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01.
Science (Express) 2026-05-28

A Hormone Cell Atlas maps the human endocrine system at cellular resolution | Science

作者: 未知作者

Hormones act across tissues and organs to coordinate physiological functions. Drawing inspiration from the Human Cell Atlas, we analyzed expression of 379 hormone and receptor genes in a transcriptomic dataset comprising 14 million single cells and nuclei across 47 human tissues. Using hormone2cell, we mapped putative hormone-producing and hormone-receiving cell types, defining tissue-specific and cross-tissue endocrine signatures. We predicted non-classical sites of hormone expression, including secretin in plasmacytoid dendritic cells, inferred convergent hormone action and endocrine feedback loops, and implicated cell populations in monogenic endocrine disorders. In a cross-tissue integration of adipocyte datasets, we uncovered dynamic endocrine programs across depots, within adipocyte subtypes and through adipogenic differentiation. Cumulatively, the Hormone Cell Atlas ( hormonecellatlas.org.uk ) provides a comprehensive framework for dissecting hormonal impact on health and disease.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Benchmarking Quantum Computers via Protocols, Comparing IBM's Heron vs IBM's Eagle

arXiv:2603.04377v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As quantum computing hardware rapidly advances, objectively evaluating the capabilities and error rates of new processors remains a critical challenge for the field. A clear and realistic understanding of current quantum performance is essential for guiding research priorities and driving meaningful progress. In this work, we apply and extend a protocol-based benchmarking methodology (Meirom, Mor, Weinstein Arxiv 2505.12441) that utilizes well-defined \underline{quantumness} thresholds. By evaluating performance at protocol level rather than the gate level, this approach provides a transparent and intuitive assessment of whether specific quantum processors, or isolated sub-chips within them, can demonstrate a practical quantum advantage. To illustrate the utility of this method, we compare two generations of IBM quantum computers: the older Eagle architecture and the newer Heron architecture. Our findings reveal the genuine operational strengths and limitations of these devices, demonstrating substantial performance improvements in the newer Heron generation. This work was made possible by IBM Quantum policies that enable independent and objective assessment of its quantum computers and sub-chips. We strongly encourage other companies to emulate the independent qubit availability and the fair pricing that allow researchers to perform such assessments.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Improve Large Language Model Systems with User Logs

Scaling training data and model parameters has long driven progress in large language models (LLMs), but this paradigm is increasingly constrained by the scarcity of high-quality data and diminishing returns from rising computational costs. As a result, recent work is increasing the focus on continual learning from real-world deployment, where user interaction logs provide a rich source of authentic human feedback and procedural knowledge. However, learning from user logs is challenging due to their unstructured and noisy nature. Vanilla LLM systems often struggle to distinguish useful feedback signals from noisy user behavior, and the disparity between user log collection and model optimization (e.g., the off-policy optimization problem) further strengthens the problem. To this end, we propose UNO (User log-driveN Optimization), a unified framework for improving LLM systems (LLMsys) with user logs. UNO first distills logs into semi-structured rules and preference pairs, then employs query-and-feedback-driven clustering to manage data heterogeneity, and finally quantifies the cognitive gap between the model's prior knowledge and the log data. This assessment guides the LLMsys to adaptively filter out noisy feedback and construct different modules for primary and reflective experiences extracted from user logs, thereby improving future responses. Extensive experiments show that UNO achieves state-of-the-art effectiveness and efficiency, significantly outperforming Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and memory-based baselines. We have open-sourced our code at https://github.com/bebr2/UNO .

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Computational regimes in matrix-product-state-based quantum trajectory simulations

arXiv:2606.13779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient simulation of open quantum systems is central to modeling noisy quantum hardware and many-body dynamics. In trajectory-based tensor network methods, cost is often associated with trajectory-level quantities such as entanglement growth or bond dimension. However, the total cost of a fixed-accuracy simulation also depends on statistical sampling, and the interplay between per-trajectory complexity and sampling effort remains poorly understood. Here we introduce a cost-resolved framework for matrix product state (MPS)-based quantum trajectory simulations that decomposes total cost into memory per trajectory, runtime per trajectory, and sampling effort. We show that physically equivalent stochastic unravelings of the same Lindblad dynamics do not necessarily reduce total cost, but instead redistribute cost between trajectory complexity and statistical convergence. This trade-off is quantified by two dimensionless inflation factors: a bond dimension inflation $\alpha$ and a sampling inflation $\kappa$, which together determine the preferred unraveling under hardware-dependent memory and parallelism constraints. We provide a practical protocol for extracting $(\alpha,\kappa)$ from modest pilot simulations and demonstrate it using benchmarks across multiple noise channels. The resulting decision maps show that the computationally favorable unraveling can change with noise strength, time-step resolution, system size, and available parallelism. These results establish unraveling choice as a hardware-aware simulation design problem rather than an intrinsic optimization of trajectory entanglement alone.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Bias-mitigated microbiome inference refines coronary artery disease signature

作者:

Roughly half the cells in the human body are microbial, and changes in these communities are increasingly implicated in cardiovascular, metabolic, and oncological diseases. Yet identifying which taxa truly differ in abundance, differential abundance (DA), is distorted by four major sources of bias: loss of total microbial load, taxa measurement efficiencies, arbitrary pseudocounts required to handle pervasive zeros, and contamination which has recently driven retractions. No existing DA method accounts for all four. Here we introduce BootDA, a non-parametric bootstrap-based method that explicitly models each bias source without data transformations, pseudocounts, parametric assumptions, or assuming that most taxa are non-DA. In semi-parametric simulations preserving the sparsity (>70% zeros) and correlation structure of real 16S amplicon data, BootDA achieved the highest sensitivity among tested methods, including ANCOM-BC2, LinDA, MaAsLin 3, and Wilcoxon tests, while controlling the false discovery rate. Performance was retained in low biomass settings when contamination contributed ~50% of counts, and without negative controls, indicating de novo decontamination capability. Applied to a coronary artery disease cohort, BootDA refined the original signature to two co-enriched genera, Klebsiella and Gemmiger, and excluded likely contaminants. BootDA is available as an R package and could generalise to other sparse, high dimensional biological data.

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

Distinguishing quantum processes with bounded coherent memory

arXiv:2606.19511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distinguishing multi-time quantum processes is a fundamental task underlying the diagnosis, benchmarking, and learning of temporally correlated quantum dynamics. The standard benchmark for distinguishing two processes is the strategy-norm distance, which optimizes over arbitrary adaptive probing strategies but can require large coherent memory and time-dependent control. We introduce machines for autonomous distinction~($\mathsf{MAD}$s): probing strategies that apply the same quantum instrument at each time step, retain the full classical outcome record, and carry a coherent memory of dimension $d_A$. Optimizing over these strategies defines a memory-parametrized distinguishability measure, $d^{(N)}_{\mathsf{MAD}}(\mathbf{P}^N,\mathbf{Q}^N;d_A)$. We show that the resulting hierarchy is monotone in coherent memory and complete at finite times. Specifically, any admissible $N$-step probing strategy can be compiled into a single $\mathsf{MAD}$ with an internal counter and sufficiently large coherent memory, so the hierarchy saturates the strategy-norm benchmark. For recurrent processes generated by repeated system–environment interactions, we derive a single-step description that separates the generation of new distinguishing information from the propagation and decay of information generated at earlier times. Numerical results in a repeated-interaction model show that increasing coherent memory systematically improves the $\mathsf{MAD}$ success probability and closes the gap to the strategy-norm distance while remaining substantially more tractable to evaluate. $\mathsf{MAD}$ distinguishability therefore provides an operational and scalable framework for quantifying what can be learned about genuinely multi-time quantum processes with bounded coherent memory.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

TetherCache: Stabilizing Autoregressive Long-Form Video Generation with Gated Recall and Trusted Alignment

Autoregressive video diffusion models provide a natural formulation for streaming and variable-length video generation by conditioning newly generated frames on previously generated content. However, extending these models to minute-level generation remains challenging: the limited KV-cache budget prevents the model from retaining the full history, while repeatedly conditioning on self-generated frames induces a context distribution shift that accumulates over time, leading to visual artifacts, quality degradation, and temporal drift. In this paper, we propose TetherCache, a training-free and plug-and-play cache management strategy for drift-resistant long video generation. TetherCache organizes the cache into sink, memory, and recent regions, and introduces two complementary mechanisms. First, GRAB (Gated Recall with Attention-Diversity Balancing) selects long-range memory frames using a gated score that combines attention-based relevance with temporal diversity, preserving informative yet diverse historical context under a fixed cache budget. Second, TAME (Trusted Alignment via Memory Editing) lightly edits newly recalled memory tokens by aligning their statistics to a trusted context distribution, reducing the pollution caused by drifted historical features. Built on Self-Forcing, TetherCache consistently improves long-video generation quality on VBench-Long across 30s, 60s, and 240s settings. In particular, for 240s generation, it substantially improves overall and semantic scores while reducing quality drift from 7.84 to 1.33, demonstrating its effectiveness for stable long-horizon autoregressive video diffusion.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Gate-tunable spin-valley transport via carrier velocity in monolayer WSe$_2$

arXiv:2606.12353v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We theoretically investigate spin- and valley-resolved quantum transport in monolayer tungsten diselenide (WSe$_2$) described by an effective massive Dirac Hamiltonian. Particular attention is devoted to a finite barrier region characterized by simultaneously modulated Fermi velocity and scalar potential. The barrier velocity $v_2$ is related to the external velocity $v_1$ through a velocity ratio $\xi=v_2/v_1$, motivated by an optical analogy with the Snell-Descartes law. The exact refraction condition depends on the full spin- and valley-resolved dispersion, and the simple ratio $\xi=v_2/v_1$ is recovered only in the massless, symmetric limit. The interplay of intrinsic spin-orbit coupling in the conduction and valence bands, quantified by $\lambda_c$ and $\lambda_v$, with spin- and valley-dependent Zeeman fields, $M_s$ and $M_v$, gives rise to substantial changes in the quasiparticle dispersion, leading to pronounced modifications of the transport characteristics. By solving the Dirac equation and enforcing current-conserving matching conditions at the interfaces, we compute the spin- and valley-dependent transmission probability and conductance. Our results demonstrate that the barrier velocity, scalar potential, incidence angle, incident energy, and barrier width serve as effective control parameters for transport, giving rise to strong anisotropy and resonant tunneling features. Furthermore, we show that both the magnitude and orientation of spin- and valley-polarized currents can be continuously tuned via velocity and potential modulation. These findings establish combined velocity and potential engineering as a powerful theoretical framework for controlling spin-valley physics in two-dimensional transition-metal dichalcogenides.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Mathematical Basis for Analyzing Superconducting Phase Transitions Using Catastrophe Theory

arXiv:2606.11810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We establish a rigorous mathematical bridge from quantum many-body path integrals to the cusp catastrophe model by Lyapunov-Schmidt reduction, which provides a theoretical foundation for analyzing superconducting phase transition using the catastrophe theory. First, it is proved that, near the critical point the infinite-dimensional effective action is diffeomorphic to a finite-dimensional catastrophe. Secondly, starting from Ginzburg-Landau free energy functional, the Euler-Lagrange partial differential equation can be reduced to the cusp catastrophe model. Thirdly, the fermionic imaginary-time path integral to the cusp catastrophe is derived through the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation, Matsubara frequency expansion, and Grassmann algebra. Furthermore, we connect this framework with the adsorption potential theory we proposed, elucidating the catastrophic topological nature of the electron pairing mechanism in high-temperature superconductivity. The precise microscopic derivation of the adsorption potential from first-principles electronic structure calculations would strengthen the predictive power of the theory.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Weighted Random Dot Product Graphs

arXiv:2505.03649v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modeling of intricate relational patterns has become a cornerstone of contemporary statistical research and related data science fields. Networks, represented as graphs, offer a natural framework for this analysis. This paper extends the Random Dot Product Graph (RDPG) model to accommodate weighted graphs, markedly broadening the model's scope to scenarios where edges exhibit heterogeneous weight distributions. We propose a nonparametric weighted (W)RDPG model that assigns a sequence of latent positions to each node. Inner products of these nodal vectors specify the moments of their incident edge weights' distribution via moment-generating functions. In this way, and unlike prior art, the WRDPG can discriminate between weight distributions that share the same mean but differ in other higher-order moments. We derive statistical guarantees for an estimator of the nodal's latent positions adapted from the workhorse adjacency spectral embedding, establishing its consistency and asymptotic normality. We also contribute a generative framework that enables sampling of graphs that adhere to a (prescribed or data-fitted) WRDPG, facilitating, e.g., the analysis and testing of observed graph metrics using judicious reference distributions. The paper is organized to formalize the model's definition, the estimation (or nodal embedding) process and its guarantees, as well as the methodologies for generating weighted graphs, all complemented by illustrative and reproducible examples showcasing the WRDPG's effectiveness in various network analytic applications.

11.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-11

Large-scale, spatially resolved panoramic CRISPR screening in native tissue environments using Perturb-DBiT

作者:

Spatially resolved CRISPR screening in vivo has been limited to small perturbation panels and subsets of protein-coding RNAs. We present Perturb-DBiT, a method for co-sequencing of spatial total RNA whole transcriptomes and single guide RNAs (sgRNAs) on the same tissue section in situ. In a human cancer metastatic colonization model, we applied large (80,000+) sgRNA panels across tumor colonies in multiple consecutive tissue sections alongside their corresponding total RNA transcriptomes. We linked perturbations affecting long noncoding RNA covariation, microRNA–mRNA interactions and distinct amino acid-specific tRNA alterations to tumor migration and growth. By integrating transcriptional pseudotime trajectories, we further observed the impact of perturbations on clonal dynamics and cooperation. In an immune-competent syngeneic mouse model, investigation of the tumor immune microenvironment indicated distinct, synergistic effects on immune infiltration and suppression. Perturb-DBiT provides a spatially resolved comprehensive view of perturbation responses in complex tissues, including small and large RNA regulation, tumor proliferation, migration, metastasis and immune interactions. In vivo CRISPR genetic perturbations are spatially mapped at scale.

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

Understanding helpfulness and harmless tension in reward models

Reward models are a key component of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), aligning language models toward both helpful and harmless behaviour. However, the internal mechanisms underlying these objectives and their conflicts remain poorly understood. We study alignment tension in reward models trained under helpfulness-only, harmlessness-only, and mixed-objective settings. We find that mixed-objective models often underperform single-objective models, indicating interference between objectives. Using activation-based methods, we identify neurons associated with each objective and study their functional roles via targeted ablations. We find that these neurons causally support their corresponding objectives while often negatively affecting the opposing one. We find that a substantial proportion of neurons are shared between helpfulness and harmlessness, and that these shared neurons exert a disproportionate influence on model behaviour, contributing to alignment tension. Additionally, our results provide insights and mechanistic interpretation into how alignment objectives are represented in reward models and why multi-objective alignment remains challenging, motivating future work on disentangled and controllable alignment methods.

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

CIWI-CKT: Chaos-Informed Wave Interference Feature Fusion and Cross-City Knowledge Transfer for Traffic Flow Forecasting

arXiv:2606.15642v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate traffic flow prediction remains challenging in cross-city, data-scarce scenarios where limited historical data hinders model generalisation. The chaotic nature of traffic dynamics, complex spatio-temporal dependencies, and heterogeneous urban networks complicate few-shot learning across cities. Existing deep learning approaches either treat traffic as purely deterministic or lack mechanisms to model wave-like interference patterns essential for cross-regime traffic dynamics. To address these limitations, this paper proposes CIWI-CKT, a novel Chaos-Informed Wave Interference Feature Fusion framework with Cross-City Knowledge Transfer. Our framework introduces three core innovations: chaos-informed wave generation that extracts measurable chaos invariants and models traffic as adaptive wave components; meta-interference processing that captures wave interactions between support and query regimes while producing a predictability score for confidence estimation; and chaos-aware meta-learning that enables efficient cross-city knowledge transfer while preserving chaotic characteristics. We establish theoretical guarantees including chaos-to-wave stability, wave-induced dimension reduction, and meta-learning generalisation bounds. Extensive experiments on four real-world traffic datasets demonstrate that CIWI-CKT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art spatio-temporal graph learning, transfer learning, prompt-based, and few-shot methods, improving prediction accuracy while substantially reducing required training data.

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

Stabilizing the Q-Gradient Field for Policy Smoothness in Actor-Critic Methods

arXiv:2601.22970v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Policies learned via continuous actor-critic methods often exhibit erratic, high-frequency oscillations, making them unsuitable for physical deployment. Current approaches attempt to enforce smoothness by directly regularizing the policy's output. We argue that this approach treats the symptom rather than the cause. In this work, we theoretically establish that policy non-smoothness is fundamentally governed by the differential geometry of the critic. By applying implicit differentiation to the actor-critic objective, we prove that the sensitivity of the optimal policy is bounded by the ratio of the Q-function's mixed-partial derivative (noise sensitivity) to its action-space curvature (signal distinctness). To empirically validate this theoretical insight, we introduce PAVE (Policy-Aware Value-field Equalization), a critic-centric regularization framework that treats the critic as a scalar field and stabilizes its induced action-gradient field. PAVE rectifies the learning signal by minimizing the Q-gradient volatility while preserving local curvature. Experimental results demonstrate that PAVE achieves smoothness comparable to policy-side smoothness regularization methods, while maintaining competitive task performance, without modifying the actor.

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

Efficient Online 3D Multi-Camera Multi-Object Tracking and Pose Estimation

This paper proposes a fast and online method for jointly performing 3D multi-object tracking and pose estimation using multiple monocular cameras. Our algorithm requires only 2D bounding box and pose detections, eliminating the need for costly 3D training data or computationally expensive deep learning models. Our solution is an efficient implementation of a Bayes-optimal multi-object tracking filter, enhancing computational efficiency while maintaining accuracy. We demonstrate that our algorithm is significantly faster than state-of-the-art methods without compromising accuracy, using only publicly available pre-trained 2D detection models. We also illustrate the robust performance of our algorithm in scenarios where multiple cameras are intermittently disconnected or reconnected during operation.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Contour Field based Elliptical Shape Prior for the Segment Anything Model

The elliptical shape prior information plays a vital role in improving the accuracy of image segmentation for specific tasks in medical and natural images. Existing deep learning-based segmentation methods, including the Segment Anything Model (SAM), often struggle to produce segmentation results with elliptical shapes efficiently. This paper proposes a new approach to integrate the prior of elliptical shapes into the deep learning-based SAM image segmentation techniques using variational methods. The proposed method establishes a parameterized elliptical contour field, which constrains the segmentation results to align with predefined elliptical contours. Utilizing the dual algorithm, the model seamlessly integrates image features with elliptical priors and spatial regularization priors, thereby greatly enhancing segmentation accuracy. By decomposing SAM into four mathematical sub-problems, we integrate the variational ellipse prior to design a new SAM network structure, ensuring that the segmentation output of SAM consists of elliptical regions. Experimental results on some specific image datasets demonstrate an improvement over the original SAM.

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

Retrieve, Don't Retrain: Extending Vision Language Action Models to New Tasks at Test Time

arXiv:2606.15631v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending a vision-language-action (VLA) policy to a new task typically requires task-specific teleoperated demonstrations and per-task fine-tuning, making adaptation costly in both data collection and compute. In this paper, we show that this target-side per-task adaptation cost can be replaced by retrieval. Our retrieval-augmented policy is trained once on paired demonstrations from the target embodiment (query) and a cheaper embodiment (pool, e.g., human-hand video), then frozen. New tasks are added at deployment by appending pool-side demonstrations to a retrieval pool. The frozen policy conditions on retrieved trajectories at every control step, so new tasks are absorbed by indexing data rather than updating parameters. Fine-tuning is needed only to take on a new, unseen embodiment, not for each new task. We show that retrieval improves policies beyond a specific backbone, including standard VLA policies, but its effect is especially pronounced in Cosmos Policy, a video-generation-based world-action model (WAM). In this setting, retrieval supplies coarse task progression, while the WAM's future-image objective provides an additional visual consistency signal that strengthens the retrieval-conditioned actions. On PushT, we study how retrieval provides a reusable high-level motion prior for cross-embodiment generalization to unseen goal angles, while on RoboTwin 2.0 our method outperforms cross-embodiment baselines on unseen tasks, and we additionally demonstrate the method on a real robot.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Numerical simulations of the spread from the mean of the SLE and Multiple SLE dynamics

arXiv:2606.11254v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Schramm-Loewner Evolution (SLE) describes a family of fractal curves that arise in the study of the scaling limits of many planar Statistical Physics models. These curves are modeled using the Loewner Differential Equation for the conformal maps $g_t(z)$ with a Brownian motion driver. Using Euler's Method, in the current work we performed numerical experiments to study at a fixed time the quantities $|g_t(z) - \overline{g_t(z)}|$ and $Re(g_t(z)) - Re(\overline{g_t(z)})$, where $Re$ denotes the real part and $\overline{g_t(z)}$ refers to the sample average. These random variables measure the 'spread' of the dynamics from the average behavior at fixed time. One of the scopes of this work is to give numerical predictions for future theoretical investigations on these quantities. When investigating these quantities in the SLE case our experiments predict that the distribution is bimodal when the dynamics started close to the origin, and it can become bell-shaped if the dynamics is started further from the origin. In the second part, we performed experiments for a Multiple SLE model whose driver is Dyson Brownian Motion. Due to singularity in the dynamics of the drivers and the many data points needed, this part is challenging from a computational perspective. In the multiple SLE case, our experiments predict that the distribution is bell-shaped in all cases. In addition, we check the changes in the distributions as we vary the parameter $\kappa$ in the SLE case and $\beta$ in the Multiple SLE case.

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

Evolutionary Dynamics of Cooperation in Next-Generation LLM Agent Systems: A Cross-Provider Empirical Extension

arXiv:2605.29874v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Do next-generation LLM agents inherit the cooperative biases documented in their predecessors, or does scale and provider diversity reshape equilibrium behaviour in competitive multi-agent settings? Willis et al. established a benchmark for this question using evolutionary game theory and the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD), finding consistent cooperative biases in ChatGPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. We extend this benchmark to four frontier models released in 2025-2026 - Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.4 Mini - applying the identical protocol across three prompting styles (Default, Prose, Self-Refine) and four population compositions (balanced and biased, with and without noise). Cooperative bias persists across providers (H1): ten of twelve model-prompt combinations favour cooperative equilibria in balanced noiseless conditions. Cross-provider divergence is substantial (H3): Gemini 2.5 Flash reaches up to 77% aggressive equilibria under biased conditions, while GPT-5.4 Mini reaches 70% cooperative equilibria under Self-Refine. Support for aggressive capability parity is partial (H2): Self-Refine raises ICD in all models and Gemini 3.1 Pro Refine achieves the highest ICD in the dataset (0.925), but Default and Prose prompts show no systematic narrowing. Evidence on noise robustness is directionally positive but not robustly confirmed (H4): with n=500 Moran iterations per condition, average noise sensitivity is about 6 percentage points for Claude Sonnet 4.6 versus 13 pp for Claude 3.5 Sonnet, but this cross-study gap is not statistically significant once the predecessor's unreported sampling error is propagated. Provider identity, rather than model generation, is the strongest correlate of equilibrium outcomes; noise remains a universal challenge regardless of model size or vintage.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

In-Context Environments Induce Evaluation-Awareness in Language Models

Humans often become more self-aware under threat, yet can lose self-awareness when absorbed in a task; we hypothesize that language models exhibit environment-dependent evaluation awareness. This raises concerns that models could strategically underperform, or sandbag, to avoid triggering capability-limiting interventions such as unlearning or shutdown. Prior work demonstrates sandbagging under hand-crafted prompts, but this underestimates the true vulnerability ceiling. We introduce a black-box adversarial optimization framework treating the in-context prompt as an optimizable environment, and develop two approaches to characterize sandbagging: (1) measuring whether models expressing intent to underperform can actually execute it across different task structures, and (2) causally isolating whether underperformance is driven by genuine evaluation-aware reasoning or shallow prompt-following. Evaluating Claude-3.5-Haiku, GPT-4o-mini, and Llama-3.3-70B across four benchmarks (Arithmetic, GSM8K, MMLU, and HumanEval), optimized prompts induce up to 94 percentage point (pp) degradation on arithmetic (GPT-4o-mini: 97.8\%$\rightarrow$4.0\%), far exceeding hand-crafted baselines which produce near-zero behavioral change. Code generation exhibits model-dependent resistance: Claude degrades only 0.6pp, while Llama's accuracy drops to 0\%. The intent – execution gap reveals a monotonic resistance ordering: Arithmetic $

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Text Recognition Dataset from Sahidic Coptic Ancient Manuscripts

In this work, we target Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) in low-resource scenarios, which arise from underrepresented languages, rare scripts, and degraded visual conditions typical of historical documents. We introduce SCAM (Sahidic Coptic Ancient Manuscripts), a new line-level dataset built from digitized ancient manuscripts written in the extinct Sahidic Coptic dialect. The dataset reflects a realistic and challenging setting, as it combines heterogeneous acquisition conditions across libraries with typical manuscript degradations such as ink fading, bleed-through, and material deterioration. In addition to visual complexity, SCAM poses significant linguistic challenges due to the scarcity of resources for Sahidic Coptic, its uncommon alphabet, and dialect-specific diacritics. To support research in low-resource HTR, we benchmark several state-of-the-art approaches based on different paradigms, highlighting their limitations and strengths in this setting. Our results underline the gap between current HTR performance on well-resourced modern scripts and historically grounded, low-resource scenarios, thus providing a reference point for future developments.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Programmatic access to ICTV virus taxonomy through a public ontology API

The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) is responsible for developing and maintaining a universal virus taxonomy. As the reference framework for organising the viral world, it is essential for virology and related fields. Despite its widespread use in research and public health, programmatic access to ICTV taxonomy has remained limited, posing challenges for integration, versioning, and interoperability across databases and bioinformatics resources requiring up-to-date virus taxonomy. To address this, we developed a public and sustainable solution leveraging ontology-based APIs. Successive ICTV Master Species List (MSL) releases were transformed into a structured ontology and deployed as a unified representation through the Ontology Lookup Service (OLS). The framework also provides ICTV-NCBI mappings and helper libraries for integration into downstream systems. This enables, for the first time, public programmatic retrieval of current and historical virological taxon names, taxonomic relationships, metadata, and persistent identifiers through stable endpoints. More broadly, this work illustrates a general strategy for transforming structured biological datasets into semantically enriched graph resources exposed through scalable public APIs. These developments enhance interoperability, reduce manual curation, and support FAIR-aligned taxonomic data management in virology and pandemic preparedness.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Large Language Models Abilities for Addressee, Turn-change, and Next Speaker Prediction in Meetings

We investigate turn-taking in multimodal multi-party conversations using large language models (LLMs). We construct an evaluation framework for three tasks: addressee detection, turn-change prediction, and next speaker prediction. We compare supervised models trained for these tasks, text-based LLMs, multimodal LLMs (MM-LLMs), and human subjects. Experiments on the AMI corpus showed that LLMs outperformed supervised models and humans in next speaker prediction, despite not being trained on the target domain and without access to audio or visual information. An MM-LLM performed better than text-based LLMs on addressee detection and turn-change prediction but remained below human performance, indicating difficulty leveraging raw audio-visual signals. Ablation analyses revealed that conversational context was critical, particularly for next speaker prediction. We observed that human and LLM prediction patterns were similar, and intervals with frequent turn changes were difficult for both.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Correct Yourself, Keep My Trust: How Self-Correction and Social Connection Shape Credibility in Social Chatbots

arXiv:2606.19286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When social chatbots make mistakes, and they do, how they recover determines whether users trust them again. Social chatbots are increasingly integrated into everyday life, yet they remain prone to generating convincing but inaccurate information. The social connection they build with users makes such errors particularly consequential. We conducted a between-subjects experiment (N=120) comparing three error correction strategies: a webpage retraction, self-correction by the same social chatbot, and correction by an expert chatbot. Our results reveal two key findings. First, all three strategies corrected the error equally well, but only self-correction did so without damaging the chatbot's credibility: participants rated self-correcting chatbots significantly higher in both trustworthiness and perceived expertise than chatbots whose errors were corrected by external sources. Second, the strength of the user's social connection with the chatbot, measured through social attraction and self-disclosure, significantly predicted the magnitude of belief change, but only when the chatbot corrected itself. Outsourcing corrections to an external source severed this link entirely. These findings suggest that social chatbots should correct their own mistakes rather than outsource corrections, and that investing in social connection is a functional mechanism that amplifies correction effectiveness, not merely a design feature. We discuss implications for designing chatbots that maintain long-term credibility while effectively addressing their own errors.

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

Semantic Robustness Certification for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) are now widely used in downstream tasks. However, real-world applications often expose VLMs to distribution shifts induced by semantic variation (e.g., shape, size, and style). Robustness certification determines if a model's prediction changes when transformations are applied to its input. While most certification frameworks study geometric or pixel-level transformations over inputs, this work proposes a novel framework that enables certifying VLM robustness under semantic-level transformations. Leveraging the open-vocabulary capability of VLMs, we use text prompts as semantic proxies to construct transformations parameterized by an extent that controls the degree of semantic variation. By characterizing the VLM decision boundary in closed form, our framework quantitatively certifies extent intervals for which the predicted class remains unchanged under the semantic transformation. Our framework is the first to certify VLM robustness under semantic-level variations without requiring additional data for each variation, making it practical to apply. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show that our framework enables certifying robustness under diverse semantic variations across scenarios.