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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Epileptogenicity alters intrahippocampal ripple propagation

Objective: Tracing the propagation of high-frequency oscillations (HFOs) aids in localizing epileptogenic regions and improving surgical outcomes. We examined how hippocampal epileptogenicity influences the propagation properties of the HFOs it generates. Methods: We analyzed non-REM sleep stereo-EEG from 49 patients (68 hemispheres) with verified hippocampal contacts. Hippocampi were stratified by excitability: 28 seizure onset zone (SOZ), 22 more-irritative non-SOZ (>6 interictal epileptiform discharges [IED]/min), and 18 less-irritative non-SOZ (

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CEVAR: Centerline Embedding Extraction for Endovascular Aneurysm Repair

Long-term mortality rates after endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) remain elevated due to post-EVAR rupture caused by loss of seal in stent graft sealing zones. Structured CT review using centerline measurements improves detection, but current workflows require manual centerline editing and expert operators. We propose a transformer framework for automated, protocol-driven sealing zone assessment that combines 3D centerline tracking with embedding-based geometric prediction. Two state-of-the-art image-to-graph models are evaluated for aorto-iliac centerline extraction from follow-up CT and for measurement of stent position, vessel diameters, and seal lengths according to EVAR4C protocol. Across the full test set and a challenging no-contrast subset, the proposed fully automatic method outperforms the commercial semi-automatic workflow.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Mapping Geopolitical Bias in 11 Large Language Models: A Bilingual, Dual-Framing Analysis of U.S.-China Tensions

Large language models are how hundreds of millions of people now encounter contested political questions, raising a subtle measurement problem: a model that simply agrees with whatever it is told can masquerade as biased, contaminating any claim that models hold political opinions. We address this by importing balanced keying from survey psychometrics, posing each proposition and its swapped reverse and signing the response so acquiescence cancels and genuine conviction accumulates. The result is a reproducible, quantitative instrument that maps geopolitical stance across 11 models and 2 languages (19,712 responses). Developer origin, query language and issue domain emerge as three near-equal, additive factors; every model, including those built in the United States, leans more Pro-China in Mandarin; and two models with identical agreement bias are told apart, one neutral, one biased. We release it as an open, interactive tool that extends to any contested-opinion domain.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Split-Head Quantum Generative Adversarial Network for Crystalline Material Discovery

arXiv:2606.17852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The discovery of novel crystalline materials is a critical challenge in computational materials science, often limited by the spatial representation limitations and mode collapse typical of classical generative models. Traditionally, developing Quantum GANs for continuous 3D space is hindered by the limited capacity of near-term hardware. To overcome this, we adapt a physics-informed "split-head" architecture right from the quantum trunk to explicitly decouple macroscopic lattice bounds from microscopic atomic coordinates, significantly maximizing resource efficiency. This study disentangles the contributions of quantum circuits from these architectural priors by evaluating a Split-Head Quantum Generative Adversarial Network against an architecture-matched classical ablation model. Evaluated on the highly constrained Mg-Mn-O system, the results reveal a highly nuanced performance dichotomy between the advanced models. The architecture-matched classical ablation model demonstrated superior thermodynamic precision. Conversely, the integration of quantum circuits in the SH-QGAN drove unparalleled structural breadth and latent space exploration, more than doubling the ablation's geometric validity and successfully generating novel, metastable candidates converging on the Mg2MnO4 stoichiometry. These findings clarify that while architectural separation of cell and atom generation drives strict thermodynamic precision, quantum feature mapping independently provides the spatial diversity necessary to overcome mode collapse. Both mechanisms offer distinct, complementary enhancements for the generative discovery of advanced materials.

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

Q-Learning with Fine-Grained Gap-Dependent Regret

arXiv:2510.06647v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for model-free reinforcement learning in episodic tabular Markov Decision Processes. Existing model-free algorithms achieve minimax worst-case regret, but their gap-dependent bounds remain coarse and fail to fully capture the structure of suboptimality gaps. We address this limitation by establishing fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for both UCB-based and non-UCB-based algorithms. In the UCB-based setting, we develop a novel analytical framework that explicitly separates the analysis of optimal and suboptimal state-action pairs, yielding the first fine-grained regret upper bound for UCB-Hoeffding (Jin et al., 2018). To highlight the generality of this framework, we introduce ULCB-Hoeffding, a new UCB-based algorithm inspired by AMB (Xu et al.,2021) but with a simplified structure, which enjoys fine-grained regret guarantees and empirically outperforms AMB. In the non-UCB-based setting, we revisit the only known algorithm AMB, and identify two key issues in its algorithm design and analysis: improper truncation in the $Q$-updates and violation of the martingale difference condition in its concentration argument. We propose a refined version of AMB that addresses these issues, establishing the first rigorous fine-grained gap-dependent regret for a non-UCB-based method, with experiments demonstrating improved performance over AMB.

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

HMR-Net: Hierarchical Modular Routing for Cross-Domain Object Detection in Aerial Images

Despite advances in object detection, aerial imagery remains a challenging domain, as models often fail to generalize across variations in spatial resolution, scene composition, and semantic label coverage. Differences in geographic context, sensor characteristics, and object distributions across datasets limit the capacity of conventional models to learn consistent and transferable representations. Shared methods trained on such data tend to impose a unified representation across fundamentally different domains, resulting in poor performance on region-specific content and less flexibility when dealing with novel object categories. To address this, we propose a novel modular learning framework that enables structured specialization in aerial detection. Our method introduces a hierarchical routing mechanism with two levels of modularity: a domain routing layer that uses latent geographic embeddings to assign inputs to domain-specialized expert modules, and a scene routing mechanism that allocates image subregions to scene-specific expert modules. This allows our method to specialize across datasets and within complex scenes. Additionally, the framework contains a conditional expert module that uses external semantic information (e.g., category names or textual descriptions) to enable detection of novel object categories during inference, without the need for retraining or fine-tuning. By moving beyond monolithic representations, our method provides an adaptive framework for remote sensing object detection. Comprehensive evaluations on four datasets highlight improvements in multi-dataset generalization, region-level specialization, and open-category detection.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

novelBGC: An interactive dual-score framework for biosynthetic gene cluster novelty assessment and candidate prioritisation

Genome mining now yields tens of thousands of putative biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) per project, yet, separating genuinely novel candidates from rediscoveries of known compounds remains the rate-limiting step before experimental validation. Single-axis prioritisation tools, antiSMASH similarity, BiG-FAM GCF distance, and self-resistance-enzyme (SRE) filters such as ARTS, each surface a different facet of evidence, yet their isolated use systematically over-ranks rediscovery-prone BGCs and overlooks genuinely orphan clusters. We present novelBGC, a web-hosted framework that converts these disparate outputs into two deliberately non-inverse continuous metrics per BGC, a Novelty (N) and a Reference Similarity (RS) score which together define a 2D decision plane that resolves rediscoveries, divergent family members, contig-edge artefacts, and uncharted chemistry with interactive visualisations, with all component weights user-tuneable at submission. Retrospective validation across three independent experimental datasets demonstrates the utility of the framework for candidate prioritization. Within the first 186-BGC SRE-guided cloning study, every confirmed bioactive product fell within the low-to-mid N band whereas 55 high-N (N [≥] 0.50) BGCs were never selected. Moreover, in the other two studies, it correctly prioritised the fully orphan lariocidin BGC of Paenibacillus sp. M2 and the divergent within-family indanopyrrole-A idp BGC of Streptomyces sp. CNX-425. Together, these case studies demonstrate that the joint (N, RS) space facilitates prioritization decisions that are difficult to achieve using any single criterion alone. from identical input data. novelBGC requires no command-line expertise, no local tool installation, and no manual integration of intermediate output formats, addressing a well-documented accessibility barrier for wet-laboratory researchers engaging with genome-mining workflows. novelBGC is freely available at https://project.iith.ac.in/sharmaglab/novelbgc/.

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

Agentomics: Economic Foundations for the Valuation, Attribution, and Pricing of AI Agents in Human-AI Workflows

作者:

arXiv:2606.14769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems are increasingly being deployed as productive resources in organizational workflows, yet existing evaluation methods primarily measure isolated technical performance rather than economic contribution. This paper introduces Agentomics, a workflow-based framework for valuing, attributing, and pricing human and artificial agents. The framework models a workflow as a configuration of heterogeneous agents whose collective performance determines gross value, deployment cost, reliability, and expected failure loss. Workflow value is treated as a team-level quantity that may include complementarities, substitution effects, bottlenecks, and nonlinear production; additive stage-level value is only a special case. Building on this workflow model, the paper formulates AI deployment as a coalition-formation problem and defines coalition value as the incremental net surplus generated relative to a benchmark human workflow. The Shapley value is then used to attribute economic surplus among participating AI agents, yielding a principled connection among valuation, accountability, and market pricing. The resulting Shapley pricing equilibrium provides a normative benchmark for assessing whether agent prices reflect expected marginal contribution. A security-operations case study illustrates how the framework accounts for productivity gains, deployment costs, reliability losses, and coalition-level complementarities in hybrid human–AI workflows.

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

m2sv: A Scalable Benchmark for Map-to-Street-View Spatial Reasoning

Vision–language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on many multimodal benchmarks but remain brittle on spatial reasoning tasks that require aligning abstract overhead representations with egocentric views. We introduce m2sv, a scalable benchmark for map-to-street-view spatial reasoning that asks models to infer camera viewing direction by aligning a north-up overhead map with a Street View image captured at the same real-world intersection. We release m2sv-20k, a geographically diverse benchmark with controlled ambiguity, along with m2sv-sft-11k, a curated set of structured reasoning traces for supervised fine-tuning. Despite strong performance on existing multimodal benchmarks, the best evaluated VLM achieves only 65.2% accuracy on m2sv, below human annotators who reach 72.0% on average (and 95% for an expert) with strong inter-annotator agreement ($\kappa$ up to 0.76). While supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning yield consistent gains, cross-benchmark evaluations reveal limited transfer. Beyond aggregate accuracy, we systematically analyze difficulty in map-to-street-view reasoning using both structural signals and human effort, and conduct an extensive failure analysis of adapted open models. Our findings highlight persistent gaps in geometric alignment, evidence aggregation, and reasoning consistency, motivating future work on grounded spatial reasoning across viewpoints.

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

Learning Augmented Exact Exponential Algorithms

arXiv:2606.18807v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The field of learning-augmented algorithms has demonstrated that machine-learned predictions can bypass worst-case lower bounds across a wide range of problems. So far, however, the focus has been almost exclusively on polynomial-time algorithms, where predictions improve competitive ratios, approximation guarantees, or running times. In this paper, we raise the question of whether predictions can push the frontier of exact exponential-time algorithms for NP-hard problems. We answer this question affirmatively by proposing a general approach that augments an entire family of state-of-the-art exact algorithms for a variety of subset selection problems. We show that a noisy predictor that is only marginally better than random guessing suffices to provably reduce the search space, and that the resulting runtime speedup scales smoothly with the prediction quality. Importantly, our algorithms require only pairwise independence of predictions or, alternatively, do not require the knowledge of the predictor's accuracy - both strictly weaker and more realistic settings than typically assumed.

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

SPEAR: A System for Post-Quantization Error-Adaptive Recovery Enabling Efficient Low-Bit LLM Serving

arXiv:2606.11244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficient large language model (LLM) serving is increasingly constrained by deployment cost. Quantization is a key technique for reducing serving cost, yet even state-of-the-art 4-bit quantizers exhibit a noticeable quality gap from FP16, particularly for smaller models where low-bit serving is most beneficial. We identify a fundamental cause of this gap: quantization error is highly input-dependent and varies substantially across tokens, while existing post-quantization compensation methods are static and apply identical corrections to all inputs. As a result, easy tokens are over-corrected while hard tokens remain under-corrected. We present SPEAR, a system for post-quantization error-adaptive recovery that improves low-bit LLM serving. SPEAR introduces lightweight Error Compensators (ECs) modulated by per-token gates and places them only at the most error-sensitive layers identified through a CKA-guided entropy-aware diagnostic. This focuses a small parameter budget where it is most effective. Efficient deployment of ECs presents several systems challenges, including additional computation, tensor-parallel synchronization caused by input-dependent gating, and latency instability across configurations. SPEAR addresses these issues through adaptive kernel-fusion dispatch, combining an epilogue-integrated peer-reduction kernel with P2P dual-write to fuse the post-EC computation into low-bit GEMMs, and an SLO-constrained EC-aware scheduler for predictable serving performance. Across challenging per-channel quantization settings, SPEAR recovers 56-75% of the perplexity gap between W4 and FP16 while adding less than 1% model memory overhead and maintaining latency comparable to a widely used 4-bit serving deployment.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

ProfiLLM: Utility-Aligned Agentic User Profiling for Industrial Ride-Hailing Dispatch

arXiv:2606.18803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bringing Large Language Models (LLMs) into industrial ride-hailing dispatch as semantic feature extractors over platform-scale behavioral logs is a compelling but under-explored data systems problem. Production matching pipelines remain dominated by structured numerical features, yet decisive behavioral signals (e.g., a driver's habitual aversion to certain regions) are inherently contextual and naturally expressible as LLM-generated user profiles. However, scaling such profiling to a live, millisecond-latency dispatcher faces three intertwined constraints rarely addressed together: on a platform with millions of daily orders, logs exceed any LLM's context window by orders of magnitude; most users are long-tail, with too few interactions for per-user profiling; and surface-fluent profiles do not necessarily improve downstream prediction utility. We present ProfiLLM, an agentic LLM data pipeline that operationalizes utility-aligned user profiling for production matching systems through two modules. (1) Tool-Augmented Global Knowledge Mining equips an LLM agent with 27 analytical tools to mine platform-scale data, producing reusable global knowledge, adaptive user clustering rules, and region-level supply-demand priors. (2) Utility-Aligned Profile Exploration generates multiple candidate profiles per cluster, evaluates them via a lightweight downstream utility proxy, iteratively refines the best candidates and constructs preference pairs for DPO fine-tuning. Deployed on DiDi's production dispatcher, ProfiLLM achieves up to +6.14% relative AUC improvement in outcome prediction, up to +4.35% GMV gain in dispatching simulation, and consistent improvements in a 14-day online A/B test including +0.47% GMV, +0.33% Completion Rate, and -0.82% Cancel-Before-Accept rate.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

On The Effectiveness-Fluency Trade-Off In LLM Conditioning: A Systematic Study

Controlling the output of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a central challenge for their reliable deployment, yet a clear understanding of the involved trade-offs remains elusive. Current approaches to conditioning are often evaluated with a narrow focus on their effectiveness at injecting or removing a target concept, neglecting generation quality. We systematically investigate a range of conditioning methods in both injection and removal scenarios. We find that efficient steering methods frequently achieve conditioning at a steep cost to fluency. Furthermore, we identify a critical yet previously overlooked interaction with the training paradigm: activation steering methods are far less effective on instruction-tuned models than on their base counterparts. Simple prompting and full-fledged supervised fine-tuning, on the other hand, are viable options for concept injection, but are not as good at concept removal. Finally, cheaply computed textual metrics highly correlate to costly LLM-as-judge scores, and provide insights on the behavior of conditioning methods.

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

Optimal Ansatz-free Hamiltonian Learning In Situ

arXiv:2606.19486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Characterizing the features of a Hamiltonian that governs a quantum system serves as a fundamental subroutine of quantum device calibration, signal sensing, and error correction. Recent works proposed protocols have achieved the optimal Heisenberg-limited scaling learning ansatz-free Hamiltonians from their real-time evolutions without fully specifying interaction structures. However, these protocols rely on both deep circuits with interleaving probes and control, and extremely short time resolution, making them difficult to implement on near- and intermediate-term in situ quantum experiments. In this work, we propose a computationally efficient, control-free, and ancilla-free algorithm that uses only Pauli product state preparation and measurement, and learns an ansatz-free Hamiltonian $H$ with $||H||\leq\Lambda$ in total evolution time of $\Theta(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon^2}\log(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon}))$. The evolution time cost of our algorithm is optimal for any control-free protocols as we further prove a lower bound of $\Omega(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon^2}\log(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon}))$. Technically, our method introduces a randomized-sampling framework that combines band-limited kernel-based time sampling with a displacement sieve for Hamiltonian structure learning. The characteristic probe time resolution depends only on $\Lambda$ instead of $\varepsilon$, which makes our protocol especially appealing in the high-precision regime for sensing and calibration applications. We also show that the algorithm maintains the same asymptotic total evolution time in the presence of state-preparation-and-measurement (SPAM) noise when the Hamiltonian is local after calibration. Our results demonstrate the fundamental cost of experimentally friendly Hamiltonian learning and provide a practical route to rigorous in situ characterization of near-term quantum platforms.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Preserved Medial Temporal Lobe Flexibility Predicts Memory Generalization Only in the Context of Good Sleep Quality among Older African Americans

Objectives: Poor sleep quality is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease (AD). Older African Americans experience disproportionately high rates of sleep disturbance and AD. Medial temporal lobe (MTL) flexibility reflects dynamic neural reorganization and may be a marker of generalization performance. This study examined whether sleep quality moderates the association between MTL flexibility and memory generalization. Methods: Fifty older African Americans (MeanAge=69.7{+/-}6.21 years; 80% women) underwent rs-fMRI to quantify MTL flexibility, Rutgers Acquired Equivalence Task for memory generalization, and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index for sleep quality. Results: Greater MTL flexibility was associated with better generalization (r=0.367, p=.017). Good sleepers showed higher MTL flexibility (F(1,44)=8.11, p2=.156, p=.007) and superior generalization (F(1,46)= 12.33, p2=.211, p=.001). Sleep quality significantly moderated the MTL flexibility and generalization relationship ({beta}=-1.519, p=.012). Conclusions: Preserved MTL flexibility may confer generalization only in good sleepers, suggesting that sleep disturbance may disrupt the MTL neural resilience among older African Americans.

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

SICI: A Semantic-Pragmatic Complexity Index Reveals Regime Shifts in LLM Stance Detection

Prompt-based LLMs are increasingly used for stance detection, but harder examples are not always repaired by clearer instructions, reasoning prompts, retrieval, or debate. We introduce SICI (Stance Inference Complexity Index), a seven-dimensional diagnostic measure of the semantic-pragmatic burden imposed by a target–text pair. Across SemEval-2016 and VAST, SICI predicts LLM accuracy better than surface proxies and shows substantial cross-scorer reliability ($\alpha=0.771$). More importantly, LLM errors change regime as SICI increases: low-complexity examples invite over-attribution, especially Against predictions; intermediate examples form an unstable boundary; and high-complexity examples rapidly concentrate on None. This phase-transition-like structure persists across GPT-3.5, GPT-4o-mini, DeepSeek-V3, and GPT-4o, although stronger models move the boundaries. A 15-method intervention study further shows that prompting, retrieval, and debate often shift models along the attribution–abstention axis rather than removing the high-complexity bottleneck.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A random recursive tree model with doubling events

arXiv:2501.18466v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new model of random tree that grows like a random recursive tree, except at some exceptional "doubling events" when the tree is replaced by two copies of itself attached to a new root. We prove asymptotic results for the size of this tree at large times, its degree distribution, and its height profile. We also prove a lower bound for its height. Because of the doubling events that affect the tree globally, the proofs are all much more intricate than in the case of the random recursive tree in which the growing operation is always local.

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

SED:Lightweight Saliency prediction for Event-based data via Distillation

Event-based saliency prediction has gained attention recently, as combining event cameras with saliency estimation can act as an upstream stage that naturally improves the efficiency of downstream eventbased perception at the edge. However, current approaches are either neuromorphic, underperforming on event-based saliency benchmarks, or too heavy for resource-constrained edge applications due to their reliance on transformers or 3D convolutions. Drawing inspiration from efficient convolutional modules, SED and aiming to exploit the temporal information in event data, we propose a lightweight network, trained through knowledge distillation, built on a Depthwise Spatio-Temporal Block (DSTconv) – a factorization of the 3D depthwise separable convolution. Relative to its teacher, our model reduces the model size from 180 MB to 0.32 MB (562x) and the parameter count from 45M to 81k (554x), while matching or outperforming it on the N-DHF1K and N-UCF Sports datasets. Moreover, it generalizes strongly beyond its training distribution, transferring from synthetic to real event data where a model trained from scratch fails.

19.
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.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Differentiable Thermodynamic Phase-Equilibria for Machine Learning

arXiv:2603.11249v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate prediction of phase equilibria remains a central challenge in chemical engineering. Physics-consistent machine learning methods that incorporate thermodynamic structure into neural networks have recently shown strong performance for activity-coefficient modeling. However, extending such approaches to equilibrium data arising from an extremum principle, such as liquid-liquid equilibria, remains difficult. Here we present DISCOMAX, a differentiable algorithm for phase-equilibrium calculation that guarantees thermodynamic consistency at both training and inference, only subject to a user-specified discretization. The method combines discrete enumeration of feasible phase states with masked softmax aggregation in the backward pass, with the propagation of the true equilibrium state in the forward pass, using a straight-through gradient estimator to enable physics-consistent end-to-end learning of neural \gls{gE}-models. We show that this approach bears analogy to statistical thermodynamics, and we evaluate it on binary liquid-liquid equilibrium data where it outperforms existing surrogate-based methods, while offering a general framework for learning from different kinds of equilibrium data.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Disparate Impact in Synthetic Data Generation

arXiv:2606.13105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We revisit the fairness notion of disparate impact for synthetic data generation (SDG), that assesses whether the utility of generated records is the same across sensitive groups. Our approach departs from existing work on fair SDG, that address the problem of correcting for undue biases in the observed distribution, hence redefining SDG as learning a distribution that is not that of the real data. By contrast, non-disparate impact is notably achieved when the synthetic and real distributions are the same. We expose reasons why SDG may fail to reach that solution and discuss why approximation and estimation errors occur and can be disparate across groups. We notably look into the expressive power of SDG methods relative to distribution complexity, sampling errors due to group proportions, and estimation errors induced by differential privacy mechanisms. We illustrate cases of disparate impact on both artificial and real-world data, focusing on SDG methods that rely on probabilistic graphical models. We also introduce a strategy of learning group-wise SDG models and illustrate how it can improve both the overall utility and its parity in many settings.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Simulating Students' Java Programming Errors with Large Language Models

Understanding student errors in the programming is a cornerstone of programming education, yet obtaining a representative set of student errors for any newly designed task remains slow and costly, since authentic submissions only accumulate after extensive classroom deployment. This paper explores whether large language models (LLMs) can serve as scalable proxies for students by simulating realistic logical errors in code submissions. Using the CodeWorkout dataset of 74,000+ unique student Java submissions across 37 problems, we evaluate five LLMs under three mainstream prompting strategies: Input-Output (IO), Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and iterative Self-Refine. We assess performance along two key dimensions: diversity (the range of distinct error patterns) and alignment (alignment with authentic student mistakes), and examine how these vary by struggling level of programming tasks. Our quantitative findings reveal that while all models generate diverse errors, their alignment to human submissions diverges: Claude Sonnet 4 achieves the most balanced performance. In addition, we conducted a blinded expert annotation study (N = 401) comparing synthetic and authentic errors. This qualitative analysis confirms that the generated errors are functionally indistinguishable from authentic student errors. Moreover, higher-struggling-level problems elicit more diverse but less student-like errors. These results highlight trade-offs in using LLMs to simulate human learners and suggest design considerations for integrating synthetic errors into teachable agents, intelligent tutoring systems, and large-scale learning analytics.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Amylo-Pipe: an integrated web server for mechanistic and kinetic prediction of protein and peptide aggregation

Protein aggregation is central to amyloid-related disorders and remains a major developability challenge for protein therapeutics. Over the past two decades, significant advances have been made to predict aggregation-prone regions (APRs) and estimate aggregation propensity in proteins and peptides. In contrast, the prediction of aggregation kinetics has received relatively less attention due to the limited availability and heterogeneity of experimental data. Consequently, aggregation propensities from APR prediction algorithms were widely accepted as a means to predict relative changes in the aggregation kinetics of proteins and mutants. Previous studies have demonstrated, using large-scale datasets, that aggregation propensity shows a weak or inconsistent correlation with aggregation kinetics. In the present study, we have integrated complementary state-of-the-art mechanistic and kinetic prediction tools for protein aggregation into a unified, user-friendly web framework entitled "Amylo-Pipe". Amylo-Pipe also implements practical features that are especially useful for protein engineering, such as gatekeeper-residue mutational scanning to support the design of aggregation-resistant variants. By consolidating multiple prediction tasks in a single interface, Amylo-Pipe enables a more comprehensive assessment of aggregation behavior than APR-only workflows. The web server is freely accessible at: https://web.iitm.ac.in/bioinfo2/amylopipe/.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Toward Instructions-as-Code: Understanding the Impact of Instruction Files on Agentic Pull Requests

arXiv:2606.13449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-agents (e.g., GitHub Copilot) collaborate as teammates in different software engineering tasks, including code generation proposed through pull requests (Agentic-PRs). For better agent efficiency, developers create instruction files that guide the AI-agents, including how to navigate the project, locate the right components, run tests, respect best practices, and more. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the creation of these instructions and the performance of AI-agents in creating better pull requests, which have a higher chance of success (i.e., the merge rate), address more complex tasks (e.g., code churn), and require less effort to be merged (e.g., time to merge). To this end, we analyze 15,549 agentic PRs from 148 projects in the AIDev dataset. Using the three dimensions, we compare each project before and after the creation of the instruction files. We find that specifying instructions for AI-agents does not necessarily lead to better results. With the instruction files, 27.7\% of the projects increased their merge rate by at least 20\%, while 26.35\% decreased it. The same observation is seen with the amount of changes (e.g., code churn, number of modified files) and with the efforts to merge an agentic PR (e.g., merge time and number of comments). From a first exploration, we find that projects that managed to increase their merge rate have substantially longer instruction files, which are also well structured into a higher number of sections and sub-sections. Our results motivate the need for research to assist practitioners in framing the development of instruction files as a software engineering activity (aka, Instructions-as-Code).

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Graph-ESBMC-PLC: Formal Verification of Graphical PLCopen XML Ladder Diagram Programs Using SMT-Based Model Checking

PLCopen XML defines two encoding formats for IEC 61131-3 Ladder Diagram programs: a textual encoding using elements, and a graphical encoding that represents rung logic as a directed graph of localId/refLocalId connections. ESBMC-PLC supported the textual format but parsed graphical exports from CONTROLLINO, Beremiz, and OpenPLC Editor into an empty GOTO intermediate representation, causing vacuous verification success. This paper presents Graph-ESBMC-PLC, which closes this gap with a DFS-based graphical LD resolver. The resolver traverses the connection graph from leftPowerRail to each coil, extracts rung paths as Boolean contact conjunctions, and applies a three-tier I/O inference scheme. Ordering coils by rightPowerRail connectionPointIn sequence ensures SET coils process before RESET coils, matching IEC scan-cycle semantics. The graphical-to-IR conversion leaves the ESBMC backend unchanged. Validation on 3 graphical LD programs from CONTROLLINO/OpenPLC Editor shows all produce full GOTO IR with nondeterministic inputs and rung logic, versus the empty IR previously. All 3 verify SAFE at k=2 under 70ms. The 11 textual LD benchmarks are fully preserved, with no regression. Two Beremiz examples with no LD content or unsupported timer semantics are reported as discovered limitations. Artifact at Zenodo (DantasCordeiro2026graphical, doi:10.5281/zenodo.20699856).