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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

First to reach $n$ game

arXiv:2506.08782v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider a game with two players, consisting of a number of rounds, where the first player to win $n$ rounds becomes the overall winner. Who wins each individual round is governed by a certain urn having two types of balls (type 1 and type 2). At each round, we randomly pick a ball from the urn, and its type determines which of the two players wins. We study the game under three regimes. In the first and the third regimes, a ball is taken without replacement, whilst in the second regime, it is returned to the urn with one more ball of the same colour. We study the properties of the random variables equal to the properly defined overall net profits of the players, and the results are drastically different in all three regimes.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Masked and Predictive Self-Supervised Foundation Models for 3D Brain MRI

Self-supervised foundation models have shown strong promise in medical imaging. However, existing MRI foundation-model studies have primarily emphasized segmentation and dense prediction tasks, while systematic investigation of self-supervised foundation models for MRI-based disease detection remains limited. In this work, we investigate two major self-supervised pretraining paradigms for MRI-based disease detection: reconstruction-based learning via Masked Autoencoders (MAE) and predictive representation learning via Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA). We study the role of auxiliary objectives by introducing a novel spectral-domain reconstruction loss for MAE to enhance sensitivity to fine-grained anatomical structure, and by integrating variance–covariance regularization (VCR) within our JEPA framework to encourage decorrelated latent representations. Our models are pretrained on heterogeneous single-contrast MRI volumes in a contrast-agnostic setting, without modality concatenation. Across five downstream disease detection tasks, our results highlight the importance of self-supervised objective design for medical foundation model pretraining, demonstrating that the downstream benefit of each objective is determined by its relevance to the task's structure. Specifically, spectral regularization yields the largest improvements when the downstream discriminative signal is characterized by strong high-frequency anatomical structures, while covariance regularization is most beneficial when discriminative information spans multiple decorrelated feature dimensions. MAE with spectral-domain supervision consistently achieves superior downstream performance for MRI-based disease detection. These findings suggest that self-supervised objectives in medical imaging encode specific biases, and their downstream benefit is fundamentally conditioned on the task's structure.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

What Type of Inference is Active Inference?

arXiv:2606.04935v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Active inference casts decision-making as inference, with the Expected Free Energy (EFE) unifying goal-directed and information-seeking behavior. Recent work showed that EFE minimization can be written as Variational Free Energy (VFE) minimization on a generative model augmented with epistemic priors. We prove that the VFE of the augmented model can be rewritten as the VFE of the predictive model plus explicit entropy-correction terms, making the EFE contribution transparent. We then show that proper EFE-based planning requires combining these epistemic corrections with a planning correction that turns marginal inference into policy optimization, yielding a full variational characterization of EFE-based planning. This clarifies which corrections are needed for cross-entropy planning and for full EFE-based planning. The same entropy-corrected formulation leads to a detailed message-passing scheme for EFE-based planning together with simpler ablations. Experiments on three grid-world environments show that full EFE-based planning outperforms ablations that omit either the planning correction or the epistemic corrections.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Solving Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Learning from an Auto-Annotation Perspective

Semi-supervised few-shot learning (SSFSL) resembles real-world applications such as auto-annotation, as it aims to learn a model from a few labeled and abundant unlabeled task-specific examples to annotate the unlabeled ones. Despite the availability of powerful open-source Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and open-world data, existing SSFSL literature largely neglects these resources. In contrast, the related area few-shot learning (FSL) has already exploited them to boost performance. Arguably, to solve real-world auto-annotation, SSFSL should leverage such open resources. To bridge this gap, we explore established SSL methods to finetune a VLM. Unexpectedly, they significantly underperform FSL baselines that do not use unlabeled data. Our in-depth analysis reveals the root cause of failure: VLMs produce flat distributions of softmax probabilities, resulting in zero utilization of unlabeled data and weak supervision signals. To address this challenge, we propose an embarrassingly simple solution that uses temperatures to sharpen the softmax output, which not only increases the confidence scores of pseudo-labels to improve the utilization of unlabeled data, but also strengthens training supervision for effective finetuning. Furthermore, we exploit task-relevant open data, e.g., those retrieved from VLMs' publicly available pretraining set. To mitigate the imbalance and domain gaps in retrieved data, we employ a stage-wise training strategy. Building on the successful finetuning of VLMs and the exploitation of open data, we present a simple yet effective SSFSL method, Stage-Wise Finetuning with Temperatures (SWIFT). Across five benchmarks, SWIFT outperforms recent FSL and SSL methods by $\sim$5 accuracy points. SWIFT even rivals supervised learning, which finetunes a VLM assuming unlabeled data having ground-truth labels!

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Hybrid Transformer-Mamba for Weakly Supervised Volumetric Medical Segmentation

Weakly supervised segmentation enables model training from plane-level labels. Existing methods often rely on 2D encoders, neglecting the volumetric nature of medical data. We propose TranSamba, a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture designed to capture 3D context via cross-plane modeling. TranSamba augments a Vision Transformer backbone with Cross-Plane Mamba blocks, leveraging linear-time modeling for efficient information exchange across neighboring planes. This exchange improves in-plane self-attention and subsequent attention maps for object localization. TranSamba maintains linear time complexity and constant space complexity with respect to the input volume depth. Extensive experiments on three datasets covering diverse modalities and pathologies show that TranSamba achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the generalizable efficacy of cross-plane modeling. Code is available at: https://github.com/YihengLyu/TranSamba.

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

Faster Completion, Less Learning: Generative AI Reduced Study Time on Math Problems and the Knowledge They Build

arXiv:2605.21629v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How much have students' ordinary learning processes shifted in response to generative AI, and how does that affect their durable learning outcomes? Self-report surveys show little change, while small-scale behavioral studies report widespread AI use without the scale or duration to measure learning consequences. We address both questions using a ten-year panel of $3.2$ million ALEKS learning interactions for investigating time-on-task, complemented by ALEKS PPL placement-assessment data for examining proctoring and learning outcomes, with a quasi-experimental design exploiting variation in tasks that are more susceptible to AI (text-based word problems) and less susceptible to AI (interactive graph-based problems). Learning time on AI-susceptible problems declines $2.8\%$ per quarter among college students after ChatGPT's release, cumulating to $26.9\%$ over eleven quarters; high-schoolers show $31.3\%$, middle-schoolers $9.0\%$, and Grade 5 students no detectable change. Among college students, the post-ChatGPT divergence vanishes entirely under proctoring, ruling out broad efficiency gains as the likely explanation. Logistic fixed-effects models on randomly assigned proctored retention items yield a $25\%$ cumulative decline in odds of correct response; the same estimator on non-proctored assessment produces a large opposite-signed increase – inconsistent with any platform, cohort, or curriculum explanation. These results are among the first large-scale behavioral and outcome evidence that generative AI has altered how students study and the knowledge they build – the population-level indicator of cognitive surrender, with direct implications for educational research, assessment governance, and AI policy.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Long-range nonstabilizerness of topologically encoded states from mutual information

arXiv:2605.22424v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study long-range nonstabilizerness (LRN), namely the obstruction to remove nonstabilizerness with shallow-depth local quantum circuits. In one-dimensional settings, the mutual information between disconnected spatial regions has proven to be a powerful tool to diagnose LRN. In this work, we focus on encoded states of two-dimensional topologically-ordered systems, and explore the ability of the mutual information to serve as a diagnostic of LRN. Focusing on the concrete setting of lattice models defined on a torus, we show that information about LRN can be gained from the analysis of the mutual information between non-overlapping regions containing non-contractible loops, and of the change of such mutual information under modular real-space transformations. We exemplify this idea in the toric code and the non-abelian string-net model with doubled Fibonacci topological order. In the former case, we show that the mutual information provides a full classification, certifying LRN for all encoded non-stabilizer states. In the latter case, instead, our approach does not lead to a full classification, as it detects LRN for all states except from a finite subset with special transformation properties under the modular group. Finally, we discuss how our results on LRN constrain the logical gates that can be implemented fault-tolerantly on the torus.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

MambaRaw: Selective State Space Modeling for Efficient 4K Raw Image Reconstruction

In-camera JPEG previews are ubiquitous in raw image formats and provide an sRGB reference at negligible storage cost. Although existing metadata-based reconstruction frameworks can exploit this side information when recovering raw images, their context models often become computationally expensive especially at high resolution, eg, 4K raw image, given that attention mechanisms scale quadratically with feature maps, hindering its practical application. To address these limitations, we propose MambaRaw, a JPEG-conditioned metadata-based raw image reconstruction framework that uses State Space Models (SSMs) to estimate entropy parameters efficiently. Our key contribution comprises a Spatial-Energy Coupled Context Modeling mechanism with two lightweight modules: (1) TileMambaBlock, which performs Mamba-style selective scanning only on information-dense tiles to improve the efficiency; and (2) Energy-Aware Refinement (EAR), an identity-initialized residual module that enhance feature representation to match the long-tail energy distribution of raw signals. Extensive experiments on three camera datasets (Sony, Olympus, Samsung) show consistent improvements over strong metadata-based baselines and set a new state of the art for JPEG-guided raw reconstruction with great efficiency. Notably, at low metadata bitrates, MambaRaw increases PSNR by 1.2–1.4 dB and reduces end-to-end coding latency by about 9%. Code is released at https://github.com/Peizeli1/MambaRaw.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Which Speech Representation Better Matches Text-Native Reasoning? A Study of Speech-Text Alignment on Frame Rate and Representation

Spoken dialogue models typically start from text LLM backbones, yet reasoning often degrades when conditioning on speech instead of text. We attribute part of this modality gap to a temporal-granularity mismatch: speech tokens are temporally redundant and far longer than text under matched semantics, diluting per-token semantic density and weakening text-native reasoning dynamics. We study speech token design as a representation selection problem and sweep frame rates under a frozen LLM backbone with a fixed information rate. To make low frame rates feasible, we introduce factorized FSQ and a lightweight non-autoregressive audio LM head, scaling capacity to nearly 300\,bits/frame without sacrificing efficient prediction. With the bottleneck removed, we sweep frame rates (50$\rightarrow$2.08\,Hz) and alignment depth, and observe a consistent best regime for speech QA at 4.17\,Hz with intermediate-layer representation alignment.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

PETRA: Transforming Web Text for Petroleum-Engineering Domain Adaptation

Petroleum-engineering search exposes a supervision gap for strong general retrievers: relevant evidence exists in public web text, but domain relevance labels are scarce. To address this gap, we propose PETRA, a large-scale Petroleum Engineering Text for Retrieval Adaptation dataset and pipeline that converts noisy public web data into a curated domain corpus and synthetic supervision for dense retrieval and reranking. PETRA contains 1.36M curated chunks, approximately 2B token equivalents, $\approx$859k, embedding training rows from $\approx$224k anchors, and roughly 400k teacher-scored reranker candidate rows. Its construction combines high-recall energy-domain curation, an energy-domain classifier with 98.4% test accuracy, chunk-grounded query generation, LLM-written hard negatives, and retrieval-mined candidate lists. PETRA improves first-stage in-domain Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG) from 0.703 to 0.763 through score fusion. Reranker adaptation improves the public Earth Science benchmark by 44% relative and a six-task reasoning-intensive panel by 23%. Failed training recipes show that high train-holdout accuracy on synthetic labels does not predict retrieval gains; retrieval-mined data helps only after being repackaged as teacher-scored candidate lists sampled from the inference-time candidate distribution.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

CaricHarmony: Contrastive Diffusion Paths for Identity-Preserving Caricature Synthesis

Sketch-based caricature synthesis suffers from a fundamental failure mode: when identity and shape conditions are combined in diffusion models, they create destructive interference that causes inevitable collapse toward either bland portraits or unrecognizable distortions. We identify the root cause as condition signal contamination – competing probability distributions in the denoising trajectory that make balanced generation impossible. We present CaricHarmony, the first training-free method that explicitly resolves this contamination through parallel uncontaminated diffusion paths. During inference, we maintain three paths: $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i}}$ (pure identity), $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{s}}$ (pure shape), and $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ (harmonized output). Novel energy functions operating on cross-attention features provide gradient guidance that steers $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ toward optimal balance: $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{shape}}$ ensures sketch fidelity through layout and semantic alignment, while $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{id}}$ employs token-level correspondence matching robust to extreme distortions. Unlike DemoCaricature requiring 70 seconds per-identity fine-tuning or CaricatureBooth constrained to Bezier curves, CaricHarmony accepts any sketch format and generates in under 16 seconds. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: 0.8615 shape CLIP score (vs. 0.8450) under comparable identity consistency score, with 7.81 overall user preference score (vs. 6.06). Our method fundamentally reconceptualizes the ID-shape conflict as conditioning signal contamination for diffusion models, enabling unprecedented creative control while preserving recognition.

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

Where's the Plan? Locating Latent Planning in Language Models with Lightweight Mechanistic Interventions

arXiv:2605.07984v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study planning site formation in language models – where internal representations of structurally-constrained future tokens form during the forward pass, and whether they causally drive generation. Using rhyming-couplet completion as a clean test of forward-looking constraint, we apply two lightweight methods (linear probing and activation patching) across Qwen3, Gemma-3, and Llama-3 at more than ten scales. Probing shows that future-rhyme information is linearly decodable at the line boundary, with signal that strengthens with scale in all three families. Activation patching reveals that only Gemma-3-27B causally relies on this encoding, exhibiting a handoff in which the causal driver migrates from the rhyme word to the line boundary around layer 30. Every other model we test conditions on the rhyme word throughout generation, with near-zero causal effect at the line boundary despite strong probe signal. We localize the Gemma-3-27B handoff to five attention heads through two-stage path patching that recover ~90% of the rhyme-routing capacity at the newline.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Differential DNA Methylation and Delirium After Anesthesia and Surgery

Background: DNA methylation is an epigenetic modification that regulates gene expression in response to environmental exposures. We measured differential DNA methylation levels in blood before after general anesthesia and surgery in participants with and without postoperative delirium (POD) and postoperative neurocognitive disorder (PNCD). Methods: Blood sampling, delirium assessment and cognitive testing were prospectively performed at baseline before non-cardiac, non-neurologic surgery, and at 24 hours (24h) and 6 weeks (6wk) thereafter in 94 participants comprising 13 with POD and 81 without POD, and 40 with PNCD and 54 without PNCD 6wk after surgery who were matched for age and sex in the INTUIT and MADCO cohorts. DNA methylation was assessed using the Illumina Infinium MethylationEPIC Beadchip. Results: 132 differentially methylated positions (DMPs) annotated to 198 differentially methylated genes (DMGs) were identified in 94 participants 24h after surgery compared to baseline with a local false discovery rate (LFDR)

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Signed Compression Progress on a Sealed Audit is Goodhart-Resistant

arXiv:2606.11417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compression progress is a long-standing proposal for intrinsic motivation: reward an agent when its world model becomes better at predicting or compressing experience. The folk claim is that this reward is "credible" because it is paid only for learning. We make this precise and prove it. If intrinsic reward is the signed decrease of a fixed sealed-audit loss, r_t = E(theta_{t-1}) - E(theta_t), then cumulative reward telescopes exactly to endpoint audit improvement, so no policy can push reward up indefinitely while true audit performance stagnates or degrades. For finite audit panels the same result holds with a sharp false-positive budget: cumulative empirical reward is at most true audit improvement plus 2 Delta_n(F, delta), the uniform audit deviation of the model class. This is horizon-free: adaptivity over time costs nothing once the sealed panel uniformly controls the class. The theorem also identifies the failure modes: the guarantee disappears if progress is clipped, scored on the agent's own stream, exposed to a high-capacity model on a reusable panel, or applied to a neural class that makes Delta_n vacuous. We give a Lean 4 mechanization of the structural core (telescoping, the finite-audit bound, finite Gibbs, and the entropy floor) and an experiment suite on ARC-TGI grid-transformation generators with adaptive holdout attacks. Experiments confirm the theory: finite-audit deviation scales as n^{-0.527}; signed progress resists clip-farming, stream leakage, and noisy-TV curiosity; naive reusable audits are exploitable by black-box scalar feedback, while standard release defenses keep the attack below the 2 Delta_n threshold. Signed compression progress on a sealed audit is an accounting signal of genuine improvement.

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

Caring Without Feeling: Affective Dynamics as the Control Layer of Human-AI Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2606.18259v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI agents that plan, retain memory across sessions, invoke external tools and act with partial autonomy are transforming human–AI collaboration. Research on affective computing, simulated empathy in large language models, trust in automation and AI safety has illuminated important design principles, yet these literatures remain fragmented. No integrated account explains how affective cues operate within agentic collaboration – settings in which humans delegate, monitor and correct consequential tasks. This Review synthesises computational and interactional mechanisms of affective dynamics: the processes through which affective cues, emotion-like behaviour and perceived agent affect shape trust calibration, delegation decisions, error correction, dependence and governance. We trace how model-generated affective signals enter interaction loops that govern reliance, repair and oversight, and propose a framework that treats affect not as an internal property of AI but as a coordination layer through which humans and agents negotiate capability, uncertainty and responsibility. The framework provides a foundation for calibrated measurement, purposeful design and informed governance.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Closest Accessible Symmetry reduction: a tool for Hamiltonian interpolation analysis

arXiv:2606.18161v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a framework for analysing the spectrum of Hamiltonian interpolations without heavily relying on discretising the interpolation parameter. The method is based on the concept of accessible symmetries: a problem-class-dependent family of certifiable reflections that induce bipartitions of the Hilbert space. At each step, the interpolation Hamiltonian is projected onto the sectors of the accessible symmetry that is closest to being satisfied, yielding a hierarchy of weakly coupled pseudo-eigenspaces together with explicit residual couplings between them. We show that this representation captures qualitative signatures of quantum phase transitions, provides estimates of their location, and offers insights into their nature. The quality of the approximation is controlled by the compatibility between the accessible symmetry family and the problem instance. Although motivated in spirit by adiabatic quantum computation, our approach applies more broadly to the study of Hamiltonian phase diagrams, providing a new perspective on the spectral reorganisation of many-body quantum systems.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

LESS Is More: Mutual-Stability Sampling for Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive decoding by iteratively refining masked sequences, enabling parallel token updates and bidirectional conditioning. Their practical efficiency, however, is limited by sampling procedures that execute a fixed number of reverse denoising steps selected before decoding, spending computation on already-stable positions and sometimes committing unstable ones too early. We present \textsc{LESS}, a training-free, model-agnostic adaptive sampler that treats token commitment as an online stopping problem. \textsc{LESS} implements mutual-stability sampling through a joint stability rule that makes a masked position eligible for unmasking only when its top-1 prediction has high confidence, its top-1 token persists across recent reverse steps, and its predictive distribution is stable under top-$K$ inter-step Jensen–Shannon divergence. We evaluate \textsc{LESS} on Dream-7B, LLaDA-8B, and LLaDA-1.5-8B, covering full-sequence diffusion and semi-autoregressive blockwise sampling regimes, across seven benchmarks spanning general knowledge, math, and code. \textsc{LESS} improves average accuracy over strong training-free adaptive samplers while using $72.1\%$ fewer reverse steps than fixed-budget decoding. Since each reverse step requires a Transformer forward pass, these step-count reductions translate into fewer forward evaluations, lower measured wall-clock latency, and lower estimated inference compute.

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

MMRINet: Efficient Mamba-Based Segmentation with Dual-Path Refinement for Low-Resource MRI Analysis

Automated brain tumor segmentation in multi-parametric MRI remains a critical yet underserved challenge in resource-constrained clinical settings, where deep 3D networks requiring high-end GPUs are not viable. This is particularly acute across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where low-field scanners, heterogeneous patient demographics, and severe data scarcity compound the difficulty of applying standard deep learning pipelines. We present MMRINet, a lightweight segmentation architecture purpose-built for these constraints. At its core, MMRINet replaces quadratic-complexity self-attention with linear-complexity Mamba state-space models, enabling efficient long-range volumetric context modeling without the computational overhead of Transformer-based approaches. We combine two lightweight refinement components:Dual-Path Feature Refinement (DPFR), which extracts complementary detail and contextual representations to improve feature diversity under limited data, and Progressive Feature Aggregation (PFA), which hierarchically fuses multi-scale decoder outputs for sharper segmentation boundaries. Evaluated on the BraTS-Lighthouse SSA 2025 challenge dataset, comprising 3D MRI scans from Nigerian clinical sites, MMRINet achieves an average Dice score of 0.752 and an average HD95 of 12.23 mm with only ~2.5M parameters, outperforming all evaluated baselines, including UNETR, Swin-UNETR, SegMamba, and SegResNet3D. These results indicate that strong validation-set segmentation performance can be achieved with substantially reduced computation, offering a practical step toward AI-assisted neuro-oncology in low-resource clinical environments. Our GitHub repository can be accessed here: BioMedIA-MBZUAI/MMRINet.

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

The Scaffold Effect: How Prompt Framing Drives Apparent Multimodal Gains in Clinical VLM Evaluation

arXiv:2603.28387v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trustworthy clinical AI requires that performance gains reflect genuine evidence integration rather than surface-level artifacts. We evaluate 12 open-weight vision-language models (VLMs) on binary classification across two clinical neuroimaging cohorts, \textsc{FOR2107} (affective disorders) and \textsc{OASIS-3} (cognitive decline). Both datasets come with structural MRI data that carries no reliable individual-level diagnostic signal. Under these conditions, smaller VLMs exhibit gains of up to 58\% F1 upon introduction of neuroimaging context, with distilled models becoming competitive with counterparts an order of magnitude larger. A contrastive confidence analysis reveals that merely mentioning MRI availability in the task prompt accounts for 70-80\% of this shift, independent of whether imaging data is present, a domain-specific instance of modality collapse we term the scaffold effect. Expert evaluation reveals fabrication of neuroimaging-grounded justifications across all conditions, and preference alignment, while eliminating MRI-referencing behavior, collapses both conditions toward random baseline. Our findings demonstrate that surface evaluations are inadequate indicators of multimodal reasoning, with direct implications for the deployment of VLMs in clinical settings.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Risk or Replace: Efficient Asymptotics for Data-Driven Maintenance

arXiv:2606.14706v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Condition-based maintenance (CBM) is an approach that plans interventions for deteriorating systems according to their observed operational state. CBM reduces unplanned downtime and extends usable lifetime. We study a heterogeneous population of components that degrade over time according to a stochastic processes with non-negative and i.i.d. increments that are characterized by component-specific parameters that remain unobservable to the decision maker. We rely on degradation data to estimate these parameters and determine replacement actions at equidistant epochs. The goal is to minimize the long-run average cost, which incorporates fixed replacement costs, failure costs, and operating costs. This problem can be formulated as a high-dimensional partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), which is generally intractable. We develop a tractable, data-driven CBM policy that estimates the optimal policy of a hypothetical Oracle that has full information of the underlying degradation parameters and call this policy the Estimated Oracle's Optimal Policy (EOP). We introduce a scaling regime where both the failure thresholds and cost parameters increase proportionally, reflecting practical settings in which component lifetimes and maintenance costs are large relative to the time between two consecutive CBM decision moments. We show that the regret of the EOP, defined as the difference between its long-run average cost and that of the Oracle, converges to zero in the scaling regime when the parameter estimator is consistent. Across extensive experiments using both real and simulated data, the EOP achieves very low regret and, whenever the optimal POMDP policy can be computed exactly, a negligible optimality gap.

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

CANDLE: Character-level Arabic Noise Deduplication using Lightweight Encoder

Handling repeated characters in text can be tricky, since they can represent either the correct spelling of a word or informal character elongation often seen in social media posts. We present CANDLE, a lightweight system for character-level Arabic noise deduplication that addresses this challenge without relying on handcrafted rules, dictionaries, or morphological analyzers. At the heart of CANDLE is a novel application of Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) to this task, a formulation not previously explored for character deduplication, which frames normalization as a sequence alignment problem over a character-based encoder. Evaluated on three benchmarks spanning clean newspaper, manually curated ambiguous cases, and real-world social media text, the CTC model achieves a Sentence Error Rate (SER) as low as $5.37\%$ and consistently outperforms a classification-based baseline by a large margin. To reduce inference overhead, we distill the 6-layer CTC model into a 2-layer student, achieving a $3\times$ depth reduction with minimal performance degradation. Beyond deduplication accuracy, normalization yields a practical downstream benefit: a relative reduction in tokenizer fertility of up to $12.8\%$ across a diverse set of Arabic LLM tokenizers, directly lowering inference costs and improving context window utilization. We release all code and models publicly to support reproducibility and advance future research\footnote{https://github.com/abjadai/candle}.

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

From Chatbot to Digital Colleague: The Paradigm Shift Toward Persistent Autonomous AI

arXiv:2606.14502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are undergoing a fundamental transformation from conversational generators into integrated AI systems capable of reasoning, action, memory, and self-improvement. We conceptualize this transition as a shift from Chatbot to Digital Colleague: from conversational answers to persistent work. We organize this transition along two tightly coupled dimensions. First, at the cognitive core level, LLMs are advancing from Chatbot-era "fast thinking" systems driven by next-token prediction toward Thinking LLMs that leverage inference-time computation, Chain-of-Thought reasoning, reflection, process supervision, and reinforcement learning to support more deliberate and reliable cognition. Second, at the tool-augmented task execution level, LLMs are progressing from tool-calling Agents that invoke external resources in an ad hoc manner toward OpenClaw-style workstation systems (OpenClaw) equipped with persistent Workspaces, skills, verification loops, and governance. The "Workspace + Skill" paradigm makes episodic tool use colleague-like via state persistence, reusable procedures, task closure, and experience reuse. We examine data construction shifts from instruction-response pairs to State-Action-Observation trajectories and evaluation from static benchmarks to sandboxed, auditable, self-evolving AI ecosystems.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Learning the Context of Errors: Black-Box Online Adaptation of Time Series Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.14222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid evolution of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) has advanced zero-shot forecasting across diverse domains. Inspired by the current form of Large Language Models, future TSFMs may be offered as commercialized, closed-source API services. However, many existing online adaptation methods still rely on white-box access for parameter fine-tuning or gradient backpropagation. This paradigm mismatch raises a question: In black-box online adaptation for TSFMs, what should we learn? We answer this with an insight: the predictive errors of the base model are conditioned on both the input and output of the base model (i.e., the context of errors). To validate this insight, we propose ORCA (Online Residual Contextual Adaptation). We conduct extensive experiments across 5 state-of-the-art TSFMs and 8 datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, through ablation studies, we quantitatively analyze the impact of different adapter learning hypotheses on the final adaptation performance in black-box online adaptation. Code available at https://github.com/Fifthky/ORCA.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A 5.3-million-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone

Whale falls are biodiversity oases at seabeds1–6, yet their record from the oceans has remained sparse and fragmentary6,7. Here we report the discovery of a vast whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone (4,616- to 7,001-m depth), extending about 1,200 km along the sea floor of the southeastern Indian Ocean. This area has a deep and extensive accumulation comprising five modern natural whale-fall communities and 476 fossil cetaceans recorded. We show that carcasses host specialized communities dominated by brittle stars, bone-boring worms and chemosynthesis-based bivalves and that the fossil record in this area comprises both extant and extinct deep-diving beaked whales. Isotopic dating shows that whale falls in this region have occurred since at least 5.3 million years ago. These findings reshape the understanding of the limits and biogeography of whale-fall ecosystems and establish some deep sea floors as a fossil archive for tracing cetacean evolution over geological time. Researchers uncovered an enormous deep-sea accumulation of whale remains in the southeastern Indian Ocean, showing long-term, specialized ecosystems and an extensive fossil record that offers new insight into deep-ocean biodiversity and whale evolutionary history.

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

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

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