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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Feynman–Kac formula for the heat equation with a one-center point interaction in $d=3$

arXiv:2606.11677v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study Schrödinger operators with a one-center point interaction, formally defined by \begin{align*} -\Delta_\alpha=-\Delta+\alpha\,\delta_0(\cdot), \end{align*} for $\alpha\in\mathbb{R}$, and the associated heat equation \begin{align} \partial_t u=\tfrac{1}{2}\Delta_{\alpha} u,\quad u(0,x)=u_0(x)\in C_c^{\infty}(\mathbb{R}^3\setminus\{0\}).\label{eq:HEapp} \end{align} Here $\Delta$ denotes the Laplacian (self-adjoint on $L^2(\mathbb{R}^3)$) and $\delta_x$ the Dirac measure at $x$. The operator $-\Delta_\alpha$ can be realized either as a self-adjoint extension of $-\Delta|_{C_0^{\infty}(\mathbb{R}^3\setminus\{0\})}$ in $L^2(\mathbb{R}^3)$, or as the norm-resolvent limit of $-\Delta+\lambda_\varepsilon V(\cdot/\varepsilon)$ for suitable $\lambda_\varepsilon$ and $V:\mathbb{R}^3\to\mathbb{R}$. In this paper we construct, for each $t>0$ and $x\in\mathbb{R}^3\setminus\{0\}$, a probability law on path space and a normalizing function $G_t^\alpha(x)$ giving the following probabilistic representation of the solution to the associated equation: \begin{align*} u(t,x)=G_t^\alpha(x)\,\mathbb{E}\bigl[u_0\bigl(W^{t,x}(t)\bigr)\bigr], \end{align*} where $\{W^{t,x}(s):0\le s\le t\}$ is a continuous process depending on $(t,x,\alpha)$. The result provides a Feynman–Kac type formula for the heat equation with a one-point interaction in three dimensions.

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

AI Coding Agents Can Reproduce Social Science Findings

Recent anecdotal evidence suggests that AI coding agents can reproduce published findings when provided with original data and code; yet systematic evaluation across social sciences remains limited. Existing evaluation benchmarks are insufficient, either small or conflate agent performance with problems in the reproduction materials themselves, such as code that fails to execute correctly. Here we introduce SocSci-Repro-Bench, a benchmark of 221 tasks spanning four disciplines and 13 substantive domains, constructed from studies whose results are either fully reproducible with available materials or demonstrably non-reproducible due to missing data, allowing us to isolate agents' reproduction capacity. Evaluating two frontier coding agents, Claude Code and Codex, we find that both can reproduce a large share of social science findings, with Claude Code substantially outperforming Codex. These reproduction rates considerably exceed those previously reported for general-purpose LLM-based agents on comparable reproducibility benchmarks. Both agents also perform strongly on a reasoning task requiring identification of underlying research questions, and additional analyses suggest that results are not primarily driven by memorization. Providing the original paper PDF alongside replication materials modestly improves performance but introduces bias on tasks where reproduction is impossible. We also show that agents can be nudged toward confirmatory specification search through subtle prompt framing. Together, these findings suggest that at least some frontier coding agents can serve as reliable executors of computational workflows while underscoring the need for careful benchmarking and prompt design as AI systems assume larger roles in scientific production.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

JEDEL: Zero-Shot DNA-Encoded Library Design for Early-Stage Drug Discovery

arXiv:2606.23745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present JEDEL, a framework for generating synthesis-ready DNA-encoded libraries (DELs) directly from three-dimensional pharmacophore representations of active ligands. JEDEL is the first model to map pharmacophore interaction patterns to actionable, scalable synthesis instructions, enabling the design of targeted libraries comprising potentially millions of molecules. Unlike existing generative approaches that produce virtual compounds requiring downstream synthesis planning, JEDEL operates within the space of purchasable building blocks and validated reactions, ensuring that every output is experimentally realizable by construction. JEDEL learns a predictive alignment between pharmacophore geometry and molecular structure and decodes this into combinatorial synthesis routes at scale. Across 18 protein targets, it generates focused libraries that outperform random and diversity-based baselines in predicted binding affinity, pharmacophore recovery, and sample efficiency, without target-specific retraining. JEDEL enables a shift from virtual molecule generation to experimentally deployable library design.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Integrating Spatially Adjusted Protein Summaries for Survival Prediction in Spatial Proteomics

Recent advances in spatial proteomics, particularly imaging mass cytometry, enable the measurement of protein expression at the single-cell level while preserving a spatial context. Conventional survival analyses, however, typically rely on patient-level averages of protein intensities and therefore overlook spatial heterogeneity and tissue architecture. To address this limitation, we introduce a framework that incorporates spatial information into survival modeling by generating spatially adjusted protein summaries (SAPS). In this approach, cell-level protein intensities within each patient are modeled using spatial spline regression to capture spatial trends. From these models, we extract two complementary features: a spatially adjusted mean expression and a residual variance that reflects cell-to-cell variability unexplained by spatial effects. These summaries are then incorporated into Cox proportional hazards models in combination with clinical covariates. In simulation studies, our proposed framework achieved improved predictive performance compared to other alternative methods. The application of the method to breast cancer imaging mass cytometry data indicate that spatially adjusted summaries may enhance survival prediction and reveal biologically interpretable spatial protein patterns, suggesting high translational potential. This methodology offers an efficient means of translating complex spatial proteomics data into patient-level features, providing both improved survival prediction and new insights into the role of spatial heterogeneity in cancer outcomes.

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

Self-Driving Datasets: From 20 Million Papers to Nuanced Biomedical Knowledge at Scale

arXiv:2605.07022v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Manually curated biomedical repositories – spanning bioactivity, genomics, and chemistry – are expensive to maintain, lag behind primary literature, and discard experimental context, obscuring nuances needed to assess data correctness and coverage. We show that PubMed itself can be autonomously and cost-effectively turned into structured datasets that are larger, more nuanced, and more accurate than the curated databases they replace. We present three coupled contributions: (1) an LLM-based entity-tagging pipeline, grounded in nine biomedical ontologies, that tags 4.5B entities across 19 categories in a 22.5M-paper, 2.5T-token PubMed corpus; (2) hybrid sparse-dense retrieval supporting entity-filtered semantic queries over the tagged corpus; and (3) Starling, a multi-agent deep research system that, given only a natural-language task description, designs precision- and recall-targeted retrieval filters, induces an extraction schema, and emits structured records with nuance-rich fields and supporting passages. Across six tasks – blood-brain barrier permeability, oral bioavailability, acute toxicity (LD50), gene-disease associations, protein subcellular localization, and chemical reactions – Starling produces ~6.3M records (91K-3M per task); several are, to our knowledge, the largest public datasets for their property. Frontier-model rejection of our extractions is 0.6-7.7% across tasks, far below error rates we measure on widely used curated counterparts (e.g., 16.5% on BBB_Martins, 7.3% on Bioavailability_Ma). Beyond scale and accuracy, the supporting passages carry nuance tabular databases discard – e.g., oral bioavailability may depend on fed vs. fasted state. Together, the corpus, retrieval, and agent establish a foundation for AI-driven therapeutic design. Code and datasets: https://github.com/starling-labs/starling.

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

Sensitivity Shaping for Latent Modeling

arXiv:2606.14585v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative dynamics models enable planning in challenging robotic systems, but safe deployment requires reliably detecting policy-induced out-of-distribution (OOD) transitions. Existing methods typically treat the learned dynamics as fixed and attach post hoc support surrogates. We show that these surrogates can fail when the dynamics are locally insensitive to critical action choices: unsupported control actions may produce latent predictions that resemble demonstrated transitions, suppressing OOD signals despite large true predictive errors. To address this, we introduce support-conditioned control-sensitivity regularization, which promotes sensitive local response to control input changes in learned dynamics in high-support training regions. This preserves control-induced variation while limiting unstable extrapolation due to weak empirical support. Experiments in vision-based obstacle avoidance, manipulation, and real-robot navigation show improved OOD detection and safer closed-loop planning.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

MinhwaNet: Faithful but Insufficient Object Grounding in Korean Folk Painting

Korean folk painting (minhwa) is built from a small vocabulary of auspicious symbols, a tiger for protection, a pair of birds for marital harmony, a peony for wealth, that recur across many of its painted genres. This suggests an obvious computational approach, identify which symbols appear in a painting and read the genre from the inventory. Working with a public corpus that pairs whole paintings, eight-field bilingual curatorial captions, and a separate set of expert object crops, we find that this approach does not work. A model given only a list of which symbols a painting contains predicts the genre far worse than a model that fuses the image with the curatorial text, and forcing the genre representation to be object-grounded actively hurts accuracy. The visual evidence on which the genre prediction rests is nonetheless localized and inspectable. A leakage-safe object evidence map projected from a part-level detector is spatially faithful to where curators isolated symbolic objects and to a patch-based surrogate's own gradient saliency. We name this configuration a faithful-but-insufficient dissociation. The part-level explanation is honest about what the part-level model sees, yet the genre target turns on how symbols are arranged rather than on which ones appear. The same lens separates a content label that survives transfer to held-out source institutions, genre, from a style label that does not, era, a prediction we confirm on two further labels in the corpus. We release the multimodal system, a worked-example reading of one painting's evidence map against its catalogue, and a set of evaluation cautions that recur in long-tailed heritage collections.

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

Moving Beyond Diversity: Visual Token Pruning as Subspace Reconstruction for Efficient VLMs

Despite their remarkable performance, Vision Language Models (VLMs) incur substantial computational overhead due to the large number of visual tokens. While diversity maximization has become a dominant strategy for token reduction, existing methods rely on cosine-based normalized similarity that discards magnitude information, failing to faithfully approximate the original feature representation and leading to suboptimal performance, particularly on compositional multi-skill reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce SPARE, a subspace reconstruction method that reformulates token pruning as a column subset selection problem and explicitly minimizes reconstruction error. By iteratively selecting tokens with large projection residuals, SPARE performs reconstruction-driven pruning beyond angular diversity. Moreover, we reveal a counterintuitive anti-relevance phenomenon: tokens with lower image-text relevance score can better preserve contextual information. Based on this finding, we incorporate anti-relevance into SPARE as an additional selection criterion to promote context-aware token selection. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that SPARE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, with strong gains on compositional tasks. When applied to LLaVA, SPARE removes up to 94% of visual tokens while retaining 95% of the baseline performance, all in a fully training-free manner.

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

Decoupling Inference from State Updates in Low-Latency Feature Engines via Probabilistic Thinning

arXiv:2606.16981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Streaming data systems increasingly underpin Machine Learning workflows that maintain large numbers of continuously updated aggregations. In production settings, each incoming event typically triggers read-modify-write operations to persistent storage, making high-frequency state updates a dominant source of latency, contention, and operational cost. In this work, we decouple inference from state persistence in streaming Machine Learning pipelines via probabilistic thinning: every event is scored, but durable state updates are selectively triggered by informative events. Unlike approaches that shed input or state, we show that persistence-path control is achievable without a high-frequency in-memory control plane or cross-worker coordination, relying exclusively on approximate statistics retrieved from disk-backed key-value stores. We model the resulting stochastic processes, derive bounds on filtering rates, and prove that common time-based aggregations remain unbiased under variance-aware formulations, preventing systemic error accumulation. We evaluate the approach in a controlled setting that isolates per-event costs, demonstrating substantial reductions in storage Input/Output and serialization overhead. Across experiments, up to 90% of events are excluded from the persistence path while preserving and in some cases improving downstream utility.

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

GRASP: Gradient-Aligned Sequential Parameter Transfer for Memory-Efficient Multi-Source Learning

arXiv:2606.14900v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-source transfer learning faces a fundamental scalability bottleneck: existing approaches require either loading all K source models into memory simultaneously during parameter fusion, requiring O(K) memory, or deploying all models at inference time, making production deployment infeasible. We propose GRASP (Gradient-Aligned Sequential Parameter Transfer), which achieves superior knowledge integration while maintaining O(1) memory consumption through three key innovations: (1) sequential processing that merges one source at a time into an evolving target model, (2) parameter-wise gradient alignment that selectively transfers only parameters whose optimization directions align with the target domain, avoiding negative transfer, and (3) iterative fine-tuning that adapts transferred knowledge before integrating the next source. Extensive experiments across three continual learning benchmarks (Yearbook, CLEAR-10, CLEAR-100) spanning 10 to 108-year temporal distribution shifts and four architectures (1.3M to 25.6M parameters) demonstrate that GRASP achieves 93.5% mean accuracy over all datasets and architectures compared to ensemble method's 71.7% accuracy while requiring only constant memory versus K models for standard multi-source fusion. Critically, GRASP's sequential previously merged models and scales to arbitrarily many sources without memory growth, making it uniquely suitable for resource-constrained deployment and continually evolving source domains.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

The Hidden Cost of Approximation in Online Mirror Descent

arXiv:2511.22283v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online mirror descent (OMD) is a fundamental algorithmic paradigm that underlies many algorithms in optimization, machine learning and sequential decision-making. The OMD iterates are defined as solutions to optimization subproblems which, oftentimes, can be solved only approximately, leading to an inexact version of the algorithm. Nonetheless, existing OMD analyses typically assume an idealized error free setting, thereby limiting our understanding of performance guarantees that should be expected in practice. In this work we initiate a systematic study into inexact OMD, and uncover an intricate relation between regularizer smoothness and robustness to approximation errors. When the regularizer is uniformly smooth, we establish a tight bound on the excess regret due to errors. Then, for barrier regularizers over the simplex and its subsets, we identify a sharp separation: negative entropy requires exponentially small errors to avoid linear regret, whereas log-barrier and Tsallis regularizers remain robust even when the errors are only polynomial. Finally, we show that when the losses are stochastic and the domain is the simplex, negative entropy regains robustness-but this property does not extend to all subsets, where exponentially small errors are again necessary to avoid suboptimal regret.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FactoryLLM: A Safe and Open-Source AI Playground for Evaluating LLMs in Smart Factories

arXiv:2606.14119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault diagnostics and recovery in smart factories is challenging because critical information is dispersed across manuals of multiple machines which are interconnected through the manufacturing process. Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide a promising approach. In this paper, we propose FactoryLLM, a safe and open-source AI playground designed for evaluating different LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models by analysing documents from multiple machines across the manufacturing process. FactoryLLM enables the user to configure the LLM, and assess performance when reasoning over multiple documents, through a dual evaluation setup using both RAGAS and NVIDIA's LLM-as-a-Judge metrics. FactoryLLM is safe because it allows users to run local or open-source LLMs without sharing sensitive industrial data, providing a controlled environment for experimentation. We demonstrate the efficacy of FactoryLLM through a case study which involves an Autonomous Intelligent Vehicle and its Mobile Planner software, evaluating three LLMs across 30 maintenance queries derived from approximately 600 pages of cross-machine documentation. The results suggest that FactoryLLM is effective in cross-machine document reasoning: every model achieved a groundedness score above 0.88. The full code and documentation for community to test FactoryLLM with their manufacturing specific scenarios are publicly available.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Decay of correlations and zeros for the hard-core model

arXiv:2603.17858v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In a recent paper the last author proved that absence of complex zeros of the partition function of the hard-core model near a parameter $\lambda>0$ implies a form of correlation decay called strong spacial mixing. In this paper we investigate the reverse implication. We introduce a strengthening of strong spatial mixing that we call very strong spatial mixing (VSSM). Our main result is that if VSSM holds at a parameter $\lambda>0$ for a family of graphs, this implies that the partition function has no zeros near that parameter for each graph in the family. We also demonstrate that a closely related variant of very strong spatial mixing does not imply zero-freeness. As a consequence of our main result, we moreover obtain that VSSM implies spectral independence. Our proof relies on transforming the problem to the analysis of an induced non-autonomous dynamical system given by Möbius transformations.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Multiple cyclicity and Wavelet Decomposition with Channel Correlation for Long-term Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.17996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cyclicity and trend are important components of time series data and many studies based on cyclicity and trend have achieved good results in long-term time series forecasting. However, we believe that current work neglects the influence of real-world inter-channel correlations in time series data which leads to suboptimal predictions. Furthermore, these models rely on complex designs to capture diverse information so that resulting in low computational efficiency. To address this challenge, we propose McWC, a long-term time series forecasting model that separately models the cyclicity, trend, and inter-channel correlations. Specifically, McWC first decouples cyclical information from data using a multi-layer cyclicity construction module. Then, it extracts inter-channel correlations using multi-layer perceptron. Next, it models and fuses the multi-layer high-frequency and low-frequency information from data using a multi-level wavelet decomposition module. Finally, it aggregates the results of different components to obtain the output. Simultaneously, we decouple intra-channel autocorrelations by calculating a loss function in the frequency domain. Experiments on six real-world datasets demonstrate that McWC achieves state-of-the-art performance, exhibiting excellent computational efficiency and historical information extraction capabilities.

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

Rhythm of the Deep: A Computational-Linguistic Test of Duality of Patterning in Sperm Whale Codas

Human language has often been described as combining structure at two levels: lower-level units combine into larger units, which then combine into larger sequences. We test for this design feature, duality of patterning, in sperm whale codas using 1,483 codas from the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. Because acoustic similarity can imitate symbolic structure, we treat the problem as computational-linguistic structure discovery from continuous audio rather than as a direct claim about language or meaning. We use a consensus of frozen audio encoders, held-out structural tests, per-statistic nulls, and acoustic-null recoverability gates. The evidence supports a narrow two-tier architecture. At the lower tier, clicks compose into codas not by a stable ordered rule, but by which clicks are present together with their inter-click rhythm. At the upper tier, coda tokens show bout-level sequential dependence, with an NSB second-order transfer-entropy lift of 0.132 bits (p = 0.002). Under tempo scaling, encoder-derived click identity is strongly rate-bound, while coda identity remains substantially more stable, yielding a measurable abstraction gradient across the click-to-coda step. Rhythm-only baselines recover substantial lower-tier structure but fail to reproduce the upper-tier sequential-dependence signal. We do not claim language, semantics, perception, or human-like phonemes. Instead, we report representation-level evidence for a duality-of-patterning-like architecture whose lower tier is rhythmic rather than segmental, and provide a portable null-controlled framework for testing combinatorial structure in induced acoustic token systems.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Small Experiments, Cheaper Decisions: A Case Study in Staged Promotion for Micro-Pretraining

Short pretraining runs can reduce experimental cost, but they can also over-promote configurations that only look strong at tiny budgets. We study an auditable staged-promotion protocol for a fixed micro-pretraining runner on two heterogeneous host blocks: Windows A100 and Linux L40S. Starting from twelve prior-screened configurations, we use staged budgets of 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 60 minutes, and 12 hours, with frozen promotion rules before expensive continuations. The early screens are intentionally treated as unstable: the 5- and 10-minute rankings are host-sensitive, and the eventual 12-hour top-ranked condition is not the mean-best condition at the replicated 10-minute gate. Because seed ranges differ across stages, these changes are operational promotion evidence, not within-seed curves. A replicated 60-minute gate keeps the Staged Factorial Screening bridge reference in the promoted set, where it ranks first in all four 60-minute host-seed cells. In the final 12-hour confirmation package, the bridge condition ranks first in all four host-seed cells across two seeds; the greedy comparator does not meet the frozen 0.010 val_bpb near-equivalence rule; and the cheaper d8/ar48 (depth-8, aspect-48) sentinel does not meet the frozen 0.020 mean-gap rule. The executed 12-hour branch spends 144 GPU-hours, and the full staged protocol records 169.2 training GPU-hours including screening stages. Continuing all four 60-minute candidates would spend 192 GPU-hours, while continuing all nine replicated 10-minute candidates would spend 432 GPU-hours. The latter numbers are accounting counterfactuals for unrun continuations, not evidence that skipped candidates could not have overtaken the reference. The result is a bounded cost-allocation finding, not a claim of global optimality, capacity-normalized superiority, or superiority over adaptive hyperparameter optimization methods.

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

Segmentation-based Detection for Efficient Multi-Task Spacecraft Perception

Vision-based perception is fundamental to Space Situational Awareness and autonomous on-orbit operations such as rendezvous, docking, servicing, and navigation. However, progress in this area is limited by the scarcity of annotated space imagery and by challenging visual-domain characteristics including severe illumination changes, low signal-to-noise ratio, and high contrast. We address Stream 1 of the SPARK 2026 Challenge, which requires a single model for spacecraft classification, detection, and fine-grained component segmentation across multiple target types. We propose a compact architecture that integrates a MobileNetV3 encoder with a U-Net-style decoder, combining computational efficiency with accurate dense prediction. Detection is derived analytically from the union of predicted component masks, avoiding a separate bounding-box regression head in the single-spacecraft setting. Our method achieved an overall leaderboard score of 0.9482, with task-specific scores of 1.0000 in classification, 0.9788 in detection, and 0.8917 in segmentation. The proposed approach ranked second overall in the SPARK 2026 Challenge, demonstrating that lightweight encoder-decoder architectures can deliver strong multi-task performance for practical onboard space vision systems.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Ranking-optimized survival models can underperform fixed-horizon clinical prediction: a SUPPORT2 reanalysis of machine learning, attending-physician judgment, and the original SUPPORT model at 60- and 180-day mortality

Machine-learning survival models are increasingly proposed for intensive-care mortality prediction and are almost always selected and reported using the concordance index, a ranking metric averaged over follow-up. Yet most bedside decisions hinge on a probability at a specific time, such as 60- or 180-day mortality. We asked whether ranking-optimized models remain competitive at fixed clinical horizons against two reference points clinicians actually rely on: unaided attending-physician judgment and the original 1995 SUPPORT logistic model. Reanalyzing the SUPPORT2 cohort (9,105 critically ill adults from five United States centers, 1989-1994) under a stratified 70/15/15 split, we compared a gradient-boosted survival model, the physician's recorded prognosis, and the 1995 model at 60 and 180 days, alongside several alternative learners. The survival model achieved competitive ranking concordance (0.705) yet underperformed both comparators at fixed horizons: at 60 days its area under the ROC curve was 0.750, against 0.808 for physicians on the matched sample and 0.827 for the 1995 model, a gap that held across eight independent data splits and remained statistically reliable after multiplicity correction. The shortfall was not miscalibration, since post-hoc recalibration left discrimination unchanged, nor limited capacity, since neural networks, a deep ranking model, and two timepoint-aware discrete-time models also failed to close it; replacing the ranking objective with timepoint-matched binary training recovered roughly half the gap, pointing to an objective-horizon mismatch. Discrimination was equitable across sex, race, and age, but leave-one-disease-out validation exposed severe failure for disease groups absent from training, and the physician advantage was conditional on a physician electing to provide an estimate. We recommend reporting timepoint-specific discrimination alongside concordance, timepoint-matched training when fixed-horizon predictions drive care, leave-one-subgroup validation, and distribution-free prediction intervals to support selective deployment.

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

Intrinsic preservation of plasticity in continual quantum learning

arXiv:2511.17228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence in dynamic, real-world environments requires the capacity for continual learning. However, standard deep learning suffers from a fundamental issue: loss of plasticity, in which networks gradually lose their ability to learn from new data. Here we show that quantum learning models naturally overcome this limitation, preserving plasticity over long timescales. We demonstrate this advantage systematically across a broad spectrum of tasks from multiple learning paradigms, including supervised learning and reinforcement learning, and diverse data modalities, from classical high-dimensional images to quantum-native datasets. Although classical models exhibit performance degradation correlated with unbounded weight and gradient growth, quantum neural networks maintain consistent learning capabilities regardless of the data or task. We identify the origin of the advantage as the intrinsic physical constraints of quantum models. Unlike classical networks where unbounded weight growth leads to landscape ruggedness or saturation, the unitary constraints confine the optimization to a compact manifold. Our results suggest that the utility of quantum computing in machine learning extends beyond potential speedups, offering a robust pathway for building adaptive artificial intelligence and lifelong learners.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Average Rankings Mask Per-Subject Optimality: A Friedman-Nemenyi Benchmark of EEG Motor-Imagery BCI Decoders

arXiv:2606.24394v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) is the dominant non-invasive modality for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), yet reliable decoding of motor imagery is hampered by inter- and intra-individual variability. A recurring claim is that one decoding pipeline, most often a spatial or Riemannian method, is broadly preferable. We test the weakest version of that claim under the most favourable conditions. Using the Mother of All BCI Benchmarks (MOABB) framework, we evaluated 1,056 decoding configurations (feature extractor x scaler x classifier), >340,000 subject-level model fits, across three public left-versus-right motor-imagery datasets (PhysionetMI, 109 participants; Cho2017, 52; Zhou2016, 4) and two frequency bands (8-15 Hz, 8-30 Hz). Every model is fit and tested within a single session of a single participant, the easiest regime, giving every pipeline its best chance. We apply the statistics standard for multi-classifier comparison: Friedman omnibus tests, Nemenyi critical-difference analysis and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with effect sizes. Covariance tangent-space projection (cov-tgsp) and Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) are the strongest families, but their ordering is dataset-dependent and, on the largest and most heterogeneous cohort (PhysionetMI), statistically indistinguishable (Nemenyi p = 0.27; Kendall's W = 0.11). At the individual level the single best pipeline is optimal for only 35% of PhysionetMI participants, and nonlinear descriptors are best for roughly one third; matching pipeline to participant adds about seven accuracy points over the best fixed choice. The ranking is not an artefact of dimensionality, and classifier and scaler choices are secondary to the feature representation. Even in the easiest regime, no single pipeline dominates: a lower bound on the personalization problem and a quantitative case for participant-aware model selection rather than a universal decoder.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Constructing Evaluation Datasets for Procedural Reasoning: Balancing Naturalness, Grounding, and Multi-Hop Coverage

arXiv:2606.12767v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating procedural reasoning in AI-supported learning systems requires question-answer datasets that are both learner-like and grounded in the instructional knowledge the system is expected to use. We study how TMK-based question generation strategies affect dataset quality for procedural and multi-hop reasoning. We compare three strategies: strict generation from Task-Method-Knowledge (TMK) models, transcript-first generation with post-hoc TMK filtering, and TMK-aware generation that combines transcripts with structured guidance. To evaluate generated items, we introduce a grounding validation framework based on closed-set evidence units extracted from TMK models. The framework measures whether answers are supported by the underlying representation, whether questions are self-contained, and whether they target multi-hop procedural reasoning. Across 23 instructional topics and 690 generated question-answer pairs, strict TMK generation achieves the strongest overall quality, with 96.5% grounded questions and 92.6% usable questions. Transcript-first generation produces more learner-like questions but more context-dependent or weakly grounded items, while TMK-aware generation yields high raw multi-hop coverage but lower grounding. These results show that procedural richness and natural phrasing do not guarantee representational grounding, motivating explicit representation-aware validation for evaluation datasets in AI-supported learning.

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

Proactive Conversational Assistant for a Procedural Manual Task based on Audio and IMU

Real-time conversational assistants for procedural manual tasks often depend on video input, which can be computationally expensive and compromise user privacy. For the first time, we propose a real-time conversational assistant that provides comprehensive guidance for procedural manual tasks using only lightweight privacy-preserving modalities such as audio and IMU inputs from a user's wearable device to understand the context. Using a furniture assembly task and a cooking task, we show how this assistant proactively communicates step-by-step instructions to a user performing a procedural task, and answers user questions. We illustrate the data generation method and the system design to achieve such an assistant. On observing that an off-the-shelf language model is a talkative assistant but is not always able to answer questions correctly, we demonstrate how finetuning the model improves its ability to limit unnecessary dialogues with a 50% increase in the precision, while also improving its ability to answer questions correctly, measured by a 150% increase in the recall of answers. We further describe how such an assistant is implemented on an edge device with no dependence on the cloud.

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

Modeling Sarcastic Speech: Semantic and Prosodic Cues in a Speech Synthesis Framework

Sarcasm is a pragmatic phenomenon in which speakers convey meanings that diverge from literal content, relying on an interaction between semantics and prosodic expression. However, how these cues jointly contribute to the recognition of sarcasm remains poorly understood. We propose a computational framework that models sarcasm as the integration of semantic interpretation and prosodic realization. Semantic cues are derived from an LLaMA 3 model fine-tuned to capture discourse-level markers of sarcastic intent, while prosodic cues are extracted through semantically aligned utterances drawn from a database of sarcastic speech, providing prosodic exemplars of sarcastic delivery. Using a speech synthesis testbed, perceptual evaluations show that semantic and prosodic cues enhance perceived sarcasm, with the combined system achieving the best downstream F1 while maintaining high subjective sarcasm ratings. These findings highlight the complementary roles of semantics and prosody in pragmatic interpretation and illustrate how modeling can shed light on the mechanisms underlying sarcastic communication.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

FineREX: Fine-Tuned NER-RE for Human Smuggling Knowledge Graphs

Court proceedings contain valuable evidence about human smuggling networks, but this information is often buried within unstructured, jargon-heavy legal documents. While large language models (LLMs) can support knowledge graph construction through automated information extraction, existing approaches rely on general-purpose models that are not tailored to the entity and relationship definitions required in this domain. We introduce FineREX, a streamlined knowledge graph construction pipeline built around a fine-tuned LLM for named entity recognition and relationship extraction (NER-RE). Using a manually annotated dataset of $512$ text chunks, FineREX achieves absolute improvements of 15.50% and 31.46% in entity and relationship F1-score, respectively, compared to a larger general-purpose baseline. These gains translate into higher-quality knowledge graphs, reducing legal noise by nearly half and lowering node duplication on long documents from 17.78% to 11.17%. By eliminating document rewriting and redundant extraction stages, FineREX also reduces end-to-end processing time by 50.0%. Our results demonstrate that domain-specific fine-tuning can substantially outperform larger general-purpose models while improving both the quality and efficiency of knowledge graph construction for illicit network analysis.

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

Reasoning as Intersection: Consensus-Frame Alignment for Visual Focus in Video-MLLMs

Reinforcement learning has improved the reasoning ability of large language models, but applying outcome-only rewards to video multimodal large language models (Video-MLLMs) provides limited guidance on which visual evidence should support the answer. Inspired by multisensory integration, where consistent cues can enhance the salience and reliability of perceptual estimates, we introduce Consensus Frame GRPO (CF-GRPO), a temporal-annotation-free process-level reward framework for evidence-aware video reasoning. CF-GRPO constructs a consensus frame prior from intrinsic video cues, including temporal coverage, scene-transition cues, and query-conditioned visual relevance. It then computes a model-side frame-use score from visual and response representations and optimizes their agreement through the Consensus Frame Reward (CFR). With salience-aware sparse aggregation and distribution sharpening, CFR provides a high-contrast reward signal without requiring human temporal annotations. Experiments show that VideoCFR achieves competitive performance across complex video reasoning benchmarks and improves several metrics over representative Video-MLLM and RL baselines, while the consensus prior provides an interpretable view of the evidence frames emphasized during training. The implementation is available at https://github.com/1Pansy/VideoCFR.