise or motion-related artifacts by ICA-AROMA showed uniformly poor predictive performance, confirming that highly predicted components reflect genuine stimulus-related neural signals rather than confounds. Overall, IC-based encoding models enable analyses at the level of functional networks, accommodating the variability in network locations across individuals and providing interpretable results that are easy to compare across subjects. Code provided at: https://github.com/kamyahari/IC-Encoding-Models.git

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

APT: Atomic Physical Transitions for Causal Video-Language Understanding

Physical events are not understood by their names alone, but by the causal state changes that compose them. A clip-level label such as "bounce" can be correct while hiding the process that makes the event physically valid, from support loss and contact onset to rebound and settling. To make this hidden process explicit, we introduce Atomic Physical Transitions (APTs): minimal, temporally localized state changes that bind a visible cue to an active physical mechanism and before/after dynamical regimes. An APT chain represents a video as an ordered causal transition sequence rather than a single aggregate event label: event labels tell what happened; APT chains explain why it happened. To make APTs learnable by VLMs, we construct mixed-source APT data from human annotations and simulator ground truth, covering 14 transition types across contact, gravity, friction, and rotation/stability, with 27,303 timed instances over 1,246 trials. Using this data, we find that current VLMs miss transition-level physics, with zero-shot recall at most 14% and errors dominated by missed transitions. Direct fine-tuning on APT chains improves transition detection but causes event-level forgetting, indicating that the model learns a specialized answer format rather than a reusable physical representation. We therefore propose APT-Tune, a parameter-efficient recipe that teaches VLMs to use causal transitions without forgetting how to answer video questions. It combines image-pad-aware supervision, format-conditional co-training, and mechanism-conditioned domain-to-type decoding to make APT learning format-robust and physically grounded. With only 11 M LoRA parameters on Qwen3-VL-2B, APT-Tune substantially improves APT recall while also improving event-level video transfer. These results show that APTs are not a new answer format, but a human-aligned causal supervision signal for physical video understanding.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Martingale Solutions to a Stochastic Keller-Segel System with nonlocal Source and Super-linear Noise

arXiv:2606.11774v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Global nonnegative martingale solutions are shown to exist for a stochastic Keller-Segel system with a nonlocal Fisher-KPP source and super-linear multiplicative noise. The result is obtained for nonnegative initial data with no smallness assumption, provided that the nonlocal source term is dominant. The main difficulty stems from the absence of a coercive structure and the super-linear nature of the noise. An additional cut-off with finite L^2 norm in the classical Galerkin method is added to establish a well-posed approximation problem. Moreover, due to the nonlocal Fisher-KPP structure, it is necessary to prove the positivity of the approximating solution in order to obtain uniform estimates. In the compactness arguments, the usual tightness argument in the framework of Hilbert spaces cannot be directly applied to the uniform estimates obtained in this paper. As a result, we develop a more general version of the compactness argument and tightness criterion, presented in the appendix, which will be applied throughout the paper. This allows for the global existence of nonnegative martingale solutions to be derived from Jakubowski's version of the Skorokhod Theorem, along with a thorough discussion of the convergence properties.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Agentra: A Supervisable Multi-Agent Framework for Enterprise Intrusion Response

arXiv:2606.18325v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enterprise intrusion response still depends on static playbooks and analyst-driven triage, creating delay between alert generation and containment. We present Agentra, a supervisable multi-agent Intrusion Response System (IRS) framework that converts alerts from IDS, EDR, and XDR platforms into structured incident response plans grounded in MITRE ATT&CK, MITRE D3FEND, and NIST CSF 2.0. Agentra decomposes response reasoning across role-scoped agents, validates proposed plans through a bounded Planner–Validator review loop, screens retrieved threat intelligence through a Moderator security gateway, gates actions through an Action Catalog and risk score, and records decisions in an append-only audit log. We evaluate Agentra against a static OASIS CACAO v2.0 cyber-playbook baseline on a 120-event corpus drawn from ThreatHunter-Playbook, Splunk BOTSv3, and DARPA OpTC. The strongest configuration improves FP-aware IRS F1 from 0.61 to 0.84 and restores the projected harmful-action rate to the static baseline level of 0.0% after Planner-only configurations introduce unsafe overreaction. These results indicate that multi-agent response planning can improve ontology-grounded IRS coverage while preserving analyst approval and auditability.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Rock weathering can counteract river CO<sub>2</sub> emissions induced by permafrost thaw

Authors:

Climate-induced permafrost thaw unlocks large stores of organic carbon that are mineralized and emitted as carbon dioxide (CO2) from rivers to the atmosphere1. Concurrently, warming and permafrost thaw can increase mineral weathering rates, thus affecting the release and sequestration of inorganic carbon2–4. Yet how these biological and geological carbon cycles interact and jointly affect CO2 dynamics (emission compared with drawdown) in permafrost rivers remains unknown5. Here we combine CO2 emissions, organic and inorganic solute concentrations, dual carbon isotopes (δ13C–Δ14C) and geochemical modelling to infer how permafrost thaw may affect river biogeochemistry over decades to centuries across the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. Leveraging a gradient of thermal permafrost degradation, we find that river CO2 emissions decline, whereas solute fluxes from rock weathering increase with decreasing permafrost cover. Across this region, net CO2 drawdown fluxes from rock weathering are about 35% of river CO2 emissions, varying from around 15% in catchments with continuous permafrost to more than 100% in catchments with discontinuous or isolated permafrost. Thus, carbon fluxes from chemical weathering may become increasingly important with ongoing permafrost thaw, potentially even outpacing river CO2 emissions. Our findings disentangle the interplay between biological and geological carbon fluxes that are important for the cryosphere and the global carbon cycle. Permafrost thaw on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau increases rock-weathering rates while reducing river CO2 emissions, suggesting geological carbon fluxes may eventually outpace thaw-driven emissions.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Diffusive Dynamics of Nonstabilizerness

arXiv:2606.13606v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symmetries shape the quantum-information dynamics of many-body systems, but their effect on nonstabilizerness, the resource complementary to entanglement, is less understood. We compute the stabilizer Rényi entropy, a measure of nonstabilizerness, in $\mathrm{U}(1)$-symmetric one-dimensional random circuits. The disorder-averaged dynamics is captured by a four-replica tensor network, which we evaluate by $S_4$-adapted infinite time-evolving block decimation (iTEBD) directly in the thermodynamic limit. Together with a hydrodynamic argument, our results identify a diffusive universality class for the late-time approach of nonstabilizerness to its random-state value, with the stabilizer Rényi entropy gap closing as $1/t$. The same scaling is verified in an energy-conserving nonintegrable Ising chain. More broadly, our framework provides a hydrodynamic perspective on nonstabilizerness generation and offers insight into the design of approximate Haar-random states in Hamiltonian dynamics.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Early-life Urban Environment, Nutrition, and Pubertal Timing in Southern Europe: An Exposome Analysis

Background: Urban environmental and lifestyle factors during early life may influence pubertal timing, but the combined effects of multiple environmental exposures within an exposome analytical framework remain poorly understood. Objective: To examine the association between early-life urban environmental exposures and pubertal timing, and to explore whether these exposures interact with early-life nutritional factors, namely breastfeeding duration and childhood diet quality. Methods: Data from two European population-based birth cohorts were analysed: Generation XXI (G21, Portugal; n=5263; 51.5% girls) and INfancia y Medio Ambiente (INMA, Spain; n=1019; 50.1% girls). Urban environmental exposures including indicators of air pollution, traffic, built environment, and natural spaces were estimated at 4 early-life stages at both cohorts: pregnancy (INMA only), birth, 1 year, and 4-5 years of age. Pubertal development timing was assessed using Tanner staging and/or the Pubertal Development Scale (PDS), and age at menarche was self-reported. Exposome-Wide Association Study (ExWAS) models and unsupervised clustering followed by ordinal logistic regression models were used to examine single- and multi-exposure associations, respectively. Regression models were fitted adjusting for relevant child characteristics, maternal factors, and household socioeconomic conditions, and corrected for multiple testing. Results: Individuals living in more unfavourable urban environments characterised by higher building density, air pollution, and lower access to natural spaces showed earlier pubertal timing according to multiple outcomes, across multiple early-life exposure periods, and in both cohorts. In the G21 cohort, these environmental profiles were associated with earlier age at menarche, particularly for exposures at 1-1.5 and 4-5 years (e.g., 1-1.5y: {beta}=-0.172, FDR-adjusted p-value=0.041), while in the INMA cohort, boys exposed to more unfavourable environmental profiles showed more advanced pubertal development, also particularly for exposures at 1-1.5 and 4-5 years of age (e.g., 1-1.5y; {beta}=0.572, FDR-adjusted p-value=0.008). Among environmental domains, air pollution and traffic were the factors most consistently associated with pubertal timing. Regarding early-life nutritional factors, longer duration of exclusive breastfeeding was associated with a lower Tanner stage among girls in G21. No significant interactions between breastfeeding duration and environmental exposure clusters were observed. Conclusion: Early-life urban environmental exposures, particularly air pollution and traffic, may influence pubertal timing. Exclusive breastfeeding may have a protective role against earlier pubertal development. These findings highlight the importance of improving urban environmental conditions and promoting breastfeeding to support healthy developmental trajectories.

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

Pricing Excess-of-Loss Reinsurance and CAT Bonds under Climate Uncertainty: A Cox Process Framework with Temperature-Dependent Stochastic Intensity

arXiv:2606.14830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a climate-aware pricing framework for excess-of-loss (XL) reinsurance contracts and catastrophe (CAT) bonds under non-stationary catastrophe risk. Catastrophe arrivals are modeled as a Cox process whose stochastic intensity depends exponentially on a temperature-related climate index. To represent climate dynamics, the index is modeled as a mean-reverting Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process around a time-dependent warming trend. Within this setting, aggregate losses follow a compound Cox structure with lognormal severities. Pricing is performed under a reduced-form risk-adjusted measure, which provides a tractable valuation approach for XL reinsurance layers and binary zero-coupon CAT bond payoffs in an incomplete market setting. Because catastrophe losses are not dynamically replicable, the framework emphasizes scenario-based valuation rather than model-independent no-arbitrage bounds. A Monte Carlo valuation scheme is implemented to quantify the economic implications of climate-dependent catastrophe intensity. The numerical results show that climate dependence materially changes the loss-generation mechanism and affects the valuation of catastrophe-linked contracts. In the baseline calibration, the climate-aware model increases the excess-of-loss reinsurance premium and lowers the CAT bond price relative to the stationary benchmark. Furthermore, our analysis of the 99.5\% Tail Value-at-Risk (TVaR) indicates that stationary benchmarks may underestimate economic capital requirements by approximately 13.7\% compared to the climate-aware framework, highlighting the potential regulatory relevance of the proposed model. This finding highlights that benchmark design is critical for interpreting climate-pricing effects.

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

Discovering Lattice Reduction Strategies via Self-Play

arXiv:2606.15301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovász (LLL) algorithm is a seminal contribution to computer science used for lattice basis reduction, yet its polynomial-time outputs produce bases that are far from optimal as the dimension grows. We show that deep reinforcement learning can discover strictly superior, generalizable reduction strategies by interacting with the primitive action space of LLL. We formulate lattice reduction as a single-player Markov Decision Process (MDP) and train a deep residual network using an AlphaZero-style self-play pipeline augmented with adaptive-horizon MCTS (Monte Carlo Tree Search), which couples multi-step network predictions with an entropy-gated expansion mechanism. The resulting policy, DeltaStar, is trained exclusively on small $8$-dimensional $q$-ary lattices and requires fewer primitive row operations than LLL. Crucially, it generalizes zero-shot to unseen moduli and higher dimensions up to $n=32$ without retraining.

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

How Well Do Large Language Models Capture Human Personality?

arXiv:2606.18263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human populations via persona prompting, often under the assumptions that richer persona descriptions improve behavioral fidelity, similarly sized attribute combinations are equally simulatable, and persona definitions generalize across tasks. In this work, we formalize these assumptions and systematically evaluate them across multiple architectures, scales, and simulation settings. We identify a fundamental limitation we term persona manifold collapse, where increasingly expressive persona specifications lead to systematic contraction of representational and behavioral diversity. Across models, increasing persona complexity consistently reduces inter-persona separation in latent space and weakens behavioral differentiation in downstream simulation tasks. These effects persist across multiple analyses as richer personas fail to preserve human subgroup disagreement, performance varies across attribute combinations of similar size, and adding descriptive detail often degrades rather than improves simulation fidelity. Surprisingly, simple Age-Gender personas consistently outperform richly specified Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) across industries, achieving substantially higher downstream prediction accuracy. We find that collapse is not uniform across attributes. Certain combinations remain behaviorally stable and preserve stronger alignment with human responses, forming localized regions we term alignment bridges. Together, our results provide empirical and conceptual foundations for understanding the limits of persona-conditioned simulation, highlighting the need for representation-aware persona construction rather than increasing persona expressivity alone.

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

VHDLSuite: Unified Pipeline for LLM VHDL Generation with Data Synthesis and Evaluation

arXiv:2606.13735v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLM) have shown impressive capabilities in Register Transfer Level (RTL) code generation, particularly for Verilog. However, evaluating their performance with other Hardware Description Languages (HDL), especially VHDL, remains limited although its distinct language characteristics, such as stricter semantic rules, introduce evaluation considerations that differ from Verilog. This lack of coverage restricts fully understanding of how well current models generalize across hardware design languages with differing structures and semantics. To address this gap, we introduce VHDLSuite, a benchmark-centered infrastructure for scalable VHDL generation evaluation, integrating automated benchmark synthesis, executable validation, and multi-model diagnostic analysis. First, we propose a data pipeline that automatically converts Verilog designs and their accompanying testbenches into executable VHDL benchmark instances, followed by VUnit/GHDL-based validation to ensure each released task is compilable, runnable, and consistently checkable in the VHDL environment. Second, we introduce VHDLBench, a benchmark with over 200 VHDL problems with complete and validated testbenches across a wide range of complexity levels. Third, we extensively evaluate cutting-edge LLMs and uncover key challenges specific on LLM-aided VHDL generation. Our findings provide important insights and support future work in multi-language hardware design automation.Our data pipeline, benchmark, and evaluation framework will be open-sourced.

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

Multimodal Evaluator Preference Collapse: Cross-Modal Contagion in Self-Evolving Agents

Authors:

When AI agents use language models to evaluate their own outputs in a feedback loop, systematic biases emerge. We show that Evaluator Preference Collapse (EPC) is dramatically amplified in multimodal settings. Using GPT-4o to evaluate DeepSeek-chat across text and visual tasks, we find that a single strategy (step_by_step) absorbs 48.4% of all weight – 3.2x the collapse observed in text-only self-evaluation – while three visual-domain strategies receive only 9.1% combined weight. We then demonstrate a novel phenomenon we term cross-modal contagion: evaluator preferences acquired on one modality transfer to and corrupt strategy selection on another. Through a four-phase isolation training paradigm, we measure contagion coefficients and document strategy inversion – the optimal strategy for a modality reverses after cross-modal exposure. A Phase 3 statistical validation across four evaluator configurations (N=53 total independent repetitions, 15,592 API calls) reveals a clear hierarchy: cross-model evaluation (GPT-4o, N=8) produces strong but symmetric bidirectional contagion (mean gamma_{T->V}=1.176, gamma_{V->T}=1.089, Delta=-0.088, p=0.575, Cohen's d=0.29); high round counts (DashScope, 50 rounds) cause collapse to single-strategy dominance (70% zero contagion); and self-evaluation provides near-complete immunity – 97% of runs (N=30, DeepSeek-chat) yield exactly zero contagion (mean gamma=0.033, 95% CI [-0.031, 0.010], p=0.642, d=0.07). No evaluator condition shows statistically significant directional asymmetry. We introduce the contagion matrix indexed by evaluator identity, release the MM-EPC experimental framework, and identify cross-model evaluator architecture as the primary risk factor for preference contagion.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

InnoEval: On Research Idea Evaluation as a Knowledge-Grounded, Multi-Perspective Reasoning Problem

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models has catalyzed a surge in scientific idea production, yet this leap has not been accompanied by a matching advance in idea evaluation. The fundamental nature of scientific evaluation needs knowledgeable grounding, collective deliberation, and multi-criteria decision-making. However, existing idea evaluation methods often suffer from narrow knowledge horizons, flattened evaluation dimensions, and the inherent bias in LLM-as-a-Judge. To address these, we regard idea evaluation as a knowledge-grounded, multi-perspective reasoning problem and introduce InnoEval, a deep innovation evaluation framework designed to emulate human-level idea assessment. We apply a heterogeneous deep knowledge search engine that retrieves and grounds dynamic evidence from diverse online sources. We further achieve review consensus with an innovation review board containing reviewers with distinct academic backgrounds, enabling a multi-dimensional decoupled evaluation across multiple metrics. We construct comprehensive datasets derived from authoritative peer-reviewed submissions to benchmark InnoEval. Experiments demonstrate that InnoEval can consistently outperform baselines in point-wise, pair-wise, and group-wise evaluation tasks, exhibiting judgment patterns and consensus highly aligned with human experts.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Patcher: Post-Hoc Patching of Backdoored Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.02995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models remain vulnerable to jailbreak backdoor attacks, where adversaries poison safety alignment data to embed hidden triggers that bypass safety mechanisms. Existing defenses often require comprehensive attack information or multiple triggered examples, making them impractical when defenders only observe a single reported failure case without knowing whether it stems from a backdoor attack or a natural alignment bug. This paper presents Patcher, a post-hoc defense framework that repairs backdoored language models using only a single reported failure case and the model parameters. Patcher operates in two stages. First, it localizes backdoor triggers by computing response-conditioned gradient-based saliency scores and applying adaptive clustering to separate triggers from benign context. Second, it patches the model through a constrained fine-tuning objective that breaks the trigger-response association while preserving benign-task utility and robustness to non-triggered jailbreak attacks through KL-divergence constraints. We conduct extensive evaluations across multiple backdoor attack strategies and demonstrate that Patcher successfully localizes triggers and neutralizes backdoors while maintaining model utility. We further show robustness against adaptive attacks designed to evade our defense. This work represents a significant step toward practical defenses against training-time attacks in deployed language models.

22.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

CoDaLoMic: An R package for modeling microbiome compositional and longitudinal data

by Irene Creus-Martí, Andrés Moya, Francisco J. Santonja In this paper we present CoDaLoMic, an R package for analyzing longitudinal and compositional microbiome datasets. The CoDaLoMic package implements three models specifically designed for the analysis of microbiome data that are both compositional and longitudinal. Unlike many existing methods that focus solely on pairwise interactions, CoDaLoMic also captures interactions among groups of bacteria, providing a more robust methodological framework for studying microbial relationships at the community level. In addition, the package facilitates the analysis of microbiome variability in relation to host health status and allows for the identification of groups of taxa that exhibit similar temporal dynamics. Working with time series data makes it possible to understand not only the current state of a microbial community but also its dynamics over time, which is essential for identifying patterns of ecological succession, detecting events of dysbiosis or recovery, and inferring potential causal relationships between taxa. On the other hand, focusing on interactions among groups of bacteria, rather than analyzing only pairwise relationships, enables a more integrated and functionally meaningful view of the microbiome. Many key ecological functions are the result of the collective behavior of functionally related groups of taxa. Two datasets have been considered in CoDaLoMic, one real and one simulated. The real dataset contains the information of the genera present in the microbiome of the Blatella germanica cockroach at 105 time points. The simulated dataset is defined taking Lotka-Volterra structure into account. CoDaLoMic is available at CRAN.

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

CRC-Screen: Certified DNA-Synthesis Hazard Screening Under Taxonomic Shift

Authors:

arXiv:2605.00074v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: DNA-synthesis providers screen incoming orders by searching the requested sequence against curated hazard lists. We show that this baseline collapses to a 100% false-flag rate when the hazardous sequence comes from a taxonomic family absent from the reference set: under Conformal Risk Control's certified miss-rate constraint, a low-discrimination signal forces the threshold below the entire test-benign mass. We compose three signals derived from a synthesis order's public annotation: $k$-mer Jaccard similarity to known toxins, the trimmed-mean score of a five-LLM judge panel, and cosine similarity to clustered embedding centroids. Fused under a monotone logistic aggregator and calibrated by Conformal Risk Control, the resulting screener certifies $\mathbb{E}[\mathrm{FNR}] \le \alpha + \mathrm{TV}$, where the additive term is the calibration-to-test distribution shift under family holdout (a certified ceiling of 24-49% across folds). Across ten leave-one-taxonomic-family-out folds at $\alpha=0.05$ on UniProt KW-0800 reviewed toxins, the calibrated screener achieves 0% empirical test miss rate on every fold and 0% test false-flag rate on nine of ten folds. The bound's finite-sample slack $1/(n_{\mathrm{cal}}+1)$ caps the certifiable miss rate at 1.77% on our 200-hazard subsample; reaching procurement-grade $\alpha=10^{-3}$ requires an $18\times$ larger calibration set, which the full reviewed UniProt KW-0800 corpus is large enough to deliver. The binding constraint on certifiable DNA-synthesis screening is calibration data, not algorithms. Code: https://github.com/najmulhasan-code/crc-screen

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

The Periodic Table of LLM Reasoning: A Structured Survey of Reasoning Paradigms, Methods, and Failure Modes

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across natural language processing tasks, yet reliable reasoning remains an open challenge. Although modern LLMs show progress in structured inference, multi-step problem solving, and contextual understanding, their reasoning behavior is often inconsistent and sensitive to prompting strategies, task design, and model scale. This survey provides a systematic analysis of more than 300 recent papers from arXiv, Semantic Scholar, Google Scholar, Papers with Code, and the ACL Anthology to examine how reasoning capabilities emerge in LLMs and where they fail. We make three main contributions. First, we introduce a structured taxonomy of LLM reasoning research, covering Chain-of-Thought reasoning, multi-hop reasoning, mathematical reasoning, common sense reasoning, visual and temporal reasoning, code and algorithmic reasoning, retrieval-augmented reasoning, tool-augmented and agentic reasoning, and reinforcement learning-based reasoning. Second, we analyze methodological trends across these paradigms, including prompting methods, model architectures, training objectives, reward modeling, and evaluation benchmarks. Third, we synthesize recurring limitations and failure modes, such as reasoning hallucinations, brittle multi-step inference, weak causal abstraction, and poor cross-domain generalization. By organizing a rapidly expanding literature, this survey offers a unified view of the current capabilities and limitations of reasoning in LLMs. We also identify emerging research directions, including meta-reasoning, self-evolving reasoning frameworks, multimodal reasoning, and socially grounded reasoning. Overall, this work aims to serve as a reference for developing more robust, interpretable, and generalizable reasoning systems in future language models.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Reaching out-of-school girls with HPV vaccination: A qualitative evaluation in six low- and middle-income countries using the RE-AIM framework

Background Infection with human papillomavirus (HPV), the primary cause of cervical cancer, disproportionately affects women in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). While school-based vaccination of adolescent girls against HPV is highly effective, this strategy systematically excludes out-of-school (OOS) girls. Using the RE-AIM framework, we explored strategies to reach OOS girls with HPV vaccination across six African and Asian LMICs. Methods We conducted semi-structured key informant interviews with 32 vaccination program stakeholders from Cambodia, Cameroon, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Uganda between May and September 2024. Interviews explored countries implementation successes, challenges, and strategies to reach OOS girls with HPV vaccination and sustainability considerations. Data were analyzed using a hybrid team-based thematic analysis approach guided by the RE-AIM framework. Results Community outreach-based strategies, typically integrated into routine immunization outreach, were identified as the most effective approach to reach OOS girls with HPV vaccination. Targeted strategies, such as locating outreach clinics in community venues frequented by OOS girls (e.g., churches, markets) enhanced implementation. Perceived effectiveness of these strategies varied across participants, and formal assessment of effectiveness was constrained by the absence of disaggregated vaccination coverage data by school enrollment status. Some subpopulations of OOS girls (i.e., girls in nomadic or migrant communities, urban OOS girls) were not readily reached through standard outreach approaches, prompting implementation of adapted and tailored strategies for these subpopulations. Costs associated with conducting outreach in harder-to-reach areas were major barriers to reaching OOS girls, presenting challenges to the sustainability and cost-effectiveness of these approaches. Conclusions Routine community outreach platforms were widely perceived as most effective for reaching OOS girls. Strengthening disaggregated monitoring systems, adapting outreach for harder-to-reach subpopulations of OOS girls, and financing delivery models for tailored outreach strategies will be critical to improving equitable HPV vaccine coverage among OOS girls.