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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Reconstruction of detector error model for quantum error correction

arXiv:2606.16288v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum computing fundamentally relies on the accurate characterization of circuit-level noise to optimize decoding algorithms. However, extracting complex multi-body error correlations remains challenging. Contemporary greedy inference algorithms can suffer from statistical distortion, discarding true physical mechanisms while introducing many unphysical false positives. Here, we introduce the Correlation-Analysis-based Hypergraph Reconstruction (CAHR) algorithm, a globally consistent framework to invert experimental syndrome statistics directly into discrete physical hypergraphs. By coupling exact algebraic correlation equations with a top-down concurrent-pruning strategy, CAHR recovers the fault topology without false positives for both $d=5$ rotated surface codes and dense 8-body 2D color codes in our benchmark settings. Furthermore, we show that exact continuous parameter extraction in dense codes is limited by a variance cascade, where absolute statistical variance accumulates linearly from high- to low-degree mechanisms. This motivates a two-stage inference paradigm: utilizing CAHR to extract the fault topology, followed by continuous probability optimization. This provides a practical approach for characterizing and decoding highly correlated noise in realistic quantum hardware.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

A Cycle Walk for Sampling Measures on Spanning Forests for Redistricting

arXiv:2509.08629v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the Cycle Walk, a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method for sampling distributions on balanced graph partitions, motivated by applications in political redistricting. The method operates on spanning forests and combines two types of updates: local "cycle" moves within districts and global moves that exchange population between adjacent districts while preserving balance constraints. This construction enables efficient Metropolis–Hastings correction while allowing proposals at multiple spatial scales. We show that the Cycle Walk naturally interpolates between existing approaches based on local updates and a class of global update methods derived from recombination (RECOM). Through a range of numerical experiments on synthetic graphs and real-world precinct data, we demonstrate that the Cycle Walk exhibits improved empirical convergence diagnostics for distributions that place weaker weight on spanning-tree counts, a regime that is challenging for existing methods. In particular, the algorithm remains effective when incorporating alternative compactness measures that more closely reflect policy-relevant criteria. These results suggest that the Cycle Walk provides a flexible and computationally efficient framework for sampling from a broader class of redistricting distributions than previously accessible with MCMC techniques.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Geometric obstructions to Lipschitz transport between weighted Hessian $\mathrm{CD}(\kappa,\infty)$ manifolds

arXiv:2606.11085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct a weighted Riemannian manifold $(\mathbb R^2,g,\mu)$ satisfying $\mathrm{CD}(1/2,\infty)$, the curvature-dimension condition, with the following property: if $\gamma$ denotes a centered Gaussian measure on $\mathbb R^2$, then there is no Lipschitz map $T:(\mathbb R^2,\|\cdot\|) \to (\mathbb R^2,g)$ satisfying $T_\#\gamma=\mu$. Building on this, we prove a Weyl-type asymptotic law for the eigenvalues of the weighted Laplacian $-\Delta_{g,\mu}$ and show that they are asymptotically negligible when compared to the eigenvalues of $-\Delta_{\gamma}$. These results give strong counterexamples to two questions of E. Milman and complement the recent counterexample of Aryan.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Midwifery Practice in Conflict Contexts: Lived Experiences from Somalia and Nigeria

Background: Midwives are a central cadre in the health system, particularly in conflict-affected settings where they are sometimes the primary or even only skilled providers available. Yet, despite their critical role, there is limited qualitative evidence capturing their lived experiences and how these shape workforce entry, retention, and overall well-being. Methods: Drawing on a phenomenological research methodology, this qualitative study was embedded within a larger prospective longitudinal cohort of midwifery students and graduates in Somalia and Nigeria. We conducted focus group discussions with graduate midwives (n=48 in Nigeria; n=63 in Somalia) to explore their experiences transitioning into the workforce and their realities working in health systems impacted by conflict and violent insecurity. Data were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Results: Five themes emerged from the data: (1) job search and workforce entry, which was described as fraught with challenges and shaped by a set of formal systems in Nigeria but informal networks and structural barriers in Somalia (2) working conditions that were marked by resource scarcity, infrastructural challenges, and heavy and unreasonable workloads, (3) safety, security and coping strategies that differed across the two contexts but reflected persistent exposure to violence and a reliance on ad hoc and personal coping in lieu of systematic protection, (4) community perceptions of midwives, shaped and constrained by social and gender norms and (5) mental health and emotional wellbeing, highlighting stress, burnout and moral injury experienced by this cadre. Conclusion: Our findings highlight the profound challenges faced by midwives working in conflict-affected settings, and they shine a light on the urgent need to support and invest in this critical and predominantly female health workforce.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Towards Conversational AI for Disease Management

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in diagnostic dialogue1, their capabilities for effective management reasoning—including disease progression, therapeutic response, and safe medication prescription—remain under-explored. We advance the previously demonstrated diagnostic capabilities of the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE)1−3 through a new LLM-based agentic system optimized for multi-visit clinical management and dialogue. To ground its reasoning in authoritative clinical knowledge, AMIE leverages Gemini’s long-context capabilities4, combining in-context retrieval with structured reasoning to align its output with up-to-date clinical practice guidelines and drug formularies. In a randomized, blinded virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) study, AMIE was compared to 21 primary care physicians (PCPs) across 100 multi-visit case scenarios designed to reflect UK NICE Guidance and BMJ Best Practice guidelines. AMIE was non-inferior to PCPs in management reasoning as assessed by specialists and scored better in both preciseness of treatments and investigations, and in its alignment with and grounding in clinical guidelines. To benchmark medication reasoning, we developed RxQA, a multiple-choice question benchmark derived from two national drug formularies (US, UK) and validated by board-certified pharmacists. Though AMIE and PCPs both benefited from the ability to access external drug information, AMIE outperformed PCPs on higher difficulty questions. While further research would be needed before real-world translation, AMIE’s strong performance across evaluations marks a significant step towards conversational AI as a tool in disease management.

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

RePAIR: Predictive Self-Supervised Representation Learning in Chess

arXiv:2606.11860v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we introduce Representation Prediction via Autoencoding using Iterative Refinement (RePAIR) - a novel self-supervised representation learning architecture that synthesizes Masked Autoencoders (MAE), Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA), and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). We demonstrate how it can be used to encode objects in sequential data like consecutive chess positions into compact yet meaningful representations. The basic principle of the architecture is to mask large portions of a sequence of latent states, similar to BERT and MAE. Then, we apply a lightweight Predictor to the latent representations that repairs gaps in the sequence in a lower-dimensional embedding space akin to JEPA. Our experiments in the domain of chess show that the Encoder refines the board representations such that meaningful chess concepts emerge clustered in the latent space. Furthermore, reconstructions of the masked board states show that the model is able to reason about the piece movements without relying on costly reinforcement learning methods. Lastly, we find that the resulting representation space allows for quick and intuitive dissections of chess games by observing the game path trajectories in this semantically rich space.

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

Beyond Text-to-SQL: An Agentic LLM System for Governed Enterprise Analytics APIs

Enterprise analytics aims to make organizational data accessible for decision-making, yet non-technical users still face barriers when using traditional business intelligence tools or Text-to-SQL systems. While recent Text-to-SQL approaches based on Large Language Models (LLMs) promise natural language access to structured data, they fall short in enterprise settings where analytics pipelines rely on governed APIs rather than raw databases. In practice, these APIs encapsulate complex business logic to ensure consistency, auditability, and security. However, delegating mathematical or aggregation logic to an LLM introduces reliability and compliance risks. To this end, we present Analytic Agent, an LLM-based agentic system that translates natural language intents into secure interactions with enterprise analytics APIs. Evaluated on 90 real enterprise use cases constructed by domain experts, it reliably interprets user goals, validates permissions, executes governed queries, and generates compliant visualizations through multi-step reasoning and policy-aware orchestration.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Enhancing CVRP Solver through LLM-driven Automatic Heuristic Design

arXiv:2602.23092v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), a fundamental combinatorial optimization challenge, focuses on optimizing fleet operations under vehicle capacity constraints. While extensively studied in operational research, the NP-hard nature of CVRP continues to pose significant computational challenges, particularly for large-scale instances. This study presents AILS-AHD (Adaptive Iterated Local Search with Automatic Heuristic Design), a novel approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to revolutionize CVRP solving. Our methodology integrates an evolutionary search framework with LLMs to dynamically generate and optimize ruin heuristics within the AILS method. Additionally, we introduce an LLM-based acceleration mechanism to enhance computational efficiency. Comprehensive experimental evaluations against state-of-the-art solvers, including AILS-II and HGS, demonstrate the superior performance of AILS-AHD across both moderate and large-scale instances. Notably, our approach establishes new best-known solutions for 8 out of 10 instances in the CVRPLib large-scale benchmark, underscoring the potential of LLM-driven heuristic design in advancing the field of vehicle routing optimization.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

DynamicPTQ: Mitigating Activation Quantization Collapse via Residual-Stream Dynamics

arXiv:2606.12487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training quantization (PTQ) is essential for efficient large language model inference, but reliably quantizing activations remains challenging when weights, activations, and KV caches are all quantized to 4-bit precision. A key difficulty lies in massive activations, whose extreme values dominate the activation range and amplify quantization errors. State-of-the-art methods mainly mitigate massive activations through transformation-based smoothing, such as orthogonal rotations and affine scaling, but overlook the cross-layer dynamics of the residual stream. In this paper, we show that massive activations emerge and disappear in a phase-wise pattern across network depth, triggering large residual changes. These changes cause newly injected layer-wise updates to dominate the 4-bit quantization scale and weaken historical residual information. To characterize this behavior, we introduce Jump Ratio and Historical Feature SNR. This suggests that static transformation-based smoothing cannot fully resolve dynamic quantization instability caused by cross-layer residual changes. Based on this analysis, we propose DynamicPTQ, a Dynamic Post-Training Quantization policy for phase-aware mixed-precision activation quantization. DynamicPTQ identifies quantization-sensitive layers from residual-stream dynamics and assigns 8-bit activation precision only to these layers, while keeping weights, KV caches, and other activations in 4-bit precision. It can be directly integrated with strong PTQ baselines such as QuaRot, SpinQuant, and FlatQuant. Experiments on LLaMA-2 and LLaMA-3 show that DynamicPTQ consistently improves perplexity and zero-shot QA performance under W4A4KV4 quantization, while achieving 1.05 to 1.07 times throughput improvement with modest memory overhead. These results demonstrate a practical path toward robust low-bit LLM inference.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Latent Space Analysis for Interpretable Uncertainty in Melanoma Classification

Melanoma is a highly aggressive skin cancer, making early and accurate diagnosis critical. While deep learning excels in skin lesion classification, standard ``black-box" models struggle to explain diagnostic uncertainty, limiting clinical trust. This work introduces a hybrid framework combining a class-aware adversarial Variational Autoencoder and an XGBoost classifier, transcending simple binary classification by leveraging a generative latent space for interpretable decision support. Guided by adversarial training, the model learns the visual characteristics of skin lesions and projects them into a continuous latent space, ensuring that similar images are grouped closely together. Trained on this latent space, the XGBoost classifier achieves a robust AUC of 0.868, competing closely with state-of-the-art models. For borderline cases, the framework enables clinicians to leverage the latent topology through Content-Based Image Retrieval. This provides a dual benefit: it allows the clinician to visually compare an ambiguous lesion against biopsy-confirmed precedents and acts as an early warning sign since a borderline classification can indicate that a lesion shares features of both nevi and melanomas, potentially requiring close monitoring. Our approach translates algorithmic hesitation into transparent, evidence-based visual support, bridging the gap between predictive performance and clinical trust.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Convergence Analysis of the Random Bisection Method

arXiv:2603.20483v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a generalized version of the bisection method where the cutting point between the two subintervals is chosen at random following an arbitrary distribution. We compute expected convergence rates with respect to any arbitrary a priori distribution for the position of the root in the initial interval and proved that it depends only on the the expectation $\mathbb{E}[c(1-c)]$ of the cut $c$. We also provide a generalization of the method for $K$ random cuts and study its convergence properties. Most probabilistic derivations are kept fairly simple for the ease of understanding of a larger audience. Our theoretical results are then validated numerically using statistical simulation.

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

VANDERER: Map-Free Exploration using Future-Aware and Visual-Curiosity-Guided Diffusion Policy

Mobile agents require efficient exploration strategies to map unseen environments and autonomously plan tasks. Traditional methods rely on generating occupancy maps and optimizing the sequence in which unexplored regions are visited. However, in sensor-constrained settings, such as those limited to monocular cameras, generating accurate occupancy maps is challenging. To address this, we propose VANDERER, an exploration framework that leverages a Visual Curiosity Module (VCM) to guide pre-trained diffusion policies using only monocular image data. This curiosity module predicts the outcomes of proposed actions via a navigation world model and evaluates them through a curiosity cost. The cost then guides the diffusion process toward generating actions that maximize exploration. Evaluated across diverse simulated environments, VANDERER consistently outperforms established baselines, exploring an average of 13.4% more area than NoMaD. Our results reveal a direct correlation between visual and geometric curiosity in outdoor environments, demonstrating that VANDERER can effectively leverage this relationship for efficient exploration using sensor-constrained agents.

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

Vulcan: Instance-specialized, Verifiable Systems Heuristics Through LLM-driven Search

arXiv:2512.25065v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Systems resource management tasks rely primarily on hand-designed heuristics. However, growing hardware heterogeneity and workload diversity require heuristics specialized to particular deployment instances, making manual design expensive and difficult to scale. In this paper, we explore how to synthesize systems heuristics using LLMs. The main challenge is ensuring that generated heuristics execute safely, integrate correctly with the surrounding system, and still achieve strong performance. We propose Vulcan, a framework that identifies LLM-friendly interfaces that isolate core decision logic from the rest of the implementation. With Vulcan, LLM-generated code is restricted to simple stateless decision functions, while trusted runtime abstractions provide rich derived statistics for meaningful policy exploration without system-integration bugs. To ensure execution safety, LLMs synthesize heuristics in a restricted language, Anvil, that guarantees important properties by construction. We evaluate Vulcan across three well-studied domains and demonstrate up to 4.9x higher savings for spot-VM scheduling, up to 2x lower miss ratios for cache eviction, and up to 10% higher application performance for tiered-memory systems, while ensuring execution safety throughout.

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

ROSE: Benchmarking the Perception-to-Action Gap in Multimodal Models

arXiv:2606.19965v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly expected to act on visual information, yet the same scene may require different actions under different task contexts. How reliably can a model turn the same visual evidence into the action required by the current context? To answer this question, we introduce \textsc{ROSE} (Reference-conditioned Oddity and Symbolic Execution), a controlled benchmark that holds the visual scene fixed while varying region constraints and required symbolic outputs. Through coupled counting and coordinate-action tasks, \textsc{ROSE} tests whether models can infer an implicit majority reference and act on the resulting fine-grained visual evidence under changing contexts. Across nine recent MLLMs, performance drops by as much as 44.5 percentage points from counting-oriented tasks to region-conditioned action, despite 98.8\% human performance. The gap persists on paired scenes and regions for which the same model returns the correct count, while global-click and matched local controls show that coordinate grounding explains only part of the loss, revealing a distinct, model-dependent bottleneck in turning shared visual evidence into context-specific actions.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

MortarBench: Evaluating Mortgage Loan Origination Agents

arXiv:2606.19416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Loan origination is the process by which a lender creates a new loan, from application and underwriting through approval and funding. This process serves a critical role in evaluating the eligibility and level of risk posed by an applicant. Recently, firms have begun using mortgage loan agents to augment human loan officers, despite a lack of any public benchmark. To fill this gap, we present MortarBench, a loan origination agent benchmark. MortarBench uses a financial data synthesis and mutation pipeline to generate examples with broad edge case coverage that match real-world distributions and questions. We find that state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) perform poorly, with closed-source models achieving at most 77.1\% exact match accuracy. We also discover systematic biases in LLM perception of foreignness related to non-English names. Noting these weaknesses, we introduce CRIT, a confidence calibration framework. Our method increases accuracy to 80.5\% while improving risk management steering and reducing bias.

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

Getting Better at Working With You: Compiling User Corrections into Runtime Enforcement for Coding Agents

Interactive LLM agents are becoming part of daily work, but they do not reliably become easier to work with over time: a correction remembered in one session may still be violated in the next. We study this gap between preference access and preference compliance. In tasks derived from anonymized real-user friction cases, Mem0 memory still leaves 57.5% of applicable preference checks violated. We introduce Test-time Rule Acquisition and Compiled Enforcement (TRACE), a drop-in skill-layer pipeline for coding-agent runtimes that mines user corrections, rewrites them as atomic rules, and compiles them into runtime checks that must pass before an agent completes future tasks. Unlike runtime checks written ahead of time by developers, TRACE skills come from the user's own chat corrections. We evaluate TRACE with simulated user-in-the-loop experiments on ClawArena coding-agent tasks and MemoryArena-derived memory-intensive tasks. On ClawArena, TRACE reduces held-out preference violation from 100.0% to 37.6% on in-distribution tasks and from 100.0% to 2.0% on out-of-distribution tasks. On MemoryArena-derived tasks, TRACE reduces in-distribution violation from 100.0% to 60.5% while matching or exceeding the strongest memory baseline on task pass. These results suggest that compiling corrections into runtime enforcement can address a repeated-friction failure mode that memory alone does not reliably solve, reducing the need for users to restate the same correction across future sessions. Experiment code is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/TRACE_exp, and the deployable skill is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/tellonce.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Real-order moments, tail representations, and logarithmic means

arXiv:2606.14019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a unified framework for the study of real-order moments of arbitrary random variables. General integral representations are established in terms of cumulative distribution functions and survival functions, covering continuous, discrete, and mixed distributions supported on the whole real line. These formulas extend the classical tail-integral identities for nonnegative random variables and provide a common treatment of positive, fractional, and negative moments. For discrete distributions, explicit series representations are derived in terms of cumulative probabilities, yielding simple criteria for the existence of moments. Applications are presented for the zeta and Skellam distributions, illustrating how tail behavior determines moment finiteness and how moments can be represented geometrically through cumulative distribution functions. In addition, a representation for logarithmic moments is obtained, linking logarithmic means, Laplace transforms, and the classical Frullani identity. The results provide a unified perspective on moment representations and establish useful connections between tail probabilities, distribution functions, Laplace transforms, and moment existence.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Faithful Action-unit Causal Reasoning for Counterfactually Faithful Emotion Explanations

Multimodal models can name the action units (AUs) behind a facial emotion, but their AU->emotion rationales are typically plausible rather than faithful: nothing forces the AUs a model invokes to be the AUs that actually drive its prediction. We cast AU->emotion reasoning as a counterfactual-consistency problem between the rationale, the label, and a structural AU->emotion causal graph G, and propose FACR, which grounds the reasoner in an independently induced, polarity-aware G and trains a counterfactual-faithfulness objective: a do-intervention on an AU that G marks causal for a class must move the prediction, while one it marks irrelevant must leave it unchanged. Faithfulness is thereby both trainable and measurable through a matching interventional metric, which we evaluate against a known causal structure, the PSPI pain-AU composition, as no existing affective-reasoning benchmark allows. We are explicit that this metric tests fidelity to the supplied structure rather than its rediscovery: it asks whether the trained reasoner invokes the AUs the structure marks causal, on held-out subjects and a second dataset. Under subject-independent evaluation on UNBC-PAIN, the objective raises the agreement between the invoked AUs and the PSPI composition from a no-objective baseline of 0.08 to 0.57, at a small detection cost; an unfaithfulness control attributes the gain to the objective. On a cross-dataset emotion transfer, the objective likewise raises fidelity to G on a seven-class task (0.50 to 0.84). Finally, we attach a language verbalizer and extend the audit to the generated text: biasing each action unit's emission by its latent activation makes the rationale faithful by construction, so that ablating an AU removes it from the explanation, a property that transfers to a second language-model backbone, whereas a freely generated rationale is unfaithful.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Nocturnal Respiratory Rate and Variability Predict Long-term Mortality in Stable Outpatients with Cardiovascular Disease

Background: Respiratory rate (RR) predicts short-term mortality in acute care settings, yet its prognostic significance in clinically stable outpatients remains poorly defined. Objectives: To determine whether the median and variability of nocturnal respiratory rate (NRR) are independently associated with long-term cardiovascular and all-cause mortality in outpatients with cardiovascular disease. Methods: We analyzed overnight chest belt waveforms from elective polysomnography in 5,679 older adults with cardiovascular disease enrolled in the Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS). NRR was quantified at 30-second resolution, and per-subject median NRR and within-night variability (standard deviation) were derived. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and Cox proportional hazards models were used to evaluate associations with cardiovascular and all-cause mortality over 3-year and 15-year follow-up periods, adjusting for demographic characteristics, cardiopulmonary comorbidities, and sleep apnea severity. Results: Higher median NRR and greater NRR variability were each associated with increased cardiovascular and all-cause mortality. Combining these metrics identified a high-risk group characterized by elevated median and high variability of NRR, with approximately five-fold higher 3-year all-cause mortality compared with a low-risk group; this association remained significant in Cox models (unadjusted HR: 2.61; 95% CI: 1.65, 4.14; p

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

PERRY: Policy Evaluation with Confidence Intervals using Auxiliary Data

arXiv:2507.20068v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods estimate the value of a new reinforcement learning (RL) policy prior to deployment. Recent advances have shown that leveraging auxiliary datasets, such as those synthesized by generative models, can improve the accuracy of OPE methods. Unfortunately, such auxiliary datasets may also be biased, and existing methods for using data augmentation within OPE lack principled uncertainty quantification. In high stakes domains like healthcare, reliable uncertainty estimates are important for ensuring safe and informed deployment of RL policies. In this work, we propose two methods to construct valid confidence intervals for OPE with data augmentation. The first provides a confidence interval over $V^{\pi}(s)$, the policy value conditioned on an initial state $s$. To do so we introduce a new conformal prediction method suitable for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with continuous state spaces, extending prior work to higher-dimensional settings. Second, we consider the more common task of estimating the average policy performance over all initial states, $V^{\pi}$; we introduce a method that draws on ideas from doubly robust estimation and prediction powered inference. Across simulators spanning inventory management, robotics, healthcare, and a real healthcare dataset from MIMIC-IV, we find that our methods can effectively leverage auxiliary data and consistently produce confidence intervals that cover the ground truth policy values, unlike previously proposed methods. Our work enables a future in which OPE can provide rigorous uncertainty estimates for high-stakes domains.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Static Leaderboards: Predictive Validity for the Evaluation of LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.19704v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent benchmarks are growing fast, but no single benchmark touches more than four or five of the dimensions that deployment exposes. This paper aggregates the largest coordinated deep-dive of one MCP-based industrial-agent benchmark to date: fourteen parallel implementation studies covering new asset classes (including a multi-modal visual extension), alternative orchestrations, retrieval strategies, reasoning modes, infrastructure optimizations, and evaluation-methodology probes. Consolidating those studies with seven prior agent benchmarks, we argue that aggregate-score leaderboards systematically underspecify deployed-agent evaluation. Rankings derived from aggregate scores do not transfer to out-of-distribution settings; recent public-to-hidden competition retrospectives provide direct empirical evidence of this rank instability. We propose ranking configurations by predictive validity, the correlation between in-sample and out-of-sample rank, rather than in-sample mean, and report a twelve-tier measurement apparatus that exposes the deployment-relevant dimensions HELM and its agent-era successors collapse. The position is operationalized through three falsifiable out-of-distribution criteria with explicit thresholds; existing evidence partly supports it but is too thin to confirm. We close with a pre-registered pilot design and a field-level vision for what the next generation of agentic benchmarks should report.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Fault Lines: Navigating Ethics and Responsible AI Where National Policy Meets Local Practice in Public Sector Transformation

arXiv:2606.13039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The UK government has adopted a pro-AI stance to help transform public service delivery in the face of severe financial pressures, but the path to translate this vision into responsible AI practice remains ill-defined. While UK policy is often set at the national level, local authorities are responsible for most public service delivery, and the rapid advance of AI-first narratives in the public sector is exposing fault lines in knowledge and practice at this national-local interface. This paper examines how responsible AI is interpreted and implemented at the interface between the UK's central government and local authorities, taking the high-stakes area of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) as a case study. We present a thematic analysis of 17 semi-structured interviews with policymakers, practitioners, and third-sector professionals to identify barriers and enabling conditions for responsible AI where national policy meets local practice. We identify five interconnected challenges facing local authorities: shadow usage of AI and data privacy risks, market-government asymmetry in AI provision, insufficient workforce readiness, a lack of standardised definitions and measurements, and gaps in human accountability. For each, participants proposed actionable steps, from strengthening data protection frameworks and rebalancing the market-government relationship to enhancing workforce capacity. Our examination of SEND brings these challenges into sharper focus, showing how high-stakes decisions affecting vulnerable children and families intensify tensions around accountability, fairness, and human oversight, exposing the limits of a principle-based regulatory approach. We argue that responsible public sector AI requires both national policy adjustments and structural reforms to institutional capacity, values, and governance mechanisms at the local level.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

TS-Fault: Benchmarking Time Series Forecasters Against Structural Faults

arXiv:2606.18539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting (TSF) underpins consequential decisions in energy, transportation, finance, and healthcare, yet TSF models are almost universally ranked by a single number (e.g., average error) on clean held-out data, under the implicit assumption that it predicts deployed reliability. However, real faults are not i.i.d noise but structured events with temporal shape, broken cross-variable dependencies, regime change coupled with missingness, and causal propagation across a sensing pipeline. Treating TSF robustness as a data-quality problem, we present TS-Fault, a benchmark that evaluates forecasting models under explicit, parameterized fault scenarios with controllable semantic difficulty. TS-Fault organizes recurring failures into four modes along two orthogonal axes (observation- vs mechanism-level; univariate vs multivariate) and injects each fault into the most prediction-critical window via a unified importance score. This design enables robustness to be tested against the structures models actually rely on, rather than reduced to generic noise sensitivity. We evaluate 21 models across 6 datasets, 4 modes, and 5 difficulty levels under a paired clean/corrupt protocol. The results reveal three findings that contradict common leaderboard intuition: (i) clean-data accuracy anti-correlates with robustness; (ii) clean rankings are preserved under observation-level faults but reshuffled under mechanism-level faults; and (iii) all catastrophic failures occur under mechanism-level faults, with foundation models achieving the highest clean-data accuracy yet exhibiting the greatest fragility. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Ray-zyy/TS-Fault.

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

MGI: Member vs Generated Inference

arXiv:2606.23872v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As generative models increasingly produce samples that are indistinguishable from human-created content, it becomes difficult to determine whether a given data point was part of a model's natural training set or was generated by the model itself, especially when models memorize and reproduce training data. We formalize this challenge as Member vs Generated Inference (MGI): given a sample and a target generative model, infer whether the sample is a true training member or a generated output of that model. Focusing on image generation, we show that existing membership inference methods systematically misclassify generated samples as training members, while attribution-based methods often misclassify true members as generated. This failure arises because both approaches rely on likelihood-related signals that are similarly elevated for training examples and for the model's own outputs. To address MGI, we propose Data Circuit Breaker (DCB), a three-stage method that combines complementary signals from a generative model's autoencoder and latent generator to distinguish training members from generated samples. Across multiple generative models, including image autoregressive and diffusion models, DCB consistently addresses the shortcomings of membership inference and attribution methods, remains effective even when models reproduce near-duplicates of training samples, and generalizes to challenging model derivative settings in which new models are trained on generated data.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

AnomalyMatch: Discovering Rare Objects of Interest with Semi-supervised and Active Learning

arXiv:2505.03509v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Anomaly detection in large datasets is essential in astronomy and computer vision. However, due to a scarcity of labelled data, it is often infeasible to apply supervised methods to anomaly detection. We present AnomalyMatch, an anomaly detection framework combining the semi-supervised FixMatch algorithm using EfficientNet classifiers with active learning. AnomalyMatch is tailored for large-scale applications and integrated into the ESA Datalabs science platform. In this method, we treat anomaly detection as a binary classification problem and efficiently utilise limited labelled and abundant unlabelled images for training. We enable active learning via a user interface for verification of high-confidence anomalies and correction of false positives. Evaluations on the GalaxyMNIST astronomical dataset and the miniImageNet natural-image benchmark under severe class imbalance display strong performance. Starting from five to ten labelled anomalies, we achieve an average AUROC of 0.96 (miniImageNet) and 0.89 (GalaxyMNIST), with respective AUPRC of 0.82 and 0.77. After three active learning cycles, anomalies are ranked with 76% (miniImageNet) to 94% (GalaxyMNIST) precision in the top 1% of the highest-ranking images by score. We compare to the established Astronomaly software on selected 'odd' galaxies from the 'Galaxy Zoo- The Galaxy Challenge' dataset, achieving comparable performance with an average AUROC of 0.83. Our results underscore the exceptional utility and scalability of this approach for anomaly discovery, highlighting the value of specialised approaches for domains characterised by severe label scarcity