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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Approximate quantum error correction theory of non-isometric codes

arXiv:2606.13559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-isometric encoding arises in various important contexts in quantum error correction, most notably in the finite-energy, non-ideal codewords inevitable in experimental realizations of continuous-variable codes, and holographic quantum gravity. In this work, we present a general and systematic theory of non-isometric quantum error-correcting codes. In particular, we employ the approximate quantum error correction framework to quantitatively study the fundamental limitations imposed by non-isometric encodings on the accuracy of quantum error correction and implementation of logical operations. We apply our theory to analyze GKP and tiger codes under energy constraints, and discuss the implications to holography.

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

Learning Task-Aware Sampling with Shared Saliency through Density-Equalizing Mappings

In image and surface-based learning tasks, convolutional features are typically extracted using receptive fields that are sampled uniformly across the entire domain. However, informative structures are rarely distributed uniformly in practice and are often concentrated in localized regions. Such phenomena are particularly common in medical imaging, where pathological changes are spatially confined. Consequently, uniform convolution allocates equal computational effort to both informative and uninformative regions, resulting in inefficient feature extraction and suboptimal utilization of model capacity. To address this issue, we propose a framework for task-adaptive sampling that dynamically redistributes computational attention according to the spatial importance of the data. Specifically, we introduce the Density-Equalizing Convolutional Neural Network (DECNN), which employs density-equalizing mappings to guide convolution through a learned density function. The density function encodes the relative importance of different regions and induces a transformation that enlarges informative areas while compressing less relevant ones. As a result, convolutional receptive fields are redistributed non-uniformly over the domain, enabling denser sampling in task-relevant regions. By coupling this importance-driven transformation with convolution, DECNN performs adaptive feature extraction that focuses computational resources on informative structures. This leads to more efficient use of model capacity, yielding a lightweight yet expressive architecture while simultaneously producing an interpretable saliency map. Experiments on image classification and craniofacial surface analysis demonstrate that DECNN achieves competitive or superior performance with fewer parameters, accurately identifies task-relevant regions, and remains robust under complex geometric variations.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Variational Graph Neural Networks for Uncertainty Quantification in Inverse Problems

arXiv:2603.29515v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The increasingly wide use of deep machine learning techniques in computational mechanics has significantly accelerated simulations of problems that were considered unapproachable just a few years ago. However, in critical applications such as Digital Twins for engineering or medicine, fast responses are not enough; reliable results must also be provided. In certain cases, traditional deterministic methods may not be optimal as they do not provide a measure of confidence in their predictions or results, especially in inverse problems where the solution may not be unique or the initial data may not be entirely reliable due to the presence of noise, for instance. Classic deep neural networks also lack a clear measure to quantify the uncertainty of their predictions. In this work, we present a variational graph neural network (VGNN) architecture that integrates variational layers into its architecture to model the probability distribution of weights. Unlike computationally expensive full Bayesian networks, our approach strategically introduces variational layers exclusively in the decoder, allowing us to estimate cognitive uncertainty and statistical uncertainty at a relatively lower cost. In this work, we validate the proposed methodology in two cases of solid mechanics: the identification of the value of the elastic modulus with nonlinear distribution in a 2D elastic problem and the location and quantification of the loads applied to a 3D hyperelastic beam, in both cases using only the displacement field of each test as input data. The results show that the model not only recovers the physical parameters with high precision, but also provides confidence intervals consistent with the physics of the problem, as well as being able to locate the position of the applied load and estimate its value, giving a confidence interval for that experiment.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Learning to Trigger: Reinforcement Learning at the Large Hadron Collider

arXiv:2606.23993v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-throughput scientific facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider depend on real-time event filtering (triggering) under tight constraints on bandwidth, latency, and storage. In practice, trigger menus are largely static and hand-tuned and can become suboptimal as detector conditions, pileup, and background composition drift over time. We cast online threshold tuning as a sequential decision-making problem: a reinforcement learning agent ingests streaming summaries of recent rates and signal-sensitive features and updates trigger thresholds to maximize signal efficiency while tracking a target background rate within a tolerance band. We adapt Group-Filtered Policy Optimization (GFPO) to streaming control and introduce two variants (GFPO-F, GFPO-FR) that enforce background rate feasibility during training. On a benchmark that emulates realistic collider operation, we study two representative triggers: a total transverse energy ($H_{T}$) trigger sensitive to pileup variation, and an anomaly-detection (AD) trigger based on reconstruction loss for rare or non-standard signatures. On Monte Carlo streams, our agent increases the fraction of in-tolerance time intervals by 48\% ($H_T$) and 28\% (AD), with a cumulative gain of up to 2\% in signal efficiency on those in-tolerance intervals. Transferring from simulation to real collision data (CMS Run 283408), the same agent, without fine-tuning, achieves a 56\% ($H_T$) and 28\% (AD) in-tolerance improvement over baselines, with further signal-efficiency gain on both triggers. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of RL-based trigger control on real Large Hadron Collider collision data. Code is available at https://github.com/Zixind/GFPO\_LHC.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Is ChatGPT Fair for Recommendation? Evaluating Fairness in Large Language Model Recommendation

The remarkable achievements of Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the emergence of a novel recommendation paradigm – Recommendation via LLM (RecLLM). Nevertheless, it is important to note that LLMs may contain social prejudices, and therefore, the fairness of recommendations made by RecLLM requires further investigation. To avoid the potential risks of RecLLM, it is imperative to evaluate the fairness of RecLLM with respect to various sensitive attributes on the user side. Due to the differences between the RecLLM paradigm and the traditional recommendation paradigm, it is problematic to directly use the fairness benchmark of traditional recommendation. To address the dilemma, we propose a novel benchmark called Fairness of Recommendation via LLM (FaiRLLM). This benchmark comprises carefully crafted metrics and a dataset that accounts for eight sensitive attributes1 in two recommendation scenarios: music and movies. By utilizing our FaiRLLM benchmark, we conducted an evaluation of ChatGPT and discovered that it still exhibits unfairness to some sensitive attributes when generating recommendations. Our code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/jizhi-zhang/FaiRLLM.

06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Confirmation that bryozoan animals were present during the Cambrian explosion

作者: 未知作者

Bryozoans are marine invertebrates that live in colonies and have long been considered absent from the Cambrian explosion — a rapid evolutionary event that began around 538 million years ago. Newly discovered fossils from the Cambrian period reveal that the bryozoan phylum had already diversified by this time. Fossils of two forms of bryozoans show evidence of soft tissue still preserved inside their mineralized skeletons.

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

Analyzing Defensive Misdirection Against Model-Guided Automated Attacks on Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.20470v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems increasingly rely on language-model components to interpret instructions, process external data, invoke tools, and coordinate with other agents. These capabilities make prompt-injection and jailbreak attacks more consequential, especially as attackers adopt model-guided automation to scale probing, prompt refinement, and response evaluation. This work analyzes the resulting attack-defense setting through a probabilistic model of a target system, its defense mechanism, and the attacker's automated judge. Our analysis shows that conventional detect-and-block defenses can allow attacker success rate (ASR) to approach one as the query budget grows, since predictable refusals provide useful feedback to automated search. We then examine detect-and-misdirect, where detected malicious interactions receive controlled, non-operational responses designed to induce false-positive errors in the attacker's judge. This strategy reduces the positive predictive value of attacker-selected candidates and yields a bounded asymptotic ASR. We evaluate a proof-of-concept realization of this strategy through Contextual Misdirection via Progressive Engagement (CMPE), a lightweight conversational misdirection method designed to replace predictable refusal text with safe but strategically misleading responses in automated jailbreak settings. On jailbreak benchmarks, CMPE reduces estimated ASR upper bounds by up to two orders of magnitude and nearly eliminates verified attack success in end-to-end PAIR and GPTFuzz attack runs.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Reliability of Probabilistic Emulation of Physical Systems

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

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Comprehensive Survey of Medical Image Segmentation: Challenges, Benchmarks, and Beyond

Medical image segmentation plays a critical role in clinical diagnostics, treatment planning, disease monitoring, and neurological disorder identification. This article presents a comprehensive review of its systematic development, covering widely used public datasets, representative methods built on the U-Net, Transformer, and SAM architectures, and key evaluation metrics with their differences, followed by an analysis of major challenges from multiple perspectives. Unlike surveys that focus on a single model family or a specific clinical application, this review organizes U-Net-, Transformer-, and SAM-based methods within a unified analytical framework, with a particular focus on their effectiveness in improving segmentation accuracy and efficiency. This work aims to guide future research and support clinical translation of medical image segmentation, with all related resources publicly available in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/andrew-pengyu/Awsome_MedSeg/tree/main.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Analytic Bijections for Smooth and Interpretable Normalizing Flows

arXiv:2601.10774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A key challenge in normalizing flows is finding expressive invertible scalar bijections. Existing approaches face trade-offs: affine transformations are smooth and analytically invertible but lack expressivity; monotonic splines offer local control but are only piecewise smooth and act on bounded domains; residual flows achieve smoothness but need numerical inversion. We introduce three families of analytic bijections that are globally smooth ($C^\infty$), defined on all of $\mathbb{R}$, and analytically invertible in closed form, combining the favorable properties of prior approaches. Beyond serving as drop-in replacements in coupling flows, where they match or exceed spline performance, we develop radial flows: a novel architecture using direct parametrization that transforms the radial coordinate while preserving angular direction. Radial flows exhibit exceptional training stability, produce geometrically interpretable transformations, and on targets with radial structure can achieve comparable quality to coupling flows with $1000\times$ fewer parameters. We provide comprehensive evaluation on 1D and 2D benchmarks, and demonstrate applicability to higher-dimensional physics problems through experiments on $\phi^4$ lattice field theory, where our bijections outperform affine baselines and enable problem-specific designs that address mode collapse.

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

Computational regimes in matrix-product-state-based quantum trajectory simulations

arXiv:2606.13779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient simulation of open quantum systems is central to modeling noisy quantum hardware and many-body dynamics. In trajectory-based tensor network methods, cost is often associated with trajectory-level quantities such as entanglement growth or bond dimension. However, the total cost of a fixed-accuracy simulation also depends on statistical sampling, and the interplay between per-trajectory complexity and sampling effort remains poorly understood. Here we introduce a cost-resolved framework for matrix product state (MPS)-based quantum trajectory simulations that decomposes total cost into memory per trajectory, runtime per trajectory, and sampling effort. We show that physically equivalent stochastic unravelings of the same Lindblad dynamics do not necessarily reduce total cost, but instead redistribute cost between trajectory complexity and statistical convergence. This trade-off is quantified by two dimensionless inflation factors: a bond dimension inflation $\alpha$ and a sampling inflation $\kappa$, which together determine the preferred unraveling under hardware-dependent memory and parallelism constraints. We provide a practical protocol for extracting $(\alpha,\kappa)$ from modest pilot simulations and demonstrate it using benchmarks across multiple noise channels. The resulting decision maps show that the computationally favorable unraveling can change with noise strength, time-step resolution, system size, and available parallelism. These results establish unraveling choice as a hardware-aware simulation design problem rather than an intrinsic optimization of trajectory entanglement alone.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

AgentArmor: A Framework, Evaluation, \& Mitigation of Coding Agent Failures

arXiv:2606.19380v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software engineering and deployment are increasingly being delegated to AI coding agents. The scale of their adoption is surfacing rare, but highly destructive, failure modes. In this paper, we study these failure modes as stemming from three distinct mechanisms: underspecification, where default model behavior is unsafe; capability errors, where the safe action is available but the model does not adhere to it due to bias or capability limitations; and agent harness errors, where the model fails to execute the safe action through the harness. We evaluate these across 8 different evaluations, each inspired by real-life deployment failures, totaling 20 coding environments and 59 synthetic transcript templates. Based on this evaluation, we propose AgentArmor, an agent harness modification, to mitigate these errors. By adding an extended system prompt, a separate command classifier, a ``3 strikes'' policy, deterministic guardrails, and tools for the agent to edit its own context, we show that AgentArmor is safer across a statistically significant number of samples. Thus, we suggest concrete mitigations for current coding agents and a design philosophy for future agent harness features.

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

CrossFusion: A Multi-Scale Cross-Attention Convolutional Fusion Model for Cancer Survival Prediction

Cancer survival prediction from whole slide images (WSIs) is a challenging task in computational pathology due to the large size, irregular shape, and high granularity of the WSIs. These characteristics make it difficult to capture the full spectrum of patterns, from subtle cellular abnormalities to complex tissue interactions, which are crucial for accurate prognosis. To address this, we propose CrossFusion, a novel multi-scale feature integration framework that extracts and fuses information from patches across different magnification levels. By effectively modeling both scale-specific patterns and their interactions, CrossFusion generates a rich feature set that enhances survival prediction accuracy. We validate our approach across six cancer types from public datasets, demonstrating significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, when coupled with domain-specific feature extraction backbones, our method shows further gains in prognostic performance compared to general-purpose backbones. The source code is available at: https://github.com/RustinS/CrossFusion

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Repurposing cardiovascular disease risk models to predict incident and co-occurring cardiovascular, cardiometabolic and neurocognitive outcomes.

Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD), cardiometabolic and neurocognitive conditions share risk factors and frequently co-occur. We evaluated whether four established CVD risk prediction models (QRISK3, PCE, SCORE2, SCORE2-OP) can be repurposed to predict 10-year risk of these conditions and their co-occurrence with CVD. Methods: The models were recalibrated using 20% of the UK Biobank (UKB) and evaluated in the remaining 80%. We performed external validation using data from Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) Aurum, assessing model discrimination (c-statistics) and calibration (intercept and slope). We used permuted feature importance to determine the influence of each individual predictor in the models. Results: Depending on the model, the c-statistics for incident CVD ranged from 0.71 to 0.74 in the UKB test set (16,137 events). Discrimination was equal to or higher than CVD when evaluated against non-traditional CVD outcomes: 0.74 to 0.77 for heart failure (3,471 events), 0.72 to 0.73 for atrial fibrillation (9,213 events), 0.73 to 0.75 for peripheral arterial disease (1,927 events) and 0.80 to 0.82 for abdominal aortic aneurysm (595 events). For the multimorbidity endpoints, model discrimination ranged from 0.74 for the composite of CVD and T2DM (SCORE2-OP) to 0.83 for the composite of CVD and dementia or Parkinson's disease (QRISK3). When considering the onset of any cardiovascular, cardiometabolic, or neurocognitive outcome discrimination ranged from 0.71 to 0.72. The repurposed models slightly underestimated the predicted risk in the CPRD compared to the UKB: average difference in calibration intercept was at most -0.64. After age and sex, smoking status and systolic blood pressure contributed most to model predictions. Conclusions: Repurposed CVD models can be used to identify 10-year risk of many CVD-related conditions and their multimorbidity. These may be used to support risk-based approaches to prevention and screening. The repurposed models have been made available at: https://repurposed-cvd-risk-models.shinyapps.io/cvd_cmd_dementia_app/ Keywords: Risk prediction; cardiovascular disease; cardiometabolic disease; dementia; disease prevention.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Stochastic trace estimation with tensor train random vectors

arXiv:2606.15679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stochastic trace estimation is a standard tool for approximating the trace of a large-scale matrix available only through matrix-vector products. However, in tensor-structured settings, unstructured Gaussian or Rademacher test vectors may be prohibitively expensive to store and compute with, while cheaper rank-one tensor-product vectors can require sample complexities that grow exponentially with the tensor order. This work studies Gaussian random tensor train vectors as a structured alternative for stochastic trace estimation. We show that, with a suitable choice of the tensor train rank, random tensor train vectors recover dimension-independent guarantees for the Girard–Hutchinson estimator. In particular, a median-of-means variant with tensor train rank $r \geq d-1$ achieves the same dependence on the accuracy $\varepsilon$ and failure probability $\delta$ as the classical estimator based on unstructured Gaussian vectors. We further prove an oblivious subspace injection result for sketches formed from independent Gaussian random tensor train vectors: tensor train rank $r\geq d-1$ and $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-2}(k+\log(1/\delta)))$ samples suffice for a $k$-dimensional target subspace. Finally, we investigate the use of such sketches within the Nystr\"{o}m++ framework. We show that the resulting estimator can achieve the desired $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-1})$ sample complexity under an additional spectral-tail condition. These results provide clarififcation on both the potential and the limitations of random tensor train vectors in stochastic trace estimation.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Persuasion Index: A Theory-Guided Framework for Persuasion Analysis

Identifying persuasive rhetorical cues is critical across domains, from detecting information manipulation and improving AI safety to advancing public health communication. We propose Persuasion Index (PI), a taxonomy of 15 dimensions grounded in persuasion theories from psychology and communication, and one transparent implementation using 55 sub-features built from lexicons and rule-based detectors. The taxonomy is modular: individual detectors can be replaced while preserving the theoretical structure. By evaluating PI on four public datasets varying in domain, style, and outcome measures, we show that PI provides a shared feature space for interpreting rhetorical patterns associated with persuasion-related outcomes. Linear models show that PI features carry meaningful predictive signal while remaining computationally lightweight. Dimension-level analyses reveal recurring associations between PI dimensions and persuasion outcomes across datasets, while also highlighting topic- and stance-specific variation. We release PI as an open-source package and web interface for principled and auditable analysis of human and AI-mediated communication.

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

Spectro-Temporal Interference Confounds Phase Encoding in Spatial Audio Foundation Models

Recent spatial self supervised audio models achieve high performance on localization tasks, raising questions about their encoding of microsecond interaural phase fine structures. We propose a psychoacoustic benchmark based on the binaural masking level difference to evaluate this. Using an equalization cancellation baseline and a GCC PHAT positive control we evaluate nine frozen audio models spanning binaural SSL, monaural SSL, and neural audio codecs. Four monaural negative controls yield zero BMLD confirming binaural specificity. Two general purpose binaural SSL models exhibit minimal phase sensitivity while dedicated binaural spatial SSL models achieve BMLD comparable to the analytical baseline. Progressive physical ablations show that general purpose binaural SSL models rely on spectro temporal interference textures rather than cross channel phase computation. High detection rates in speech reflect a confounding reliance on broadband envelopes rather than genuine phase encoding.

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

NarrativeWorldBench: A Frontier-Saturated Benchmark and a Latent World Model for Long-Horizon Co-Creative Audio Drama

Long-form serialized audio drama, with arcs that run for 200 to 800 episodes, is a major creative medium and a setting where frontier large language models (LLMs) fail. We benchmark 21 models, spanning classical, fine-tuned, open-frontier, closed-frontier, and reasoning tiers, on a uniform set of structural narrative metrics. All closed-frontier systems saturate at a plot-beat F1 in the band [0.78, 0.81] and collapse by about -0.20 F1 at horizon h=200. We introduce NarrativeWorldBench, an open benchmark of nine narrative-structure metrics evaluated across horizons h in {10, 20, 50, 100, 200}, with cross-lingual evaluation across four Indic languages (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi). We introduce N-VSSM, a Narrative Variational State-Space Model that maintains a structured 256-dimensional latent world state over more than 200 episodes via a Mamba-2 backbone with an event-conditioned posterior and an 8B decoder. N-VSSM holds plot-beat F1 >= 0.84 across all horizons at 4x lower compute than the closed-frontier band. A learned Cultural Transfer Function lifts cross-language fidelity by +0.20 to +0.23 Likert points. In a within-subjects writer study (n = 12 professional authors, 240 trials), N-VSSM is preferred over Claude Opus 4.5 on long-arc consistency 71% of the time and rated +1.3 Likert points higher on controllability.

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

AC-ODM: Actor–Critic Online Data Mixing for Sample-Efficient LLM Pretraining

arXiv:2505.23878v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Optimizing pretraining data composition is pivotal for LLM generalization. While dynamic mixing outperforms static strategies by capturing evolving training dynamics, current methods fail to reconcile computational efficiency with sample efficiency and structural flexibility for diverse pipelines.We introduce Actor–Critic Online Data Mixing (AC-ODM), which approaches data mixing from a reinforcement learning perspective with a parameterized policy that we theoretically prove to act as a dynamic linear surrogate maximizing the constructive interference of gradients. To enhance practical flexibility, AC-ODM supports two operational modes: (i) a proxy mode for fixed, pre-prepared corpora, where a policy learned on a small model is transferred to a larger target; and (ii) a non-proxy mode for direct end-to-end training from scratch without priors. Empirically, AC-ODM significantly outperforms prior methods in convergence speed and downstream accuracy across various architectures. On Pythia-1B, it reaches optimal validation perplexity using up to 66% fewer training steps than competitive baselines, delivering a 27.5% relative improvement in MMLU accuracy and a 2.23 x higher pass@1 on HumanEval, all while incurring a virtually negligible (0.4%) per-step wall-clock increase and only 2% additional memory overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/DANG-ai/AC-ODM.

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

Quality Adaptive Angular Margin Learning for Respiratory Sound Classification

arXiv:2606.11915v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a quality-adaptive angular-margin learning framework that improves feature generalization by enforcing intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Our framework, titled QLung, introduces a no-reference audio quality margin derived from spectral entropy and root-mean-square energy, which adaptively scales angular margins based on recording quality. To this end, we propose a log-scaled angular margin that stabilizes training under severe class imbalance. We also use an angular classifier that normalizes features and class weights, ensuring margin penalties are applied consistently on the unit hypersphere. Our approach improves in-distribution performance on the ICBHI dataset by 2.46\% over the cross-entropy baseline, and most significantly, achieves the strongest out-of-distribution performance on the SPRSound dataset compared to prior state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/RSC-Toolkit/QLung.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ScaffoldAgent: Utility-Guided Dynamic Outline Optimization for Open-Ended Deep Research

arXiv:2606.20122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended deep research (OEDR) requires systems to acquire knowledge through multi-round retrieval and generate coherent long-form reports. The outline plays a central role as a structural scaffold that coordinates retrieval, evidence organization, and generation. However, existing methods either fix the outline before writing or refine it with local heuristics, leading to scaffold drift under continuous information accumulation and delayed feedback for evaluating outline modifications. We propose ScaffoldAgent, a utility-guided dynamic outline optimization framework for OEDR. ScaffoldAgent models outline evolution as a structured decision process with three operations: Expansion, Contraction, and Revision, enabling controlled updates to the report scaffold. It further introduces a utility-guided feedback mechanism that estimates the downstream value of each outline operation from retrieval gain, structural coherence, and trial-generation quality. The resulting utility signal guides node selection, operation scheduling, and termination during inference. Experiments on DeepResearch Bench and DeepResearch Gym show that ScaffoldAgent consistently improves long-form report generation and factual grounding over existing deep research agents.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Accounting for uncertainty in the expected treatment effect substantially increases the sample size required for randomised trials: implications for the feasibility of clinical trials in anaesthesia and critical care

Background Multicentre trials in anaesthesia and critical care report low rates of statistically significant differences. This finding may partly reflect conventional sample size methods, which assume a fixed treatment effect. Assurance methods use a design prior to represent uncertainty in the expected treatment effect, which may provide a more realistic way of estimating sample sizes. Methods We calculated power curves across a range of effect sizes, design priors, and sample sizes using frequentist and Bayesian assurance methods and compared the sample sizes required to achieve 80% and 90% power to the conventional method. We standardised the design priors across effect sizes using the coefficient of variation. We derived a theoretical limit for achievable power. We validated a normal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution. Results Frequentist and Bayesian assurance methods produced similar power curves across all scenarios. At a coefficient of variation of 0.5 - reflecting realistic prior uncertainty in the expected effect size - both methods required sample sizes that were approximately 1.5 to 3.5 times larger than the conventional method. The theoretical power limit depends only on the coefficient of variation of the design prior and holds true across all effect sizes. The normal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution matched the results obtained from Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling. Conclusions Incorporating clinical uncertainty in the expected effect size substantially increases the sample size required to achieve adequate power, which has important implications for the feasibility of randomised trials in anaesthesia and critical care.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

NeuroSonic: Conditional Flow Matching for EEG-to-Speech Reconstruction

arXiv:2606.24087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reconstructing continuous speech from scalp electroencephalography (EEG) remains fundamentally challenging. EEG provides a weak, spatially diffuse, and highly variable measurement of distributed cortical activity, whereas speech is organized as a coherent acoustic trajectory with strong harmonic and temporal structure. The resulting mismatch makes waveform regression unstable and causes stochastic multi-step generation to be sensitive to artifact-dependent conditioning and subject variability. We introduce NeuroSonic, a conditional flow-matching framework for EEG-to-speech reconstruction. Instead of predicting waveforms directly or refining them through stochastic denoising, NeuroSonic learns a deterministic probability-flow velocity field that transports a noise-corrupted acoustic state toward clean speech under EEG conditioning. EEG and audio are embedded into a shared token space and processed by a time-conditioned gated Transformer that parameterizes the transport ordinary differential equation. This formulation models trajectory evolution explicitly while avoiding iterative stochastic sampling. We evaluate NeuroSonic on the CineBrain and EAV benchmarks under cross-subject evaluation. Across both datasets, the proposed method improves distributional realism, spectral fidelity, and perceptual quality over representative GAN-, diffusion-, and mean-flow baselines, with up to a 26.3\% gain in overall perceptual quality. The performance gap is most evident in artifact-heavy segments, where conditioning variability is strongest. These findings indicate that deterministic conditional transport provides a stable and effective formulation for EEG-driven speech reconstruction. Code is available at https://github.com/Y-Research-SBU/NeuroSonic/ .

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Cost-Performance Evaluation of Large Language Models for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis of HCAHPS Patient Comments: A Validation Study

Background: Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) free-text comments contain actionable feedback, but timely, scalable, and affordable sentiment analysis remains challenging for health systems that rely on third-party vendors. Objectives: To evaluate cost-performance tradeoffs between a cost-optimized and a flagship large language model (LLM) for aspect-based sentiment analysis of HCAHPS comments, using human inter-rater agreement as a reproducibility benchmark. Methods: We analyzed 512 free-text HCAHPS comments collected from two community hospitals in calendar year 2023. Six trained reviewers (medical students, recent medical graduates, and practicing internists) independently assigned positive, negative, or neutral labels to each comment-aspect pair; the majority label among three reviewers formed the consensus reference standard. Two OpenAI models - GPT-5-nano (cost-optimized) and GPT-5 (flagship) - were prompted in a zero-shot setting via the OpenAI API. We calculated pairwise Cohen's {kappa} to establish a human inter-rater baseline, then compared each model's labels to the consensus using Cohen's {kappa}, accuracy, weighted F1, and per-call cost and latency. Results: Mean human inter-rater agreement was {kappa} = 0.79 (substantial). Both LLMs exceeded this baseline (cost-optimized {kappa} = 0.85; flagship {kappa} = 0.85) with nearly identical accuracy (0.92) and weighted F1 (0.93 vs. 0.93). Performance was strong on positive (F1 ~ 0.97) and negative (F1 ~ 0.90) classes but poor on the underrepresented neutral class (F1

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

LivePI: More Realistic Benchmarking of Agents Against Indirect Prompt Injection

arXiv:2605.17986v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI agents such as OpenClaw are increasingly deployed in local workflows with access to external tools. This creates indirect prompt-injection (IPI) risk: an agent may execute harmful instructions embedded in untrusted inputs such as email, downloaded files, webpages, repositories, or group-chat messages. Existing evaluations are often small, purely simulated, or focused on a narrow set of channels. We introduce LivePI (Live Prompt Injection), a structured benchmark for IPI risk in a production-like but test-controlled environment. LivePI covers seven input surfaces, twelve attack/rendering families, and five malicious goals, including protected-information exfiltration, unauthorized security-control changes, unsafe code retrieval or execution, inbox-summary exfiltration, and cryptocurrency transfer. We run LivePI on a real virtual machine with live but test-controlled email, chat, web, local-file, repository, and wallet interfaces. Across GPT-5.3-Codex, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Kimi K2.5, and GLM-5, total attack success rates range from 10.7% to 29.6%. Group-chat injection is uniformly successful across the evaluated backbones in our deployment, and repository-link attacks produce high-severity failures despite a small denominator. We also evaluate a two-layer defense consisting of prompt-level filtering and pre-execution tool-call authorization. In the GPT-5.3-Codex setting, the defense intercepts all tested malicious-goal completions in LivePI before execution while preserving benign utility on PinchBench-derived workloads.