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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Minimal surfaces, Knots, and Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.26234v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A recent conjecture by Joel Fine posits a relationship between the coefficients of the HOMFLY polynomial of a knot $K$ in the 3-sphere $S^3$, and the signed count of minimal surfaces in hyperbolic 4-space $\mathrm{H}^4$ meeting the sphere at infinity at $K$, with prescribed genus and self-intersection number. In this paper, we develop a novel machine learning framework based on Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) to solve the minimal surface equation in hyperbolic space. We utilise this framework to test Fine's Conjecture by constructing near-minimal surfaces bounding various families of knots in $S^3$. Furthermore, we develop an algorithmic method to find self-intersections and compute their sign. For every knot analysed, the computationally discovered minimal surfaces and their self-intersection numbers perfectly align with the predictions of Fine's Conjecture, providing empirical evidence for it.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MultiToP: Learning to Patch Visual Tokens to Mitigate Hallucinations in Video Large Multimodal Models

Video Large Multimodal Models have achieved remarkable progress in video understanding, yet they remain prone to hallucinations, where generated responses are not faithfully supported by the input video. In this paper, we propose MultiToP, a multimodal-context-aware visual token patching framework that mitigates hallucinations by refining unreliable visual tokens before language generation. MultiToP introduces a lightweight Visual Token Patcher to predict token-level replacement distributions and selectively substitute unreliable visual tokens with a dynamic global patch token. To train the patcher effectively, we further propose information-guided rank calibration, which uses answer-conditioned frame-level information cues derived from the backbone to guide token replacement. Combined with ground-truth answer supervision and sparsity regularization, MultiToP enables localized visual evidence refinement without modifying the original model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MultiToP effectively reduces hallucinations on Vript-HAL with negligible inference overhead, improving the F1 scores of Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct by 50.60% over the vanilla model. Meanwhile, MultiToP preserves general video understanding ability, yielding an 18.58% relative accuracy gain on ActivityNet-QA for Video-LLaVA-7B.

03.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-09

Prediction of hospitalisation in young children with pneumonia in Malawi: A machine learning-based approach

by Patrick Staunton, Mohammad Adib Makrooni, Master Chisale, Billy Nyambolo, Joseph Wu, Damien McCarthy, Mark Ledwidge, Yasir Bin Nisar, Chris Watson, Balwani Mbakaya, Cathal Seoighe, Joe Gallagher Background Globally, pneumonia remains the single biggest cause of mortality in children under 5 years of age. This study sought to train and test a prediction model for hospitalisation within 7 days after initial presentation in 2- to 59-month-old Malawian children with WHO-defined pneumonia in primary care and compare its performance to existing risk prediction models. Methods and findings BIOTOPE is a cohort study of children with pneumonia in a primary healthcare setting in Malawi. The training cohort involved nine primary care centres and the testing cohort involved two primary care centres in Northern Malawi. The training cohort was recruited between December 2022 and April 2023 while the testing cohort was recruited in 2016. Participants were consecutive children aged 2–59 months presenting with cough and/or difficulty breathing and who were diagnosed as WHO-defined pneumonia in primary care of any severity. The training cohort was used to train and validate a machine learning model with a prespecified primary outcome defined as hospitalisation and/or death within 7 days as the outcome. This model was then further evaluated in the testing cohort.Median age was 15 months (interquartile range 8−27) in the training and 17 months (interquartile range 9−29) in the external testing cohort (52.1% and 54.4% male, respectively). Hospitalisation occurred in 14.3% (294) of the training cohort and 12.1% (55) of the testing cohort. There was one death in the training cohort only. WHO danger signs were present in 17.6% (360) and 15.9% (70) of children in the training and testing cohorts, respectively. The optimal machine learning model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic and precision recall curves of 0.87 and 0.57, respectively, in the testing cohort outperforming existing risk prediction models; furthermore, this model produced an expected calibration error of 0.16 (a logistic regression model using severity status as the response variable and the log odds of the machine learning model’s calibrated probabilities produced an intercept estimate of −0.32 and a slope estimate of 1.13). Key limitations include the use of hospitalisation and/or death as a severity outcome, which may reflect health system factors rather than true disease severity, that mortality-based comparisons were not possible due to low mortality in these primary care cohorts, and that comparator tools were developed for hospital populations rather than primary care populations. Conclusion This machine learning score outperformed traditional pneumonia risk scores in predicting hospitalisation within 7 days in Malawian children presenting to primary care. Traditional pneumonia risk scores diminish in performance when externally applied to new datasets suggesting they may not generalise well beyond their original derivation settings. Mortality-related findings are not applicable as there was only one death in this cohort. Overall these findings support the potential of machine learning to meaningfully improve early identification of children at risk of severe pneumonia in low-resource primary care settings. Further external validation and clinical impact studies are needed to confirm these results.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Sovereign Assurance Boundary: Certificate-Bound Admission for Agentic Infrastructure

arXiv:2606.11632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic infrastructure introduces a critical control-plane authorization problem: non-deterministic reasoning systems can propose high-stakes mutations to production resources, yet existing security mechanisms – such as identity and access management (IAM), policy engines, consensus protocols, and audit logs – either enforce static, context-unaware permissions or merely record actions post-execution. This paper introduces the Sovereign Assurance Boundary (SAB), a certificate-bound runtime admission layer for autonomous execution authority. SAB intercepts agent proposals at an assurance airlock, compiles them into typed execution contracts $C$, and binds these contracts to cryptographic evidence digests $H(E)$ and policy versions. The contracts are then routed through consequence-aware certification paths. Upon successful admission, the system emits a signed Sovereign Assurance Certificate ($\Omega$) that is strictly scoped to a specific execution identity, revocation epoch, and validity window. Finally, a sovereign execution broker verifies $\Omega$ and performs fresh pre-execution revocation and drift checks before invoking infrastructure APIs. We detail the airlock-broker architecture, formalize its admission and revocation invariants, and report preliminary feasibility measurements from a Go prototype evaluated over 2,500 admission attempts. Ultimately, this broker-enforced model prevents autonomous reasoning from directly mutating state, transforming delegated execution authority into a cryptographically verifiable, evidence-bound, revocable, and replayable runtime artifact.

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

FlexPooling with Simple Auxiliary Classifiers in Deep Networks

In computer vision, the basic pipeline of most convolutional neural networks consists of multiple feature extraction layers, where the input signal is downsampled to a lower resolution in each subsequent layer. This downsampling process is commonly referred to as pooling, which is an essential operation in CNNs. Pooling improves robustness against transformations, reduces the number of trainable parameters, increases the receptive field, and lowers computation time. Since pooling is a lossy process but remains important for extracting high-level information from low-level representations, it is important to preserve the most prominent information from previous activations to improve network discriminability. Standard pooling is usually performed using dense pooling methods, such as max pooling or average pooling, or through strided convolutional kernels. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective adaptive pooling method, called FlexPooling, which generalizes average pooling by learning a weighted average over activations jointly with the rest of the network. We further show that attaching Simple Auxiliary Classifiers (SAC) to the CNN improves performance and demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with standard pooling methods. Experiments on multiple popular image classification datasets show that FlexPooling consistently outperforms baseline networks, achieving approximately 1 to 3 percent improvement in accuracy.

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

Kolmogorov Regression for Robust Diffusion Policies

作者:

arXiv:2606.18186v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finite-dimensional (FD) diffusion policies exhibit temporal drift owing to discretization artifacts that degrade long-horizon performance (when deployed on physical systems). We introduce a backward Kolmogorov equation that lifts diffusion policies to a Cameron-Martin space – a subset of the Hilbert space. Essentially, replacing stochastic score matching with a deterministic boundary-value PDE problem. Our core innovation thrives on Gaussian measure theory whereupon the diffusion noise covariance operator is realized from a colored noise distribution which prescribes a notion of regularity on samples from the model at inference time. We train the diffusion model with a derived precision-weighted Cameron- Martin loss and a Kolmogorov residual is introduced as a PDE diagnostic during inference. These substitutions yield (i) convergence guarantees where the bound's constants depend on the effective rank of the kernel rather than action dimension, (ii) improved trajectory regularity via spectral weighting, and (iii) a deterministic failure detector without reward signals. Validation across two application domains demonstrates substantial improvements: on the PushT manipulation benchmark, the Cameron-Martin loss achieves a 17% improvement in maximum episode reward (0.95 vs. 0.78 for MSE) and 67.6% reduction in inter-step drifts during inference via the introduced residual magnitude. Similarly, on a 6-station manufacturing line with constant work-in-process (CONWIP) flow control, we achieve 28.4% lower RMSE than classical LSTM baselines; a high starvation-event recall (1.0 in test cycles), and effective bottleneck identification (Precision@1 = 1.0 in test set, 13x signal-to-noise ratio). We then certify the dispatch policies with Hamilton-Jacobi reachability theory which reduces deadlock events by 96% compared to uncontrolled dispatch over 100 simulated runs (351 events prevented).

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Construction of ergodic IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$

arXiv:2506.10476v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove the existence of infinite-volume IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ , with $d \geq 2$, based on a multi-source IDLA protocol. Unlike IDLA aggregates, the laws of the IDLA forests studied here depend on the trajectories of particles, and then do not satisfy the famous Abelian property. Their existence is due to a stabilization result (Theorem 1.1, our main result) that we establish using percolation tools. Although the sources are infinitely many, we also prove that each of them play the same role in the building procedure, which results in an ergodicity property for the IDLA forests (Theorem 1.2).

08.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-25

Ligand-enabled distal desaturative lactonization of aliphatic acids

作者:

Transition metal catalysis serves as a fundamental strategy for transforming inert C−H bonds into valuable functional motifs.1,2 However, achieving regioselective activation of remote C−H bonds remains challenging, particularly in unbiased hydrocarbon frameworks.2,3 In this context, distal C(sp3)−H bonds are especially difficult to functionalize, as conformational flexibility favors proximal C−H activation.3,4 In this study, we demonstrate a ligand-enabled strategy using designed O-allyl amido ester (OAAE) ligands for palladium-catalyzed activation of γ-methylene and methine C−H sites in unbiased aliphatic carboxylic acids, derived from readily available fatty and cyclic acid feedstocks. This protocol enables direct transformation of aliphatic carboxylic acid substrates into distal desaturated γ-lactones and double dehydrogenated γ-spirolactones. Mechanistic studies are consistent with a pathway involving Pd(II)-mediated γ-C(sp3)−H activation, followed by dehydrogenation and intramolecular cyclization. These lactones with an unsaturated arm, serve as key intermediates for the formation of complex natural products and pharmaceuticals. For instance, muricatacin (from soursop/laxman phal) and its analogue were rapidly assembled in three steps from margaric acid using this strategy and evaluated for anticancer activity, thereby demonstrating the potential of our approach for providing a rapid access to biologically relevant frameworks for traditional medicine. The introduced distal desaturation further opens up new avenues for remote functionalization, streamlining access to diverse bioactive molecules with improved step and atom economy.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Unraveling Syntax: Language Modeling and the Substructure of Grammars

While language models achieve impressive results, their learning dynamics are far from understood. Many domains of interest – such as natural language syntax, coding languages, arithmetic – are captured by context-free grammars (CFGs). In this work, we extend prior work on neural language modeling of CFGs in a novel direction: how language modeling behaves with respect to CFG substructure, namely subgrammars. We define subgrammars, and prove a set of fundamental theorems connecting language modeling and subgrammars. We show that language modeling loss recurses linearly over its top-level subgrammars; applied recursively, the loss decomposes into losses for "irreducible" subgrammars. Under additional assumptions, and empirically, parametrized models learn subgrammars in parallel, unlike children who first master simple substructures. We find that subgrammar pretraining can improve final performance, but only for tiny models relative to the grammar, while alignment analyses show that pretraining consistently leads to internal representations that better reflect the grammar's substructure.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

The Information-Theoretic Benefit of Shared Representations under Orthogonality Constraints

arXiv:2606.16028v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern deep learning architectures are increasingly multi-task and multi-modal, using a pretrained foundation model combined with task-specific, fine-tuned models. Empirically, exploiting similarity across different problems, instead of solving them individually, can significantly improve overall performance. While the generalization and sample complexity properties of multitask learning have been widely studied, the parametric complexity of joint approximation in comparison to separate approximation remains less well understood. The question is particularly relevant in modern deep learning, where models are increasingly required to satisfy structural constraints such as equivariance, conservation laws, or orthogonality. We prove lower and upper bounds on the description-length for separate and joint approximation classes, respectively, in uniform norm. We build a class of orthogonal functions by composing a shared hard feature, realized by a Rademacher-Haar wavelet series, with Sawtooth-Walsh readouts to enforce orthogonality of output coordinates. The dyadic tree structure of the Rademacher-Haar wavelet concentrates the approximation hardness in the common feature component, while the readouts act as task-specific heads. Using an information-theoretic framework, we obtain a sharp gap between the optimal approximation rates achievable by joint and separate coding. Finally, we realize this separation in a neural network model using Heaviside activations via reduction to triangle-wave approximation. Our results show that even under an orthogonality constraint joint approximation requires strictly fewer bits in compositional architectures, provided the tasks share a latent hard feature. This provides theoretical insight into the description-length-efficiency of compositional multi-output architectures and clarifies how neural networks can retain expressivity under geometric constraints.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Faster algorithm for achieving minimal-size quantum decision diagrams

arXiv:2606.24789v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The decision diagram (DD) data structure enables fast linear-algebra calculations by bringing vectors into a normal form and subsequently merging equivalent ones, yielding a minimally-sized DD modulo the equivalence relation. A fruitful application area is quantum-circuit simulation, where the vectors represent quantum states. The Local Invertible Map Decision Diagram (LIMDD) type, merges LIM-equivalent (typically Pauli-gate equivalent) vectors, can efficiently simulate Clifford circuits as well as some high-T-count circuits, and has theoretically been proven exponentially faster for simulation than other well-developed data structures, including other common DD variants. However, these exponential advantages have not fully materialized yet in existing implementations, for which the normal-form procedure, which is a highly complex algorithm, is either absent or only partially implemented. We here present a novel normal-form algorithm for Pauli-LIMDDs, achieving a worst-case speedup from $O(n^3)$ to $O(n^2)$ for an $n$-qubit DD node with a single child node while keeping the $O(n^3)$ run time in case of two distinct children nodes. We implement the algorithm as part of QolDDer, our Pauli-LIMDD simulator for quantum circuits, written from scratch in C/C++. The implementation realizes the theoretically-proven advantages of Pauli-LIMDDs on Clifford circuits, is significantly faster than the existing LIMDD simulators on such circuits, and on a public quantum-circuit data set often outperforms them by an order of magnitude. In the future, we envision that our work will enable further application and development of LIMDD variants, not only for quantum design tasks, but also for analysis of linear-algebra-based systems in general.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

As Easy as Rocket Science: Assessing the Ability of Large Language Models to Interpret Negation in Figurative Language

Figurative language and negation are two areas that challenge current language models, however, both are widely used throughout written and spoken language. Large language models (LLMs) are also widely used in everyday contexts where they cannot necessarily be tuned for a specific dataset. It is therefore essential to understand the ability of LLMs to correctly interpret text that includes both negation and figurative language. To investigate this, we develop a set of new annotations to an existing dataset of figurative language, and test a range of language models on the dataset. We find that the combination of negation and figurativeness can present a particular challenge, and that performance overall and across different negation types is particularly dependent on the prompt style used.

13.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-01

Prenatal exposure to asthma medications and risk of neurodevelopmental disorders and educational difficulties: A systematic review and meta-analysis

by Lama A. Shakhshir, Alexia Karain, Jill P. Pell, Claire E. Hastie, Scott M. Nelson, Michael Fleming Background Since asthma exacerbations during pregnancy risk maternal and fetal health, continued medication is important. However, some studies have reported adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes following prenatal exposure to asthma medication. Therefore, this systematic review aimed to collate the existing evidence on the associations between prenatal exposure to asthma medication and neurodevelopmental and educational outcomes. Methods and findings A systematic review was conducted in accordance with PRISMA guidelines and the PECO framework. PubMed, Medline and Embase databases were searched for studies investigating prenatal exposure to one or more asthma medication and neurodevelopmental or educational outcomes published, in English, between January 2003 and September 2024, and updated in November 2025. Studies of asthma medication used for other indications were excluded. Study quality was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale. Random-effects meta-analyses were conducted where appropriate and heterogeneity was evaluated using Cochran’s Q and I2 tests.Of 16,824 studies identified by the initial search, seven were eligible for inclusion. All investigated beta-2-adrenergic agonists (B2AA), with one including B2AA as mono- and polytherapy—and one study also investigated inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) exposure. Two reported associations with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and one with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). An updated search identified one additional eligible study, which examined both ADHD and ASD, as well as other neurodevelopmental disorders. The included eight studies (n = 3,867,170 participants) comprised cohort (n = 5) and case-control (n = 3) designs and reported inconsistent results. Meta-analysis of three studies (n = 1,380,871) indicated significant associations with ASD for exposure to B2AA both preconception (aOR 1.34, 95% CI [1.19,1.52]) and during pregnancy (aOR 1.29, 95% CI [1.16,1.42]). Heterogeneity was low, with no evidence of significant publication bias. Limitations of the included studies comprised residual confounding and exposure misclassification. Additionally, studies included in the meta-analysis were few in number and did not adequately distinguish between medication effects and underlying maternal asthma. Conclusion Meta-analysis suggested an association between prenatal exposure to B2AA and ASD. An association with ADHD, reported in a single study, requires corroboration. To date, based on our search strategy, no association has been reported with communication skills, motor skills, problem-solving and personal-social skills, or cerebral palsy.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Safety-Aware Denoiser for Text Diffusion Models

arXiv:2605.08116v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work on text diffusion models offers a promising alternative to autoregressive generation, but controlling their safety remains underexplored. Existing safety approaches are geared toward autoregressive models and typically rely on post-hoc filtering or inference-time interventions. These are inadequate for effectively addressing safety risks in text diffusion models. We propose the Safety-Aware Denoiser (SAD), a safety-guidance framework in text diffusion models. The SAD modifies the iterative denoising process such that the text sample at the final denoising step is steered toward provably safe regions of the text space. This inference-time method can integrate safety constraints into the denoiser, avoiding computationally expensive retraining of the underlying diffusion model and enabling flexible, lightweight safety guidance. We evaluate the safety of the generated text using the SAD, with respect to hazard taxonomy, memorization, and jailbreak. Experimental results show that SAD substantially reduces unsafe generations while preserving generation quality, diversity, and fluency, outperforming existing methods. These results demonstrate that our safety guidance during denoising provides an effective and scalable mechanism for enforcing safety in text diffusion models.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Dual-Branch Cross-Projection Debiasing through Diffusion-based Disentanglement

Foundation models trained on biased datasets often rely on spurious correlations between target labels and non-causal attributes, resulting in poor generalization on minority groups. Bias mitigation remains challenging due to two fundamental issues. First, when group labels are unavailable, existing group-unsupervised methods typically infer spurious attributes implicitly from model behavior, making it difficult to identify spurious factors that are semantically aligned with real-world biases. Second, even with pseudo spurious supervision, most existing debiasing methods follow a single-branch design that operates within a single shared feature space, where target and spurious attributes are intrinsically entangled. To address the first challenge, we introduce Confidence-guided Bias Concept Mining (CBCM), which leverages diffusion-disentangled, semantically grounded concept representations to identify reliable spurious attributes without attribute annotations. To address the second challenge, we propose Dual-branch Cross-projection Debiasing (DCD), a prompt-tuning framework that separates target and spurious representations into two branches and explicitly removes spurious information through cross null-space projection while preserving target-relevant semantics. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art worst group accuracy among group-unsupervised approaches, while tuning at most 0.22% of the model parameters. The source code is available in the supplementary materials.

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

Can LLMs Accurately Score Medical Diagnoses and Clinical Reasoning?

arXiv:2604.14892v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating medical AI systems using expert clinician panels is costly and slow, motivating the use of large language models (LLMs) as alternative adjudicators. Here, we evaluate an LLM Jury, composed of three frontier AI models, for scoring 3334 diagnoses on 300 real-world low- and middle-income country (LMIC) hospital cases. Both LLM- and clinician-generated diagnoses are scored against expert panel diagnoses across four dimensions: diagnosis, differential diagnosis, clinical reasoning, and negative treatment risk. The LLM Jury scores are compared with expert and independent re-scoring panel scores to assess error metrics, inter-rater agreement, severe-risk errors, and the effect of post hoc calibration using isotonic regression. In our data, we find that: (i) the uncalibrated LLM Jury scores preserve ordinal agreement with the expert clinician panel scores, but are systematically lower; (ii) the probability of severe-risk errors is lower for the LLM Jury than the human expert re-score panels; (iii) the LLM Jury combined with LLM diagnoses can be used to identify diagnoses at high risk of error, enabling targeted expert review and improved panel efficiency; (iv) the calibrated LLM Jury scores and rankings of diagnosing agents show excellent agreement with those of the primary expert panels; (v) LLM Jury models show no self-preference bias, they did not score diagnoses generated by their own underlying model or models from the same vendor more (or less) favourably than those generated by other models. Together, these results provide evidence that a calibrated LLM Jury is a trustworthy and reliable proxy for expert clinician evaluation in medical AI benchmarking. Confirming these findings in other clinical settings is an important direction for future work.

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

VANDERER: Map-Free Exploration using Future-Aware and Visual-Curiosity-Guided Diffusion Policy

Mobile agents require efficient exploration strategies to map unseen environments and autonomously plan tasks. Traditional methods rely on generating occupancy maps and optimizing the sequence in which unexplored regions are visited. However, in sensor-constrained settings, such as those limited to monocular cameras, generating accurate occupancy maps is challenging. To address this, we propose VANDERER, an exploration framework that leverages a Visual Curiosity Module (VCM) to guide pre-trained diffusion policies using only monocular image data. This curiosity module predicts the outcomes of proposed actions via a navigation world model and evaluates them through a curiosity cost. The cost then guides the diffusion process toward generating actions that maximize exploration. Evaluated across diverse simulated environments, VANDERER consistently outperforms established baselines, exploring an average of 13.4% more area than NoMaD. Our results reveal a direct correlation between visual and geometric curiosity in outdoor environments, demonstrating that VANDERER can effectively leverage this relationship for efficient exploration using sensor-constrained agents.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Vernier: Probing Representational Misalignment Behind Lexical Gaps in Causal Reasoning

作者:

Instruction-tuned language models can answer the same causal-reasoning question differently after its English variable names are replaced by type-preserving placeholders, although the structural causal model and the gold answer are unchanged. We ask whether this lexical gap reflects information loss in the placeholder view or a misaligned read-out from a representation that still carries answer-relevant content. Vernier uses a paired-view weight update as an instrument and then inspects the mechanism left after the gap closes. In the working regimes, the evidence favours representational misalignment. A variable-name probe becomes more accurate on the placeholder view, and activation patching on Qwen-7B, Qwen-14B, and Llama-3.1-8B shows that the decision-token representation can transfer answer identity between views. The update that realigns the views is counterfactual augmentation over original and placeholder prompts, while the answer-subspace KL mainly sharpens intermediate answer-belief agreement. Success is bounded by model family, scale, and task. CRASS transfer is reliable across Qwen scales and Llama, e-CARE remains weak, and preliminary non-causal rename tasks show a similar qualitative pattern.

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

Toward Calibrated Mixture-of-Experts Under Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.20544v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Calibration aligns a model's predictive uncertainty with the frequencies of its empirical outcomes and is important for understanding and trusting reported probabilities. Recent work shows that enforcing calibration at the level of individual predictors can improve ensemble accuracy and calibration, with mixture-of-experts (MoE) models showing strong empirical improvements in particular; however, the conditions under which calibration helps MoE are not well understood. In this work, we study how MoE models behave under distribution shift, focusing on how routing mechanisms interact with expert-level calibration. We show that expert calibration is sufficient to ensure calibration of the overall model under a broad class of distribution shifts in hard-routed models, but is insufficient for calibrating soft-routed models. To address this, we propose an adversarial reweighting that penalizes calibration errors of the routed aggregate under distribution shift, and we demonstrate that it improves the accuracy-calibration tradeoff both on average and on difficult subsets of the data, across model classes, prediction tasks, and distribution shifts.

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

Does the Judge Prefer English? Evaluating Language-Switching Invariance in LLM-as-a-Judge

作者:

Large language models (LLMs) are now widely used as automatic judges for open-ended instruction-following evaluation. This practice is convenient, scalable, and often more semantically aware than reference-based metrics, but it also introduces a new reliability question: does a judge evaluate the quality of an answer, or does it also react to the language in which the comparison is presented? We propose Judge-LS, a lightweight meta-evaluation protocol that transforms LLMBar response-pair items into English, Chinese, and Chinese-English language-switched variants. A reliable judge should preserve its preference under label-preserving language transformations and should not prefer a language when two answers are translation-equivalent. We evaluate four API-accessible judges on the full 419-item LLMBar benchmark, producing 13,408 successful pairwise judgments. Across models, Chinese and language-switched presentations induce 10.7–14.4% preference flips relative to English, and all judges achieve their highest accuracy in English. However, translation-equivalent tie probes do not reveal a systematic English preference: most probes are judged as ties, and non-tie decisions more often favor Chinese. We add confidence intervals, paired significance tests, and an automatic transformation audit with a sensitivity analysis that excludes mechanically flagged high-risk variants. The experiment requires no model training, uses only API calls, and is feasible on modest local hardware.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CARE: Competence-Aware Reward Shaping for Adaptive Reasoning Length in Video-MLLMs

In multimodal video reasoning, reinforcement learning-based methods typically rely on simplistic and inflexible reasoning-length control strategies that fail to adapt to the model's evolving competence. This mismatch may suppress necessary exploration at early stages, while encouraging redundant reasoning and inefficient decoding once the model becomes more competent. In this paper, we propose CARE, a competence-aware reward shaping framework for adaptive reasoning length optimization in multimodal reasoning. Specifically, CARE maintains a smoothed competence estimate via an exponential moving average of pass rates, and uses it to route training into progressive stages that shift the reward preference from exploration-oriented long-form reasoning to efficiency-oriented concise reasoning. To avoid conflating verbosity with intrinsic task complexity, CARE further normalizes reasoning effort with batch-level statistics, and introduces a posterior amplifier to strengthen reward signals for unexpectedly strong performance on historically difficult samples. The proposed mechanism is seamlessly integrated into the GRPO training pipeline and incurs no additional inference-time overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple video reasoning and general video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that CARE consistently improves reasoning accuracy, stabilizes reinforcement learning, and significantly enhances token efficiency. Moreover, CARE exhibits a characteristic inverted-U trajectory of reasoning length during training, and yields shorter yet more informative reasoning traces at convergence, indicating effective adaptive allocation of reasoning budget. We provide the source code for our proposed CARE framework and experiments at https://github.com/1Pansy/Video-CARE.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Detection of anisotropic cosmic structures on a gigaparsec scale

Galaxy redshift surveys map the cosmic web and provide a key observational test of whether the Universe becomes statistically homogeneous and isotropic on sufficiently large scales, as assumed by the cosmological principle underpinning the standard cosmological model1. In this framework, beyond the nonlinear regime of structure formation, inhomogeneous and anisotropic features are expected to fade rapidly, reflecting the near-isotropic primordial density field and its subsequent gravitational evolution. Although supported by the small amplitude of cosmic microwave background anisotropies2, this view is increasingly challenged by the complex network of large-scale structures and voids in the galaxy distribution3–6, as well as by independent probes reporting possible large-scale deviations from statistical homogeneity7 and isotropy8,9. Here we show that the galaxy distribution exhibits persistent anisotropic structures extending to scales on the order of one gigaparsec. Using the Angular Distribution of Pairwise Distances (ADPD)10, a parameter-free statistic that measures directional correlations, we detect anisotropy signals exceeding those in isotropic controls and geometry-matched ΛCDM mock catalogues with conservative significance greater than 3σ. These results provide direct evidence that directional coherence persists to larger scales than predicted in the standard framework, challenging the assumption of large-scale isotropy. They call for a reassessment of how homogeneity and isotropy are realized in the observed Universe and motivate new tests of cosmological models based on directional statistics. Using the parameter-free Angular Distribution of Pairwise Distances for measuring directional correlations, evidence is found for coherent anisotropic structures extending over gigaparsec scales, challenging the assumption that the Universe becomes statistically isotropic on sufficiently large scales.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

LADBench: A Benchmark for Logical Fault Detection in Images

Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual question answering and semantic grounding, but their capacity for autonomous logical reasoning remains underexplored. Existing anomaly benchmarks emphasize visual errors or direct prompting rather than the physical and social common sense needed for open-world deployment. To address this, we introduce LAD-bench, a benchmark of more than 1,000 curated synthetic images with logical anomalies across four domains: Residential, Urban, Collaborative, and Nature. We further propose a Tiered Prompting Protocol based on progressive disclosure, which measures how much explicit assistance a model needs to localize and reason about a logical fault. Evaluating leading foundation models reveals substantial weaknesses: even the best achieves only 70.11% overall accuracy, showing that implicit logical fault detection remains unsolved. Crucially, models often fail to identify anomalies even after receiving explicit hints in deeper tiers. By surfacing these limitations in sequential multimodal reasoning, LAD-Bench offers a rigorous framework for advancing the safety, reliability, and cognitive alignment of autonomous visual systems. Dataset and Code: https://huggingface.co/datasets/SahasraK/LADBench

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

Medical world models: representing medical states, modelling clinical dynamics and guiding intervention policies

arXiv:2606.16721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Medical diagnosis and treatment are dynamic processes in which patient states evolve over time and clinical interventions alter future outcomes. Although current medical AI can detect disease, estimate risk and generate reports, many systems still return static labels or scores, offering limited insight into how illness may progress or how alternative interventions may reshape its trajectory. Medical world models adapt the world-model idea from artificial intelligence to healthcare by learning internal simulators of patient-state dynamics. Their long-term goal is to help clinicians anticipate deterioration, compare treatment-conditioned futures and tailor care to individual patients. Yet relevant work remains scattered across foundation models, longitudinal modelling, disease simulation, treatment-effect estimation, reinforcement learning and digital twins. To bridge this gap, this review outlines a roadmap for advancing medical AI from isolated diagnosis and prediction toward medical world models that simulate disease evolution and support intervention decisions. This roadmap is organized around three coupled capabilities: patient-state construction, clinical dynamics modelling and intervention decision support. Across representative systems, the comparison highlights what each capability contributes and how partial components can be integrated into more mature perception–dynamics–planning systems. Finally, we identify the challenges involved in turning plausible rollouts into clinically useful simulators. Related literature is available at https://github.com/1999kevin/awesome_medical_world_models.