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

SkillJuror: Measuring How Agent Skill Organization Changes Runtime Behavior

arXiv:2606.11543v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent Skills augment large language model (LLM) agents with procedural knowledge at inference time, but current benchmarks rarely distinguish what a Skill says from how it is organized. We study this distinction through Progressive Disclosure, where a concise root file points agents to supporting resources on demand, and compare it with a normalized flat baseline. We present SkillJuror, a framework for evaluating Skill writing paradigms through semantically controlled variants, matched multi-trial evaluations, and trajectory evidence while holding task knowledge fixed. In an 82-task SkillsBench study, Progressive Disclosure changes runtime behavior before aggregate outcomes: distinct Skill resources touched per trajectory rise from 1.18 to 3.85, and effective uptake events rise from 1.33 to 3.92. It also yields 17 additional verifier-passing trials out of 410 matched trials (+4.1%) over the normalized flat baseline. The benefit is task-dependent. Progressive Disclosure helps when supporting resources guide implementation, checking, or repair, but is weaker when success hinges on exact output conventions, numerical thresholds, or long artifact-generation pipelines. These results show that Skill organization is not mere presentation: it can change how agents search and apply procedural knowledge, while outcome gains depend on whether the exposed resources are actionable for the task. Code is available at https://github.com/zhiyuchen-ai/skill-juror.

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

The Standard Interpretable Model: A general theory of interpretable machine learning to deductively design interpretable methods using Lagrangian mechanics

arXiv:2606.12289v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Artificial Intelligence models grow in complexity, interpretability has become an indispensable tool for understanding, debugging, and controlling their computations. However, interpretability lacks general theories to deductively design interpretable methods. This gap between theories and methods results in a fragmented literature and inconsistent evaluation protocols. To fill this gap, we introduce the Standard Interpretable Model (SIM), a general theory grounded in Lagrangian mechanics that enables the deductive design of interpretable methods. Specifically, the SIM summarises, in a set of premises, what interpretability is for a target user. From these premises, the SIM systematically derives interpretability symmetries and corresponding constraints, which shape the landscape of a Lagrangian whose minima correspond to optimal interpretable models. To reach the minima, one can either update the parameter values of an opaque model to make it more interpretable or compile constraints into an interpretable architecture. We empirically show that the SIM identifies and solves limitations of existing methods (including traditional, concept-based, and mechanistic interpretability), highlights underexplored research directions, and informs the design of core programming interfaces. Beyond being a research method, the deductive nature of the SIM offers pedagogical grounding for interpretability curricula and may shift the scientific community's perspective of a discipline that has long been fragmented.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Curvature-Guided Geometric Representation for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

arXiv:2606.14159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein-ligand binding affinity (PLA) prediction is critical in drug discovery. Despite the notable advancements in machine learning-based approaches, existing methods struggle to jointly characterize local geometric organization and globally coordinated cross-molecular interactions, limiting their ability to model complex binding mechanisms. Here, we propose RicciBind, a geometric representation framework that integrates curvature-guided hierarchical structure learning with optimal transport (OT)-based cross-domain alignment to model molecular interactions. Specifically, RicciBind leverages Ricci curvature to capture local interaction tightness within molecular structures, enhancing structural awareness and organizing atomic interactions into curvature-aware hierarchical representations. An OT-based cluster matching mechanism then aligns protein and ligand clusters across heterogeneous domains under geometric constraints, enabling globally consistent correspondences and revealing higher-order interaction patterns beyond local neighborhoods. By coupling curvature-guided structure encoding with OT-driven cross-domain alignment, RicciBind effectively models complex interaction semantics and substantially improves both the accuracy and interpretability of binding affinity prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RicciBind achieved superior predictive performance and generalization across PLA benchmarks and virtual screening tasks. Ablation studies further confirmed the essential role of Ricci curvature in enhancing molecular interaction representations.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Rethinking Cross-lingual Gaps from a Statistical Viewpoint

Any piece of knowledge is usually expressed in one or a handful of natural languages on the web or in any large corpus. Large Language Models (LLMs) act as a bridge by acquiring knowledge from a source language and making it accessible when queried using target languages. A cross-lingual gap is a drop in accuracy incurred when querying knowledge in a target language rather than the source language. Existing research focused on modeling or training failures leading to cross-lingual gaps. In this work, we take an alternative view to characterize the nature of cross-lingual error, and hypothesize that the variance of responses in the target language is a key cause of this gap. For the first time, we formalize the cross-lingual gap in terms of biased and unbiased errors. We empirically validate our hypothesis through multiple inference-time interventions that control variance and reduce the cross-lingual gap. We demonstrate a few test-time ensemble methods that reduce response variance, and thereby improve source-target transfer scores by up to 12 absolute points yielding relative gains of 8% to over 50% across various LLMs.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Routine use of oral iron for people with heart failure and iron deficiency in primary care; retrospective cohort study

Aims: Iron deficiency is common among people with heart failure and associated with morbidity and mortality. While intravenous iron improves clinical outcomes, oral iron continues to be prescribed in routine practice despite limited evidence of benefit. Methods: We completed a retrospective primary care cohort study (2016 to 2021) to investigate the proportion of people with an incident diagnosis of heart failure who had iron deficiency identified (defined as ferritin

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

Toward Self-Evolution-Ready Workflow Harnesses: A Reversible Migration Path and Convertibility Taxonomy for Expert LLM Pipelines

arXiv:2606.24598v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While expert-validated "LLM + script" workflows deliver significant value, they remain static: they encode hard-won domain knowledge yet fail to adapt execution based on feedback. Existing agent research predominantly targets greenfield agents and synthetic benchmarks, leaving the migration of active legacy workflows unresolved. To bridge this gap, we present a reversible, Strangler-Fig migration path that refactors legacy workflows into composable, typed, and auditable stages. Central to this framework is a three-tier convertibility taxonomy (A/B/C), implemented as a routing stage within the system harness, which diagnoses a workflow's readiness and routes it accordingly.

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

Authority, Truth, and Citation Bias: A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Benchmark for Studying Epistemic Susceptibility in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.13104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed in citation-augmented settings, yet the effect of citation presence on model behavior independent of factual content remains poorly understood. We introduce AuthorityBench, a 220,564-prompt multi-domain benchmark that isolates how citation-based authority signals influence epistemic behavior in LLMs. The benchmark uses a fully balanced 2x2 factorial design crossing claim veracity with citation veracity, the first to do so, across four domains (general knowledge, science, law, and medicine), with controlled variation over 40 prompt templates, four venue prestige tiers, and a country-coded author name dataset. Evaluating seven models on 12 structured research questions, we find that citation presence, whether real or fabricated, consistently increases hallucination rates relative to a no-citation baseline. The effect is strongest when fabricated citations accompany true claims, raising hallucination rates by 3 to 22 percentage points and reaching 35 to 77% in the general knowledge domain, while legal claims are comparatively robust and venue prestige and author demographics show negligible impact. All datasets and evaluation code are available at: https://github.com/floating-reeds/AuthorityBench

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Do vision-language models search like humans? Reasoning tokens as a reaction-time analog in classic visual-search paradigms

Visual search has been one of the most productive paradigms in the study of visual attention: the way reaction time scales with the number of items distinguishes parallel, "pop-out" search from serial, attention-demanding search. I ask whether vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit the same behavioral signatures. I adapt four classic paradigms: feature versus conjunction search, spatial-configuration (T-vs-L) search, enumeration, and the tilted/vertical search asymmetry; and present them to current frontier and mid-tier models. Because a single model call has no reaction time, I use the number of reasoning ("thinking") tokens a model spends per trial as a within-model analog of search effort, and I compare against a large public human benchmark (Wolfe et al., 2010). The models reproduce several human signatures: feature search costs flat effort while conjunction effort climbs with set size; frontier models hold accuracy where mid-tier models collapse to chance; and a resolution control shows the conjunction cost is genuine search rather than difficulty resolving small shapes. They also diverge from humans in informative ways. The target-present effort slope exceeds the target-absent slope, reversing the human ordering; enumeration remains accurate where humans would lose count; and a reasoning model with adaptive deliberation declines to deliberate on detection tasks altogether, so that a single search expresses itself as an effort gradient in one model and as an accuracy cliff in another. I argue that psychophysical paradigms, applied behaviorally, are a sharp and inexpensive probe of machine visual cognition, and that the points of divergence are as informative as the points of agreement.

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

Tail-Shape Estimation in LLM Evaluation Is Fragile: A Protocol for Diagnosing False Positives

作者:

arXiv:2606.16511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work motivates moving large language model (LLM) evaluation from mean-based to tail-aware metrics, including conditional value-at-risk and tail-index estimates of reward-model error. We ask whether the canonical extreme-value-theory tail-index parameter, which isolates how heavy a tail is from how large the tail mass is, adds discriminative information beyond the mean and a standard tail-magnitude statistic in LLM evaluation. We pre-register a protocol covering admissibility, goodness-of-fit, threshold-stability, and effect-size requirements for any positive tail-shape claim. The protocol is the contribution of this paper; the empirical study below is a demonstration of what its gates catch. Applied to a standard LLM toxicity-evaluation setup under two structurally different scorer families, the protocol catches three distinct modes of false positives that a naive analysis would have published, and rejects the headline tail-shape claim on both scorers. We conclude that tail-shape estimation in the LLM toxicity-evaluation setups we examined is more fragile than the recent literature suggests, and recommend the protocol as a starting point for tail-index claims in similar setups.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Uniform Consistency of Generalized Fréchet Means

arXiv:2408.07534v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Loss-based notions of centre on nonlinear spaces range from the Fréchet mean and power means to the geometric median and, in a limiting sense, the Chebyshev centre. To use such summaries statistically, one first needs a law of large numbers that remains valid beyond smooth manifolds and beyond a fixed choice of loss. We study generalized Fréchet means on metric spaces with the Heine–Borel property, obtained by replacing squared distance with a convex loss under a mild exponential-growth condition. We prove existence and compactness of the population mean set, establish a sharp diameter bound, obtain almost-sure consistency of empirical $\phi$-means, and derive a uniform strong law over compact classes of losses. The analysis is driven by a deterministic argmin principle together with a Glivenko–Cantelli theorem for monotone classes. For isotropic densities on Riemannian symmetric spaces, we identify the population $\phi$-mean for every strictly increasing loss for which the objective is finite, including bounded robust losses. We also illustrate the framework on spheres and on the polyhedral space of ultrametric phylogenetic trees.

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

Predicting gestational age at birth in the context of preterm birth from multi-modal fetal MRI

arXiv:2606.20172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preterm birth is associated with significant mortality and a risk for lifelong morbidity. The complex multifactorial aetiology hampers accurate prediction and thus optimal care. A pipeline consisting of bespoke machine learning methods for data imputation, feature selection, and regression models to predict gestational age (GA) at birth was developed and evaluated from comprehensive multi-modal morphological and functional fetal MRI data from 333 control cases and 93 preterm birth cases. The GA at birth predictions were classified into term and preterm categories and their accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity were reported. An ablation study was performed to further validate the design of the pipeline. Performance was evaluated using stratified 10-fold cross-validation. The pipeline achieves an R2 score of 0.13 and a mean absolute error of 2.74 weeks. It also achieves a 0.77 accuracy, 0.59 sensitivity, and 0.82 specificity across folds. The predominant features selected by the pipeline include cervical length and statistics derived from placental T2* values. The confluence of fast, motion-robust and multi-modal fetal MRI techniques and machine learning prediction allowed the prediction of the gestation at birth. This information is essential for any pregnancy. To the best of our knowledge, preterm birth had only been addressed as a classification problem in the literature. Therefore, this work provides a proof of concept. Future work will increase the cohort size to allow for finer stratification within the preterm birth cohort. Our code is available at https://github.com/dfajardorojas/ml-for-preterm-birth-.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Unlocking Latent Dimensions: Exploring Representations of Large-Scale X-ray Scattering Data using Variational Autoencoders

arXiv:2606.14999v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific user facilities generate X-ray scattering data faster than traditional workflows can process them. We address this challenge across two settings, offline dataset exploration and live on-the-fly analysis. We train a domain-specific attention-based Convolutional Variational Autoencoder (C-VAE) on 1.5 million X-ray scattering images to learn low-dimensional representations capturing structural variation across diverse experimental conditions. The learned latent space reveals well-organized clusters and smooth trajectories reflecting experimental progression. It further supports controlled synthetic scattering image generation across diverse structural states. When deployed without retraining, the model organizes time-resolved film formation experiments at two synchrotron facilities into interpretable latent structures. Benchmarking against DINOv3 (ViT-7B), a general-purpose vision foundation model, demonstrates that domain-specific training yields more interpretable latent organization for scattering data. Both workflows are integrated within Latent Space Explorer, a component of the MLExchange platform, supporting interactive structural exploration across archived datasets and live experiments.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Introducing corpora Hlava Cor and Hlava AD: Human Label Variation in Coreference and Discourse Relations

As previous research on annotator disagreement in discourse phenomena has shown, understanding text coherence varies considerably from one individual to another. To explore this phenomenon, we created two corpora with multiple annotations of Czech texts, accompanied by annotators' explanations of their choices. The first corpus consists of 1,024 contexts annotated in parallel by three annotators. It captures differences in the identification of coreference across various text types and grammatical-semantic categories, including pronouns, full noun phrases, and anaphoric adverbials. The second corpus comprises 512 contexts, annotated in parallel by five annotators, and focuses on identifying discourse relations in attributive and non-attributive constructions. Both corpora achieve a comparable inter-annotator agreement of approximately 60-65%. For coreference annotation, agreement tends to be lower in cases where automatic coreference resolution models disagree, suggesting that when the models disagree, the examples tend to be more difficult or ambiguous for human annotators to interpret. The annotators' comments, both for coreference and discourse relations, further reveal differences in interpretation, varying levels of confidence in text understanding, and individual reading strategies.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Diffusion Offline Reinforcement Learning for Fair and Energy-Efficient UAV-Assisted Wireless Networks

arXiv:2606.16331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The integration of generative artificial intelligence with wireless communication and signal processing systems has opened new avenues for intelligent, data-driven decision-making in future 6G networks. This work proposes a diffusion soft actor-critic (Diffusion-SAC) approach that leverages offline reinforcement learning (RL) enhanced by denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) to optimize trajectory and scheduling control in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks. While offline RL methods, such as conservative Q-learning (CQL), can learn from static datasets, they often struggle to generalize in low-data or dynamic conditions. To address this, we combine the robustness of CQL with the generative power of diffusion models, enabling expressive and signal-aware policy learning that generalizes beyond behavior policies. Applied to a UAV-assisted wireless network, the proposed framework minimizes transmission energy and improves fairness among devices. Simulations show that Diffusion-SAC outperforms standard offline RL baselines, achieving more stable convergence and higher rewards even with limited datasets. The method enhances data efficiency, reduces energy consumption, and increases throughput by more than 35 % compared to existing algorithms, demonstrating its potential for robust policy learning in next-generation wireless control systems.

15.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-08

Apitegromab for lean mass preservation during tirzepatide-induced weight loss: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 2 trial

Loss of lean mass in proportion to total weight loss is observed with incretin mimetic therapies such as tirzepatide and has the potential to adversely affect health and function. Apitegromab is an investigational, fully human monoclonal antibody that selectively inhibits myostatin activation and is, thereby, capable of increasing muscle mass. In the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 2 EMBRAZE study, adults with overweight or obesity (n = 102) were randomized 1:1 to receive tirzepatide plus apitegromab (10 mg kg−1) or tirzepatide plus placebo. At week 24, apitegromab resulted in a least square mean (80% confidence interval (CI)) of 1.9 (1.2−2.7) kg less lean mass loss than placebo (P = 0.001), despite similar total body weight loss between groups, representing a 54.9% retention of lean mass relative to placebo. In participants receiving apitegromab, trough concentrations of apitegromab and total latent myostatin, a pharmacodynamic marker, both increased over time and reached a plateau after approximately 16 weeks. Incidence of adverse events (AEs) (% (95% CI)) was generally similar across apitegromab-treated participants and placebo-treated participants, with 39 of 51 (76% (63−86%)) and 36 of 51 (71% (57−81%)) participants experiencing an AE, respectively. Serious adverse events (SAEs) were balanced and experienced by one of 51 (2% (0−10%)) participants in each arm. In summary, this proof-of-concept study demonstrated that selective targeting of myostatin by apitegromab was well tolerated and effective in preserving lean mass when combined with tirzepatide. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT06445075 . In the phase 2 EMBRAZE study, participants receiving tirzepatide and apitegromab lost less lean mass compared to participants receiving tirzepatide and placebo.

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

Uncertainty Estimation and Generalization Bounds for Modern Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.13818v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This thesis investigates how Bayesian principles can deepen our understanding of modern deep learning systems. While neural networks achieve remarkable predictive performance, their ability to generalize and to quantify uncertainty remains only partly understood. This thesis approaches this challenge from both methodological and theoretical angles: unifying Bayesian inference, function-space modeling, and large-deviation theory under a common probabilistic perspective. On the methodological side, the thesis introduces the Deep Variational Implicit Process (DVIP), a scalable Bayesian framework that extends implicit processes to deep architectures. Complementing this, two post-hoc methods – the Variational Linearized Laplace Approximation (VaLLA) and the Fixed-Mean Gaussian Process (FMGP) – are proposed to equip pretrained deterministic networks with calibrated uncertainty estimates. The theoretical contributions focus on one of the central open questions in modern machine learning: why do large, over-parameterized neural networks generalize so well? To address this, the thesis develops a unified probabilistic framework that connects three key mechanisms – diversity, smoothness, and stochasticity – within the language of PAC-Bayesian and large-deviation theory.

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

Measuring Whether LLM Tutors Teach or Solve: A Diagnostic for Educational Impact

Large language models are increasingly proposed as educational tutors, yet stronger task-solving ability does not necessarily imply stronger learning support. Motivated by recent calls to measure the social impact of NLP systems in practice, we study whether public LLM tutoring benchmarks distinguish learning-supportive behavior from mere answer production. We propose a lightweight diagnostic based on the gap between solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented benchmark performance. Using public MathTutorBench leaderboard results, we show that these dimensions are only partially aligned: across eight publicly reported models, the correlation between solving and pedagogy composites is 0.421, and several models shift meaningfully in rank when evaluation moves from solving to pedagogy. We then analyze the public TutorBench sample and show that agency-relevant behaviors are explicitly encoded in benchmark rubrics, especially in active-learning settings that reward guiding questions, calibrated hints, and non-disclosive scaffolding. Together, these findings suggest that educational-impact evaluation should not treat task success as a sufficient proxy for learning support. We argue that public tutoring benchmarks can better support positive-impact evaluation by reporting solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented scores separately and by making disclosure-sensitive, student-agency-preserving criteria more explicit.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

From Task-Guided Conversational Graphs to Goal-Oriented Dialogue Runtimes

Graph and multi-agent orchestration frameworks make production large language model (LLM) workflows practical, but they do not by themselves solve conversational continuity when users maintain several interdependent objectives. This conceptual systems paper focuses on the high-complexity end of that design space, where goals can be suspended, resumed, revised, and invalidated by actions in other goals. We introduce the Goal-Oriented Dialogue Runtime (GODR), a framework-neutral design pattern that treats goals, task frames, lifecycle state, invalidation rules, and resumption contracts as first-class runtime objects while delegating bounded execution to graph runtimes, agents, tools, or application programming interfaces (APIs). GODR is not proposed as a replacement for workflow graphs in simple guided processes; it is intended for complex, multi-domain, interruptible conversations where objective continuity cannot be recovered reliably from agent identity, chat history, or execution-graph position alone. The paper formalizes the problem, proposes runtime objects and architecture-selection criteria, and frames evaluation as an agenda for future empirical validation rather than as a measured performance claim.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Low-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol and Dementia Risk: Integrating Mendelian Randomization and Target Trial Emulation Within the Heart-Brain Axis

Background: The heart-brain axis links cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disease through shared vascular and inflammatory mechanisms. Although low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) is an established causal factor in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), its relationship with dementia remains uncertain, with midlife elevations associated with increased risk but late-life associations often appearing null or inverse. To address this cholesterol paradox, we integrated mendelian randomization (MR) with an active-comparator new-user target trial emulation. Methods: We applied a triangulated causal inference framework integrating two-sample MR with observational target trial emulation. Genetic variants associated with LDL-C were used as instrumental variables to evaluate Alzheimer disease (AD), dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and any dementia (AnyDem), with causal estimates derived using inverse-variance weighted models and sensitivity analyses for heterogeneity and pleiotropy. In parallel, an active-comparator new-user design compared statin versus ezetimibe initiation among adults aged 60 years or older using propensity score (PS) overlap weighting and Cox proportional hazards models to evaluate cardiovascular and dementia outcomes. Results: Genetically predicted LDL-C was associated with increased risk of DLB (OR 1.65, 95% CI 1.30-2.10; p

20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

Europe must seize the moment to lead on free and open science

作者: 未知作者

An under-appreciated research powerhouse, Europe has a responsibility to champion democratic science that is accessible to all the world’s research talent. An under-appreciated research powerhouse, Europe has a responsibility to champion democratic science that is accessible to all the world’s research talent.

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

EMS: Multi-Agent Voting via Efficient Majority-then-Stopping

arXiv:2604.02863v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Majority voting is the standard for aggregating multi-agent responses into a final decision. However, traditional methods typically require all agents to complete their reasoning before aggregation begins, leading to significant computational overhead, as many responses become redundant once a majority consensus is achieved. In this work, we formulate efficient multi-agent voting as a reliability-aware agent scheduling problem and propose Efficient Majority-then-Stopping (EMS) to improve reasoning efficiency. EMS first estimates a Task-Conditioned Reliability Ordering (TCRO) for each agent by retrieving its historical consensus evidence on semantically similar queries, and then invoking agents in descending reliability order. Next, Adaptive Incremental Voting (AIV) terminates the process once the current leading answer cannot be overturned by any possible votes from the remaining agents, and returns this answer. Finally, Reliability History Updating (RHU) updates only the invoked agents according to their consensus with the final decision. Extensive evaluations across five benchmarks show that EMS preserves the accuracy of Majority Voting while reducing the average number of invoked agents by 35% and token consumption by 44%, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/fuyu66/EMS.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

PhaseWY: A pipeline for haplotype phasing, sex chromosome identification and extraction of sex-limited sequences

Sex chromosomes are central to many ecological and evolutionary processes. Evidence has accumulated that sex chromosome systems vary extensively in age, turnover and transitions, motivating renewed efforts to study the diversity of sex chromosome systems across the tree of life. However, successful genomic detection of sex chromosomes depends on several factors, including the size and divergence time, background genetic diversity, and the number of sequenced females and males. In addition, technical challenges associated with sequencing and analysing the sex-limited Y/W chromosome remain. Here, we present PhaseWY, an automated Snakemake pipeline that uses whole-genome sequencing data from multiple female and male individuals to identify sex-chromosomal regions and extract the corresponding Y/W sequences. PhaseWY (i) detects sex differences in alignment depth, (ii) applies read-based and statistical haplotype phasing, (iii) identifies sex-linked regions using haplotype clustering, and (iv) subsets autosomal, X/Z- and Y/W-linked variants for downstream analyses. We applied PhaseWY to simulated data to benchmark factors influencing sex-linkage detection and successful extraction of Y/W-linked variants. To demonstrate its practical utility, we further applied PhaseWY to the neo-sex chromosome system in Alauda larks (Alaudidae) and performed a range of downstream analyses demonstrating the scope of applications of the PhaseWY output. We conclude that PhaseWY provides an easy-to-use and reproducible tool for population-genomic analyses in non-model organisms, with particular importance for advancing our understanding of sex-chromosome evolution.

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

AI Fiction in the Wild

Some professional authors are beginning to use AI tools to help produce their fiction writing. Are readers using AI to generate fiction, too? Drawing on over 500,000 anonymized, English-language ChatGPT-user conversations (arXiv:2405.01470), we find that more than one third of the conversations involve some form of fiction generation – including original stories, roleplay, fanfiction, and erotica. This AI-generated fiction is notably dominated by power users. We identify common fiction generation patterns and profiles among these users, including what we call "infinite story demanders," who repeatedly request and revise variations of the same or similar narratives over extended periods of time. We show that users especially gravitate toward fanfiction and erotica, and that they are broadly drawn to generic forms, repetition, immediacy, and niche combinations of story elements. Our findings motivate two theoretical provocations. First, we argue that AI technologies may lead to a shift in the conventional relationship between the author and reader, potentially producing what we call a "solipsistic reader-writer," who both generates and consumes fiction within a closed conversational loop, interacting with a machine rather than a human other. Second, we note that LLMs enable interactivity, play, and permutation in ways that are seemingly pleasurable for users, raising questions about where AI will fit into contemporary storytelling and entertainment ecosystems. We situate these developments within broader transformations in literature and media, including self-publishing, fanfiction, and pornography, and suggest that AI-generated fiction shares structural affinities with on-demand, personalized, and repetitive cultural forms.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Divide-and-Denoise: A Game-Theoretic Method for Fairly Composing Diffusion Models

The abundance of pre-trained diffusion models provides an opportunity for composition. Combining several models, however, runs the risk of one model dominating or models disagreeing with each other. Here, we propose Divide-and-Denoise, a method for coordinating multiple pre-trained diffusion models during sampling. Much like managing a specialized workforce, our method creates a fair but efficient division of labor across models. Central to our method is the notion of an allocation which defines the responsibility of each model to every region of the noisy sample. At every timestep, we then denoise by (i) updating the allocation by solving a fair division game, where we divide the sample into regions that maximize total utility under fairness constraints, and (ii) aligning the models with this allocation, where we guide each model to denoise within its assigned region. This leads to a new composite denoising process that evolves in tandem with a division process. We evaluate Divide-and-Denoise on conditional image generation. Across several quality metrics, including the GenEval benchmark, our method outperforms baselines and resolves common failures including missing objects and mismatched attributes. Experiments show that Divide-and-Denoise utilizes each model's expertise without neglecting any other model.

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

Where to Place the Query? Unveiling and Mitigating Positional Bias in In-Context Learning for Diffusion LLMs via Decoding Dynamics

While In-Context Learning (ICL) is extensively studied in Autoregressive (AR) LLMs, its mechanism within Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) remains largely unexplored. Unlike AR models restricted by unidirectional causal masking, dLLMs intrinsically utilize bidirectional attention, offering extensive spatial flexibility for query placement. Unfortunately, current practices conventionally inherit AR-style trailing-query templates, often overlooking the structural paradigm shift. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis unveiling that query position is actually a first-order variable in dLLMs. Through empirical decoupling, we demonstrate that positional variance impacts generation quality on par with example semantic quality. Internally, this positional sensitivity stems from a spatial ``Recency Effect'' in attention flow and task-dependent shifts in decoding trajectories. To mitigate this instability without ground-truth labels, we reveal that traditional single-step confidence ($C_{decoded}$) fails in dLLMs. Instead, we propose Average Confidence ($\overline{C}$), a novel metric tracking the iterative decoding process. By establishing the foundational spatial ICL baselines, we introduce Auto-ICL, a training-free adaptive routing strategy that dynamically optimizes query placement, robustly approaching oracle performance across heterogeneous reasoning and perception tasks.