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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum correlations in QBism's reconstruction program

arXiv:2606.07485v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: QBism recasts quantum theory as a normative framework for an agent's probability assignments, with the Born rule taking the form of a consistency condition known as the Urgleichung. Motivated by this perspective, qplex theories provide a broader class of probabilistic models in which the sets of valid states and measurements are constrained by QBist-inspired geometric conditions. While qplexes have been extensively studied for single systems, their implications for bipartite correlations remain largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate bipartite correlations in qplex theories by expressing joint expectation values as inner products between suitably defined $C$-vectors. This geometric formulation allows Bell-type inequalities to be studied as optimization problems over qplex-compatible probability assignments. We first analyze the CHSH scenario and show that the shared inner-product structure of the $C$-vectors restricts the maximal value to the Tsirelson bound $2\sqrt{2}$. We then turn to the three-outcome CGLMP inequality $I_{2233}$ and find that the same qplex-derived norm and inner-product constraints allow a violation of up to $\leq 2+2\sqrt(3)/3 \approx 3.1547$ versus the quantum maximum of $\approx 2.8729$, thereby exhibiting super-quantum correlations. These results show that qplex geometry captures enough structure to reproduce an important quantum bound in the two-outcome case, but not enough to recover the full set of quantum correlation constraints. The analysis therefore suggests that additional principles are needed to complete the QBist reconstruction of quantum theory.

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

Optimal Order of Multi-Agent and General Many-Body Systems

作者:

arXiv:2606.20485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a general framework for analyzing multi-agent systems with feedback loops between agents actions and collective observations. The framework is built on two fundamental agent-level variables: power, which measures agent influence on collective outcomes, and response functions, which determine how agents react to observations. We derive how macroscopic properties, including total power, useful power, entropy, order, fragility, and mobility, emerge from these two variables of heterogeneous agents. To study the trade off between growth and resilience, we introduce a system-level utility function parameterized by a risk-appetite coefficient and derive an optimal degree of order that balances productivity, stability, and adaptability. The analysis suggests that stronger synchronization can increase collective output but may also increase systemic fragility and reduce mobility. We further argue that order, entropy, information, and useful energy are task-dependent and system-relative concepts whose meanings depend on the objectives of the system. By measuring and designing agent power distributions and response functions, it may be possible to better understand, predict, and optimize collective behavior and identify the conditions under which collective intelligence and optimal order emerge.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

A New Definition of Quantum Superposition

arXiv:2606.15607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The usual description of the superposition of two (pure quantum) states is ambiguous, since the binary operation of summation in a Hilbert space does not pass down to the quotient projective space. Even though Dirac noted this as early as 1930, it is often asserted that the superposition is a binary operation acting on two states with a value that is a unique state. The goal for this note is to motivate a rigorous, geometrical definition of the superposition of states in the setting of complex projective space, which has been argued elsewhere to be the natural geometric phase space for quantum theory. The upshot is that the new definition of the superposition of two pure states, viewed as two distinct points in the projective space, is the unique (complex) line on which those two points lie. Finally, a comparison is given between superposition and expansion in an orthonormal basis.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Encoding parameters by measurement: Forgetting can be better in quantum metrology

arXiv:2512.10541v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce quantum parameter estimation with the encoding being via a quantum measurement. We quantify the precision for estimating parameters characterizing a general two-outcome qubit measurement, considering two cases: when the outcomes of the encoding measurement are recorded and when the same are ignored. We find that in a large variety of such estimation scenarios, forgetting the outcomes yields higher precision. We derive a necessary criterion under which remembering the measurement outcomes provides better precision in comparison to the outcome-forgotten strategy. Furthermore, we establish a necessary and sufficient criterion for the simultaneous estimation of multiple parameters encoded by an arbitrary quantum process, including those involving measurements, using qubit probes, and find when the quantum Cramér$-$Rao bound is valid and achievable. For simultaneous estimation of two parameters characterizing the measurement, we find that the achievable quantum Cramér$-$Rao bound can be a valid precision bound only when the measurement direction depends on the parameters of interest.

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

Probabilistic Contrastive Pretraining for Multi-task ADME Property Prediction

arXiv:2606.11508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) properties is critical to drug discovery, but remains challenging because ADME endpoints are noisy, interdependent, and often data-limited. We propose a molecular graph-transformer pretraining framework that combines chemistry-specific self-supervision with contrastive mutual information machine learning (cMIM). Our method encodes molecular graphs into latent variables, reconstructs SMILES strings from the graph-derived latent codes, and augments the contrastive objective with domain-specific self-supervised chemistry tasks. Rather than treating these tasks as auxiliary regularizers with separately tuned loss weights, we formulate reconstruction, contrastive discrimination, and chemistry-specific supervision as unit-weighted log-probability factors in a single probabilistic latent-variable objective. For fine-tuning, we propose a multi-task GNN readout architecture with task-specific multilayer perceptron heads, preserving shared representation learning while mitigating negative transfer and improving the modeling of heterogeneous, nonlinear task relationships. Across Biogen, ExpansionRX, and ChEMBL-MT, the resulting Contrastive KERMT pretraining improves over the KERMT baseline by 7.6%, 9.9%, and 9.5% respectively (averaged over significantly-improved endpoints). Adding ADME-adjacent molecules to the pretraining corpus further improves transfer, and the contrastive component sharpens chemically meaningful latent neighborhoods.

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

DoubtProbe: Black-Box Jailbreak Defense via Structural Verification and Semantic Auditing

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing systems, black-box jailbreak defense has become an important practical problem. Existing defenses often rely on known-attack coverage, prompt-level semantic judgment, or local runtime control, yet these paths can become unstable under evolving prompt packaging, expression rewriting, and structure manipulation. We observe that many black-box jailbreaks do not remove the harmful goal, but reorganize the information needed to express and execute it, thereby evading safety alignment while remaining recoverable during generation. Motivated by this observation, we propose DoubtProbe, a dual-branch inference-time defense framework that combines structural verification with semantic auditing and formulates black-box jailbreak defense as consistency checking under controlled transformation. The structural branch extracts a structured representation from the original request, reconstructs the request under representation constraints, and detects information-preservation failures between the original and reconstructed requests; the semantic branch audits the original prompt directly. We evaluate DoubtProbe against representative black-box defenses on jailbreak and benign-request benchmarks, and further test backbone transfer from Qwen2.5-72B to Llama-3.1-70B. Results show that DoubtProbe achieves a stronger and more stable defense-utility trade-off: on Qwen2.5-72B, it reduces the JBB attack success rate from 0.293 to 0.100 and the CodeAttack attack success rate from 0.152 to 0.001, while maintaining false positive rates of 0.022 and 0.016 on AlpacaEval and OR-Bench; the same pattern remains stable on Llama-3.1-70B. These findings show that structural inconsistency signals provide a practical and generalizable basis for black-box jailbreak defense, especially when combined with semantic auditing.

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

Virtual Speech Therapist: A Clinician-in-the-Loop AI Speech Therapy Agent for Personalized and Supervised Therapy

This paper develops Virtual Speech Therapist (VST), an intelligent agent-based platform that streamlines stuttering assessment and delivers customized therapy planning through automated and adaptive AI-driven workflows. VST integrates state-of-the-art deep learning-based stuttering classification, and multi-agent large language model (LLM) reasoning to support evidence-based clinical decision-making. The VST begins with the acquisition and feature extraction of patient speech samples, followed by robust classification of stuttering types. Building on these outputs, VST initiates an agentic reasoning process in which specialized LLM agents autonomously generate, critique, and iteratively refine individualized therapy plans. A dedicated critic agent evaluates all generated therapy plans to ensure clinical safety, methodological soundness, and alignment with peer-reviewed evidence and established professional guidelines. The resulting output is a comprehensive, patient-specific therapy draft intended for clinician review. Incorporating clinician feedback, the system then produces a finalized therapy plan suitable for patient delivery, thereby maintaining a clinician-in-the-loop paradigm. Experimental evaluation by expert speech therapists confirms that VST consistently generates high-quality, evidence-based therapy recommendations. These findings demonstrate the system's potential to augment clinical workflows, reduce clinician burden, and improve therapeutic outcomes for individuals with speech impairments. An interactive user interface for the proposed system is available online at: https://vocametrix.com/ai/stuttering-therapy-planning-agent , facilitating real-time stuttering assessment and personalized therapy planning.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Conversational Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Precision Oncology Reveals Context-Specific TGFβ and JAK/STAT Alterations in Pancreatic Cancer

Background: Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is characterized by extensive molecular complexity, profound stromal remodeling, and limited responsiveness to systemic therapies. Although gemcitabine-based regimens remain widely utilized, the molecular pathways that influence treatment-associated biological variation are incompletely understood. The TGF{beta} and JAK/STAT signaling networks are recognized regulators of tumor progression, immune modulation, and therapeutic resistance; however, their genomic architecture in clinically stratified PDAC populations remains poorly defined. Methods: We employed a conversational artificial intelligence-driven analytical framework to investigate TGF{beta} and JAK/STAT pathway alterations in a cohort of 184 PDAC patients. Clinical and molecular data were integrated to generate age- and treatment-stratified cohorts, enabling pathway-level and gene-level analyses according to gemcitabine exposure. Findings generated through AI-assisted interrogation were subsequently evaluated using conventional statistical approaches. Results: TGF{beta} pathway alterations were identified in approximately one-quarter to one-third of tumors across clinical subgroups and demonstrated relatively stable frequencies regardless of age at diagnosis or gemcitabine treatment status. Gene-level analyses revealed that pathway disruption was predominantly driven by recurrent alterations in SMAD4, with additional low-frequency events involving TGFBR1 and TGFBR2. Notably, TGFBR2 mutations were significantly more frequent among late-onset PDAC patients receiving gemcitabine compared with untreated late-onset patients (8.8% vs. 1.4%; p = 0.04), suggesting a potential treatment-associated enrichment. In contrast, JAK/STAT pathway alterations were rare throughout the cohort, with only isolated mutations observed in pathway components including JAK1, JAK2, JAK3, STAT1, STAT3, and related regulatory genes. No significant differences in JAK/STAT alteration frequencies were identified according to age or treatment exposure. Conclusions: TGF{beta} and JAK/STAT pathways exhibit distinct genomic architectures in PDAC. TGF{beta} pathway disruption represents a recurrent feature of disease biology, largely driven by SMAD4 alterations, while TGFBR2 enrichment in gemcitabine-treated late-onset tumors suggests a potential context-specific association worthy of further investigation. Conversely, genomic alterations within the JAK/STAT pathway are uncommon, indicating that pathway activity may be regulated predominantly through non-genomic mechanisms. These findings demonstrate the utility of conversational artificial intelligence agents for rapid, scalable, and clinically contextualized pathway interrogation and support future studies integrating multi-omic data to refine precision medicine strategies in PDAC.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

QualiaNet: An Experience-Before-Inference Network

作者:

Human 3D vision involves two distinct stages: an Experience Module, where stereo depth is extracted relative to fixation, and an Inference Module, where this experience is interpreted to estimate 3D scene properties. Paradoxically, although stereo vision does not provide us with absolute distance information, it nonetheless affects our inferences about distance. We propose the Inference Module exploits a natural scene statistic: near scenes produce vivid disparity gradients, while far scenes appear comparatively flat. QualiaNet implements this two-stage architecture computationally: disparity maps simulating human stereo experience are passed to a CNN trained to estimate distance. The network can recover distance from disparity gradients alone, validating this approach.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A Compositional Framework for Open-ended Intelligence

arXiv:2606.15386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended intelligence is the capacity to adapt to novel problems and environments that are substantially different from those in training. We formalize open-ended intelligence as the closure induced by a finite primitive set \(P\) and a set of composition operators \(C\). We characterize properties of the induced closure \(\mathcal{L}(P,C)\) that support unbounded compositional generation across families of tasks and worlds. A mathematics of open-ended intelligence requires two pillars: a minimal set of representational primitives (e.g., states, actions) and algorithmic primitives (e.g., nearest neighbor), together with composition motifs (e.g., recursion, sequencing) that reflect an acquired compositional grammar. The closure of these two pillars enables the generation of infinite adaptive responses across a wide range of settings. The mathematics supports complementary research agendas, including evaluation metrics for explanation and interpretability, as well as building architectures where compositional generalization is native. We propose next primitive prediction as a novel architectural objective, where the training objective encourages the acquisition of reusable algorithmic primitives and their compositional grammar, such that new solutions are generated through recombination. Curriculum learning and self-play enable lifelong learning and expansion of the closure by discovering reusable primitives and transition motifs across families of tasks and worlds. We ground the framework through case studies in physics, evolution, and neuroscience.

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

Quantile-Free Uncertainty Quantification in Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.04847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in graph neural networks (GNNs) is crucial in high-stakes domains but remains a significant challenge. In graph settings, message passing often relies on strong assumptions such as exchangeability, which are rarely satisfied in practice, and achieving reliable UQ typically requires costly resampling or post-hoc calibration. To address these issues, we introduce Quantile-free Prediction Interval GNN (QpiGNN), a framework that builds on quantile regression (QR) to enable GNN-based UQ by directly optimizing coverage and interval width without requiring quantile inputs or post-processing. QpiGNN employs a dual-head architecture that decouples prediction and uncertainty, and is trained with label-only supervision through a quantile-free joint loss. This design allows efficient training and yields robust prediction intervals, with theoretical guarantees of asymptotic coverage and near-optimal width under mild assumptions. Experiments on 19 synthetic and real-world benchmarks show QpiGNN achieves average 22% higher coverage and 50% narrower intervals than baselines, while ensuring efficiency and robustness to noise and structural shifts.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Law of the Iterated Logarithm for $p$-Walks on $\mathbb{Z}$

作者:

arXiv:2606.19131v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The $p$-rotor walk on $\mathbb{Z}$ is a self-interacting walk that interpolates between the simple random walk and the deterministic rotor walk. While the weak convergence of this model to a perturbed Brownian motion is known, its almost sure asymptotic boundaries have not been characterized. In this paper, we establish the exact Law of the Iterated Logarithm (LIL) for the $p$-rotor walk. Utilizing the decomposition of the walk into a martingale perturbed by its running extrema, we obtain first a functional Law of the Iterated Logarithm for the linearly interpolated paths of the $p$-walk. We then obtain the classical LIL constants by solving a calculus of variations problem over the perturbed Strassen set.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Decoding Hidden Deception in Reasoning LLMs: Activation Explainers for Deception Auditing

As LLMs acquire stronger reasoning capabilities, deceptive behavior becomes an increasingly serious safety concern. Existing deception monitors either score visible transcripts or derive scalar probe scores from representation vectors, leaving little inspectable evidence about why a response is suspicious. We introduce STATEWITNESS, an activation explainer for deception auditing. A separate decoder reads a target model's hidden states, then answers natural-language queries or emits structured reports about them. We evaluate STATEWITNESS on two target reasoning LLMs across seven deception datasets. STATEWITNESS reaches 0.916 mean AUROC, a relative gain of 11.6% over the best black-box text monitor and 25.0% over the best activation-probe baseline under the same evaluation protocol. When combined with existing monitors, STATEWITNESS reduces missed deceptive examples in simple threshold ensembles. Beyond scalar detection, the decoder returns query-level answers, schema reports, and token- or sentence-level evidence traces for human inspection. We view this interface as a potential building block for broader interpretability and alignment tools.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

UoU: A Universal Fingerprint Foundation Model Based on Large-Scale Unsupervised Learning

Fingerprint recognition is still dominated by task-specific pipelines, where enhancement, structural parsing, alignment, and matching are optimized in isolation. Although effective in narrow settings, this design limits representation reuse across sensors, qualities, and downstream applications. We therefore present UoU, short for ``a Universal fingerprint foundation model based on large-scale Unsupervised learning,'' which reframes fingerprint feature extraction as a domain-specific foundation-model problem. UoU is organized around a multi-level representation hierarchy spanning image restoration, structural fields, semantic tokens, point-level biometric entities, and compact global descriptors. Its training recipe combines a supervised cold start on precise annotations, large-scale weakly supervised refinement, and large-scale unsupervised consolidation, with the latter two stages iterated during large-scale training so that weak supervision broadens semantic coverage while unsupervised learning stabilizes correspondences, invariances, and representation geometry. Rather than treating fingerprint imagery as generic texture, UoU exploits domain-specific symmetries and intermediate structure, including orientation flow, periodic ridge patterns, sparse biometric entities, and spatial equivariance. The framework is intentionally architecture-agnostic: while the present study includes an initial transformer-based structured-prediction instantiation, the broader design supports multi-task learning, scalable model configurations, and downstream specialization for matching, alignment, enhancement, registration, and related fingerprint applications. This paper presents the technical motivation, system design, and validation protocol of UoU, and part of the baseline implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/XiongjunGuan/UoU.

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

Polar: A Benchmark for Evaluating Political Bias in LLMs

Political bias in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly significant, but difficult to measure reproducibly across political and linguistic contexts. We introduce Polar, a 4,026-instance multiple-choice benchmark that measures political bias through option-level likelihoods rather than prompt-based generation. Polar covers two ideological axes and eight issue categories derived from the Manifesto Project, and evaluates models in parallel across U.S. and South Korean political contexts. Across 38 LLMs, measured bias varies systematically with political context, issue category, model group, and presentation language. All models lean left-progressive on U.S. political content, but show more centered and mixed patterns on South Korean content. Translation experiments further show that presentation language alone can shift measured bias. These findings highlight the need for multilingual and cross-contextual evaluation of political bias in LLMs.

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

BioDivergence: A Benchmark and Evaluation Framework for Hidden Contextual Contradictions in Biomedical Abstracts

Biomedical findings often seem to conflict across studies, but many of these differences are context-dependent rather than true contradictions. Variations in cohort, geography, assay protocol, disease subtype, and clinical setting can make both claims locally valid. Existing NLI and scientific claim-verification benchmarks reduce such cases to entailment, contradiction, or neutral, failing to capture the contextual structure behind divergence. To address this, we introduce BioDivergence, an evaluation framework with a six-class conflict taxonomy, a 13-axis divergence ontology, and four structured outputs per claim pair: conflict type, divergence axes, dominant confounder, and reconciliation explanation. We release BioDivergence-Silver-v1.0, an article-disjoint silver benchmark of 11,865 claim pairs across five biomedical domains, alongside a legacy deduplicated variant for comparison. Results show notable ranking differences between the two variants, with the fine-tuned reference model dropping about 12 points under the article-disjoint setting, while Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 achieves 0.5523 accuracy and 0.3894 contextual-F1 on the 842-example primary test set. BioDivergence offers a more faithful way to distinguish contextual divergence from direct contradiction and to separate article-level memorization from genuine task learning.

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

Graph-based Target Back-Propagation for Context Adaptation in Multi-LLM Agentic Systems

Context adaptation automates prompt engineering in LLM-based systems by iteratively revising tunable prompts from task feedback, without modifying model weights. Extending this paradigm to multi-LLM agentic systems is crucial: existing methods suffer from inaccurate credit assignment and lack convergence guarantees. We propose Graph-based Target Back-Propagation (GTBP), a context adaptation framework for agentic workflows modeled as directed acyclic graphs. GTBP propagates local target outputs backward through the workflow graph and uses target–output discrepancies to guide a stage-wise prompt update mechanism. Theoretically, we show that GTBP's stage-wise prompt updates become stable over iterations, and that a sufficiently capable LLM optimizer can decrease the overall objective. Empirically, GTBP consistently outperforms strong baselines across three benchmarks while maintaining comparable computational cost.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Calibrated Uncertainty Quantification for Patient-Level AML Drug Sensitivity Prediction Using Split Conformal Prediction

Accurate prediction of ex vivo drug sensitivity in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients from transcriptomic data is a critical challenge for precision oncology. Existing computational approaches have explored uncertainty quantification in cancer drug response prediction primarily using cell line data, while patient-level AML models typically rely on heuristic confidence measures rather than statistically calibrated uncertainty estimates. Here, we present a framework applying split conformal prediction to patient-level AML drug response modeling using the BeatAML 2.0 cohort. We trained Elastic Net and XGBoost regressors on bulk RNA-seq gene expression profiles from 318 AML patients, analyzing 34,764 patient-drug observations across 122 compounds. Baseline models achieved median Pearson R values of 0.291 (Elastic Net) and 0.281 (XGBoost) across 122 drugs. Wrapping these models with split conformal prediction yielded well-calibrated prediction intervals across three confidence levels: empirical coverages of 81.4%, 90.7%, and 95.5% against nominal targets of 80%, 90%, and 95%, respectively. Analysis of prediction interval widths revealed substantial drug-class-specific uncertainty patterns, with HDAC and BCL-2 inhibitors exhibiting markedly higher uncertainty than MDM2 inhibitors, suggesting a potential association between transcriptomic predictability and drug mechanism of action, although several drug classes were represented by only a small number of compounds. Predictive uncertainty was not significantly associated with ELN2017 molecular risk classification (Kruskal-Wallis p=0.395) or NPM1 mutation status (p=0.788). These results demonstrate that statistically valid uncertainty quantification can be achieved for patient-level AML drug response prediction despite substantial biological heterogeneity. to the best of our knowledge, no published study has applied split conformal prediction to patient-level ex vivo drug sensitivity prediction in the BeatAML cohort, providing a principled alternative to heuristic confidence scoring approaches. Keywords: Acute myeloid leukemia (AML); Ex vivo drug sensitivity; Conformal prediction; Uncertainty quantification; Precision oncology; BeatAML; Transcriptomic biomarkers; Machine learning.

19.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Ten simple rules for making the supplement increase your paper’s impact

作者:

by Volker Grimm, Uta Berger, Stefano Mammola Have you ever lost hours navigating supplementary materials—clicking between the main text and dozens of auxiliary files only to encounter broken links, illegible figures, and undefined variables and acronyms? If so, you’re not alone. What should support scientific communication has instead become an obstacle: supplementary information (SI) increasingly suffers from inconsistent formatting, poor accessibility, and fragmented organization that impedes rather than advances understanding. This is disheartening since the SI, if used effectively, has the power to enhance transparency, credibility, and reproducibility of research. Therefore, we propose 10 simple rules to help authors design SI that genuinely increase the impact of their research. The rules emphasize treating SI with the same care as the main text, using it strategically to support the scientific narrative while preserving clarity and focus. Key recommendations include creating a single, well-structured, self-contained SI master document; ensuring explicit cross-referencing between the main text and SI; making SI machine-readable; and avoiding the misuse of SI as a substitute for proper data repositories. We also highlight the importance of creativity in choosing appropriate formats and strict adherence to journal-specific guidelines. Finally, when available, we advocate the use of standardized templates to improve consistency, readability, and reuse across studies. By following these rules, authors can substantially increase the scientific impact of their work while at the same time contributing to more sustainable research practices.

20.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

pyhgf: A neural network library for predictive coding

by Nicolas Legrand, Lilian Weber, Peter Thestrup Waade, Anna Hedvig Møller Daugaard, Mojtaba Khodadadi, Nace Mikuš, Christoph Mathys Bayesian models of cognition have gained considerable traction in computational neuroscience and psychiatry. Their scopes are now expected to expand rapidly to artificial intelligence, providing general inference frameworks to support embodied, adaptable, and energy-efficient autonomous agents. A central theory in this domain is predictive coding, which posits that learning and behaviour are driven by hierarchical probabilistic inferences about the causes of sensory inputs. Biological realism constrains these networks to rely on simple local computations in the form of precision-weighted predictions and prediction errors. This can make this framework highly efficient, but its implementation comes with unique challenges on the software development side. Embedding such models in standard neural network libraries often becomes limiting, as these libraries’ compilation and differentiation backends can force a conceptual separation between optimization algorithms and the systems being optimized. This critically departs from other biological principles such as self-monitoring, self-organisation, cellular growth, and functional plasticity. In this paper, we introduce pyhgf: a Python package backed by JAX and Rust for creating, manipulating, and sampling dynamic networks for predictive coding. We improve over other frameworks by enclosing the network components as transparent, modular, and malleable variables in the message-passing steps. The resulting graphs can implement arbitrary algorithms as belief propagation. Moreover, the transparency of core variables can also translate into inference processes that leverage self-organisation principles and express structure learning, meta-learning, or causal discovery as the consequence of network structural adaptation to surprising inputs. The main functions of the library are differentiable and seamlessly integrate into sampling or optimization workflows. Additionally, we offer generalized Bayesian filtering and the hierarchical Gaussian filter as key examples of dynamic networks implemented in our library. The source code, tutorials, and documentation are hosted under the main repository at https://github.com/ComputationalPsychiatry/pyhgf.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

When Generic Prompt Improvements Hurt: Evaluation-Driven Iteration for LLM Applications

Evaluating Large Language Model (LLM) applications differs from conventional software testing because outputs are probabilistic, semantically variable, and sensitive to prompt and model changes. This technical report proposes the Minimum Viable Evaluation Suite (MVES), an audit-oriented structure for application-level LLM evaluation. MVES links application categories to failure modes, metrics, required artifacts, and validation evidence across general LLM applications, retrieval-augmented systems, and agentic workflows. We pair the framework with a reproducible local evaluation harness covering structured extraction, RAG citation/content-compliance, and instruction-following checks. Using Ollama with Llama 3 8B Instruct and Qwen 2.5 7B Instruct, we evaluate five prompt conditions over expanded 30-case-per-suite ablations. The results show that, in the tested local conditions, generic prompt additions do not produce monotonic improvements: stronger output-contract prompts improve strict extraction for both models, while RAG citation/content-compliance declines under some generic-rule conditions. The largest observed decline occurs for Qwen 2.5 on RAG when generic rules are appended to the user prompt, from 26/30 to 9/30. These findings support evaluation-driven prompt iteration: prompt changes should be treated as potential regression risks and tested against task-specific suites before deployment. The accompanying repository contains the test suites, prompt variants, evaluation harness, raw result logs, and scripts needed to reproduce the reported local ablations.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SpecAlign: Efficient Specification-Grounded Alignment of Large Language Models via Synthetic Data

arXiv:2606.16276v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, alignment is no longer governed by a single universal notion of safety or helpfulness, but instead by provider- or application-specific model specifications. These specifications are typically long, structured, and frequently updated, yet existing alignment pipelines lack a systematic mechanism to operationalize them as training signals. In this paper, we propose specification-grounded alignment, a new alignment paradigm that treats provider-authored model specifications as the primary alignment target rather than abstract principles or static benchmarks. To instantiate this paradigm, we introduce SpecAlign, a framework that synthesizes alignment data directly from specification documents. SpecAlign combines structured rule annotation, controllable specification instantiation, and multi-agent adversarial data synthesis to generate fine-grained, boundary-aware preference pairs that capture both compliant behaviors and meaningful specification violations. Experiments across multiple model specifications and backbone models demonstrate that training with SpecAlign consistently improves rule compliance while preserving general capabilities and avoiding over-conservative behavior. These results suggest that grounding alignment in explicit model specifications enables rapid, precise, and scalable adaptation of LLM behavior to evolving policy requirements.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

When to Align, When to Predict: A Phase Diagram for Multimodal Learning

arXiv:2606.11190v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cross-modal alignment (CA) and cross-modal prediction (CP) are the dominant paradigms for multimodal representation learning, yet there is no systematic understanding of when each succeeds, when each fails, and when cross-modal training helps at all – a gap that leaves practitioners, especially in scientific domains like biomedicine or astrophysics, with heterogeneous instruments and multiple levels of organization and measurement, unable to diagnose why standard methods underperform the best single modality. We develop a unified linear framework that addresses both questions. Under a spiked signal-plus-noise model with structured cross-modal nuisance correlation, we derive separation ratios for both objectives that expose complementary failure modes: alignment whitens each modality and fails when nuisance is strongly correlated across views; prediction encodes whatever is cross-predictable through a one-sided whitening, with recovery governed by source-modality quality. The resulting phase diagram partitions multimodal problems into four regimes: Both, CA only, CP only, and Neither. We present a data-driven procedure to locate real-world datasets in this diagram using a small labeled subsample, identifying the preferred objective and prediction direction before any cross-modal training. Experiments on synthetic data, stereo-vision benchmarks, image-caption pairs, and real astrophysical data validate the predictions in the nonlinear regime, including the Neither regime where cross-modal training is actively harmful. Our framework lets practitioners diagnose their multimodal problem and choose the right objective before committing to training. Code to reproduce the results is available at https://github.com/IlayMalinyak/mm_align_vs_pred.

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

TINNs: Time-Induced Neural Networks for Solving Time-Dependent PDEs

arXiv:2601.20361v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) solve time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) by learning a mesh-free, differentiable solution that can be evaluated anywhere in space and time. However, standard space-time PINNs take time as an input but reuse a single network with shared weights across all times, forcing the same features to represent markedly different dynamics. This coupling degrades error performance and can destabilize training when enforcing PDE, boundary, and initial constraints jointly. We propose Time-Induced Neural Networks (TINNs), a novel architecture that parameterizes the network weights as a learned function of time, allowing the effective spatial representation to evolve over time while maintaining shared structure. The resulting formulation naturally yields a nonlinear least-squares problem, which we optimize efficiently using a Levenberg-Marquardt method. Experiments on various time-dependent PDEs show up to 4 times improved relative error and 10 times faster convergence compared to PINNs and strong baselines.

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

Contour-Constrained Deformable Registration with Parameter Characterization for Head and Neck Surgical Guidance

With 890,000 annual new cases globally, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma has one of the highest recurrence rates among solid malignancies. Although frozen section analysis is the standard of care for intraoperative margin assessment, accurately relocating detected positive margins on the resection bed remains challenging due to imprecise alignment between resected specimens and their resection bed, compounded by post-resection mucosal tissue shrinkage. We present a biomechanics-driven deformable registration framework that corrects post-resection tissue deformation to provide intraoperative guidance. Our approach registers 3D specimen meshes to intraoperative resection bed point clouds using a deformable registration approach based on regularized Kelvinlet basis functions. The registration matches surface point clouds, fiducial landmarks, and boundary contour constraints that directly penalize perpendicular distance-to-agreement between specimen and resection bed boundaries. Across nine specimens from skin, buccal mucosa, and tongue sites, the overall mean target registration error was $11.11 \pm 4.07$ mm using rigid registration, which decreased to $8.20 \pm 2.68$ mm (26.19\% reduction) using deformable registration without contour constraint. The proposed contour-constrained deformable registration further reduced the error to $5.62 \pm 2.28$ mm, a 49.41\% reduction relative to rigid registration. We observed the largest reduction in the most clinically challenging tongue specimens. We also performed a systematic two-stage parameter search to characterize the relative importance of surface alignment, fiducial correspondences, contour constraint, and strain energy regularization. This search revealed that contour weighting dominates registration accuracy for tissue types with large lateral deformation, while the algorithm operates over a broad range of parameter combinations.