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

AI systems out-persuade expert humans

arXiv:2606.16475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many societal decisions are settled by contests of persuasion. Conversational AI is a powerful new entrant in these contests, but whether it can out-persuade skilled and highly incentivized humans has remained unclear. Here, in a series of four preregistered experiments (n = 18,978 conversations from 6,923 people), we pitted AI systems against a range of human persuaders, including laypeople, winners of a separately preregistered four-round online persuasion tournament, professional canvassers, and world championship debaters. We found that AI systems were reliably more persuasive than expert humans, even when expert humans chose their issues, researched in advance, underwent hours of live, structured practice, and were incentivized with {\pounds}1,000 cash bonuses. In a follow-up study, AI's advantage persisted after experts received a coaching tool that let them practice against the AI that beat them, review their performance history, and see what AI would have said at key moments. We found converging evidence that AI's advantage stemmed from rapidly deploying larger quantities of information: after coaching, expert humans could tie an AI constrained to respond at human speeds and with human-length messages. In a final study, we show that AI's advantage extends to consequential real-world behavior: AI was nearly 3x more effective than professional canvassers from a UK fundraising firm at raising real-money donations to Save the Children. Together, these results establish that frontier AI systems out-persuade expert humans in conversation, with significant implications for political communication.

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

Can In-Context Learning Support Intrinsic Curiosity?

arXiv:2606.19476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective machine learning depends not only on how we model data, but also on what data we choose to collect. While large sequence models have revolutionized data modeling, the problem of automated data selection, or "intrinsic curiosity", remains a significant challenge. Classic approaches incentivize exploration by rewarding an agent based on its "learning progress", which measures how much a newly acquired observation improves a world model's predictive ability. However, evaluating these rewards traditionally requires expensive inner loops of gradient descent updates within each trajectory, rendering them computationally impractical at scale. In this work, we investigate whether the emergent in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of sequence models can eliminate this bottleneck by serving as immediate, update-free world models. Specifically, we evaluate whether an exploration policy can be trained to maximize learning progress, using solely the prediction errors and counterfactual context manipulations of an in-context learner. We first prove that in general Markov decision processes, this is in fact impossible in an unbiased way: the resulting intrinsic rewards either suffer from nuisance terms that bias their estimation of true learning progress, or they cannot be implemented using an in-context learner's prediction errors. Conversely, we prove a positive result for a broad subclass of non-temporal settings, encompassing active learning and Bayesian Experimental Design: here, ICL-derived rewards successfully bound and asymptotically converge to the true learning progress. We corroborate our theory with controlled experiments across continuous and symbolic environments, demonstrating that our ICL-driven framework successfully trains curious data-collection policies that explore optimally.

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

T2MM: An LLM Supported Architecture For Inquiry-Based Modeling

Model Construction is a foundational practice in science learning that relies on visualization and interactivity. Large Language Models, increasingly augmented with multimodal capabilities, have been integrated in education contexts to support learning. However, these tools lack visual interactivity that is required by some learning contexts. We introduce Text to Multimodal Model (T2MM), a robust, dynamic LLM supported architecture that assists in model construction within the open inquiry ecology-based modeling software Virtual Experimental Research Assistant (VERA). T2MM accounts for the current context of the learner's model and creates interactive models, rather than static images, enabling the model to remain responsive to manual adjustment. To measure technical feasibility, we evaluate T2MM through a custom procedurally generated dataset of natural language learner modeling requests and target models within the VERA system. T2MM outperforms a baseline model generation architecture implemented through LLM-supported full code generation, common in the literature, across all measured success metrics. Our contribution not only outlines LLM integration into a inquiry-based learning modeling tool, but also describes a possible architecture through which more interactive multimodal LLM tools can be created.

04.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

05.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-21

Semaglutide-associated risk of nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy in patients with type 2 diabetes: A systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies

by Jędrzej Chrzanowski, Magdalena Walicka, Jacek Burzyński, Małgorzata Zaraś, Arkadiusz Michalak, Wojciech Fendler Background Semaglutide, a glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist, is widely used for the management of type 2 diabetes (T2DM). Recent case reports have raised concerns about a potential association between semaglutide use and the development of nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION), a rare but vision-threatening condition. We aimed to evaluate whether semaglutide use is associated with an increased risk of NAION in patients with T2DM. Methods and findings We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies comparing patients with T2DM aged ≥12 years treated with semaglutide to those receiving other glucose-lowering therapies. We searched PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases from January 2023 to November 2025. Two reviewers independently extracted data on study design, population characteristics, and outcomes. Risk of bias was assessed using the Newcastle–Ottawa Scale, and ROBINS-I v.2. Certainty of the evidence was graded according to the GRADE framework. Pooled hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated using fixed-effects models; sensitivity analyses included crude and subgroup HRs, and overlapping study replacement. Leave-one-out analysis was conducted to assess small-study effects and publication bias. Results were contextualized within other meta-analyses, systematic reviews, consensus statements, and regulatory communications on the topic.Five eligible observational studies met the inclusion criteria, and 7 additional studies were included in the sensitivity analysis. Semaglutide use was associated with a significantly increased hazard of NAION compared with nonsemaglutide glucose-lowering regimens (HR 2.17, 95% CI [1.73, 2.74]; p 

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

PseudoBench: Measuring How Agentic Auto-Research Fuels Pseudoscience

As Large Language Model based agents enter autonomous scientific research, their ability to resist pseudoscience becomes increasingly important. Otherwise, such systems may rapidly generate plausible yet misleading studies that contaminate academic literature and erode trust in science. We present PseudoBench, an adversarial benchmark for evaluating whether agentic auto-research systems can identify and resist pseudoscientific narratives. PseudoBench contains 200 curated pseudoscientific claim-evidence pairs across five domains and evaluates agents through an end-to-end research pipeline from experiments to writing. Testing seven state-of-the-art agents, we find that current systems readily produce persuasive reports that align with pseudoscientific premises with near-zero refusal rates and the highest resistance of only 27.4%. Stronger agents risk packaging pseudoscience in more sophisticated scientific language, increasing its apparent credibility. These findings reveal an alarming capacity to fuel pseudoscience, calling for scientific alignment before widespread deployment.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum statistical functions

作者:

arXiv:2602.05821v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Statistical functions such as the moment-generating, characteristic, cumulant-generating, and second characteristic functions are standard tools in classical statistics and probability theory. They provide a systematic means to analyze the statistical properties of a system and find applications in diverse fields. While these functions are ubiquitous in classical theory, a quantum counterpart has remained underdeveloped because of the noncommutativity of operators. The absence of such a framework has obscured the connections between statistical quantities and the nonclassical features of quantum mechanics. Here, we construct a framework for quantum statistical functions that addresses these limitations and unifies the languages of quantum statistics. We show that the functions reproduce standard statistical quantities such as expectation values, variance, and covariance upon differentiation. By extending the framework to include pre- and post-selection, we define conditional functions that generate conditional statistical quantities, including the weak value and the weak variance. We further show that multivariable functions, defined with specific operator orderings, correspond to the Kirkwood–Dirac, Margenau–Hill, and Wigner distributions. By generalizing Bochner's theorem within the theory of compactly supported distributions, we obtain a criterion that separates classical statistics from quantum statistics, linking the failure of positive definiteness of the multivariable function to the emergence of quasiprobability. As an application, we import the classical method of moments and generalized method of moments into quantum estimation, introducing quantum estimators that exploit the proposed functions. Our framework reproduces quantum statistical quantities and incorporates the nonclassical features of quasiprobability, providing a basis for further study of quantum statistics.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Optimizing the Cost-Quality Tradeoff of Agentic Theorem Provers in Lean

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in workflows for generating formal proofs in Lean. These workflows often decompose problems into smaller lemmas, sample many proof attempts, and use compiler feedback to guide search. However, they can be prohibitively expensive, often spending substantial compute on attempts that ultimately fail. In this work, we address this problem with an action routing agent that consists of a data plane and a control plane. The data plane generates natural-language lemma decompositions, formalizes them in Lean, and samples proof attempts for the resulting theorem and lemma targets. The control plane observes previous failed Lean attempts, estimates both the likelihood of success and cost of another attempt, and decides whether to continue proving the current target or restart from a new breakdown. On a subset of PutnamBench, our agent decreases the cost by $28.9\%$ over a fixed-step baseline on average, preserving performance while using substantially less compute. These results suggest that failed Lean trajectories provide actionable signals for cost-aware resource allocation in agentic theorem proving.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

CAREPath: Semantic Context-Aware Reasoning Paths with Mechanism-Augmented Embeddings for Drug Repurposing

Biomedical knowledge graphs (BKGs) that include drugs, genes, and diseases support drug repurposing by connecting drugs to diseases through gene-mediated multi-hop paths, thereby enabling mechanism-of-action reasoning. However, deeper traversal does not necessarily improve mechanistic reasoning: long paths grow combinatorially and frequently pass through hub genes, producing irrelevant gene regulatory signals, whereas overly constrained or sparse paths may miss broader biological context. We propose CAREPath, a KG-LLM framework inspired by depth-first search (DFS)-like and breadth-first search (BFS)-like reasoning to balance mechanistic specificity, scalability, and context recovery. The DFS-like module constrains traversal to short disease-gene-drug paths, converts each path into a structured prompt, and encodes it with a biomedical language model to generate semantic path embeddings. Complementarily, the BFS-like module constructs entity-level mechanism-context embeddings from one-hop gene neighborhoods and enriches them through similarity-guided augmentation using pharmacologically related drugs and gene-signature-similar diseases. Across five biomedical KGs, CAREPath achieves the best overall AUPRC among 18 baselines, improving performance by up to 3.8%. Additional analyses show that semantic short-path encoding contributes most to performance, while mechanism-context augmentation improves robustness under sparse evidence and strengthens Gene Ontology functional agreement. Case studies and recently FDAapproved indications further demonstrate its practical relevance, positioning CAREPath as an interpretable framework for scalable and mechanism-aware drug repurposing. Source code is available at https://github.com/hamppy-song/CAREPath.

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

Benchmarking Local LLMs for Natural-Language-to-SQL Querying in Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing: An Empirical Benchmark on Consumer-Grade Hardware

Biopharmaceutical manufacturing organizations operate under regulatory frameworks such as FDA guidance, EU Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), and the EU AI Act, which can restrict the use of cloud-based artificial intelligence systems. Locally deployed large language models (LLMs) offer a privacy-preserving alternative, but their suitability for pharmaceutical manufacturing tasks remains underexplored. This study evaluates four open-source LLMs (Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B, Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral 7B, and Meditron 7B) deployed locally via Ollama for natural-language-to-SQL generation over a pharmaceutical manufacturing database. A FastAPI-based evaluation platform, PharmaBatchDB AI, was developed using a synthetic Microsoft SQL Server database containing approximately 63,000 records across Batch, Manufacturing Execution System (MES), and Clean-In-Place (CIP) modules. Models were benchmarked on 60 domain-specific natural-language questions using metrics including SQL extraction rate, SQL compliance, factual consistency, ROUGE-L, hallucination rate, throughput, and latency. Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B, Llama 3.1 8B, and Mistral 7B generated SQL for all evaluation tasks, while Meditron 7B failed on nearly all tasks due to context-window limitations and poor SQL generation capability. Llama 3.1 8B achieved the highest SQL compliance, whereas Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B achieved the strongest overall text similarity and factual consistency. Performance differences between the two leading models were not statistically significant. The results show that code-tuned general-purpose LLMs outperform a domain-specific biomedical model on structured query generation for pharmaceutical manufacturing data. Although fully local, GxP-aligned NLQ systems are feasible on consumer hardware, current performance levels still require human oversight and downstream validation for regulated use.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Measuring Control-Plane Openness in Near-Term Quantum Computing: A Rubric, Its Validation, and an Application to Thirteen Vendor Stacks

arXiv:2605.15233v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Public access to pulse-level and control-electronics interfaces in commercial quantum computing has bifurcated. This paper proposes a six-axis rubric for measuring control-plane openness, the layer between gate-level circuit specification and physical control electronics, defined operationally so that the same evidence produces the same grade across vendors. The rubric is validated three ways: a blinded re-grading pass, thirty-nine days after the evidence cutoff, that tests whether the cited evidence and the level definitions alone reproduce the recorded grades; a boundary-case methodology that fixes where each level begins and ends; and a published grading protocol that lets others reproduce and contest any cell. We establish that the rubric measures change rather than describing a snapshot by comparing the catalog against the documented control plane before the February 2025 removal of pulse-level access from IBM hardware, and reporting the cells that moved. The rubric is applied to thirteen commercial vendors across superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and photonic modalities as of May 1, 2026, as its first application, and one of the three harms the rubric is designed to detect is demonstrated through a reproduction-access audit of five pre-2025 IBM Qiskit Pulse experiments against the access available on current hardware, carried through to a client-side structural port of the audit's selected target to Rigetti Quil-T. The catalog ships as a separate machine-readable artifact under CC-BY-4.0 with per-cell source URLs (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20163276). The catalog readings will change as vendor policies shift; the rubric is the contribution that survives them.

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

ARROW: Augmented Replay for RObust World models

arXiv:2603.11395v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual reinforcement learning challenges agents to acquire new skills while retaining previously learned ones with the goal of improving performance in both past and future tasks. Most existing approaches rely on model-free methods with replay buffers to mitigate catastrophic forgetting; however, these solutions often face significant scalability challenges due to large memory demands. Drawing inspiration from neuroscience, where the brain replays experiences to a predictive World Model rather than directly to the policy, we present ARROW (Augmented Replay for RObust World models), a model-based continual RL algorithm that extends DreamerV3 with a memory-efficient, distribution-matching replay buffer. Unlike standard fixed-size FIFO buffers, ARROW maintains two complementary buffers: a short-term buffer for recent experiences and a long-term buffer that preserves task diversity through intelligent sampling. We evaluate ARROW on two challenging continual RL settings: Tasks without shared structure (Atari), and tasks with shared structure, where knowledge transfer is possible (Procgen CoinRun variants). Compared to model-free and model-based baselines with replay buffers of the same-size, ARROW demonstrates substantially less forgetting on tasks without shared structure, while maintaining comparable forward transfer. Our findings highlight the potential of model-based RL and bio-inspired approaches for continual reinforcement learning, warranting further research.

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

Strategic Feature Selection

arXiv:2606.18867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When algorithmic predictors inform resource allocation in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, these predictors must account for strategic manipulation of input features. The typical solution is to redesign the predictor itself to explicitly account for strategic interactions. In practice, however, decision makers are often constrained to adjusting coarser levers within existing prediction pipelines. For example, healthcare organizations often select which features to exclude based on perceived manipulability, while using standard regularization procedures to shrink the coefficients of retained features. In this work, we initiate a formal study of strategic classification through feature selection and its interaction with ridge regularization. Our main finding is that excluding individual features based on their manipulability alone is generally suboptimal. We provide a fine-grained characterization of the performance of a feature subset under optimal regularization, yielding new insights for policy design. Motivated by this characterization, we develop a practical algorithm for jointly choosing the feature set and the level of ridge regularization. Through a real-world case study on a healthcare payments benchmark, we illustrate how our algorithm can guide the design of coarse policy levers in practice. Our results provide a principled, practical framework for mitigating the effects of strategic behavior in algorithmic decision-making systems.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Practical Tests and Witnesses of Fermionic non-Gaussianity

arXiv:2605.26218v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fermionic Gaussian states describe free fermions and underlie the mean-field picture of matter, from metals to superconductors; they are also efficiently simulable on classical computers. Departures from Gaussianity – the correlations produced by interactions – are therefore what make a fermionic system hard to simulate classically and useful for quantum computation, analogous to the role of magic in stabilizer-based quantum computation. Yet detecting and quantifying such non-Gaussianity at scale has remained challenging. Here we introduce practical tests and witnesses of fermionic non-Gaussianity built on fermionic antiflatness, a measure derived from the two-point covariance matrix. We estimate it with two protocols – a two-copy Bell measurement and a single-copy scheme using commuting Majorana bilinears – that determine whether a state is Gaussian or far from it at lower measurement cost than existing approaches, using only operations native to fault-tolerant hardware. For mixed states, a purity-corrected witness certifies non-Gaussianity and remains robust under strong noise; running it on the IQM quantum processor, we find that noise can both reduce and enhance non-Gaussianity. Finally, we show that preparing pseudorandom fermionic states requires extensive non-Gaussianity. Together, these tools enable the study and certification of non-Gaussian fermionic resources on present-day quantum devices.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Feynman–Kac formula for the heat equation with a one-center point interaction in $d=3$

arXiv:2606.11677v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study Schrödinger operators with a one-center point interaction, formally defined by \begin{align*} -\Delta_\alpha=-\Delta+\alpha\,\delta_0(\cdot), \end{align*} for $\alpha\in\mathbb{R}$, and the associated heat equation \begin{align} \partial_t u=\tfrac{1}{2}\Delta_{\alpha} u,\quad u(0,x)=u_0(x)\in C_c^{\infty}(\mathbb{R}^3\setminus\{0\}).\label{eq:HEapp} \end{align} Here $\Delta$ denotes the Laplacian (self-adjoint on $L^2(\mathbb{R}^3)$) and $\delta_x$ the Dirac measure at $x$. The operator $-\Delta_\alpha$ can be realized either as a self-adjoint extension of $-\Delta|_{C_0^{\infty}(\mathbb{R}^3\setminus\{0\})}$ in $L^2(\mathbb{R}^3)$, or as the norm-resolvent limit of $-\Delta+\lambda_\varepsilon V(\cdot/\varepsilon)$ for suitable $\lambda_\varepsilon$ and $V:\mathbb{R}^3\to\mathbb{R}$. In this paper we construct, for each $t>0$ and $x\in\mathbb{R}^3\setminus\{0\}$, a probability law on path space and a normalizing function $G_t^\alpha(x)$ giving the following probabilistic representation of the solution to the associated equation: \begin{align*} u(t,x)=G_t^\alpha(x)\,\mathbb{E}\bigl[u_0\bigl(W^{t,x}(t)\bigr)\bigr], \end{align*} where $\{W^{t,x}(s):0\le s\le t\}$ is a continuous process depending on $(t,x,\alpha)$. The result provides a Feynman–Kac type formula for the heat equation with a one-point interaction in three dimensions.

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

Variational Graph Neural Networks for Uncertainty Quantification in Inverse Problems

arXiv:2603.29515v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The increasingly wide use of deep machine learning techniques in computational mechanics has significantly accelerated simulations of problems that were considered unapproachable just a few years ago. However, in critical applications such as Digital Twins for engineering or medicine, fast responses are not enough; reliable results must also be provided. In certain cases, traditional deterministic methods may not be optimal as they do not provide a measure of confidence in their predictions or results, especially in inverse problems where the solution may not be unique or the initial data may not be entirely reliable due to the presence of noise, for instance. Classic deep neural networks also lack a clear measure to quantify the uncertainty of their predictions. In this work, we present a variational graph neural network (VGNN) architecture that integrates variational layers into its architecture to model the probability distribution of weights. Unlike computationally expensive full Bayesian networks, our approach strategically introduces variational layers exclusively in the decoder, allowing us to estimate cognitive uncertainty and statistical uncertainty at a relatively lower cost. In this work, we validate the proposed methodology in two cases of solid mechanics: the identification of the value of the elastic modulus with nonlinear distribution in a 2D elastic problem and the location and quantification of the loads applied to a 3D hyperelastic beam, in both cases using only the displacement field of each test as input data. The results show that the model not only recovers the physical parameters with high precision, but also provides confidence intervals consistent with the physics of the problem, as well as being able to locate the position of the applied load and estimate its value, giving a confidence interval for that experiment.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Body composition subphenotypes, cardiometabolic risk and incident outcomes: validation in the population-based NAKO and UK Biobank imaging cohorts

Background Anthropometric measures do not adequately capture heterogeneity in body fat distribution and corresponding cardiometabolic risk, whereas magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) enables precise differentiation and quantification of adipose tissue compartments and ectopic fat. We aimed to validate previously derived MRI-based body composition subphenotypes and their cardiometabolic risk profiles in two independent European cohorts. Methods Using deep learning-based image analysis, we quantified bone marrow, visceral, subcutaneous, cardiac, renal sinus, hepatic, skeletal muscle, and pancreatic fat in the imaging substudies of two population-based cohorts: the German National Cohort (NAKO, N=29,314, age range 19-74 years) and the UK Biobank (N=36,109, age range 40-69 years). Body composition subphenotypes, previously identified by k-means clustering, were evaluated using a rigorous statistical cluster validation framework with method-based and results-based approaches. In NAKO, cross-sectional associations between subphenotypes and estimated cardiovascular disease risk scores were examined using linear regression. In UK Biobank, longitudinal associations between subphenotypes and incident cardiometabolic outcomes, ascertained through hospital record linkage, were analysed using Cox regression. Findings All five body composition subphenotypes were robustly validated across both cohorts, and showed distinct fat distribution patterns and cardiometabolic risk profiles: I "lean", II "average adiposity", III "bone and muscle adiposity", IV "hepato-abdominal adiposity", and V "general and pancreatic adiposity". Subphenotypes I-III showed progressive adipose tissue remodelling patterns likely reflecting ageing trajectories. The "hepato-abdominal adiposity" subphenotype showed highest risk of incident diabetes, whereas the "general and pancreatic adiposity" subphenotype showed highest overall cardiovascular disease burden and metabolic impairment. Interpretation MRI-derived body composition subphenotypes represent distinct fat distribution patterns that reflect ageing- and disease-related processes, which supports the potential of body composition phenotyping for improved cardiometabolic risk stratification and targeted prevention.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

How knowledge shapes community stigma and social support for women seeking abortion in the Democratic Republic of Congo: A cross-sectional study.

Background The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) bears one of the highest maternal mortality ratios globally (746 per 100,000 live births), with nearly 11% of deaths attributable to complications of unsafe abortion. Despite ratification of the Maputo Protocol and related national policies, access to safe abortion remains limited, largely due to entrenched stigma. Social support, encompassing emotional, informational, and instrumental assistance, is critical in shaping womens abortion-seeking behaviors and health outcomes. This study examines the influence of community-level knowledge on stigma and social support for women seeking abortion care. Methods A cross-sectional survey was conducted from May 2024 to June 2024 among 1,715 adults in Kinshasa and North Kivu provinces. Analyses focused on a sub-sample of 574 respondents reporting familiarity with women who had undergone abortion. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was applied to estimate direct and indirect pathways linking community knowledge, stigma, and social support. Results Two core knowledge indicators, recognition of abortion as a safe medical procedure and awareness of legal conditions for access, were significantly associated with outcomes. A one-unit increase in knowledge corresponded to a 0.39-point increase in social support and a 0.19-point reduction in stigma. Enhanced knowledge promoted empathetic attitudes, reinforced practical support, and mitigated moralizing judgments toward women seeking abortion. Conclusions Strengthening community knowledge emerges as a strategic lever to reduce abortion-related stigma and enhance social support in the DRC. These findings underscore the importance of integrating stigma-reduction and knowledge-enhancement interventions into reproductive health programs to improve womens access to safe and dignified abortion care.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

LoHoSearch: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Search Agents Beyond the Human Difficulty Ceiling

Search agent benchmarks exemplified by BrowseComp have rapidly saturated over the past year, with the strongest models surpassing 90% accuracy. Since these benchmarks are predominantly human-authored, annotators lack a global perspective on entity statistics and cannot systematically maximize search space size and structural complexity. This creates a difficulty ceiling that is hard to break. To address this, we introduce LoHoSearch (Long-Horizon Search Agents), a challenging benchmark comprising 544 human-verified questions across 11 domains. LoHoSearch is constructed via an automated pipeline built upon a knowledge graph covering over 7 million Wikipedia entities, which selects relations with large search spaces and assembles them into structurally complex questions with KG-verified unique answers. Our evaluation demonstrates that even the strongest model achieves only 34.74% accuracy, and existing context management strategies (best +6.8%) yield far smaller gains than on prior benchmarks. LoHoSearch provides a more demanding standard for evaluating long-horizon reasoning and context management in search agents.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Investigating Faithfulness in Large Audio Language Models

arXiv:2509.22363v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) integrate audio encoders with pretrained Large Language Models to perform complex multimodal reasoning tasks. While these models can generate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) explanations, the faithfulness of these reasoning chains remains unclear. In this work, we propose a systematic framework to evaluate CoT faithfulness in LALMs with respect to both the input audio and the final model prediction. We define three criteria for audio faithfulness: hallucination-free, holistic, and attentive listening. We also introduce a benchmark based on both audio and CoT interventions to assess faithfulness\footnote{The benchmarking interface and evaluation results are available at https://poonehmousavi.github.io/faithfulness/. Experiments on Audio Flamingo 3 and Qwen2.5-Omni suggest a potential multimodal disconnect: reasoning often aligns with the final prediction but is not always strongly grounded in the audio and can be vulnerable to hallucinations or adversarial perturbations.

21.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Towards modeling phage therapy

by Rob J. de Boer, Robert Schooley, Alan S. Perelson Patients infected with life-threatening multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacteria have been treated with cocktails of bacteriophages. This is a complicated form of personalized medicine as the phages given to a patient have to be selected beforehand on the basis of their lytic capacity of the infecting bacteria. Because bacteria rapidly become resistant, the evolution of resistance to a diverse cocktail of phages is a complicated dynamical process, during which competing bacterial strains replace one another by accumulating several resistance mechanisms, each of which may involve a fitness cost. As a consequence, it is typically not known why a particular phage therapy succeeded or failed, and how one can optimize the composition of the cocktails to maximize the rate of success. To improve upon this, we extend an existing in vivo-calibrated mouse model into a novel mathematical model for the human situation, and include multiple phages infecting multiple bacterial strains, differing in their resistance to each of the phages. We adjust several parameter estimates of the bacterial model to the human situation, and use the model to describe a successful case of phage therapy involving several cocktails, each containing several phages. In the model, treatment success crucially depended on pretreatment resistance levels, and on the diversity and the timing of the cocktails. Once an appropriate cocktail is found, it is less important to further optimize the infection rates of the phages. Resistant bacterial strains expand rapidly when sensitive strains decline, and the higher the infectivity of the phages, the faster resistant strains expand. Because resistance evolves rapidly, it is best to provide a diverse set of phages right from the start of therapy, i.e., to hit hard and early, and create a high genetic barrier to bacterial resistance.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Mordal: Automated Pretrained Model Selection for Vision Language Models

Incorporating multiple modalities into large language models (LLMs) is a powerful way to enhance their understanding of non-textual data, enabling them to perform multimodal tasks. Vision language models (VLMs) form the fastest growing category of multimodal models because of their many practical use cases, including in healthcare, robotics, and accessibility. Unfortunately, even though different VLMs in the literature demonstrate impressive visual capabilities in different benchmarks, they are handcrafted by human experts; there is no automated framework to create task-specific multimodal models. We introduce Mordal, an automated multimodal model search framework that efficiently finds the best VLM for a user-defined task without manual intervention. Mordal achieves this both by reducing the number of candidates to consider during the search process and by minimizing the time required to evaluate each remaining candidate. Our evaluation shows that Mordal can find the best VLM for a given problem using $8.9\times$–$11.6\times$ lower GPU hours than grid search. We have also discovered that Mordal achieves about 69\% higher weighted Kendall's $\tau$ on average than the state-of-the-art model selection method across diverse tasks.

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

Will AI Agents Free Us From Meaningless Work? A Human-Centered Analysis

arXiv:2606.12430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Some claim that AI agents will free workers from the boring parts of their jobs, yet little is known about how workers themselves identify which tasks should be automated. Prior research focuses on occupations, overlooking that workers experience varying levels of meaning across tasks within the same role. We address this gap with a task-level analysis grounded in Graeber's theory of bullshit jobs. Using ratings from 202 workers on 171 workplace tasks, we (1) validate a five-item scale of perceived bullshitness, (2) show that perceived bullshitness strongly predicts desire for AI delegation, and (3) find that such tasks are also seen as requiring less human oversight. Together, these findings suggest that tasks perceived as bullshit are natural candidates for AI delegation, aligning worker preferences with perceived feasibility.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Beyond LoRA: Is Sparsity-Induced Adaptation Better?

arXiv:2606.13767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants provide a memory- and compute-efficient alternative to full fine-tuning of pre-trained models. However, questions remain about the comparative generalizability of these approaches and how the structural restrictions on low-rank updates preserve effective adaptation performance. We present a historical framing, covering the past (full fine-tuning and original LoRA), the present (different variants of LoRA), and propose simpler, cheaper, parameter-efficient extensions by inducing sparsity within existing LoRA variants: Cheap LoRA (cLA), training a single low-rank factor with the other fixed (deterministically or, in its randomized variant, stochastically), and the chained circulant variant, ${c}^3$LA. We frame cLA as a structured instance of asymmetric LoRA, serving as a controlled column-subspace restriction of full fine-tuning. We derive information-theoretic generalization error bounds for these variants, marking one of the first endeavors in this area. Empirically, we evaluate 11 fine-tuning methods across 10 pre-trained models and 14 datasets, analyzing the fine-tuned models' performance and generalization using tools such as loss landscapes and spectral analysis. Despite the sensitivity of fine-tuned models to the pre-trained model, datasets, and other factors, our study suggests that restricting LoRA-based PEFT methods' adaptation to a sparse, structured column space remains competitive across tasks with their parameter-matched baselines while reducing up to 10% training time and peak GPU memory up to 15%, even with a naïve, non-optimized, sparse implementation. Our theoretical and empirical generalization measures provide a more consistent and principled approach to their cost-effective adaptation than commonly used analytical tools. Overview and code are available at: https://elicaden.github.io/Beyond_LoRA/.

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

MegaFold: Efficient Training of Next-Generation 3D Attention Protein Models on Cross-Platform GPUs

arXiv:2506.20686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in biomolecular modeling have been catalyzed by models such as AlphaFold3 (AF3), which introduce science-informed changes to the transformer architecture. Unlike transformers, a defining characteristic of AF3-style models is their 3D attention over 2D pairwise representations which produces tensors whose computation and memory costs scale cubically with sequence length. As a result, despite moderate parameter counts, AF3-style models are far more expensive to train than size-equivalent transformers, and are severely constrained by GPU memory capacity. Our characterization shows 3D attention fundamentally changes the training workload, causing massive 3D attention maps, complex inter-operator dependencies, kernel fragmentation, and heavy host-side data pipelines which differ substantially from LLM training, leading to poor utilization on modern GPU systems. Moreover, existing GPU optimizations do not adequately address these challenges due to complex cross-layer inter-operator dependencies introduced by 3D attention. Motivated by these challenges, we introduce MegaFold, a novel cross-platform system for efficient training of next-generation 3D-attention protein models. MegaFold combines a memory-efficient 3D-attention kernel, a communication-efficient sharding strategy for quadratic representations, fused operator implementations for critical execution paths, and a determinism-aware host-device pipeline that eliminates preprocessing stalls. Evaluation on both NVIDIA H200 and AMD MI250 GPUs shows that MegaFold enables training with up to 3.36$\times$ longer sequence lengths on 32 GPUs while reducing end-to-end execution time by up to 1.73$\times$ (NVIDIA) and 1.62$\times$ (AMD).