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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Internet of Agentic AI: Communication, Coordination, and Collective Intelligence at Scale

作者:

arXiv:2606.12835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid emergence of autonomous AI agents is transforming artificial intelligence from isolated model inference into distributed systems of reasoning, communication, and action. This paper develops the vision of the Internet of Agentic AI (IoAI): an open ecosystem in which heterogeneous agents discover one another, negotiate responsibilities, exchange context, invoke tools, and execute workflows across cloud, edge, device, organizational, and cyber-physical environments. We synthesize foundations from single-agent agentic AI, multi-agent systems, distributed computing, communication networks, game theory, and security engineering to characterize the architectures and mechanisms required for scalable agent ecosystems. The paper examines agent deployment models, workflow lifecycles, communication protocols, interoperability layers, resource-management challenges, and trust architectures, with case studies in adaptive manufacturing and distributed operational coordination. The resulting framework highlights the central research challenges of controlled emergence, semantic interoperability, secure identity, incentive-compatible coordination, resource-aware orchestration, and governance for large-scale networks of autonomous agents.

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

Real-Time Neural Hair Denoising

We propose a lightweight real-time method for reconstructing strand-based hair G-Buffers from severely undersampled rasterized inputs. Our pipeline first applies neural spatial reconstruction and temporal accumulation to recover hair coverage, i.e., fractional hair visibility within a pixel, and tangent. It then uses a tangent-guided reconstruction step to complete the position, which is subsequently used for physically based deferred hair shading. We evaluate our method across a diverse set of hairstyles, including straight, wavy, afro, and ponytail styles, under both static and dynamic scenarios. Our method achieves higher hair reconstruction quality than existing hair-specific denoising techniques and general industrial neural reconstruction solutions such as DLSS and FSR.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

deFOREST: Fusing Optical and Radar satellite data for Enhanced Sensing of Tree-loss

arXiv:2510.14092v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper we develop a deforestation detection pipeline that incorporates optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. A crucial component of the pipeline is the construction of anomaly maps of the optical data, which is done using the residual space of a discrete Karhunen-Lo\'{e}ve (KL) expansion. Anomalies are quantified using a concentration bound on the distribution of the residual components for the nominal state of the forest. This bound does not require prior knowledge on the distribution of the data. This is in contrast to statistical parametric methods that assume knowledge of the data distribution, an impractical assumption that is especially infeasible for high dimensional data such as ours. Once the optical anomaly maps are computed they are combined with SAR data, and the state of the forest is classified by using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). We test our approach with Sentinel-1 (SAR) and Sentinel-2 (Optical) data on a $92\,km \times 92\,km$ region in the Amazon forest. The results show that both the hybrid optical-radar and optical only methods achieve high accuracy that is superior to the recent state-of-the-art hybrid method. Moreover, the hybrid method is significantly more robust in the case of sparse optical data that are common in highly cloudy regions.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Objects Before Words: Object-First Inductive Biases for Grounding Language in Child-View Video

Learning grounded word meaning from natural experience requires resolving two ambiguities in infant-view recordings: when the named referent appears and where it is in a cluttered frame. In SAYCam-style data, caregiver speech is sparse and weakly synchronized with egocentric video, so single-frame contrastive pairing yields noisy positives in which the intended object is absent or entangled with distractors. We propose BabyMind, an object-first bias for child-view contrastive learning under sparse, noisy supervision. BabyMind extracts candidate object embeddings using an offline mask-based region interface, links candidates across a short utterance-centered window into lightweight object files via tracking, and aligns utterances to bags of object files with a prototype-space multiple-instance contrastive objective. Track-coherence and global-object agreement regularizers stabilize learning and transfer object-file structure into the global frame embedding used at evaluation. On SAYCam-S, BabyMind improves Labeled-S 15 forced-choice accuracy by +2.6 points over CVCL and yields consistent gains on in-vocabulary out-of-distribution benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/sathiiii/BabyMind.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

V3Cell: A Vision-Guided Virtual 3D Cell Framework for Phenotypic Modeling and Perturbation Prediction

Predicting how organoids respond to chemical perturbations is central to disease modeling and drug discovery. Existing virtual cell models operate at the single-cell level, producing static endpoint predictions from destructive assays. This leaves a critical gap at the organoid scale, where biological identity is defined by tissue-level architecture and continuous developmental dynamics rather than single-cell features. Here we introduce V3Cell, a vision-guided framework that constructs in silico surrogates of organoids directly from non-invasive brightfield microscopy. A foreground-aware model constructs static virtual 3D cells across colon, stomach, and lung organoid lineages. These virtual 3D cells closely match real samples across distributional metrics, micro-texture, and lineage-specific morphometrics, with small effect sizes for most descriptors. A temporal module further predicts developmental fate from as few as six early-frame observations and models fate-conditioned spatiotemporal trajectories that closely recapitulate real perturbation responses. V3Cell requires no omics profiling or fluorescent labeling, establishing a non-invasive brightfield-based paradigm for organoid-scale perturbation prediction. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/Laineyoulu/V3Cell.

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

ClinHallu: A Benchmark for Diagnosing Stage-Wise Hallucinations in Medical MLLM Reasoning

Building trustworthy medical multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is critical for reliable clinical decision support. Existing medical hallucination benchmarks mainly focus on data collection, but often ignore where hallucinations originate within the reasoning process. We find that hallucination sources vary across samples: errors may arise from visual misrecognition, incorrect medical knowledge recall, or flawed reasoning integration. To enable source-level hallucination diagnosis, we introduce ClinHallu, a benchmark for stage-wise hallucination diagnosis in medical MLLM reasoning. ClinHallu contains 7,031 validated instances, where each instance is augmented with a structured reasoning trace decomposed into Visual Recognition, Knowledge Recall, and Reasoning Integration. We also use stage-replacement interventions to measure how correcting specific stages affects the final answer. Beyond evaluation, we show that trace-supervised fine-tuning reduces stage-wise hallucinations. ClinHallu provides a fine-grained hallucination testbed for diagnosing and mitigating reasoning failures in medical MLLMs. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/ClinHallu.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination

Global illumination (GI) is essential for realistic rendering but remains computationally expensive due to the complexity of simulating indirect light transport. Recent neural methods have mainly relied on per-scene optimization, sometimes extended to handle changes in camera or geometry. Efforts toward cross-scene generalization have largely stayed in 2D screen space, such as neural denoising or G-buffer based GI prediction, which often suffer from view inconsistency and limited spatial understanding. We propose a generalizable 3D light transport embedding that approximates global illumination directly from 3D scene configurations, without using rasterized or path-traced cues. Each scene is represented as a point cloud with geometric and material features. A scalable transformer models global point-to-point interactions to encode these features into neural primitives. At render time, each query point retrieves nearby primitives via nearest-neighbor search and aggregates their latent features through cross-attention to predict the desired rendering quantity. We demonstrate results on diffuse global illumination prediction across diverse indoor scenes with varying layouts, geometry, and materials. The embedding trained for irradiance estimation can be quickly adapted to new rendering tasks with limited fine-tuning. We also present preliminary results for spatial-directional radiance field estimation for glossy materials and show how the normalized field can accelerate unbiased path guiding. This approach highlights a path toward integrating learned priors into rendering pipelines without explicit ray-traced illumination cues.

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

Contagion Networks: Evaluator Bias Propagation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

作者:

arXiv:2606.20493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When large language models serve as evaluators in multi-agent systems, their systematic evaluation biases propagate through the agent network. We introduce Contagion Networks, a formal framework for measuring how evaluator biases spread across interacting LLM agents. In a controlled 3-agent experiment using DeepSeek-chat with three distinct evaluator bias profiles (structured, balanced, evidence-based), we measure the Cross-Agent Contagion Matrix Gamma_3 and find that evaluator biases consistently propagate between agents (gamma in [0.157, 0.352]), even within the same underlying model. We identify three propagation regimes governed by the spectral radius rho(Gamma_N), and demonstrate that homogeneous-model agents produce contagion coefficients 3-5x weaker than cross-model coefficients observed in prior work (MM-EPC: gamma approx 0.85-1.3), placing them in the suppression regime. We show that increasing evaluator committee size from k=1 to k=3 reduces effective contagion by 72.4%, providing an actionable mitigation strategy. We release the open-source Contagion Network experimental framework.

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

Selective Rotary Position Embedding

Position information is essential for language modeling. In softmax transformers, Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) encode positions through fixed-angle rotations, while in linear transformers, order is handled via input-dependent (selective) gating that decays past key-value associations. Selectivity has generally been shown to improve language-related tasks. Inspired by this, we introduce Selective RoPE, an input-dependent rotary embedding mechanism, that generalizes RoPE, and enables rotation in arbitrary angles for both linear and softmax transformers. We show that softmax attention already performs a hidden form of these rotations on query-key pairs, uncovering an implicit positional structure. We further show that in state-space models and gated linear transformers, the real part manages forgetting while the imaginary part encodes positions through rotations. We validate our method by equipping gated transformers with Selective RoPE, demonstrating that its input-dependent rotations improve performance in language modeling and on difficult sequence tasks like copying, state tracking, and retrieval.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

SyncLoop: A Multimodal Dual-Loop Framework for Self-Improving Mathematical Reasoning

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities. However, further enhancing existing MLLMs necessitates high-quality vision-language datasets with carefully curated task complexities, which are both costly and challenging to scale. Although recent self-improving models that iteratively refine themselves offer a feasible solution, they still suffer from two core challenges: (i) most existing methods augment visual or textual data separately, resulting in discrepancies in data complexity (e.g., over-simplified diagrams paired with redundant textual descriptions); and (ii) the evolution of data and models is also separated, leading to scenarios where models are exposed to tasks with mismatched difficulty levels. To address these issues, we propose C2-Evo, an automatic, closed-loop self-improving framework that jointly evolves both training data and model capabilities. Specifically, given a base dataset and a base model, C2-Evo enhances them by a cross-modal data evolution loop and a data-model evolution loop. The former loop expands the base dataset by generating complex multimodal problems that combine structured textual sub-problems with iteratively specified geometric diagrams, while the latter loop adaptively selects the generated problems based on the performance of the base model, to conduct supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning alternately. Consequently, our method continuously refines its model and training data, and consistently obtains considerable performance gains across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Our code, models, and datasets will be released.

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

The Hidden Power of Scaling Factor in LoRA Optimization

arXiv:2606.12883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), the scaling factor $\alpha$ is often treated as a mere complement to the learning rate, yet its role in optimization remains poorly understood. In this paper, we reveal that the scaling factor $\alpha$ and the learning rate function differently, with $\alpha$ emerging as the dominant driver of effective optimization, delivering gains that cannot be replicated by learning rate scaling alone. Through the synergy of extensive empirical analysis and a theoretical Signal-Drift framework, we uncover three findings into LoRA's scaling mechanism: First, LoRA's spectral suppression smooths the optimization landscape, rendering standard hyperparameters overly conservative and creating an optimization gap. Second, when leveraging this smoothness to accelerate convergence, $\alpha$ outperforms the learning rate by amplifying the task signal without increasing the drift ratio. Third, the optimal scaling factor follows a sublinear relationship with the rank, well characterized by a square-root law with an unexpectedly large coefficient, revealing the insufficient scaling of existing rank-tied heuristics. Based on these insights, we propose LoRA-$\alpha$, a minimalist framework that restores $\alpha$ to its principled regime, making LoRA compatible with standard small learning rates. Extensive evaluations across diverse tasks demonstrate that LoRA-$\alpha$ consistently improves performance while streamlining hyperparameter search, unleashing the learning potential of LoRA.

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

SPRI: SVD-Partitioned Residual Initialization for Data-Constrained MoE Upcycling

arXiv:2606.16456v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enable efficient scaling, but training them from scratch remains prohibitively expensive. MoE upcycling mitigates this cost by converting pretrained dense models into sparse MoE models. However, existing upcycling methods typically rely on large-scale continued training and often perform poorly under data-constrained supervised adaptation, due to either homogeneous experts or overly disruptive perturbations to pretrained parameters. In this setting, effective upcycling must leverage pretrained weight structure while introducing sufficient diversity among routed experts. To this end, we propose SVD-Partitioned Residual Initialization (SPRI), which distributes SVD-partitioned residuals derived from pretrained feed-forward network (FFN) weights across routed experts, introducing controlled expert diversity grounded in pretrained spectral structure. We further introduce a two-stage training strategy to improve adaptation stability. We evaluate SPRI on multilingual speech-to-text translation, where limited supervised data challenges MoE upcycling and multiple target languages provide natural routing heterogeneity. On CoVoST2 across 15 En-to-XX directions, SPRI improves average BLEU and COMET over fully fine-tuned dense models by 2.58 and 3.32 points, respectively, and outperforms the prior best MoE upcycling baseline by 3.39 BLEU and 4.34 COMET points.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

On the Stability of the Jacobian Matrix in Deep Neural Networks

arXiv:2506.08764v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep neural networks are known to suffer from exploding or vanishing gradients as depth increases, a phenomenon closely tied to the spectral behavior of the input-output Jacobian. Prior work has identified critical initialization schemes that ensure Jacobian stability, but these analyses are typically restricted to fully connected networks with i.i.d. weights. In this work, we go significantly beyond these limitations: we establish a general stability theorem for deep neural networks that accommodates sparsity (such as that introduced by pruning) and non-i.i.d., weakly correlated weights (e.g. induced by training). Our results rely on recent advances in random matrix theory, and provide rigorous guarantees for spectral stability in a much broader class of network models. This extends the theoretical foundation for initialization schemes in modern neural networks with structured and dependent randomness.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Tracking Representation Dynamics in Large Language Models with Persistent Homology

arXiv:2606.19542v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are commonly aligned through supervised fine-tuning, yet little is known about how their internal representations evolve during this process. We study alignment dynamics using persistent homology by tracking the topology of activation spaces throughout fine-tuning. Across four transformer language models ranging from 1B to 7B parameters and three alignment objectives corresponding to helpful, harmless, and mixed training data, we find that the majority of topological reorganization occurs during the earliest stages of training. A dense checkpoint analysis reveals a transient peak in topological activity followed by rapid stabilization. We further show that different alignment objectives induce distinguishable topological trajectories, while instruction-tuned and pretrained models exhibit qualitatively different patterns of evolution. Our results suggest that persistent homology provides a complementary perspective on alignment, revealing representation-level changes that are not apparent from behavioral metrics alone.

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

Token-Level Entropy Reveals Demographic Disparities in Language Models

We ask whether demographic identity, signaled by a name alone, systematically reshapes the generative distribution of a language model. Measuring full-vocabulary Shannon entropy at temperature zero across six open-weight base models and 5,760 implicit sentence-completion prompts (e.g., "Tanisha walked into the office on a Monday morning and"), we find that Black-associated names produce higher first-token entropy than White-associated names across all six architectures - opposite to the output-level homogeneity bias documented under explicit demographic prompting (Lee et al., 2024) - and Black-associated names always produce greater entropy above identity-neutral baselines than White-associated names ($\Delta\Delta > 0$ in all six models). Women-associated names co-occur with lower first-token entropy (DL-pooled $\hat\beta = -0.041, p = .019$) and more homogeneous outputs ($\hat\alpha = +0.024, p < .001$) than men-associated names - a pattern convergent with homogeneity bias; race and gender effects are additive. Instruction tuning does not attenuate the race gap (matched-format DL-pooled $\hat{\beta}=+0.153$). Running the same templates with explicit group labels instead of names yields null race effects in 10 of 12 models where implicit probing is significant - establishing that probing methodology is a primary determinant of which distributional structure is recovered.

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

Holistic Data Scheduler for LLM Pre-training via Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

The composition of training data, governed by the diversity of sources and their mixing strategy, is a cornerstone of Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training. Online Data Mixing (ODM), the technique of adaptively adjusting data mixtures during training, has emerged as a promising direction to improve efficiency. However, existing methods are constrained by their reliance on a singular optimization perspective, which fundamentally overlooks the need for complex LLM pre-training to consider the dynamic data composition from multiple dimensions. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the Holistic Data Scheduler (HDS), a novel online data mixing framework. HDS formulates the data scheduling challenge as a reinforcement learning problem in a continuous control space and leverages the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm for its stability and sample efficiency in exploring the high-dimensional policy space. At the core of HDS lies a novel multi-objective, holistic reward function that integrates three critical perspectives: a data-driven reward for quality, a loss-driven reward capturing inter-domain influence, and a model-driven reward based on weight norms. To validate our design and determine its optimal configuration, we conducted systematic experiments on LLMs of various sizes. On The Pile benchmark, HDS reaches the final validation perplexity of the next best method with 44% fewer training iterations. Furthermore, it achieves a 7.2% improvement on the MMLU 0-shot task along with consistent gains on other benchmarks, showcasing its ability to enhance both training efficiency and final model capability.

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

Geometry-Preserving Encoder/Decoder in Latent Generative Models

arXiv:2501.09876v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative modeling aims to generate new data samples that resemble a given dataset. When using diffusion models for this task, one of the main challenges is solving the problem in the input space, which tends to be very high-dimensional. To address this, recent approaches solve diffusion models in the latent space through an encoder that maps from the data space to a lower-dimensional latent space, improving training efficiency and achieving state-of-the-art results. The variational autoencoder (VAE) is the most commonly used encoder/decoder framework in this domain, known for its ability to learn latent representations and generate data samples. In this paper, we introduce a novel encoder/decoder framework with theoretical properties distinct from those of the VAE, specifically designed to preserve the geometric structure of the data distribution. We demonstrate the significant advantages of this geometry-preserving encoder in the training process of both the encoder and decoder. Additionally, we provide theoretical results proving convergence of the training process, including convergence guarantees for encoder training, and results showing faster convergence of decoder training when using the geometry-preserving encoder.

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

A Hybrid LSTM–Vision Transformer Architecture for Predicting HRRR Forecast Errors

arXiv:2606.19026v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Forecast errors in high-resolution numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems are often linked to unresolved planetary boundary layer (PBL) processes, convection, terrain-induced circulations, and other vertically structured atmospheric phenomena. Previous work demonstrated that Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks can successfully predict forecast errors in the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) model using mesonet observations, but we believe performance degradation is linked to periods of complex vertical atmospheric evolution. To address this limitation, we develop a hybrid LSTM-Vision Transformer (LSTM-ViT) framework that combines temporal sequence learning from surface observations with atmospheric profiles from the New York State Mesonet profiler network. The LSTM-ViT framework is trained to predict HRRR hourly precipitation, 10 m wind speed, and 2 m temperature forecast errors at individual mesonet stations. Across all three predictors, incorporation of profiler-derived atmospheric structure improves forecast error prediction skill relative to the baseline LSTM architecture, with the largest gains occurring at shorter forecast lead times and during periods of enhanced PBL activity. Improvements are particularly pronounced for precipitation forecast error, where the LSTM-ViT framework achieves approximately a twofold increase in predictive skill relative to the baseline LSTM while better capturing convectively driven error evolution and reducing degradation associated with PBL processes. These results demonstrate that combining temporal sequence learning with vertically informed attention mechanisms provides a physically meaningful pathway for improving forecast error prediction in operational NWP systems. Our research offers forecasters enhanced guidance regarding model bias and forecast confidence.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

A parameterized family of balance indices for phylogenetic networks

arXiv:2606.24562v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce a new family of balance indices for phylogenetic networks: the $H_\alpha$ indices, where $\alpha$ is a positive real number. This family includes the $B_2$ index as a special case ($\alpha = 1$) and provides a natural extension of the Sackin index to phylogenetic networks. We show that the $H_\alpha$ indices share many structural properties with the $B_2$ index, most notably a "grafting property" that makes it possible to express the $H_\alpha$ index of a network in terms of the $H_\alpha$ indices of its biconnected components. These properties allow us to identify networks that minimize / maximize $H_\alpha$ for various classes of phylogenetic networks, and to study its distribution for several models of random trees and networks (in particular, Galton-Watson trees and binary Markov branching trees, with a focus on the Yule and PDA models). Finally, we show how local limits can be used to analyze the asymptotic behavior of $H_\alpha$ for large trees and networks, and we obtain general results for the moments of $H_\alpha$ for a broad class of random phylogenetic networks known as blowups of Galton-Watson trees.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

From Rubble Simulation to Active Magnetic Mapping: Quantum Sensing for Disaster Response

arXiv:2606.25957v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Locating survivors of building collapses within the first 72 hours is a critical challenge in disaster response, and existing sensing modalities provide only partial information about the structure beneath the rubble. This paper proposes drone-based quantum magnetometry as a complementary modality and develops a simulation pipeline spanning rubble physics, sensor-array deployment, and active spatial reconstruction. We use Unreal Engine to generate a steel-reinforced concrete parking-garage collapse and compute the induced magnetic field via a per-triangle dipole approximation, establishing that meaningful magnetic structure is recoverable in the sub-pT to sub-nT range from roughly 1 m above the roofline. Then, we feed sparse multi-sensor samples into a Gaussian Process Regression back-end driven by Bayesian active sampling and validate the pipeline across multiple independent collapse realizations; a three-sensor array optimizes the trade-off between gradient resolution and UAV payload constraints, and active sampling reaches peak structural correlation in roughly $100$ samples. Together, these results indicate that quantum-grade sensing could become a useful tool for drone-based structural analysis and potentially void detection in collapsed buildings.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

When Does Synthetic Data Augmentation Improve Score-Based Imbalanced Classification?

arXiv:2606.26053v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic data augmentation is widely used to mitigate class imbalance, but its theoretical effects on score-based classification remain poorly understood. This paper develops a framework for characterizing when synthetic minority augmentation can improve threshold-integrated and threshold-optimized metrics, including AUROC, AUPRC, best-threshold balanced accuracy, and best-threshold \(\F_1\) score. We separate the effect of augmentation into two components: a change in effective class weighting and a discrepancy between the synthetic and true minority distributions. Under well-specified score models, the raw estimator already targets the likelihood-ratio ordering, which is population-optimal for the metrics considered. Consequently, augmentation cannot provide a fundamental population-level improvement beyond possible finite-sample variance reduction, and may introduce additional bias through synthetic distributional error. We further establish minimax lower bounds showing that the raw estimator already achieves the optimal metric-regret rate in the well-specified regime. Under misspecification, however, augmentation can play a qualitatively different role: by changing the effective class balance, it can alter the restricted-class projection and correct ranking errors induced by the raw imbalanced objective. We provide explicit improvement bounds quantifying the roles of approximation error, finite-sample estimation error, and synthetic distributional error. Simulation studies corroborate the theory, demonstrating limited gains under well-specification and nontrivial but nonmonotone improvements under misspecification.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A Critical Look at Targeted Instruction Selection: Disentangling What Matters (and What Doesn't)

arXiv:2602.14696v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involves selecting a subset of instruction training data from a large candidate pool, using a small query set from the target task. Despite growing interest, the literature on targeted instruction selection remains fragmented and opaque: methods vary widely in selection budgets, often omit zero-shot baselines, and frequently entangle the contributions of key components. As a result, practitioners lack actionable guidance on selecting instructions for their target tasks. In this work, we aim to bring clarity to this landscape by disentangling and systematically analyzing the two core ingredients: data representation and selection algorithms. Our framework enables controlled comparisons across models, tasks, and budgets. We find that only gradient-based data representations choose subsets whose similarity to the query consistently predicts performance across datasets, models, and candidate pools. While no single method dominates, gradient-based representations paired with greedy round-robin selection often perform best on average at low budgets, but these gains diminish at larger budgets. Finally, we unify several existing selection algorithms as forms of approximate distance minimization between the selected subset and the query set, and support this view with new generalization bounds. More broadly, our findings provide critical insights and a foundation for more principled data selection in LLM fine-tuning. The code is available at https://github.com/dcml-lab/targeted-instruction-selection.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Use of the Pharmacy First service in England in the first 12 months: geographic variation and health system context

Objectives: The Pharmacy First (PF) service was introduced across England from 31 January 2024 to expand the clinical role of community pharmacies and improve access to primary care. This paper describes use of PF in its first 12 months, in terms of uptake, access routes, consultation outcomes, geographic variations, service costs and antimicrobial supply. Methods: A descriptive analysis of all PF consultations submitted for payment to NHS Business Services Authority in England between 31 January 2024 and 31 January 2025. Pharmacy-level consultation data were linked to national data on population, location and pharmacy characteristics. PF use was examined using population-standardised consultation rates and consultations per pharmacy. Results: During the first year of implementation, 2,205,731 PF consultations were recorded as delivered across 11,349 pharmacies, with payment of GBP123 million to pharmacies. Uptake increased steadily over time. Most consultations were for acute sore throat (33%) and uncomplicated urinary tract infection (27%), with corresponding antibiotics, phenoxymethylpenicillin and nitrofurantoin being the most supplied. Most people self-referred (74%) into the service, with 95% of consultations managed without onward referral. Substantial geographic variation was observed. Northern regions had higher use based on the eligible population. The South East and Midlands had higher activity per pharmacy. London showed a distinct pattern, with higher self-referral into the service, lower medication supply and higher referral to other healthcare services. Higher consultation volume was weakly associated with pharmacy characteristics, including opening hours, pharmacy type and retail setting, and local context, in terms of socio-economic and geographic factors. Conclusions: PF had immediate uptake and is operating primarily as a direct-access model for common acute conditions. Findings suggest that PF is contributing to improved access to care and may shift demand away from general practice. However, the service uptake appears to be shaped by geographic location, proximity to other healthcare services and pharmacy characteristics.

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

Less is More: Quality-Aware Training Data Selection for Scientific Summarization

Scientific long-document summarization datasets commonly treat author-written abstracts as gold reference summaries, although their quality and alignment with the source article vary. At the same time, publicly available scientific summarization datasets remain limited in scale and structure for modern long-context models. In this work, we address both challenges by a) constructing and releasing one of the largest biomedical and life science datasets for long-document summarization, containing 1.88 million PMC articles, and b) analyzing the reference quality of author-written abstracts with source-grounded and model-based metrics. We show that author-written abstracts vary in their alignment with the full article and that these quality signals can guide training-data selection. Training on selected high-quality subsets outperforms random sampling at matched training sizes and can match or exceed larger random subsets on factuality-oriented metrics. Our findings suggest that reference quality is an important factor in scientific summarization and that quality-aware data selection can improve training efficiency.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Initial Exploration Problem in Knowledge Graph Exploration

arXiv:2602.21066v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge Graphs (KGs) enable the integration and representation of complex information across domains, but their semantic richness and structural complexity create substantial barriers for lay users without expertise in semantic web technologies. When encountering an unfamiliar KG, such users face a distinct orientation challenge: they do not know what questions are possible, how the knowledge is structured, or how to begin exploration. This paper identifies and theorises this phenomenon as the Initial Exploration Problem (IEP). Drawing on theories from information behaviour and human-computer interaction, including ASK, exploratory search, information foraging, and cognitive load theory, we develop a conceptual framing of the IEP characterised by three interdependent barriers: scope uncertainty, ontology opacity, and query incapacity. We argue that these barriers converge at the moment of first contact, distinguishing the IEP from related concepts that presuppose an existing starting point or information goal. Analysing KG exploration interfaces at the level of interaction primitives, we suggest that many systems rely on epistemic assumptions that do not hold at first contact. This reveals a structural gap in the design space: the absence of interaction primitives for scope revelation, mechanisms that communicate what a KG contains without requiring users to formulate queries or interpret ontological structures. In articulating the IEP, this paper provides a theoretical lens for evaluating KG interfaces and for designing entry-point scaffolding that supports initial exploration.