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01.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-10

Brain Health for Economic Resilience: a data-driven framework for the brain-positive economic transition

Announced in this Comment and in collaboration with Nature Medicine is the convening of the Brain Health for Economic Resilience Commission, a global, transdisciplinary effort to define, measure and operationalize brain health and cognitive capacity as foundational drivers of economic resilience.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Contract-Based Compositional Shielding for Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.14130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe coordination problems surface in multi-agent reinforcement learning when global safety cannot be enforced by any agent unilaterally: the admissibility of one agent's action may depend on the dynamics of other agents. Decentralised shields can enforce safety at runtime, but purely factorised permissions often exclude optimal team behaviour that is safe only through coordination. We study deterministic safety guarantees for agents trained and deployed under decentralised execution, recovering team-optimal safe behaviour without centralised runtime control. Agents have a shared global specification $\phi$ in the safety fragment of Linear Temporal Logic ($\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ ), and select among tuples of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations whose conjunction implies the global specification $\phi$. Each agent may rely on the other agents' local obligations as assumptions because the whole contract tuple is certified simultaneously and allows projection into local action masks. At learning time, a non-stationary multi-armed bandit chooses among a library of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations to select the tuple that optimises team reward, all without forgoing end-to-end safety. We evaluate the approach across 6 environments and 15 algorithmic variants.

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

Breaking the Code: Security Assessment of AI Code Agents Through Systematic Jailbreaking Attacks

arXiv:2510.01359v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Code-capable large language model (LLM) agents are embedded in software engineering workflows where they can read, write, and execute code, raising "jailbreak" stakes beyond text-only settings. Prior evaluations emphasize refusal or harmful-text detection, leaving open whether agents compile and run malicious programs. We present JAWS-Bench (Jailbreaks Across WorkSpaces), a benchmark spanning three escalating workspace regimes mirroring attacker capability: empty (JAWS-0), single-file (JAWS-1), and multi-file (JAWS-M). We pair this with a hierarchical, executable-aware Judge Framework that tests (i) compliance, (ii) attack success, (iii) syntactic correctness, and (iv) runtime executability, to measure deployable harm. Across seven LLM backends from five families, prompt-only attacks in JAWS-0 achieve 61% compliance; 58% are harmful, 52% parse, and 27% run end-to-end. In JAWS-1, compliance reaches ~100% for stronger models with a mean ASR (Attack Success Rate) ~71%; JAWS-M raises mean ASR to ~75%, with 32% runnable attack code. Wrapping an LLM in an agent increases ASR by 1.6$\times$, by overturning initial refusals during planning and tool use. Similar trends hold for OpenHands, SWE-Agent, and OpenAI Codex, suggesting our JAWS-Bench is agent-agnostic. Category analyses identify which attack classes are most vulnerable and deployable, motivating execution-aware defenses and refusal-preserving agent designs.

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

A Multimodal Approach to Alzheimer's Diagnosis: Geometric Insights from Cube Copying and Cognitive Assessments

arXiv:2512.16184v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Early and accessible detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD) remains a critical clinical challenge, and cube-copying tasks offer a simple yet informative assessment of visuospatial function. This work proposes a multimodal framework that converts hand-drawn cube sketches into graph-structured representations capturing geometric and topological properties, and integrates these features with demographic information and neuropsychological test (NPT) scores for AD classification. Cube drawings are modeled as graphs with node features encoding spatial coordinates, local graphlet-based topology, and angular geometry, which are processed using graph neural networks and fused with age, education, and NPT features in a late-fusion model. Experimental results show that graph-based representations provide a strong unimodal baseline and substantially outperform pixel-based convolutional models, while multimodal integration further improves balanced classification performance and discriminative ability. SHAP-based interpretability analysis identifies specific graphlet motifs associated with corner integrity and edge continuity as key predictors, closely aligning with clinical observations of distorted cube drawings in AD. Together, these findings establish graph-based analysis of cube-copying behavior as an interpretable, non-invasive, and scalable framework for Alzheimer's disease screening.

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

S3OD: Towards Generalizable Salient Object Detection with Synthetic Data

Salient object detection exemplifies data-bounded tasks where expensive pixel-precise annotations force separate model training for related subtasks like DIS and HR-SOD. We present a method that dramatically improves generalization through large-scale synthetic data generation and ambiguity-aware architecture. We introduce S3OD, a dataset of over 139,000 high-resolution images created through our multi-modal diffusion pipeline that extracts labels from diffusion and DINO-v3 features. The iterative generation framework prioritizes challenging categories based on model performance. We propose a streamlined multi-mask decoder that handles the inherent ambiguity in salient object detection by predicting multiple valid interpretations. Models trained only on synthetic data achieve 20-50% error reduction in cross-dataset generalization, while fine-tuned versions reach state-of-the-art performance across DIS and HR-SOD benchmarks.

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

Memory as a Wasting Asset: Pricing Flash Endurance for Embodied Agents, and the Limits of Doing So

arXiv:2606.18144v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A robot's flash endurance is a non-renewable stock: every persisted write spends one of a few thousand program/erase cycles and never refills, yet no fielded robot memory system prices which memories are worth an erase cycle. We treat embodied memory as depreciating capital and price that stock with a single endurance shadow price $\eta$, which makes cost-minimizing placement across a RAM / on-board NVM / cloud hierarchy a threshold in a wear-augmented per-byte index. The index is cost-optimal whatever the sign of the value-write association $\chi$; only when $\chi > 0$ does the optimum turn non-monotone, sending a robot's most valuable memories off its flash. The pivot is thus empirical, and we measure $\chi$ on real robot logs at a pre-specified gate: its sign is a property of the deployment regime – positive on recurrent long-horizon manipulation ($\hat{\chi} \approx +1.0 \times 10^{-3}$, replicated at full power), null on a shorter-horizon suite, and negative on non-recurrent teleoperation. Two boundaries scope the result. The endurance budget is dormant on premium 3,000-P/E TLC at datasheet prices and binding on the commodity QLC/eMMC ($\sim$1,000 P/E) that cheaper edge robots run. And where it binds, a learned wear-aware controller only ties price-based routing on task value, because realized value is tier-invariant across RAM, NVM, and cloud: the rent governs device lifetime and cost, not task performance. Whether wear-aware placement improves task value remains open – $\chi$ is measured against a value proxy, and the non-monotone optimum, while proven, is not yet observed in data.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fermions are fundamentally more nonlocal than Bosons

arXiv:2606.12363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bell's theorem shows that entangled quantum particles can exhibit correlations that classical particles cannot reproduce without an additional nonlocal resource, such as communication. In this sense, quantum particles are fundamentally more nonlocal than classical ones, and entanglement becomes unavoidable in physics. Here we prove the analogous result within quantum theory itself: indistinguishable fermions transmitted through a quantum network can generate correlations that distinguishable particles or indistinguishable bosons cannot reproduce without additional communication. In the same sense, fermions are fundamentally more nonlocal than bosons or distinguishable particles, motivating fermionic anticommutation and indistinguishability as unavoidable operational resources. Our result further implies that fermions can strictly surpass all qubit-based protocols for certain distributed computing tasks, demonstrating that a complete understanding of information processing requires going beyond qubits to fermionic information carriers - febits.

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

An In-depth Study of LLM Contributions to the Bin Packing Problem

arXiv:2510.27353v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent studies have suggested that Large Language Models (LLMs) could provide interesting ideas contributing to mathematical discovery. This claim was motivated by reports that LLM-based genetic algorithms produced heuristics offering new insights into the online bin packing problem under uniform and Weibull distributions. In this work, we reassess this claim through a detailed analysis of the heuristics produced by LLMs, examining both their behavior and interpretability. Despite being human-readable, these heuristics remain largely opaque even to domain experts. Building on this analysis, we propose a new class of algorithms tailored to these specific bin packing instances. The derived algorithms are significantly simpler, more efficient, more interpretable, and more generalizable, suggesting that the considered instances are themselves relatively simple. We then discuss the limitations of the claim regarding LLMs' contribution to this problem, which appears to rest on the mistaken assumption that the instances had previously been studied. Our findings instead emphasize the need for rigorous validation and contextualization when assessing the scientific value of LLM-generated outputs.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Loss Landscape Poisoning: Targeted Extraction of Unseen Training Data from LLMs

arXiv:2606.17110v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models are increasingly trained on proprietary or sensitive data, from private healthcare and financial records to user conversations containing secrets. Ensuring the privacy of such data against extraction attacks has become a central concern. In this paper, we ask whether an attacker who can poison a portion of the training data can facilitate the leakage of a separate target record they have no access to. We answer in the affirmative and show that such leakage can be induced by a poisoning mechanism that reshapes the model's local loss landscape around the target completion. Our key insight is that poisoning to create a sharp loss minimum at the target, surrounded by elevated loss on nearby alternatives, forces the model to memorize the target as the unique low-loss solution in its neighborhood. The attack requires no architectural changes, and generalizes across centralized and federated learning settings. We demonstrate that the attack amplifies privacy leakage across language (up to 100% successful extraction), and vision-language models (up 90% successful extraction). We show that the attack is thwarted when the model is trained to be differentially private. However, we introduce a new attack that directly probes the loss landscape bypassing even differential privacy defenses.

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

An affordable hardware-aware neural architecture search for deploying convolutional neural networks on ultra-low-power computing platforms

arXiv:2606.16290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW-NAS) allows the integration of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in microcontrollers devices by automatically designing neural architectures that can fit prearranged hardware constraints. However, state-of-the-art HW-NAS target high-performance microcontrollers, whose power consumption does not meet sensing nodes requirements. This work presents a HW-NAS generating tiny CNNs that can run on ultra-low-power microcontrollers, featuring a lightweight search procedure enabling its execution even on embedded devices. Empirical results on three well-known benchmarks for tiny computer vision proved that the proposed HW-NAS was able to generate tiny CNNs while preserving state-of-the-art classification accuracy.

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

Two-Layer Linear Auto-Regressive Models Estimate Latent States

arXiv:2606.12691v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Auto-regressive models have emerged as powerful tools for sequential data, from language to video. Understanding how and why these models learn latent representations remains an open theoretical question. In this work, we demonstrate that when trained by empirical risk minimization on data from partially observed linear dynamical systems, two-layer linear auto-regressive models naturally learn to approximate Kalman filtering. In particular, we show that the learned hidden representation coincides, up to a similarity transformation, with the state estimates produced by the optimal (Kalman) filter, even though the model has no explicit knowledge of the underlying dynamics or state. The result follows from three main insights. First, we establish that the Kalman filter is well approximated by an auto-regressive model with bounded truncation error. Second, we show that despite non-convexity, the two-layer optimization landscape is benign, i.e., all stationary points are either strict saddles or global minima. Finally, as our main contributions, we provide finite-sample guarantees on prediction error, parameter estimation error, and latent state recovery. Numerical simulations support the theoretical results and demonstrate that the latent representations of auto-regressive models recover state estimates.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Compositional Skill Routing for LLM Agents: Decompose, Retrieve, and Compose

作者:

LLM agents increasingly rely on external skills – reusable tool specifications – but real-world tasks often require composing multiple skills, not just selecting one. We formalize this as the Compositional Skill Routing problem: given a complex user query and a large skill library, decompose the query into atomic sub-tasks, retrieve the appropriate skill for each sub-task, and compose an executable plan. We present SkillWeaver, a decompose-retrieve-compose framework combining an LLM task decomposer, a bi-encoder skill retriever with FAISS indexing, and a dependency-aware DAG planner. To support evaluation, we introduce CompSkillBench, a benchmark of 300 compositional queries over 2,209 real MCP server skills spanning 24 functional categories, sourced from the public MCP ecosystem. Our experiments reveal that task decomposition quality is the primary bottleneck: standard LLM decomposition reaches only 34.2% category recall at the step level. To address this, we propose Iterative Skill-Aware Decomposition (SAD), a retrieval-augmented feedback loop that iteratively aligns decomposition with available skills. SAD improves decomposition accuracy from 51.0% to 67.7% (+32.7%, Wilcoxon p < 10^-6) in a single iteration; DA-conditioned analysis confirms that correct granularity is the prerequisite for effective retrieval (CatR@1 rises from 34% to 41% when DA=1). SkillWeaver reduces context window consumption by over 99%, and transfer experiments confirm generalization (+35.6% relative DA gain even when target categories are absent from the retrieval pool).

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Constitutional Value Potentials: reading and steering internal priority margins in language models

arXiv:2606.15420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A constitution tells a language model what to value, but little tells us whether it does. Adherence is judged from outputs, and output evidence is most fragile on value conflicts, where what matters is not which value a model mentions but which one it is willing to sacrifice. We provide evidence that this arbitration can be read from activations in a structured margin readout. We introduce Constitutional Value Potentials (CVP). For each value we learn a scalar potential from the hidden state: an internal pressure to preserve that value, supervised not by the prompt but by an independent judge's verdict on which value the model's own response actually preserved. The signed difference of two potentials is a priority margin. A constitutional clause becomes the claim that a margin stays positive, and a single monitor score flags when it does not. The monitor predicts conflict violations with AUROC up to 0.95, beats a strong hidden-state probe, and generalizes to held-out synthetic conflicts across three Qwen2.5 scales. The signal appears as the answer begins, from the prompt tail and first response token. Read this early, the same signal reveals whether an adversarial priority hack has actually pushed the model toward a violation, rather than only whether the prompt looks adversarial. The same directions also support intervention tests: under selected steering settings, moving along a value direction shifts judged trade-offs in the intended direction. Together, these results suggest that some constitution-relevant priorities are accessible as activation-space margins, rather than only as output behavior.

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

Person Identification from Contextual Motion

We consider the problem of identifying people based on their motion styles. We present a generative model describing the action instance creation process and derive a probabilistic identity inference scheme for two common person identification scenarios motivated by the surveillance and authentication applications. We introduce a novel, interactive, scenario for person identification from motion patterns. To this end, we formalize the identification process in the context of a sequential message exchange session between the subject and the system. The subject's behavior is modeled using a probabilistic generative model inspired by the Human Information Processing (HIP) paradigm. At each stage, the system presents a visual stimulus (a cue) to the subject and records their motion response. The cue is selected so as to maximize the mutual information of the expected response and the subject's identity. Once recorded, the response is used to update the a posteriori probability over possible subjects' identities. The process terminates once a sufficient classification confidence level is reached. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time person identification is addressed in such interactive setting. We report high recognition rates on five publicly available datasets and our own novel dataset consisting of 4,476 recordings of 22 test subjects responding to 15 cues.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Frequency-dependent cognitive effects of Deep Brain Stimulation in Parkinson's Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) improves levodopa-induced motor complications and cardinal motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), but stimulation frequency may differentially shape outcomes. This is evident for axial and gait symptoms, which may respond differently to lower-frequency stimulation. Whether frequency-dependent effects extend to cognition remains unclear. Objective: To investigate the cognitive effects of DBS at distinct frequencies in PD. Methods: We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis (PROSPERO - CRD42024618253). PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE were searched for studies assessing cognitive outcomes under different stimulation frequencies. Eight cognitive domains were defined: verbal fluency, cognitive flexibility, executive control, working memory, attention, processing speed, episodic memory, and time processing. Multilevel random-effects meta-analyses were performed, with effect sizes expressed as Hedges' g. Results: Forty-three studies met the inclusion criteria, the majority (n = 31) involving STN-DBS. Twenty-one STN-DBS studies, including 355 patients, were included in the meta-analysis. Compared with HFS ([&ge;] 130 Hz), lower frequencies (4-80 Hz) were associated with better verbal fluency (g = 0.27) and cognitive flexibility (g = 0.38), with consistent effects across sensitivity and leave-one-out analyses. Accuracy-based executive control measures also favored lower-frequency stimulation. OFF-stimulation comparisons showed a concordant pattern. Evidence for other targets (PPN and NBM) was limited. Conclusions: Lower-frequency STN-DBS was associated with modest benefits in specific cognitive domains compared with HFS. These findings highlight the need for future research to determine how frequency interacts with stimulation location and symptom-specific networks to shape cognitive and cognitive-motor outcomes in PD.

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

Approximate Structured Diffusion for Sequence Labelling

Sequence labelling, a core task of Natural Language Processing (NLP), consists in assigning each token of an input sentence a label. From a Machine Learning point of view, sequence labelling is often cast as a Linear-Chain Conditional Random Field (CRF) parametrised by a neural network. While this approach gives good empirical results, CRFs assume a finite decision span (eg label bigrams) which can limit their expressivity and hurt performance when long-range dependencies are required. We show we can leverage diffusion to train a CRF conditioned on an entire label sequence, with the caveat that the condition is on a noisy version of labels. We show experimentally that this method, in conjunction with approximate CRF inference, improves label accuracy with a 16.5% error reduction for POS-tagging.

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

Quantum Cinema: An Interactive Cinematic Exploration of Quantum Computing Hardware via Generative World Models

arXiv:2606.17102v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum computing promises transformative advances across science and industry, yet the physical hardware that enables these computations remains invisible to the public: quantum processors operate inside sealed dilution refrigerators at temperatures near absolute zero, making direct observation impossible. This "imagination gap" between quantum computing's growing societal impact and the public's ability to visualize it represents a significant barrier to quantum literacy and workforce development. We present Quantum Cinema, an open-source, browser-based interactive application that closes this gap by transforming invisible quantum hardware into explorable, cinematic experiences using generative world models. Quantum Cinema guides users through a four-act narrative – from the foundational Nobel Prize-winning science of quantum entanglement, through curated video introductions to three major quantum computing architectures (trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and superconducting systems), into immersive three-dimensional generative worlds that make invisible quantum phenomena observable, and finally to interactive radar-chart comparisons grounded in real quantum device specifications. All three-dimensional environments are generated using WorldLabs' generative world model platform and are scientifically grounded in curated metrics from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Braket quantum hardware. Quantum Cinema requires no installation, no specialized hardware, and no quantum computing background. It is designed to serve two distinct communities: scholars and developers seeking to replicate or extend the platform, and educators, researchers, and science communicators seeking an intuitive tool for explaining quantum hardware to diverse audiences. This paper describes the system architecture, the generative world model pipeline, use cases for both communities, and directions for future work.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Scaling Generative Foundation Models for Chest Radiography with Rectified Flow Transformers

arXiv:2606.19460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the first generative foundation model for chest radiograph synthesis trained from scratch at the billion-parameter scale. Existing radiographic AI models often suffer from poor generalisation across patient subpopulations, institutions, and acquisition settings, resulting in limited real-world clinical utility. Controlled, high-fidelity synthesis of chest radiographs is a promising path toward diversifying clinical datasets and evaluating the robustness of diagnostic models. Therefore, we present the largest specialist generative foundation model for chest radiographs to date, with over 1.3B parameters, trained for 1.6T tokens on a curated, heterogeneous dataset comprising 1.2M radiographs and clinical expert-guided metadata. Our model supports controllable radiograph generation and editing across multiple demographic subgroups, acquisition views, and a dozen pathologies. Moreover, we significantly advance the state of the art in radiograph synthesis fidelity, producing images that are indistinguishable from real radiographs to clinical experts.

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

MaxProof: Scaling Mathematical Proof with Generative-Verifier RL and Population-Level Test-Time Scaling

We present MaxProof, a population-level test-time scaling framework for competition-level mathematical proof in the MiniMax-M3 series. M3 first trains three proof-oriented capabilities – proof generation, proof verification, and critique-conditioned proof repair – using a defense-in-depth generative verifier engineered for low false-positive rate. These capabilities are merged into a single released M3 model. At test time, MaxProof treats the model as a generator, verifier, refiner, and ranker, searches over a population of candidate proofs, and returns one final proof through tournament selection. With MaxProof test-time scaling, the M3 model reaches 35/42 on IMO 2025 and 36/42 on USAMO 2026, exceeding the human gold-medal threshold on both.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Impact of Early Treatment on Symptom Improvement and Procedural Events among Men with BPH and Bothersome Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms: A Contemporary Analysis of the American Urological Association Quality (AQUA) Registry

PURPOSE: As the armamentarium of BPH therapies continues to expand, it remains imperative to maximize patient satisfaction and minimize decisional regret. We sought to determine the impact of time from BPH diagnosis to index treatment on symptom improvement and subsequent procedural events. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We queried the American Urological Association Quality Registry for men [&ge;] 40 years old with BPH, available IPSS data, and no receipt of prior BPH treatment. Index treatment included medication, surgery, or minimally invasive surgical therapy (MIST). Outcomes included IPSS over 3 years of follow-up, change in percentage of mild lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) by 3 months, and time to procedural event. Patients were stratified by time from index diagnosis to treatment by 3 years. Outcomes were compared across time-to-treatment cohorts with appropriate statistical tests with p < 0.05 as significant. RESULTS: 43,919 patients met criteria with 19,642 pursuing treatments. Patients pursued treatment at comparably lower baseline IPSS compared to prior prospective series. Patients undergoing surgery and MIST had significantly higher baseline IPSS, while medical comorbidities were significantly more common among men initiating pharmacotherapy. Early surgery and MIST were associated with significant improvement in IPSS within 6-12 months and an increase in mild LUTS by 3 months. All forms of early treatment were associated with delayed time to procedural events, including catheterization and fulguration. CONCLUSIONS: Early procedural intervention for BPH is associated with early symptom improvement and delayed time to procedural events among real-world, contemporary practice.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Evaluating Local Explainability Metrics for Machine Learning Models on Tabular Data

arXiv:2605.27618v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite the wide use of explainability techniques to attempt to understand the behavior of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the generated explanations may not always be reliable. An explanation can appear plausible to humans but fail to capture the internal reasoning of a model, particularly when dealing with complex tabular data. This paper studies the trustworthiness of local explainability techniques when applied to complex tabular classification tasks, considering evaluated metrics for three main properties: faithfulness to the model's predictions, robustness to input data variations, and complexity of the explanation itself. A benchmark was performed for Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), Kernel SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), and Feature Ablation techniques, across 32 datasets and different types of machine learning models. Model performance ranges were analyzed to identify two groups: consensus-correct, which are samples that all models predicted correctly, and consensus-wrong, samples that all models predicted incorrectly. The obtained results demonstrate that that the explanations are not always correlated with a model's predictive performance. Instead, dataset complexity and feature distributions seem to be the main factors affecting explanation quality and reliability.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Native Active Perception as Reasoning for Omni-Modal Understanding

Passive models for long video understanding typically rely on a "watch-it-all" paradigm, processing frames uniformly regardless of query difficulty, causing computational cost to grow with video duration. Although interactive frameworks have emerged, they often rely on global pre-scanning, and their context cost still scales with video length. We propose OmniAgent, the first native omni-modal agent that formulates video understanding as a POMDP-based iterative Observation-Thought-Action cycle. OmniAgent executes on-demand actions to selectively distill audio-visual cues into a persistent textual memory, effectively decoupling reasoning complexity from raw video duration. To operationalize this, we introduce (1) Agentic Supervised Fine-Tuning to bootstrap native active perception via best-of-N trajectory synthesis with dual-stage quality control, and (2) Agentic Reinforcement Learning with TAURA (Turn-aware Adaptive Uncertainty Rescaled Advantage), which leverages turn-level entropy to steer credit assignment toward pivotal discovery turns. Crucially, OmniAgent exhibits positive test-time scaling, where performance improves as the number of reasoning turns increases, validating the efficacy of active perception. Empirical results across ten benchmarks (e.g., VideoMME, LVBench) demonstrate that OmniAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models. Notably, on LVBench, our 7B agent outperforms the 10$\times$ larger Qwen2.5-VL-72B (50.5% vs. 47.3%).

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Understanding Sample Efficiency in Predictive Coding

arXiv:2605.11911v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Predictive Coding (PC) is an influential account of cortical learning. Much of recent work has focused on comparing PC to Backpropagation (BP) to find whether PC offers any advantages. Small scale experiments show that PC enables learning that is more sample efficient and effective in many contexts, though a thorough theoretical understanding of the phenomena remains elusive. To address this, we quantify the efficiency of learning in BP and PC through a metric called ``target alignment'', which measures how closely the change in the output of the network is aligned to the output prediction error. We then derive and empirically validate analytical expressions for target alignment in Deep Linear Networks. We show that learning in PC is more efficient than BP, which is especially pronounced in deep, narrow and pre-trained networks. We also derive exact conditions for guaranteed optimal target alignment in PC and validate our findings through experiments. We study full training trajectories of linear and non-linear models, and find the predicted benefits of PC persist in practice even when some assumptions are violated. Overall, this work provides a mechanistic understanding of the higher learning efficiency observed for PC over BP in previous works, and can guide how PC should be parametrised to learn most effectively.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Simultaneous Latent Budget Trees for Stratified Classification

arXiv:2606.13295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In the era of Explainable Artificial Intelligence, there is a renewed focus on single trees for their ease of interpretation. This paper introduces Simultaneous Latent Budget Trees, a probabilistic machine learning framework for classification trees in the presence of a stratification factor such as a temporal, spatial, or demographic variable, acting as a control variable or potential confounder. Standard tree growth procedures are not designed to optimize a conditional split rule. A model-based split rule is proposed in which child nodes are interpreted as latent components of a simultaneous mixture model, such as the Simultaneous Latent Budget Model and its constrained versions, fitted to the parent node. Mixing parameters drive the observations, differently for each group, to the child nodes whereas latent budgets parameters update the response classes profile of each level of the control variable. Parameters are estimated by least squares considering a neural network perspective of the model. An informative tree structure can be interactively visualized with interpretation aids on the node and the paths, including visual pruning and decision tree selection procedure. Suitable measures are proposed to handle an unbalanced response class distribution. The proposed methodology is applied to investigate gender-related differences in disease progression of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. The SLBT library with the various tree-based algorithms is available in the linked GitHub repository.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Improving Alignment Between Human and Machine Codes: An Empirical Assessment of Prompt Engineering for Construct Identification in Psychology

Due to their architecture and vast pre-training data, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong text classification performance. However, LLM output - here, the category assigned to a text - depends heavily on the wording of the prompt. While literature on prompt engineering is expanding, few studies focus on classification tasks, and even fewer address domains like psychology, where constructs have precise, theory-driven definitions that may not be well represented in pre-training data. We present an empirical framework for optimizing LLM performance for identifying constructs in texts via prompt engineering. We experimentally evaluate five prompting strategies – codebook-guided empirical prompt selection, automatic prompt engineering, persona prompting, chain-of-thought reasoning, and explanatory prompting - with zero-shot and few-shot classification. We find that persona, chain-of-thought, and explanations do not fully address performance loss accompanying a badly worded prompt. Instead, the most influential features of a prompt are the construct definition, task framing, and, to a lesser extent, the examples provided. Across three constructs and two models, the classifications most aligned with expert judgments resulted from a few-shot prompt combining codebook-guided empirical prompt selection with automatic prompt engineering. Based on our findings, we recommend that researchers generate and evaluate as many prompt variants as feasible, whether human-crafted, automatically generated, or ideally both, and select prompts and examples based on empirical performance in a training dataset, validating the final approach in a holdout set. This procedure offers a practical, systematic, and theory-driven method for optimizing LLM prompts in settings where alignment with expert judgment is critical.