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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

History of the Muddy Children Puzzle

arXiv:2606.13703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Muddy Children Puzzle is a puzzle about knowledge and ignorance that has been inspiring for the development of epistemic logic. Who came up with it first? This is unclear. We trace the origin of the Muddy Children Puzzle through logical and literary publications over the past two centuries. The puzzle inspired a numerous variations such as involving numbers or coloured hats. We also present a novel hats puzzle involving self-reference.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SafeLLM: Extraction as a Hallucination-Resistant Alternative to Rewriting in Safety-Critical Settings

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to access organisational documentation, including standard operating procedures (SOPs), HR policies and institutional guidelines. However, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems that rely on free-form rewriting can introduce hallucinations and unstable trade-offs between completeness and conciseness, particularly in safety- and compliance-critical settings. Objectives: To evaluate extraction as a hallucination-resistant alternative to rewriting-based RAG and compare strategies that balance precision, recall and safety across document types and model scales. Methods: We compare multiple prompting strategies, including line-number-based source selection, extraction of relevant guideline sentences with explicit safety annotations, and a multi-stage pipeline that refines draft answers using supporting evidence from source guidelines. Experiments are conducted on documents of varying length and structure, including local NHS acute care and oncology guidelines and UK-wide NICE guidelines, using both frontier-scale and locally deployable models. Performance is assessed using automatic metrics and human expert evaluation of relevance and completeness. Results: Line-number selection achieves the strongest results, outperforming direct copying and safety-focused strategies across both large and small models while maintaining high term recall (up to 95%) and close alignment with source text. Safety-oriented approaches improve precision but introduce systematic omissions, while multi-stage filtering further amplifies this trade-off. Performance varies with document structure: line-based extraction excels in protocol-like content, whereas alternative strategies perform better on more verbose documents (up to 97% term recall).

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Truncated Wigner dynamics of biclique quantum spin glasses

作者:

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

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

Systematic Evaluation of Novel View Synthesis for Video Place Recognition

The generation of synthetic novel views has the potential to positively impact robot navigation in several ways. In image-based navigation, a novel overhead view generated from a scene taken by a ground robot could be used to guide an aerial robot to that location. In Video Place Recognition (VPR), novel views of ground locations from the air can be added that enable a UAV to identify places seen by the ground robot, and similarly, overhead views can be used to generate novel ground views. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of synthetic novel views in VPR using five public VPR image databases and seven typical image similarity methods. We show that for small synthetic additions, novel views improve VPR recognition statistics. We find that for larger additions, the magnitude of viewpoint change is less important than the number of views added and the type of imagery in the dataset.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

When Preferences Fail to Become Incentives: A Utility-Behavior Gap in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.22974v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work on preference elicitation in large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated that, when given a series of choices between two outcomes, LLMs reveal a coherent, model-specific utility structure. Notably, this structure often includes preferences that the models' trainers did not intend, such as valuing people of some nationalities above others, raising the possibility that LLMs might be forming emergent, misaligned goals, which, if true, would have major safety implications. However, the choice paradigms in which these preferences are observed are not reflective of real-world situations in which misaligned behavior would be a practical concern. Therefore, we design an experimental paradigm to probe whether these preferences serve as motivations for LLM behavior in realistic scenarios. First, we reproduce prior findings on consistent preference elicitation. Next, we create a set of common writing tasks - essays, grant proposal abstracts, incident postmortems, and translations - where quality can be assessed by a blind, independent LLM judge panel. Then, we demonstrate that LLMs can be motivated via direct exhortation and other explicit cues to modulate their output quality on these tasks. Finally, we probe whether utilities inferred from explicitly reported preferences can shift output quality on these tasks by offering LLMs high-utility incentives for high-quality outputs. In all tasks, across all models tested, offering LLMs outcomes that they report in the choice paradigm as being highly preferred does not lead them to create higher quality outputs than offering them dispreferred outcomes, or even no outcomes at all. We conclude that the existence of coherent preferences as demonstrated in choice paradigms should not be taken as evidence that those preferences have incentive value for the models or affect their behavior in other contexts.

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

Energy-Conserved Neural Pipelines: Attenuating Error Propagation in Modular Neural Networks via Physical Conservation Constraints

arXiv:2606.11341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modular neural network pipelines suffer from error compounding: noise at any module boundary propagates and potentially amplifies through subsequent modules. We introduce energy conservation as a hard physical constraint on inter-module information flow. Activation energy (the squared L2 norm of feature vectors) is enforced to be exactly preserved at every module boundary. Unlike soft energy penalties, conservation is an inviolable law: the network may redistribute energy across neurons but cannot create or destroy it. Four experiments on CIFAR-10 demonstrate: (1) conservation retains 77.4% of clean accuracy at noise sigma=0.2, versus 35.1% for baselines and 30.9% for energy-penalized models (p

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Random Local Stabilizer Codes in Three Dimensions without String or Self-Similar Fractal Logical Operators

作者:

arXiv:2606.19873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error-correcting codes (QECs) are essential components quantum computation and have deep connections to quantum phases of matter. A key obstruction to passive self-correcting QECs is the presence of string logical operators, which can generate logical errors through constant-energy-barrier processes. Haah's Codes (fracton codes) showed that three-dimensional stabilizer codes can forbid such string logical operators, but their translation-invariant structure supports self-similar fractal logical operators with a logarithmic energy barrier. We introduce the qutrit random cubic codes, a family of local qutrit Calderbank-Shor-Steane stabilizer Hamiltonians with similar cube-check structure as Haah's Code 1 but built from spatially varying stabilizers. We prove that these models retain the no-string property and numerically observe that they have properties distinct from translation-invariant fracton codes: the smallest ground-state degeneracy exponent is $k=2$ for odd $L$ and $k=4$ for even $L$; noncontractible plane-logical operators span the entire logical space; and charge-push diagnostics show that the self-similar fractal operators are absent. These results demonstrate that constrained randomness can fundamentally change the nature of stabilizer codes and improve their self-correction properties. They further point to broader families of quantum error-correcting codes and quantum phases beyond canonical topological and fracton orders.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Exact Schur-Sylvester Dimensionality Reductions for Non-Smooth Stochastic Complexity and Manifold Sampling

arXiv:2606.23867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The exact computation of the Normalized Maximum Likelihood (NML) codelength for regular non-smooth estimators (e.g., Lasso) has been historically limited by the cubic scaling walls of manifold-constrained projection and volume integration. At each step of the geometric Propose-and-Project Metropolis–Hastings (PPMH) sampler, evaluating the projection operator requires inverting an $(N+k) \times (N+k)$ generalized KKT matrix, while calculating the volume factor requires the determinant of an $(N-k) \times (N-k)$ Gram matrix. This paper presents an exact, mathematically equivalent formulation that bypasses both bottlenecks by utilizing the block Schur complement and Sylvester's determinant identity. We prove that the computational complexity of both operations collapses from $\mathcal{O}(N^3)$ to $\mathcal{O}(k^3 + N^2 k)$ per step. We generalize this reduction to Sparse Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Elastic Net, and Group Lasso. Finally, we provide a rigorous numerical stability analysis and evaluate the sampler's efficiency using the Effective Sample Size (ESS) per second. Our empirical benchmarks on high-dimensional datasets confirm a constant speedup exceeding $14{,}100\times$ while maintaining double-precision numerical equivalence, rendering exact non-smooth NML estimation highly tractable for large-scale statistical inference.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Activation Functions, Statistics and Learning of Higher-Order Interactions in Restricted Boltzmann Machines

arXiv:2605.19178v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The great success of neural networks primarily arises from the presence of the large number of weight parameters combined with nonlinearities in the input-output relationship of single neurons. In this work, we study the relationship between the statistical properties of the weights and the nonlinearity of the hidden unit in Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) on the one side, and the distribution induced on binary visible units. We do this for four commonly used activation functions: Linear, Step, ReLU, and Exponential, and make qualitative predictions about the ability of these models to learn distributions with strong higher order interactions over the visible nodes. We show that in general, in an ensemble of RBMs with Gaussian weights, these distributions are rare and hard to learn, except when the hidden unit activation function is an Exponential.

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

RetailBench: Benchmarking long horizon reasoning and coherent decision making of LLM agents in realistic retail environments

arXiv:2606.15862v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents have made rapid progress on short-horizon, well-scoped tasks, yet their ability to sustain coherent decisions in dynamic long-horizon environments remains uncertain. We introduce RetailBench, a data-grounded simulation benchmark for evaluating tool-using LLM agents in single-store supermarket operation. RetailBench models retail management as a partially observable decision process and is designed to support thousand-day-scale simulations. In this environment, agents must manage pricing, replenishment, supplier selection, shelf assortment, inventory aging, customer feedback, external events, and cash-flow constraints. We evaluate seven contemporary LLMs under representative agent frameworks over a 180-day evaluation horizon and compare them with a privileged oracle policy. Results show substantial variation across models: only a small subset survives the full evaluation horizon, and even the strongest LLM runs remain substantially behind the oracle policy in final net worth and sales outcomes. Behavioral analysis attributes these gaps to incomplete evidence acquisition, surface-level decision making, and the lack of a consistent long-horizon policy. RetailBench provides a controlled testbed for studying reliable autonomy in economically grounded long-horizon decision-making.

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

Designing AI-Supported Focus Groups: A Role x Modality Playbook

arXiv:2606.11835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collecting participants' lived experiences is central to design research. Focus groups are uniquely valuable because participants not only share individual accounts but also respond to one another, surfacing comparison, disagreement, and collective sensemaking. However, focus groups are resource-intensive and highly sensitive to facilitation: moderators must probe for specificity, balance participation, manage topic flow, and sustain psychological safety, and subtle facilitation choices can shape what becomes salient. Recent HCI work and commercial meeting tools show that generative AI can scaffold live conversation through prompting, turn regulation, thematic mapping, and real-time summarization. Yet UXR teams lack a clear map of what these capabilities mean in focus groups and what methodological risks they introduce. We synthesize AI supports for live conversation and translate them into a focus-group-specific playbook organized by AI role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied).We synthesize prior work on AI-supported live conversation and propose a focus-group-specific playbook of AI supports organized by role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied). We characterize interactional trade-offs and identify open questions for evaluating AI-supported focus groups as methodological configurations.

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

Hidden Anchors in Multi-Agent LLM Deliberation

arXiv:2606.19494v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent LLM deliberation, where agents exchange and revise answers over several rounds, is increasingly used to improve reasoning and accuracy, yet how and why it works is rarely modelled. Such deliberation mirrors how humans reach decisions. As social animals we are pulled both by the group, the herd effect that classical opinion-dynamics models such as DeGroot and Friedkin–Johnsen capture, and by our own internal belief, which they do not. We model multi-agent deliberation as a closed-loop dynamical system in which each agent carries a hidden internal belief, its anchor, that continually pulls its opinion regardless of its neighbours. We show this anchor can be recovered from the deliberation alone, and that it explains a behaviour classical consensus rules forbid: an agent's confidence in the correct answer can climb past where any agent started, escaping the space (convexhull) formed by the initial beliefs. Checking whether the recovered anchor also predicts held-out runs (generalizes) gives a simple test for when a model is truly driven bysuch an anchor. Across three open-weight model families this is a spectrum, not all-or-nothing. All anchors' influence are about equally strongly, but they differ in where the anchor sits, and only when it sits far from the initial opinions does deliberation escape the hull and need the full closed-loop model.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Denoising Distances in Metric Measure Spaces

arXiv:2606.18301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work studied the problem of finding clusters and denoising pairwise distances from noisy distances of points sampled on a manifold. We study the same problems in more general metric measure spaces under \lowerphiregularity{}. We give an algorithm that extracts large localized clusters around every sampled point and uses them to denoise distances to any fixed accuracy, with near-linear running time in the dense fixed-accuracy regime. We also show how to achieve much higher accuracy with a non-efficient algorithm. This suggests that unlike the Riemannian case, denoising to higher accuracy in more general metric spaces has a statistical-computational gap.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Cost analysis of overseas versus domestic vaccination of US-bound refugees

Context: To ensure healthy resettlement and protect US health security, the Vaccination Program for US-bound Refugees (VPR) offers some recommended vaccines to refugees overseas before resettlement to the United States. The selected vaccines and number of doses vary by country of departure. VPR was found to be cost-saving in 2018 but had since expanded to more sites. Objective: Assess VPR's current costs and impact on post-arrival domestic vaccination needs and costs. Setting and Participants: A model-based analysis of the Federal government costs for VPR and post-arrival (US) vaccination of resettled refugees separated across five regions: Africa, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa/Republic of Turkiye and Middle East, Europe, and the Americas using fiscal year 2024 data. Design: We quantified and compared full vaccination costs for refugees under two scenarios: (1) 'No VPR' and (2) 'VPR'. Refugees would receive no vaccines overseas and be fully vaccinated after US arrival under 'No VPR'. Under 'VPR', refugees receive one or two doses of selected vaccines overseas before completing vaccination schedules after arrival. Main Outcomes: Costs were reported in 2023 US dollars for 'VPR' and 'No VPR' scenarios and further subdivided by grouping countries/sites depending on whether the International Organization for Migration (IOM) provides vaccination services for refugees (IOM sites) versus non-IOM providers (non-IOM sites). Results: 'VPR' resulted in average net cost savings of $147 per person or $14.7 million per 100,000-refugee cohort compared to providing all vaccines after US arrival ('No VPR'). 'VPR' was cost-saving across most regions, except for IOM sites in Europe, where a net cost of $44 per person was observed. Net cost savings per person were highest for IOM sites in Africa ($333). Conclusions: VPR remains a cost-saving strategy, while protecting US-bound refugees' health and US health security by preventing disease outbreaks during resettlement.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Innate immunity associates with protection from pneumococcal colonisation, but colonisation does not confer capsule-independent protection

Nasopharyngeal colonisation with Streptococcus pneumoniae is a prerequisite for transmission and disease and represents an important immunising event. While colonisation induces serotype-specific immunity, the mechanisms underlying heterologous protection remain unclear. We developed a controlled human infection model using pneumococcal serotype 15B and investigated colonisation dynamics, immunogenicity, and cross-protection against subsequent heterologous challenge with serotype 6B. Fifty-four healthy adults were intranasally inoculated with 15B at escalating doses. Colonisation rates peaked at 31.4% with 8 x 10 CFU per naris, lower than those historically observed with 6B and 3 strains. Density was also lower than previously observed with other strains. In vitro assays demonstrated that 15B adhered more readily to epithelial cells than 6B, but was less efficiently internalised, potentially reducing attack rates and colonisation density. Colonisation with 15B induced capsular polysaccharide-specific serum IgG, but baseline humoral immune measures did not predict protection from acquisition. Prior colonisation with 15B did not reduce acquisition of 6B upon re-challenge. Analysis of nasal microbiopsy samples revealed distinct innate activation signatures. Resistance to colonisation was associated with elevated baseline MIP-1 and MIP-1{beta} responses upon in vitro stimulation, whereas carriage was associated with enhanced chemokine and IL-6 responses. Local innate immune activation, rather than circulating antibody responses alone, may therefore contribute to colonisation control. We demonstrate that experimental colonisation with 15B does not confer heterologous protection against 6B and highlight the importance of mucosal innate immune conditioning in serotype-independent defence. Strategies enhancing nasal innate immune recruitment and activation may be required for broader protection against pneumococcal colonisation.

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

GRAPE: Guided Parameter-Space Evolution for Compact Adversarial Robustness

arXiv:2606.14865v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adversarial Training (AT) improves neural network robustness, but most methods train a fixed parameter space from the start. This paper asks whether the order in which parameters become optimizable can affect the final robust solution, even when the final architecture or computation budget is controlled. We propose GRAPE, Guided Parameter-Space Evolution, a training framework for compact adversarial robustness. GRAPE combines parameter-space stabilization with progressive hidden expansion: it stabilizes robust optimization in the currently exposed space, gradually releases new optimizable dimensions, and uses an adversarial spectral utilization score to guide newly released capacity toward high-pressure modules. In contrast to fixed-structure AT, GRAPE treats robust model learning as a process of progressive parameter-space exposure and evolution. Under the standard $\ell_\infty$ threat model on CIFAR-10, with fixed-structure ResNet-18 AT as a controlled reference, GRAPE improves PGD-20 robust accuracy from 51.70% to 56.94% at a nearly matched computation budget with a FLOPs ratio of 1.009x, while reducing parameter count by about 21.4%. A sequential grow variant with the same final ResNet-18 architecture reaches 56.52% PGD-20 robust accuracy, indicating that the gain is not only due to final architecture differences but also to the parameter-space exposure path. These results suggest that guided parameter-space evolution can yield compact and robust parameter configurations under matched computation.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Conformal Recovery-Deadline Certificates for Runtime Assurance of Adapting Controllers

arXiv:2606.25371v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Runtime assurance (RTA) protects a safety-critical system by switching from an advanced controller to a verified safe controller when a monitored condition is violated. The standard latching rule, which trips on the first breach of the safe set and then coasts, is correct for a diverging controller but pathological for a capable online-adapting one. Such a controller is unsafe by design during a bounded recovery transient. It must excite the plant to identify the fault before it can correct it, so a latching shield trips on that transient and suppresses a controller that would have recovered. We introduce the conformal recovery-deadline certificate, a split-conformal, distribution-free, finite-sample upper bound on the adapting controller's recovery time that licenses delayed fallback with a coverage guarantee, backstopped by a verified monitor at a hard critical limit. The certified deadline discriminates capable from incapable controllers, keeping the recoverer autonomous while catching the diverger. The construction separates autonomy, governed by statistical coverage, from safety, governed by the verified backstop, as an instance of reliability-asymmetric design. We prove marginal coverage, a weighted extension that restores coverage under a known fault-distribution shift, and group-conditional Mondrian coverage. We demonstrate all three on two unrelated Simplex testbeds: a 6-DOF spacecraft attitude controller and a torque-controlled inverted pendulum. Both show the same suppression pathology and the same cure, making the certificate a domain-general mechanism rather than a single-system trick.

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

Task Decomposition for Efficient Annotation

High-quality annotations of structured representations are expensive to collect over large corpora. Manual annotation of structure is laborious, and model-based annotation, although cheaper to generate, requires expensive validation and potentially significant supervision to ensure that the annotation quality is strong enough to be useful downstream. In traditional annotation workflows, annotation of each complete example is performed end-to-end by a single annotator. However, structured annotation is complex, and each aspect of the task represents a unique challenge with an associated inferential load for a given annotator. Modern annotation projects can incorporate heterogeneous groups of annotators, including both models and human annotators with varying domain and linguistic expertise. It remains unclear, however, how to redesign annotation tasks in this setting, where efforts are discriminately allocated across heterogeneous annotators with respect to distinct annotation challenges. We propose to decompose annotation tasks into sub-tasks in order to reduce the aggregate inferential load of annotation projects. Inspired by the notion of centers from centering theory, we introduce a formal model of inferential load based on the degrees of freedom in the space of valid annotations. Using this model, we show that identifying these centers (i.e. salient anchor entities realized by annotation sub-tasks) constrains the output space complexity, and decompositions which isolate and advance center identification reduce the aggregate inferential load. We provide guidelines for decomposing complex structured annotation tasks, supported by examples demonstrating improved cost-efficiency from our prior work. Finally, we present a procedure for allocating sub-tasks across annotators to maximize quality under a fixed budget.

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

Squeeze-Release: Iterative Pruning with Exact Structural Minimization

arXiv:2606.14346v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unstructured pruning produces sparse weight tensors, but the standard implementation keeps tensor shapes unchanged so the deployed model is no smaller than before pruning. We present an exact structural rewrite, which we call minimization, that converts a masked network into a smaller dense network with the same forward function up to floating-point rounding. The Squeeze-Release cycle iterates pruning and minimization with an intermediate release step that re-enables the exact-zero positions inside the compacted tensors as small calibrated noise, turning otherwise wasted capacity back into trainable parameters. Successive cycles use that capacity to find structural redundancy a single pass cannot reach. We additionally introduce CompensatedLayerNorm, a function-preserving replacement for LayerNorm that extends minimization to channel reduction across LayerNorm-equipped residual streams. Squeeze-Release compresses the deployable network to 39x smaller than the unpruned model on a fully-connected model network and 14.8x smaller on modern CNN (ConvNeXt-Tiny), at comparable accuracy. In addition we prove that the rewrite can be extended to transformer architectures.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Causal Object-Centric Models for Planning with Monte Carlo Tree Search

arXiv:2606.14418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce COMET (Causal Object-centric Model for Efficient Tree search), a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm that performs Monte Carlo Tree Search in a slot-structured latent space. COMET pairs a frozen unsupervised object-centric encoder with a transformer-based world model, in which actions are bound to objects through a novel action-slot fusion mechanism that is used in slot transition prediction. Policy and value heads use object-causal attention, modulating token interactions by learned per-slot relevance scores so that decision-making concentrates on task-relevant entities. COMET adds an explicit object-level inductive bias to MuZero-style latent planning. Across eight visually and dynamically diverse tasks from the Object-Centric Visual RL benchmark, ManiSkill, Robosuite, and VizDoom, COMET achieves a higher mean normalized score during the early stages of training compared to object-centric and monolithic baselines.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

P3D-Bench: Benchmarking MLLMs for Parametric 3D Generation and Structural Reasoning

Multimodal large language models can write code to produce complex programs as well as use programs to do 3D modeling, which opens up a new avenue for 3D generation powered by their priors, world knowledge and reasoning. Yet existing benchmarks rarely evaluate 3D modeling through code. Such modeling demands more than runnable code: from a text or visual specification, a model must generate a parametric 3D program that is geometrically precise, semantically aligned and assembly-consistent. We introduce P3D-Bench, a benchmark for parametric 3D generation. Unlike a 3D mesh, a parametric 3D program exposes explicit dimensions, construction operations and part relations, revealing whether a model recovers a design's structure, not just its appearance. Under a unified protocol, P3D-Bench covers three task families (Text-to-3D, Image-to-3D and Assembly-3D) and scores each output for executability, geometric fidelity, topology, text-grounded constraints, multiview semantic alignment and part-level structure. We evaluate frontier MLLMs and text-only LLMs on 400 text cases, 400 image cases and 203 annotated assemblies, with domain-specific models as reference points. Our extensive evaluation yields three findings. First, assemblies are the hardest setting, where models still fail to compose multiple parts into a coherent structure. Second, models can often recover the global shape and semantic identity of the target object, yet fail to reproduce the precise parametric geometry specified by the input. Third, part-level modeling remains weak on assemblies, where models recover neither the geometry of each part nor the right number of parts. These results position P3D-Bench as a benchmark for evaluating precise parametric geometry and part-level structure in parametric 3D generation.

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

MyPCBench: A Benchmark for Personally Intelligent Computer-Use Agents

Current benchmarks for computer-use agents evaluate models in impersonal environments. This leaves a gap between evaluation and deployment where personal assistants are expected to work across a user's whole digital life, including their context, historical data, and logged-in accounts. This gap is widest on web tasks, where live web evaluations cannot exercise sites that require logging in or personal information, the kind of site a real personal assistant has to drive. We introduce MyPCBench, which tests computer-use agents as personal assistants on a Linux desktop populated with 17 simulated real-world web applications and a full desktop stack, all seeded for one canonical persona, Michael Scott from The Office. We define 184 tasks in this environment, each inspired by a real request drawn from the OpenClaw community, and benchmark six closed and open-weight models with a uniform computer+bash tool surface. We find that the best model, Claude Opus 4.6, fully solves 55.4\% of the tasks, the only model above 50\%. Model failures cluster on tasks that span many applications and on long trajectories, where personalization stresses an assistant the most. We release the environment, task set, and agent harness at https://mypcbench.com.

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

From Observation to Intervention: A Causal Audit of Expert Importance in Mixture-of-Experts Models

Interpretability methods routinely use population-level summary statistics over observed model behaviour to license claims about the effects of targeted interventions on specific computations; in Pearl's terms, they treat rung-1 associational evidence as if it supported rung-2 interventional conclusions, a move whose validity is rarely tested. We examine one concrete instance: the use of routing statistics in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) pruning, where utilization rates, activation norms, and routing weight distributions are treated as predictors of which experts can be removed without functional cost. A token-level interventional audit across three high-redundancy MoE architectures (OLMoE-1B-7B-0924, Qwen1.5-MoE-A2.7B, DeepSeek-V2-Lite) finds no observational metric predicts causal expert importance in any model: across all 60 metric-layer combinations effect sizes stay below Cohen's $d = 0.23$, and no metric is reliably positive under our corrected, dual-test criterion. A per-token routing weight control, run with identical $n$, rules out insufficient power, recovering a signal whose CI excludes zero at OLMoE's final MoE layer ($d = +0.231$, 95\% CI $[+0.09, +0.37]$, $p = 0.0013$). Existing pruning methods succeed in this regime not by identifying dispensable experts but because early-layer redundancy renders most selection criteria interchangeable. Our results provide an explicit counterexample to the common inferential step from population-level observational summaries to token-level interventional claims about expert importance, and illustrate how interventional audits can calibrate the evidential standards for interpretability claims.

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

Variable Bound Tightening for Nash Equilibrium Computation in Multiplayer Imperfect-Information Games

arXiv:2606.25997v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: There has been significant recent progress in algorithms for approximation of Nash equilibrium in large two-player zero-sum imperfect-information games and exact computation of Nash equilibrium in multiplayer strategic-form games. While counterfactual regret minimization and fictitious play are scalable to large games and have convergence guarantees in two-player zero-sum games, they do not guarantee convergence to Nash equilibrium in multiplayer games. Recently, an approach has been presented for exact computation of Nash equilibrium in multiplayer imperfect-information games that solves a quadratically constrained program based on a nonlinear complementarity problem formulation derived from the sequence-form game representation. This formulation was solved using Gurobi's nonconvex quadratic solver, which employs spatial branch-and-bound to iteratively refine variable bounds by solving convex relaxations of bilinear terms via McCormick envelopes. During presolve, Gurobi introduces auxiliary variables and, in some cases, binary variables, leading to an internal MIQCP reformulation. This approach was demonstrated to outperform prior algorithms from the Gambit software suite and quickly solve three-player Kuhn poker after removal of dominated actions; however, the algorithm was not able to solve the full version of the game within 24 hours. In this paper, we derive finite bounds on slack and multiplier variables in the nonlinear complementarity formulation. These bounds strengthen the convex relaxations used within spatial branch-and-bound and lead to substantial computational improvements. We demonstrate the impact of the proposed bounds on exact Nash equilibrium computation in three-player Kuhn poker.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

PseudoBench: Measuring How Agentic Auto-Research Fuels Pseudoscience

As Large Language Model based agents enter autonomous scientific research, their ability to resist pseudoscience becomes increasingly important. Otherwise, such systems may rapidly generate plausible yet misleading studies that contaminate academic literature and erode trust in science. We present PseudoBench, an adversarial benchmark for evaluating whether agentic auto-research systems can identify and resist pseudoscientific narratives. PseudoBench contains 200 curated pseudoscientific claim-evidence pairs across five domains and evaluates agents through an end-to-end research pipeline from experiments to writing. Testing seven state-of-the-art agents, we find that current systems readily produce persuasive reports that align with pseudoscientific premises with near-zero refusal rates and the highest resistance of only 27.4%. Stronger agents risk packaging pseudoscience in more sophisticated scientific language, increasing its apparent credibility. These findings reveal an alarming capacity to fuel pseudoscience, calling for scientific alignment before widespread deployment.