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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Security Analysis of Long-Horizon Agentic AI Systems: Threats, Evaluation, and Framework Development

arXiv:2606.14816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a structured analysis of security challenges in long-horizon agentic AI systems. The study reviews existing threats, evaluation approaches, attack propagation mechanisms, and security frameworks. A taxonomy of security threats and a framework for analyzing attack propagation are proposed to support future research in agentic AI security

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Asymptotic properties for fully coupled delayed forward-backward stochastic differential equations

arXiv:2606.19925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the asymptotic behavior of solutions to a class of fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations with time-delayed generators. Such systems arise naturally in stochastic models with memory effects and constitute a significant extension of the classical fully coupled FBSDE framework. The presence of delay introduces additional analytical difficulties due to the dependence of the coefficients on the past trajectories of the solution processes and the resulting non-Markovian structure. Under suitable assumptions on the coefficients, we study the asymptotic properties of a perturbed delayed FBSDE driven by a small noise parameter. We first establish the convergence in distribution of the associated solution processes as the perturbation parameter tends to zero. We then prove almost sure convergence towards the solution of the corresponding deterministic limiting system. As a consequence of these asymptotic results, we derive a large deviation principle for the solution processes. Our results extend the asymptotic analysis of Cruzeiro, Gomes and Zhang (2014) from the classical fully coupled FBSDE setting to the delayed framework, and complement existing works on weakly coupled delayed forward-backward systems. They provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first large deviation principle for fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations with delayed generators.

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

Hybrid Open-Ended Tri-Evolution Makes Better Deep Researcher

arXiv:2606.13710v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research and agent evolution serve as de-facto tasks for AI agents in real-world applications toward artificial general intelligence. The former enables autonomous retrieval and integration of information in open-ended environments to tackle open-ended research tasks, yet it is constrained by the static parametric deep research capabilities of agent systems. The latter allows agents to autonomously interact with the environment to gain experiences that evolve model capabilities. However, its effectiveness has been widely validated only on verifiable tasks with standard answers, leaving a gap with open-ended research tasks. To bridge these two critical tasks, we propose the Hybrid Open-Ended Tri-Evolution (HOTE) framework, which leverages hybrid-mode reinforcement learning to facilitate the collaborative evolution of a proposer, solver and judge based on web-scale knowledge, moving toward autonomous evolving agents in open-ended tasks and environments. Extensive experiments on three long-form deep research benchmarks demonstrate that the 8B model trained via HOTE surpasses the strongest static open 8-32B models as well as those trained by state-of-the-art deep research training methods with less time overhead, and further verify that the evolution of all three modules in HOTE is indispensable.

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

ESBMC-PLC: Formal Verification of IEC 61131-3 Ladder Diagram Programs Using SMT-Based Model Checking

PLCs execute safety-critical programs across industrial sectors. The dominant PLC notation, ladder diagram (LD) per IEC 61131-3, remains absent from formal verification: SMT-based model checkers cannot process LD's rung-and-coil graphics. This paper presents ESBMC-PLC, the first open-source formal verifier with native LD support (PLCopen XML format), implemented as a new ESBMC frontend. ESBMC-PLC translates LD rungs to GOTO IR, models the PLC scan cycle as a while(true) loop with nondeterministic inputs, and checks safety properties via SMT-based bounded model checking or k-induction. A five-property YAML language (mutual_exclusion, invariant, absence, response, reachability) avoids temporal logic. A survey of 22 studies (2020-2026) identifies four research gaps; ESBMC-PLC closes two of them. Evaluation on 13 benchmarks (6 domains, 3 sources - including deployed CONTROLLINO PLCs and MathWorks Simulink PLC Coder) shows correct classification across 61 properties: all 9 author-constructed programs (Categories A/B) as expected, all 4 vendor programs (Category C) correctly unlabeled, with 8 bugs found (actionable counterexamples), 7 unbounded k-induction proofs, all runs under 60ms on Apple Silicon. Feature comparison with PLCverif shows that ESBMC-PLC is the only open-source tool that combines native LD, k-induction, and SMT bit-vector semantics.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CheXGenBench: A Unified Benchmark For Fidelity, Privacy and Utility of Synthetic Chest Radiographs

Structured benchmarks have advanced text-conditional image generation for real-world imagery, however, no such benchmark exists for synthetic radiograph generation. Despite being a highly active area of research, existing studies continue adopting inconsistent evaluation protocols and lack a unified assessment of the three most critical criteria: generative fidelity, privacy risk, and downstream utility. To address these limitations, we introduce CheXGenBench, the first unified evaluation framework for synthetic chest radiograph generation that simultaneously assesses fidelity, privacy risks, and downstream utility across frontier text-to-image (T2I) generative models. Our evaluation protocol, comprising over 20 quantitative metrics, covers 11 leading T2I architectures with plug-and-play integration for newer models. Through a rigorous and fair evaluation protocol, we establish comprehensive baseline state-of-the-art (SoTA) performances across all dimensions to guide future research. Furthermore, our results uncover several limitations of current generative models, which include first, even SoTA models struggle with long-tailed medical distributions; second, models pose high privacy risks regardless of fidelity quality; and third, while synthetic data already benefits downstream classification, it is of limited utility for downstream multimodal tasks. Drawing from these results, we propose concrete research directions to advance the field. The code is available at https://github.com/Raman1121/CheXGenBench

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

SAGE: Answer-Conditioned Uncertainty Targets for Verbal Uncertainty Alignment

Large language models increasingly express uncertainty through natural-language statements, yet these expressions often fail to reflect the model's sampled behavior. We study verbal uncertainty alignment as a distributional calibration problem: the appropriate uncertainty target for a prompt should be estimated from repeated model outputs rather than from an isolated response. However, group rollouts alone are insufficient, since the resulting target must provide a useful training signal. Existing targets only partially satisfy this requirement. We propose SAGE, Semantic-Answer Guided Entropy, a group-level uncertainty target that constructs an answer-conditioned uncertainty geometry over sampled responses. SAGE preserves categorical, numeric, and symbolic answer distinctions while maintaining a smooth and scale-preserving calibration signal. We further apply this target through Group-Uncertainty Preference Optimization, or GUPO, an uncertainty-channel training framework that supervises verbal uncertainty expressions rather than the full response. Experiments across factual, mathematical, and multiple-choice reasoning tasks show improved uncertainty ranking, lower calibration error, and reduced overconfidence.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

UniversalRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation over Corpora of Diverse Modalities and Granularities

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown substantial promise in improving factual accuracy by grounding model responses with external knowledge relevant to queries. However, most existing approaches are limited to a text-only corpus, and while recent efforts have extended RAG to other modalities such as images and videos, they typically operate over a single modality-specific corpus. In contrast, real-world queries vary widely in the type of knowledge they require, which a single type of knowledge source cannot address. To address this, we introduce UniversalRAG, an any-to-any RAG framework designed to retrieve and integrate knowledge from heterogeneous sources with diverse modalities and granularities. Specifically, motivated by the observation that forcing all modalities into a unified representation space derived from a single aggregated corpus causes a modality gap, where the retrieval tends to favor items from the same modality as the query, we propose modality-aware routing, which dynamically identifies the most appropriate modality-specific corpus and performs targeted retrieval within it, and further justify its effectiveness with a theoretical analysis. Moreover, beyond modality, we organize each modality into multiple granularity levels, enabling fine-tuned retrieval tailored to the complexity and scope of the query. We validate UniversalRAG on 10 benchmarks of multiple modalities, showing its superiority over various modality-specific and unified baselines.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SHARD: Safe and Helpful Alignment via Self-Reframing Distillation

Large language models often struggle with sensitive prompts. They may refuse outright, provide generic safety boilerplate, or fail to address the user's legitimate informational needs that can be answered safely. We introduce SHARD, a self-reframing distillation method to improve safe-helpfulness. It first rewrites sensitive prompts to surface benign intent using philosophical guidelines, then reframes its original responses into safe, more helpful ones, and finally fine-tunes the model on its self-reframed responses. Across DNA and the English subset of LINGUASAFE, SHARD improves helpfulness for most model families while preserving safety. It also remains competitive with distillation from a larger teacher model, suggesting that models can internalize safe and helpful behavior elicited from their own. Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or harmful.

09.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-08

Effects of SGLT2 inhibition on incident heart failure in carriers of cardiomyopathy-associated genetic variants

Although the beneficial effects of sodium–glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibition in heart failure (HF) have been well established, it is unknown whether SGLT2 inhibition confers benefit in carriers of rare variants in cardiomyopathy-associated genes. Here we evaluated whole-exome sequencing data from the randomized DECLARE-TIMI 58 trial, in which adults with type 2 diabetes and increased cardiovascular risk were randomized to dapagliflozin or placebo treatment. Pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants (P/LP) in high-confidence cardiomyopathy genes were identified, and treatment effects on hospitalization for HF (HHF) were compared between carriers of such variants and noncarriers. Among 12,685 patients for whom sequence data were obtained, 121 carried a cardiomyopathy variant (76 dilated cardiomyopathy, 25 hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and 25 arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy). Over a median follow-up of 4.2 years, dapagliflozin lowered the risk of HHF more strongly in carriers (hazard ratio 0.18, 95% confidence interval 0.04–0.86) than in noncarriers (hazard ratio 0.70, 95% confidence interval 0.57–0.86; P interaction 0.03). Absolute risk reduction was 13.0% in carriers and 1.0% in noncarriers (P interaction 0.03). Most carriers (82%) had no prior HF, and in carriers without prior HF, treatment with dapagliflozin reduced the absolute risk of HHF by 12.8%, compared with a reduction of 0.6% in noncarriers (P interaction 0.01). The findings from this cohort of older and high-risk patients raise the possibility that SGLT2 inhibitor treatment should be started early to prevent HF in individuals who carry P/LP cardiomyopathy variants. These results need to be confirmed in a prospective, dedicated trial of preventive HF treatments in carriers of P/LP cardiomyopathy-associated variants. In a whole-exome sequencing analysis, the beneficial effects of the SGLT2 inhibitor dapagliflozin in reducing the risk of future heart failure hospitalization in individuals with type 2 diabetes were markedly greater in individuals who carried a cardiomyopathy-associated genetic variant compared with noncarriers, suggesting a personalized preventative therapy based on genetic information.

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

CoffeeBench: Benchmarking Long-Horizon LLM Agents in Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Economies

arXiv:2606.16613v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM agents become capable of increasingly long-horizon tasks, evaluating their performance in economic systems is becoming increasingly important. Unlike existing benchmarks that primarily evaluate a single agent interacting with a passive environment, economic systems are inherently multi-agent, requiring autonomous agents to communicate, negotiate, and transact while pursuing their own objectives over extended periods. We introduce CoffeeBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLM agents in a long-horizon multi-agent economy composed of heterogeneous firms. In CoffeeBench, two farmers, two roasters, and two retailers autonomously operate their businesses over a 90-day simulation, each seeking to maximize cumulative net income through communication and transactions while managing cash, inventory, and pricing. The evaluated model controls one coffee roaster, while the remaining firms are controlled by fixed reference agents. Across several recent open-weight and proprietary LLMs, all models outperform a passive baseline that takes no actions, with most achieving positive net income. Analysis of agent behavior reveals substantial differences in long-horizon economic interaction: higher-performing models communicate more actively with other firms, whereas Claude~Haiku~4.5 exhibits an idle-drift failure mode, repeatedly choosing inaction despite producing coherent assessments and plans. We release our code and agent trajectories to support future research.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

AdsMind: A Physics-Grounded Multi-Agent System for Self-Correcting Discovery of Adsorption Configurations on Heterogeneous Catalyst Surfaces

arXiv:2606.19152v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identifying the lowest-energy surface-adsorbate configuration is critical for modeling heterogeneous catalysis, yet exhaustive exploration with ab initio calculations is computationally prohibitive. Machine-learning force fields (MLFFs) accelerate structural relaxation but leave the search over the vast configurational space a major bottleneck, and open-loop large language model (LLM) agents lack a physics-grounded feedback mechanism to correct erroneous initial guesses. We propose AdsMind (Adsorption configuration discovery with Machine intelligence and relaxation feedback), a closed-loop multi-agent framework that enables autonomous error correction through MLFF relaxation feedback. Across four LLM backends, AdsMind achieves consistently high search reliability, with success rates of 100% and 98.8% on the benchmarks AA20 and OCD-GMAE62. Relative to its single-pass (1-Shot) ablation it reduces cross-backend energy dispersion, and it uses only 4.11 and 4.67 MLFF relaxations per case, respectively – an approximately 14-fold reduction over heuristic enumeration baselines. Density functional theory (DFT) validation using VASP/PBE on six representative AA20 systems shows that the reported open-loop Adsorb-Agent outputs exhibit qualitative adsorption-energy sign errors for molecular adsorbates, whereas AdsMind preserves the correct sign in all tested cases with closer quantitative agreement. AdsMind thus delivers reliability, self-reflection, and interpretability simultaneously, supporting more DFT-informed autonomous chemistry workflows.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Experimental Observation of Dynamical Phase Transitions in a Dephased Photonic Quantum Walk

arXiv:2606.15935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamical phase transitions in open quantum systems govern how non-equilibrium states relax toward a stationary state. We study these transitions experimentally using a discrete-time photonic quantum walk on a three-node graph. A tunable synthetic gauge flux and calibrated dephasing allow us to control time-reversal symmetry and the detailed balance properties of the effective Markovian dynamics. With detailed balance, we observe a first-order dynamical phase transition marked by a crossing of real Liouvillian eigenvalues. When detailed balance is broken, we observe a second-order dynamical phase transition at an exceptional point where eigenvalues and eigenvectors coalesce. By progressively reducing the dephasing strength, we track the crossover toward the quantum-coherent regime and determine that the transitions persist down to a finite threshold. Our results link Liouvillian spectral topology to relaxation criticality and demonstrate a controllable platform for engineered dissipative dynamics.

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

Sensor-Conditioned Representation Learning via Scene-Relevant Observation Quotients

arXiv:2606.16210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned representations in intelligent sensing systems are often evaluated by reconstruction fidelity or downstream prediction accuracy, but these criteria do not specify which latent distinctions are justified by the sensing process. In sensor-conditioned environments, nuisance factors can change measurements without changing the scene, while distinct scenes may be indistinguishable under limited sensing capability. This paper formulates sensor-conditioned representation correctness as preserving sensing-supported scene distinctions while suppressing nuisance-induced and sensor-unsupported variation. We introduce the scene-relevant observation quotient, a representation target induced by sensing-supported distinguishability after nuisance canonicalization, and develop Observation-Quotient Tucker-Structured Autoencoding (OQ-TSAE), a scene-nuisance factorized framework with diagnostics for false distinction, false merge, nuisance sensitivity, and latent ordering consistency. Experiments on a controlled benchmark show that quotient-consistent supervision improves representation-correctness diagnostics over reconstruction-oriented, metric-learning, and contrastive-learning baselines. Sensitivity, perturbation, and ablation studies show the importance of quotient-aligned supervision, reliable quotient relations, and quotient geometry. Complementary real-radar experiments show that a reconstruction-only OQ-TSAE variant retains competitive downstream utility, robustness under observation degradation, and low seed-to-seed variability. These results suggest that sensor-conditioned representations should be evaluated not only by predictive utility, but also by whether their latent geometry preserves sensing-justified scene distinctions.

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

MemSlides: A Hierarchical Memory Driven Agent Framework for Personalized Slide Generation with Multi-turn Local Revision

Personalized presentation generation requires more than conditioning on a current prompt or template: agents must preserve stable user preferences across tasks, retain newly introduced preferences and constraints during multi-turn revision, and carry out local edits reliably. We propose MemSlides, a hierarchical memory framework for personalized presentation agents that separates long-term memory from working memory and further divides long-term memory into user profile memory and tool memory. User profile memory stores intent-conditioned profiles for round-0 personalization, working memory carries active preferences and session constraints across revision rounds, and tool memory stores reusable execution experience for reliable localized editing. MemSlides pairs this memory design with scoped slide-local revision, so targeted updates act on the smallest affected region instead of repeatedly regenerating the full deck. In controlled experiments, user profile memory improves persona-alignment judgments on a multi-persona, multi-intent profile bank, tool-memory injection improves closed-loop modify behavior in diagnostic matched-pair settings, and qualitative cases illustrate working memory's ability to carryover preferences. Taken together, these results suggest that effective personalization in presentation authoring depends on separating persistent user profiles, session-level working memory, and reusable execution experience across generation and localized revision.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Automated AI-Based Ventricular Subcompartment Segmentation and Volumetry in Idiopathic Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus

Purpose In idiopathic normal pressure hydrocephalus (iNPH), longitudinal monitoring of ventricular size is important for diagnosis and treatment follow-up. This study aimed to validate a fully automated AI model for CT ventricular volumetry with subcompartments and to compare AI-derived volume changes with routine radiology assessments. Methods This retrospective, single-center study included 88 patients with iNPH and 456 non-contrast-enhanced head CT examinations. The model was trained on 38 manually labeled CT scans with 12 ventricular subcompartments. Outcomes included segmentation accuracy, correspondence between AI-derived longitudinal ventricular volume changes and radiology report categories (decreased, unchanged, increased), radiologist detection thresholds for ventricular change, and paired pre- and postoperative volume changes in 22 patients with ventriculoperitoneal shunt. Results Mean segmentation accuracy was high (Dice, 0.83). 91% of 100 segmentations were rated as excellent by an expert neuroradiologist. AI-derived ventricular volume changes corresponded well to radiology report categories (median total ventricular volume changes of -17% in cases reported as decreased, 0% in unchanged cases, and +22% in increased cases; all p < 0.001). Radiologists reported ventricular volume change in 50% of cases at an AI-measured relative volume change of +/-6%, and in 90% of cases at +21% for enlargement and -18% for decrease. After shunt placement, ventricular volume decreased by -8% (median), with the largest relative reductions observed in the right temporal and occipital horns. Conclusions Automated AI-based ventricular segmentation on CT enables accurate and reproducible assessment of ventricular volume changes in iNPH and complements routine radiological evaluation for longitudinal and postoperative monitoring.

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

ToolChain-CRC: Conformal Risk Control for Agentic AI Under Retrieval and Tool-Use Drift

arXiv:2606.18467v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern AI agents retrieve documents, call tools, check intermediate information, and then produce a final answer or action. This creates a risk-control problem that is not visible from the final answer alone. A final response may look acceptable even when the retrieval was weak, a tool output was wrong, or an earlier step was unsupported. We propose ToolChain-CRC, a conformal risk-control method for retrieval-augmented and tool-using agents under drift. The method treats each agent run as a full trajectory of actions, observations, and final output. It builds step-level risk scores, combines them into a trajectory risk score, calibrates an accept-or-intervene rule, and adds an anytime alarm that can stop risky runs before the final answer. We prove trajectory-level risk control under exchangeable calibration runs, give a drift-aware extension with auditable constants, and prove an anytime escalation rule through a supermartingale construction. Experiments cover synthetic tool-chain drift, RAG/tool-use stress tests, public SQuAD-derived retrieval tasks, an API-free agentic QA case study, ablations, target-risk sensitivity checks, 20-seed robustness checks, a drift-margin audit, and a live RAG/tool-use agent benchmark. Across these settings, final-answer-only calibration can miss retrieval and tool failures, while trajectory-level calibration keeps accepted-trajectory risk below the target.

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

Beyond Models: Reflections on Engineering AI-enabled Systems in a Project-Based Course

arXiv:2606.16842v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Teaching Software Engineering for AI-enabled systems entails addressing the integration of AI components within full-scale software architectures under realistic constraints. While machine learning courses emphasize model development, students often lack experience in architectural design, deployment, and monitoring of AI-enabled systems. Empirical evaluations of such system-oriented AI courses remain limited. This paper reflects on the design and implementation of a project-based master's-level course titled AI Algorithms: Theory and Engineering, at the University of Bremen, in which students developed a movie recommendation system while making architectural design decisions to address challenges related to scalability, deployment, and evolving requirements. We conducted a mixed-methods study combining analyses of student submissions and questionnaire responses to investigate integration challenges, learning outcomes, and opportunities for improvement. Our results indicate persistent difficulties in early architectural decisions, heterogeneous ML integration, evolving requirements, and data management, largely due to uneven ML and software engineering expertise. From the educator's perspective, the course fostered system-level reasoning and strengthened awareness of data-centric ML practices in AI-enabled systems.

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

PCFootprint: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Vectorized Building Footprint Extraction from Aerial LiDAR Point Clouds

Building footprint extraction is a fundamental task in photogrammetry, remote sensing, and computer vision. Recent image-based methods have achieved remarkable progress in extracting vectorized footprints from high-resolution optical imagery. However, optical imagery inherently susceptible to occlusions, perspective distortions, and residual relief displacement, yielding incomplete or misaligned footprint extraction. Furthermore, the lack of explicit elevation information limits its direct applicability to Level of Detail building modeling. In this paper, we present PCFootprint, the first large-scale public dataset for footprint extraction from airborne laser scanning point clouds. PCFootprint comprises \num{33000} tiles derived from the Estonian Land and Spatial Development Board, covering diverse urban and rural landscapes. Each tile spans \qtyproduct{128 x 128}{\m} with systematically aligned vectorized footprints aligned to point clouds. The dataset includes a \num{3000} tiles cross-domain test set for evaluating generalization across geographic regions. We establish comprehensive benchmarks by evaluating mainstream methods. Experimental results reveal significant challenges including high intra-class variance, data imbalance, and noise across complex geospatial environments. We believe PCFootprint will advance future research in building modeling, urban scene understanding, and geospatial analysis. The PCFootprint dataset is publicly available at \url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/Haoyuan-Shen/PCFootprint}.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Silent Manipulation of Mental Health Treatment Recommendations from a Large Language Model

Importance. Large language models (LLMs) increasingly inform mental health decisions by patients and clinicians. Inference-time activation steering can shift model behavior on a target dimension without altering weights or prompts and without disclosure to users, allowing treatment recommendations to be silently changed for commercial or ideological reasons. Objective. To determine whether directional activation steering can shift an open-weights LLM's depression treatment recommendations. Design, Setting, and Participants. This non-human subjects study applied directional activation steering to an open-weights LLM (DeepSeek V4 Flash) responding to 12 depression-advice scenarios (4 favoring medication, 4 favoring avoidance, 4 neutral), generated at 30 amplitudes from -1.5 to +1.5 in 0.1 increments plus an unsteered baseline. Exposures. A single steering direction contrasting antidepressant medication with self-directed approaches (diet, exercise, meditation, dietary supplements), constructed from 16 paired training prompts and applied at the attention output of every transformer block; weights and system prompt were held constant. Main Outcomes and Measures. The extent to which medication and four self-care categories were addressed, scored 0 to 3 by a human-validated LLM rater (Claude Opus 4.7), the medication-versus-self-care balance, and clinician referral, estimated per unit of amplitude using mixed-effects models with a scenario random intercept. Results. Across 372 generations, steering produced a graded, dose-dependent shift in the medication-versus-self-care balance, which declined by 0.32 per unit of amplitude (beta=-0.32; 95% CI, -0.39 to -0.25; P < .001); medication extent fell and self-care extent rose. The shift was largest for scenarios with no stated treatment preference (beta = -0.44; 95% CI, -0.54 to -0.34; P < .001). A clinician referral appeared in 322 of 372 responses (87%) and did not vary with steering amplitude (P = .63). Conclusions and Relevance. In this open-weights LLM providing depression treatment information, inference-time activation steering shifted treatment recommendations without altering weights, prompt structure, or safety outputs, with the largest effect among users expressing no treatment preference. These findings suggest a need for LLM disclosure standards and independent auditing as such models inform clinical decisions.

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

SpheriCity: Designing Trustworthy Conversational AI for Sustainability Decision Support

arXiv:2606.13854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present SpheriCity, an expert-grounded conversational prototype designed to support trustworthy knowledge sensemaking from sustainability reports. City-level circularity assessment reports contain rich information about materials, infrastructure, and policy interventions, yet their length and heterogeneous structure make cross-document synthesis and comparison difficult for practitioners and researchers working on circular economy initiatives. While large language models (LLM) promise faster knowledge access and synthesis, their opaque reasoning, hallucinations, and lack of source transparency introduce risks for trust and interpretability, and require verification in high-stakes sustainability contexts. SpheriCity addresses these challenges through a provenance-first conversational agent that foregrounds evidence traceability, structured synthesis, and interaction scaffolds to support exploratory querying and cross-document synthesis across sustainability reports. We conducted a formative expert review with six sustainability experts using representative queries spanning cross-city comparison, policy summarization, and recommendation-oriented tasks. Experts evaluated responses across dimensions and provided qualitative reflections on the system's usefulness for sustainability knowledge work. Our results reveal that transparent sourcing, contextual explanation, interpretability, and alignment with expert workflow strongly shape expert trust and judgments of system usefulness. This work contributes (1) a conversational prototype for sustainability knowledge sensemaking, (2) an expert-grounded evaluation framework for assessing AI responses in high-stakes knowledge domains, and (3) design insights into how provenance, uncertainty communication, and integration in workflow influence expert users' trust in AI assistance for sustainability decision support.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Quantifying Aleatoric Uncertainty of In-Context Learning for Robust Measure of LLM Prediction Confidence

In-Context Learning (ICL) allows LLMs to adapt to new tasks from a few demonstrations, but its reliability remains a concern: predictions are highly sensitive to both prompt design and the model's ability to understand the context, obscuring whether failures arise from data properties or model limitations. Uncertainty decomposition-separating aleatoric from epistemic sources-is particularly crucial in this setting, yet existing methods, designed for standard generation tasks, fail to capture the unique dynamics of ICL. To address this, we introduce a concept of self-function vectors, built upon Bayesian views and the mechanistic interpretability of ICL. These vectors leverage internal model representations to model the latent concept learned during in-context prompting, thereby enabling a direct estimation of aleatoric uncertainty within a Bayesian framework and circumventing the reliance on brittle input or decoding manipulations. Given the lack of established benchmarks and suitable evaluation protocols, we also propose the first and rigorous evaluation protocol, in which data is manipulated in controlled ways so as to quantify aleatoric uncertainty precisely and separately from epistemic uncertainty. With this new evaluation framework, initially grounded in synthetic tasks for conceptual development and subsequently extended to real-world datasets, we show that our proposed methodology can measure uncertainty of LLM predictions made under ICL more reliably than existing alternative methods. Moreover, we show it can be used as a practical tool for trustworthy-related applications, such as hallucination detection. Our findings pave a new direction for connecting the quantitative view of uncertainty with the mechanistic understanding of model behavior.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Uniform-in-time error estimates for McKean-Vlasov SDEs with common noise and stochastic algorithms

arXiv:2606.14170v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, by construct an asymptotic coupling by reflection, we first explore the uniform-in-time estimate on probability distance for two measure-valued processes induced by a McKean-Vlasov SDE with common noise and an interacting particle system, where the drift terms are dissipative merely in the long distance. As direct applications of this estimate, we establish the uniform-in-time error estimates for the numerical solutions derived via backward/tamed/adaptive Euler-Maruyama methods. Moreover, as another direct application, the uniform-in-time conditional propagation of chaos is quantified.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

GeoNatureAgent Benchmark: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Environmental Geospatial Analysis Across Frontier and Open-Weight Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.12821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Environmental scientists spend disproportionate effort on data wrangling rather than analysis, and AI agents that automate geospatial workflows remain unvalidated: no benchmark evaluates agents operating through structured tool calling against real APIs. We introduce the GeoNatureAgent Benchmark, the first benchmark for environmental analysis agents that operate via structured tool calls to a production-style geospatial API. It comprises 93 tasks across 18 categories, covering municipality analysis, multi-turn conversation, spatial reasoning, cross-indicator synthesis, error handling and recovery, ranking, comparison, multilingual understanding, habitat analysis, and task rejection. Tasks are evaluated against an open, self-hostable API serving three environmental indicators across Spain and Portugal via sixteen tools. We evaluate seven LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4, DeepSeek V3.2, GLM-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Qwen3-235B, GPT-OSS-120B, Llama 4 Scout) under three temperature-1.0 seeds, reporting capability and per-case cost as orthogonal axes. We find: (1) Claude Sonnet 4 leads at 60.8% +/- 0.8%, followed by DeepSeek V3.2 at 56.3% +/- 3.1%, with no other model above 51%; (2) the cost-accuracy Pareto frontier is occupied mostly by open-weight models, with DeepSeek V3.2 offering 93% of Claude's capability at 11x lower cost ($0.011/case); (3) comparison tasks remain universally unsolved (0% on close-value comparisons), exposing systematic reasoning limits; and (4) structured tool calling against a real API is more discriminative than general-purpose GIS benchmarks, with accuracies 25-35 points lower. We further show extensibility by integrating BigEarthNet V2 land cover for Portugal alongside Spanish CO2 and erosion indicators. The benchmark, harness, and self-hostable API are publicly available.

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

TerraMARS: A Domain-Adapted Small-Language-Model Pipeline for Mars Terraforming Literature

Researchers are interested in learning about Mars so that it may eventually become habitable for humans. To achieve this, there is a need for comprehensive knowledge of the planet's atmosphere, hydrology, surface chemistry, radiation environment, and spatial features through the scientific literature. These contain valuable information and meaningful quantitative constraints that can be used in other models and studies, such as habitability assessment and future terraforming studies. We present TerraMARS, an end-to-end information extraction pipeline that combines a domain-adapted Small Language Model to answer Mars terraforming-related questions and convert unstructured Mars science text into machine-readable structured outputs in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. A corpus of open-access papers is collected and processed using a multistage retrieval and chunking framework. Google Gemma 3 1B was adapted to the domain using Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) fine-tuning on Mars-specific question-answering and information extraction datasets. The resulting pipeline generates both types of output and provides a foundation for integrating knowledge from scientific literature into downstream applications like digital twins and habitability modeling for Mars. The output from this pipeline looks promising, but further improvements are needed to increase extraction accuracy and factual consistency.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Topological Codes Based on Space Groups

arXiv:2606.20548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Topological codes form one of the most important classes of stabilizer codes. Most existing algebraic constructions and analyses of topological codes assume translation invariance. Here we show that topological codes can arise in more general settings by incorporating point group operations. The central construction is a class of Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes called space-group codes, whose check operators are built from group-algebra templates over space groups that combine translations with point-group operations. We develop methods for analyzing topological properties of space-group codes using ring-modules and their invariant theory. At first glance, space-group codes might appear to complicate practical implementation; however, we find that they can exhibit greater locality than previous codes based purely on translations. Our framework thus extends the landscape of topological codes and opens up a broader design space for the co-design of topological codes with quantum computing platforms.