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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Specialty Choice Attitudes Among Medical Interns: Evidence from Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences

Background: Choosing a medical specialty is a critical career decision that affects both physicians future professional lives and the composition of the healthcare workforce. Specialty preferences are shaped by multiple personal, educational, and socioeconomic factors, yet evidence from senior medical students in southern Iran remains limited. This study aimed to assess willingness to pursue specialty training among medical interns at Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences, identify their preferred specialties, and examine factors associated with their decisions. Methods: This descriptive-analytical cross-sectional study was conducted in 2023 among medical interns at Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences in Bandar Abbas, Iran. Using a convenience census approach, all eligible interns were invited to participate, and 83 students completed an online questionnaire. The instrument collected demographic, academic, and occupational data, as well as reasons for willingness or unwillingness to pursue specialty training and specialty preferences. Content and face validity were assessed by faculty members and students, and internal consistency reliability in the present study was acceptable (Cronbach alpha = 0.82). Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and logistic regression in SPSS version 27. Results: Of the 83 participants, 50 (60.2%) reported willingness to pursue specialty training, while 33 (39.8%) did not. Among students willing to continue, the most frequently cited reasons were achieving a better economic position, broader job opportunities, and higher social status. Among those unwilling to continue, the most common reasons were fatigue from prolonged studying, financial problems, and the desire to start working after graduation. Radiology was the most common first-choice specialty, followed by otorhinolaryngology, dermatology, and cardiology. In regression analyses, no demographic or academic variable remained independently associated with willingness to pursue specialty training in the final multivariable model. Conclusions: A majority of medical interns were interested in pursuing specialty training, with preferences concentrated in a limited number of specialties perceived as offering favorable financial prospects, prestige, and lifestyle. Economic concerns and educational fatigue were the dominant factors influencing willingness and unwillingness to continue specialty education. These findings highlight the need for structured career counseling, broader exposure to different specialties, and policy measures to address financial and structural barriers to residency training. Keywords: medical specialty choice; medical interns; residency training; medical education; Hormozgan university of medical sciences

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Pseudo-Formalization for Automatic Proof Verification

arXiv:2605.20531v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable verification of proofs remains a bottleneck for training and evaluating AI systems on hard mathematical reasoning. Fully formal proofs, in languages like Lean, are easy to verify because they are unambiguous and modular. Most proofs, particularly those written by AI systems, have neither property, and translating them into formal languages remains challenging in many frontier math settings. We propose Pseudo-Formalization (PF), a proof format that captures the modularity and precision of formal proofs while retaining the flexibility of natural language. A Pseudo-Formal proof is decomposed into self-contained modules, each stating its premises, conclusion, and proof in natural language. To verify the correctness of a regular natural language proof, an LLM translates it to Pseudo-Formal and then verifies each module independently, an algorithm we call Block Verification (BV). We evaluate PF+BV on two benchmarks spanning olympiad and research-level mathematics, where it pareto-dominates LLM-as-judge baselines on error-finding precision and recall. To support future work, we release our research-level proof verification benchmark ArxivMathGradingBench.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Within-host pathogen population diversity predicts treatment response in tuberculosis

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) treatment outcomes remain suboptimal, and standard clinical diagnostics cannot reliably identify patients at high risk of treatment failure or relapse at the time of diagnosis. While within-host Mycobacterium tuberculosis genetic diversity is hypothesized to reflect the viable bacterial burden and adaptive capacity of the infection, its clinical prognostic value remains unknown. Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 364 patients with newly diagnosed, rifampicin-susceptible pulmonary TB in South Africa. Patients received standard 6-month therapy and were monitored for up to two years to ascertain composite unfavorable outcomes (treatment failure, death, or relapse). To accurately detect low-frequency (unfixed) genetic variants and eliminate reference bias artifacts, we mapped medium to high depth short-read sequences against matched, patient-specific long-read assemblies. The association between baseline pathogen genetic diversity and clinical outcomes was evaluated using multivariable Cox proportional-hazards models. Results: After bioinformatic filtering, true unfixed variants were relatively rare but significantly enriched in genes mediating pathogen adaptation and drug tolerance, including transporter proteins and two-component regulatory systems. Within-host bacterial genetic diversity (i.e., the total number of unfixed variants) ranged from 0-20, with a median of 1 per patient. In survival analysis adjusting for known clinical risk factors–including HIV status, prior TB, baseline smear positivity, and radiographic lung involvement–baseline within-host genetic diversity emerged as a strong, independent predictor of unfavorable treatment outcomes. For patients with greater than 3 unfixed variants at diagnosis, each increase of 5 unfixed variants was associated with more than double the risk of a composite unfavorable outcome (adjusted Hazard Ratio, 2.36; 95% CI, 1.27 to 4.39; p=0.007). Conclusions: Baseline within-host pathogen genetic diversity is an independent predictor of unfavorable TB treatment outcomes. As sequencing becomes increasingly integrated into routine diagnostics, quantifying unfixed variants is an accessible approach that promises to risk-stratify patients and guide the duration of individualized regimens.

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

Navigating the Safety-Fidelity Trade-off: Massive-Variate Time Series Forecasting for Power Systems via Probabilistic Scenarios

arXiv:2606.13338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Probabilistic forecasting models are increasingly deployed on multivariate systems with distinct channel physics and operational constraints, but existing benchmarks evaluate neither property at scale. Public canonical multivariate benchmarks cap out at 2,000 channels, while power-system benchmarks either lack temporal structure or probabilistic evaluation. We introduce PowerPhase, a probabilistic forecasting benchmark built on six transmission grids ranging from 2,000 to 36,964 jointly forecasted channels, more than an order of magnitude beyond popular canonical multivariate benchmarks. Each target trajectory is the output of an AC power-flow solve, and PowerPhase ships with constraint-aware metrics, including Safety_mBrier, NECV, and CVaR-alpha, that complement CRPS and Distortion. Across eight baselines and three seeds, distributional accuracy and constraint satisfaction rank models differently, a trade-off we term safety-fidelity. We further propose PowerForge, a scenario-based quantile forecaster with type-specific decoding heads and a causal bridge between variable groups, which achieves the best average rank on every grid.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Scaffold Effect: How Prompt Framing Drives Apparent Multimodal Gains in Clinical VLM Evaluation

arXiv:2603.28387v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trustworthy clinical AI requires that performance gains reflect genuine evidence integration rather than surface-level artifacts. We evaluate 12 open-weight vision-language models (VLMs) on binary classification across two clinical neuroimaging cohorts, \textsc{FOR2107} (affective disorders) and \textsc{OASIS-3} (cognitive decline). Both datasets come with structural MRI data that carries no reliable individual-level diagnostic signal. Under these conditions, smaller VLMs exhibit gains of up to 58\% F1 upon introduction of neuroimaging context, with distilled models becoming competitive with counterparts an order of magnitude larger. A contrastive confidence analysis reveals that merely mentioning MRI availability in the task prompt accounts for 70-80\% of this shift, independent of whether imaging data is present, a domain-specific instance of modality collapse we term the scaffold effect. Expert evaluation reveals fabrication of neuroimaging-grounded justifications across all conditions, and preference alignment, while eliminating MRI-referencing behavior, collapses both conditions toward random baseline. Our findings demonstrate that surface evaluations are inadequate indicators of multimodal reasoning, with direct implications for the deployment of VLMs in clinical settings.

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

GraspLLM: Towards Zero-Shot Generalization on Text-Attributed Graphs with LLMs

Research on Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) has gained significant attention recently due to its broad applications across various real-world data scenarios, such as citation networks, e-commerce platforms, social media, and web pages. Inspired by the remarkable semantic understanding ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been numerous attempts to integrate LLMs into TAGs. However, existing methods still struggle to generalize across diverse graphs and tasks, and their ability to capture transferable graph structural patterns remains limited. To address this, we introduce the GraspLLM, a framework that combines Graph structural comprehension with semantic understanding prowess of LLMs to enhance the cross-dataset and cross-task generalizability. Specifically, we represent node texts from different graphs in a unified semantic space with a frozen general embedding model, on top of which we perform motif-aware contrastive learning across multiple motif-induced adjacency matrices to extract dataset-agnostic structural information. Then, with our proposed optimal contextual subgraph, we extract the most contextually relevant subgraph for each target node and align these subgraphs to the token space of LLM via an alignment projector. Extensive experiments on TAG benchmark datasets spanning diverse domains reveal that GraspLLM consistently outperforms previous LLM-based methods for TAGs, especially in zero-shot scenarios, highlighting its strong generalizability across different datasets and tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Heinz217/GraspLLM.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

DecNefSimulator: A Modular, Interpretable Framework for Decoded Neurofeedback Simulation Using Generative Models

arXiv:2511.14555v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Decoded Neurofeedback (DecNef) is a promising non-invasive approach to brain modulation with wide-ranging applications in neuromedicine and cognitive neuroscience. However, progress in DecNef research remains constrained by subject-dependent learning variability, reliance on indirect measures to quantify progress, and the high cost and time demands of experimentation. We present DecNefSimulator, a modular and interpretable simulation framework that formalizes DecNef as a machine learning problem. Beyond providing a virtual laboratory, DecNefSimulator enables researchers to model, analyze and understand neurofeedback dynamics. Using latent variable generative models as simulated participants, DecNefSimulator allows direct observation of internal cognitive states and systematic evaluation of how different protocol designs and subject characteristics influence learning. We demonstrate how this approach can (i) reproduce empirical phenomena of DecNef learning, (ii) identify conditions under which DecNef feedback fails to induce learning, and (iii) guide the design of more robust and reliable DecNef protocols in silico before human implementation. In summary, DecNefSimulator bridges computational modeling and cognitive neuroscience, offering a principled foundation for methodological innovation, robust protocol design, and ultimately, a deeper understanding of DecNef-based brain modulation.

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

AL-GNN: Privacy-Preserving and Replay-Free Continual Graph Learning via Analytic Learning

arXiv:2512.18295v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual graph learning (CGL) aims to enable graph neural networks to incrementally learn from a stream of graph structured data without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Existing methods particularly those based on experience replay typically store and revisit past graph data to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, these approaches pose significant limitations, including privacy concerns, inefficiency. In this work, we propose AL GNN, a novel framework for continual graph learning that eliminates the need for backpropagation and replay buffers. Instead, AL GNN leverages principles from analytic learning theory to formulate learning as a recursive least squares optimization process. It maintains and updates model knowledge analytically through closed form classifier updates and a regularized feature autocorrelation matrix. This design enables efficient one pass training for each task, and inherently preserves data privacy by avoiding historical sample storage. Extensive experiments on multiple dynamic graph classification benchmarks demonstrate that AL GNN achieves competitive or superior performance compared to existing methods. For instance, it improves average performance by 10% on CoraFull and reduces forgetting by over 30% on Reddit, while also reducing training time by nearly 50% due to its backpropagation free design.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Prefill/Decode-Aware Evaluation of LLM Inference on Emerging AI Accelerators

arXiv:2606.17104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in latency- and cost-sensitive settings, inference efficiency has become a central systems challenge. While GPUs dominate current deployments, a growing number of AI accelerators claim advantages for LLM inference, yet it remains unclear under which conditions such accelerators outperform GPUs in practice. Recent inference systems decompose execution into Prefill and Decode phases, which exhibit distinct computational characteristics and latency metrics, commonly captured by time to first token (TTFT) and time per output token (TPOT). This paper presents a phase-aware evaluation of LLM inference performance across GPUs and emerging AI accelerators using a common model, Llama2-7B. By separately measuring Prefill and Decode performance, we reveal that accelerator advantages differ by phase and metric. Our results show that GPUs consistently excel in the compute-intensive Prefill phase, while GroqRack achieves significantly lower TPOT during Decode (batching not currently supported). However, GPUs regain an advantage in Decode throughput as batch size increases. These findings demonstrate that each platform exhibits distinct phase-dependent strengths. We further analyze heterogeneous Prefill/Decode disaggregation across different accelerator platforms, identifying performance gains and the workload and network conditions under which such gains are realized.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

VikingMem: A Memory Base Management System for Stateful LLM-based Applications

arXiv:2605.29640v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models have revolutionized interactive applications; however, their finite context windows pose a critical data management challenge for maintaining stateful, long-term interactions. Existing memory approaches often rely on simplistic extraction methods that lead to incomplete memories or use rigid, single-purpose memory extraction prompts tailored to a single use case, such as chatbots. Consequently, they lack generalizability and perform poorly across diverse downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Memory Base, a novel data management paradigm for managing the persistent state of long-term interactions. It is characterized by three core principles: selective extraction of high-value memories from raw information streams; inherent statefulness and evolution, where memory content is progressively summarized, corrected, and temporally weighted to prioritize recent interactions; and a generalizable abstraction paradigm designed for robust transferability across diverse applications, including education, recommendation, and agent memory. Building on this foundation, we present VikingMem, an end-to-end Memory Base Management System implemented on the VikingDB vector engine. VikingMem materializes this paradigm through interconnected event and entity abstractions. It features event-centric memory extraction to selectively handle complex information streams, while entities are dynamically updated by events to achieve stateful evolution. Using temporal compression via a topic-wise timeline and time-weighted recall, the system progressively produces high-level summary memories, prioritizes recent items, and compresses and fades older ones. Extensive evaluations on long-term memory benchmarks demonstrate that VikingMem outperformes baselines by up to 30% in memory retrieval effectiveness while maintaining the low latency essential for interactive applications.

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

MaskWAM: Unifying Mask Prompting and Prediction for World-Action Models

World Action Models (WAMs) present a promising paradigm for robotic control via video prediction. However, current WAMs suffer from fundamental spatial bottlenecks: standard text inputs introduce referential ambiguity in cluttered scenes, while unstructured RGB predictions lack semantic grounding and remain biased by task-irrelevant backgrounds. To overcome these limitations, we introduce MaskWAM, an object-centric world-action model. By jointly integrating masks as both explicit inputs and predictions via a unified Mixture of Transformers (MoT), MaskWAM unlocks robust policy generalization. This design provides two key benefits: (1) predicting future masks yields object-centric semantic supervision that suppresses visual noise, significantly enhancing even standard text-conditioned WAMs; and (2) coupling this predictive supervision with first-frame visual prompts, such as target object masks, establishes a precise spatial anchor that substantially reduces language ambiguity. Crucially, as WAMs are inherently vision-driven architectures, direct mask conditioning yields substantially stronger guidance than text alone, establishing a precise and robust paradigm for manipulating unseen objects. Evaluations on LIBERO, RoboTwin, and real-world tasks demonstrate that MaskWAM significantly outperforms baselines in both language-clear and language-ambiguous tasks.

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

NavWAM: A Navigation World Action Model for Goal-Conditioned Visual Navigation

Goal-conditioned visual navigation requires a robot to act under partial observability by anticipating how its motion will change the future egocentric view and whether that change brings it closer to the goal. Navigation world models provide such visual foresight, but they remain prediction modules that require an external planner to convert predicted futures into closed-loop control. We propose Navigation World Action Model (NavWAM), a diffusion-transformer policy that turns navigation world-model prediction into executable action by representing future observations, goal-progress values, and action chunks in a shared latent sequence. By learning future prediction jointly with the action and value targets that determine closed-loop behavior, NavWAM makes visual foresight directly usable for robot control. We build NavWAM through simulation pretraining and real-robot adaptation, and evaluate it on image-goal navigation against planning-based world models and a representative direct navigation policy. Across offline benchmarks and closed-loop real-robot deployment, NavWAM improves over planning-based world-model baselines in our evaluations while using the default policy mode without CEM-style action search. Project page: https://dachii-azm.github.io/navwam/

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

Dynamic Black-hole Emission Tomography with Physics-informed Neural Fields

With the success of static black-hole imaging, the next frontier is the dynamic and 3D imaging of black holes. Recovering the dynamic 3D gas near a black hole would reveal previously-unseen parts of the universe and inform new physics models. However, only sparse radio measurements from a single viewpoint are possible, making the dynamic 3D reconstruction problem significantly ill-posed. Previously, BH-NeRF addressed the ill-posed problem by assuming Keplerian dynamics of the gas, but this assumption breaks down near the black hole, where the strong gravitational pull of the black hole and increased electromagnetic activity complicate fluid dynamics. To overcome the restrictive assumptions of BH-NeRF, we propose PI-DEF, a physics-informed approach that uses differentiable neural rendering to fit a 4D (time + 3D) emissivity field given EHT measurements. Our approach jointly reconstructs the 3D velocity field with the 4D emissivity field and enforces the velocity as a soft constraint on the dynamics of the emissivity. In experiments on simulated data, we find significantly improved reconstruction accuracy over both BH-NeRF and a physics-agnostic approach. We demonstrate how our method may be used to estimate other physics parameters of the black hole, such as its spin.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Counterfactual Credit Policy Optimization for Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2603.21563v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Collaborative multi-agent large language models (LLMs) can solve complex reasoning tasks by decomposing roles, but reinforcement learning for such systems is limited by credit assignment: shared terminal rewards obscure individual contributions and can encourage free-riding. We introduce two optimizer-agnostic credit assignment methods for converting joint outcomes into agent-specific learning signals. Counterfactual Credit for Policy Optimization (CCPO) estimates an agent's marginal contribution by comparing the realized joint outcome with a counterfactual outcome where that agent is removed. Self-Evaluated Credit for Policy Optimization (SEPO) uses constrained self- and peer-evaluations as a verifier-anchored credit signal while keeping the external task outcome dominant. Both operate at the reward-construction layer rather than as policy optimizers, producing role-specific rewards or advantages for GRPO, GSPO, or REINFORCE++. We instantiate these credit signals in a sequential Think–Solve setting and evaluate them on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Results show that explicit credit assignment often improves dual-agent reasoning, especially on MATH500 and several out-of-distribution settings, while gains vary across models and datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/bhai114/ccpo.

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

HyPE: Category-Aware Hypergraph Encoding with Persistent Edge Embeddings for Persona-Grounded Dialogue

Persona-grounded dialogue systems aim to produce responses consistent with a speaker's persona, yet existing methods treat personas as a flat set of sentences and fail to model the high-order relations among persona attributes-e.g., that several persona sentences share a topical category. We propose HyPE (Hypergraph Persona Encoder), a framework that (i) analyzes each persona-bearing text as a (Core, Expression, Sentiment, Category) quadruple, and (ii) organizes persona elements into a hypergraph whose hyperedges are induced by shared category labels. An HyperGCN hypergraph neural network propagates this structure into a persona summary vector and a soft-memory bank that condition the response generator. We further propose Persistent Edge Embeddings (PEE), lightweight per-category learnable priors fused into the HyperGCN message-passing step. On PersonaChat under greedy decoding, HyPE consistently outperforms sentence-level pooling baselines across GPT-2, LLaMA-3.2-3B, and Qwen2.5-3B backbones by demonstrating that structured hyperedge-level persona encoding provides a transferable advantage across model scales.

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

Roto-Reflection Geometry of Pure Two-Qubit Entanglement

arXiv:2606.12637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pure two-qubit entanglement is usually characterized by scalar quantities such as concurrence. Here we show that it also has a natural geometric form. In the Pauli correlation tensor, maximally entangled states appear as improper orthogonal maps between two local Bloch spheres. These maps are roto-reflections. For partially entangled pure states, the same roto-reflection geometry is recovered after separating the contraction associated with concurrence. We call the corresponding geometric object the Entanglement Roto-Reflection Plane (ERRP). It organizes the maximally correlated directions of the two-qubit state and provides a covariant geometric complement to the scalar magnitude of entanglement.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Adaptive Oscillatory-State Alignment for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.06010v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-term time series forecasting benefits from inductive biases that expose recurring temporal structure. Existing periodic forecasting methods typically model recurrence through predefined periods, global spectral components, or fixed learnable templates. However, real-world temporal dynamics are rarely rigidly periodic: around a nominal cycle, oscillatory behavior often exhibits non-rigid periodicity (NRP), where cycle magnitude, cycle alignment, and local cycle duration vary over time. Under these conditions, fixed-template periodic modeling can become fundamentally mismatched to the underlying temporal states. We propose AOSNet, a Hilbert-guided forecasting framework that reformulates periodic forecasting from fixed template matching to adaptive oscillatory-state alignment. AOSNet extracts analytic-signal descriptors from both the observed sequence and a learnable global oscillatory prior, then adaptively aligns local states through a descriptor-conditioned gate that selectively preserves reliable observations while softly correcting mismatched regions. The learned prior serves not as a rigid repeated template but as a flexible oscillatory reference interpreted through local state dynamics. Experiments on eight public benchmarks and two cloud workload traces demonstrate leading or highly competitive accuracy with a compact model size and low inference latency, supporting repeated forecasting settings such as capacity planning and autoscaling. Controlled synthetic studies that isolate cycle-magnitude and cycle-alignment variation and combine them with cycle-duration changes show that the advantage of oscillatory-state alignment increases as NRP intensifies.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

The Lov\'{a}sz Local Lemma: Foundations and Applications

作者:

arXiv:2603.07245v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Lov\'{a}sz Local Lemma (LLL) is a central tool in probabilistic combinatorics, providing a sufficient condition under which a finite collection of undesirable events with limited dependencies can be simultaneously avoided with positive probability. This paper offers a self-contained expository treatment of the lemma and its strengthened versions, emphasizing mathematical foundations, conceptual clarity, and applications. We begin with a pedagogically motivated proof of the LLL based entirely on unconditional probability inequalities. Particular attention is given to the symmetric form of the lemma and several subsequent strengthenings. The paper also discusses a variety of classical applications of both the symmetric and asymmetric forms of the LLL in combinatorics and graph theory, including bounds for the edge-disjoint paths problem, satisfiability of Boolean formulas in conjunctive normal form, lower bounds on diagonal and off-diagonal Ramsey numbers, hypergraph coloring results, structural properties of directed graphs, and acyclic graph colorings. Additional observations and refinements are provided throughout. We also introduce the algorithmic framework of Moser and Tardos, highlighting its constructive counterpart to the LLL, together with an introduction to the entropy-compression principle. The lopsided LLL, a refinement of the LLL, is presented along with an application to the Latin transversal problem. We further discuss the cluster-expansion lemma and its relation to the LLL, and present an alternative treatment of the Latin transversal problem from the cluster-expansion perspective that yields an improved result. The paper concludes with a high-level overview of the iterated LLL, also known as the semi-random method.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

DAL: A Practical Prior-Free Black-Box Framework for Piecewise Stationary Bandits

arXiv:2501.19401v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a practical, black-box framework termed Detection Augmented Learning (DAL) for the problem of piecewise stationary bandits without knowledge of the underlying non-stationarity. DAL accepts any stationary bandit algorithm with order-optimal regret as input and augments it with a change detector, enabling applicability to all common bandit variants. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that DAL consistently surpasses all state-of-the-art methods across diverse non-stationary scenarios, including synthetic benchmarks and real-world datasets, underscoring its versatility and scalability. We provide theoretical insights into DAL's strong empirical performance, complemented by thorough empirical validation.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Democracy in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.13026v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interfacing Artificial Intelligence (AI) with democracy is one of the most profound challenges of our times. On the one hand, AI comes with opportunities to overcome long-standing challenges in democracy, such as low participation in deliberative and voting processes with poor representation of people. On the other hand, new risks arise from AI algorithms that are privacy-intrusive, biased, manipulative, spread misinformation and influence election results. Moving beyond the over-simplistic question of whether AI is good or bad for democracy, the Handbook on Democracy in the Era of Artificial Intelligence asks instead: how to upgrade democracies and the principles they are built on, using AI? How to engage with AI and on what terms? Which new values and design principles are required to build democratic resilience? In 34 chapters by 59 authors across the world from different disciplines, we explore how AI can empower collective intelligence for democracy (Part 1) and what is the future of deliberative democracy using large language models and social media (Part 2). We also illustrate the role of AI for building resilient self-governance systems (Part 3) and the challenges of transforming democracy in the age of AI (Part 4). We conclude with broader perspectives (Part 5) that re-imagine the interplay of democracy and AI.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Parthenon Law: A Self-Evolving Legal-Agent Framework

arXiv:2606.04602v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As agents grow more capable, legal-domain LLM agents promise to turn document-heavy matters into reviewable work products – yet reliable deployment faces three obstacles: no large-scale evidence on how today's strongest model-and-harness combinations behave on end-to-end legal matters; no agent architecture adapted to the legal vertical, only general-purpose harnesses; and, in a setting that keeps shifting with new facts, authorities, and deadlines, no mechanism for systems to learn from their own outcomes. We address each. A large-scale empirical study on Harvey LAB – $12{,}510$ agent trajectories – shows that even frontier agents remain far from completing matters in a single pass: per-criterion accuracy climbs with stronger models while strict matter completion stalls. We then introduce \textsc{Parthenon}, a self-evolving legal-agent framework that factors Model, Harness, Agent roles, legal Knowledge, deterministic Tools, and procedural Skills into auditable surfaces for source traceability, date and number grounding, deliverable compliance, and issue closure. Finally, an anti-leakage learning loop converts scored failures into task-agnostic edits to skills, tools, and knowledge, letting the system improve with experience – as a firm refines its checklists and playbooks after each matter – without touching model weights. Across our large-scale empirical analysis, \textsc{Parthenon} substantially improves the performance of state-of-the-art models and harnesses on legal-matter tasks.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Architectural Bias in Face Presentation Attack Detection: A Comparative Study of Vision Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks

Face Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) systems constitute a critical security layer in biometric authentication; however, existing approaches exhibit systematic performance disparities across demographic groups, disproportionately affecting individuals with darker skin tones. This paper presents a comparative empirical investigation of whether Vision Transformer architectures reduce demographic bias in face PAD systems relative to convolutional baselines. Experiments are conducted on the CASIA-SURF Cross-Ethnicity Face Anti-Spoofing (CeFA) dataset. Three architectures are evaluated: a Multimodal ViT-Tiny trained from scratch, a ResNet18 CNN baseline, and a pretrained DeiT-S fine-tuned on CeFA across African, East Asian, and zero-shot Central Asian demographic groups. DeiT-S achieves the highest overall accuracy of 97.27% and the lowest EER of 0.86%, outperforming ResNet18 at 90.15% accuracy. In terms of fairness, DeiT-S reduces the inter-ethnic ACER gap between African and East Asian subjects to 0.13%, compared to 0.75% reported in an LBP-based work [6], representing an 83% reduction. Most notably, while ResNet18 records a BPCER of 10.44% on zero-shot Central Asian subjects, DeiT-S maintains 2.89% on the same unseen group, demonstrating a 3.6x generalization advantage. These results suggest that pretrained Vision Transformers achieve superior PAD accuracy, produce smaller demographic performance gaps, and generalize more equitably across unseen demographic groups, indicating that cross-demographic fairness in PAD may partly be influenced by architectural design.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Instance-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Semi-Supervised Learning of an On-Board Multi-Task Dense Prediction Model for Collision Avoidance System

Collision avoidance systems have evolved toward camera-based deep learning approaches for driving scene understanding. However, deployment in edge environments such as country clubs is constrained by limited computational resources and unreliable communication infrastructure. Moreover, constructing large-scale datasets for the target domain involves substantial annotation cost. To address these limitations, we propose an instance-aware knowledge distillation framework for semi-supervised learning. Specifically, we generate pseudo labels that mitigate teacher bias by leveraging domain priors from the teacher and instance-centric knowledge from foundation models. The trained lightweight student is deployed in the proposed collision avoidance system and performs multiple dense prediction tasks in real-time. The system detects frontal obstacles and encodes their spatial information into controller area network messages for automated guided vehicle operation. To achieve this, we construct a large-scale country club dataset and perform field validation of the proposed system. Experimental results demonstrate that the student outperforms the large teacher in instance segmentation while mitigating performance degradation in monocular depth estimation. Compared with the teacher, the student reduces FLOPs by 22.68$\times$ and parameters by 14.33$\times$, achieving 6.46 FPS on a low-cost edge device.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Pathwise structure of the three-dimensional attractive one-point interaction diffusion

作者:

arXiv:2606.08008v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the pathwise behavior of the three-dimensional attractive one-point interaction diffusion whose law was constructed by Cranston, Koralov, Molchanov and Vainberg, corresponding to the singular Schrödinger Hamiltonian \[ \frac12\Delta+\frac{\beta}{2}\delta_0, \qquad \beta>0. \] We identify a local stochastic differential equation satisfied by the process away from the origin and use it to construct a natural submartingale whose increasing component in the Doob-Meyer decomposition is supported on the set of times at which the process visits the origin. In particular, we show that the process visits the origin with positive probability and that the law conditioned on avoiding the origin is three-dimensional Wiener measure.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Teaching Diffusion to Speculate Left-to-Right

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their autoregressive decoding process incurs substantial inference costs due to inherently sequential token generation. Speculative decoding addresses this bottleneck by employing a lightweight draft model to propose multiple future tokens that are subsequently verified in parallel by a larger target model. Recent work has demonstrated that diffusion language models are well suited for this setting, as they can generate entire blocks of draft tokens in parallel and thereby alleviate the sequential constraints of autoregressive drafting. A subtlety of this regime is that block-diffusion drafters generate tokens bidirectionally within a block, whereas verification is performed by an autoregressive target model that evaluates tokens in a strictly left-to-right manner, leaving a gap between the symmetric training-time objective and the asymmetric verification-time reward. In this work, we offer an empirical analysis of three training-time interventions that narrow this gap: token positional weighting, a first-error focal loss that targets the position that breaks the accepted prefix within each block, and a chain loss term that substitutes a differentiable surrogate for the expected accepted length. The three interventions act along orthogonal axes (position, block-conditional first error, joint prefix) and compose additively; they are likewise orthogonal to test-time alignment mechanisms such as multi-draft self-selection, with which they can in principle be combined. Across four target models and six reasoning, code, and dialogue benchmarks, the three interventions raise accepted draft length by 21-76% per benchmark over a position-uniform baseline, without adding additional forward passes and without changing the inference pipeline or the rejection-sampling exactness contract.