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

Skill-to-LoRA: From Using Skills to Learning Behaviors for Token-Efficient LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.16769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are commonly distributed as SKILL.md files: human-readable procedural documents that describe workflows, tools, resources, and domain conventions. While convenient for inspection and reuse, this design requires the same reusable procedure to be repeatedly injected into the runtime context. We propose Skill-to-LoRA(S2L), a behavior-centric skill representation that replaces runtime skill text with skill-specific LoRA adapters. Rather than compressing the skill document itself, S2L models the behavioral change induced by the skill text: offline, the complete SKILL.md is used to synthesize skill-guided demonstrations; online, the full document is omitted and the corresponding LoRA adapter is dynamically loaded to activate the learned skill behavior. We evaluate S2L with Qwen3.6-27B on a 21-skill subset of SWE-Skills-Bench. Compared with the no-skill and Full Skill Text baselines, S2L improves pass rate by 2.9 and 5.2 percentage points, respectively, while reducing per-step token cost by 6.6% relative to Full Skill Text prompting. S2L matches or improves Full Skill Text on 18/21 skills and the no-skill baseline on 15/21 skills. Control experiments further show that the gains depend on skill-specific adapter alignment: Wrong-LoRA and Shared-LoRA both reduce performance. These results suggest that many procedural agent skills can be converted from runtime instructions into trainable, dynamically loadable behavioral modules. Code will be released upon acceptance.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Teaching Values to Machines: Simulating Human-Like Behavior in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate a remarkable capacity to adopt different personas and roles; however, it remains unclear whether they can manifest behavior that adheres to a coherent, human-like value structure. In this work, we draw on established psychological value theory to induce human-like values in LLMs and assess their alignment with patterns observed in human studies. Using validated psychological questionnaires, we conduct large-scale experiments – over 5 million questions – to evaluate value structures and value-behavior relationships in leading LLMs and compare them to humans. Our findings reveal strong agreement between value-prompted LLMs and humans across both dimensions. Moreover, incorporating human value distributions enhances population-level simulations with value-induced LLMs. These findings highlight the potential of value-induced LLMs as effective, psychologically grounded tools for simulating human behavior.

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

Renewable Lasso without Batch-Number Constraints: A Gradient-Enhanced Approach

arXiv:2606.11738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study online estimation for high-dimensional generalized linear models with streaming data. First, for the non-distributed setting, we propose a gradient-enhanced surrogate loss that approximates the cumulative loss using only historical summaries, which modifies and improves upon the existing renewable estimation approach for the same model in the high-dimensional setting, and removes the batch-number constraint in previous studies. We then extend the method to distributed streaming data under the master-client architecture, where batches are partitioned across sites and only summaries (gradient vectors) are exchanged. Instead of directing applying the popular method of Jordan et al. (2019) to the surrogate quadratic loss, our adjusted approach does not require the clients to compute the full surrogate loss. We derive non-asymptotic error bounds under the high-dimensional scaling, without the stringent constraint on the number of batches in the previous studies. Simulation results under linear and logistic models, together with a real-data application, show improved accuracy over existing renewable estimators.

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

More Context, Larger Models, or Moral Knowledge? A Systematic Study of Schwartz Value Detection in Political Texts

Detecting Schwartz values in political text is difficult because implicit cues often depend on surrounding arguments and fine-grained distinctions between neighboring values. We study when context and explicit moral knowledge help sentence-level value detection. Using the ValuesML/Touché ValueEval format, we compare sentence, window, and full-document inputs; no-RAG and retrieval-augmented settings with a curated moral knowledge base; supervised DeBERTa-v3-base/large encoders; and zero-shot LLMs from 12B to 123B parameters. The results show that more context is not uniformly better: full-document context improves supervised DeBERTa encoders by 3.8-4.8 macro-F1 points over sentence-only input, but does not consistently help zero-shot LLMs. Retrieved moral knowledge is more consistently useful in matched comparisons, improving each tested model family and context condition under early fusion. However, scaling from DeBERTa-v3-base to large and from 12B to larger LLMs does not guarantee gains, and simple early fusion outperforms the tested late-fusion and cross-attention RAG variants for encoders. Per-value analyses show that context and retrieval help most for socially situated or conceptually confusable values. These findings suggest that value-sensitive NLP should evaluate context, knowledge, and model family jointly rather than treating longer inputs or larger models as universal improvements.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

High-Fidelity Video Compression based on Invertible Neural Transform and Implicit Conditioning

Learning-based video compression has recently achieved competitive rate-distortion performance compared to conventional video codecs. However, most existing methods rely on non-invertible analysis-synthesis transforms, with reconstruction quality subject to both quantization and transform approximation errors. This limitation becomes particularly restrictive at higher quality points, where quantization errors are small and transform-induced distortion dominates. To address this, we propose InnVC, an Invertible neural network based Video Codec for wide-range and high-fidelity compression. The core idea is to preserve an invertible main transform path prior to quantization, while injecting content-adaptive context through a compact implicit conditioning field. This decouples strongly correlated video content from harder-to-model fine details, allowing different components to specialize in complementary reconstruction tasks for more efficient compression. To further improve compressibility, we introduce a scheduled masking strategy that progressively concentrates informative content into fewer latent channels for more effective entropy coding. Experiments on the UVG and MCL-JCV benchmarks show that InnVC achieves strong compression performance over a broad quality range, being particularly effective in the high-quality regime, yielding BD-rate reductions of 21.66% in PSNR and 46.06% in MS-SSIM relative to x265 on UVG. To the best of our knowledge, InnVC is the first neural video codec covers operating poins from low bitrate to high fidelity within a single architecture scale, spanning more than 20 dB in PSNR.

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

From Seeing to Experiencing: Scaling Navigation Foundation Models with Reinforcement Learning

Navigation foundation models trained on massive web-scale data enable agents to generalize across diverse environments and embodiments. However, these models, which are trained solely on offline data, often lack the capacity to reason about the consequences of their actions or adapt through counterfactual understanding. They thus face significant limitations in real-world urban navigation, where interactive and safe behaviors, such as avoiding obstacles and moving pedestrians, are critical. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Seeing-to-Experiencing (S2E) learning framework to scale the capability of navigation foundation models with reinforcement learning. S2E combines the strengths of pretraining on offline videos and post-training through reinforcement learning. It maintains the model's generalizability acquired from large-scale real-world videos while enhancing its interactivity through reinforcement learning in simulation environments. Specifically, we introduce two innovations: (1) an Anchor-Guided Distribution Matching strategy for offline pretraining, which stabilizes learning and models diverse motion patterns through anchor-based supervision; and (2) a Residual-Attention Module for reinforcement learning, which obtains reactive behaviors from simulation environments without erasing the model's pretrained knowledge. Moreover, we establish a comprehensive end-to-end evaluation benchmark, NavBench-GS, built on photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructions of real-world scenes that incorporate physical interactions. It can systematically assess the generalizability and safety of navigation foundation models.

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

Metacognitive Myopia in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit potentially harmful biases that reinforce culturally embedded stereotypes, influence moral judgments, or amplify positive evaluations of majority groups. We propose metacognitive myopia as a cognitive-ecological framework accounting for a conglomerate of established and emerging LLM biases. Our theoretical framework posits that biased samples in the information environment cause five symptoms of metacognitive myopia in LLMs: integration of invalid embeddings, susceptibility to redundant information, neglect of base rates in conditional computation, decision rules based on frequency, and inappropriate higher-order statistical inference for nested data structures. Moreover, it posits that the two main components of metacognition, monitoring and control, could account for these five symptoms. Accordingly, we further outline how monitoring and control could be approximated technically, for instance, through hidden parallel reasoning histories that allow interactive LLMs to evaluate risks of myopic inference before generating overt responses. Our theoretical framework provides a novel perspective on flawed human-machine interactions and agentic AI and raises significant ethical concerns regarding the implementation of LLMs in organizational structures and high-stakes decisions.

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

Evaluative Judgement in Teaching AI-based Translation: A Class-room Case Study of AI-Mediated Translation and Post-Editing

Authors:

Drawing on 23 anonymized student pro-jects from a fourth-year Machine Transla-tion and Post-editing course in a BA-level translation programme, this paper exam-ines how structured comparison of gen-eral-purpose LLMs and online MT sys-tems can elicit evaluative judgement in AI-mediated translation. Students translat-ed short specialised English Wikipedia texts into Catalan or Spanish, generated four system outputs, evaluated them using automatic metrics and human adequa-cy/fluency assessment, selected one output for post-editing, and justified their deci-sion in written reports. Descriptive counts are reported for all 23 projects, while qualitative interpretation is based on the 22 cases accompanied by written reports. Results show that students did not treat automatic metrics as final authority: final post-editing selections often diverged from metric rankings and were justified through adequacy, fluency, terminology, naturalness, and expected post-editing ef-fort. The study therefore does not bench-mark systems under controlled conditions; it analyses how students justified system choice within an authentic classroom as-signment.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

In-Domain Supervised Pathology Report Classification: A Reproducible Pipeline from Data Curation to Production-Matched Evaluation

We introduce an in-domain supervised pipeline designed to counter the out-of-distribution performance drop that hampers supervised biomedical NLP models, a problem observed when models trained on pathology reports are moved across cancer registries. Our contribution is a reproducible recipe for training a supervised classifier from routinely collected cancer registry data. It describes how to build the in-domain training set and a production-matched holdout, and to choose operating points that keep the false-negative rate (FNR) very low while keeping reviewer workload manageable. The pipeline standardizes data curation with facility-stratified sampling and separate handling of reports linked to registry cases, and includes a blinded manual audit to estimate positive-case prevalence and label noise. On a 418k-report holdout set, the Kentucky model achieved FNR 0.003 and false-positive rate (FPR) 0.097, improving over the Seattle-trained MOSSAIC OncoID baseline (FNR 0.010, FPR 0.183) and raising F1 from 0.860 to 0.922. In a blinded manual review of 600 reports, estimated positive prevalence declined from 0.500 to 0.398, indicating substantial label noise with errors concentrated in rare primary sites.

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

JustDiag!: A Diagnostic Justification Engine for Accountable Root Cause Analysis

arXiv:2606.19407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models can produce fluent root cause analyses, but fluent final answers alone are insufficient evidence for accountability in high-stakes operations. In real incident response, engineers need to know what evidence supported a diagnosis, which alternatives were considered, where contradictions remained, and whether the system resolved the case or preserved uncertainty. We address this gap with JustDiag, a diagnostic justification engine for RCA that maintains an explicit process state over evidence, findings, competing hypotheses, conflicts, and next checks. We evaluated the system on 66 real-world incidents using a two-layer protocol that separately scores final-answer quality and process quality. Relative to a matched control without diagnostic justification, JustDiag achieved stronger outcome and process scores, while accepting slightly lower terminal completion due to more calibrated non-closure. These results suggest that accountable RCA requires explicit diagnostic justification artifacts and process-aware evaluation, not only fluent final answers.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Cluster LOCO: Feature Importance For Interpreting Clusters

arXiv:2606.14592v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clustering is widely used for exploratory analysis and scientific discovery, driving insights from market segmentation to biological data analysis, but its outputs can be difficult to interpret, audit, and reproduce as modern datasets become increasingly large and complex. Reliable use of clustering requires understanding which features drive the discovered structure, yet feature-level explanations for clustering remain scarce compared with methods in supervised learning. Furthermore, existing clustering feature importance scores are often tied to specific algorithms and data assumptions. To address these challenges, we propose Cluster LOCO (Leave-One-Covariate-Out), a family of model-agnostic feature importance scores for clustering. Cluster LOCO is built on feature occlusion and clustering generalizability, defined as whether cluster labels learned on one subset of the data can be accurately predicted on held-out samples. For any chosen clustering algorithm, Cluster LOCO quantifies a feature's importance by measuring how much its removal degrades generalizability. We first introduce Cluster LOCO-Split, which relies on data splitting, and then extend it to Cluster LOCO-MP, a minipatch ensemble-based version designed for large-scale data. Across synthetic simulations and an application to cell-type discovery in single-cell transcriptomics, we show that Cluster LOCO more reliably recovers informative features than existing clustering feature importance methods.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

PowerOPD: Stabilizing On-Policy Distillation with Bounded Power Transformation

arXiv:2606.17199v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard on-policy distillation (OPD) for large language models estimates the reverse-KL objective using student-sampled tokens, yielding an unbiased single-sample Monte Carlo estimator that avoids vocabulary-wide computation. However, we show that this estimator suffers from severe training pathologies in practice: sample inefficiency, unstable generation dynamics, and a substantial performance gap compared to exact full-vocabulary OPD. Reward-level diagnosis traces these pathologies to the log-ratio reward, which is unbounded by construction, producing extremely high-variance gradients concentrated at early positions and persisting throughout training; standard post-hoc scaling fail as they operate only after this distortion occurs. To solve this problem, we propose PowerOPD: a family of natively bounded, sign-consistent rewards from the Box-Cox power transformation, parameterized by alpha > 0, of which the log-ratio is the degenerate alpha -> 0 limit. Across six mathematical reasoning benchmarks and four Qwen3 teacher-student pairs, PowerOPD achieves benchmark-averaged Avg@8/Pass@8 gains of up to +6.37/+5.71 over vanilla OPD, +3.01/+3.54 over post-hoc stabilization, and +2.59/+8.90 over full-vocabulary OPD, while reducing wall-clock time by 59.2% and peak GPU memory by 23.1%. Larger alpha generally improves accuracy, consistently shortens responses, and keeps gradient norms more than 3,000x smaller than vanilla OPD.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Universal Time Series Generation with Neural Controlled Differential Equations

arXiv:2605.28507v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work on the sequence universality of State Space Models (SSMs) has introduced efficient, maximally expressive continuous-time approaches for time-series modelling. While these works focus on discriminative settings, we extend this perspective to generative time-series modelling by proving that maximally expressive Structured Linear Controlled Differential Equations (SLiCEs) are universal time-series generators, in the sense that they can approximate the induced path laws of continuous causal pushforwards on compact latent sets in $W_\infty$. Building on these theoretical results, we propose Generative SLiCEs (G-SLiCEs), a maximally expressive continuous-time model for flow matching on path-space. Empirically, we show that expressivity improves performance in probabilistic forecasting and downstream tasks, while retaining the advantages of continuous-time models such as generalising to arbitrary observation grids. This is particularly beneficial for irregular grids, where fixed-grid models often struggle.

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

Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton: Learning Compliant Whole-body Policies with Real-time Torque Feedback

arXiv:2606.14218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For robots to work safely in household environments, they need to be compliant and react to torque and force feedback during contact. However, the majority of existing data collection pipelines still lack the ability to capture force and torque data for learning active compliant policies. In this paper, we present Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton (UME), an upper-limb exoskeleton that provides real-time haptic torque feedback while recording whole-arm configurations and joint torque signals for teleoperation. With transparent torque feedback, human operators can even unsheathe kinematically constrained objects while blindfolded. UME is low-cost, lightweight, and portable. Equipped with an embedded IMU, it enables teleoperation for mobile manipulation. With our proposed universal retargeting algorithm, UME can teleoperate a range of robots, including the 7DoF OpenArm, 7DoF Franka, and 6DoF X-ARM. We demonstrate that this combination of capabilities enables learning bimanual, whole-body, and active compliant policies that operate effectively in highly constrained spaces. The learned robust autonomous policies achieve high success rates across a variety of tasks, including long-horizon mobile manipulation, force-mediated box flipping, visually occluded box pushing, and space-constrained tabletop manipulation. Videos, code, and additional information can be found at https://ume-exo.github.io.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

MagpieTTS-LF: Inference-Time Long-Form Speech Generation Without Training on Long-Form data

arXiv:2606.18485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems achieve remarkable quality on short utterances but long-form speech generation shows prosodic drift, speaker inconsistencies and sentence boundary artifacts. Existing approaches either compress sequences, increase context length or naively concatenate independently synthesized chunks. We present an inference-time approach called MagpieTTS-LF that enables MagpieTTS to produce coherent long-form speech without model retraining. Our method introduces three key innovations: (1) soft attention priors to guide monotonic alignment while preserving past and future context; (2) a stateful inference algorithm that maintains context across sentence chunks, ensuring prosodic continuity; (3) history-aware text encoding that uses past text for discourse-level prosodic planning. Experiments on long texts show significant improvements in long-range intelligibility, prosodic coherence, speaker consistency, and boundary naturalness compared to other baselines.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-18

Daily briefing: The brain builds a sentence neuron by neuron

Authors:

Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals. Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

MeshPad: Interactive Sketch-Conditioned Artist-Reminiscent Mesh Generation and Editing

We introduce MeshPad, a generative approach that creates 3D meshes from sketch inputs. Building on recent advances in artist-reminiscent triangle mesh generation, our approach addresses the need for interactive mesh creation. To this end, we focus on enabling consistent edits by decomposing editing into 'deletion' of regions of a mesh, followed by 'addition' of new mesh geometry. Both operations are invoked by simple user edits of a sketch image, facilitating an iterative content creation process and enabling the construction of complex 3D meshes. Our approach is based on a triangle sequence-based mesh representation, exploiting a large Transformer model for mesh triangle addition and deletion. In order to perform edits interactively, we introduce a vertex-aligned speculative prediction strategy on top of our additive mesh generator. This speculator predicts multiple output tokens corresponding to a vertex, thus significantly reducing the computational cost of inference and accelerating the editing process, making it possible to execute each editing step in only a few seconds. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MeshPad outperforms state-of-the-art sketch-conditioned mesh generation methods, achieving more than 22% mesh quality improvement in Chamfer distance, and being preferred by 90% of participants in perceptual evaluations.

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

MemNovo: Look Back at the Spectrum for Balanced De Novo Peptide Sequencing from Mass Spectrometry

arXiv:2606.11868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: De novo peptide sequencing from tandem mass spectrometry is pivotal in proteomics, enabling identification of novel peptides without reference databases. While recent Transformer-based encoder-decoder models have achieved remarkable performance, we uncover a critical pathology in their inference dynamics. Through comprehensive feature scaling experiments, we demonstrate that existing auto-regressive peptide decoders tend to over-rely on generated-sequence priors while progressively under-utilizing fine-grained physical evidence from the input mass spectrum. This phenomenon leads to suboptimal results, where generated peptide sequences are biologically plausible yet not faithful to the input spectrum. To rectify this, we propose MemNovo, a training-free and plug-and-play mechanism that re-balances peptide and spectral contributions at inference time. MemNovo alleviates the information bottleneck by establishing a persistent spectral memory bank and injecting retrieved features directly into the final decoding stage via an ultra-conservative residual connection. Theoretical analysis confirms that this mechanism restores the mutual information between the decoder state and the raw spectrum. Extensive experiments on the Nine Species benchmark with two representative baselines, Casanovo and InstaNovo, demonstrate that MemNovo consistently improves both amino acid precision and peptide precision, achieving up to 39.1% relative improvement in peptide precision for Casanovo and up to 3.9% for InstaNovo, with negligible computational overhead.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimizing resource bounds in direct fidelity estimation

arXiv:2606.16336v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Direct fidelity estimation provides a way to estimate the fidelity between an experimentally prepared state and a desired pure target state without performing full tomography. Two influential formulations were introduced in 2011 by Flammia and Liu and by da Silva, Landon-Cardinal, and Poulin. In these protocols, the total estimation error is controlled through two distinct probabilistic steps: first, the fidelity is approximated using randomly sampled Pauli observables; second, each sampled expectation value is estimated from finitely many measurement outcomes. In this work we show that additional structural information about the noise can substantially sharpen the corresponding resource bounds. In particular, for some canonical channels the effective number of sampled Pauli settings can be reduced, leading to lower measurement cost both in the general pure-state setting and in the case of a stabilizer state. These results illustrate a broader point: worst-case confidence bounds in direct fidelity estimation can be significantly conservative when experimentally relevant structure is ignored. As a technical ingredient, we also revisit the allocation of the total accuracy and confidence budgets between the two probabilistic steps. Reformulating the analysis in terms of separate error parameters yields a constrained optimization problem whose solution lowers the average number of measurements in the general pure-state setting. Numerical simulations based on quantum circuits implemented in Qiskit illustrate both the improvement obtained under structured-noise assumptions and the conservativeness of the original worst-case bounds.

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

Structuring and Tokenizing Distributed User Interest Context for Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2606.20554v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation is an emerging paradigm that has shown promise in industrial recommendation systems, aiming to predict users' next interactions from their historical behaviors. At the core of generative recommendation lies item tokenization, which bridges item semantics and recommendation models. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively organize and inject complex user-behavioral and item-semantic contexts into recommendation models simultaneously. On the one hand, existing graph-based integration methods, such as graph serialization and graph neural networks, either suffer from scalability issues or exploit only local graph information. On the other hand, existing semantic tokenization methods typically rely on heuristics and lack explicit supervision signals, which may lead to inaccurate or suboptimal semantic representations. To address these limitations in user interest context modeling, we propose G2Rec, a scalable framework that unifies holistic graph-based user co-engagement modeling with semantic tokenization for industrial-scale generative recommendation. Overall, G2Rec enables recommendation models to capture holistic and semantically grounded user interest prototypes without requiring ground-truth user interests, thereby providing more comprehensive and accurate modeling of user behavior contexts in industrial sequential recommendation. Online deployment across product surfaces and extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of G2Rec over existing methods.

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

MOLAR: Learning Multimodal Molecular Representations from Noisy Labels

arXiv:2606.18390v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motivation: Noisy labels are a common challenge in molecular property prediction because molecular annotations are often obtained from assays, curated databases, or weak annotation pipelines rather than directly observed clean biological states. Treating recorded labels as reliable supervision can cause models to memorize corrupted observations and learn misleading molecular evidence. In multimodal molecular representation learning, this issue can be amplified by graph-text fusion or alignment, which may propagate label-induced errors across modalities. Results: We propose MOLAR, a noise-aware framework for learning multimodal molecular representations from noisy labels. MOLAR separates latent clean-property inference from recorded-label observation: graph and text views contribute residual evidence to a clean-property distribution, and a categorical label-observation channel maps this distribution to recorded labels for training. This formulation derives posterior label reliability and modality-specific molecular evidence from the model. Experiments on naturally noisy molecular benchmarks and controlled label-flipping benchmarks show that MOLAR consistently outperforms representative baselines. Visualization analyses further show that MOLAR provides interpretable reliability and modality-evidence diagnostics.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

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

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

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Geometry-Aware Post-Hoc Uncertainty Quantification in Operator Learning

arXiv:2606.17513v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural operators provide fast surrogates for PDEs but their deterministic predictions limit their use in tasks requiring uncertainty quantification (UQ), especially under geometric variability. Existing approaches primarily model uncertainty in network parameters, largely overlooking the geometry-aware representations learned by the operator itself. We propose REEF-GP (Residual on Embedded Features Gaussian Process), a post-hoc UQ framework that fits a GP to the residuals of a frozen neural operator whose internal embeddings define the kernel feature space. Rather than learning a separate feature map, REEF-GP adapts the operator's intrinsic coordinate-feature representations to construct geometry-aware uncertainties. To ensure stability and scalability on unstructured domains, REEF-GP incorporates spectral-normalized projections, heteroscedastic geometry-aware noise, and efficient subset-based training that avoids restrictive low-rank approximations. Across five PDE benchmarks with varying geometries, REEF-GP preserves predictive accuracy while achieving calibrated uncertainty estimates competitive with deep ensembles but at a fraction of their cost. Our approach remains robust under geometric distribution shift, with uncertainty concentrating in physically meaningful regions (e.g., shock fronts). Our results demonstrate that accurate and scalable post-hoc UQ for neural operators can be achieved directly in their learned feature space, offering a practical alternative to parameter-centric approaches.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Quantum Annealing Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Accurate Remaining Useful Lifetime Prediction

arXiv:2606.18503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Remaining useful life (RUL) estimation is central to predictive maintenance, where an unplanned failure can cost far more than the asset itself. Statistical degradation models miss the strong nonlinearity of real systems, and data-driven models often converge to suboptimal solutions in high-dimensional, non-convex search spaces. We propose a Quantum Annealing enhanced Q-Learning (QAQL) framework that couples the sampling behaviour of quantum annealing with the sequential decision making of Q-learning. Each Q-value update is encoded as a small quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) whose ground state is the greedy action; rather than acting as a deterministic optimizer, the annealer returns a distribution over near-optimal actions across many reads, and this stochastic action selection supplies the exploration that curbs premature convergence on nonlinear degradation trajectories. The QUBO is solved on the D-Wave Advantage system using minor embedding, with the annealer woven into the reinforcement-learning loop rather than bolted on after training. We validate QAQL on two public benchmarks: the NASA C-MAPSS turbofan engine datasets and a device-fleet predictive maintenance dataset. Averaged over many independent runs and across six error metrics, QAQL outperforms the classical and quantum baselines considered in this study, with statistically significant improvements. The results indicate that quantum annealing is a usable, not merely theoretical, optimizer inside a reinforcement-learning loop for industrial predictive-maintenance applications.