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

AgentBeats: Agentifying Agent Assessment for Openness, Standardization, and Reproducibility

arXiv:2606.13608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent systems are advancing quickly across domains, but their evaluation remains fragmented. Most benchmarks rely on fixed, LLM-centric harnesses that require heavy integration, create test-production mismatch, and limit fair comparison across diverse agent designs. The root problem is the lack of an open, agent-agnostic assessment interface. We advocate Agentified Agent Assessment (AAA), where evaluation is performed by judge agents and all participants interact through standardized protocols: A2A for task management and MCP for tool access. Conventional benchmarking defines two separate interfaces, one for the benchmark and one for the agent, while AAA only needs one; this yields a generic, unified framework that separates assessment logic from agent implementation and enables reproducible, interoperable, and multi-agent evaluation. We further introduce AgentBeats as a concrete realization of AAA: we identify five practical operation modes that make standardized assessment compatible with real-world constraints on openness, privacy, and reproducibility. To evaluate our design at scale, we conduct two studies: a five-month open competition that drew 298 judge agents across 12 categories together with 467 subject agents from independent participants, showing that AAA applies across a heterogeneous range of benchmarks; and a case study on coding agents that confirms agentified evaluation preserves fidelity with the public record while surfacing previously missing head-to-head results, yielding research insights about agent design. Combining a community-scale field study and a controlled coding case study, we verify that AAA delivers coverage, practicality, and fidelity across heterogeneous scenarios at scale. Together, AAA and AgentBeats offer a clear path toward open, standardized, and reproducible agent assessment.

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

Rethinking Shrinkage Bias in LLM FP4 Pretraining: Geometric Origin, Systemic Impact, and UFP4 Recipe

arXiv:2606.20381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: FP4 training promises substantial reductions in memory and computation cost for LLM pretraining, yet current FP4 hardware paths and recipes, including NVIDIA Blackwell/Rubin-class systems and AMD MI350-series GPUs, remain centered on E2M1 data elements. In this study, we identify a fundamental limitation of that choice: non-uniform formats such as E2M1 inherently suffer from Shrinkage Bias, a systematic negative rounding error caused by the geometric asymmetry of their representable bins. We show that this bias accumulates multiplicatively across layers and is amplified by the Random Hadamard Transform (RHT), providing a unified explanation for the training instability observed in existing E2M1-based FP4 recipes. In contrast, uniform grids (E1M2/INT4) bypass this grid-geometry error and better convert the improved bucket utilization from RHT into higher quantization quality. Based on this finding, we propose UFP4, a uniform 4-bit training recipe that applies RHT to all three training GEMMs while restricting stochastic rounding to dY alone. On Dense 1.5B, MoE 7.9B, and MoE 124B long-run pretraining, UFP4 consistently achieves lower BF16-relative loss degradation than strong E2M1-based baselines, supported by scaling-law analysis and ablation studies. Our results suggest that future accelerators should support E1M2/INT4-style uniform 4-bit grids as first-class training primitives alongside E2M1.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Token-to-Token Alignment of Text Embeddings for Semantic Blending

In modern generative models, images are specified and controlled through text prompts. In practice, images are generated from sequences of tokens derived from these prompts. However, the space of token sequences lacks a consistent accessible structure: semantically similar images may correspond to sequences that differ in wording, ordering, and placement of concepts, while similar token sequences may encode very different semantics. This apparent lack of structure makes it difficult to perform smooth transitions in this space, hindering applications such as image blending and continuous control of edits. We argue that this limitation stems not from the absence of semantic structure, but from misalignment between representations. To address this misalignment, we introduce Token-to-Token alignment, a framework that establishes explicit semantic correspondence between tokens across prompts. Our approach transforms prompts into a structured representation in which semantically corresponding concepts are mapped to consistent positions across prompts, and then aligns their token embeddings based on semantic similarity. Concretely, the method consists of two stages: a structural alignment that rephrases prompts into a shared structured form, followed by an embedding-level alignment that matches token representations across prompts. With this alignment in place, simple linear interpolation becomes a meaningful operation, producing smooth and coherent semantic transitions and enabling applications such as blending and continuous editing. Our results show that text embedding spaces in text-to-image models implicitly encode a continuous semantic structure that becomes accessible once representations are properly aligned, suggesting that semantic control can be achieved by organizing existing representations rather than modifying the generative model.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

IsabeLLM: Automated Theorem Proving Applied to Formally Verifying Consensus

arXiv:2606.18098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have led AI for Theorem Proving to become a promising means of formally verifying computer systems. Whilst formal verification is traditionally reserved for safety-critical systems due to the required amount of expertise and effort, AI can help to automate a large amount of this workload and make it far more accessible. Blockchain-based systems are becoming increasingly popular and are frequently targeted by malicious actors, often resulting in huge financial losses, highlighting the need to better verify these systems and mitigate vulnerabilities. Arguably the most important component of these systems is the consensus protocol, which allows nodes to agree on decisions in a potentially adversarial environment. In this paper, we improve upon IsabeLLM, the automated theorem proving tool in Isabelle. Namely, we implement a Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework, Error tracing and counterexample generation for improved context supplied to the Large Language Model. Compatibility with the latest version of Isabelle and Sledgehammer is also implemented for improved efficiency. We compare the performance of the two versions of IsabeLLM in their ability to complete the verification of Bitcoin's Proof of Work consensus.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Understanding Cross-Modal Contributions in Continual Vision-Language Models: A Theoretical Perspective

Continual vision-language models are commonly addressed through sequential fine-tuning; however, although this paradigm enables adaptation to new environments (tasks), it inherently emphasizes the contribution of previously learned environments (tasks) at the expense of the stability required to preserve previously acquired knowledge. While existing approaches have adequately studied continual learning and catastrophic forgetting in vision-language models (VLMs), the theoretical understanding of modality-specific contributions across a sequence of environments remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a new theoretical perspective to understand the cross-modal (vision-language) contributions to consecutive environments. We empirically evaluate our theoretical findings on large VLMs and demonstrate their effectiveness in capturing environment-level cross-modal contributions. Our analysis provides deeper insights into continual VLMs, highlighting their contribution robustness to varying task orders and inter-task similarities, and their improved generalization performance.

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

Learning Permutation Distributions via Reflected Diffusion on Ranks

arXiv:2603.17353v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The finite symmetric group S_n provides a natural domain for permutations, yet learning probability distributions on S_n is challenging due to its factorially growing size and discrete, non-Euclidean structure. Recent permutation diffusion methods define forward noising via shuffle-based random walks (e.g., riffle shuffles) and learn reverse transitions with Plackett-Luce (PL) variants, but the resulting trajectories can be abrupt and increasingly hard to denoise as n grows. We propose Soft-Rank Diffusion, a discrete diffusion framework that replaces shuffle-based corruption with a structured soft-rank forward process: we lift permutations to a continuous latent representation of order by relaxing discrete ranks into soft ranks, yielding smoother and more tractable trajectories. For the reverse process, we introduce contextualized generalized Plackett-Luce (cGPL) denoisers that generalize prior PL-style parameterizations and improve expressivity for sequential decision structures. Experiments on sorting and combinatorial optimization benchmarks show that Soft-Rank Diffusion consistently outperforms prior diffusion baselines, with particularly strong gains in long-sequence and intrinsically sequential settings.

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

Diffusion Models for Adaptive Sequential Data Generation

arXiv:2606.06007v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generating realistic synthetic sequential data is critical in real-world applications across operations research, finance, healthcare, energy systems, and scientific computing, where time-indexed observations are used for prediction, simulation, risk assessment, and data-driven decision-making. While diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating static data, their direct extensions to sequential settings often fail to capture temporal dependence and information structure. Designing diffusion models that can simulate sequential data in an adapted manner, and hence without anticipation of future information, therefore remains an open challenge. In this work, we propose a sequential forward-backward diffusion framework for adapted time series generation. Our approach progressively injects and removes noise along the sequence, conditioning on the previously generated history to ensure adaptiveness. A novel score-matching objective is introduced for efficient parallel training. We derive rigorous statistical guarantees under a generic framework, then establish score approximation, score estimation, and distribution estimation results with ReLU networks serving as a concrete instance. Empirically, we validate our method on synthetic data, including ARMA models and Gaussian processes, and demonstrate its effectiveness in constructing mean-variance optimal portfolios.

08.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Reference Fields Transformations in Linearized Quantum Gravity

arXiv:2606.09344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffeomorphism invariance is a central feature of general relativity. Without external reference structures, matter and geometry must be specified relationally, with respect to internal subsystems serving as reference frames. In quantum gravity, these reference systems must themselves be treated as quantum, motivating the use of quantum reference frames. In this work, we address how such a relational description could be formulated within linearized quantum gravity. To this purpose, we introduce quantum reference fields, i.e. sets of four dynamical scalar fields whose stress-energy tensors enter the gravitational constraints. These fields extend the notion of quantum reference frames to local field-theoretic reference systems, allowing matter and gravitational degrees of freedom to be described relationally with respect to physical quantum systems. By generalizing the perspective-neutral construction of quantum reference frames, we show that relational, gauge invariant observables admit reduced descriptions in the perspective of each quantum reference field, and we derive the unitary transformations relating them. The resulting unitary maps implement local quantum coordinate changes between different internal perspectives, and act on the linearized gravitational field with an analogous structure to a linearized diffeomorphism, but with the classical gauge parameter replaced by a physical quantum field. Finally, we construct a relational von Neumann-type measurement scheme, showing how the corresponding reduced observables can be accessed operationally from the perspective of a quantum reference field.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Evaluation of Image Matching for Art Skills Assessment

While some individuals possess a natural talent for drawing, mastering this skill requires dedicated training and practice. Determining one's skill in the art of drawing requires proper comprehensive assessment. In this paper, we propose a method to measure drawing skill by by matching the hand-drawn image with the original template. Existing techniques often involve complex processes. However, advancements in computer vision allow us to train computers to perform these comparisons at a human-like level, thereby resolving the tedious and overwhelming traditional process. Using computer vision applications, determining image similarity involves identifying the level of similarities in an image with a reference image. We have implemented and analyzed the SIFT feature and Siamese network to measure image similarity. Our results indicate that it is feasible to assess art skill levels. Through feature analysis, we found that SIFT-based key point matching provides a more effective means of detecting drawing skills.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Anticipating the Optimism Gap: Predicting Distribution-Shift Degradation of RF-Impairment Detectors from In-Distribution Statistics

arXiv:2606.22054v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Detectors for GNSS radio-frequency impairments (jamming, spoofing, multipath) are usually reported with a single AUC measured on the distribution they were tuned on. That number falls once conditions move, and the size of the drop is rarely known in advance because labelled field data is scarce. We ask whether this optimism can be predicted before any out-of-distribution data is seen. On an open, parameter-grounded synthetic testbed with a tunable severity shift, we evaluate thirteen detectors (five physics baselines, full-feature logistic regression and multilayer perceptrons, and single-feature learned controls) across four impairment classes. The optimism gap, the difference between in-distribution and shifted AUC, grows monotonically as the shift deepens (mean Spearman correlation 0.50). It is driven by how many observables a detector uses rather than by whether it is learned, and it varies systematically by class. Centrally, a ridge model built only from in-distribution score statistics predicts the gap for a detector it has never seen (R^2 = 0.47) and for an impairment class it has never seen (R^2 = 0.46); both are significant against a 2000-fold permutation null (p < 0.001) and survive removing the feature that is, by construction, part of the target. The headline findings are synthetic. We then run the pre-registered protocol on three open field corpora: on Jammertest 2024 the cross-detector prediction holds (R^2 = 0.11, p = 0.009), and on SatGrid, whose spoofer power sweep gives a calibrated severity axis, in-distribution AUC overstates higher-severity AUC by up to 0.22 and to the point of sign inversion, with in-distribution AUC and realised gap perfectly rank-correlated (Spearman rho = 1.0). The mechanism survives contact with real data, at smaller magnitude than in simulation. We release the testbed, a software-receiver front end, the ingest adapters and the protocol.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

TA-RAG: Tone-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Peer-Support Health Communication

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) successfully grounds large language model (LLM) outputs in trusted documents, but factual grounding alone is insufficient for sensitive peer-support health communication. In domains such as HIV peer support, responses must also be accessible, stigma-free, empathetic, and tailored to the recipient. This paper presents TA-RAG, a lightweight, prompt-based tone-aware RAG framework that embeds explicit tone control into a RAG pipeline without requiring model fine-tuning. We operationalise tone across four core components: stigma-free rewriting, readability adjustment, recipient adaptation, and empathy rephrasing. We evaluate TA-RAG through component-level tests using questions derived from HIV Online Learning Australia (HOLA), UNAIDS terminology guidance, readability metrics, peer-support standards from National Association of People with HIV Australia (NAPWHA), and a public empathy dataset. Results show that the TA-RAG's components improve their targeted communication quality while preserving key content. These findings emphasise that prompt-based tone control is a potential direction for making RAG outputs suitable for sensitive peer-support health communication.

13.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-12

Placenta accreta spectrum in the 21st century: Challenging dogma and redefining disorder

Authors:

by Eric Jauniaux, Helena C. Bartels, Yalda Afshar Placenta accreta spectrum (PAS) is a serious pregnancy complication caused by abnormal placental attachment to the uterus. In this Perspective, Eric Jauniaux and colleagues discuss emerging evidence that challenges our long-held pathophysiological understanding of PAS, and argue that a critical reassessment of definition, diagnosis, and management is overdue. In this Perspective, Jonathan Evans and colleagues discuss why restricting access to joint replacement surgery based on BMI alone is not supported by evidence, and highlight how such rest rictions risk exacerbating stigma, inequity and avoidable harm to those who would benefit from surgery.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Med-R2: Perception and Reflection-driven Complex Reasoning for Medical Report Generation

Automated medical report generation (MRG) is increasingly used to reduce the burden of manual reporting and for decision support. Large vision-language models (LVLMs) hold great promise for automated MRG due to their fine-grained image-text alignment and advanced text-generation capabilities. Currently, state-of-the-art MRGs primarily focus on adapting pre-trained LVLMs with direct supervised fine-tuning (SFT), a fine-tuning strategy with medical image-report pairs. However, several factors limit the performance of these LVLMs. Firstly, direct SFT enables LVLMs to generate medical reports directly without an intermediate thinking process of pathological feature perception and diagnostic reasoning. This causes a potential failure to perceive pathological features and thus leads to misdiagnosis. Secondly, direct SFT lacks the incorporation of radiology-specific knowledge guidance, causing LVLMs to misinterpret perceived pathological features and make incorrect diagnoses. To address these gaps, we propose a novel fine-tuning strategy named Med-R2. We introduce a perception-driven long reasoning process that precedes report generation and incorporates radiology-specific knowledge as guidance. Additionally, to alleviate potential perceptual errors in complex reasoning, a reflection mechanism is introduced to refine the perception of pathological features and the generated report. Our experiments demonstrate that Med-R2 effectively enhances the capability of pathological features perception and diagnosis accuracy for MRG via fine-tuned LVLMs.

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

RegMix-D: Dynamic Data Mixing via Proxy Training Trajectories

Data mixture selection is critical for Large Language Model pretraining. Existing methods such as RegMix select a single static mixture by fitting a regression model on small-scale proxy runs. We propose RegMix-D, a simple extension of RegMix to dynamic mixing. Our key observation is that proxy runs produce not only endpoint losses, but also full loss trajectories, which can be used to further improve data mixture. By training regression model on these trajectories, we can predict optimal mixtures at multiple training stages. RegMix-D supports two deployment modes: an offline variant that generates a complete mixture schedule before target training, and an online variant that adapts the mixture during training using observed loss. Experiments on 25B tokens of the Pile dataset with a 1B parameter target model show that RegMix-D consistently improves over RegMix and DoReMi across 13 downstream tasks while remaining proxy-efficient: it surpasses RegMix even with only 128 proxy models (25% of RegMix's proxy compute budget).

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

VeriPilot: An LLM-Powered Verilog Debugging Framework

arXiv:2606.23759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Verilog debugging remains one of the most time-consuming stages in digital circuit design. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled automated debugging; however, most existing approaches rely solely on test outputs and compiler feedback in an end-to-end manner, limiting their effectiveness on complex bugs. A key challenge is that the root cause of an error may be far removed from its observable outputs, making it difficult for LLMs to trace long dependency chains in code. This challenge is further exacerbated in large codebases, where long context lengths hinder efficient reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose VeriPilot, an LLM-powered debugging framework that leverages golden reference models to enable fine-grained bug localization and repair. VeriPilot goes beyond output-level comparison by aligning internal variable semantics between the Verilog design and its corresponding golden model through LLM-based analysis. It then performs step-by-step signal tracing using Control-Data-Flow Graphs (CDFGs) derived from static analysis, identifying a minimal set of suspicious code regions along with their correct counterparts from the golden model. These structured insights are subsequently provided to the LLM to guide reasoning and automated code repair. Experimental results on the Comprehensive Verilog Design Problems (CVDP) benchmark from NVIDIA demonstrate that VeriPilot improves the repair success rate of GPT-4o from 54.3\% to 85.71\%, significantly enhancing both bug localization accuracy and repair effectiveness for complex Verilog designs. The source code and benchmark are publicly available at Github https://github.com/YihanWn/VeriPilot.git.

17.
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.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Autoregressive Processes on Riemannian Manifolds

arXiv:2606.24771v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper introduces a Riemannian autoregressive (R-AR) model of order one, generalising classical discrete-time stochastic processes to manifold-valued data. The model is based on two parameters, a parameter $\mu$ representing the intrinsic central tendency as the Fréchet mean and an autoregressive parameter $\phi$ controlling the stationarity and ergodic properties. Due to the inherent dependence structure of the R-AR process, the estimation procedure for these parameters necessitates new asymptotic results for dependent processes on manifolds. Thus, we establish a strong law of large numbers for the sample Fréchet mean set of ergodic Markov chains in proper metric spaces. By proving this general consistency result, we move beyond the limitations of classical i.i.d. theory to provide the mathematical foundation required for the strong consistency of our proposed estimators. The framework is validated through numerical simulations in the hyperbolic plane and an application to aerosol size distributions on the Fisher-Rao manifold, demonstrating how the proposed model can characterise mean-reverting dynamics in nonlinear geometries.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Risk-averse mean field games: exploitability and non-asymptotic analysis

arXiv:2301.06930v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we use mean field games (MFGs) to investigate approximations of $N$-player games ($N$pGs) with uniformly symmetrically continuous heterogeneous closed-loop actions. To incorporate agents' risk aversion (beyond the classical expected utility of total costs), we use an abstract evaluation functional for their performance criteria. Centered around the notion of exploitability, we conduct non-asymptotic analysis on the approximation capability of MFGs from the perspective of state-action distributions without requiring the uniqueness of equilibria. Under suitable assumptions, we first show that scenarios in the $N$pGs with large $N$ and small average exploitabilities can be well approximated by approximate solutions of MFGs with relatively small exploitabilities. We then show that $\delta$-mean field equilibria can be used to construct $\varepsilon$-equilibria in $N$pGs. Furthermore, in this general setting, we prove the existence of mean field equilibria. This proof reveals a possible avenue for incorporating penalization for randomized action into MFGs.

20.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-11

Robust discovery of mutational signatures using power posteriors

Authors:

by Catherine Xue, Jeffrey W. Miller, Scott L. Carter, Jonathan H. Huggins Mutational processes, such as the molecular effects of carcinogenic agents or defective DNA repair mechanisms, produce different mutation types with characteristic frequency profiles, known as mutational signatures. Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has been successfully used to discover many mutational signatures, yielding novel insights into cancer etiology and informing targeted therapies. However, the NMF model is only a rough approximation to reality, and even small departures from this assumed model can have large negative effects on the accuracy and reliability of the results. We propose BayesPowerNMF, a Bayesian NMF method that provides nonparametric robustness to model misspecification, principled automated selection of the number of latent processes, and uncertainty quantification of model parameters. In extensive simulation studies, we find that our proposed approach recovers more true signatures with greater accuracy than current leading methods. On whole-genome sequencing data for six cancer types from the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium, we find that our method is able to accurately recover more signatures than the current state-of-the-art.

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

Ranking Abuse via Strategic Pairwise Data Perturbations

arXiv:2604.17805v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pairwise ranking systems based on Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), such as the Bradley-Terry model, are widely used to aggregate preferences from pairwise comparisons. However, their robustness under strategic data manipulation remains insufficiently understood. In this paper, we study the vulnerability of MLE-based ranking systems to adversarial perturbations. We formulate the manipulation task as a constrained combinatorial optimization problem and propose an Adaptive Subset Selection Attack (ASSA) to efficiently identify high-impact perturbations. Experimental results on both synthetic data and real-world election datasets show that MLE-based rankings exhibit a sharp phase-transition behavior: beyond a small perturbation budget, a limited number of strategic voters can significantly alter the global ranking. In particular, our method consistently outperforms random and greedy baselines under constrained budgets. These findings reveal a fundamental sensitivity of MLE-based ranking mechanisms to structured perturbations and highlight the need for more robust aggregation methods in collective decision-making systems.

22.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-05

Multiplexed, precise genome engineering in monocots with twin prime editing systems

Authors:

Simultaneously introducing diverse genomic edits remains a challenge in crop genome engineering. Here we describe a twin prime editing-based knockout (TKO) system that installs stop codon clusters (SCCs) for precise translational termination with minimal in-frame mutations. TKO achieves knockout efficiencies of up to 70.5%, 58.6% and 75.1% in rice, maize and wheat protoplasts, respectively, and produces heritable knockout alleles in 96.8% of regenerated rice plants. In hexaploid wheat, TKO outperforms Cas9 4.2-fold in generating triple-homolog knockouts, largely by reducing in-frame mutations. Orthogonal TKO editors with sequence-divergent SCCs enable simultaneous knockout of up to ten genes without cross-interference. Integration of TKO with conventional prime editing establishes TRIM1 (TKO editor-enabled gene rupture and development of integrated multitype genome modification system) for simultaneous knockout and precise editing, achieving a 22.8% coediting of four genes in rice. TRIM2 extends this capacity to kilobase-scale modifications through a prime editor–recombinase system, enabling a 4.9-kb insertion (1.2% efficiency) and gene knockout (up to 79.8%) in protoplasts. Plant genome editing is multiplexed with twin prime editing.

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

DeepInsight: A Unified Evaluation Infrastructure Across the Physical AI Stack

arXiv:2606.17574v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating a Physical AI stack spans operators that differ by more than three orders of magnitude – from a single foundation-model decoding step to thousands of physics ticks of whole-body control – varying orthogonally in modality, reward semantics, and resource profile. No existing framework spans this range, so the stack is evaluated today by stitching together separate harnesses that share neither runtime nor scoring, preserving each segment's local validity but losing the shared identity needed to diagnose cross-layer regressions. We present DeepInsight, an evaluation infrastructure that serves this full spectrum on a single runtime. Rather than homogenize the regimes, it preserves their heterogeneity behind three narrow abstractions – task, resource, and result – each realized as one invariant shared by every subsystem: one episode driver, one resource-handle protocol implemented by every expensive backend (LLM inference and sandboxed runtimes alike), and one trace identity scheme under which every event is written. Deployed in production across all three layers of an embodied humanoid stack, this single set of invariants onboards new benchmarks largely by configuration. Where mature peer orchestrators exist – at the foundation-model end – it reproduces published references and peer-framework readings within their own spread, runs the same suites faster on a single node, and scales near-linearly across nodes. Its distinctive return is diagnostic: because every layer writes into one shared trace, a regression that begins in one layer and surfaces in another stays localizable on that trace – a cross-layer payoff no federation of per-segment harnesses can reproduce.

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

Skill-Guided Continuation Distillation for GUI Agents

arXiv:2606.18890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Improving GUI agents typically relies on behavior cloning on expert trajectories. However, as the current policy deviates from the expert policy, it inevitably encounters policy-induced off-trajectory states during closed-loop execution, i.e., states that fall outside the expert trajectories. Since expert trajectories provide no demonstrations for these unseen states, such states receive no effective supervision, leaving the policy unable to select the correct action. To close this supervision gap, we propose Skill-Guided Continuation Distillation (SGCD), an iterative self-improvement framework. SGCD first runs the plain policy without skill guidance for a few steps to reach realistic off-trajectory states. From these states, a skill-guided policy then completes the task and produces successful continuations, which are mixed with expert trajectories to supply supervision over policy-induced off-trajectory states. The skills are extracted from both successful and failed rollouts, consisting of Continuation Plans, Critical Targets, Failure Traps, and Success Criteria. On OSWorld-Verified, SGCD improves the success rate of three base models from the low-30\% range to over 50\%, demonstrating its effectiveness and generality.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SafeSpec: Fast and Safe LLM via Dynamic Reflective Sampling

arXiv:2606.19755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative inference accelerates large language model (LLM) decoding but provides no inherent safety guarantees. Existing safety defenses are largely incompatible with speculative inference: they either introduce additional computation or disrupt the draft-verify mechanism, negating acceleration benefits. This reveals a fundamental incompatibility between current safety methods and speculative decoding. We propose SafeSpec, a safety-aware speculative inference framework that integrates risk estimation directly into the verification process. SafeSpec attaches a lightweight latent safety head to the target model to jointly evaluate semantic validity and safety in a single forward pass. When unsafe generations are detected, SafeSpec applies rollback and safety-guided reflective multi-sampling to recover safe continuations rather than terminating generation. We model jailbreak attacks as distributional shifts over generative trajectories, where adversarial prompts increase the probability of harmful continuations without eliminating safe ones. Under this model, SafeSpec performs risk-aware trajectory recovery within the speculative decoding process. Across multiple models and adversarial benchmarks, SafeSpec achieves a substantially improved safety-efficiency trade-off. On Qwen3-32B, SafeSpec reduces attack success rates by 15% while preserving a 2.06x inference speedup on benign workloads, demonstrating that speculative acceleration and inference-time safety can be jointly optimized.