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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

When and How Severely: Scenario-Specific Safety Envelopes for Driving VLAs

arXiv:2606.14238v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety certification of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) driving planners under ISO 21448 (SOTIF) rests on an Operational Design Domain (ODD) specification that answers two complementary questions: when does the planner start to fail, and how severely does it fail once it does? We evaluate Alpamayo R1, a 10B-parameter open-weight driving VLA, on 15,968 (clip, attack) pairs. We find a conservative-aggregate gap: an aggregate safe threshold of $\sigma \leq 50$ under a 15% average displacement error (ADE) budget masks well-sampled scenarios that tolerate the top of the tested grid ($\sigma = 70$). A Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) on the changed-explanation subset identifies six discrete severity bands (BIC-optimal $k{=}6$), so two perturbation conditions with the same mean error can differ materially in their share of high-severity (C4/C5) failures. Joining the two analyses on the same corpus surfaces a finding neither yields in isolation: the scenarios with the loosest noise thresholds are not those with the lowest high-severity rate: STOP_SIGNAL concentrates roughly $4\times$ the C4/C5 share of LANE_KEEPING despite tolerating a larger $\sigma$. A deployable SOTIF ODD specification for driving VLAs therefore requires a two-dimensional safety envelope, not a single aggregate value per hazard.

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

System Report for CCL25-Eval Task 5: New Dataset and LoRA-Fine-Tuned Qwen2.5

作者:

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have achieved promising progress in the fields of classical Chinese translation and the generation of classical poetry. However, domain-specific research on precise translation and affective-semantic understanding of classical poetry remains limited. The main challenge is that most studies treat the poetic appreciation task as a general-domain problem, neglecting the distinctive features of poetic appreciation, while high-quality and domain-specific datasets are extremely limited. To address this limitation, we decompose the task into three subtasks: term interpretation, semantic interpretation, and emotional inference. Based on multiple open-source datasets, we perform data cleansing and alignment to construct the Classical Chinese Poetry Instruction Pair Dataset (CCPoetry-49K), which comprises 49,404 high-quality instruction-response pairs explicitly optimized for this domain. We then propose a domain-specialized LLM, called PoetryQwen, by applying Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the Qwen2.5-14B model. Experimental results on the CCL25-Eval Task 5 benchmark demonstrate that PoetryQwen achieves a score of 0.757, representing a 9.7% improvement over the Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct baseline (0.690). These findings clearly indicate that PoetryQwen significantly enhances performance in precise translation and emotional understanding of classical poetry. We present new dataset and methodological considerations intended to support the domain-specific optimization of LLMs.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

APEX: A Network-Native Time-Series Foundation Model for Forecasting and Anomaly Detection for Wireless Edge Operations

arXiv:2606.11553v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generic time-series foundation models transfer poorly to wireless network telemetry whose signals are bursty, zero-inflated, and coupled across protocol layers. We present APEX, a network-native, decoder-only transformer for forecasting enterprise AP telemetry, and evaluate it on DHCP degradation as a representative network task. APEX is pre-trained on 10-channel multivariate telemetry from ~4,500 production wireless networks (~100K AP time series, 34 metrics per AP), and is available as APEX-Large (269M, cloud) and APEX-Edge (10.5M, edge). On a 192-step (4-day) DHCP degradation benchmark, APEX-Large reduces MAE by 18% over the strongest foundation-model baseline (Toto) and 38% over SARIMA, with anomaly-detection F1 = 0.93, while APEX-Edge enables sub-second, privacy-preserving inference on AP-class edge hardware. These results suggest network-native pre-training is a practical foundation for proactive wireless operations.

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

The MAMA-MIA Challenge: Advancing Generalizability and Fairness in Breast MRI Tumor Segmentation and Treatment Response Prediction

arXiv:2603.01250v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed malignancy among women worldwide and a leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging plays a central role in tumor characterization and treatment monitoring, particularly in patients receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy. However, existing artificial intelligence models for breast magnetic resonance imaging are typically developed and evaluated using heterogeneous datasets, study populations, and assessment protocols, making direct comparison difficult and limiting understanding of model robustness across institutions and clinically relevant patient subgroups. The MAMA-MIA Challenge was designed to address these challenges by providing a standardized benchmark for the joint evaluation of primary tumor segmentation and prediction of pathologic complete response using pre-treatment magnetic resonance imaging only. The training cohort comprised 1,506 patients from multiple institutions in the United States, while evaluation was conducted on an external test set of 574 patients from three independent European centers to assess cross-continental and cross-institutional generalization. A unified scoring framework combined predictive performance with subgroup consistency across age, menopausal status, and breast density. Twenty-six international teams participated in the final evaluation phase. Results demonstrate substantial performance variability under a common external evaluation framework and reveal trade-offs between overall accuracy and subgroup fairness. The challenge provides standardized datasets, evaluation protocols, and public resources to promote the development of robust and equitable artificial intelligence systems for breast cancer imaging.

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

Temporal Validation Changes the Apparent Public-Health Utility of Under-Five Mortality Prediction in Bangladesh: A Four-Round DHS Machine-Learning Study

arXiv:2602.03957v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Background: Under-five mortality in Bangladesh remains uneven despite national progress. DHS-based prediction models may guide targeted follow-up, but only if validation reflects future use. We examined how validation design changes apparent prediction performance. Methods: Four BDHS rounds (2011-2022; 33,962 children; 1,290 deaths) were analysed with a 26-feature pipeline and three model classes under four validation regimes, including cross-survey temporal validation (train 2011+2014, calibrate 2017, test 2022). A 32-unit ELU multilayer perceptron was selected via genetic-algorithm neural architecture search. AUROC used 2,000 bootstrap resamples; screening utility used sensitivity, PPV, and number needed to screen (NNS) at fixed capacity. Results: Validation regime altered public-health interpretation more than model class. NAS MLP AUROC ranged from 0.669 (2022-only random) to 0.775 (pooled random), with temporal AUROC 0.730. At the top-10% temporal threshold, NAS identified 152/355 deaths in 2022 (sensitivity 42.8%, PPV 13.2%, NNS 7.6). NNS across designs ranged from 5.6 to 11.0. Conclusions: Validation-regime choice changed screening workload and apparent policy value more than architecture. Temporal validation supports defensible estimates of follow-up and referral demand; DHS child-mortality studies should report sensitivity, PPV, and NNS before programmatic use.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Optimal Shadow Estimation with Minimal Measurement Settings

arXiv:2606.20003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shadow estimation is a powerful framework for predicting quantum properties from randomized measurements. While $3$-design protocols achieve optimal worst-case performance, the minimal number of measurement bases required for such optimality has remained open. Here we prove that $\Theta(d^2)$ measurement bases are both necessary and sufficient for worst-case optimal shadow estimation and construct an explicit basis family. In stark contrast, any state $2$-design already suffices for average-case optimality: the mean squared shadow norm of normalized observables is bounded by a universal constant, and we prove strong concentration for Haar-random states, yielding constant sample complexity for generic pure-state fidelity estimation. Easily implementable $2$-designs – from mutually unbiased bases, cyclic measurements, or shallow $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$-depth circuits – enable optimal average-case protocols with remarkably simple measurement strategies. Our results establish a fundamental complexity separation: worst-case estimation requires $\Theta(d^2)$ bases, whereas average-case performance requires only $\Theta(d)$ bases, with broad implications for quantum information theory and near-term experiments.

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

StagePilot: Stage-Level Planning for Long-Horizon Dialogue Simulation in Cybergrooming

Cybergrooming is an evolving threat to youth, requiring proactive educational interventions. We address this by modeling dialogue progression as a structured planning problem over stage-wise interactions. We propose StagePilot, a dialogue framework that separates stage-level planning from response generation, in which the model selects the next stage under constrained transitions and generates responses conditioned on it, enabling coherent and realistic progression. Reinforcement learning is used to learn stage-level policies from offline data, optimizing for both emotional alignment and goal-consistent progression. Our empirical experiments show that StagePilot generates more structured, coherent dialogue trajectories and reduces conversational stagnation compared to baselines; notably, the IQL+AWAC variant reaches the final stage more often while maintaining over 70% positive or neutral responses, yielding a 43% relative improvement.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Online Dynamic Batching with Formal Guarantees for LLM Training

arXiv:2606.19989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern LLM training breaks a core assumption behind offline batch samplers: the true training cost of a sample is only observable after preprocessing, augmentation, templating, tokenization, and multimodal visual-token expansion. Unless one pays for a preprocessing- and augmentation-dependent length cache, batch construction is therefore blind to the quantity that determines padding, memory use, and GPU saturation. We introduce Online Dynamic Batching (ODB), a DataLoader-side drop-in system that moves batch formation to this point of accurate observability while preserving DDP step alignment. We formalize this synchronization requirement as the Distributed Group Alignment Problem and prove deadlock-free bounded termination with default join-mode identity coverage and opt-in non-join sample-quota closure. ODB requires no model, optimizer, or attention-kernel changes and is released as online-dynamic-batching with lightweight trainer adapters. Across public 2B/8B Qwen3-VL runs on UltraChat/LLaVA/ShareGPT4o, ODB improves literal emitted-sample throughput vs. fixed-batch Standard by 1.58-2.51x on single-node Full FT/LoRA and 1.71-3.78x on two-node Full FT, with Standard-comparable quality; production MM-Mix reaches 4.43x. Against GMT/BMT offline token-budget oracles, ODB is within 15% on UltraChat/LLaVA and faster on high-CV ShareGPT4o: 2.24-2.39x single-node Full FT/LoRA and 3.06-3.69x two-node Full FT. Together, ODB occupies the online/drop-in regime for high-heterogeneity LLM fine-tuning: large throughput gains at Standard-comparable quality, formal DGAP guarantees, and no length-cache precompute or kernel rewrites.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

EyeTheia: A Lightweight and Accessible Eye-Tracking Toolbox

We introduce EyeTheia, a lightweight and open deep learning pipeline for webcam-based gaze estimation, designed for browser-based experimental platforms and real-world cognitive and clinical research. EyeTheia enables real-time gaze tracking using only a standard laptop webcam, combining MediaPipe-based landmark extraction with a convolutional neural network inspired by iTracker and optional user-specific fine-tuning. We investigate two complementary strategies: adapting a model pretrained on mobile data and training the same architecture from scratch on a desktop-oriented dataset. Validation results on MPIIFaceGaze show comparable performance between both approaches prior to calibration, while lightweight user-specific fine-tuning consistently reduces gaze prediction error. We further evaluate EyeTheia in a realistic Dot-Probe task and compare it to the commercial webcam-based tracker SeeSo SDK. Results indicate strong agreement in left-right gaze allocation during stimulus presentation, despite higher temporal variability. Overall, EyeTheia provides a transparent and extensible solution for low-cost gaze tracking, suitable for scalable and reproducible experimental and clinical studies. The code, trained models, and experimental materials are publicly available.

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

WorkBench Revisited: Workplace Agents Two Years On

作者:

The best agent on WorkBench in March 2024, GPT-4, completed 43% of tasks and took an unintended harmful action, such as emailing the wrong person, on 26% of them. We re-visit the benchmark in June 2026 and find that the best agent to date, Claude Opus 4.8, completes 89% and takes an unintended harmful action on 2.5%. Aside from this considerable progress in frontier agent performance, three things stand out. First, capability and safety go together on WorkBench rather than trade off, so the models that finish the most tasks also do the least unintended damage. Second, while several classes of error have been totally eliminated, frontier models still make some basic mistakes that occasionally result in irreversible harm, such as sending an email to the wrong person. Third, the rise of open-weight models has drastically lowered costs for a performance level that was previously only accessible to proprietary models, while frontier costs have stayed relatively stable. We release an updated version of the benchmark with data and code quality improvements, new model scores, and analysis of agent progress on WorkBench since 2024.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

GrapNet: A Programmable Dynamic-Architecture Neural Graph Substrate

作者:

arXiv:2606.18923v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Programmability is a missing first-class interface in fixed-tensor neural networks: editing a relation, freezing a subgraph, auditing a local function, or changing the execution backend should be an operation on the neural program rather than ad-hoc parameter surgery. GrapNet studies this graph-as-network setting. The graph is the architecture and executable program, not an input data graph. Each compute node owns its next-layer child references and a trainable allocation vector aligned with those references; deleting a relation physically removes both the child reference and the corresponding allocation coordinate. Structural rules and execution policies live outside the node core, so the same child-owned graph can be grown, frozen, structurally edited, grouped into trainable family blocks, routed by attention over active relations, or lowered to dense snapshots after topology stabilizes. GrapNet composes with conventional modules through a vector-valued parent interface: dense layers, CNN encoders, ResNet feature extractors, attention blocks, and transformer representations can all feed one sensory GrapNode per coordinate. The evaluation is organized as a programmability stress suite rather than as a new replay benchmark. In a matched ten-seed Split Fashion-MNIST study, a plastic GrapNet+ER head reaches 63.16 percent seen-class accuracy versus 51.08 percent for a parameter-larger dense MLP+ER under the same seen-class loss and replay memory, with paired delta 12.08 points and p=1.3e-5. On Split CIFAR-10 with a frozen ImageNet ResNet-18 encoder, the same substrate improves the online head over MLP-256 by 3.81 points, with p=0.0026. These results support GrapNet as an editable neural graph substrate whose core value is structural programmability with faithful execution views.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Beyond the Training Distribution: Evaluating Predictions Under Distribution Shift and Selection Bias

arXiv:2606.14506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding how a prediction model will perform in a new environment before deployment is essential to preventing harm when algorithms inform decision-making. Two common sources of model performance degradation are (i) covariate shift, where the target covariate distribution differs from the source, and (ii) selective labels, where the observability of outcomes depends on historical decisions. We study pre-deployment model evaluation under the joint presence of covariate shift and labeling of outcomes selectively based on observed features. In particular, we present a double machine learning procedure for estimating the target risk of an arbitrary black-box prediction model under a general loss function. We show identification of this estimand under standard assumptions and derive a bias-corrected estimator based on the influence function of the target risk. Finally, we evaluate our estimator through experiments using the eICU electronic health records database, showing that it tracks the true target risk more accurately than methods that address either selective labels or covariate shift alone, as well as baselines that combine standard plug-in approaches.

14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Confined migration induces non-lethal DNA damage in developing neurons

Migratory cells tend to have soft nuclei that deform and penetrate narrow spaces1,2. Extensive nuclear deformation during migration can cause nuclear-envelope rupture and DNA damage in cancer cells, which may contribute to malignant transformation during tumour progression3–6. However, the importance of DNA damage in physiological migration is less well understood. Here we demonstrate that the migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-stranded breaks (DSBs) due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces. In contrast to many other migratory cells, these DSBs occur without detectable nuclear envelope rupture. Confined migration increases topoisomerase-IIβ covalently bound DSBs, and these lesions are repaired through non-homologous end-joining during brain development without causing cell death. Genome sequencing revealed that DSBs tend to occur at transcriptionally inactive regions. The deletion of ligase IV at the onset of neuronal migration leads to persistent DSB accumulation in cerebellar neurons with moderate transcriptional changes in genes related to synaptic function, neuronal development and stress and immune responses. The mutant mouse develops mild motor deficits in later life, suggesting that the DNA damage generated during normal brain development poses a potential disease risk if left unrepaired. The migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-strand breaks due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces.

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

CausalT5k: Diagnosing Refusal and Failure Modes in Trustworthy Causal Reasoning Across Causal Rungs

arXiv:2602.08939v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models increasingly produce fluent causal explanations, yet they often fail in ways aggregate accuracy cannot diagnose: confusing association with intervention, abandoning correct judgments under pressure, over-refusing valid claims, or answering when evidence is underdetermined. We introduce CTK, a diagnostic benchmark of 5,147 cases and growing, across 10 domains and all three levels of Pearl's Ladder of Causation. Unlike benchmarks that only score correctness, CTK reveals why a model failed by annotating causal rung, trap type, pressure sensitivity, refusal quality, and Utility-Safety tradeoffs. Its Sheep/Wolf taxonomy separates valid causal designs from inferential traps; paired neutral/pressure variants measure sycophantic drift through Bad Flip Rate; and Wise Refusal fields test whether a model identifies the missing information needed before endorsing a claim. CTK exposes failure modes hidden by aggregate accuracy: the Skepticism Trap, Rung Collapse under scaling, pressure-induced drift, Detection-Correction gaps, and counterfactual error modes. Rather than prescribing a correction method, it provides the diagnostic substrate for studying causal-reasoning failure profiles.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Lignin to adipic acid in a high-yield chemical and biological redox process

Viable manufacturing pathways to produce bio-based chemicals from renewable feedstocks, such as lignin derived from plant biomass, are needed to decarbonize the chemicals manufacturing sector. Converting the recalcitrant lignin polymer to valuable bioproducts remains a longstanding challenge in biorefining, with the highest reported single-product yield from lignin currently around 20 wt% (refs. 1–4). Most existing lignin depolymerization strategies target aryl–ether bond cleavage, which can produce aromatic monomers in yields of only about 30 wt%, and still as complex mixtures with C–C-linked dimers and oligomers5,6. The recalcitrance of these C–C linkages between aromatic moieties fundamentally limits single-product yields from lignin, prompting the development of strategies to efficiently cleave these C–C bonds3,7–9. Here we show how reductive processing of lignin from poplar accesses a hydrocarbon mixture of alkyl-aromatic monomers and oligomers that is privileged for oxidative conversion to monomeric aromatic carboxylic acids, comprising mostly benzoic acid and phthalic acid isomers in up to 73 wt% monomer yields, using a Co/Mn/Br catalyst. The soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida KT2440 was engineered to convert this mixture of aromatic carboxylic acids to muconolactone, a precursor to bio-based nylons, enabling final adipic acid yields up to 26 wt% (gram adipic acid per gram lignin) with a maximum theoretical yield of 57 wt%. This pairing of reductive and oxidative steps with lignin resembles processes in petrochemical refining and shows how lignin may be converted into a single, valuable bioproduct in high yields. A chemical and biological redox process that resembles processes in petrochemical refining is used to convert lignin from poplar into a single, valuable bioproduct, adipic acid, in high yields.

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

PhysGuard: Fisher-Guided Gradient Projection for Sim-to-Real Neural PDE Surrogates

arXiv:2606.16602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural operator models trained on simulation data often lose accuracy when applied to experimental measurements due to the sim-to-real gap. Standard fine-tuning with limited real data can reduce this gap, but it may also damage the core physics-relevant representations learned during pretraining. Although knowledge-preserving adaptation has been widely investigated in vision or language tasks, it remains unclear whether these methods are suitable for neural operators whose architectures and protected knowledge are fundamentally different. Neural operators need to preserve core-scale physical structures rather than semantic or visual features. We propose PhysGuard, a physics-preserving framework for accurate sim-to-real adaptation of neural operators. Specifically, PhysGuard uses the empirical Fisher Information Matrix computed on simulation data to identify physics-critical parameter directions, then restricts fine-tuning updates to directions that do not interfere with them. A layer-wise Gram-matrix formulation makes this efficient for models with millions of parameters, while an adaptive threshold automatically determines the protected subspace size. A spectral probe experiment shows that the dominant Fisher directions are strongly associated with low-frequency output structures. Experiments on benchmark across four neural operator architectures and different physical systems show that PhysGuard performs strongly on most evaluation metrics compared to baselines. The benefits are most evident under severe domain shift, where it reduces low-frequency error by up to 32\% compared to standard fine-tuning while maintaining adaptability. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhouChaunge/PhysGuard.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Optimisation of steatotic liver disease screening algorithm for resource-poor settings using machine learning

Background The European Association for the Study of the Liver (ESAL) - Steatotic Liver Disease (SLD) screening algorithm involves two steps; initial screening with FIB-4 followed by referral for vibration-controlled transient elastography (VCTE) in patients likely to have significant fibrosis (SF). However, VCTE is not widely available in resource-limited settings. Aim To optimise the EASL SLD screening algorithm for resource-poor settings using machine learning (ML). Methods We analysed data from 964 adults aged [≥]35 years who underwent VCTE at a tertiary referral centre in Sri Lanka between November 2024 and 2025. Multiple ML models using different methods and variable combinations were trained on 80% of the dataset and tested on the remaining 20%. Best models were selected based on performance and externally validated using data from 430 patients who underwent VCTE before November 2024. Model performance was compared with the FIB-4 using confusion matrices. Results A Random Forest model incorporating age, AST, ALT, and platelet count separately, rather than using FIB-4, outperformed. The all-variable ML model showed the best predictive performance for SF, with accuracy of 77.2%, recall of 0.762, precision of 0.778, and AUC-ROC of 0.818. The variables used in the model, in descending order of feature importance, were AST, platelet count, BMI, ALT, age, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, dyslipidaemia, sex, family history, hypothyroidism, diabetes complication and smoking. External validation demonstrated 75.1% accuracy and an AUC of 0.779. When used as the first step of the SLD screening algorithm, the all-variable ML model identified 37 (17.1%) additional true positives and reduced false-negative diagnoses by 50% compared with FIB-4. Conclusions ML-based models were more effective than the FIB-4 score as the first-line screening tool for VCTE referral, substantially improving the identification of patients with significant fibrosis in this South Asian cohort.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Where's the Plan? Locating Latent Planning in Language Models with Lightweight Mechanistic Interventions

arXiv:2605.07984v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study planning site formation in language models – where internal representations of structurally-constrained future tokens form during the forward pass, and whether they causally drive generation. Using rhyming-couplet completion as a clean test of forward-looking constraint, we apply two lightweight methods (linear probing and activation patching) across Qwen3, Gemma-3, and Llama-3 at more than ten scales. Probing shows that future-rhyme information is linearly decodable at the line boundary, with signal that strengthens with scale in all three families. Activation patching reveals that only Gemma-3-27B causally relies on this encoding, exhibiting a handoff in which the causal driver migrates from the rhyme word to the line boundary around layer 30. Every other model we test conditions on the rhyme word throughout generation, with near-zero causal effect at the line boundary despite strong probe signal. We localize the Gemma-3-27B handoff to five attention heads through two-stage path patching that recover ~90% of the rhyme-routing capacity at the newline.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

When Errors Become Narratives: A Longitudinal Taxonomy of Silent Failures in a Production LLM Agent Runtime

作者:

arXiv:2606.14589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agent systems increasingly run as long-lived autonomous runtimes: scheduling jobs, calling tools, maintaining memory, and pushing results to humans. We present a longitudinal study of silent failures in one such system: a personal-assistant agent runtime in continuous production since March 2026, with roughly 40 scheduled jobs, 8 LLM providers, a tool-governance proxy, and a knowledge-base memory plane, defended by 4,286 unit tests and 827 governance checks. Over eight weeks we documented 22 incidents with full root-cause postmortems, in which one meta-pattern – a failure whose error signal never reaches a human in actionable form – manifested at least 28 times. We derive a five-class, mechanism-oriented taxonomy: (A) environment and platform quirks, (B) design-assumption mismatches, (C) error swallowing and dilution, (D) chained hallucination and fabrication, (E) operational omission and forensic blind spots. Class D is unique to LLM systems and the most dangerous: the system does not merely fail to report an error – the LLM transforms it into fluent, plausible narrative delivered to the user. We term this fail-plausible: gray failure's differential observability escalated – the observer is not just blind, it is convincingly lied to by the failure itself. Three findings: about 70% of silent failures were caught by human user-view observation, not tests or audits; a retrospective audit of 15 incidents found 0% ex-ante prevention but 87% regression blocking – audits are regression engines, not prediction engines; incident latency (13 hours to 60 days) tracks failure mechanism, not code complexity – the longest-lived failures lived in the seams between components, where no test runs. We describe the resulting defense framework and distill design principles for agent systems whose failures are loud, attributable, and boring. All postmortems and artifacts are public.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

County Year Informatics Model for Annual and Cumulative Unique Lung Cancer Screening Eligibility in Maryland, 2026 to 2045

Purpose: Population-level lung cancer screening programs require denominators that reflect age, smoking history, geography, and changing eligibility over time. We estimated annual prevalent and 20-year cumulative unique low-dose computed tomography screening eligibility for Maryland residents under alternative screening criteria. Methods: We built a deterministic cohort-cell stock-flow simulation using Maryland county-equivalent jurisdiction projections by age, sex, and race/ethnicity, with ACS socioeconomic/nativity covariates and smoking-history priors for ever-smoked status, pack-years, and quit-years. Scenarios included USPSTF 2013 legacy, USPSTF 2021, ACS 2023/2024, a risk-model-expanded sensitivity, and ever-smoked-only capacity stress tests. Cumulative unique eligibility counted people once at first eligibility rather than summing annual prevalent person-years. Results: Under USPSTF 2021, an estimated 238,346 Maryland residents were eligible in 2026 and 245,326 in 2045. The 20-year cumulative unique denominator was 768,668, whereas naively summing annual prevalent counts produced 4,850,735 person-years, a 6.31-fold overcount. ACS 2023/2024 expanded annual eligibility to 314,616 in 2026 and cumulative unique eligibility to 902,796 by adding remote former smokers. Ever-smoked-only adult eligibility was 1,957,699 in 2026 and 3,383,683 cumulative unique over 20 years. Conclusion: A Maryland statewide screening initiative should plan from cumulative unique eligibility and county-equivalent jurisdiction-specific burden rather than annual prevalence alone. Explicit pack-year and quit-year modeling materially changes statewide and county allocation compared with current-smoking proxy models.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

The Third Challenge on Image Denoising at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Image Denoising, specifically focusing on the high-noise regime ($\sigma = 50$). The competition investigates advanced neural architectures designed to restore high-fidelity details from images corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Unlike constrained benchmarks, this track emphasizes peak quantitative performance, measured by Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), without limitations on parameter count or computational overhead. By synthesizing contributions from 20 finalist teams out of 116 registrants, this report benchmarks the latest technical innovations and provides a comprehensive snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in unconstrained image restoration.

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

TuneJury: An Open Metric for Improving Music Generation Preference Alignment

arXiv:2606.17006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce TuneJury, an open, instance-level pairwise reward model for text-to-music that predicts a music preference score from a text prompt and an audio clip. The released checkpoint is trained on publicly available human-preference labels covering arena-style (A vs. B) votes, metric-alignment preference pairs, crowdsourced pairwise comparisons, and expert aesthetic ratings. The predicted score margin between two clips is well calibrated on our held-out test split, supporting data filtering via a simple score threshold. TuneJury generalizes to both held-out test pairs and out-of-distribution benchmarks, remaining competitive with prior baselines on the latter. For generators released after training, we introduce anchor calibration, a post-hoc, per-system Bradley-Terry calibration that recovers agreement at substantially better data efficiency than from-scratch retraining. The same frozen reward drives consistent reward-axis gains across three downstream applications: inference-time best-of-N selection, DITTO-style latent optimization, and expert-iteration post-training. TuneJury is available at https://github.com/yonghyunk1m/TuneJury.

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

Noise-Driven Escape from Metastable Phases explains Grokking in Deep Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.17120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit first order phase transitions under variations of the L2 regularization strength, with each transition marking the onset of a new learnable feature. Below a critical regularization strength, all features are in principle learnable, but coexisting metastable states, separated by energy barriers, can trap the network and impede convergence. A strength of DNNs is their ability to generalize. But many open questions remain, among them the origin of so called grokking: the abrupt, delayed onset of generalization after prolonged apparent overfitting. We show for linear DNNs that grokking is consistent with hysteresis in first-order L2 phase transitions: using L2 regularization to engineer deliberate trapping, we demonstrate that a model in a low-accuracy metastable state escapes only when SGD noise drives it across an energy barrier, with escape times following Arrhenius scaling. We reproduce grokking-like delayed convergence across two orders of magnitude in escape time by deliberately trapping models in metastable phases. Using sparse sub-sampling we also reproduce the canonical grokking curve where test error eventually approaches the final training error. Our work suggests that the number of metastable states equals the number of learnable features – one per singular value of the data covariance – the potential for hysteresis grows naturally with task complexity. We provide evidence that the same mechanism likely operates in general nonlinear DNNs. Our results provide routes toward more efficient learning schemes.

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

Dual-Network PINNs for Optimal Control: A Reproducible Benchmark on the Mass-Spring-Damper System

arXiv:2606.15271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a transparent and reproducible benchmark study of a direct dual-network Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) formulation for the optimal control of a mass-spring-damper system. The classical linear-quadratic optimal control problem is solved by two independent classical methods – Pontryagin's Minimum Principle with single shooting, and direct transcription through trapezoidal collocation – and recast as a constrained optimization problem solved by two feedforward neural networks: a state network whose boundary conditions are enforced exactly through a composite cubic-and-mask ansatz, and an unconstrained control network. The composite loss combines the physics residual at the collocation points with a trapezoidal approximation of the cost functional, weighted by a single scalar hyperparameter. On the benchmark considered, the PINN reproduces the classical optimal cost to four significant digits, satisfies the terminal state constraints exactly by construction, and produces pointwise state and control errors that fall within the spread of the two classical references. Training is approximately two orders of magnitude slower than classical shooting on this benchmark, which is honestly reported. The contribution is methodological clarity rather than methodological novelty: the formulation and the accompanying Google Colab implementation are intended to lower the barrier to entry for practitioners exploring PINN-based optimal control without prior exposure to adjoint methods or two-point boundary value problems.