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

StyleShield: Exposing the Fragility of AIGC Detectors through Continuous Controllable Style Transfer

arXiv:2605.00924v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-generated content (AIGC) detectors are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings such as academic integrity screening, yet their reliability rests on a fundamental paradox: as language models are trained on human-written corpora, the statistical boundary between AI and human writing will inevitably dissolve as models improve. Commercial incentives have further distorted this landscape – detection services and "de-AIification" tools often operate within the same supply chain, replacing evaluation of content quality with judgment of content origin. We present StyleShield, the first flow matching framework for conditional text style transfer, operating directly in continuous token embedding space via a DiT backbone with zero-initialized cross-attention adapters conditioned on frozen Qwen-7B representations. At inference, we adapt the SDEdit paradigm from image synthesis to text embeddings, with a single parameter gamma providing smooth continuous control over the evasion-preservation trade-off. On a multi-domain Chinese benchmark, StyleShield achieves 94.6% evasion against the training detector and >=99% against three unseen detectors, maintaining 0.928 semantic similarity. We further introduce RateAudit, a document-level scheduling algorithm that demonstrates detection-rate verdicts can be set to arbitrary values, directly questioning the reliability of score-based evaluation.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

The Impact of Pregnant Womens Dietary Behavior on the Physiological Adaptation Paradox and Maternal-Fetal Resource Conflict in Conflict Settings: A Predictive Analytical Study

This scientific study aims to assess the level of awareness, nutritional knowledge, and actual behavioral practices among pregnant women in the Capital District of Sanaa, Republic of Yemen, and to determine their impact on the health and clinical indicators of the mother and fetus under complex conflict conditions. The study employed a descriptive-analytical approach based on a simple random sample of 200 pregnant women attending government-run hospitals and specialized medical centers in the Capital District. Field data were collected during December 2025 using a structured and validated questionnaire consisting of 42 items measuring demographic variables, awareness, practices, barriers, and health outcomes. The results of the statistical analysis using SPSS software showed a high level of nutritional awareness (87%) and healthy dietary practices (80%) among the sample participants. Simple and multiple linear regression tests revealed a statistically significant effect of awareness and practices in explaining 20.2% of the variance in the health status of the mother and fetus (R{superscript 2}= 0.204, p < 0.001). The study demonstrated that actual behavioral practices have greater predictive power ({beta}=0.316, p=0.001) compared to theoretical cognitive awareness ({beta}=0.232, p=0.005) in determining clinical outcomes for the mother and fetus, highlighting the widening gap between knowledge and behavior under structural pressures. "Morning sickness" (80%) and the deterioration of "family economic status" (71%) emerged as the greatest physiological and material barriers to proper nutrition. With their inferential impact established as an extension of the maternal-fetal resource allocation conflict in a physiologically and economically challenging environment, the study also identified significant differences in nutritional behavior and health outcomes in favor of housewives and mothers who are more educated and have higher incomes, while no significant differences were recorded attributable to obstetric variables such as stage or order of pregnancy. The study offers a unique theoretical and practical contribution by formulating an integrated causal model that demonstrates that the fetus acts as a biological drain on the mothers cellular and mineral reserves in a war environment, which necessitates directing antenatal care and support programs toward effective behavioral empowerment and nutritional support to overcome the structural and material barriers faced by pregnant women.

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

Attribution-Guided and Coverage-Maximized Pruning for Structural MoE Compression

arXiv:2606.18304v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale compute efficiently, yet remain expensive to deploy due to their substantial memory footprint and inference overhead. Prior compression methods mainly operate at the expert level, either removing entire experts or ranking experts by coarse-grained importance scores. However, such expert-wise decisions are often too coarse to capture fine-grained redundancy, leading to misallocated pruning budgets and limited compression. To address this problem, we observe that information within MoE experts is highly concentrated in a small subset of channels, leaving substantial redundancy even in experts deemed important. Based on this observation, we propose a structural pruning framework tailored for MoE models. Our method reformulates prune-ratio allocation as a channel-score coverage maximization problem and solves it efficiently using an attribution-based approximation. Experiments on DeepSeek and Qwen MoE models show that our method preserves model accuracy under 50% or 25% structured pruning when combined with 4-bit quantization. On Qwen3-30B-A3B, our approach reduces memory footprint by 5.27$\times$ and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across diverse benchmarks.

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

An Electric Potential-Augmented Benchmark Dataset for Physics-Guided Image Reconstruction of Electrical Capacitance Tomography

While deep learning has significantly advanced image reconstruction of Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT), most data-driven methods map directly between capacitance and permittivity distribution, treating the sensor as a black box. This overlooks the electric potential field – the fundamental physical link governing the nonlinear and ill-posed ``soft-field'' effect. To address this, we propose an electric potential-augmented ECT benchmark dataset designed to explicitly integrate latent physics behind ECT into the learning process. Generated via a COMSOL-MATLAB pipeline for an eight-electrode sensor as an example, the dataset comprises 20,000 randomized samples across four typical flow patterns. Crucially, alongside the conventional capacitance vectors and permittivity distributions depicted as images, each sample preserves eight excitation-wise full-field potential maps. Beyond data release, we provide illustrative evaluation protocols for both forward and inverse problems of ECT. Through comprehensive testing on both in-distribution (IID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, we systematically demonstrate how the inclusion of electric potential maps enhances modeling accuracy and robustness. Fundamentally, the explicit inclusion of latent field information significantly lowers the barrier to integrating physical laws into ECT modeling, thereby establishing a standardized foundation for future physics-guided machine learning of ECT image reconstruction.

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

A Unified Framework for Structured Flow Modeling: From Representation to Verification and Model Discovery

Authors:

arXiv:2605.18250v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many dynamical systems can be described in terms of structured flows combining source/sink behavior, cyclic dynamics, and topology-constrained transport. These features arise across a wide range of physical, engineered, and data-driven systems. The objective of this work is to establish a unified perspective on such systems, to identify modeling approaches that balance expressivity, interpretability, computational complexity, and data requirements, and to investigate how highly expressive models can be used to uncover the dominant mechanisms underlying observed dynamics. Starting from the Helmholtz-Hodge decomposition of continuous vector fields, we review the recently proposed Graph Vector Field (GVF) framework and its discrete representation on simplicial complexes. We then introduce a hierarchy of alternative approaches, including parametric conditional models, linear graph dynamical systems, and reduced Hodge representations. Finally, we propose a verification and validation methodology based on benchmark datasets from well-understood physical systems and on systematic model-reduction and ablation studies. The resulting family of structured-flow models within a common framework, ranging from low-dimensional parametric representations to full GVF formulations, supports a diagnostic methodology in which gradient, curl, harmonic, and topological contributions are systematically assessed through ablation studies. This process enables the identification of dominant mechanisms underlying the observed dynamics and guides the construction of simplified models tailored to the available data and operational constraints. By separating structural verification, behavioral verification, and domain-specific validation, the proposed approach provides a foundation for scalable and interpretable analysis of complex dynamical systems across multiple application domains.

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

GeneralVLA-2: Geometry-Aware Reconstruction and Governed Memory for Robot Planning

Generalist vision-language-action systems need object-centric 3D evidence and reusable manipulation experience to plan reliable robot trajectories. GeneralVLA provides a hierarchical interface for converting language and RGB-D observations into 3D end-effector paths, but two bottlenecks remain. First, monocular SAM3D-style object reconstruction can hallucinate pose and unseen geometry, while manipulation benefits from stable object shape when calibrated multi-view observations are available. Second, the original KnowledgeBank mainly retrieves semantically similar snippets and appends new knowledge, which makes it difficult to control memory quality, conflicts, confidence, and geometric relevance. To address the first challenge, we introduce GeoFuse-MV3D, a geometry-prior-guided MV-SAM3D reconstruction branch that verifies external geometry cues with input-view masks, applies soft visual-hull support, performs axis-wise refinement, and fuses only geometry while preserving appearance. To address the second challenge, we upgrade KnowledgeBank into a governed long-term memory system with explicit quality, confidence, lifecycle, verifier, and conflict metadata, together with precision-oriented retrieval. Finally, we evaluate the reconstruction branch on GSO-30 and the memory module on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and SWE-Bench Verified; GeoFuse-MV3D improves over the MV-SAM3D baseline by reducing CD and LPIPS by 2.20% and 2.02% while increasing PSNR and SSIM by 2.36% and 1.03%, and KnowledgeBank improves over ReasoningBank by 4.53% on Terminal-Bench SR and 3.73% on SWE-Bench resolve rate, while reducing AS by 4.95% and 5.65%, respectively. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/GeneralVLA-2. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/GeneralVLA-2.

07.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12

A new method for augmenting short time series, with application to pain events in sickle cell disease

Authors:

by Kumar Utkarsh, Nirmish R. Shah, Tanvi Banerjee, Daniel M. Abrams Researchers across different fields, including but not limited to ecology, biology, and healthcare, often face the challenge of sparse data. Such sparsity can lead to uncertainties, estimation difficulties, and potential biases in modeling. Here we introduce a novel data augmentation method that combines multiple sparse time series datasets when they share similar statistical properties, thereby improving parameter estimation and model selection reliability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through validation studies comparing Hawkes and Poisson processes, followed by application to subjective pain dynamics in patients with sickle cell disease (SCD), a condition affecting millions worldwide, particularly those of African, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Indian descent.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Beyond representational alignment with brain-guided language models for robust reasoning

The correspondence between large language models (LLMs) and the neural mechanisms underlying human higher-order cognition remains insufficiently characterized. Given that language and reasoning in the human brain appear dissociable, an open question is whether LLMs align with neural signals from reasoning-related regions and whether such signals can improve them. Here, focusing on deductive reasoning, we show that LLM internal representations are not only partially aligned with task-fMRI activity but can also be directly enhanced by these signals. Using a neural-predictivity metric, we find that LLMs explain a substantial fraction of the explainable variance in reasoning-related regions at the aggregate level, whereas predictivity within specific reasoning types is lower, indicating both alignment and divergence. Building on this, we propose a brain-guided framework: we steer model representations along directions induced by the joint structure of model and brain representations, applying intervention at inference and fine-tuning during training. We demonstrate that task-evoked brain signals can directly enhance LLM reasoning, yielding gains orthogonal to language-only supervision across 10 LLMs (1.5B-72B), with transfer across reasoning types and up to 13\% absolute accuracy gain. Our results advance LLM-brain correspondences from correlation to guidance, establishing a brain-signal-driven pathway toward more robust and cognitively aligned AI.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Projected logical ensembles in surface codes via the random-matrix theory of quantum dots

arXiv:2606.17140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Measurements underpin active quantum error correction (QEC) and have been recognized as a source of novel measurement-induced many-body phenomena. Here, we study the statistical properties of post-measurement logical states arising in QEC on topological codes subject to deterministic transversal unitary gates. Upon syndrome extraction followed by maximum-likelihood decoding, a Born-weighted ensemble arises which we dub the "projected logical ensemble" (PLE). Focusing on surface codes subject to uniform single-qubit Pauli-$X$ rotations, we characterize the measurement-induced randomness of the PLE. To this end, we show that for a code with a single logical qubit, the PLE is isomorphic to an ensemble of scattering matrices describing mesoscopic quantum dots obtained from a 2D Majorana network model with suitable boundary conditions. We uncover regimes where these quantum dots are chaotic such that their scattering matrices are well-described by random matrix theory. In these regimes, the PLE approaches a universal ensemble that is maximally random up to symmetry and decoder-induced constraints. The symmetry constraints, set by stabilizer and logical operator weights, realize Altland-Zirnbauer classes D or DIII, which we both illustrate. Our results establish a fundamental connection between emergent universality concepts in mesoscopic physics, quantum many-body systems, and QEC.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

AFFORDABILITY OF INTOXICATION FROM CHEAP ETHANOL: EVIDENCE FROM RETAIL ALCOHOL MARKETS IN UGANDA

Background: Alcohol affordability is a determinant of consumption and alcohol-related harm. In many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), informal production, variable alcohol strength, and non-standard packaging complicate conventional affordability measures, limiting evidence on the economic accessibility of alcohol and the cost of intoxication. Objective: To assess the affordability of intoxication in Uganda by estimating the cost of obtaining ethanol to reach intoxication across alcohol products, packaging types, and retail contexts. Methods: Data were collected on 824 alcoholic beverages from urban, rural, and urban-slum retail markets. Ethanol-standardized pricing (price per gram of alcohol) was calculated, and the cost of consuming 60 g of ethanol was estimated. Multivariate regression identified determinants of ethanol affordability. Results: Affordability varied by product type and packaging. Opaque beers and illicit spirits provided the cheapest pathways to intoxication, with median costs of UGX 1,200-1,500 per 60 g of ethanol. Plastic packaging was associated with lower ethanol costs than glass packaging. Ethanol prices differed across formal and informal markets (p < 0.01), while rural areas and urban informal settlements had 20-25% lower costs than urban areas. Regulatory status alone did not predict affordability. Conclusions: In Ugandas diverse alcohol market, affordability is driven by access to ethanol rather than beverage price alone. Low-cost, high-strength alcohol sold through informal channels enables intoxication at minimal expense, among disadvantaged populations. Implications: Alcohol policies should target ethanol content through minimum unit pricing, alcohol-content-based taxation, and regulation of informal markets and packaging practices to reduce harmful consumption and inequities.

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

GroupToM-Bench: Benchmarking Group Theory of Mind and Nonlinear Social Emergence in MLLMs

True general intelligence requires not only a model of the physical world but also a social world model: the capacity to infer how individual mental states interact and crystallize into group-level outcomes. Despite notable progress in individual-level Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning, existing multimodal large language models fail at this broader task. Collective behavior emerges non-linearly from social tensions, conformity dynamics, and structural constraints, meaning it cannot be recovered by merely summing individual intentions. We present GroupToM-Bench, the first multimodal benchmark for group-level ToM, built around a causal chain spanning micro-level BDI states (belief, desire, intention), meso-level group tension and structural constraints, and macro-level outcome prediction and mechanistic attribution. To probe this full arc, we develop a seven-level cognitive audit framework. Experiments reveal a gap between current models and human baselines, highlighting a failure to process social structures and non-linear collective dynamics.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

OmniPath Metabo: chemical structures, interactions and mechanisms to study the metabolome

Mechanistic and functional analysis of omics data largely relies on the incorporation of prior knowledge; however, connecting metabolomics data and knowledge is a major methodological challenge. This is largely driven by the diverse prior knowledge being fragmented across many databases requiring the merging of different database records across chemical structures, identifiers, and varying levels of structural specificity. Hence, this limits mechanistic interpretation and functional characterisation of the metabolome. Here, we present OmniPath Metabo, a comprehensive, harmonized, metabolome-centric database covering metabolites, lipids, food-derived compounds, and small molecule drugs, along with their associated receptors, transporters, enzymes, reactions, allosteric regulators, and disease associations. OmniPath Metabo harmonizes attributes using controlled vocabularies and ontologies, structures and built-in cheminformatics to map identifiers and track ambiguity. OmniPath Metabo is built directly from 40+ original resources and is freely accessible via an interactive web app and API at metabo.omnipathdb.org. OmniPath Metabo enables dynamic, context-specific construction of subnetworks to serve dedicated purposes, such as cell-cell communication or integrated multi-omics metabolite-driven regulation, connecting reactions, allosteric regulation, metabolite-receptor and metabolite-transporter interactions. Combining it with the over 170 other resources in OmniPath, it can be used for integrated networks of signaling, gene regulation, and metabolism. We showcase the application of OmniPath Metabo by analysing publicly available metabolomics data of lung cancer cell lines and metabolic footprints to mutational patterns. In summary, OmniPath Metabo transforms fragmented resources into a harmonised prior knowledge framework for a mechanistic and functional analysis of the metabolome.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Where to Place the Query? Unveiling and Mitigating Positional Bias in In-Context Learning for Diffusion LLMs via Decoding Dynamics

While In-Context Learning (ICL) is extensively studied in Autoregressive (AR) LLMs, its mechanism within Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) remains largely unexplored. Unlike AR models restricted by unidirectional causal masking, dLLMs intrinsically utilize bidirectional attention, offering extensive spatial flexibility for query placement. Unfortunately, current practices conventionally inherit AR-style trailing-query templates, often overlooking the structural paradigm shift. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis unveiling that query position is actually a first-order variable in dLLMs. Through empirical decoupling, we demonstrate that positional variance impacts generation quality on par with example semantic quality. Internally, this positional sensitivity stems from a spatial ``Recency Effect'' in attention flow and task-dependent shifts in decoding trajectories. To mitigate this instability without ground-truth labels, we reveal that traditional single-step confidence ($C_{decoded}$) fails in dLLMs. Instead, we propose Average Confidence ($\overline{C}$), a novel metric tracking the iterative decoding process. By establishing the foundational spatial ICL baselines, we introduce Auto-ICL, a training-free adaptive routing strategy that dynamically optimizes query placement, robustly approaching oracle performance across heterogeneous reasoning and perception tasks.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

String dynamics of a (2+1)D U(1) quantum link model on a digital quantum computer

arXiv:2606.19601v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The (2+1)D U(1) pure gauge theory always exists in the confining phase, with strings of non-zero string tension giving a characteristic linear potential between static charges. This makes it a useful testing ground for quantum computing methods designed to study string dynamics of confining gauge theories. Here we implement a minimal U(1) quantum link model on a quantum computer with qubit degrees of freedom representing the dual height variables of the model. This facilitates an efficient realization of plaquette interactions and enables effective calculations of real-time dynamics that are inaccessible to traditional quantum Monte Carlo. A specifically tailored lattice geometry is chosen to match the heavy-hexagonal geometry of the IBM quantum hardware used here, minimizing non-adjacent qubit interactions. By performing quantum quenches from a simple initial string state, we probe the transverse quantum fluctuations of the string before it thermalizes. Our experimental results from digital quantum simulations, with up to 112 qubits, show good agreement with reference tensor-network calculations at short times and with thermal averages at long times. Near the phase transition, the quench dynamics exhibit large fluctuations of the initial string that extend across both spatial dimensions of the lattice. Nonetheless, our error-mitigated estimators from the quantum hardware also give accurate predictions in that regime, with noise-induced violations of local gauge symmetries comparable to finite-bond-dimension tensor-network results.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Global and local genetic overlap among ME/CFS, irritable bowel syndrome and psychiatric traits: a hypothesis-generating analysis

Authors:

Background. Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) frequently co-occur following infection, yet shared genetic architecture at the locus level has not been systematically characterised. Aims. To estimate global and local genetic correlations between ME/CFS (including infection-onset subgroup), IBS, major depressive disorder (MDD) and loneliness/isolation, and characterise ME/CFS cell-type heritability enrichment. Method. GWAS summary statistics: DecodeME (15,579 ME/CFS; 9,738 infection-onset), FinnGen R9 (9,296 IBS), PGC MDD Wave 2 (45,396) and UK Biobank loneliness (N=455,364). LDSC for global correlations; LAVA for local correlations across 2,495 loci; MAGMA for cell-type enrichment (Descartes Human atlas); coloc.abf for colocalisation. Results. All pairwise global correlations were significant after Bonferroni correction, including ME/CFS-all-MDD (rg=0.598, 95% CI 0.46-0.74) and ME/CFS-all-IBS (rg=0.573, 0.39-0.75). Of 4,232 local tests, 16 reached FDR

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Towards the implementation of a quantum classifier

arXiv:2606.10150v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we investigate the use of a quantum circuit as a binary classification model in the context of quantum machine learning. We call this model, binary quantum classifier. First, we describe fundamental concepts of quantum computing and introduce the computational tool used: Qibo, an open-source framework for efficient quantum simulations and quantum hardware control. Then, we describe how to design a binary quantum classifier for the classification of images and small arrays of variables by showing how to input data in the circuit, defining a quantum circuit model Ansatz with trainable parameters and a loss function, and implementing multiple minimizers. We test our quantum classifier with two data sets. The first one is the MNIST data set which is composed of handwritten digits (reduced to only handwritten zeros and handwritten ones for binary classification). We study the behavior of different minimizers by increasing the number of layers of the Ansatz. The second data set represents two different high energy collisions that can occur at colliders such as LHC (CERN). Due to in-time proton-proton interactions known as pile-up, we distinguish two different data sets: "without pile-up" and "with pile-up". These collisions can be represented by images of size 32x32 or by six high-level variables that we call features. By increasing the size of the training data set and the number of layers of the Ansatz, we search for the best minimizer. Splitting the data set in training set and test set, we compute: ROC curve, AUC score, confusion matrices and test set accuracy. For "with pile-up" images, we compare the results obtained with the quantum classifier with a small convolutional neural network. We conclude that is possible to build a binary quantum classifier with a quantum circuit and we highlight its performances and limitations in comparison with classical technologies.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Development of iADJUST: a theory-informed, patient co-designed digital psychological intervention for adjustment in chronic kidney disease

Background: Psychological distress is common in chronic kidney disease (CKD) and is associated with reduced quality of life, treatment non-adherence, and worse clinical outcomes. Distress in CKD is also linked to difficulties adjusting to the demands of illness management. Despite this, psychological support remains inconsistently integrated within kidney care pathways, and existing interventions often lack clear theoretical specification and explicit targeting of mechanisms underpinning adjustment to CKD. Objectives: To describe the systematic development of iADJUST, a theory-informed patient co-designed digital psychological intervention targeting key cognitive and behavioural mechanisms involved in adjustment to CKD. Methods: Intervention development was guided by the Medical Research Council framework for complex interventions. A structured, iterative process integrated empirical evidence, psychological theory, and patient and public involvement and engagement. The Common-Sense Model of Self-Regulation and cognitive behavioural theories informed the identification of modifiable maintaining mechanisms associated with adjustment to CKD. Intervention components were mapped onto these mechanisms and refined through co-design with people living with CKD. Results: iADJUST is a six-session self-guided digital psychological intervention delivered over 12 weeks and supplemented by therapist contact. The intervention targets illness-related uncertainty, fatigue-related activity dysregulation, catastrophic what-if thinking, self-critical evaluation, and behavioural withdrawal. It integrates psychoeducation, cognitive and behavioural strategies, maintenance planning, and elements from acceptance and commitment therapy and compassion-focused approaches. Content is delivered through video, audio, and guided tasks and activities. Conclusion: iADJUST provides a theory-informed, evidence-based psychological intervention for CKD explicitly mapping intervention components to maintaining cognitive and behavioural mechanisms implicated in adjustment. Feasibility evaluation is underway.

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

NavWAM: A Navigation World Action Model for Goal-Conditioned Visual Navigation

Goal-conditioned visual navigation requires a robot to act under partial observability by anticipating how its motion will change the future egocentric view and whether that change brings it closer to the goal. Navigation world models provide such visual foresight, but they remain prediction modules that require an external planner to convert predicted futures into closed-loop control. We propose Navigation World Action Model (NavWAM), a diffusion-transformer policy that turns navigation world-model prediction into executable action by representing future observations, goal-progress values, and action chunks in a shared latent sequence. By learning future prediction jointly with the action and value targets that determine closed-loop behavior, NavWAM makes visual foresight directly usable for robot control. We build NavWAM through simulation pretraining and real-robot adaptation, and evaluate it on image-goal navigation against planning-based world models and a representative direct navigation policy. Across offline benchmarks and closed-loop real-robot deployment, NavWAM improves over planning-based world-model baselines in our evaluations while using the default policy mode without CEM-style action search. Project page: https://dachii-azm.github.io/navwam/

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

From Agent Traces to Trust: A Survey of Evidence Tracing and Execution Provenance in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.04990v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agents are evolving from passive text generators into autonomous systems capable of planning, tool use, retrieval, memory access, environmental interaction, and multi-agent collaboration. These capabilities expand agent autonomy, but also make agent behavior harder to verify, debug, and audit. Final-answer accuracy alone cannot explain how an output was produced, which evidence supported each claim, whether tool calls were justified, how memory influenced later decisions, or where failures originated. This survey examines evidence tracing and execution provenance as foundations for process-level accountability in trustworthy LLM agents. We define execution provenance as the typed graph of an agent execution and evidence tracing as its projection onto evidence-support relations. This perspective connects retrieval grounding, claim support, tool-use safety, memory lineage, observability, debugging, audit, and recovery within a unified framework. We introduce a taxonomy covering trace sources, evidence and execution units, provenance relations, tracing granularity and timing, representation forms, and trust functions. We then review key methodological directions, including provenance representation, evidence attribution, tool-use provenance, runtime guardrails, provenance-bearing memory, observability, and failure diagnosis. Finally, we discuss benchmarks, datasets, metrics, and open challenges for building provenance-aware, auditable, and recoverable agent systems.

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

MVOFormer: Flow-Semantic Transformer for Robust Monocular Visual Odometry

Monocular visual odometry (MVO) is foundational to autonomous navigation and robotic localization. However, existing learning-based MVO approaches often struggle with either a lack of interpretable, complementary features or overly complex multi-stage architectures. These limitations inherently restrict their robustness and cross-domain generalization. In this work, we propose MVOFormer, a novel transformer framework for robust monocular visual odometry. Our architecture features a Flow-Semantic Dual Branch Encoder that synergizes dense geometric motion cues with object-centric semantic priors, explicitly distinguishing static structures from dynamic distractors. These representations are then fused by an Iterative Multimodal Decoder, enabling coarse-to-fine pose refinement while dynamically suppressing attention on unreliable regions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that, without any target-domain fine-tuning, MVOFormer achieves superior zero-shot generalization and robustness, significantly outperforming prior learning-based frame-to-frame methods across diverse benchmarks including TartanAir, KITTI, TUM-RGBD, and ETH3D-SLAM.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum coherence and Leggett-Garg inequality

arXiv:2606.15717v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we attempt to establish the relationship between quantum coherence and the violation of the Leggett-Garg inequality. In particular, employing the Lindblad equation, we obtain the pseudo-density matrix for a damping system to study the effect of environment interaction on the violation of this inequality in a two-state quantum system. It is shown that the violation of the Leggett-Garg inequality can be observed as long as temporal evolution does not induce decoherence. This statement is independent of the initial state of the system. Furthermore, similar to the Horodecki criterion for the CHSH inequality (R. Horodecki et al. Phys. Lett. {\bf A200}, 340), we study necessary and sufficient conditions for violating the Leggett-Garg inequality. Hereby, under the circumstance that the inequality violation occurs, an upper bound for the time interval between consecutive measurements with respect to the time scale of interaction with the environment (the relaxation time) is obtained.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

MinderCare: protocol for a mixed-methods evaluation of a digitally enabled dementia care service.

Introduction and aims Dementia is a growing public health challenge affecting millions of people worldwide. It is a progressive condition that increases the risk of infections, falls, hospital admissions, dependence in activities of daily living, safety issues such as wandering, care home transfers, and death. New ways of supporting people living with dementia (PLWD) at home are urgently needed. We describe the MinderCare study which evaluates a digitally enabled care model that integrates low-burden sensor-based remote monitoring within a nurse-led clinical service. Methods and analysis In this mixed-methods study, we will recruit 100 people with confirmed or suspected dementia living at home and deploy the Minder remote monitoring system for at least 12 months. A detailed characterisation of the cohort will be obtained, including cognition, frailty, participant and carer wellbeing, functioning, and quality of life. The feasibility, acceptability, sustainability, and resource requirements of the service will also be assessed. Low-cost sensors provide information about behaviour, environment and physiology from the home. Machine-learning algorithms have been used to develop digital biomarkers of infection, sleep, night-time behaviours, daily activities and routines, and the effects of clinical events and treatment. These will be assessed through clinical reports of sensor-derived data that include anomaly alerts provided to the clinical teams. Algorithms will be assessed for their clinical utility and acceptability. The comparative-effectiveness component will be designed as a target trial emulation using linked electronic health-record data to construct a time-indexed external usual-care control cohort. The primary comparative outcome will be Days Alive and Out of Hospital (DAOH) over 12 months from the activation-index date, with healthcare utilisation, costs, institutionalisation and mortality assessed as secondary outcomes. DAOH and estimated MinderCare effects will also be examined across prespecified strata of baseline inpatient utilisation. Ethics and dissemination Ethical approval has been granted by the North East Newcastle and North Tyneside 2 Research Ethics Committee, and the study has received confirmation of capacity and capability by the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. Study findings will be disseminated to patients, health and social care professionals, and policymakers through peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations. Study registration number: ISRCTN14997677 and NIHR portfolio CPMSID 63023.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Rethinking Scaffolding in LLM Tutors: The Interactional Mismatch Between Benchmarks and Real-World Deployments

arXiv:2606.15766v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central pedagogical value evaluated in AI tutor benchmarks is scaffolding: guiding students through graduated steps toward a solution. Alignment and evaluation methods for embedding scaffolding behaviour into chatbots, however, rest on an implicit assumption: that students will take up the scaffolding and engage in the conversation. To examine whether this assumption holds, we introduce an evaluation pipeline around two metrics - Chatbot Scaffolding and Student Uptake - and apply them across nine datasets of 9,490 chats, spanning AI tutor benchmarks and real-world deployments of educational chatbots. Our analysis reveals that while benchmarks assume a high-scaffolding, high-student-uptake environment, students in real-world settings exhibit lower levels of uptake overall - frequently bypassing the chatbot's pedagogical framing to drive the interaction toward their own learning goals at little interpersonal cost. We argue that bypassing scaffolding is not necessarily detrimental; rather, it frequently highlights a mismatch between a chatbot's pedagogical framing and the student's learning goals. To meaningfully evaluate the effectiveness of a chatbot's assistance, future benchmarks must move beyond the assumption that students will simply take up the scaffolding, and instead evaluate how these chatbots navigate diverse learning contexts and student-driven interaction patterns.

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

Forced Deferral: Manipulating Routing Decisions in Multimodal LLM Cascades

arXiv:2606.15308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong visual reasoning abilities, serving a large model for every query is computationally expensive. MLLM cascades mitigate this cost by first querying a weak but cheaper model and deferring to a strong model when the weak model's output is unconfident. However, since the weak model's confidence directly controls compute allocation, these systems expose a new attack surface: an adversary can manipulate confidence so that their queries are consistently deferred to the strong model. Motivated by this vulnerability, we introduce the Forced Deferral Attack (FDA), an adversarial image attack that lowers the weak model's confidence and causes cascades to route queries to the strong model. FDA learns a universal border trigger by optimizing a temperature-flattened objective. This objective pushes the weak model's token distribution on triggered inputs toward less concentrated targets constructed from its clean responses. Across datasets, model families, and deferral metrics, FDA consistently increases strong-model routing while outperforming image-perturbation and prompt-injection baselines. These results show that MLLM cascades are vulnerable to attacks that manipulate compute allocation, forcing unintended strong-model usage without directly targeting answer correctness.