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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Don’t compete, collaborate: why collective funding applications are the future

Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them. Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

What Intermediate Layers Know: Detecting Jailbreaks from Entropy Dynamics

Jailbreak attacks reveal a persistent weakness in aligned Large Language Models: carefully crafted prompts can elicit policy-violating responses despite safety training. While most defenses operate at the prompt or output level, it remains unclear how harmful intent is encoded within the model's internal representations. We investigate this question by analyzing token-level predictive entropy trajectories across layers of a frozen LLM using the logit lens. We find that static aggregate statistics of prompt-level entropy (e.g., mean, variance) carry little discriminative signal, whereas features capturing how entropy evolves across token positions, such as monotonic rank-based trend scores, are substantially more informative. Importantly, this signal is not uniform across model depth: it is concentrated in intermediate layers and degrades at the final layer, indicating that jailbreak-relevant structure is most pronounced in mid-network representations rather than at the output head. Across multiple models (Llama, Qwen, Gemma) and adversarial benchmarks, these entropy dynamics provide architecture-consistent separation without additional training. Together, our findings show that jailbreak behavior is reflected in structured intermediate uncertainty dynamics, clarifying both which entropy-derived features encode harmful intent and where in the network that signal is most pronounced.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Visual-Redundancy-Controlled Parallel Decoding for Diffusion-Based Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2605.25820v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based multimodal large language models (dMLLMs) decode by iteratively predicting tokens at multiple masked positions in parallel. This turns each decoding step into a position-selection problem: the model must choose not only which predictions are reliable in isolation, but also which positions should be committed together as context for later decoding steps. Existing confidence-based decoding ranks masked positions independently and commits the top-K positions, largely ignoring whether the committed tokens provide complementary visual grounding. We identify a step-level limitation of this strategy in multimodal settings: high-confidence tokens selected in the same step can rely on overlapping visual grounding, introducing visual redundancy among the committed tokens and leaving less complementary visual grounding available for later decoding. To quantify this effect, we introduce the Visual Redundancy Index (VRI), which measures visual grounding overlap among tokens committed in parallel. To control this redundancy during decoding, we propose Visual-Redundancy-Controlled Decoding (VRCD), a training-free inference-time decoding method that uses token-to-image attention to prioritize visually complementary positions. Across diverse multimodal benchmarks, VRCD reduces visual redundancy and remaining-position entropy with modest runtime overhead. In longer decoding experiments, it also achieves relative accuracy gains of up to 18.8% on M^3CoT and 6.9% on MMBench over confidence-based decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/infiniteYuanyl/VRCD.

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

Wasserstein Convergence of ODE-Based Samplers in Decentralized Diffusion Model via Velocity Field Decomposition

arXiv:2606.15835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion models have achieved impressive empirical success in generative tasks, and their convergence theory is now relatively well understood. Motivated by privacy and scalability, recent decentralized diffusion architectures replace a single global velocity field with multiple local experts and a routing mechanism, yielding a sampling dynamics with stochastic expert switching that falls outside standard diffusion convergence analyses. In this work, We study a decentralized diffusion framework with stochastic velocity fields and ODE-based sampling. We establish a convergence guarantee in Wasserstein-2 distance, showing that the distribution of the $N$-step discretization converges to the analytical solution at rate $\mathcal{O}(N^{-1/2}+\varepsilon)$ in $W_2$, where $\varepsilon$ captures the neural approximation errors. To our knowledge, this is the first $W_2$ convergence result for decentralized diffusion models with an ODE-based sampling scheme.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

FoundCause: Causal Discovery with Latent Confounders from Observational Data

arXiv:2606.17516v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery from observational data remains challenging due to the need to recover directed structure and latent confounding without interventions. We propose FoundCause, an amortized causal discovery model trained entirely on synthetic data that maps datasets directly to causal graphs in a single forward pass. By learning from large collections of simulated structural causal models, FoundCause captures transferable statistical patterns that generalize beyond individual datasets. The architecture incorporates several key inductive biases for causal discovery. It uses a permutation-invariant transformer encoder with alternating attention over samples and variables to jointly model cross-variable dependence and per-variable distributions. Pairwise statistical features derived from classical asymmetry measures are injected through statistics-conditioned attention, guiding the model toward known causal signals. A factorized decoder separates edge existence from direction, while a triangular refinement module enables reasoning over higher-order causal motifs such as chains and colliders. In addition, a dedicated confounder module based on learnable latent tokens explicitly models hidden common causes, and the model explicitly handles missing data via its masked input representation. To our knowledge, FoundCause is the first amortized causal discovery approach to explicitly model latent confounding. FoundCause outperforms 11 classical non-amortized methods (e.g., PC, GES, NOTEARS-style optimization) and 4 amortized causal discovery methods on 15 real-world datasets, achieving +9.6% improvement in $F_1$, +1.2% in AUROC, and an 18.9% reduction in structural Hamming distance relative to the strongest non-amortized methods, while performing inference in a single forward pass.

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

A Hybrid, Multi-Layered Pipeline for Phishing and Threat Classification: Independently Validated URL and NLP Engines with a Calibrated Multi-Channel Fusion Stage

Phishing is a multi-modal threat. We present a hybrid pipeline that scores each modality with its own engine and fuses the results. Three engines are built, deployed, and independently benchmarked: a four-stage URL stack (Domain Guard, lexical model, threat intelligence, and an asymmetric L2 fusion sidecar); a generalization-hardened DistilBERT NLP classifier whose held-out real-phishing recall rises from 0.8% to 87.3%; and a threat-intelligence synchronizer with end-to-end OpenTelemetry instrumentation confirming 1:1 message conservation. A decision-level fusion stage, characterized on a 10,677-email whole-system benchmark, reaches F1=0.914 with a calibrated probabilistic-OR over URL, header, and phishing-probability channels while reducing held-out real-spam false positives to 3.6%. Because that benchmark uses proxy URL and header channels and an operating point still needing recalibration, we present it as a preliminary integrated result. For deployable detection, the limiting factor is how well a model generalizes, not how accurately it scores data drawn from its own training distribution.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Human-like autonomy emerges from self-play and a pinch of human data

arXiv:2606.19370v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-play reinforcement learning has recently emerged as a way to train driving policies without any human data. It uses cheap, large-scale simulations to substitute expensive, large-scale human driving demonstrations. A key limitation of this approach is that policies trained through pure self-play can learn effective but alien driving conventions incompatible with people. Previous works attempt to mitigate such behavioral misalignments through extensive reward engineering and domain randomization, which are brittle and labor-intensive. Instead of completely discarding human demonstrations, our method treats them as a regularization objective on top of a minimal safe goal-reaching reward. Like the spice in a good stew, we find that a little human data goes a long way: our method uses only 30 minutes of human demonstrations, 2500x fewer than comparable imitation learning approaches. Resulting policies coordinate with held-out human trajectories and complete training in 15 hours on a single consumer-grade GPU. Videos and full source code are available at https://spiced-self-play.com/.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Is Variational Monte Carlo Robust? Sharp Moment Thresholds and Heavy-tailed Stochastic Optimization

arXiv:2606.26009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) is a central algorithm in electronic structure theory and has gained renewed importance through modern neural-network ansätze such as FermiNet. At its core, VMC seeks ground states by minimizing the Rayleigh quotient by stochastic optimization. In this work, we show that the resulting stochastic optimization problem is intrinsically governed by the nodal geometry of the underlying wave function. More precisely, we establish that properties of the nodal set determine the integrability of the local energy and gradient estimators that drive VMC. For broad and practically relevant ansatz classes, including Slater-Jastrow wave functions with variable-exponent Slater-type orbitals, we prove that these estimators are generically heavy-tailed and fail to admit higher moments. At the same time, for general analytic ansätze, we prove weak moment bounds for the relevant estimators and identify precise low-moment regimes, showing how generic and degenerate nodal structures lead to different integrability thresholds. Building on this analysis, we introduce a new robust variant of VMC $\unicode{x2013}$ coined PS-Clip-VMC $\unicode{x2013}$ which is based on clipping both the local energy and the gradient random variable. We prove that PS-Clip-VMC converges both in expectation and with high probability in the weak moment regime of VMC. Preliminary experiments for training FermiNet on Atoms with up to 18 electrons suggest that PS-Clip-VMC is significantly more robust than standard methods.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Rethinking Shrinkage Bias in LLM FP4 Pretraining: Geometric Origin, Systemic Impact, and UFP4 Recipe

arXiv:2606.20381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: FP4 training promises substantial reductions in memory and computation cost for LLM pretraining, yet current FP4 hardware paths and recipes, including NVIDIA Blackwell/Rubin-class systems and AMD MI350-series GPUs, remain centered on E2M1 data elements. In this study, we identify a fundamental limitation of that choice: non-uniform formats such as E2M1 inherently suffer from Shrinkage Bias, a systematic negative rounding error caused by the geometric asymmetry of their representable bins. We show that this bias accumulates multiplicatively across layers and is amplified by the Random Hadamard Transform (RHT), providing a unified explanation for the training instability observed in existing E2M1-based FP4 recipes. In contrast, uniform grids (E1M2/INT4) bypass this grid-geometry error and better convert the improved bucket utilization from RHT into higher quantization quality. Based on this finding, we propose UFP4, a uniform 4-bit training recipe that applies RHT to all three training GEMMs while restricting stochastic rounding to dY alone. On Dense 1.5B, MoE 7.9B, and MoE 124B long-run pretraining, UFP4 consistently achieves lower BF16-relative loss degradation than strong E2M1-based baselines, supported by scaling-law analysis and ablation studies. Our results suggest that future accelerators should support E1M2/INT4-style uniform 4-bit grids as first-class training primitives alongside E2M1.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Faithful by Construction: Claim-Anchored Attribution for Multi-Document Summarization

作者:

End-to-end large language models (LLMs) produce fluent multi-document summaries but remain prone to hallucination, and the attributions they offer are typically coarse (whole documents or passages) and generated post hoc, leaving each summary statement hard to verify. We revisit the modular Extract–Select–Rewrite paradigm and recast its intermediate representation as the unit of attribution. We present CAMS, a Claim-Anchored Multi-document Summarization framework that (i) extracts atomic claims with token-level provenance from every source document, (ii) clusters equivalent claims across documents while flagging inter-source conflicts, (iii) selects a support-aware and salient subset, and (iv) rewrites the selection into a summary in which every sentence is anchored to a support-checked claim that links back to one or more source spans. Because content is localized before it is realized, the pipeline is attribution-oriented by construction and faithfulness-oriented by construction: it structurally preserves fine-grained, multi-source traceability while using support-aware selection, constrained rewriting, and verification to encourage, rather than guarantee, factual faithfulness. We evaluate quality, faithfulness, and localization on MultiNews, analyze conflict handling on DiverseSumm, and test zero-shot transfer on WCEP, using a two-regime protocol that separates reference-free citation quality from gold-aligned localization accuracy, and we add an evaluator-decoupled audit that tests citation precision with a support model never used for selection or verification. CAMS matches strong end-to-end and span-attribution baselines on summary quality while substantially improving faithfulness and citation precision, lifting multi-source attribution accuracy by roughly two-thirds, and exposing a controllable faithfulness–coverage trade-off that end-to-end models leave implicit.

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

Generative Engine Optimization at Scale: Measuring Brand Visibility Across AI Search Engines

People increasingly get answers straight from AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini rather than scrolling search results. Brands that once focused on search engine optimization (SEO) must now optimize for how these engines represent, cite, and recommend them – a shift variously called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and AI Search Visibility. We treat AEO and AI Visibility as part of GEO, and study how to measure brand visibility across AI engines: what they value when they cite a brand, which sources they rely on, and what content large language models surface. The hard case is everyone outside the already-authoritative top brands – SMEs, D2C brands, creators, and early-stage startups. We analyze 100K+ prompt responses across 100+ brands tracked on Ranqo between March and May 2026. First visibility runs form a clear three-tier brand-stature ladder: global household names (e.g., Stripe, Nike) appear in 73% of relevant AI answers on their first run; established mid-market and regional brands (e.g., Olipop, Klaviyo) in 44%; niche and small brands in just 11% – about 30 percentage points per step. When engines cite sources, about 78% go to corporate websites; among non-corporate sources YouTube leads, ahead of Reddit, editorial media, and Wikipedia. The highest-leverage page is the ranked "best-of" listicle, the most-cited content format at about 21% of all citations. Sentiment is the unstable signal: whether a brand is framed positively or negatively flips about 6.7 times more often than whether it is mentioned at all. These findings provide a first large-scale baseline for measuring GEO: AI brand visibility can be measured, differs by platform, and varies strongly by brand maturity. We close by proposing seven v1.1 protocols to test whether specific recommendations can causally improve AI visibility.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Descriptor: Certus Caliber Classification Gunshot Dataset (C3GD)

arXiv:2606.18135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we introduce the Certus Caliber Classification Gunshot Dataset (C3GD), a publicly accessible data set developed for the analysis of firearm muzzle blast sounds. The dataset aims to provide a wide variety of firearms, calibers, cartridges, microphones, and microphone locations with metadata detailed beyond what is currently otherwise available. It comprises more than 8000 field-collected data points from 28 firearms across 16 calibers. Because data collection in the field is costly, much of the existing research has been done using gunshot audio collected from the internet, which increases the risk of low-quality data and label noise. This dataset is primarily focused on caliber classification, but can also be used for gunshot detection, audio separation, and audio signal processing, providing a diversified and real-world reference. The dataset aims to provide enough diversity to be able to generalize to more real-world applications while also providing enough metadata for detailed academic analysis.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Direct Fisher Score Estimation for Likelihood Maximization

arXiv:2506.06542v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the problem of likelihood maximization when the likelihood function is intractable but model simulations are readily available. We propose a sequential, gradient-based optimization method that directly models the Fisher score based on a local score matching technique which uses simulations from a localized region around each parameter iterate. By employing a linear parameterization to the surrogate score model, our technique admits a closed-form, least-squares solution. This approach yields a fast, flexible, and efficient approximation to the Fisher score, effectively smoothing the likelihood objective and mitigating the challenges posed by complex likelihood landscapes. We provide theoretical guarantees for our score estimator, including bounds on the bias introduced by the smoothing. Empirical results on a range of synthetic and real-world problems demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing benchmarks.

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

Identifiability Without Gaussianity: Symbolic World Models and Near-Infinite Temporal Consistency

Klindt, LeCun, and Balestriero (arXiv:2605.26379) proved that Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) achieve linear identifiability, the linear recovery of the world's true latent variables, if and only if the world's latent dynamics follow a Gaussian, stationary process. This Gaussian boundary implies a fundamental limit on temporal consistency: for any non-Gaussian physical system, the representation error of a statistical World Model grows monotonically with time. We prove that this limit is an artifact of the statistical alignment mechanism, not a property of World Models in general. We introduce the Physics-Grounded Symbolic Architecture (PGSA) and prove three results: (1) a PGSA achieves exact linear identifiability for all physical regimes, regardless of the latent distribution; (2) the per-step error of a PGSA is bounded by numerical precision alone; and (3) as a direct consequence, a PGSA maintains temporal consistency for an unbounded number of transitions, a property we term near-infinite temporal consistency. We further prove that statistical World Models cannot achieve this property for any non-Gaussian system, regardless of model capacity or the volume of training data. The algebraic cores of four of the theorems are formalized in Lean 4 with Mathlib4 v4.31.0 (zero sorry placeholders); the Klindt et al. converse is taken as an external premise. The contrast establishes that symbolic grounding in the causal generator of the world's dynamics is the sufficient condition and, in non-Gaussian regimes, the only condition for near-infinite temporal consistency.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Expert in Ultrasound Skills: Feasibility of an IMU-video platform to describe technical profiles during focused cardiac ultrasound. Pilot study

Background: Focused cardiac ultrasound (FoCUS) is operator dependent and requires coordinated probe manipulation, image interpretation and iterative visual feedback. Existing assessment approaches often emphasize final image quality or expert rating. We developed Expert in Ultrasound Skills (EXUS) , a platform that synchronizes transducer-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) data with ultrasound video, and evaluated its technical feasibility during FoCUS acquisition. Methods: This observational pilot study included 6 operators performing two repetitions of a four-view FoCUS protocol, yielding 12 analytical sessions and 48 planned acquisitions. Feasibility was defined by acquisition completion, video availability, start/stop events, fused IMU-video windows, temporal coverage, complete human label entries and IMU integrity. A 100-image Likert rating task was used to summarize pairwise inter-rater agreement for still-frame image quality assessment. Results: All 48 planned acquisitions were completed with video, start/stop events, fused windows and complete human label entries. Temporal coverage was at least 90% in 47/48 acquisitions. IMU integrity endpoints exceeded the 80% threshold: 43/48 acquisitions had no extreme IMU-derived artifact, 43/48 had no active-segment IMU restart and 44/48 had no complete motion flatline. Mean pairwise exact agreement for the Likert task was 38.9%, with mean quadratic-weighted Cohen's kappa of 0.564. Post hoc profiles varied across duration, visual quality, mechanical load and motor efficiency. Conclusions: EXUS was technically feasible for synchronized IMU-video capture during FoCUS. The pilot supports multimodal acquisition data as a way to describe technical profiles and generate formative feedback hypotheses, but the post hoc indices are not validated competency measures. Keywords: focused cardiac ultrasound; point-of-care ultrasound; inertial measurement unit; medical education; deliberate practice

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

SARA: Unlocking Multilingual Knowledge in Mixture-of-Experts via Semantically Anchored Routing Alignment

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have emerged as an increasingly influential paradigm as they offer a strategic balance between parameter scalability and computational efficiency. However, low-resource languages, which suffer from a scarcity of high-quality training data, often have their tokens routed to different experts than those predominantly activated by high-resource inputs, which limits cross-lingual expert sharing. This cross-lingual routing divergence consequently hinders their efficacy in multilingual contexts. To address this issue, we propose SARA (Semantically Anchored Routing Alignment), a framework designed to transfer specialized capabilities from high-resource languages as anchors to low-resource languages. SARA explicitly aligns the routing distribution of multilingual inputs with high-resource semantic anchors using a symmetric Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence constraint. Unlike traditional distillation methods that operate on output logits, SARA directly aligns the internal routing distributions of MoE layers, encouraging mechanistic consistency in expert selection across languages. We conduct experiments on 2 LLMs across 5 low-resource languages and 3 benchmarks. Experiment results demonstrate that SARA outperforms standard instruction tuning, e.g., +0.8% on Qwen3-30B-A3B and +1.2% on Phi-3.5-MoE-instruct on Global-MMLU. Further analyses show that SARA effectively addresses performance bottlenecks in low-resource languages, providing a scalable pathway to enhance multilingual capabilities in sparse architectures.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Logic Codes: Complete Transversal Logical Clifford Instruction Sets for High-Rate Stabilizer Quantum Error Correcting Codes

作者:

arXiv:2606.13521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the structure and transversal logical capabilities of stabilizer quantum error correcting codes. Among our results, we identify universal lower bounds on circuit depth to generate a full logical Clifford algebra, and develop novel constructions of logical transversal gates including a new depth-one transversal phase $\mathrm{\overline{S}}$ gate in the rotated surface code and a depth-one intra-block $\mathrm{\overline{CZ}}$ gate in the 2D-toric code that generalizes to all odd distances and all lengths $L\ge3$, respectively. Finally, we construct a high-rate non-LDPC CSS code family with parameters $[[n,\sqrt{n},\Theta({n^{\beta}})]]$ where $\beta \approx 0.2823$ in one demonstrated case, that provably possesses a constant-depth complete 2-local transversal logical Clifford basis instruction set architecture (ISA) composed of all individually targeted $\mathrm{\overline{S}}$, $\mathrm{\overline{SHS}} = \sqrt{X}$, and $\mathrm{\overline{CZ}}$ gates. This ISA is depth-one for certain subfamilies that we design and generally constant-depth under certain conditions. The code family is built from a small code with parameters $[[n_0, 2, d_0]]$, and is tunable in the standard way: it tiles out to form utility-scale logical qubit counts, and it scales up through concatenation to achieve higher distances and error suppression. We show that this construction preserves the depth-one complete transversal logical Clifford basis ISA when composed with these commuting construction actions, inheriting structure from the core codes so that at scale the complete logical Clifford basis ISA remains depth-one up to depth-two addressable operations between tiled cores. We call these Quantum Logic Codes.

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

Low-resource Language Discrimination Towards Chinese Dialects with Transfer learning and Data Augmentation

Chinese dialects discrimination is a challenging natural language processing task due to scarce annotation resource. In this article, we develop a novel Chinese dialects discrimination framework with transfer learning and data augmentation (CDDTLDA) in order to overcome the shortage of resources. To be more specific, we first use a relatively larger Chinese dialects corpus to train a source-side automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. Then, we adopt a simple but effective data augmentation method (i.e., speed, pitch, and noise disturbance) to augment the target-side low-resource Chinese dialects, and fine-tune another target ASR model based on the previous source-side ASR model. Meanwhile, the potential common semantic features between source-side and target-side ASR models can be captured by using self-attention mechanism. Finally, we extract the hidden semantic representation in the target ASR model to conduct Chinese dialects discrimination. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark Chinese dialects corpora.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ClawEnvKit: Automatic Environment Generation for Claw-Like Agents

Constructing environments for training and evaluating claw-like agents remains a manual, human-intensive process that does not scale. We argue that what is needed is not just a dataset, but an automated pipeline capable of generating diverse, verified environments on demand. To this end, we introduce ClawEnvKit, an autonomous generation pipeline that instantiates this formalism from natural language descriptions. The pipeline comprises three modules: (1) a parser that extracts structured generation parameters from natural language input; (2) a generator that produces the task specification, tool interface, and scoring configuration; and (3) a validator that enforces feasibility, diversity, structural validity, and internal consistency across the generated environments. Using ClawEnvKit, we construct Auto-ClawEval, the first large-scale benchmark for claw-like agents, comprising 1,040 environments across 24 categories. Empirically, Auto-ClawEval matches or exceeds human-curated environments on coherence and clarity at 13,800x lower cost. Evaluated across 4 model families and 8 agent harness frameworks, we find that harness engineering boosts performance by up to 15.7 percentage points over a bare ReAct baseline, completion remains the primary axis of variation with no model saturating the benchmark, and automated generation enables evaluation at a scale previously infeasible. Beyond static benchmarking, ClawEnvKit enables live evaluation: users describe a desired capability in natural language and obtain a verified environment on demand, turning evaluation into a continuous, user-driven process. The same mechanism serves as an on-demand training environment generator, producing task distributions that adapt to an agent's current weaknesses rather than being bounded by existing user logs.

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

LLMs Contain Multitudes: How Deployment Context Reshapes Model-Level Preferences and Values

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly characterised in recent evaluation work as having stable, model-level preference and value systems. However, accompanying robustness checks are limited to incidental prompt perturbations such as syntax variation and option reordering. This leaves open whether the measured properties survive when the surrounding task context changes, as it does in most real deployments. We test this directly across two established pairwise paradigms: ranking country preferences and eliciting utility judgements. In both, we make the deployment context – the high-level task the model is performing while making concrete value-dependent choices – our controlled variable, varied across framings such as writing a Reddit post or a news article. Across five LLMs and over 1.2M pairwise decisions, deployment context produces variation far larger than prompt paraphrasing and temperature controls. In country preference rankings over 15 countries, context induces widespread, statistically significant rank shifts; the aggregate Global North favouritism reported in prior work is itself context-dependent, with each model's bias shifting systematically across contexts. In utility elicitation over 50 outcomes, broad cross-category ordering is preserved, but fine-grained rankings within domains vary substantially, and cardinal exchange rates between outcomes (e.g. how many lives in one region equal one in another) shift by a factor of 2.47 at the median. Reported model-level preferences and utilities are therefore better understood as context-conditioned measurements than fixed model-level properties: safety guarantees obtained under one framing provide limited assurance in another.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices Regarding Maternal Nutrition Counselling Among Frontline Health Workers in Udupi, Karnataka, India: A Sequential Explanatory Mixed-Methods Study

Background Indias maternal nutrition profile is undergoing a dual-direction shift, with persistent undernutrition coexisting alongside rising overweight and micronutrient deficiencies. Despite national efforts through Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) and the National Health Mission (NHM), maternal dietary diversity remains suboptimal in India. Frontline health workers (FLWs) play a central role in delivering nutrition counselling; however, gaps remain between knowledge and its translation into practice, highlighting the need to strengthen training, applied competencies, and health system support within primary care settings. Objective To assess knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) regarding maternal nutrition counselling among FLWs and to explore contextual factors influencing counselling delivery. Methods A sequential explanatory mixed-methods study was conducted in Udupi, Karnataka, India. In phase one, 46 FLWs- Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA), Community Health Officers (CHO), and Primary Health Care Officers (PHCO) completed a validated Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices (KAP) questionnaire. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Kruskal-Wallis test, Spearman correlation, and exploratory multiple linear regression. In phase two, one focus group discussion with 21 participants was conducted and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results FLWs demonstrated moderate KAP scores (37.50 {+/-} 5.09), with lower scores observed in dietary diversity knowledge and counselling practices. CHOs and PHCOs had significantly higher knowledge (p < 0.001) and practice scores (p = 0.002) compared to ASHAs, while attitudes were similar across cadres. Knowledge was positively associated with practice ({rho} = 0.389, p = 0.008). Exploratory regression indicated that cadre and knowledge were associated with practice, while attitude was not statistically significant. Qualitative findings suggested that counselling was largely protocol-based and constrained by workload, limited counselling tools, economic barriers, and cultural food practices. Conclusion Despite positive attitudes towards maternal nutrition counselling, frontline health workers demonstrated gaps in knowledge and counselling practices. Mixed-methods findings suggest that counselling delivery is shaped by both provider competencies and health-system constraints, highlighting the need for implementation-focused strategies to strengthen maternal nutrition counselling in routine antenatal care.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

How to improve the accuracy of semiclassical and quasiclassical dynamics with and without generalized quantum master equations

arXiv:2603.04563v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Semi- and quasi-classical (SC) theories can handle arbitrary interatomic interactions and are thus well-suited to predict quantum dynamics in condensed phases that encode energy and charge transport, spectroscopic responses, and chemical reactivity. However, SC theories can be computationally expensive and inaccurate. When combined with generalized quantum master equations (GQMEs), the resulting SC-GQMEs have been observed to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of SC dynamics. Yet, while the mechanism responsible for improved efficiency is clear, the underlying improved accuracy remains elusive. What is worse, SC-GQMEs can yield unphysical dynamics in challenging parameter regimes – a shortcoming that might be avoided if the mechanism of accuracy improvement were understood. Here, we uncover this mechanism. We leverage short-time analyses to prove that exact, "left-handed" time-derivatives delay the onset of SC inaccuracy, and show that their numerical integration yields dynamics with improved accuracy, even without the GQME. We find, however, that these derivatives are a double-edged sword: while offering greater short-time accuracy, they become unphysical in challenging parameter regimes. Because short-lived memory kernels can leverage short-time accuracy while circumventing long-time instability, we develop a protocol to unambiguously determine the memory kernel cutoff, even in challenging regimes where previous treatments had failed. Our insights into accuracy improvement and kernel cutoff protocol can be expected to apply to complex systems that go beyond simple models.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

SDE-Driven Spatio-Temporal Hypergraph Neural Networks for Irregular Longitudinal fMRI Connectome Modeling in Alzheimer's Disease

arXiv:2603.20452v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Longitudinal neuroimaging is essential for modeling disease progression in Alzheimer's disease (AD), yet irregular sampling and missing visits pose substantial challenges for learning reliable temporal representations. To address this challenge, we propose SDE-HGNN, a stochastic differential equation (SDE)-driven spatio-temporal hypergraph neural network for irregular longitudinal fMRI connectome modeling. The framework first employs an SDE-based reconstruction module to recover continuous latent trajectories from irregular observations. Based on these reconstructed representations, dynamic hypergraphs are constructed to capture higher-order interactions among brain regions over time. To further model temporal evolution, hypergraph convolution parameters evolve through SDE-controlled recurrent dynamics conditioned on inter-visit intervals, enabling disease-stage-adaptive connectivity modeling. We also incorporate a sparsity-based importance learning mechanism to identify salient brain regions and discriminative connectivity patterns. Extensive experiments on the OASIS-3 and ADNI cohorts demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art graph and hypergraph baselines in AD progression prediction. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SDE-HGNN-017F.