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

Stable Menus of Public Goods: AI-Enabled Progress

Authors:
Sara Fish↗

arXiv:2606.16989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Using an open problem from the EC 2025 paper "Stable Menus of Public Goods" as a testbed, we conduct experiments to understand the effectiveness of different AI-for-EconCS research workflows. Specifically, we study three questions: Does providing human intuition in the prompt help? Does automated multi-turn interaction help? And, does an LLM outperform a first-year PhD student? Regarding the first two questions, we provide evidence for the following workflow suggestions: (1) prompting with human intuition can encourage the LLM to have better "taste", (2) multi-turn workflows help when the pipeline encourages "ambitious" steps. Regarding the third question, using an unpublished manuscript written by the paper's senior authors prior to collaborating with the first-year PhD student, we compare the effectiveness of the LLM with that of the first-year PhD student, and find that the LLM is slightly less effective.

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

MAD: Manifold Attracted Diffusion

Authors:
Dennis Elbr\"achter↗Giovanni S. Alberti↗Matteo Santacesaria↗

arXiv:2509.24710v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Score-based diffusion models are a highly effective method for generating samples from a distribution of images. We consider scenarios where the training data comes from a noisy version of the target distribution, and present an efficiently implementable modification of the inference procedure to generate noiseless samples. Our approach is motivated by the manifold hypothesis, according to which meaningful data is concentrated around some low-dimensional manifold of a high-dimensional ambient space. The central idea is that noise manifests as low magnitude variation in off-manifold directions in contrast to the relevant variation of the desired distribution which is mostly confined to on-manifold directions. We introduce the notion of an extended score and show that, in a simplified setting, it can be used to reduce small variations to zero, while leaving large variations mostly unchanged. We describe how its approximation can be computed efficiently from an approximation to the standard score and demonstrate its efficacy on toy problems, synthetic data, and real data.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

What Drives Test-Time Adaptation for CLIP? A Controlled Empirical Study from an Update Perspective

Authors:
Jiazhen Huang↗Xiao Chen↗Zhiming Liu↗Yaru Sun↗Jingyan Jiang↗Zhi Wang↗

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have become a standard backbone for open-vocabulary recognition, yet their zero-shot predictions remain vulnerable to distribution shifts encountered at deployment. Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) has recently been extended to CLIP as a lightweight solution, leading to a rapidly growing body of TTA4CLIP methods. However, empirical progress in this area has largely outpaced our understanding of what truly drives adaptation, where their gains originate, and under which shifts they remain reliable. In this paper, we take a step back from the pursuit of state-of-the-art accuracy and conduct a systematic controlled study of TTA4CLIP. We first organize existing methods into three unified paradigms according to what is updated at test time. We then introduce TTABC, an open-source TTA Benchmark for CLIP, which standardizes evaluation protocols and integrates more than 20 representative methods. Our controlled empirical analysis focuses on three key areas. First, we determine the driving factors in parameter-based methods, revealing that adaptation gains are primarily driven by test-time evidence and reliable proxies rather than heavy optimization. Second, we explore evidence utilization beyond heavy parameter tuning, showing that competitive and efficient performance can be achieved through cross- or current-sample evidence and lightweight prototype updates. Finally, we demonstrate that there is no silver bullet for TTA: no single adaptation paradigm is universally optimal, and the preferred paradigm depends on the nature of shift. We hope our benchmark and study provide a clearer understanding of the current TTA4CLIP landscape and establish a foundation for further research.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

A Large-Scale Multi-Dimensional Empirical Study of LLMs for Conversation Summarization

Authors:
Weixiao Zhou↗Gengyao Li↗Xianfu Cheng↗Junnan Zhu↗Feifei Zhai↗Zhoujun Li↗

Despite the significant advancement of LLMs in conversation summarization, their evaluation remains limited by insufficient scenarios, input lengths, and sample sizes. Furthermore, existing benchmarks often omit frontier reasoning systems and efficient small models, or lack fine-grained, multi-dimensional assessments. To bridge these gaps, we propose OmniCSEval, a unified benchmark comprising 1,800 diverse conversations across six real-world scenarios, featuring context lengths ranging from 128 to 32k tokens. For fine-grained evaluation, we employ a bidirectional fact-checking framework that integrates key fact matching to assess completeness and conciseness, alongside summary fact verification to evaluate faithfulness. To ensure reliable assessment, we establish a human-LLM collaborative pipeline for key fact extraction and a multi-LLM consensus verifier for summary fact decomposition. Leveraging this framework, we evaluate 28 LLMs across four distinct categories grouped by reasoning capability and model scale. Our extensive empirical study reveals critical insights regarding the cross-scenario challenges current LLMs continue to face, the impacts of reasoning and scale, and the efficiency and adaptability of reasoning models. We also provide guidance for system selection in real-world deployments.

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05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

What Is the Optimal Timing and Frequency of Workload-Matched Postprandial Physical Activity Breaks? A Randomized Controlled Crossover Study of Cardiometabolic and Cognitive Responses During Sedentary Behavior

Authors:
Euring↗Niederer↗Groneberg↗Engeroff↗

Purpose Postprandial sedentary behavior is associated with negative health effects and constitutes a large part of daily life in modern society. This study investigated how the timing of physical activity after eating influences glucose levels, cerebral and muscle oxygenation, cognitive performance, and well-being during subsequent sitting. Methods In a four-armed randomized crossover trial, healthy adults consumed four standardized meals separated by 48-hour washout periods. Each meal was followed by 2 hours of sitting combined, in random order, with one of four interventions: (1) sitting only, (2) 15 minutes of moderate intensity cycling immediately after eating, (3) 15 minutes of cycling 20 minutes after eating, or (4) three workload-matched five-minute cycling bouts during sitting. Interstitial glucose (continuous glucose monitoring), cerebral and muscle oxygenation (Functional near infrared spectroscopy), cognitive performance (Stroop test), heart rate, blood pressure, and subjective ratings were assessed every 30 minutes. Data were analyzed using repeated-measures ANOVA. Results Twenty participants (mean age 27.1{+/-}10.3 years, 12 females) completed the study. Cycling immediately after eating reduced mean glucose levels during postprandial sitting, while both 15-minute cycling bouts increased cerebral oxygenation. All active conditions enhanced muscle oxygenation. Heart rate and arousal increased with delayed cycling and active breaks. No effects were observed for blood pressure, cognitive performance, focus, or well-being. Conclusion A short bout of physical activity immediately after eating reduces postprandial hyperglycemia and improves brain oxygenation during sitting, whereas delayed activity and brief breaks increase physiological activation without cognitive or perceptual benefits.

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

Mathematical perspective on genetic algorithms with optimization guided operators

Authors:
Anna Brandenberger↗Ilan Doron-Arad↗Elchanan Mossel↗

arXiv:2606.12279v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work in ML applies genetic algorithms at inference time to iteratively improve solutions to optimization problems. The basic mutation and recombination operators involved are qualitatively different from those studied classically. Mutations are no longer random; an ML algorithm mutates a solution with the goal of improving an objective. Similarly, recombination is not based on random collages of parent solutions. Instead, it is an ML optimization-based operator whose goal is to synthesize improved solutions from its inputs. Thus, these mutation and recombination operators are more likely to improve the objective, but their computational cost is much higher. We introduce a general model of genetic algorithms and formulating optimization in this model as a query-complexity problem, using the language of reinforcement learning. We then study specialized models. We show that some optimization problems require generation, mutation, and recombination to be solved. We then obtain qualitatively tight algorithms for a family of problems within this framework that captures the nontrivial role of diversity in the solution pool, a key feature of practical ML genetic algorithms.

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

Measuring Whether LLM Tutors Teach or Solve: A Diagnostic for Educational Impact

Authors:
Junyi Yao↗Zihao Zheng↗Baichuan Li↗

Large language models are increasingly proposed as educational tutors, yet stronger task-solving ability does not necessarily imply stronger learning support. Motivated by recent calls to measure the social impact of NLP systems in practice, we study whether public LLM tutoring benchmarks distinguish learning-supportive behavior from mere answer production. We propose a lightweight diagnostic based on the gap between solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented benchmark performance. Using public MathTutorBench leaderboard results, we show that these dimensions are only partially aligned: across eight publicly reported models, the correlation between solving and pedagogy composites is 0.421, and several models shift meaningfully in rank when evaluation moves from solving to pedagogy. We then analyze the public TutorBench sample and show that agency-relevant behaviors are explicitly encoded in benchmark rubrics, especially in active-learning settings that reward guiding questions, calibrated hints, and non-disclosive scaffolding. Together, these findings suggest that educational-impact evaluation should not treat task success as a sufficient proxy for learning support. We argue that public tutoring benchmarks can better support positive-impact evaluation by reporting solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented scores separately and by making disclosure-sensitive, student-agency-preserving criteria more explicit.

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

ToolSelf: Unifying Task Execution and Self-Reconfiguration via Tool-Driven Emergent Adaptation

Authors:
Jingqi Zhou↗Sheng Wang↗Dezhao Deng↗Junwen Lu↗Junwei Su↗Qintong Li↗Jiahui Gao↗Hao Wu↗Jiyue Jiang↗Lingpeng Kong↗Dunhong Jin↗Chuan Wu↗…

arXiv:2602.07883v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM-powered agentic systems excel at complex long-horizon tasks, but remain constrained by static configurations fixed before execution. Such rigidity forces a trade-off between domain-specific performance and cross-task generalization: strong priors and compact tool spaces aid specialization but weaken transfer, while task-agnostic workflows and broad action spaces expand coverage but dilute guidance. Existing pre-execution optimization, planner-worker orchestration, and configuration patching fall short of resolving this tension, as they decouple adaptation from execution, causing information loss, fragmented optimization, and ambiguous credit assignment. We propose ToolSelf, a tool-driven runtime self-reconfiguration paradigm that abstracts configuration updates as a standardized tool interface and unifies execution and adaptation within one policy's action space. The execution agent can dynamically update sub-goals, strategies, toolboxes, context, and context-management modes based on task progress and feedback. We further introduce Configuration-Aware Two-stage Training (CAT), which combines rejection sampling fine-tuning with trajectory-level KTO reinforcement learning to internalize self-reconfiguration. Across diverse benchmarks, zero-shot ToolSelf rivals task-specialized agents; after CAT training, ToolSelf gains 28.8 points over the static-configuration baseline on average, illuminating a path toward emergent adaptivity that obviates manually injected guidance. The code is available at https://github.com/lian-tian-mo-zun/ToolSelf.

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

Evaluating Universal Machine Learning Force Fields Against Experimental Measurements

Authors:
Sajid Mannan↗Vaibhav Bihani↗Carmelo Gonzales↗Kin Long Kelvin Lee↗Nitya Nand Gosvami↗Sayan Ranu↗Santiago Miret↗N M Anoop Krishnan↗

arXiv:2508.05762v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Universal machine learning force fields (UMLFFs) promise to revolutionize materials science by enabling rapid atomistic simulations across the periodic table. However, their evaluation has been limited to computational benchmarks that may not reflect real-world performance. We introduce UniFFBench, a comprehensive evaluation framework featuring the MinX dataset – a diverse collection of 1,500+ mineral systems spanning 85 elements, extreme thermodynamic conditions (0–5000 K, 0–1000 GPa), and structural complexity, including partial occupancy and disorder. This diversity, combined with experimental reference values for validation, enables assessment of UMLFF generalization across chemical space and conditions substantially beyond typical training scenarios. Our systematic evaluation of six state-of-the-art UMLFFs reveals a substantial ``reality gap'': models achieving impressive performance on computational benchmarks often fail when confronted with experimental complexity. Even the best-performing models exhibit higher density prediction error than the threshold required for practical applications. We observe disconnects between simulation stability and mechanical property accuracy, with prediction errors correlating with training data representation rather than the modeling method.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SAMark: A Self-Anchored Text Watermarking with Paragraph-Level Paraphrase Robustness

Authors:
Jiahao Huo↗Wenjie Qu↗Yibo Yan↗Kening Zheng↗Jiaheng Zhang↗Xuming Hu↗Philip S. Yu↗Mingxun Zhou↗

Semantic-level watermarking (SWM) improves robustness against text modifications by treating sentences as the basic unit. However, robustness to paragraph-level paraphrasing remains difficult because such attacks globally disrupt watermark signals by changing sentence order. In this work, we propose SAMark, a self-anchored watermarking framework that removes the dependency on sentence order by establishing a step-independent green region in semantic space. To improve detectability, we introduce a multi-channel hyperbolic scoring mechanism that amplifies watermark signals while suppressing noise from weakly aligned candidates. We further propose a diversity-aware filtering strategy that combines hard filtering with soft regularization, extending beyond simple n-gram repetition filters to address semantic redundancy. Experimental results show that SAMark achieves up to 90.2% TP@FP1% under typical paragraph-level paraphrasing attacks, outperforming the strongest prior baseline by more than 30% on average, while maintaining generation quality competitive with unwatermarked text and breaking the robustness-quality trade-off that limits prior methods.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Mix-QVLA: Task-Evidence-Aware Mixed-Precision Quantization of Vision-Language-Action Models

Authors:
Navin Ranjan↗Andreas Savakis↗

We propose Mix-QVLA, a task-evidence-aware mixed-precision PTQ framework for VLA models. Mix-QVLA anchors each quantized variant to the full-precision action-token reference decision and evaluates whether quantization preserves task-relevant evidence across key VLA functional boundaries. It computes normalized gradient-weighted task-evidence maps from boundary activations and compares full-precision and quantized maps using evidence-mass and attribution-distribution distortion, capturing changes in both the strength and allocation of decision-supporting evidence. A soft-bottleneck objective aggregates boundary-level degradation into layer-wise sensitivity scores. Mix-QVLA further models sensitivity throughout task execution, capturing phase-dependent shifts in layer importance rather than assuming a fixed sensitivity profile. The resulting evidence- and time-aware scores guide mixed-precision bit allocation under model-size and BitOps budgets. Extensive evaluations on OpenVLA-style policies show that Mix-QVLA improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off of low-bit VLA deployment. On LIBERO, Mix-QVLA reduces OpenVLA-OFT memory from 15.4 GB to 4.1 GB, retains 96.3 average success compared with 97.1 for the BF16 model, and achieves a 1.52x inference speedup.

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

GraphWorld: Long-Horizon Planning with World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Authors:
Ziying Song↗Caiyan Jia↗Lin Liu↗Lei Yang↗Shengkai Zhang↗Feiyang Jia↗Fengda Zhao↗Peiliang Wu↗Shaoqing Xu↗Chen Lv↗Yadan Luo↗

End-to-end autonomous driving has made significant progress by unifying perception, prediction, and planning within a single learning framework, achieving strong performance in short-horizon decision making. However, most existing E2E-AD methods remain confined to short-horizon planning and lack the ability to model long-term temporal dependencies, which severely limits their generalization and security in complex and highly interactive driving scenarios. In this work, we propose GraphWorld, an E2E-AD framework that explicitly enhances long-horizon planning through latent world modeling. We introduce an Ego-Centric Interaction Graph, which adaptively models critical neighboring agents based on spatial proximity, and propagates relational context to planning queries via cross-node cross-attention. We present a World-State-Conditioned Planning that learns ego-centric latent world representations by modeling interactions between an ego vehicle and surrounding agents. This latent world state captures key interaction dynamics and safety-relevant semantics, and serves as a conditioning signal to guide long-horizon, safety-aware trajectory planning. Extensive experiments on Bench2Drive, NAVSIMv1/2, and nuScenes demonstrate that GraphWorld significantly reduces collision rates and improves long-horizon planning performance, validating its effectiveness in complex driving environments.

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

BLUEmed: Retrieval-Augmented Multi-Agent Debate for Clinical Error Detection

Authors:
Saukun Thika You↗Nguyen Anh Khoa Tran↗Wesley K. Marizane↗Hanshu Rao↗Qiunan Zhang↗Xiaolei Huang↗

Terminology substitution errors in clinical notes, where one medical term is replaced by a linguistically valid but clinically different term, pose a persistent challenge for automated error detection in healthcare. We introduce BLUEmed, a multi-agent debate framework augmented with hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) that combines evidence-grounded reasoning with multi-perspective verification for clinical error detection. BLUEmed decomposes each clinical note into focused sub-queries, retrieves source-partitioned evidence through dense, sparse, and online retrieval, and assigns two domain expert agents distinct knowledge bases to produce independent analyses; when the experts disagree, a structured counter-argumentation round and cross-source adjudication resolve the conflict, followed by a cascading safety layer that filters common false-positive patterns. We evaluate BLUEmed on a clinical terminology substitution detection benchmark under both zero-shot and few-shot prompting with multiple backbone models spanning proprietary and open-source families. Experimental results show that BLUEmed achieves the best accuracy (69.13%), ROC-AUC (74.45%), and PR-AUC (72.44%) under few-shot prompting, outperforming both single-agent RAG and debate-only baselines. Further analyses across six backbone models and two prompting strategies confirm that retrieval augmentation and structured debate are complementary, and that the framework benefits most from models with sufficient instruction-following and clinical language understanding.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Revisiting Chebyshev Polynomial and Anisotropic RBF Models for Tabular Regression

Authors:
Luciano Gerber↗Huw Lloyd↗

arXiv:2602.22422v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Smooth-basis models such as Chebyshev polynomial regressors and radial basis function (RBF) networks are well established in numerical analysis. Their continuously differentiable prediction surfaces suit surrogate optimisation, sensitivity analysis, and other settings where the response varies gradually with inputs. Despite these properties, smooth models seldom appear in tabular regression, where tree ensembles dominate. We ask whether they can compete, benchmarking models across 55 regression datasets organised by application domain. We develop an anisotropic RBF network with data-driven centre placement and gradient-based width optimisation, a ridge-regularised Chebyshev polynomial regressor, and a smooth-tree hybrid (Chebyshev model tree); all three are released as scikit-learn-compatible packages. We benchmark these against tree ensembles, a pre-trained transformer, and standard baselines, evaluating accuracy alongside generalisation behaviour. The transformer ranks first on accuracy across a majority of datasets, but its GPU dependence, inference latency, and dataset-size limits constrain deployment in the CPU-based settings common across applied science and industry. Among CPU-viable models, smooth models and tree ensembles are statistically tied on accuracy, but the former tend to exhibit tighter generalisation gaps. We recommend routinely including smooth-basis models in the candidate pool, particularly when downstream use benefits from tighter generalisation and gradually varying predictions.

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15.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-05

A multiscale, Bayesian inference approach to augment mechanistic models of cell signaling with machine-learning predictions of binding affinity

Authors:
Holly A. Huber↗

by Holly A. Huber, Stacey D. Finley Computational models in systems biology are often underdetermined—that is, there is little data relative to the complexity and size of the model. This lack of data is primarily due to limits in our ability to observe specific biological systems and restricts the utility of computational models. To reduce this uncertainty, recent methods have explored augmenting parameter inference of systems biology models with predictions from machine learning models. Such approaches expand the pool of data that is applicable for the inference problem. Here, we explore augmenting the parameter inference of intracellular signaling models. We choose to investigate signaling because experimental measurements of the variables of interest, protein dynamics, are still quite limited. To investigate, we propose a novel, multiscale, Bayesian inference approach that augments traditional signaling data with predictions of binding affinity. These predictions are generated using a machine learning pipeline with measurements of amino acid sequence, from the Universal Protein Resource, or protein structure, from the Protein Data Bank, as inputs. We find that we can successfully integrate these measurements into the inference problem using our novel framework. Excitingly, this integration significantly improves the parameter estimates of signaling models. We demonstrate that how much this improvement impacts predictions of signaling depends on the sensitivity of the prediction to perturbations in the parameter values. Overall, the framework we establish here improves the parameter inference of intracellular signaling models by successfully bridging data on protein sequence and structure with systems-level signaling.

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

Trusting Right Predictions for Wrong Reasons: A LIME Based Analysis of Deep Learning Interpretability in Lung Cancer Diagnosis

Authors:
Samarpan Poudel↗Vladislav D Veksler↗

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality, with approximately 2.5 million new cases and 1.8 million deaths annually, making reliable diagnosis a clinical priority. Although deep learning models have achieved strong performance in lung cancer classification, evaluation has largely focused on predictive accuracy, leaving their decision-making processes insufficiently examined. This study compares three architecturally distinct models: a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a pretrained ResNet50, and a Vision Transformer (ViT), trained on the IQ-OTH/NCCD lung cancer CT dataset. Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) were applied to investigate model reasoning. In addition to standard performance metrics, a dual-correlation framework was introduced to measure both prediction agreement and explanation agreement across model pairs. All three models achieved strong classification performance, with ResNet50 attaining 98.61% accuracy, CNN 97.91%, and ViT 93.75%, while all achieved ROC-AUC scores of 0.99. Prediction correlations exceeded 0.99 across all model pairs, indicating highly consistent outputs. However, LIME explanation correlations remained below 0.26, revealing substantial differences in the image regions used to reach those predictions. Analysis of misclassified samples further identified a consistent spatial pattern: incorrect predictions were associated with attention outside the lung parenchyma, whereas correct predictions focused primarily within lung regions. These findings demonstrate that prediction agreement is a poor proxy for reasoning consistency, and that interpretability evaluation must be treated as an independent validation criterion alongside predictive performance in clinical AI systems.

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

Skill-Constrained Model Predictive Control for Resilient Manufacturing Supply Chains

Authors:
Carlos Eduardo Sanoja↗

arXiv:2606.17269v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In skill-constrained production-inventory systems, the qualified human capacity available tomorrow depends on training decisions made today: production requires certified workers, certifications decay unless maintained, and training consumes the same scarce worker hours that production needs now. We study a closed-loop skill-constrained model predictive controller that, at every shift, solves a finite-horizon mixed-integer program over production, inventory, backlog, and training, with binary predicted certification, hard production eligibility, and an interpretable terminal value that prices certified-capacity gaps at the horizon boundary; only the first-period action is applied before replanning. On synthetic, seed-controlled SkillChain-Gym scenarios - announced and surprise new-skill shocks, demand shocks, absenteeism, forecast- and availability-quality modes, capacity-boundary and training-rate sweeps, and negative controls - we evaluate the controller against production-only and maintenance-only ablations, static cross-training insurance plans, and a strong reactive heuristic, under an ex-ante locked configuration and paired statistics. The result is regime dependence, not superiority: no policy class dominates. Predictive control helps when skill or labor bottlenecks are forecastable early enough for training to complete; lean static insurance remains hard to beat under surprise shocks, near the demand-capacity boundary, and wherever pre-shock slack makes insurance cheap. Attribution ablations separate certification maintenance, re-acquisition of lapsed certifications, and greenfield skill acquisition. Forecastability, not adaptivity per se, decides when predictive control pays.

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

Ambient Diffusion Policy: Imitation Learning from Suboptimal Data in Robotics

Authors:
Adam Wei↗Nicholas Pfaff↗Thomas Cohn↗Arif Kerem Day{\i}↗Constantinos Daskalakis↗Giannis Daras↗Russ Tedrake↗

arXiv:2606.12365v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose Ambient Diffusion Policy, a simple and principled method for imitation learning from suboptimal data in robotics. High-quality, task-specific robot data is expensive and time-consuming to collect, while suboptimal datasets with lower-quality or out-of-distribution demonstrations are abundant. Existing methods that co-train on both data sources in robotics often fail to separate the meaningful and the harmful features in the suboptimal samples. In contrast, our method extracts only the useful features by introducing a new axis to co-training in robotics: noise-dependent data usage. Ambient Diffusion Policy restricts the contribution of suboptimal data during training to only the high and low diffusion times. To rigorously justify our approach, we first observe that robot action data exhibits a spectral power law. This induces two important properties on the optimal Diffusion Policy that we exploit: a global-to-local hierarchy and locality. We theoretically formalize this discussion using a simplified model. Our experiments validate Ambient Diffusion Policy on four types of suboptimal action data (noisy trajectories, sim-to-real gap, task mismatch, and large-scale data mixtures) across six tasks. The results show that it effectively learns from arbitrary sources of suboptimal data. Notably, it outperforms existing co-training baselines by up to 33% when scaled to Open X-Embodiment - a large dataset with heterogeneous data quality and unstructured distribution shifts. Overall, Ambient Diffusion Policy increases the utility of suboptimal demonstrations and expands the set of usable data sources in robotics.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Can Language Model Agents be Helpful Circuit Explainers in Mechanistic Interpretability?

Authors:
Ayan Antik Khan↗Harsh Kohli↗Yuekun Yao↗Huan Sun↗Ziyu Yao↗

arXiv:2606.24026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability has made substantial progress in automatically localizing circuits, but explaining what localized components do remains labor-intensive and difficult to standardize. In this work, we study whether language model (LM) agents can assist with this explanation problem once a circuit has already been identified. We introduce AgenticInterpBench, a benchmark for circuit explanation built from 84 semi-synthetic transformer circuits with 163 component-level annotations. We propose HyVE (Hypothesize, Validate, Explain), an agentic explainer that analyzes each component through an iterative loop of observation, hypothesis generation, and causal validation, eventually producing a component-level explanation and a circuit-level task description. Across four LM backbones, HyVE recovers useful component- and task-level explanations, but no backbone is uniformly best. Our analysis shows that strong backbones usually form observation-grounded hypotheses, while failures more often arise later in the validation loop, through incomplete validation plans, code execution errors, or unresolved hypotheses. A case study on an arithmetic circuit in Llama-3-8B shows that the same formulation can extend beyond semi-synthetic benchmarks to naturally trained models. Overall, LM agents are promising circuit explainers, but reliable validation remains the key obstacle.

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

Fully Quantum Algorithm for the 1-dimensional linear Lattice Boltzmann Method

Authors:
Mohammed Bediche↗Matthijs van Waveren↗Denis Ricot↗Pierre Sagaut↗

arXiv:2606.16514v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A fully quantum algorithm for solving the one-dimensional linear advection-diffusion equation using the Lattice Boltzmann method as a numerical procedure is presented in this work. We start by presenting a state of the art of the current usage of quantum algorithms for solving ordinary and partial differential equations. We then describe two algorithms for the one-dimensional Lattice Boltzmann method with two degrees of freedom. The first one is an existing hybrid quantum-classical algorithm with measurements at each time step, and the second one is our improved version, viz. a fully quantum algorithm where only one measurement is needed at the end of the algorithm. The fully quantum algorithm is first executed on a quantum simulator and then compared with a classical approach. Subsequently, the fully quantum algorithm is run on a quantum system with 133 qubits to investigate the effect of noise and the depth of the circuit on the output state. We find fluctuations in the final result due to the decoherence noise of the qubits.

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21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Time-spectral control of accidental coincidences in daylight entanglement-based free-space QKD

Authors:
Jiyoung Moon↗Yonggi Jo↗Zaeill Kim↗Yong Sup Ihn↗Nam Hun Park↗

arXiv:2606.17365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Daylight entanglement-based free-space quantum key distribution (QKD) is limited by accidental coincidences from receiver-admitted background light. We develop and experimentally validate a receiver-level framework linking receiver bandwidth, accepted temporal width, and background-noise density to Bob singles, sifted-key rate, error rate, and quantum bit error rate (QBER) in telecom-wavelength BBM92 QKD. Indoor sweeps show that useful sifted counts saturate near the source-matched bandwidth, whereas broader bandwidth or higher background mainly increases accidental contamination. Increasing the accepted temporal width leaves Bob singles nearly unchanged but directly raises QBER by enlarging the random-overlap probability. A two-dimensional design map shows that the temporal-window margin contracts rapidly with increasing background-to-signal ratio, while the bandwidth margin remains comparatively broad near source-matched filtering. A 10 m rooftop daylight experiment demonstrates operation in the predicted low-accidental regime, yielding a mean sifted-key rate of 2,811 cps and a mean QBER of 4.43%.

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

LLM Jaggedness Unlocks Scientific Creativity

Authors:
Shray Mathur↗J. Anibal Boscoboinik↗Esther H. R. Tsai↗Kevin G. Yager↗

arXiv:2605.10574v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As artificial intelligence advances, models are not improving uniformly. Instead, progress unfolds in a jagged fashion, with capabilities growing unevenly across tasks, domains, and model scales. In this work, we examine this dynamic jaggedness through the lens of scientific idea generation. We introduce SciAidanBench, a benchmark of open-ended scientific questions designed to measure the scientific creativity of large language models (LLMs). Given a scientific question, models are asked to generate as many unique and coherent ideas as possible, with the total number of valid responses serving as a proxy for creative potential. Evaluating 19 base models across 8 providers (30 total variants including reasoning versions), we find that jaggedness manifests both across models and within models. First, in a cross-task comparison between general and scientific creativity, improvements in general creativity do not translate uniformly to scientific creativity, revealing divergent capability profiles across models. Second, at the prompt level, stronger models do not improve uniformly; instead, they exhibit high variability, with bursts of creativity on some questions and limited performance on others. Third, at the domain level, individual models display uneven strengths across scientific subfields, reflecting fragmented internal capability profiles. Finally, we show that this jaggedness can be harnessed. We explore mechanisms of inference-time compute, knowledge pooling, and brainstorming to combine models effectively and construct meta-model ensembles that outperform any single model. Our results position jaggedness not as a limitation, but as a resource, a structural feature of AI progress that, when understood and leveraged, can amplify LLM-driven scientific creativity.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A Model-Driven Approach for Developing Families of Reinforcement Learning Environments

Authors:
Xiaoran Liu↗Istvan David↗

arXiv:2606.20324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Virtual training environments are software-intensive systems in which reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn, adapt, and demonstrate meaningful behavior. Virtual training environments offer a safe and cost-efficient alternative to training agents in real-world settings. However, to converge, most realistic RL problems require training in multiple, mostly similar but slightly different environments - i.e., families of environment variants. The typical development process of environment families is a labor-intensive and error-prone manual endeavor that does not scale well. To alleviate these issues, in this paper, we propose a model-driven approach for developing families of RL training environments. To obtain the family of environments, we develop an approach and prototype tool. In our approach, a hybrid genetic algorithm - a combination of population-based global search and heuristic local search - generates environment families. Mutations and constraints are expressed as model transformations and are operationalized into a search process by a state-of-the-art model transformation engine. We demonstrate the soundness of our approach in a wildfire mitigation scenario and curriculum learning - a particular learning paradigm that relies on environment families.

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

Sparsity Curse: Understanding RLVR Model Parameter Space from Model Merging

Authors:
Chenrui Wu↗Zexi Li↗Jiajun Bu↗Jiangchuan Liu↗Haishuai Wang↗

arXiv:2606.18521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm that surpasses Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) in eliciting reasoning intelligence and resisting catastrophic forgetting. Recent studies further reveal that RLVR induces highly sparse and off-principal parameter updates compared to SFT. This naturally raises the question: does such sparsity make RLVR models more amenable to model merging? If so, model merging would offer a scalable, training-free path to aggregate diverse reasoning capabilities from independently trained RLVR models. Surprisingly, we find the opposite, uncovering a sparsity curse: the sparse RLVR updates are spread farther apart in parameter space, forming near-orthogonal shortcuts that make aggregation inherently fragile. This is likely rooted in the stochasticity of RL optimization and the diversity of emergent reasoning patterns. Unlike SFT models that converge to shared, flat basins and merge naturally, RLVR models suffer severe degradation under standard merging methods. Through systematic empirical analysis of the update geometry, we characterize the mechanisms behind this failure and propose Sensitivity-aware Resolving Merging (SAR-Merging), a merging recipe tailored for the unique structure of RLVR parameter spaces. SAR-Merging resolves conflicts in overlapping update regions via Fisher Information-based sensitivity arbitration, followed by magnitude-aware sparsification and rescaling to preserve fragile reasoning pathways. Experiments on mathematical and coding benchmarks demonstrate that SAR-Merging substantially outperforms existing merging methods on RLVR models, enabling both single-task enhancement and multi-capability fusion.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Robust Local Polynomial Regression with Similarity Kernels

Authors:
Yaniv Shulman↗

arXiv:2501.10729v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Local Polynomial Regression (LPR) is a widely used nonparametric method for modeling complex relationships due to its flexibility and simplicity. It estimates a regression function by fitting low-degree polynomials to localized subsets of the data, weighted by proximity. However, traditional LPR is sensitive to outliers and high-leverage points, which can significantly affect estimation accuracy. This paper revisits the kernel function used to compute regression weights and proposes a novel framework that incorporates both predictor and response variables in the weighting mechanism. The focus of this work is a conditional density kernel that robustly estimates weights by mitigating the influence of outliers through localized density estimation. The proposed method is implemented in Python and is publicly available at https://github.com/yaniv-shulman/rsklpr. The population analysis quantifies the bias induced by density-based robust weighting, and the reported experiments show lower empirical bias than iterative robust LOWESS while remaining competitive with standard LOWESS. This advancement provides a promising extension to traditional LPR, opening new possibilities for robust regression applications.

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