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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Dragon curves in Littlewood roots

arXiv:2606.25440v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A Littlewood polynomial is a polynomial whose coefficients lie in $\{- 1, +1\}$. While the majority of roots of a Littlewood polynomial of large degree are near the unit circle, numerical experiments suggest that when plotting the roots of all Littlewood polynomials of a given large degree, striking fractal structures appear away from the unit circle. These fractals resemble the attractor of a certain iterated function system and are known as dragon curves. In this note, we provide a rigorous explanation of this phenomenon, along with an analysis of a random variant, saying that such fractal behavior is typical.

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

MolE-RAG: Molecular Structure-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Chemistry

arXiv:2606.05693v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for molecular property prediction, but their ability to reason over chemical structures remains limited, as molecular representations such as SMILES differ substantially from the natural language on which LLMs are primarily trained. To bridge this semantic and chemical knowledge gap, we propose MolE-RAG, a training-free, molecule-centric retrieval-augmented generation framework for LLM-based molecular property prediction. MolE-RAG augments each prediction with three complementary sources of inference-time context: retrieved chemistry literature, molecule-specific information including compound synonyms, identifiers, functional group annotations, and physicochemical descriptors, and structurally similar molecules retrieved from the training set. We evaluate MolE-RAG across nine molecular property prediction tasks using proprietary, chemistry-specialized, and open-source LLMs. Across general-purpose LLMs, MolE-RAG improves ROC-AUC by up to 28 percentage points on classification tasks and reduces regression RMSE by up to 67% relative to a SMILES-only baseline. We further find that the utility of each context source varies across models and tasks, with different models benefiting most from textual retrieval, molecular context, or structural retrieval. These results suggest that molecule-centric retrieval can improve LLM-based molecular property prediction without model fine-tuning while providing a flexible framework for integrating heterogeneous chemical knowledge at inference time.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Deep Temporal Modeling and Ensemble Fusion for Multimodal Emotion Recognition from Physiological Signals

Physiological stress and emotion recognition are important for health monitoring and affective computing. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of deep learning models such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN), and Transformer on the WESAD dataset for multimodal affect recognition using wrist and chest sensor signals. We perform ablation studies to assess the individual contributions of each modality by training models on wrist-only and chest-only inputs. In addition, we implement a late-fusion ensemble strategy that combines predictions from all three architectures trained on multimodal input. We also employ early fusion at the sensor level by concatenating wrist and chest signals before feeding them into each model. Our results show that Transformer models consistently achieve the highest accuracy in multimodal settings, while TCN models perform best in the wrist-only configuration. The ensemble method yields the highest overall accuracy (98.91 +/- 0.13%) and macro-F1 score (98.56 +/- 0.17%). These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of sensor fusion and ensemble-based fusion in developing robust systems for physiological emotion recognition.

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

Fantastic Pretraining Optimizers and Where to Find Them II: Hyperball Optimization

arXiv:2606.16899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Matrix based optimizers such as Muon can substantially speed up language model pretraining, but their gains over AdamW are observed to shrink as model size and data scale grow when using standard constant decoupled weight decay. We propose Hyperball, a simple optimizer wrapper that addresses this issue. Given a base optimizer such as Adam or Muon, Hyperball sets the Frobenius norms of weight matrices and their corresponding optimizer updates to fixed constants. On Qwen3 style models up to 1.2B parameters, Muon Hyperball achieves 20–30% token equivalent speedup over weight decay baselines. Hyperball also improves learning rate transfer across widths and depths compared to decoupled weight decay. This method is motivated by prior theory showing that training with weight decay leads to an equilibrium weight norm that only depends on the training hyperparameters. Through this mechanism, the weight decay then decides the angular learning rate, i.e. how fast the direction of the weight matrix changes.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Project Auto-World: Towards Automated Benchmarking of Neural Relational Reasoners

arXiv:2606.24965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning about relational structures remains a significant challenge for neural models, particularly when they must systematically apply learned knowledge to problem instances that are harder than those seen in training. Progress is hampered by the difficulty of evaluating such generalization, since a priori, it is rarely clear what makes an instance hard. We study how this issue can be addressed by using large language models (LLMs) to automate benchmark generation, learning to produce increasingly challenging instances in an end-to-end manner. Concretely, given a world parametrized by Datalog rules, and an Edge Transformer as the reasoning evaluator, we use LLM-driven evolutionary search (based on FunSearch) and autonomous agentic search to discover sampling functions that yield hard problem instances. We also show that the Edge Transformer can be improved using this data such that it generalizes well to further data perturbations. Finally, we show that the same machinery can be applied to novel worlds proposed by LLMs, opening the door to autonomous research on neural relational reasoning.

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

ExTra: Exploratory Trajectory Optimization for Language Model Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.24994v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for language-model reasoning can fail at both extremes of task difficulty: easy prompts often produce all-correct, low-diversity rollout groups with little gradient signal, while hard prompts can produce all-incorrect groups with no positive reward. We introduce ExTra (Exploratory Trajectory Optimization), a GRPO-compatible framework that extracts exploration signals from the model's own rollouts. ExTra combines two mechanisms: (i) a novelty reward that adds embedding-based diversity bonuses after GRPO normalization, rewarding diverse correct solutions; and (ii) entropy-guided prefix regeneration, which scores partial trajectories using entropy signals and continues exploration from promising intermediate steps. Across six mathematical reasoning benchmarks, ExTra improves Qwen3-1.7B over GRPO by about +5 points on pass@1 and +7 points on pass@16, showing that trajectory-level exploration signals can improve both single-sample accuracy and inference-time coverage.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

FedUP: One-Shot Federated Unlearning via Centroid-Guided Plug-in Filters

arXiv:2606.24113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated unlearning (FU) is critical for complying with legal mandates like the right to be forgotten in decentralized systems, yet current methods face a persistent dilemma between non-target knowledge loss and high request latency. To resolve these issues, we propose FedUP, a one-shot federated unlearning framework utilizing lightweight pluggable filters that act as a "knowledge funnel" to screen out target data while preserving original model performance. By freezing original model parameters and training filters at the server side using differentially private (DP)-protected class centroid samples, FedUP bypasses the need for multi-round client-server communication and complex retraining, reducing unlearning latency from minutes to mere seconds. Additionally, the framework's pluggable architecture ensures inherent reversibility, enabling the seamless restoration of forgotten knowledge by simply removing the filters. Extensive experiments on diverse image and text tasks demonstrate that FedUP effectively reduces non-target knowledge loss and achieves superior unlearning precision and efficiency across various scenarios. Code is available at: https://github.com/suows/FedUP-code.

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

Probing, Fusion, and Trustworthiness: A Systematic Evaluation of Foundation Model Representations for Multimodal Cancer Analysis

arXiv:2606.17115v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models (FMs) have emerged as powerful representation extractors for medical data, yet their generalizability to datasets under distribution shift remains underexplored. This work systematically evaluates FM-based representations on a suite of computational pathology tasks across two real-world commercial cohorts, IH-BC and IH-NSCLC, drawn from the licensed in-house (IH) oncology dataset. The analysis focuses on two modalities, whole-slide images and transcriptomic profiles, drawn from the IH multimodal data. We first benchmark unimodal probing performance across five FMs on eight downstream classification tasks, and find that image and omics representations carry complementary predictive signals. Then we investigate whether multimodal fusion can yield additional gains over unimodal baselines by comparing three image-omics fusion strategies built on paired representations. The trustworthiness of selected unimodal and multimodal pipelines is further assessed through conformal prediction. Our results show that FM representations achieve competitive performance on out-of-distribution data and that multimodal fusion helps mainly when no single modality dominates the signal. Conformal prediction reveals that in the majority of cases where a point prediction fails, the true diagnosis remains recoverable within the prediction set, reinforcing the value of uncertainty-aware inference for clinical support.

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

High-Dimensional Random Projection for Activation Steering in Language Models

arXiv:2606.15092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a key methodology for controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs). Existing difference-in-means based methods, however, are fundamentally limited: they capture only mean differences between class activations and fail to recover discriminative signals that naturally exist in the nonlinear feature subspace under the superposition hypothesis. Motivated by that, we propose High-Dimensional Random-projection for Activation Steering (HiDRA), a training-free approach that integrates seamlessly with existing activation steering methods. By performing activation addition in the projected high-dimensional space, HiDRA can provably capture a better discriminative structure beyond the reach of linear methods. Experiments across diverse LLM families and benchmarks demonstrate that HiDRA consistently outperforms baseline counterparts, achieving stronger behavioral control without significant computational overhead.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Probabilistic Agents in Deterministic Audits: Evaluating Multi-Agent Systems for Automated Audits Based on the German IT-Grundschutz

arXiv:2606.25622v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The NIS-2 Directive mandates robust Risk Management from thousands of small and medium enterprises. To ensure compliance, companies rely on established standards such as the German IT-Grundschutz (IT-GS) of the Federal Office for Information Security. However, IT-GS certification is resource-intensive and requires a high level of manual effort for documentation, validation, and revision, making scalable implementation difficult and expensive. Building upon our previous conceptual framework, this paper presents the technical implementation and empirical evaluation of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture combined with Hybrid Retrieval Augmented Generation (HybridRAG) for the partial automation of IT-GS certification. We introduce two novel technical contributions to the MAS architecture to enforce the compliance rigor. The Hypothesis-Verification Loop in the Structural Analysis (SA) phase that cross-references agent-inferred dependencies against the Knowledge Graph to reduce hallucinations, and a Decoupled Reasoning Pipeline that separates agent-driven semantic extraction from the deterministic protection need inheritance. We utilize the BSI's "RecPlast GmbH" case study as a human expert-generated reference data set for end-to-end evaluation of the architecture and to quantify Precision, Recall, and F1-scores. The performance of the system is investigated across the phases of SA, Protection Needs Assessment (PNA), Modeling, and IT-GS Check. The empirical results reveal noticeable differences throughout the different steps of IT-GS. While the MAS demonstrates high efficacy in semantic tasks (SA and Modeling), significantly reducing manual effort through automated information extraction, quantitative results reveal limitations in logical reasoning phases (PNA and IT-GS Check) as the probabilistic nature of current LLMs struggles to meet the deterministic rigor required by IT-GS.

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

MorVess: Morphology-Aware Pulmonary Vessel Segmentation Network

Accurate pulmonary vessel segmentation remains challenging due to the sparse, tortuous, and multi-scale nature of vascular structures, where small branches are easily lost and topology integrity is difficult to preserve under voxel-wise supervision. Existing deep segmentation models primarily optimize binary masks, lacking explicit geometric constraints, thus struggling to recover continuous tubular morphology and fine vascular connectivity. In this study, we introduce MorVess, a morphology-aware segmentation framework that integrates differentiable geometric priors with large-scale foundation model adaptation to achieve fine-grained vascular parsing. MorVess jointly predicts vessel masks, distance maps, and thickness maps, providing explicit supervision for vascular boundaries, centerline consistency, and smooth diameter transitions. A lightweight 2.5D adapter bridges 3D spatial context and 2D SAM representations, while a global-local fusion block aggregates multi-level semantics and geometric cues for high-fidelity topology reconstruction. Across two challenging pulmonary CT benchmarks, MorVess delivers superior Dice, clDice, and HD95 scores, substantially improving small-vessel recovery and global connectivity. These results demonstrate that embedding geometric intelligence into pretrained vision models offers a principled and scalable pathway toward precise vessel analysis and clinically reliable structural quantification. Our source code is available at https://github.com/MaoFuyou/MorVess.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion Instrument for Measuring Regional Human Mobility: The Distributed Human Data Engine (DHDE)

arXiv:2603.21639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurately estimating human mobility in peripheral regional economies presents a fundamental measurement challenge: physical ground-truth sensors are sparse, behavioral intent signals are heterogeneous, and environmental friction introduces systematic bias into demand inference. We introduce the Distributed Human Data Engine (DHDE), a multi-modal sensor fusion architecture that addresses this challenge by integrating physical instrumentation (Edge-AI cameras), digital intent signals (route search impression metrics), behavioral records (90,350 spending records, 97,719 standardized survey responses), and meteorological data across four geographically distributed nodes in Fukui, Japan. The primary measurement-science contribution is the design, deployment, and cross-node validation of the DHDE as a sparse-sensor compensation instrument: a heterogeneous sensor fusion architecture that anchors non-stationary digital intent signals to concurrent physical ground-truth counts, correcting for systematic bias introduced by meteorological planning friction. The instrument is implemented as an ensemble inference pipeline (Random Forest and Ordinary Least Squares with Newey-West robust inference), calibrated across 397 daily observations and validated by chronological holdout replication across four geographically distinct node types. The primary OLS specification achieved an in-sample explanatory power of R2 = 0.810 and a chronological out-of-sample predictive performance of R2 = 0.683. Results identify an Under-Vibrancy Paradox where macro-regional visitor satisfaction correlates positively with crowd density (Spearman rank correlation rs = +0.150, p = 0.002). We estimate an annual proxy gap of 865,917 intent-implied visits, corresponding to JPY 11.96 billion (USD 72.6 million) in foregone revenue.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

A Guide to Estimating Conditional Average Treatment Effects in Competing Risks Settings

arXiv:2606.18281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) are central to treatment decision-making in personalized medicine. In competing risks settings, estimating CATEs from survival data allows for patient-specific assessments of treatment effectiveness for a specific event of interest while properly accounting for alternative event types. This distinction is essential in the presence of comorbidities, where competing causes of death may otherwise confound the therapeutic benefit. Focusing on right-censored survival times with binary treatment, we examine CATEs defined as covariate-conditional differences in the absolute risk for the event of interest at a fixed time. To this end, we study meta-learners which adapt machine learning algorithms for CATE estimation in competing risks scenarios. We systematically compare six meta-learners, combining Cox regression or random survival forests for risk modeling with elastic net regression or random forests for direct CATE modeling. To provide practical guidance on model selection, we evaluate their performance in multiple simulation settings, that differ in hazard complexity, treatment heterogeneity, treatment assignment, event type distribution and censoring. To facilitate applied use, we provide the R package, crsurvlearners, which implements all considered approaches.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

KANEL\'E: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Efficient LUT-based Evaluation

arXiv:2512.12850v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Low-latency, resource-efficient neural network inference on FPGAs is essential for applications demanding real-time capability and low power. Lookup table (LUT)-based neural networks are a common solution, combining strong representational power with efficient FPGA implementation. In this work, we introduce KANEL\'E, a framework that exploits the unique properties of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for FPGA deployment. Unlike traditional multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), KANs employ learnable one-dimensional splines with fixed domains as edge activations, a structure naturally suited to discretization and efficient LUT mapping. We present the first systematic design flow for implementing KANs on FPGAs, co-optimizing training with quantization and pruning to enable compact, high-throughput, and low-latency KAN architectures. Our results demonstrate up to a 2700x speedup and orders of magnitude resource savings compared to prior KAN-on-FPGA approaches. Moreover, KANEL\'E matches or surpasses other LUT-based architectures on widely used benchmarks, particularly for tasks involving symbolic or physical formulas, while balancing resource usage across FPGA hardware. Finally, we showcase the versatility of the framework by extending it to real-time, power-efficient control systems.

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

X-OPD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation for Capability Alignment in Speech LLMs

While the shift from cascaded dialogue systems to end-to-end (E2E) speech Large Language Models (LLMs) improves latency and paralinguistic modeling, E2E models often exhibit a significant performance degradation compared to their text-based counterparts. The standard Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) training methods fail to close this gap. To address this, we propose X-OPD, a novel Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation framework designed to systematically align the capabilities of Speech LLMs to their text-based counterparts. X-OPD enables the Speech LLM to explore its own distribution via on-policy rollouts, where a text-based teacher model evaluates these trajectories and provides token-level feedback, effectively distilling teacher's capabilities into student's multi-modal representations. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that X-OPD significantly narrows the gap in complex tasks while preserving the model's inherent capabilities.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Truncated Wigner dynamics of biclique quantum spin glasses

作者:

arXiv:2606.20187v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum spin glasses are often considered testbeds for studying quantum optimization algorithms and as such have been the subject of various quantum advantage claims. Here we investigate the near adiabatic dynamics of biclique quantum spin glasses within the (discrete) truncated Wigner approximation (TWA). Benchmarks on small systems show that TWA recovers sample-to-sample fluctuations of the Edwards-Anderson order parameter, over a wide range of annealing times, with increasing fidelity when the system size increases. We extract critical exponents from the Binder cumulant in line with theoretical expectations, reproducing recent quantum experiments. The computational cost of the method is minimal and it can easily be applied to tens of thousands of qubits.

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

Improved Baselines with Representation Autoencoders

Representation Autoencoders (RAE) replace traditional VAE with pretrained vision encoders. In this paper, we systematically investigate several design choices and find three insights which simplify and improve RAE. First, we study a generalized formulation where the representation is defined as sum of the last k encoder layers rather than solely the final layer. This simple change greatly improves reconstruction without encoder finetuning or specialized data (e.g., text, faces). Second, we study the prevalent assumption that RAE (using pretrained representation as encoder) replaces representation alignment (REPA), which distills the same representation to intermediate layers instead. Through large-scale empirical analysis, we uncover a surprising finding: RAE and REPA exhibit complementary working mechanisms, allowing the same representation to be used as both encoder and target for intermediate diffusion layers. Finally, the original RAE struggles with classifier-free guidance (CFG) and requires training a second, weaker diffusion model for AutoGuidance (AG). We show that REPA itself can be viewed as x-prediction in RAE latent space. By simply re-parameterizing the output of the DiT model, it can provide guidance for "free". Overall, RAEv2 leads to more than 10x faster convergence over the original RAE, achieving a state-of-the-art gFID of 1.06 in just 80 epochs on ImageNet-256. On FDr6, RAEv2 achieves a state-of-the-art 2.17 at just 80 epochs compared to the previous best 3.26 (800 epochs) without any post-training. This motivates EPFID@k (epochs to reach unguided gFID < k) as a measure of training efficiency. RAEv2 attains an EPFID@2 of 35 epochs, versus 177 for the original RAE. We also validate our approach across diverse settings for text-to-image generation and navigation world models, showing consistent improvements. The code is available at https://raev2.github.io.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Closed Quantum Boltzmann Bridges: Coherent Revivals, Hidden Microstates, and the Emergence of Classical Two-Time Entropy Conditioning

arXiv:2606.25260v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The classical Boltzmann Bridge describes entropy histories conditioned on both an initial low-entropy macrostate and a later macrostate. Unlike the usual past-only formulation of the thermodynamic arrow, this two-time conditioning can produce entropy profiles that rise above the final entropy and then decrease toward the imposed endpoint. In this work, we formulate closed quantum analogues of the Boltzmann Bridge using macro-subspace projectors, unitary time evolution, and Boltzmann entropy defined by the dimension of coarse-grained macroscopic sectors. We first study a minimal coherent chamber-qubit model, in which each particle has only a two-state chamber degree of freedom. Although this model is the most direct quantization of the classical two-box system, its bridge entropy profile is dominated by coherent oscillations and revivals rather than classical relaxation. We then introduce a hidden-microstate bridge, in which each chamber sector contains unresolved internal degrees of freedom while the full dynamics remain unitary. Numerical experiments show that increasing the internal Hilbert-space dimension suppresses sample-dependent revival behavior and produces bridge entropy profiles whose sign structure and coarse-grained shape increasingly agree with the classical Boltzmann Bridge. We further use a Random Forest classifier to explore the parameter regime separating revival-dominated quantum behavior from classical-like coarse-grained bridge behavior. These results suggest that classical two-time-conditioned entropy behavior is not recovered by quantizing the chamber variable alone, but can emerge statistically from closed quantum.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Efficient Rationale-based Retrieval: On-policy Distillation from Generative Rerankers based on JEPA

Unlike traditional fact-based retrieval, rationale-based retrieval typically necessitates cross-encoding of query-document pairs using large language models, incurring substantial computational costs. To address this limitation, we propose Rabtriever, which independently encodes queries and documents, while providing comparable cross query-document comprehension capabilities to rerankers. We start from training a LLM-based generative reranker, which puts the document prior to the query and prompts the LLM to generate the relevance score by log probabilities. We then employ it as the teacher of an on-policy distillation framework, with Rabtriever as the student to reconstruct the teacher's contextual-aware query embedding. To achieve this effect, Rabtriever is first initialized from the teacher, with parameters frozen. The Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) paradigm is then adopted, which integrates a lightweight, trainable predictor between LLM layers and heads, projecting the query embedding into a new hidden space, with the document embedding as the latent vector. JEPA then minimizes the distribution difference between this projected embedding and the teacher embedding. To strengthen the sampling efficiency of on-policy distillation, we also add an auxiliary loss on the reverse KL of LLM logits, to reshape the student's logit distribution. Rabtriever optimizes the teacher's quadratic complexity on the document length to linear, verified both theoretically and empirically. Experiments show that Rabtriever outperforms different retriever baselines across diverse rationale-based tasks, including empathetic conversations and robotic manipulations, with minor accuracy degradation from the reranker. Rabtriever also generalizes well on traditional retrieval benchmarks such as MS MARCO and BEIR, with comparable performance to the best retriever baseline.

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

Making Foresight Actionable: Repurposing Representation Alignment in World Action Models

World Action Models (WAMs) offer a promising route for robot manipulation by using video generation models to model future scene evolution before producing control actions. However, our empirical observations reveal a phenomenon: generating plausible visual futures does not always guarantee the extraction of accurate actions. To diagnose this failure, we conduct action-head attention analysis and causal interventions. We find that the action decoder fails to focus on task-relevant interaction regions and remains sensitive to perturbations in task-irrelevant areas. This reveals a representation mismatch: hidden states optimized for visual reconstruction are not inherently organized in a form useful for low-level action control. In this paper, we propose AGRA, an Action-Grounded Representation Alignment objective that regularizes the world-action interface by aligning intermediate video diffusion features with spatially coherent semantic representations from a foundation visual encoder. We evaluate AGRA on real-world manipulation tasks. Experiments show that AGRA makes world model representations more action-grounded: by focusing the action decoder on the correct interaction regions, it improves object localization accuracy and affordance understanding, and makes the policy more robust to perturbations in task-irrelevant regions. As a result, AGRA consistently improves both in-distribution performance and out-of-distribution generalization over the baseline world action model.

21.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-08

Climate change and non-communicable diseases: An invisible syndemic

by Gokul Parameswaran, Sadeer Al-Kindi, Sanjay Rajagopalan Climate change accelerates non-communicable diseases (NCDs) through cascading environmental disruptions and is attributed to driving increased NCD-related mortality. Yet this syndemic remains invisible and underfunded. We detail why addressing the climate-NCD intersection is critical for improving health. In this Perspective, Sanjay Rajagopalan and colleagues discusses how climate change accelerates non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and exacerbates NCD-related mortality, and calls for greater visibility and funding to address this syndemic and improve human health.

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

Attention is Just Another Name for Coupling?: A Fast-Slow ODE Perspective on Hierarchical Pretraining

arXiv:2606.16730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal self-attention is a coupling mechanism: each token's hidden state is updated by a learned mixture of preceding tokens at the same timescale. This paper asks whether a second, temporally slower coupling-a slow sub-system operating on a temporally-downsampled view of the sequence and fed back into the fast path through a zero-initialised gate-complements it. The question is framed in the language of singularly perturbed ordinary differential equations (ODEs), where the fast variable $x$ evolves at the token rate, the slow variable $y$ evolves at one update per $P$ tokens, and the timescale ratio $\varepsilon = 1/P$ is enforced structurally by causal block-mean pooling. The paper instantiates the fast-slow ODE formalism as a concrete neural network: a fast path of standard causal attention over $T$ tokens, a slow path of full attention over $T/P$ pooled tokens ($P^2 \times$ cheaper per layer), and a zero-initialised additive gate. In addition, under a linear-generator assumption on the fast dynamics, we prove that the equilibrium manifold $x = \phi(y)$ is exactly the master-equation (ME) stationary distribution $p_{\mathrm{st}}(y)$; in that regime a learned MLP $\phi_\theta(y)$ is a variational approximation of it (the trained block is not a generator, so this identity is the structured limit, not a claim about the network as trained). Empirically, at $500$k tokens the coupling is neutral – the gate stays closed and the coupled and frozen ablations are within run-to-run noise – at a wall-clock cost comparable to a dense baseline. The contribution is the precise, gap-marked mapping itself, not a performance gain.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

FeedEval: Pedagogically Aligned Evaluation of LLM-Generated Essay Feedback

Going beyond the prediction of numerical scores, recent research in automated essay scoring has increasingly emphasized the generation of high-quality feedback that provides justification and actionable guidance. To mitigate the high cost of expert annotation, prior work has commonly relied on LLM-generated feedback to train essay assessment models. However, such feedback is often incorporated without explicit quality validation, resulting in the propagation of noise in downstream applications. To address this limitation, we propose FeedEval, an LLM-based framework for evaluating LLM-generated essay feedback along three pedagogically grounded dimensions: specificity, helpfulness, and validity. FeedEval employs dimension-specialized LLM evaluators trained on datasets curated in this study to assess multiple feedback candidates and select high-quality feedback for downstream use. Experiments on the ASAP++ benchmark show that FeedEval closely aligns with human expert judgments and that essay scoring models trained with FeedEval-filtered high-quality feedback achieve superior scoring performance. Furthermore, revision experiments using small LLMs show that the high-quality feedback identified by FeedEval leads to more effective essay revisions. We release our code and curated datasets at: https://github.com/BBeeChu/FeedEval.git.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

How Complexity Contributes to Learning Opacity in Machine Learning

arXiv:2606.24953v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning (ML) algorithms are known to be opaque. We do not know the reasons for their predictions. The learning process leading to the prediction function is also opaque. We do not fully understand the time evolution of the weight values of neural nets (NN) and related dynamical phenomena. While prediction opacity is widely studied, learning opacity remains largely underexplored. This article studies learning opacity trough the lens of complex dynamical systems. We argue that NN learning is essentially a complex system and that learning opacity is due to dynamical complexity and the epistemological challenges that arise from it. We identify three key properties of training complexity – sensitivity to weight initialization, feedback in gradient based optimization, and sensitivity to the training data – and show how each contributes to learning opacity. As these properties are fundamental to the learning process damping or eliminating them would fundamentally alter how ML systems learn. Some sources of opacity in ML may hence be irreducible.

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

The Integrator Advantage: Controlled Agentic AI for Small and Medium-Sized Companies

arXiv:2606.16649v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI marks a new phase of enterprise automation. Unlike traditional automation or conversational AI, agentic systems can interpret goals, plan multi step tasks, access tools, interact with enterprise systems, and execute workflows with varying degrees of autonomy. For small and medium sized companies, this creates potential to reduce administrative burden, accelerate routine processes, and improve the use of organizational knowledge. This paper argues that the near term value of Agentic AI does not lie in full autonomy or workforce reduction, but in controlled partial autonomy for simple and medium complexity business processes. It proposes an integration framework covering use case suitability, autonomy levels, technical integration, governance, security, employee enablement, and measurable impact. The paper concludes that Agentic AI can become a productivity lever when implemented as a human centered capability with responsibility and accountability retained by people.