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

Synthetic Counteradaptation: A Principle of Human-AI Co-evolution

arXiv:2606.15503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we introduce the concept of synthetic counteradaptation, a process where human and AI systems co-evolve by adapting to each other's strategies and behaviors. Synthetic counteradaptation occurs when AI systems develop novel strategies or social protocols, prompting humans to extract insights and adapt their own behaviors in response, leading to the emergence of new agent interaction dynamics. To illustrate these dynamics, we analyze examples from various contexts, including the game of Go, mixed-motive social interactions, and geopolitical simulations. By exploring these cases, we demonstrate how synthetic counteradaptation provides a framework for understanding the recursive and co-evolutionary nature of human-AI interactions in multi-agent environments.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Models That Know How Evaluations Are Designed Score Safer

The validity of AI safety evaluations depends on models behaving consistently across controlled and deployment settings. Prior work has identified test-time contextual cues, such as hypothetical scenarios, as a source of verbalized evaluation awareness and subsequent behavioral shift. In this paper, we investigate a potential explanation of this phenomenon: evaluation meta-knowledge, defined as parametric knowledge about the structural traits that characterize evaluations. Similar to dataset contamination, where benchmark exposure leads to higher performance through memorization, we hypothesize that models trained on texts describing evaluation practices may implicitly learn to recognize and respond to evaluation-like contexts, for instance, through exposure to scientific articles or social media posts about AI benchmarking. To test this, we fine-tune models on synthetic documents describing evaluation traits such as verifiable structures or moral dilemmas. Evaluating this fine-tuned model on six safety benchmarks, we find that it is significantly safer than the base model and control model. This behavioral shift persists even when restricting the analysis to responses lacking explicit verbalization of evaluation awareness. Our results demonstrate that evaluation meta-knowledge may inflate safety benchmark performance, introducing a novel confounder that is independent of explicit memorization or verbalized evaluation awareness, thus, challenging to detect. These findings have important implications for the design and interpretation of AI safety evaluations. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/compass-group-tue/arxiv2026_evaluation_meta_knowledge.

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

How Much Capacity Does EEG Denoising Need? Ultra-Compact Networks reveal Benchmark Saturation and Metric-Utility Gap

arXiv:2606.08594v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep learning EEG denoising architectures have scaled from tens of thousands to tens of millions of parameters, yet no prior study has isolated model capacity as the experimental variable or tested whether reconstruction metrics predict downstream neural-signal utility. We address both gaps by fixing architecture, loss, data split, and training recipe while sweeping only channel width from 1.05K to 40.26K parameters in a minimal depthwise-separable convolutional U-Net. Models were evaluated on the EEGDenoiseNet benchmark, cross-dataset BCI transfer tests, controlled baseline retraining, and downstream motor-imagery classification with five decoder families across all nine BCI Competition IV-2a subjects. Reconstruction performance saturated by 3-6.5K parameters, with post-elbow gains of at most 0.015 correlation coefficient per log10-parameter unit. An 8.46M-parameter baseline retrained under the same pipeline matched the 40.26K compact variant on EOG–a 200x parameter gap yielding no advantage–while a Patch-Transformer control reproduced the same diminishing-return shape. Downstream evaluation exposed a classifier-dependent metric-utility gap: reconstruction-optimized denoising significantly degraded CSP+LDA classification across all nine subjects and three artifact types (best denoised accuracy 0.547 vs. 0.612 noisy baseline; Bonferroni p=0.0488), persisting on naturally recorded trials (Delta=-0.047; BH-FDR q=0.0049). End-to-end neural decoders showed variable or neutral effects. Standard EEG denoising benchmarks are saturated far below current model capacity, and reconstruction metrics do not predict BCI utility. Ultra-compact models at 33-46 KB and 1.27-2.61M FLOPs/segment are practical for edge deployment. These findings argue for capacity-controlled evaluation, harder task-aware benchmarks, and mandatory downstream validation.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Rewrite to Translate, Translate to Reward: Reinforcement Learning for Source Rewriting in Machine Translation

Rewriting source text with large language models (LLMs) before translation has been shown to improve machine translation (MT) quality. However, we find that prompt-based rewriting can degrade translation quality rather than improve it, particularly when smaller LLMs, such as 4B-parameter models, are used. We argue that this limitation stems from the difficulty of controlling rewriting behavior through natural-language prompts alone: a rewrite is useful only if it improves downstream translation, yet existing prompt-based methods do not explicitly optimize for this signal. To address this issue, we propose RLSR (Reinforcement Learning for Source Rewriting), a reinforcement learning framework that trains the rewriting model with a reward based on the downstream translation-quality improvement produced by each rewrite. Experiments across six MT systems and 16 language pairs show that our 4B RLSR-trained rewriting models significantly outperform both the no-rewriting baseline and prompt-based rewriting baselines at the same model scale, while remaining competitive with baselines that use a 235B LLM.

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

Quantum Annealing Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Accurate Remaining Useful Lifetime Prediction

arXiv:2606.18503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Remaining useful life (RUL) estimation is central to predictive maintenance, where an unplanned failure can cost far more than the asset itself. Statistical degradation models miss the strong nonlinearity of real systems, and data-driven models often converge to suboptimal solutions in high-dimensional, non-convex search spaces. We propose a Quantum Annealing enhanced Q-Learning (QAQL) framework that couples the sampling behaviour of quantum annealing with the sequential decision making of Q-learning. Each Q-value update is encoded as a small quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) whose ground state is the greedy action; rather than acting as a deterministic optimizer, the annealer returns a distribution over near-optimal actions across many reads, and this stochastic action selection supplies the exploration that curbs premature convergence on nonlinear degradation trajectories. The QUBO is solved on the D-Wave Advantage system using minor embedding, with the annealer woven into the reinforcement-learning loop rather than bolted on after training. We validate QAQL on two public benchmarks: the NASA C-MAPSS turbofan engine datasets and a device-fleet predictive maintenance dataset. Averaged over many independent runs and across six error metrics, QAQL outperforms the classical and quantum baselines considered in this study, with statistically significant improvements. The results indicate that quantum annealing is a usable, not merely theoretical, optimizer inside a reinforcement-learning loop for industrial predictive-maintenance applications.

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

Integrating national forest inventory, airborne lidar, and satellite imagery for wall-to-wall mapping of forest structure with computer vision

arXiv:2606.20291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Remote sensing is increasingly relied upon to deliver actionable science for forest and wildfire risk management across large landscapes. Wall-to-wall, annually updated maps are a persistent need for effective forest management. Many planning systems and data collections combine disparate data sources with different purposes, vintages, and prediction quality, which leads to confounding behavior in operational planning systems. We introduce the VibrantForests framework, developed and applied to map forest attributes and provide a coherent foundation for effective forest and wildfire planning. VibrantForests includes a satellite-based forest structure model trained on lidar-derived samples and applied across the contiguous United States to concurrently generate estimates of canopy cover, canopy height, aboveground live tree biomass, basal area, and quadratic mean diameter at 10-meter resolution. We demonstrate predictive capability spanning the full spectrum of forest conditions ranging from sparse-canopy/low-biomass to dense-canopy/high-biomass. Results show that our model extends the range at which saturation is commonly encountered in comparable passive-sensor models, and reduces regression-to-mean behavior that commonly produces overestimation of forest attributes in small/sparse conditions and underestimation in large/dense conditions. The VibrantForests framework addresses a key limitation in large-area forest and wildfire planning by delivering coherent wall-to-wall estimates of management-relevant attributes at annual cadence and 10m resolution.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

One Polluted Page Is Enough: Evaluating Web Content Pollution in Generative Recommenders

Search-augmented LLMs increasingly mediate everyday consumer recommendations by retrieving live web content. This creates a new risk: generative recommenders may consume polluted web content, such as fake reviews and promotional pages crafted to mislead recommendations. We ask: to what extent do search-augmented LLMs become unwitting promoters of fake products when consuming polluted retrieval results? To answer this, we introduce FORGE (Fake Online Recommendations in Generative Environments), a benchmark for measuring fake-product promotion under controlled web-content pollution. Given an upstream search result, FORGE locally rewrites real products in retrieved web pages into fake ones to simulate web-content pollution, and measures how often the LLM recommends the fake product. FORGE covers 225 real-world products across 15 categories and 5 consumer scenarios. Across 12 commercial and open-weights LLMs, all models are vulnerable: a single polluted page yields fooled rates of up to 27%, while the full top-3 replacement raises this to 73.8%. Vulnerability varies substantially across categories, increasing when models lack stable prior knowledge of the relevant products. Reasoning does not mitigate this vulnerability; instead, it often generates spurious social proof to justify false recommendations. We evaluate three defenses: skepticism prompting and consensus filtering (over model priors or cross-document evidence). Skepticism can exacerbate vulnerability, much like reasoning, while filtering risks suppressing legitimate products. We release FORGE at https://github.com/leoluolol/forge-benchmark.

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

Improving Pre-trained Adult Glioma Segmentation Models Using only Post-processing Techniques

Gliomas are the most common malignant brain tumors in adults and are among the most lethal. Despite aggressive treatment, the median survival rate is less than 15 months. Accurate multiparametric MRI (mpMRI) tumor segmentation is critical for surgical planning, radiotherapy, and disease monitoring. While deep learning models have improved the accuracy of automated segmentation, large-scale pre-trained models generalize poorly and often underperform, producing systematic errors such as false positives, label swaps, and slice discontinuities in slices. These limitations are further compounded by unequal access to GPU resources and the growing environmental cost of large-scale model training. In this work, we propose adaptive post-processing techniques to refine the quality of glioma segmentations produced by large-scale pretrained models developed for various types of tumors. We demonstrated the techniques in multiple BraTS 2025 segmentation challenge tasks, with the ranking metric improving by 14.9 % for the sub-Saharan Africa challenge and 0.9% for the adult glioma challenge. This approach promotes a shift in brain tumor segmentation research from increasingly complex model architectures to efficient, clinically aligned post-processing strategies that are precise, computationally fair, and sustainable.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Embodied-BenchClaw: An Autonomous Multi-Agent System for Embodied Spatial Intelligence Benchmark Construction

arXiv:2606.11909v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarks are essential for evaluating embodied spatial intelligence, yet their construction is labor-intensive, hard to reuse, and difficult to maintain. Existing embodied benchmarks are often static and may quickly become saturated as models improve, limiting their ability to distinguish new capabilities. We propose Embodied-BenchClaw, an autonomous agentic system for constructing embodied spatial intelligence benchmarks. Given a user-specified evaluation intent, Embodied-BenchClaw automatically produces a complete and continually updatable benchmark package through a five-stage pipeline: intent blueprinting, data collection, structuring and cleaning, benchmark synthesis, and evaluation reporting. The pipeline is coordinated by three agents for planning, construction, and evaluation. To improve reusability and reliability, Embodied-BenchClaw introduces an extensible Skill Library and process quality control, enabling benchmark construction to be composable, verifiable, and repairable. We instantiate multiple benchmarks covering indoor spatial reasoning, outdoor spatial reasoning, robotic manipulation, quadruped robot navigation, UAV/aerial-view understanding, and static benchmark enhancement. These benchmarks span diverse embodied carriers, data sources, and spatial capabilities. Experiments with human evaluation, judge-based assessment, consistency checks, cost analysis, and ablations show that Embodied-BenchClaw can construct verifiable, executable, maintainable, and diagnostically useful embodied spatial benchmarks with reduced manual effort.

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

DAM-VLA: Decoupled Asynchronous Multimodal Vision Language Action model

Vision-language-action (VLA) models inherit a shared synchronous clock from vision-language pretraining, processing every input at one rate. This is misaligned with physical interaction, where a high-frequency modality changes at hundreds of hertz, vision evolves more slowly, and language stays constant across an episode. A synchronous VLA oversamples slow modalities, undersamples fast ones, and caps action generation at the lowest effective frequency. We hypothesize that decoupling temporal processing per modality, letting each update and retain information at its own sensor rate, yields stronger representations and more robust control. We present DAM-VLA, which maintains per-modality latent buffers refreshed at sensor rates and read continuously by the action head, integrating new high-frequency modalities through gated cross-attention that leaves the pretrained backbone intact. Across seven contact-rich real-world manipulation tasks, DAM-VLA more than doubles the average success rate of the strongest synchronous baseline (95.2\% vs.\ 40.95\%) while sustaining smooth, reactive 100\,Hz control. Project website: \href{https://intuitive-robots.github.io/DAM-VLA/}{intuitive-robots.github.io/DAM-VLA/}

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

If These Walls Could Talk: Critical Play with Large Language Models in Museums

arXiv:2606.15565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in museums to as role playing chatbots which let visitors talk to simulated versions of people and artefacts from the past. While such installations can be playful and engaging, they are also problematic because LLMs cannot be trusted to speak truthfully. I identify a fundamental dilemma for the use of LLMs in museum chatbots: LLMs cannot be trusted to tell the truth, and efforts to make them more reliable may ruin that which is attractive about the bots in the first place - their ability to engage in life-like conversation. In response, I propose designing for critical play with LLM-based bots: Designing for playful interactions with bots that are unreliable but still able to represent the past in an adequate and engaging manner - as fictional characters representing historical narratives, styles of discourse, diverse perspectives, humor and satire.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

P$^2$CE: Model-Agnostic Plausible Pareto-Optimal Counterfactual Explanations

arXiv:2606.18418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The increasing use of machine learning algorithms in social applications has raised concerns about fairness and transparency, leading to the development of counterfactual explanations. These explanations supports individuals to understand and potentially alter unfavorable decisions in areas such as loan applications, job selections, and more, by providing actionable changes to input features that would lead to a desired outcome. Existing methods often struggle to balance feasibility, plausibility, and computational efficiency. To address this, we introduce P$^2$CE, an algorithm for generating plausible Pareto-optimal counterfactual explanations, offering users a diverse set of optimal trade-offs between different notions of feasibility. P$^2$CE employs an auxiliary isolation forest outlier detector to ensure that explanations are in accordance with the data distribution and leverages SHAP values to obtain optimal results with short computing times, regardless of the underlying model. Our algorithm was empirically evaluated on three datasets, demonstrating superior performance in terms of both solution quality and computational efficiency compared to related techniques.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Poker Arena: Multi-Axis Profiling of Strategic Reasoning and Memory in LLMs

Strategic reasoning under uncertainty underpins consequential decisions in negotiation, finance, and policy, but prevailing game-play benchmarks collapse heterogeneous reasoning dimensions into a single scalar, leaving the capability structure of frontier LLMs unexamined. We introduce Poker Arena, a no-limit Texas Hold'em tournament platform that couples a three-layer memory architecture (within-hand, session, and cross-session) with a nine-axis cognitive profile decomposing strategic reasoning into interpretable dimensions such as bet-sizing calibration and positional awareness. We evaluate seven frontier models across 50 sessions of 1,000 hands and a controlled memory ablation; tournament chips and aggregate axis score order the field differently: Claude Opus 4.6 wins +$15,730 chips with 14 first-place finishes, yet ranks only fifth of seven on mean axis score, while persistent memory helps some models and hurts others. These findings show that multi-axis evaluation surfaces capability structure that scalar leaderboards systematically misrank, with cross-dimensional consistency outweighing peak performance on any single axis.

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

Assessment of Personality Dimensions Across Situations in Dyadic Role-Play Scenarios

arXiv:2507.19137v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prior research indicates that users prefer assistive technologies whose personalities align with their own. This has sparked interest in automatic personality perception (APP), which aims to predict an individual's perceived personality traits. Previous studies in APP have treated personalities as static traits, independent of context. However, perceived personalities can vary by context and situation as shown in psychological research. In this study, we investigate the relationship between conversational speech and perceived personality for participants engaged in two work situations (a neutral interview and a stressful client interaction). Our key findings are: 1) perceived personalities differ significantly across interactions, 2) loudness, sound level, and spectral flux features are indicative of perceived extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness in neutral interactions, while neuroticism correlates with these features in stressful contexts, 3) handcrafted acoustic features and non-verbal features outperform speaker embeddings in inference of perceived personality, and 4) stressful interactions are more predictive of neuroticism, aligning with existing psychological research.

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

STRIDE: Strategic Trajectory Reasoning via Discriminative Estimation for Verifiable Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.15866v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become an effective post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models. However, existing RLVR methods typically rely on final-answer correctness to assign trajectory-level rewards, providing sparse supervision and treating all tokens uniformly regardless of their actual contribution to reasoning. Although recent studies introduce intermediate signals such as process rewards, high-entropy tokens, and semantic uncertainty, these signals are often not inherently verifiable and may fail to distinguish beneficial strategic patterns from harmful ones. To address this limitation, we propose STRIDE (Strategic Trajectory Reasoning with Discriminative Estimation), a fine-grained RLVR framework that derives strategic reasoning supervision from verifiable outcomes. STRIDE contrasts successful and failed trajectories within each response group to estimate the outcome-discriminative preference of each $n$-gram strategic pattern, and further combines this signal with reasoning saliency entropy to identify decision-relevant strategic patterns. These patterns are assigned differentiated advantage values during RL optimization, enabling more precise credit assignment while preserving the verifiability of RLVR. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STRIDE consistently improves reasoning performance across diverse models, tasks, and extended settings, including VLMs and agent-based systems.

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

TerraBench: Can Agents Reason Over Heterogeneous Earth-System Data?

arXiv:2606.13148v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Climate and environmental decision-making increasingly requires reasoning across heterogeneous inputs, including gridded physical data, satellite imagery, geospatial context, and simulator outputs. Weather and climate foundation models can forecast well, but do not reason interactively in language, while large language models (LLMs) reason in language but cannot operate directly on high-dimensional Earth-system data. As a result, real scientific workflows in Earth-science remain underserved. We introduce TerraBench, a benchmark for grounded Earth-science reasoning, built on TerraAgent, a ReAct-style executable framework that interleaves reasoning, tool calls, and observations to couple LLM planning with scientific tools for environmental retrieval, geospatial processing, simulation, and artifact-backed computation. TerraBench unifies analysis of Earth observation imagery, gridded data, GIS reasoning and simulation in a single executable interface, whereas prior benchmarks isolate these capabilities into narrow individual tasks. It is also the first in this space to pair process-level tool-use metrics with tolerance-aware numeric scoring. The benchmark comprises 403 extensive agentic tasks across three tracks (Fundamentals, Simulator-Grounded, and Document-Grounded Verification) and eight application domains with 24,500 verified execution steps. These results indicate that reliable Earth-science agents must go beyond tool access to coordinate heterogeneous workflows, parameterize tools precisely, and preserve artifact provenance.

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

EChO-Agent: Evidence Chain Orchestration Agent for Audio Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15141v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While LALMs show promise on audio question answering, they fail to focus on question-relevant segments of audio and provide a clear, checkable reasoning process when dealing with complex audio reasoning. Reinforcement learning and tool-augmented prompting can help models better relate questions to audio but lack a reliable way to understand, integrate, and self-verify audio segments. To address this gap, we present EChO-Agent, a modular agent framework that reformulates complex audio QA as a planning, tool execution, evidence integration, and answer verification workflow. Experiments on MMAR benchmark show EChO-Agent improves both accuracy and rubric scores over baseline and ablation studies show evidence integration is the key factor.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LLMCodec: Adapting Video Codecs for Efficient Weight Compression of Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.05861v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid development of large language models(LLMs) has led to remarkable advances in natural language processing. However, the increasing scale of these models introduces substantial challenges in terms of storage, transmission, and deployment. Though great efforts have been devoted to model compression and quantization, existing methods often rely on fine-tuning or calibration data, which exhibit limited generalization across different tensor types. In this paper, we argue that video codecs offer a promising solution for LLM compression, due to their inherent compatibility with matrix structured data, configurable compression strategies, and the availability of highly optimized, off-the-shelf implementations. Therefore, we present LLMCodec, a video codec-based LLM compression method that integrates affine quantization with the recent VVC/H.266 video codec. Beyond VVC, we further compare a range of video codecs and encoding profiles to evaluate their impact on compression performance. Experiments on different models demonstrate the robustness and generality of LLMCodec. Notably, on LLaMA-3-8B at 2-bit precision, LLMCodec reduces perplexity by over 1.5x and improves downstream task accuracy by 21% compared with the existing method.

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

OncoReg: Medical Image Registration for Oncological Challenges

In modern cancer research, the vast volume of medical data generated is often underutilised due to challenges related to patient privacy. The OncoReg Challenge addresses this issue by enabling researchers to develop and validate image registration methods through a two-phase framework that ensures patient privacy while fostering the development of more generalisable AI models. Phase one involves working with a publicly available dataset, while phase two focuses on training models on a private dataset within secure hospital networks. OncoReg builds upon the foundation established by the Learn2Reg Challenge by incorporating the registration of interventional cone-beam computed tomography with standard planning fan-beam CT images in radiotherapy. Accurate image registration is crucial in oncology, particularly for dynamic treatment adjustments in image-guided radiotherapy, where precise alignment is necessary to minimise radiation exposure to healthy tissues while effectively targeting tumours. This work details the methodology and data behind the OncoReg Challenge and provides a comprehensive analysis of the competition entries and results. Findings reveal that feature extraction plays a pivotal role in this registration task. A new method emerging from this challenge demonstrated its versatility, while established approaches continue to perform comparably to newer techniques. Both deep learning and classical approaches still play significant roles in image registration, with the combination of methods, particularly in feature extraction, proving most effective.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Faking entanglement with imperceptible measurement deviations

arXiv:2606.20396v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum entanglement is a central resource underpinning emerging quantum technologies, enabling capabilities beyond those of classical systems. Accurate verification of entanglement is therefore crucial. However, experimental schemes usually rely on the assumption that quantum measurements can be realized exactly. As the complexity of a quantum system grows, this assumption typically becomes increasingly unrealistic, therefore leading to a widening mismatch between theoretical models and experimental implementations. Here we demonstrate that arbitrarily small measurement errors, when adversarially encoded in the measurement apparatus, can lead to the false certification of high-dimensional entanglement in systems that are, in fact, separable. This is achieved by introducing explicit hacking attacks to measurement devices in well-established entanglement verification tests. We further experimentally demonstrate this effect using classical photonic states encoded in the spatial degree of freedom, spanning up to 61 dimensions with measurement fidelity errors as low as 0.23%. Our results uncover a fundamental vulnerability in current methods for high-dimensional entanglement detection, highlighting the susceptibility of complex quantum devices to small adversarial perturbations. The findings underscore the need for developing secure verification of quantum information that is robust to bounded discrepancies between theory and experiment.

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

AI Pluralism and the Worlds It Misses

arXiv:2606.16167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI pluralism is often framed as a problem of representing diverse values, preferences, users, or outputs. This paper argues that this framing is incomplete because AI systems also impose ontologies: they define what counts as an entity, relation, feature, harm, benefit, and valid form of evidence. We define ontological flattening as the conversion of situated, contested, and historically specific meanings into a restricted technical category, proxy, aggregation rule, or benchmark target that is treated as neutral and difficult to contest. The paper develops a bounded conceptual and qualitative synthesis across value pluralism, pluralistic alignment, participatory and democratic AI, procedural justice, science and technology studies, accountability research, aggregate themes from 11 expert interviews, and three urban AI companion cases. The cases illustrate how pluralistic methods can improve or structure model behavior while still compressing categories, proxies, aggregation rules, and revision rights before affected actors have procedural standing. We introduce Pluralistic Lifecycle Governance (PLG) as a preliminary qualitative audit scaffold for documenting ontological openness, epistemic inclusion, procedural authority, evaluation pluralism, and lifecycle accountability. PLG is not presented as a validated scoring instrument; it is a framework for making the evidence and governance conditions of pluralistic AI explicit.

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

Where Computation Lives Inside TabPFN: Causal Localisation of Attention Head Function

arXiv:2606.12917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the first causal mechanistic analysis of a tabular foundation model, investigating how TabPFN 2.5's feature wise attention heads distribute computation across layers. Using activation patching, ablation, and attention entropy across two synthetic regression datasets, we find clear temporal specialisation: one head's causal necessity dominates that of the others by 2 to 5 times at peak layer, with its dominant layer shifting across tasks of different complexity, while the remaining heads exhibit symmetric late layer profiles. Attention entropy and patching provide convergent evidence for the computationally active layers of the dominant head. We additionally investigate inference time steerability via contrastive activation steering, which fails to transfer across samples. We attribute this result to TabPFN's in context learning mechanism, which encodes task structure through context dependent attention rather than the stable parametric directions that make steering tractable in language models.

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

PRISMR: Overcoming Parse Collapse in Multimodal Listwise Ranking via Parameterized Representation Internalization

arXiv:2606.12942v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative listwise ranking with Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) aims to capture global list context in a single forward pass, but its effectiveness degrades in long-context multimodal scenarios. We identify a recurring failure mode, parse collapse, where the autoregressive decoder produces fluent yet incomplete rankings by silently omitting candidates and terminating early. This failure stems from limited context utilization rather than simple formatting mistakes, making prompt engineering and constrained decoding insufficient. We propose PRISMR (Parameterized Representation Internalization for Semantic Multimodal Ranking), a framework that replaces transient in-context list processing with parametric structural conditioning. PRISMR uses a lightweight hypernetwork to encode multimodal candidates in parallel and generate item-specific LoRA weights, which are synthesized into an instance-specific adapter for a LMM. This paradigm enables more robust internalization of list structure while preserving the base model. We further introduce a large-scale multimodal review-ranking benchmark for evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that PRISMR substantially reduces parse collapse, improves listwise ranking performance, and transfers effectively across domains and instruction-tuned backbones.

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

MedCollab: IBIS-Guided Multi-Agent Collaboration with Hierarchical Disease Relation Chains for Clinical Diagnosis

arXiv:2603.01131v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Clinical diagnosis is a gradual process of evidence integration, in which physicians move from symptoms and medical history to examinations, competing hypotheses, disease relations, and treatment decisions. Large language models have advanced medical text understanding and generation. Yet their clinical use remains limited by weak evidence grounding, opaque reasoning, and inconsistent links among differential diagnosis, final diagnosis, diagnostic basis, and treatment planning. We introduce MedCollab, a multi-agent framework for full-cycle clinical diagnosis and report generation. MedCollab coordinates specialist and examination agents according to patient records. It structures agent deliberation with an Issue-Based Information System (IBIS) protocol, so that each diagnostic position is supported by patient-specific evidence and medical knowledge. It also builds Hierarchical Disease Relation Chains (HDRC) to connect accepted hypotheses through progression, complication, and comorbidity relations. During multi-round deliberation, a verifier-guided consensus module evaluates evidence support, medical plausibility, and logical conflicts. It then adjusts agent contributions and filters unsupported reasoning. Experiments on ClinicalBench and MIMIC-IV show that MedCollab outperforms leading LLMs and medical multi-agent baselines in diagnostic accuracy, evidence consistency, and clinical reasoning quality. These results indicate that structured and auditable collaboration can produce more faithful and clinically coherent diagnostic reports.