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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

What level of expertise is necessary to generate ACLS training test questions: pre-med students vs. artificial intelligence?

Abstract Introduction In-hospital cardiac arrest carries high mortality despite standardized ACLS training. Educators face increasing time constraints in developing assessment tools for ACLS training. Two possible solutions to this problem are using pre-medical students or using artificial intelligence to generate test questions. This study compared the quality of pre-medical student-generated ACLS test questions vs. AI-generated ACLS test questions, testing the hypothesis that AI-generated questions are non-inferior to student-generated questions. Methods Ten pre-medical students created ACLS questions following predefined criteria, while an AI model (Northwell's Artificial Intelligence Hub) generated comparable questions. A blinded ACLS-certified physician evaluated questions on the qualities of Alignment, Clarity, Cognitive Level, and Question Design using a standardized rubric (Likert scale: 1 = poor quality, 5 = excellent). Student's T-test and Chi-square analysis were used to compare the quality of questions on different rubric domains within each arm (student vs. AI) and within one domain (eg, question Clarity) between arms. The Student's T test was used when 2 comparator groups were compared (eg, Clarity of student-generated vs. AI-generated questions) within one arm. The ANOVA test was used when comparing more than 2 comparator groups (eg, Alignment vs. Clarity vs. Cognitive Level) within one arm. Statistical significance was set as a priority at p

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

Process-Verified Reinforcement Learning for Theorem Proving via Lean

arXiv:2606.20068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) typically has relied on a single binary verification signal, symbolic proof assistants in formal reasoning offer rich, fine-grained structured feedback. This gap between structured processes and unstructured rewards highlights the importance of feedback that is both dense and sound. In this work, we demonstrate that the Lean proof assistant itself can serve as a symbolic process oracle, supplying both outcome-level and fine-grained tactic-level verified feedback during training. Proof attempts are parsed into tactic sequences, and Lean's elaboration marks both locally sound steps and the earliest failing step, yielding dense, verifier-grounded credit signals rooted in type theory. We incorporate these structured rewards into a GRPO-style reinforcement learning objective with first-error propagation and first-token credit methods that balances outcome- and process-level advantages. Experiments with STP-Lean and DeepSeek-Prover-V1.5 show that tactic-level supervision outperforms outcome-only baselines in most settings, delivering improvements on benchmarks such as MiniF2F and ProofNet. Beyond empirical gains, our study highlights a broader perspective: symbolic proof assistants are not only verifiers at evaluation time, but can also act as process-level reward oracles during training. This opens a path toward reinforcement learning frameworks that combine the scalability of language models with the reliability of symbolic verification for formal reasoning.

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

DuoBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Bimanual Manipulation in Simulation and the Real World

arXiv:2606.11901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bimanual robot systems substantially expand manipulation capabilities, but coordinating two arms introduces additional control complexity and failure modes that are not well captured by existing benchmarks. We introduce DuoBench, an extensible benchmarking framework for bimanual manipulation policies on the FR3 Duo platform. DuoBench comprises eleven tasks spanning four coordination categories, implemented in simulation and partially reproduced in the real world through reproducible task recipes with 3D-printable assets. In addition, we propose a stage-based evaluation scheme that supports fine-grained semantic failure analysis beyond binary success and provide human-teleoperated datasets for all benchmark tasks. We benchmark several dual-arm imitation-learning and vision-language-action policies in simulation and on real hardware. Our results show that current policies remain challenged by bimanual manipulation, particularly in early interaction stages, parallel arm execution, and transfer between simulation and real-world settings. DuoBench provides a reproducible testbed for diagnosing these failure modes and studying future methods for dual-arm policy learning. Code, datasets, and videos are available at https://duobench.github.io/

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Quickest Detection of Hallucination Onset: Delay Bounds and Learned CUSUM Statistics

作者:

Token-level hallucination detectors are evaluated as classifiers, by AUC over all tokens, yet a streaming monitor is judged by its reaction time: the number of tokens that pass between the onset of a hallucination and the alarm. We formulate hallucination onset detection as a quickest change detection problem. A first-order Markov model of the latent faithful/hallucinated state, validated on RAGTruth, places the task inside classical change-point theory and yields Lorden's lower bound on detection delay: about 1.3 tokens at a false-alarm rate of 0.01. We then show that a causal recurrent labeler acts as a CUSUM with a learned increment; at a matched false-alarm rate it detects in 11-13 tokens, against 31 for a linear per-token baseline, and a controlled decomposition attributes most of this advantage to a better per-token score rather than to temporal accumulation. An information-rate optimality theorem of Donsker-Varadhan type explains the remaining order-of-magnitude gap: the learned score realizes only 1/4.5 of the divergence the features carry, a deficit that recalibration cannot remove, with the remainder a finite-horizon effect. Classification metrics conceal this delay structure; sequential analysis makes it measurable

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Bridging the Modality Gap in Forensic Image Retrieval

Automated image retrieval plays an increasingly critical role in modern forensic analysis, supporting investigative workflows that rely on efficient comparison of visual evidence. While prior work has focused primarily on developing and optimizing multimodal retrieval systems, limited attention has been paid to evaluating the forensic applicability of these technologies across diverse real-world scenarios. In this study, we present a unified retrieval framework adapted to four key forensic tasks: (1) tattoo image retrieval given a tattoo query image; (2) tattoo retrieval guided by human-expert textual descriptions, modelling the common situation where a witness verbally describes a tattoo; (3) tattoo retrieval from hand-drawn sketches; and (4) face retrieval from forensic face sketches. Our system leverages a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to automatically generate structured textual descriptions for all queries and gallery images, followed by sentence-transformer embedding for text-based comparison. We evaluate retrieval using visual-only embeddings, text-only embeddings and a multimodal fusion strategy that combines text- and image-based similarity scores derived from state-of-the-art visual feature extractors relevant to each task. The fusion of modalities consistently improves retrieval precision and robustness, especially in scenarios where visual information is limited or noisy (e.g., sketches, partial tattoos, or fragmented witness statements). This work highlights the forensic value of a unified multimodal retrieval pipeline and demonstrates how modern MLLMs can operationalize challenging forensic tasks that traditionally rely on manual expert analysis. Our results position multimodal retrieval as a promising tool for supporting investigative workflows involving tattoos, facial composites, and witness descriptions.

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

Possibilistic Predictive Uncertainty for Deep Learning

Deep neural networks achieve impressive results across diverse applications, yet their overconfidence on unseen inputs necessitates reliable epistemic uncertainty modeling. Existing methods for uncertainty modeling face a fundamental dilemma: Bayesian approaches provide principled estimates but remain computationally prohibitive, while efficient second-order predictors lack rigorous connections between their specific objectives and epistemic uncertainty quantification. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce Dirichlet-approximated possibilistic posterior predictions (DAPPr), a principled framework grounded in possibility theory. We define a possibilistic posterior over parameters, project it to the prediction space via supremum operators, and approximate the projected posterior using learnable Dirichlet possibility functions. This projection-and-approximation strategy yields a simple training objective with closed-form solutions. Despite its simplicity, extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks show that DAPPr achieves competitive or superior uncertainty quantification performance over state-of-the-art second-order predictors while maintaining both principled derivation and computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/MaxwellYaoNi/DAPPr.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Spatio-Temporal Mixture-of-Modality-Experts Diffusion for Quantitative DCE-MRI Synthesis from Incomplete MR Sequences

Quantitative maps from dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) are essential for tumor assessment but are often unavailable due to contrast-agent risks and protocol variability. Prior methods predict these maps from other MRI modalities, yet most assume fixed, fully observed inputs and fail under realistic missingness. We present Spatio-Temporal Mixture-of-Modality-Experts (ST-MoME), a conditional diffusion framework that synthesizes 3D DCE parameter maps from diverse subsets of multimodal MRI. ST-MoME fuses modality-specific expert features through a spatio-temporal gating network that produces voxel-wise, timestep-dependent weights, forming a conditioning tensor that guides denoising. To preserve quantitative fidelity, ST-MoME performs diffusion directly in image space with 3D patch-based training and a Swin-based backbone. On a clinical brain-tumor cohort of 386 patients, we evaluate ST-MoME across 16 controlled modality-availability scenarios. It achieves the lowest mean Normalized Mean Square Error (NMSE) aggregated across all three DCE parameters, with leading performance on $v_p$ and $v_e$, competitive results on $K^{\mathrm{trans}}$, and the lowest reconstruction error within the clinically critical tumor region. A post-hoc analysis of the learned gating dynamics shows a structural-early, physiological-late fusion schedule consistent with clinical intuition.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Geometry-Aware Dataset Condensation for Diffusion Model Training

Dataset condensation aims to construct compact datasets from real data via synthesis or selection. However, existing approaches are ill-suited for diffusion model training: synthetic data generation often yields low-fidelity samples unsuitable for authentic modeling, while real subset selection typically fails to preserve the distributional geometry required by diffusion likelihood objectives. To address this, we propose to reformulate real subset selection as a geometry-aware distribution alignment problem. By incorporating one-sided partial optimal transport, our method selectively aligns a compact subset with the full data distribution while allowing unmatched mass in low-density regions, ensuring the preserved geometric structure necessary for effective diffusion model training. To further ensure distributional fidelity, we complement geometric alignment with lightweight feature-statistics and semantic consistency regularization. An efficient two-stage discrete optimization strategy is proposed to achieve this alignment objective. Extensive experiments across diffusion variants, subset sizes, image resolutions, and training rounds show that our method achieves superior fidelity and distributional coverage in diffusion model training. Codes are available at https://github.com/2018cx/GADC.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Entanglement in the Dicke subspace

arXiv:2602.15800v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We provide a complete mathematical theory for the entanglement of mixtures of Dicke states. These quantum states form an important subclass of bosonic states arising in the study of indistinguishable particles. We introduce a tensor-based parametrization where the diagonal entries of these states are encoded as a symmetric tensor, enabling a direct translation between entanglement properties and well-studied convex cones of tensors. Our results bridge multipartite entanglement theory with semialgebraic geometry and the theory of completely positive and copositive tensors. This dictionary maps separability to completely positive tensors, the PPT property to moment tensors, entanglement witnesses to copositive tensors, and decomposable witnesses to sum of squares tensors. Using this framework, we construct explicit PPT entangled states in three or more qutrits, disproving a recent conjecture. We establish that PPT entanglement exists for all multipartite systems with local dimension d >= 3 and n >= 3 parties. We also show that, for mixtures of Dicke states, the PPT condition with respect to the most balanced bipartition implies all other PPT conditions. We further connect bosonic extendibility of mixtures of Dicke states to the duals of known hierarchies for non-negative polynomials, such as the ones by Reznick and Polya. We thus provide semidefinite programming relaxations for separability and entanglement testing in the Dicke subspace.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SP-TransientBench: A Real-Captured Single Photon Perception Benchmark

Single-photon LiDAR (SPL) based on single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) sensing enables time-resolved photon measurements with extreme sensitivity, offering unique potential for active 3D perception in photon-starved scenarios.However, real-world single photon perception remains fundamentally challenging due to unique measurement noise and complex multi-return transient phenomena, which jointly complicate geometric reconstruction and semantic scene understanding. Despite growing interest in SPAD-based sensing, existing studies are largely limited to simulated data or small-scale controlled captures. As a result, systematic evaluation of real-world single photon perception across depth estimation, multi-view reconstruction, and 3D semantic understanding remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce SP-TransientBench (STB), a real-captured multi-task benchmark for single photon perception. SP-TransientBenc comprises 10 diverse scenes and 10,297 views captured using a solid-state single-photon LiDAR at $256\times192$ resolution. Each view provides full time-of-flight histograms with multi-return behavior,standardized metadata, and calibrated camera poses for multi-view evaluation. We further provide 13-class 3D semantic annotations for selected scenes. By providing dedicated data splits and evaluation protocols for each task, STB enables consistent and reproducible benchmarking of real-world single photon perception across multiple 3D vision problems. The dataset and code will be released upon acceptance.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Contactless Respiratory Monitoring on Heterogeneous Mobile Robots: A Multimodal Edge-Computing Framework

Respiratory-rate (RR) monitoring is a critical component of remote triage and victim assessment in emergency response, disaster recovery, and infectious-disease scenarios, where minimizing physical contact can reduce responder risk and improve operational safety. However, field deployment of contactless RR monitoring remains challenging due to variable illumination, posture changes, platform heterogeneity, and the impracticality of wearable sensors in hazardous environments. In this paper, we present a modality-adaptive contactless RR monitoring framework for heterogeneous mobile robots with onboard edge computing. The proposed system combines brightness-adaptive sensor selection across RGB, thermal, near-infrared (NIR), and low-light cameras, keypoint-guided chest ROI extraction for posture-robust monitoring, and a signal-quality-index (SQI)-based filtering mechanism for reliable respiratory estimation. We implement and evaluate the framework on three robotic platforms spanning quadruped and wheeled locomotion and multiple edge-computing architectures. Experiments conducted across diverse lighting conditions, subject poses, and robot-to-subject distances demonstrate that the framework generalizes across platforms without per-platform algorithmic retuning, while revealing modality-specific operational boundaries. RGB provides the broadest coverage up to 8m, NIR remains effective up to 6m, thermal is reliable only at short range, and low-light sensing supports monitoring in complete darkness up to 8m. Overall, the results demonstrate the feasibility of multimodal contactless RR monitoring on mobile robots and support its use as a foundation for autonomous triage and victim assessment in hazardous search-and-rescue settings.

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

Beyond Accuracy: Measuring Bias Acknowledgment in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Responsible AI Evaluation

arXiv:2606.15127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning models are increasingly used in settings where the final answer is not the only object of review: educational tools may show students intermediate steps, decision-support systems may require human oversight, and audit workflows may inspect traces for misleading or biased input. In such settings, two responses can receive the same final-answer score while differing in whether the trace explicitly flags injected biasing content. Accuracy-only evaluation collapses these cases. We study this gap as a measurement blind spot for responsible evaluation and introduce a minimal trace-level diagnostic with two axes: susceptibility (whether the bias breaks a previously correct answer) and acknowledgment (whether the trace contains a rubric-defined surface reference to the injected content). Across thousands of biased GSM8K trials, GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet~4 have similar susceptibility rates ($1.3\%$ vs.\ $1.2\%$) but substantially different acknowledgment rates ($13.0\%$ vs.\ $75.0\%$) under the same rubric.

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

Stitching and dimensionality effects on large artificially generated volume datasets

Generating large images via deep learning requires patching input data to accommodate hardware memory limitations, then assembling output patches, a process that can introduce stitching artifacts when neighboring patches do not align at borders. While these artifacts are known to affect segmentation tasks, their impact on generative models for style-transfer remains poorly understood. We investigated three stitching approaches and two patch dimensionalities (2D vs 3D) using cycleGAN models trained on cryo-electron microscopy datasets. We evaluated both perceptual quality and performance on downstream mitochondria segmentation. Our key findings reveal that: (1) FID scores fail to detect subtle stitching artifacts that significantly impact downstream segmentation performance, (2) 3D models with artifact-free stitching marginally outperform 2D models on downstream tasks, though the improvement barely justifies the computational cost, and (3) 2D models train more stably due to larger batch sizes. Additionally, we demonstrate that ensembling predictions from three orthogonal directions can improve low-quality volumes but provides no benefit for high-quality outputs. These results demonstrate that maximizing generative model performance on large scientific datasets requires careful consideration and mitigation of stitching artifacts, and that perceptual metrics alone are insufficient for evaluating domain adaptation quality in biomedical imaging.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The direct economic impact of surgical non-response in orthopaedic hip, knee, and spine surgery for osteoarthritis: a cost-utility analysis

Background Annually, nearly 2 million hip, knee, and spinal inpatient surgeries are performed in Canada and the US for osteoarthritis (OA), costing over $37 billion in hospital expenditures. However, 15-30% of patients experience limited or no improvement, resulting in poor value for money. This study evaluated the one-year cost-utility of joint and spine procedures for OA by comparing non-responders to responders, considering various responder definitions. Methods Individual micro-costing data were collected for 1,175 elective hip, knee, and spine patients enrolled in the Longitudinal Evaluation in the Arthritis Program - Osteoarthritis (LEAP-OA) between 2014 and 2018. Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) were derived using the SF-6D utility index. One-year incremental cost-utility ratios (ICURs) were calculated from the hospital perspective. Results Responder rates varied by definition, ranging from 78%-94% for hip replacements, 64%-90% for knee replacements, 60%-64% for spine fusions, and 50%-68% for spine decompressions. Corresponding ICURs were: $45,956-$51,773/QALY for responders versus $108,593-$485,762/QALY for non-responders for hip replacements; $54,831-$71,151/QALY for responders versus $200,486-$1,203,596/QALY for non-responders for knee replacements; $65,980-$74,422/QALY for responders versus $262,039-$729,686/QALY for non-responders for spine fusions; and $29,947-$42,168/QALY for responders versus $63,195-$662,586/QALY for non-responders for spine decompressions. Conclusions While surgical response rates were highly dependent on the responder definition, ICURs for non-responders were significantly higher than those for responders across all definitions. Beyond the negative impact on patients, there is a compelling economic argument for investment in improved pre-operative identification of patients at risk of surgical non-response. Such efforts could enable more personalized, value-based care pathways and reduce the provision of low-value surgical interventions.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Retrocausal capacity of a quantum channel: Communicating through noisy closed timelike curves

arXiv:2509.08965v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the capacity of a quantum channel for retrocausal communication, where messages are transmitted backward in time, from a sender in the future to a receiver in the past, through a noisy postselected closed timelike curve mathematically represented by the channel. We completely characterize the one-shot retrocausal quantum and classical capacities, and we show that the corresponding asymptotic capacities are equal to the average and sum, respectively, of the channel's max-information and its regularized Doeblin information. This endows these information measures with a novel operational interpretation. Furthermore, our characterization can be generalized beyond quantum channels to all completely positive maps. This imposes information-theoretic limits on transmitting messages via postselected-teleportation-like mechanisms with arbitrary initial- and final-state boundary conditions, including those considered in various black-hole final-state models.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

SSH-Net: A Deep Neural Network for Predicting Failure Time Distribution Functions under Competing Risks with Application to GPU Data

arXiv:2606.20451v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Competing risks are commonly observed in engineering fields and can bring challenges to time-to-event data modeling when the application scenarios are complicated. Recently, deep neural networks have received great attention for prediction with competing risks, due to their flexibility and high learning capability. However, the complexity of neural network structure brings extra difficulty in hyperparameter tuning based on different data inputs. Additionally, when an engineered system has complex physical structures with multiple hierarchical levels, treating all structural levels as a single group of inputs may fail to capture critical information. To address the issues, we propose a Structured Segmented Hazard Deep Neural Network (SSH-Net) for failure time prediction under cause-specific competing risks framework. Our approach associates neural network structure with data structures, and allows different covariate groups to impact the failure prediction through separate sub-networks. The neural network is constructed based on a cause-specific competing risks model. The SSH-Net outputs cause-specific hazard functions, and utilizes the penalized log-likelihood as the loss function. The prediction accuracy of SSH-Net is validated through simulation studies by evaluating the Brier score, the area under receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC), and the root mean square error (RMSE) of the predicted cause-specific cumulative incident function. We further demonstrate the model's ability to predict failure time distribution functions using the Titan GPU failure time data.

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

From Self-Supervised Speech Models to Mixture-of-Experts for Robust Anti-Spoofing

arXiv:2606.14639v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in speech generation have significantly improved the naturalness of synthetic speech, making spoofing detection increasingly challenging. A key limitation of current anti-spoofing systems is their limited robustness to unseen synthesis methods. In this work, we transform a self-supervised speech representation model into a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to improve generalization. Feed-forward blocks in selected encoder layers are replaced by multiple expert networks controlled by a layer-wise gating mechanism, allowing experts to capture complementary acoustic patterns while preserving the representations learned during self-supervised pretraining. We further analyze the architectural choices affecting the performance of this MoE conversion and investigate the activation behavior of the experts. The proposed approach is evaluated on 14 spoofing datasets and reduces the macro EER from 5.46% to 4.81%, corresponding to 11.9% relative improvement over the baseline.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Viability of engineered AAVs via protein language models

Capsid engineering has greatly improved the performance of recombinant AAV vectors used for gene therapy. One commonly used strategy is the insertion of a short, 7-mer, peptide into surface-exposed loops to modify receptor interactions and enhance cell entry. While effective in receptor retargeting and improved transduction, these insertions might destabilize the capsid protein, hinder assembly, and thus limit production. While previous attempts have used deep mutational scanning and AI to predict which insertions are viable, there is lack in understanding the structural consequences of these peptide insertions at the amino-acid level. Here we combined experiments, deep sequencing and large protein language models to gain insight on the impact of 7-mer insertions on the VR-VIII region. We first characterize the biochemical properties of viable insertions, thus identifying which residues are well tolerated, and which should instead be avoided. We then focus on the nearby context of those insertions, by studying the effect of the linkers, either for highly diverse libraries or for individual variants known for their efficiency. Next, we study the broader context, by extending our analysis to the whole capsid sequence, and identifying regions that can tolerate insertions without long-ranged structural deformations that could affect capsid functionality. We conclude with a cross-serotype comparison and a viability analysis of tens of previously engineered variants. Our work showcases how AI can uncover structure-function rules governing the success of engineered AAV capsids.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Microscopic exceptional points in the post-selected open Jaynes–Cummings model

arXiv:2606.14982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Phenomenological non-Hermitian Hamiltonians track selected signatures of complex reservoir dynamics, while post-selected no-jump effective Hamiltonians derived from microscopic open-system theory reveal the underlying system–reservoir physics. We derive such a Hamiltonian for the open Jaynes–Cummings model using a Moore–Penrose normalized $\mathrm{su}(2)$ representation that removes the vacuum-sector singularity and diagonalizes the full Hamiltonian by one operator rotation. Starting from a zero-temperature bosonic reservoir, we obtain a Gorini–Kossakowski–Sudarshan–Lindblad master equation under the Born–Markov approximation with full Bohr-frequency resolution. We use partial Bohr-frequency resolution to build a consistent post-selected no-jump Hamiltonian near exceptional points, where decay rates become comparable to Rabi frequencies and remove the scale separation behind full resolution. The normalized $\mathrm{su}(2)$ form of the resulting non-Hermitian Jaynes–Cummings Hamiltonian reveals the effects of Lamb-shifted detuning, diagonal loss imbalance, and reservoir-modified coupling. Our microscopic exceptional-point analysis recovers the experimentally reported single-excitation exceptional point for unequal independent losses and identifies regimes absent from the standard phenomenological model; for example, equal correlated losses with orthogonal channel phase produce a second-order exceptional point at the same loss-to-coupling ratio in every excitation sector.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Structure-Preserving Neural Surrogates with Tractable Uncertainty Quantification

arXiv:2606.11650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in scientific machine learning provide a means of near-real-time solution to partial differential equations (PDEs), but lack the theoretical underpinnings of conventional simulators that support contemporary verification and validation. In this work, we construct data-driven reduced-order models that serve as structure-preserving, real-time surrogates. Remarkably, the exterior calculus that imposes physical conservation structure also exposes topological structure that we use to build a Gaussian process (GP) representation of uncertainty in state-flux relationships, ultimately yielding a Dirichlet-to-Neumann map for quantities of interest with closed-form expressions for posterior uncertainty. We specifically propose structure-preserving $H(\mathrm{div})$–$L^2$ subspaces of conventional Raviart–Thomas and $dgP_0$ elements prescribed by a lightweight transformer. Reduced-order dynamics consistent with this subspace are learned by posing a conservation law in which a GP describes the fluxes between volumes. This work hinges on a novel interface between mixed FEM spaces and GP regression; when training is posed as the optimal recovery problem (ORP), the resulting GP regression can be written as an optimization problem with equality constraints that impose a conservation structure, amenable to a fast Schur-complement training strategy. The trained model can then be solved in real time with closed-form estimators for boundary fluxes driven by prescribed Dirichlet data. The paper includes RKHS posterior error bounds for linear functionals to support uncertainty quantification, as well as numerical experiments demonstrating the accuracy of the posterior distribution as a surrogate for error estimation.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

PEARL: Self-Evolving Assistant for Time Management with Reinforcement Learning

Overlapping calendar invitations force busy professionals to repeatedly decide which meetings to attend, reschedule, or decline. We refer to this preference-driven decision process as calendar conflict resolution. Automating this decision process is crucial yet challenging. Scheduling logistics can drain hours, and human delegation often fails at scale, which motivates us to ask: Can we trust large language models (LLMs) or language agents to manage time? To enable a systematic study of this question, we introduce CalConflictBench, a benchmark for long-horizon calendar conflict resolution. In CalConflictBench, conflicts are presented to agents round-by-round over a calendar year, requiring them to infer and adapt to user preferences progressively. Our experiments show that current LLM agents perform poorly with high error rates, e.g., Qwen-3-30B-Think has an average error rate of 35%. To address this gap, we propose PEARL, a reinforcement-learning framework that (i) augments the language agent with an external preference memory that stores and updates inferred strategies (e.g., attendee priorities, topic importance, time/location preferences), and (ii) optimizes the agent with round-wise rewards that directly supervise decision correctness, ranking quality, and memory usage across rounds. Experiments on CalConflictBench show that PEARL achieves an error reduction rate of 0.76 and a 55% improvement in average error rate compared to the strongest baseline.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

TransLaw: A Large-Scale Dataset and Multi-Agent Benchmark Simulating Professional Translation of Hong Kong Case Law

Translating Hong Kong Court Judgments from English to Traditional Chinese is mandated by Articles 8-9 of the Basic Law, yet remains constrained by a shortage of parallel resources and rigorous demands on legal terminology, citation format, and judicial style. We introduce HKCFA Judgment 97-22, the first large-scale sentence-aligned parallel corpus for HK case law, comprising 344 professionally translated judgments (11,099 sentence pairs; 2.1M tokens) spanning 1997-2022. Building on this resource, we propose TransLaw, a multi-agent framework that decomposes translation into word-level expression, sentence-level translation, and multidimensional review, integrating a specialized Hong Kong legal glossary database, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and iterative feedback, with four-dimensional expert review covering semantic alignment, terminology, citation, and style. Benchmarking 13 open-source and commercial LLMs, we demonstrate that TransLaw significantly outperforms single-agent baselines across all evaluated models, with convergence within 3 iterations. Human evaluation by 10 certified legal translators using our proposed Legal ACS metric confirms gains in legal-semantic accuracy, while showing that TransLaw still trails human experts in stylistic naturalness. The dataset and benchmark code are available at https://github.com/xuanxixi/TransLaw.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Sustainable Metal-Organic Framework Water Harvesters in the Artificial Intelligence Era

arXiv:2605.29179v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are excellent candidates for water harvesting due to their tunable pore environments, which can be precisely engineered to capture and release water in arid conditions. Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into MOF discovery can further accelerate the design of high-performance sorbents by identifying structural features that enhance atmospheric water harvesting (AWH), stability, and cycling efficiency. In this Perspective, we examine key MOF design principles, including cooperative adsorption, operational relative humidity (RH), uptake capacity, hysteresis, and scalability. We highlight recent design advancements such as multivariate strategies and long-arm linker extension, and examine how these principles tune pore capacity and hydrophilicity, while preserving stability and crystallinity. Furthermore, we discuss how AI, large language models (LLMs), and data mining can accelerate the discovery process through predictive synthesis, inverse design, and elucidating synthesis-structure-property relationships for the next generation of MOF water harvesters.

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

Evaluating Second-Order Bias of LLMs Through Epistemic Entitlement

Evaluations of social bias in LLMs largely focus on whether models generate or imply biased content. However, as LLMs are increasingly used as judges of bias, they may exhibit social biases in subtler ways in how they evaluate biased content, which current methods do not systematically capture. We call this second-order bias: social bias in an LLM's judgment about social bias, which we evaluate through a novel, philosophically grounded reasoning task. Drawing on entitlement epistemology, we conceptualize bias as misplaced foundational knowledge that shapes an agent's rational inquiry, and derive a logical reasoning task for LLMs to judge to whom a biased text is acceptable or non-acceptable. We develop two simple metrics to measure how biased LLM judges are in inferring demographics for acceptability without sufficient support, and how these inferences vary across groups targeted by biased texts. Evaluating open and closed models, we find that our task evades safety guardrails by surfacing bias in model judgment. It varies systematically across target groups, reflects implicit social maps, and shows how models are still triggered by demographic labels. Our work points to the need for LLM bias evaluation in judgment tasks and broadly, for more theoretically grounded approaches to bias evaluation in NLP. We release our code and model responses at https://github.com/uofthcdslab/second-order-bias.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Reasoning Models Know What's Important, and Encode It in Their Activations

Language models often solve complex tasks by generating long reasoning chains, consisting of many steps with varying importance. While some steps are crucial for generating the final answer, others are removable. Determining which steps matter most, and why, remains an open question central to understanding how models process reasoning. We investigate if this question is best approached through model internals or through tokens of the reasoning chain itself. We find that model activations contain more information than tokens for identifying important reasoning steps. Crucially, by training probes on model activations to predict importance, we show that models encode an internal representation of step importance, even prior to the generation of subsequent steps. The internal representations of importance in different models yield high agreement on which steps are important. The representation is distributed across layers, and does not correlate with surface-level features, such as a step's relative position or its length. Our findings suggest that analyzing activations can reveal aspects of reasoning that surface-level approaches fundamentally miss, indicating that reasoning analyses should look into model internals.