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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Optimizing Health Coverage in Ethiopia: A Learning-augmented Approach and Persistent Proportionality Under an Online Budget

arXiv:2509.00135v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As part of nationwide efforts aligned with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 3 on Universal Health Coverage, Ethiopia's Ministry of Health is strengthening health posts to expand access to essential healthcare services. However, only a fraction of this health system strengthening effort can be implemented each year due to limited budgets and other competing priorities, thus the need for an optimization framework to guide prioritization across the regions of Ethiopia. In this paper, we develop a tool, Health Access Resource Planner (HARP), based on a principled decision-support optimization framework for sequential facility planning that aims to maximize population coverage under budget uncertainty while satisfying region-specific proportionality targets at every time step. We then propose two algorithms: (i) a learning-augmented approach that improves upon expert recommendations at any single-step; and (ii) a greedy algorithm for multi-step planning, both with strong worst-case approximation estimation. In collaboration with the Ethiopian Public Health Institute and Ministry of Health, we demonstrated the empirical efficacy of our method on three regions across various planning scenarios.

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

Reinforcement Learning for LLM-based Event Forecasting

arXiv:2606.15917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We use Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a recently devised sample and memory efficient reinforcement learning method, to finetune pretrained LLMs in the range of 1.5B to 14B parameters equipped with the ability to get current information through the use of a Wikipedia revisions tool, or news summaries, to forecast real events beyond the knowledge cutoff of the LLM, as well as problems made to simulate different aspects of the dynamics of that training. We use the results of these experiments to comment on the scaling capability of LLMs for forecasting, as well as classify how judgmental forecasting fits into the verifiable/unverifiable domain taxonomy, considering the impact of the inherent aleatoric uncertainty when forecasting future events (e.g. the roll of a die). As a result of the GRPO training, we manage to bring a 1.5B parameter transformer (Qwen 2.5 1.5B) to forecasting performance superior to Claude Sonnet 3.5 over the same dataset as measured by cross entropy from the market agreed probabilities. We also discuss various dead ends on the path to this result.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

From Construction to Injection: Edit-Based Fingerprints for Large Language Models

Reliable model fingerprints are essential for protecting large language models (LLMs) against unauthorized redistribution and commercial misuse. In black-box deployment, verification is hindered by defensive filtering of suspected fingerprint queries, as well as by downstream model modifications that may weaken embedded ownership evidence. These risks require fingerprints to be robust in both construction and injection. For construction, prior paradigms face an imperceptibility trade-off: natural-language fingerprints may be accidentally activated, whereas garbled fingerprints are statistically exposed and easier to filter. For injection, existing methods struggle to preserve persistent trigger–target behaviors under model modification. We propose an end-to-end injected fingerprinting framework to address these challenges. Code-mixing Fingerprints (CF) use lowest-perplexity code-mixing under a high-complexity constraint to mitigate this two-sided imperceptibility trade-off. Multi-Candidate Editing (MCEdit) constructs structurally redundant, margin-separated trigger–target mappings to enable graceful degradation under model modification. Extensive evaluations on imperceptibility, detectability, and harmlessness demonstrate robust ownership verification with negligible impact on utility.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Comparing Linear Probes with Mahalanobis Cosine Similarity

arXiv:2606.19603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linear probes are widely used in interpretability research and often compared by cosine similarity. The Mahalanobis cosine similarity (MCS) between two directions, which reweights the inner product by test data covariance, is a natural task-aware refinement. Ying et al. (2026) report that a probe's MCS to a reference probe trained on the out-of-distribution (OOD) data near-perfectly linearly predicts the probe's OOD AUROC (R^2 = 0.98). Here, we extend this empirical finding across models, layers, and concept domains, and prove this general phenomenon in closed form: For balanced classes whose projections are Gaussian, OOD AUROC and MCS to the reference probe are linear because both are sigmoid-shaped functions of the probe's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the test data. The theory also predicts when this linearity fails, which we verify empirically. MCS offers a theoretically grounded and empirically effective alternative to Euclidean cosine similarity for comparing linear probes.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

IsabeLLM: Automated Theorem Proving Applied to Formally Verifying Consensus

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

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

Single-Round Clustered Federated Learning via Data Collaboration Analysis for Non-IID Data

arXiv:2601.09304v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables distributed learning across multiple clients without sharing raw data. When statistical heterogeneity across clients is severe, Clustered Federated Learning (CFL) can im-prove performance by grouping similar clients and training cluster-wise models. However, most CFL approaches rely on multiple communication rounds for cluster estimation and model updates, which limits their practicality under tight constraints on communication rounds. We propose Data Collaboration-based Clustered Federated Learning (DC-CFL), a single-round framework that completes both client clustering and cluster-wise learning, using only the information shared in DC analysis. DC-CFL quantifies inter-client similarity via total variation distance between label distributions, estimates clusters using hierarchical clustering, and performs cluster-wise learning via DC analysis. Experiments on multiple open datasets under representative non-IID conditions show that DC-CFL achieves accuracy comparable to multi-round baselines while requiring only one communication round. These results indicate that DC-CFL is a practical alternative for collaborative AI model development when multiple communication rounds are impractical. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/souta-suga/DC-CFL.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

We Need to Rethink Benchmarking in Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2507.15584v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite the continuous proposal of new anomaly detection algorithms and extensive benchmarking efforts, progress seems to stagnate, with only minor performance differences between established baselines and new algorithms. In this position paper, we argue that this stagnation is due to limitations in how we evaluate anomaly detection algorithms. In current benchmarks, a trivial algorithm that only checks for extreme values in individual features performs competitively with state-of-the-art deep learning methods, despite failing on simple cases such as anomalies within an annulus of normal points. Moreover, existing benchmarks do not adequately reflect the diversity of anomaly detection applications, making it difficult for practitioners to reliably select algorithms for their applications. Consequently, we need to rethink benchmarking in anomaly detection. In our opinion, anomaly detection should be studied using scenarios that group applications sharing relevant characteristics, defined through a common taxonomy. Benchmarking within scenarios enables scenario-specific choices for preprocessing, metrics, and model selection, clarifying which advances transfer across similar applications and providing practitioners with reliable guidance for their specific contexts.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Stochastic Linear Contextual Bandits with Bounded Noise: A Set-Membership Approach

arXiv:2606.20022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper considers stochastic linear contextual bandits (SLCB) with bounded reward noise. Existing works typically assume sub-Gaussian reward noise and bounded expected rewards, under which the optimal regret bound scales as $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ in terms of horizon $T$. However, in many applications, realized/observed rewards are also naturally bounded, implying bounded reward noise. Bounded noise is more informative than the sub-Gaussian condition but has not been leveraged explicitly in the SLCB literature. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm SME-OFU by utilizing an uncertainty quantification method called set-membership estimation (SME) and applying the principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty (OFU). Our algorithm enjoys an improved regret bound $O(\log T)$. Notice that this does not contradict the existing optimal bound $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ for sub-Gaussian noise because bounded noise is a stronger condition. Finally, simulations show empirical improvements of SME-OFU over a benchmark algorithm designed for sub-Gaussian noise when the reward noise is bounded.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A prototype differential atom interferometer for fundamental physics

Gravitational waves and ultralight dark matter are among the most compelling frontiers in fundamental physics, motivating proposals for very-long-baseline atom interferometerssuch as AION1, MAGIS2, AICE3 and AEDGE4 that aim to detect at frequencies at which ground-based5 and space-borne6 laser interferometers lose sensitivity. Very-long-baseline atom interferometers look for signals by comparing the quantum phase evolution of widely separated atomic ensembles interrogated by a common laser. However, their performance depends critically on suppressing noise sources, particularly laser phase noise. The experimental validation of such noise rejection remains an important challenge. Here we demonstrate a prototype differential atom interferometer based on the single-photon clock transition of fermionic 87Sr. Thus, we obtain a gradiometer configuration with a species intrinsically suited to kilometre-scale and space-baseline operation. The instrument operates at the standard quantum limit7 with no excess noise beyond atom shot noise. The differential configuration maintains quantum-limited sensitivity in the presence of several radians of artificially injected laser phase noise per shot, which emulates the conditions expected in a very-long-baseline atom interferometer. We also demonstrate the recovery of coherent oscillatory signals across a broad frequency range under fully phase-randomized conditions, a capability that is inaccessible to a single interferometer operating in the same regime. These results provide an experimental validation of the noise-immune measurement principle underlying very-long-baseline atom interferometers and mark an important step towards next-generation quantum sensors for gravitational-wave detection and searches for ultralight dark matter8,9. A prototype differential atom interferometer operates at the standard quantum limit with no excess noise beyond atom shot noise, achieving performance in line with the specifications for future long-baseline atom interferometers.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Infectious Disease Forecasting via Physics-Informed Machine Learning

Infectious disease transmission evolves as a dynamic process shaped by biological mechanisms, population behavior, and intervention policies, yet public health responses are often driven by lagging indicators. Accurate short- and long-term disease forecasting is essential for the timely deployment of intervention strategies, healthcare capacity planning, and uncertainty-aware, risk-informed decision-making. To address this challenge, three broad classes of forecasting models have traditionally been used: statistical, machine learning, and mechanistic approaches. However, each of these modeling paradigms faces fundamental limitations. In particular, traditional statistical models often lack the flexibility needed to capture complex disease dynamics, machine learning approaches require large, high-quality data streams, and mechanistic models are notoriously difficult to calibrate. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel physics-informed machine learning (PIML) framework for forecasting infectious disease dynamics. Our approach simultaneously forecasts new case and hospitalization counts, along with other key epidemiological quantities such as the time-varying reproduction number. This is achieved through the design of a machine learning model and estimation strategy regularized by a system of differential equations that encode disease dynamics of the SIHR model, thereby bridging the gap between purely data-driven and mechanistic models. We demonstrate the proposed methodology through in-depth numerical studies and an application to COVID-19 data collected in the state of South Carolina.

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

On the Limits of LLM-as-Judge for Scientific Novelty Assessment

arXiv:2606.12071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs are increasingly used to generate and judge scientific ideas. This makes novelty evaluation a central problem. Full idea evaluation is difficult because it often requires judging a method, its feasibility, and its empirical promise. We therefore study a cleaner upstream object: the research question (RQ). RQ generation is a prerequisite for scientific ideation, and RQs can be compared against questions pursued in real papers. We introduce RQ-Bench, a benchmark built from recent arXiv papers. For each paper, we reconstruct author-anchored RQs from its cited background, gaps, and contributions. These RQs are not the only valid questions for the same background. They are author-anchored reference points for testing novelty judgments. We evaluate model-generated RQs with standalone LLM judging, comparative LLM judging, and human expert evaluation. LLM judges consistently rate model-generated RQs as highly novel, producing a novelty mirage; in comparative evaluations, this preference becomes even stronger. Domain experts, however, reach the opposite conclusion and prefer the author-anchored reference questions. We further find that many generated RQs are narrow or source-bound, a dimension that LLM judges often miss unless explicitly tested. Overall, the contradictory novelty evaluations between LLM judges and human experts raise a serious concern about the reliability of using LLMs to assess the scientific novelty of research questions.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Searching Neural Architectures for Sensor Nodes on IoT Gateways

arXiv:2505.23939v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents an automatic method for the design of Neural Networks (NNs) at the edge, enabling Machine Learning (ML) access even in privacy-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The proposed method runs on IoT gateways and designs NNs for connected sensor nodes without sharing the collected data outside the local network, keeping the data in the site of collection. This approach has the potential to enable ML for Healthcare Internet of Things (HIoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), designing hardware-friendly and custom NNs at the edge for personalized healthcare and advanced industrial services such as quality control, predictive maintenance, or fault diagnosis. By preventing data from being disclosed to cloud services, this method safeguards sensitive information, including industrial secrets and personal data. The outcomes of a thorough experimental session confirm that – on the Visual Wake Words dataset – the proposed approach can achieve state-of-the-art results by exploiting a search procedure that runs in less than 10 hours on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

ZipSplat: Fewer Gaussians, Better Splats

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting methods reconstruct a scene from posed or pose-free images in a single forward pass, yet current approaches predict one Gaussian per input pixel, tying the representation budget to camera resolution rather than scene complexity. A flat wall and a richly textured object thus produce equally many Gaussians despite very different geometric needs. We propose ZipSplat, a token-based feed-forward model that decouples Gaussian placement from the pixel grid. A multi-view backbone extracts dense visual tokens, and k-means clustering compresses them into a compact set of scene tokens. Cross- and self-attention refine these tokens, and a lightweight MLP decodes each into a group of Gaussians with unconstrained 3D positions. Because clustering is applied at inference, a single trained model spans the quality-efficiency curve without retraining. ZipSplat operates without ground-truth poses or intrinsics, yet sets a new state of the art on DL3DV and RealEstate10K with ${\sim}6{\times}$ fewer Gaussians than pixel-aligned methods, surpassing the best pose-free baseline by 2.1dB and 1.2dB PSNR, respectively. It further generalizes zero-shot to Mip-NeRF360 and ScanNet++, outperforming all comparable baselines. Our project page is at https://veichta.com/zipsplat.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

NeuroSymbolic AI for Legal AI-TRISM: Trustworthy, Reliable, Interpretable, Safe Models

arXiv:2606.15646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, but their lack of interpretable reasoning and tendency to hallucinate pose significant challenges for legal applications. While LLMs show promise for legal text analysis and generation, they struggle with accurate citation attribution and precedent verification. For example, in legal contexts, a single incorrect precedent can jeopardize a case. Current approaches to improve LLM reliability in legal domains suffer from two key limitations: inadequate integration of structured legal knowledge during training or fine-tuning, and insufficient verification mechanisms for generated legal content. To address these challenges, we propose the TRISM (Trustworthy, Reliable, Interpretable, Safe Models) framework, which integrates NeuroSymbolic AI principles with LLMs to leverage both neural learning capabilities and symbolic reasoning over structured legal knowledge. The TRISM approach addresses the above limitations while maintaining interpretable decision pathways. Our framework formalizes the extraction of symbolic knowledge from legal textual documents and incorporates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) as a core component for grounding LLM outputs in verified legal sources. In this position paper, we make the following contributions: (1) An analysis of the limitations of AI in law; (2) Introduce RASOR RAG which creates foundations for neurosymbolic RAG by generating explicit interpretable rationales that could be formalized into symbolic representations; (3) A formalized methodology for creating symbolic legal knowledge bases that support both interpretable reasoning and output verification in LLMs; and (4) The TRISM framework for integrating symbolic legal knowledge with LLMs.

16.
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!

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Iterative Tool Usage Exploration for Multimodal Agents via Step-wise Preference Tuning

Multimodal agents, which integrate a controller e.g., a vision language model) with external tools, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tackling complex multimodal tasks. Existing approaches for training these agents, both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, depend on extensive human-annotated task-answer pairs and tool trajectories. However, for complex multimodal tasks, such annotations are prohibitively expensive or impractical to obtain. In this paper, we propose an iterative tool usage exploration method for multimodal agents without any pre-collected data, namely SPORT, via step-wise preference optimization to refine the trajectories of tool usage. Our method enables multimodal agents to autonomously discover effective tool usage strategies through self-exploration and optimization, eliminating the bottleneck of human annotation. SPORT has four iterative components: task synthesis, step sampling, step verification, and preference tuning. We first synthesize multimodal tasks using language models. Then, we introduce a novel trajectory exploration scheme, where step sampling and step verification are executed alternately to solve synthesized tasks. In step sampling, the agent tries different tools and obtains corresponding results. In step verification, we employ a verifier to provide AI feedback to construct step-wise preference data. The data is subsequently used to update the controller for tool usage through preference tuning, producing a SPORT agent. By interacting with real environments, the SPORT agent gradually evolves into a more refined and capable system. Evaluation in the GTA and GAIA benchmarks shows that the SPORT agent achieves 6.41% and 3.64% improvements, underscoring the generalization and effectiveness introduced by our method. The project page is https://SPORT-Agents.github.io.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Prediction of parsimonious and temporally sensitive sets of cell fate engineering transcription factors with IMCell

Transcription factor (TF) cocktails used in cell identity reprogramming protocols have largely been developed from experimental approaches. A handful of computational approaches have been reported, though have not been widely adopted by the scientific community. To standardize their use and assess their performance, we built CompForce, a platform that integrates these tools. Using CompForce, we found that existing computational methods offer modest improvements over differential expression on both synthetic and literature-curated data, and that their lackluster and inconsistent performance could be attributed to a reliance on local centrality metrics. To improve upon these methods, we developed IMCell, a prediction method that is inspired by the influence maximization problem. Unlike existing tools, IMCell returns optimized TF sets rather than ranked TF lists. We demonstrate that IMCell vastly out-performs existing tools, and further extend it to dynamic, stepwise contexts. The tools presented here are available in the R packages CompForce and IMCell.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

MinderCare: protocol for a mixed-methods evaluation of a digitally enabled dementia care service.

Introduction and aims Dementia is a growing public health challenge affecting millions of people worldwide. It is a progressive condition that increases the risk of infections, falls, hospital admissions, dependence in activities of daily living, safety issues such as wandering, care home transfers, and death. New ways of supporting people living with dementia (PLWD) at home are urgently needed. We describe the MinderCare study which evaluates a digitally enabled care model that integrates low-burden sensor-based remote monitoring within a nurse-led clinical service. Methods and analysis In this mixed-methods study, we will recruit 100 people with confirmed or suspected dementia living at home and deploy the Minder remote monitoring system for at least 12 months. A detailed characterisation of the cohort will be obtained, including cognition, frailty, participant and carer wellbeing, functioning, and quality of life. The feasibility, acceptability, sustainability, and resource requirements of the service will also be assessed. Low-cost sensors provide information about behaviour, environment and physiology from the home. Machine-learning algorithms have been used to develop digital biomarkers of infection, sleep, night-time behaviours, daily activities and routines, and the effects of clinical events and treatment. These will be assessed through clinical reports of sensor-derived data that include anomaly alerts provided to the clinical teams. Algorithms will be assessed for their clinical utility and acceptability. The comparative-effectiveness component will be designed as a target trial emulation using linked electronic health-record data to construct a time-indexed external usual-care control cohort. The primary comparative outcome will be Days Alive and Out of Hospital (DAOH) over 12 months from the activation-index date, with healthcare utilisation, costs, institutionalisation and mortality assessed as secondary outcomes. DAOH and estimated MinderCare effects will also be examined across prespecified strata of baseline inpatient utilisation. Ethics and dissemination Ethical approval has been granted by the North East Newcastle and North Tyneside 2 Research Ethics Committee, and the study has received confirmation of capacity and capability by the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. Study findings will be disseminated to patients, health and social care professionals, and policymakers through peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations. Study registration number: ISRCTN14997677 and NIHR portfolio CPMSID 63023.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Formal Verification of Learned Multi-Agent Communication Policies via Decision Tree Distillation

arXiv:2606.19632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) enables agents to develop coordination strategies through emergent communication, but neural policies lack the formal safety guarantees required for safety-critical robotic deployment in drone swarms and autonomous vehicle fleets. We present the first end-to-end framework for safety verification of learned multi-agent communication policies through policy abstraction: neural policies are distilled into interpretable decision trees, then formally verified, with empirical validation confirming that verified safety properties transfer to original networks. Our four-stage pipeline consists of domain-specific feature extraction from agent observations, decision tree distillation achieving 97.9% +/- 1.2% fidelity to neural policies, automated translation to PRISM probabilistic model checker specifications with complete feature-to-state-variable correspondence, and compositional verification of Probabilistic Computation Tree Logic (PCTL) properties via pairwise decomposition with union-bound aggregation and empirical neighbor modeling. Evaluating Vector-Quantized Variational Information Bottleneck (VQ-VIB) policies for multi-drone coordination with 5-7 agents, we verify 18 temporal logic properties across safety, liveness, and cooperation, achieving 88.9% property satisfaction with all five safety thresholds satisfied (0.3% collision probability vs. 1% threshold). Monte Carlo validation of original neural policies confirms that verified safety properties transfer with

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Did You Forget What I Asked? Prospective Memory Failures in Large Language Models

作者:

Large language models often fail to satisfy formatting instructions when they must simultaneously perform demanding tasks. We study this behaviour through a prospective memory inspired lens from cognitive psychology, using a controlled paradigm that combines verifiable formatting constraints with benchmark tasks of increasing complexity. Across three model families and over 8,000 prompts, compliance drops by 2-21% under concurrent task load. Vulnerability is highly type-dependent: terminal constraints (requiring action at the response boundary) degrade most, with drops up to 50%, while avoidance constraints remain comparatively robust. A salience-enhanced format (explicit instruction framing plus a trailing reminder) recovers much of the lost compliance, restoring performance to 90-100% in many settings. Interference is bidirectional: formatting constraints can also reduce task accuracy, with one model's GSM8K accuracy dropping from 93% to 27%. In additional stacking experiments, joint compliance declines sharply as constraints accumulate. All results use deterministic programmatic checkers without an LLM-as-judge component on publicly available datasets.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Audio-visual Contrastive Alignment for Diffusion-based Visual-conditioned Speech Enhancement

arXiv:2606.23712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio-visual speech enhancement (AVSE) exploits visual cues such as lip movements to recover speech in noisy environments. Recent work introduced diffusion-based unsupervised AVSE, where a speech diffusion model conditioned on visual features via cross-attention is trained and used as a data-driven prior for posterior sampling-based speech enhancement. Despite promising performance over its audio-only counterpart, the impact of explicitly enforcing cross-modal alignment in the fusion remains unclear. In this work, we propose to augment the diffusion training objective with a contrastive audio-visual loss to encourage stronger use of visual information while keeping the posterior sampling framework unchanged. Experiments across matched and mismatched test data show consistent improvements in interference suppression, signal reconstruction, and perceptual quality, with the largest gains at low SNRs. Code is available at https://github.com/ cexauce/AV-CA-DiffUSE

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Conformal Risk-Averse Decision Making with Action Conditional Guarantee

arXiv:2606.05551v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable decision making pipelines powered by machine learning models require uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods that come with explicit safety guarantees. Conformal prediction provides such UQ by wrapping ML predictions into prediction sets, and recent work by Kiyani et al. (2025b) established that these sets can be translated into optimal risk-averse decision policies – yet only inheriting marginal safety guarantees. We generalize and strengthen their results by (i) introducing action-conditional conformal prediction, which yields safety guarantees conditioned explicitly on each action taken by the decision maker, (ii) showing that action-conditional prediction sets serve as a proxy for the feasible decision space for risk-averse decision makers aiming to optimize action-conditional value-at-risk, and (iii) proposing a principled finite-sample algorithm based on pinball-loss minimization, connecting the framework of Gibbs et al. (2025) to action-conditional guarantees. Experiments on two real-world datasets confirm that our approach significantly improves action-conditional performance over conformal baselines.

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

PaLMR: Towards Faithful Visual Reasoning via Multimodal Process Alignment

Reinforcement learning has recently improved the reasoning ability of Large Language Models and Multimodal LLMs, yet prevailing reward designs emphasise final-answer correctness and consequently tolerate process hallucinations–cases where models reach the right answer while misperceiving visual evidence. We address this process-level misalignment with PaLMR, a framework that aligns not only outcomes but also the reasoning process itself. PaLMR comprises two complementary components: a perception-aligned data layer that constructs process-aware reasoning data with structured pseudo-ground-truths and verifiable visual facts, and a process-aligned optimisation layer that constructs a hierarchical reward fusion scheme with a process-aware scoring function to encourage visually faithful chains-of-thought and improve training stability. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B show that our approach substantially reduces reasoning hallucinations and improves visual reasoning fidelity, achieving state-of-the-art results on HallusionBench while maintaining strong performance on MMMU, MathVista, and MathVerse. These findings indicate that PaLMR offers a principled and practical route to process-aligned multimodal reasoning, advancing the reliability and interpretability of MLLMs.

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

Fisher Width: A Geometric Measure of Complexity on Statistical Manifolds

作者:

arXiv:2606.18306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gaussian width is a central geometric complexity measure in high-dimensional probability, compressed sensing, convex optimization, and learning theory. It quantifies the average extent of a set along random directions, thereby capturing the effective dimension of constraint sets, hypothesis classes, and descent cones. However, this notion is intrinsically Euclidean. Statistical models instead carry a natural Riemannian geometry induced by the Fisher information metric, where directions are scaled according to statistical distinguishability rather than ambient Euclidean length. We introduce Fisher width, a Fisher-geometric analogue of Gaussian width for statistical manifolds. At a parameter point $\theta$, Fisher width replaces the Euclidean identity by the local metric tensor $G(\theta)^{1/2}$, measuring the Gaussian width of the Fisher-rescaled set. This makes the resulting quantity sensitive to local statistical curvature and invariant under smooth reparameterizations. We develop the basic theory of Fisher width, showing that it retains key structural features of Gaussian width, including concentration, metric perturbation stability, and spectral comparison bounds with the Euclidean baseline, while also capturing anisotropic geometric effects invisible to Euclidean measures. As an application, we prove a generalization bound for Fisher-Lipschitz hypothesis classes and propose computable estimators, which we evaluate empirically on MNIST across three model classes. Fisher width is to statistical manifolds what Gaussian width is to Euclidean convex bodies. This work lays the foundation for studying complexity and learning on curved statistical manifolds.