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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Ontology Memory-Augmented ASR Correction for Long Text-Speech Interleaved Conversations

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) correction has traditionally focused on isolated utterances or short local contexts. However, as text and speech become increasingly interleaved in long interactions, ASR correction requires conversation-level contextual evidence. Existing ASR correction methods often rely on the current hypothesis or concatenate raw dialogue history. In such contexts, sparse correction evidence can be difficult to locate amid redundancy and noise. Addressing these challenges, we propose an ontology memory-augmented ASR correction framework for long text-speech interleaved conversations. The framework organizes preceding interaction history into a dynamically updatable ontology memory, where entities, terminology, surface variants, potential ASR confusions, and semantic relations are stored as retrievable nodes for context-grounded correction. To evaluate this setting, we construct RAMC-Corr, a dataset derived from MAGIC-RAMC for long-range ASR correction with grounded context. Experiments on RAMC-Corr show that our method improves over direct correction in 9 out of 10 paired backbone-setting combinations and encourages more selective and evidence-grounded corrections for context-dependent ASR errors.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM: Element-Level Assessment of Randomized Controlled Trial Reporting Using Large Language Models

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) play a central role in assessing the benefits and harms of interventions. Incomplete reporting in RCT publications can compromise the verifiability and usefulness of RCTs. SPIRIT and CONSORT reporting guidelines aim to improve the completeness of RCT protocols and results publications, respectively. However, many RCTs are not reported completely. Checking manuscripts automatically could help authors improve the completeness of reports prior to publication. We previously annotated SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM, a corpus of 200 articles (comprising 100 protocol-results publication pairs) using 83 checklist items drawn from SPIRIT 2013 and CONSORT 2010. We also trained machine learning models to automatically assess reporting at the item level. Each checklist item can include multiple constituent elements (i.e., specific details required for that item), and an item might be considered fully reported when all of its elements are present. However, prior work does not explicitly capture or evaluate reporting at the element level. To address this gap, we extended SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM by incorporating element-level annotations and using them to assess reporting completeness (SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM). We formulated element-level assessment as a machine reading comprehension task, operationalized through 119 questions, where each question targets a specific reporting element within a checklist item. Using the 200 articles included in SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM, two annotators independently answered 119 questions for 50 articles (25 protocol-results pairs) and resolved any discrepancies through discussion; the remaining 150 articles (75 protocol-results pairs) were assessed by a single annotator. We then developed an automated pipeline for element-level assessment using SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM. The pipeline first applies a PubMedBERT-based model to identify sentences containing item-level reporting information, then it uses a generative large language model (LLM; GPT-5) with chain-of-thought reasoning to answer element-level questions based on the retrieved evidence. Agreement between the two annotators was high (Gwet's AC1: 0.782) and our pipeline achieved high accuracy in identifying element-level reporting evidence (F1: 0.822, Gwet's AC1: 0.796). Ablation studies indicate that chain-of-thought reasoning and the inclusion of illustrative in-context examples modestly improve LLM performance on the machine reading comprehension task. SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM provides a benchmark for evaluating reporting guideline completeness at the element level, enabling assessment of RCT transparency beyond the simple presence or absence of checklist items and is publicly available at https://osf.io/kznx4/. The automated pipeline establishes a robust baseline for assessing RCT reporting and demonstrates potential as a practical aid for authors, reviewers, and editors to identify and address gaps in completeness and transparency of RCT reports.

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

Exponentially many initializations to avoid barren plateaus

arXiv:2606.18515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Barren plateaus are stated as an average-case phenomenon: pick an ansatz, initialize it naively, and concentration follows. This has led to the common view that a potential cure for barren plateaus is simply to initialize the parameters more carefully. Here we show that the situation is subtler. We introduce a first-moment framework that gives a simple operator-level diagnostic for when an initialization may escape the fully concentrated barren-plateau fixed point, and for comparing the biases induced by different initialization strategies. Our framework recovers several known initialization schemes such as identity and Gaussian initialization, but also shows that barren-plateau avoidance is highly non-unique. Indeed, many shifted, biased, and non-symmetric parameter distributions can avoid concentration, and these choices need not be equivalent. In fact, our results show that one can generate exponentially many families of inequivalent initialization strategies. Then, our numerics indicate that different first-moment-distinct initializations can lead to different attained minima, suggesting that avoiding barren plateaus via smart initializations can trade the exponential concentration problem for the challenge of selecting the right trainable pocket amongst many options.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Detecting Hallucinations for Large Language Model-based Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Knowledge graph (KG) reasoning infers new knowledge from existing facts and is widely applied in question answering, recommendation, and decision support. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), LLM-based KG reasoning frameworks have become increasingly popular by leveraging retrieved KG information. However, hallucinations in LLMs remain a critical issue. Even when relevant KG knowledge is incorporated, models may still generate incorrect outputs, leading to misinformation and unreliable decisions. Existing hallucination detection methods either focus on LLM internal states or verify consistency with retrieved contexts, but both overlook the structural information in KGs, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this gap, we propose LUCID, the first halLUcination deteCtIon method for LLM-based knowleDge graph reasoning frameworks. LUCID jointly leverages LLM attention scores, KG semantics, and structural information. Specifically, it extracts node and edge features from attention scores and semantic similarities, and integrates them with KG structure using a graph neural network. We also construct manually annotated benchmark datasets for evaluation. Experiments on nine datasets show that LUCID achieves state of the art performance compared to 15 baselines.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Drug-Specific, Half-Life-Adjusted Framework for Classifying CNS-Active Systemic Therapy Exposure During and After Radiotherapy

Clinical oncology datasets often store systemic therapy as a regimen label with a start date and an end date. Those records are clinically recognizable but can be analytically incomplete when the research question concerns whether a patient was exposed to a concurrent CNS-active drug (cCNS-aD) or an adjuvant CNS-active drug (aCNS-aD) around radiotherapy. Contemporary CNS-oncology studies usually define CNS activity by empiric drug lists and define concurrency by fixed calendar windows, although the literature shows substantial heterogeneity across both concepts. This paper proposes a generalizable framework for converting raw systemic therapy records into reproducible cCNS-aD and aCNS-aD variables, useful in subgrouping for clinical studies. The framework uses a transparent CNS scoring model based on three clinical evidence components: intracranial objective response rate, consensus CNS endorsement, and intrathecal route of administration. It then defines a pharmacokinetic exposure proxy as the recorded end date plus five half-lives. Concurrent exposure is classified by overlap with the radiotherapy interval, while post-radiotherapy exposure is classified by overlap with a prespecified post-RT attribution window. The framework separately identifies post-RT pharmacokinetic persistence and post-RT treatment initiation, allowing investigators to distinguish continued exposure from true adjuvant initiation. This is a methodological framework and reference implementation. Implementation audits and endpoint-specific sensitivity analyses remain necessary before use as a definitive exposure classifier

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

Observation of alignment tensor effects in metastability-exchange collisions with highly polarized 3He ensembles

arXiv:2606.20330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Highly polarized 3He ensembles prepared by metastability-exchange optical pumping (MEOP) have been widely used in precision measurements and fundamental physics. Metastability-exchange (ME) collisions, serving as the basis of MEOP, are traditionally described in terms of atomic orientation, while the significant contributions of metastable alignment tensor at high polarization remain unexplored. In this work, we develop a linearized model under mean-field approximation to investigate alignment tensor effects in highly polarized 3He , which originate from the metastable F = 3/2 manifold and are revealed through ME-induced relaxation and frequency shift. By means of free-induction-decay (FID) measurements, a pronounced dependence on nuclear polarization is experimentally observed in the response of the ground-state-metastable hybrid 3He ensembles to the external magnetic field. Furthermore, after obtaining the characteristics of tensor-induced phenomena, we demonstrate good agreement between the experiment and the theory. This work advances the understanding of nuclear spin dynamics in highly polarized 3He using MEOP. It further provides applications in systematic error correction of high-accuracy magnetometry, as well as in optimal protocol for the generation of nuclear spin-squeezed states.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Tree-Structured Orthonormal Decomposition of the Aitchison Simplex

arXiv:2606.11646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compositional data – vectors encoding relative proportions – arise across scientific domains, including ecology, geochemistry, and genomics. The features in these data often come with known hierarchical structure (e.g., taxonomies, phylogenies, ontologies), yet existing methods either ignore this structure, discard the intrinsic Aitchison geometry, are designed for binary trees, or yield incomplete coordinate systems. We describe PolyILR, a canonical orthonormal decomposition of the Aitchison tangent space aligned with any tree topology. Our construction defines a weighted local geometry at each internal node capturing full branching structure, then lifts these to a global orthonormal basis where every coordinate corresponds to a specific tree location. On microbiome and single-cell benchmarks, PolyILR yields stable, interpretable features and enables inference at multiscale tree resolution. We also establish a novel theoretical connection to softmax classifiers, suggesting possible applications to probabilistic modeling.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Elucidating the Design Space of Generative Models for Single-Cell Perturbation Prediction

Next-token prediction has produced predictable scaling in language, but the recipe presumes a sequence of tokens with a meaningful order. Single-cell RNA-seq counts have no natural gene ordering, so applying the recipe directly to raw expression fails under an ill-suited left-to-right bias. We instead ask whether a learned latent can supply the structure the recipe needs. We introduce texttt{ExpressionVAE} (eVAE), a discrete-latent perturbation model that compresses each cell into a short sequence of discrete codes through a finite-scalar-quantization (FSQ) bottleneck and trains a perturbation-conditioned discrete prior over those codes. On Replogle and Parse~1M, eVAE sets a new state of the art on every distributional metric and leads on most cell-eval perturbation metrics, with Fr'echet distance and $mathrm{MMD}^2$ roughly $3$ to $20times$ lower than the strongest continuous-latent baseline. Swapping the prior between autoregressive and masked discrete diffusion leaves performance near-identical, isolating the gain to the discrete latent itself rather than the prior family. A decoder-head ablation then exposes a single design axis, the richness of the predictive distribution at inference, that splits the standard metrics into two groups, variance-sensitive and mean-sensitive, which move in opposite directions along the axis. Finally, on a held-out CRISPRi reversion benchmark of $1{,}732$ perturbations under inflammatory cytokine stress, the frozen eVAE encoder outperforms UMAP and differential expression and matches scGPT on perturbation ranking at a fraction of the data.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

MapSatisfyBench: Benchmarking Satisfaction-Aware Map Agents through Behavior-Grounded Implicit Decision Factors

arXiv:2606.17453v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents are increasingly integrated into map services. Since map services are embedded in everyday-life scenarios rather than professional task settings, users often express their needs informally, resulting in underspecified queries with many unspoken needs, namely, implicit decision factors that are critical for user satisfaction. Although clarification is an effective way to mitigate this issue, it increases user burden in daily interaction, and a capable agent should first proactively recover such factors from available information sources. However, evaluating this ability is challenging. The first challenge is to determine which implicit decision factors are suitable for evaluation. A factor is evaluable only if it affects user acceptance and can be recovered from information available to the agent before it responds. Second, user satisfaction cannot be reliably represented by a single reference answer, requiring a benchmark that converts satisfaction-relevant factors into objective and quantifiable evaluation targets. To address these challenges, we propose a restore-identify-filter framework that reconstructs complete user needs from behavior-chain evidence, identifies implicit decision factors, and retains only those supported by pre-query evidence. Building on this methodology, we construct MapSatisfyBench from large-scale, real-world anonymized user data and annotate ground truth from five dimensions and enables full-chain evaluation of satisfaction-aware map agents. Experiments show that current agents generally perform well on explicit task completion, but remain limited in satisfying implicit decision factors and proactively acquiring the evidence needed for satisfaction-aware decisions. These findings establish MapSatisfyBench as a benchmark for shifting map-agent evaluation from task completion toward satisfaction-aware spatial decision making.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Riemann-Bench: A Benchmark for Moonshot Mathematics

arXiv:2604.06802v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent AI systems have achieved gold-medal-level performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad, demonstrating remarkable proficiency at competition-style problem solving. However, competition mathematics represents only a narrow slice of mathematical reasoning: problems are drawn from limited domains, require minimal advanced machinery, and can often reward insightful tricks over deep theoretical knowledge. We introduce Riemann-Bench, a private benchmark of expert-curated problems designed to evaluate AI systems on research-level mathematics that goes far beyond the olympiad frontier. Problems are authored by Ivy League mathematics professors, graduate students, and PhD-holding IMO medalists, and routinely took their authors weeks to solve independently. Each problem undergoes double-blind verification by two independent domain experts who must solve the problem from scratch, and yields a unique, closed-form solution assessed by programmatic verifiers. We evaluate frontier models as unconstrained research agents, with full access to coding tools, search, and open-ended reasoning, using an unbiased statistical estimator computed over 100 independent runs per problem. Our results reveal that all frontier models currently score below 10%, exposing a substantial gap between olympiad-level problem solving and genuine research-level mathematical reasoning. By keeping the benchmark fully private, we ensure that measured performance reflects authentic mathematical capability rather than memorization of training data.

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

MA-SBI: Misspecification-Aware Simulation-Based Inference via Side-Channel Guidance

arXiv:2606.16923v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulation-based inference (SBI) of latent parameters is often hindered by simulator misspecification, the mismatch between simulated and real-world observations caused by inherent modeling simplifications. RoPE, the recent state-of-the-art for robust SBI, addresses this through optimal transport between learned representations of real and simulated observations, but requires ground-truth parameter calibration pairs that are typically unavailable in the very settings where SBI is needed. What practitioners do have is unstructured side-information such as regime labels, instruction text, and policy bulletins. We propose Misspecification-Aware Simulation-Based Inference (MA-SBI), a calibration-free framework that turns this side-channel into a posterior correction. A learned corrector maps side-channel text to an observation-space shift applied before any pre-trained amortized posterior, requiring no retraining and no parameter ground-truth. Our main theorem bounds achievable bias reduction by the mutual information between misspecification and side-channel, with a non-vacuous constant that extends to all sub-Gaussian noise via Donsker-Varadhan. On hide-the-calibration benchmarks, MA-SBI with text alone matches the oracle posterior across 10 seeds and two backbones (TOST equivalence), while RoPE given more data does not. The two approaches are complementary: where misspecification is structural and recoverable from parameter pairs, RoPE dominates, as the theory predicts. A stochastic variant improves posterior-predictive log-likelihood on real COVID and OxCGRT epidemiological data, and correctly leaves the posterior unchanged on a well-specified cognitive-science corpus.

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

Momentum-Guided Semantic Forecasting (MoFore) for Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning

作者:

Self-supervised video representation learning has recently advanced through contrastive learning, masked reconstruction, and predictive representation learning. Reconstruction-based approaches such as MAE and VideoMAE learn representations by recovering masked visual content [he2022mae,tong2022videomae], while contrastive methods such as CLIP learn semantically meaningful embedding spaces through representation alignment [radford2021clip]. In this work, we introduce a Momentum-Guided Semantic Forecasting framework (MoFore) for self-supervised video representation learning. Instead of optimizing for pixel-level reconstruction or task-specific semantic alignment, the proposed method learns temporally predictive video representations by forecasting future latent embeddings from temporally distant context clips. To improve robustness across temporal scales, we further introduce randomized temporal-gap forecasting during training. The framework combines predictive latent forecasting with contrastive regularization to encourage temporal consistency while preventing representation collapse. Experiments on the UCF101 dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework learns temporally consistent and semantically meaningful video representations without using action labels during training. Quantitative analysis shows strong temporal stability and emergent category-level structure in the learned embedding space, while qualitative retrieval experiments reveal motion-aware organization across related activities. Overall, the results suggest that long-range latent forecasting provides an effective and computationally efficient approach for self-supervised video representation learning without relying on reconstruction-based objectives.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

The Unreliable Judges: Assessing Reproducibility and Self-Preference Bias of LLMs as Free-Text Evaluators

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming clinical practice and research, but their adoption requires rigorous evaluation. While human assessment is ideal, its cost has driven the widespread use of LLMs as evaluators. We introduce an open-source reciprocal framework comparing 71 human experts against six LLMs. AI evaluators show a strong self-preference bias, yet neither group reliably identified whether a response was human- or AI-generated. AI scores correlated with surface features such as length and lexical diversity, whereas human scores did not. By probing the evaluator's hidden states and applying targeted steering, we show that verbosity is a major causal driver of the bias. Moreover, shuffling question-response pairings shows that long responses keep high scores even when they no longer answer the question, whereas short ones do not, demonstrating that AI judges reward verbosity largely independently of content alignment. Finally, API-based and batch inference inflate stochasticity, underscoring the need for controlled deployment.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Scaling limits of the single-curve interface and outermost loops in the planar random field Ising model

arXiv:2606.13147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that the interface separating $+1$ and $-1$ spins in the near-critical planar random field Ising model (RFIM) with Dobrushin boundary conditions has a scaling limit, whose law is conformally covariant and almost surely absolutely continuous with respect to SLE$_3$. The limiting curve can be seen as a massive version of SLE$_3$ in the sense of Makarov and Smirnov, but in a random environment. We then show that the outermost spin loops of the near-critical planar RFIM with $+1$ boundary conditions have subsequential limits and that any of these limits is almost surely singular with respect to CLE$_3$. This dichotomy between absolute continuity of the single interface and singularity of the outermost loops reflects the fact that a single interface does not explore enough of the magnetization field of the near-critical RFIM to detect the singularity of this field with respect to the critical Ising magnetization field, whereas the outermost spin loops do.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

A Cross-Model VLM-Judge Protocol for Single-Image 3D Mesh Quality (and Why Cheap Proxies Fall Short)

arXiv:2606.18451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-image-to-3D generators are improving quickly, but there is no agreed, human-free way to tell whether one generated mesh is better than another. Practitioners commonly rely on cheap automatic proxies (render-space CLIP similarity and mesh geometry-validity statistics), yet how well these track perceived quality is unestablished. We make two contributions. First, we propose and validate a reproducible VLM-judge evaluation protocol: a fixed 24-view headless render rig, two independent vision-language judge families, and a mandatory position-bias correction that queries both presentation orders and keeps only order-consistent verdicts. The two judge families agree substantially with each other (Cohen's kappa = 0.66), well above the chance-agreement floor. Second, using this protocol as the reference, we show the cheap proxies do not substitute for it. Geometry validity is only a weak signal on average (because, as we show, it is bimodal) and stays below our pre-registered target, while render-CLIP is at chance. A learned Bradley-Terry head collapses onto a single manifoldness statistic (giving render-CLIP a negative weight) and matches geometry-only exactly, so learning the feature weights buys nothing. The proxy is also bimodal: it is significantly above chance on contrasts with visible geometric defects but at chance on ambiguous contrasts, consistent with geometry validity tracking the judge only when the defect is visually salient. We therefore recommend the VLM-judge protocol as a reliable, reproducible evaluator under the conditions tested (two feed-forward generators on Google Scanned Objects, with a face-drop degradation regime) and advise against geometry/CLIP proxies as optimization targets.

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

Why Sampling Is Not Choosing: Intentionality, Agency, and Moral Responsibility in Large Language Models

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have prompted claims that such systems exhibit agency or qualify as moral agents. This paper argues that these attributions are misguided. We maintain that moral responsibility requires commitment-bearing agency grounded in intrinsic intentionality and self-attributed action, and that such agency constitutes the form of free will relevant to responsibility. Although LLMs generate coherent and normatively evaluable outputs, their operation is fully characterized by probabilistic input-output mappings learned from data. Their apparent intentionality is derived rather than intrinsic, and their outputs are neither owned as commitments nor guided by reasons. Variability introduced by stochastic sampling does not amount to choice or authorship. We address objections from the intentional stance, functionalism, compatibilism, and the presence of moral reasoning in model outputs, arguing that none suffice to establish genuine agency.

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

Structured Adversarial Camouflage via Voronoi Diagrams

Pixel-wise adversarial patches are computationally heavy and often visually detectable, limiting utility in security-critical systems. We present adversarial Voronoi camouflage that optimizes only seed-point locations under fixed, printable palettes using a soft assignment, producing structured, splinter camouflage-like patterns without additional regularization. Evaluated on person detection with COCO-style AP@[.5:.95], naive placement (Inria -> COCO) performs comparably bad, while garment-level application via segmentation mask (3DPeople) results in a significant AP drop. The attack transfers to out-of-domain backgrounds and across detector families (YOLOv9/10/11/12), indicating robustness in black-box settings. Repainting with different palettes largely nullifies the effect, and single-color tweaks show limited tolerance (

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Entangled states are typically incomparable

arXiv:2406.03335v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Consider a bipartite quantum system, where Alice and Bob jointly possess a pure state $|\psi\rangle$. Using local quantum operations on their respective subsystems, and unlimited classical communication, Alice and Bob may be able to transform $|\psi\rangle$ into another state $|\phi\rangle$. Famously, Nielsen's theorem [Phys. Rev. Lett., 1999] provides a necessary and sufficient algebraic criterion for such a transformation to be possible (namely, the local spectrum of $|\phi\rangle$ should majorise the local spectrum of $|\psi\rangle$). In the paper where Nielsen proved this theorem, he conjectured that in the limit of large dimensionality, for almost all pairs of states $|\psi\rangle, |\phi\rangle$ (according to the natural unitary invariant measure) such a transformation is not possible. That is to say, typical pairs of quantum states $|\psi\rangle, |\phi\rangle$ are entangled in fundamentally different ways, that cannot be converted to each other via local operations and classical communication. Via Nielsen's theorem, this conjecture can be equivalently stated as a conjecture about majorisation of spectra of random matrices from the so-called trace-normalised complex Wishart-Laguerre ensemble. Concretely, let $X$ and $Y$ be independent $n \times m$ random matrices whose entries are i.i.d. standard complex Gaussians; then Nielsen's conjecture says that the probability that the spectrum of $X X^\dagger / \operatorname{tr}(X X^\dagger)$ majorises the spectrum of $Y Y^\dagger / \operatorname{tr}(Y Y^\dagger)$ tends to zero as both $n$ and $m$ grow large. We prove this conjecture, and we also confirm some related predictions of Cunden, Facchi, Florio and Gramegna [J. Phys. A., 2020; Phys. Rev. A., 2021].

19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Isotopic evidence for a cold and distant origin of 3I/ATLAS

Interstellar objects provide the only directly observable samples of icy planetesimals formed around other stars, and can therefore provide insight into the diversity of physical and chemical conditions occurring during exoplanet formation1−3. Here we report isotopic measurements of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, which reveal an elemental composition unlike any Solar System body. The water in 3I/ATLAS is enriched in deuterium, at a level of D/H = (0.98 ± 0.06)%, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than in known comets, while its range of 12C/13C ratios (141–191 for CO2 and 123–172 for CO) exceeds typical values found in the Solar System, as well as nearby interstellar clouds and protoplanetary disks. Such extreme isotopic signatures indicate formation at temperatures  ≲ 30 K in a relatively metal-poor environment. When interpreted with respect to models for Galactic chemical evolution, the carbon isotopic composition implies that 3I/ATLAS may have accreted as long ago as 12 billion years, following a period of intense, early star formation. 3I/ATLAS thus represents a preserved fragment of an ancient planetary system.

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

SkillAudit: Ground-Truth-Free Skill Evolution via Paired Trajectory Auditing

arXiv:2606.14239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are structured procedural packages that guide frozen LLM agents in specialized workflows. Skills rarely remain sufficient after deployment: edge cases, API changes, and deployment constraints become visible only through use, making skill evolution a practical necessity. Existing methods depend on privileged feedback such as held-out validation scores, hidden test outcomes, or environment rewards – signals often unavailable when a practitioner has only a task description and workspace data. We introduce SkillAudit, a framework for evolving agent skills without ground-truth feedback. The key idea is paired trajectory auditing: at each iteration, the same task is executed with and without the candidate skill, isolating how the skill changes agent behavior without external labels. To turn behavioral differences into edit guidance, SkillAudit uses Process-Aligned Contrastive Evaluation (PACE), a cluster of evaluators that maps trajectory divergences to diagnostic signals linked to specific passages in the skill document. A structural verifier, compiled once from the task specification and then fixed, checks task constraints and rolls back harmful updates. SkillAudit routes edits through two pipelines: Refine removes noisy or irrelevant guidance from broadly useful skills, while Repair replaces passages that conflict with the task. Across 89 containerized tasks spanning 8 professional domains, SkillAudit achieves 73.9% average task reward, outperforming an agent without skills (40.9%) and the static expert skill (56.7%). These gains are obtained without accessing hidden tests, reference solutions, or external scoring functions during evolution.

22.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

Environmental “knees” and “wiggles” as strong stabilizers of species’ range limits set by interspecific competition

by Farshad Shirani, Benjamin G. Freeman Whether interspecific competition is a major contributing factor to setting species’ range limits has been debated for a long time. Theoretical studies have proposed that the interactions between interspecific competition and disruptive gene flow along an environmental gradient can halt range expansion of ecologically similar species where they meet. However, the stability of such range limits has not been well addressed. We use a deterministic mathematical model of adaptive range evolution over a continuous habitat to show that the range limits set by interspecific competition are unlikely to be evolutionarily stable if the environmental optima for fitness-related traits vary (almost) linearly in space. That is, in a linear environment without a dispersal barrier or a third (or more) species, the range borders formed between two competing species constantly move towards the weaker species. We demonstrate that environmental nonlinearities such as “knees” and “wiggles”—wherein an isolated sharp change or a step-like change occurs in the steepness of a trait optimum—can strongly stabilize competitively formed range limits. The stabilization mechanism relies on the contrast that such nonlinearities create in the level of disruptive gene flow to the peripheral population of each species, and succeeds when an additional process, such as Allee effects, prevents the establishment of an infinitesimal population in the presence of an abundant competitor. We show that the stability of the range limits at these nonlinearities is robust against moderate environmental disturbances. Whether strong disturbances such as rapid high-amplitude climate changes can destabilize such range limits depends on how the competitive dominance of the species changes across the nonlinearity. Therefore, our findings underscore the importance of assessing species’ competitive ability when predicting responses to climate change, and identify geographic regions where established range limits are likely to persist as well as regions where shifting limits may eventually stabilize.

23.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

Fung-AI: An AI/ML-driven pipeline for antifungal peptide discovery

by Daniel S. Berman, Libby M. Lewis, Tom D. Curtis, Olivia N. Tiburzi, Daniel F. Q. Smith, Arturo Casadevall, Laura J. Dunphy Emerging fungal pathogens represent a concerning threat to both global health and food security. In this study, we aimed to address our rising vulnerability to fungal pathogens through the development of the Fung-AI pipeline: an AI/ML-driven approach for antifungal discovery. A generative adversarial network (GAN) was trained to generate novel candidate antifungal peptide sequences. Next, in silico antifungal and hemolytic classifiers were built to further prioritize AI-generated peptides for experimental validation. From a pool of ~10,000 candidates, thirteen peptides were selected for testing over two-stages of experimentation. Five peptides were found to display mild antifungal activity against the wheat pathogen, Fusarium graminearum, with minimal inhibitory concentrations (MICs) ranging from 250 µg/mL to 500 µg/mL. Four of the five peptides also showed activity against the human pathogen, Candida albicans (MIC: 500 µg/mL). Two of our AI-generated antifungal peptides additionally demonstrated low cytotoxicity in HepG2 human liver carcinoma cells (LC50 > 704.2 µg/mL) indicating that they may be useful as scaffolds for future optimization for therapeutic applications. None of our peptides were found to considerably inhibit the emerging pathogen C. auris, suggesting the need for pathogen-specific down-selection of candidate peptides. Overall, we present a proof-of-principle, generative-AI-based approach for the rapid design of de novo antifungal peptides.

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

Contagion Networks: Evaluator Bias Propagation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

作者:

arXiv:2606.20493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When large language models serve as evaluators in multi-agent systems, their systematic evaluation biases propagate through the agent network. We introduce Contagion Networks, a formal framework for measuring how evaluator biases spread across interacting LLM agents. In a controlled 3-agent experiment using DeepSeek-chat with three distinct evaluator bias profiles (structured, balanced, evidence-based), we measure the Cross-Agent Contagion Matrix Gamma_3 and find that evaluator biases consistently propagate between agents (gamma in [0.157, 0.352]), even within the same underlying model. We identify three propagation regimes governed by the spectral radius rho(Gamma_N), and demonstrate that homogeneous-model agents produce contagion coefficients 3-5x weaker than cross-model coefficients observed in prior work (MM-EPC: gamma approx 0.85-1.3), placing them in the suppression regime. We show that increasing evaluator committee size from k=1 to k=3 reduces effective contagion by 72.4%, providing an actionable mitigation strategy. We release the open-source Contagion Network experimental framework.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Towards Interpretability of Neural Quantum States

arXiv:2508.14152v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neural quantum states (NQS) have emerged as a powerful variational ansatz for representing quantum many-body wave functions. Their internal mechanisms, however, remain poorly understood. We investigate the role of correlations for NQS-like quantum state representation by employing a correlation-based interpretable neural network architecture and then proving our observations using Boolean function theory. The correlator neural network demonstrates that, even for simple product states, up to all system-size correlation orders in the chosen computational basis are required to represent a quantum state faithfully. We explain these observations using Fourier expansion, which reveals the correlator basis as the effective basis of the internal NQS structure, the resulting necessity for high-order correlations that is supported by an entanglement bound that scales with the correlation order, consequences of linear dependencies in constrained Hilbert spaces for correlation requirements, and connections between spin basis rotations and the correlator basis. Furthermore, we analyze how neural networks achieve high correlation orders by increasing the magnitude of the network weights, which can be compensated by increasing the network depth. Lastly, we discuss how activation functions, network architectures, and choice of reference basis influence correlation requirements. Our results provide new insights and a better understanding of the internal structure and requirements of NQS, enabling a more systematic use of NQS in future research.