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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Care Delivery Gap framework: a proof-of-concept patient-reported measure of guideline-referenced care-process omissions in sickle cell disease

Authors:
Agbalalah↗Rowaiye↗

Abstract Background:Sickle cell disease (SCD) is concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, where delivery of guideline-referenced care remains challenging. Current evaluation approaches rely largely on access indicators and clinical outcomes, which do not directly measure care delivery. We developed the Care Delivery Gap (CDG) framework, a patient-reported approach for identifying care-process omissions, and conducted a proof-of-concept study to assess feasibility and explore variation across income strata. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional framework-development study involving a proof-of-concept sample of 52 individuals with SCD or caregivers recruited through clinics and moderated SCD communities across Africa, North America, and Europe between June 2025 and March 2026. The CDG framework assessed patient-reported omissions in specialist involvement, follow-up continuity, cardiovascular screening, and biochemical surveillance. Analyses were descriptive. Results: Substantial multi-domain care-process omissions were identified despite high reported healthcare engagement. Across geographic income strata, cardiovascular screening was reported by 4/35 (11%) LMIC versus 16/17 (94%) HIC participants, and regular follow-up within the preceding 12 months by 14/35 (40%) versus 16/17 (94%), respectively. High CDG scores, representing 1 omissions across three or four domains, occurred in 20/35 (57%) LMIC compared with 1/17 (6%) HIC participants. Similar disparities were observed across specialist review and vitamin B12 surveillance domains. Conclusion: A structured patient-reported framework identified multi-domain omissions in guideline-referenced SCD care, including among individuals reporting healthcare access. The divergence between access indicators and reported care delivery suggests that service contact alone may not reflect care quality. The framework provides a feasible foundation for future process-level quality measurement in high-burden settings.

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

Multi-agent Framework for Time-Sensitive Complementary Collaboration in Minecraft

Authors:
Juheon Yi↗Jinglu Wang↗Xiaoyi Zhang↗Yan Lu↗

arXiv:2606.15684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present TickingCollabBench, a Minecraft-based multi-agent benchmark for a novel class of time-sensitive complementary collaboration tasks. Our benchmark reflects four core characteristics of real-world collaboration: agent heterogeneity, mandatory collaboration, dynamic environments, and strict real-time constraints with failure risks. To enable this, we develop the TickingCollab framework, which supports the generation of diverse dynamic environments and abstracts Minecraft's primitive APIs to enable declarative YAML task specifications for composing these events. Building on this, we design a feasibility-aware automated benchmark generation pipeline, where an LLM drafts structurally diverse task configurations and feasibility verifier filters out invalid ones using approximate constraints. Evaluations demonstrate that lang latency and inherent difficulty of coordinating under partial observability and agent heterogeneity cause LLMs to frequently fail under dynamic environments and fall significantly short of a global-knowledge oracle.

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

VCG: A Multimodal Retrieval Framework for E-Commerce Video Feeds under Extreme Cold-Start Conditions

Authors:
Katya Mirylenka↗Egor Malykh↗Mahdyar Ravanbakhsh↗Michael Gygli↗Marco-Andrea Buchmann↗Andrew Dzhoha↗Svitlana Borzenko↗Francesca Catino↗Mohamed Gaafar↗Maarten Versteegh↗Thomas Kober↗Dario d'Andrea↗…

arXiv:2606.19627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The digital commerce landscape is shifting from static, search-driven catalogs to dynamic, immersive video feeds. This transition introduces an ``extreme cold-start'' problem: unlike traditional items, new short-form videos lack the dense interaction history required for collaborative filtering. Furthermore, immersive feeds introduce strong position and duration biases that distort standard engagement signals. In this paper, we demonstrate the Video Candidate Generation (VCG) system, a scalable multimodal retrieval engine designed to solve these challenges in a large-scale e-commerce environment. By leveraging a domain-adapted vision-language model (based on CLIP), we map users and videos into a shared semantic space, enabling zero-shot retrieval based on visual content rather than behavioral history. We detail the system's architecture and present a rigorous evaluation comparing generative (LLM) vs. discriminative (CLIP) embeddings. Our results show that while generative models excel at attribute prediction, they suffer from embedding space collapse in retrieval tasks. Online A/B testing demonstrates that VCG effectively mitigates engagement biases, yielding a 50\% uplift in deep video completion. To showcase the system's capabilities, we present an interactive demonstration featuring three bi-directional retrieval scenarios: Product-to-Video, Video-to-Product, and Zero-Shot Semantic Search.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

One Token to Fool LLM-as-a-Judge

Authors:
Yulai Zhao↗Haolin Liu↗Dian Yu↗Sunyuan Kung↗Meijia Chen↗Haitao Mi↗Dong Yu↗

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trusted as automated judges, assisting evaluation and providing reward signals for training other models, particularly in reference-based settings like Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). However, we uncover a critical vulnerability even in this reference-based paradigm: generative reward models are systematically susceptible to reward hacking. We find that superficial inputs, which we term ''master keys'' such as non-word symbols (e.g., '':'' or ''.'') or generic reasoning openers (e.g., ''Thought process:'' or ''Let's solve this problem step by step.''), can consistently elicit false positive rewards without any substantive reasoning. Our systematic evaluation demonstrates this is a widespread failure affecting a diverse range of models, including leading proprietary systems such as GPT-o1 and Claude-4. These results challenge the assumed robustness of LLM judges and pose a significant threat to their reliability. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective data augmentation strategy using truncated model outputs as adversarial negative examples. The resulting Master Reward Models (Master-RMs) demonstrate state-of-the-art robustness against these ''master key'' attacks while maintaining high performance in standard evaluation settings. We supplement these findings with a comprehensive analysis of the vulnerability across model scales, prompt variations, and common inference-time strategies, offering insights to guide future research on robust LLM evaluation. We release our robust, general-domain reward models and the synthetic training data at https://huggingface.co/sarosavo/Master-RM and https://huggingface.co/datasets/sarosavo/Master-RM.

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

Mitigating Content Shift and Hallucination in GenAI Image Editing via Structural Refinement

Authors:
Luxi Zhao↗Michael S. Brown↗

Generative AI (GenAI) image editors, such as Nano Banana, produce visually compelling results for retouching tasks, enabling non-experts to edit images through text prompts alone. However, the generative nature of these models often introduces spatial misalignment, texture distortion, and content hallucination, all of which are detrimental to downstream workflows that require pixel-level fidelity. We identify a problem setting we call "structure-preserving GenAI fusion" for black-box GenAI image retouching: retain the perceptual enhancements of a GenAI output while enforcing structural faithfulness to the original input image. To address this problem, we propose a post-processing framework that fuses an input image with its GenAI-enhanced counterpart by first establishing coarse spatial and photometric correspondences, then performing a fusion stage that transfers desired enhancements while suppressing hallucinated content. In the absence of direct prior work in this setting, we evaluate our framework against representative methods from photorealistic style transfer and image fusion. Our experiments demonstrate that our method better preserves aesthetic quality while maintaining pixel-level structural consistency and the input resolution.

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

Budget-Aware Adaptive Adversarial Patches for Black-Box Object Detection

Authors:
Pedram MohajerAnsari↗Amir Salarpour↗David Fernandez↗Mert D. Pes\'e↗

Adversarial patches pose a practical threat to modern object detectors. Prior work shows vulnerability, but three gaps limit actionable insight: (i) few score-based black-box attacks jointly optimize patch location, texture, and size under tight query budgets; (ii) success is rarely tied to the patch's visual footprint; and (iii) evaluations often conflate EOT robustness with plain-view suppression. We present \method{}, a query-efficient, budget-adaptive black-box attack that couples a lightweight Contextual Thompson-Sampling placer with NES-style pixel updates, growing the patch only when progress stalls. Reporting is anchored by a strict plain-image suppression test; EOT is audited but never used as a substitute for success, and optional appearance/printability weights expose strength–visibility trade-offs. Across YOLOv5, Faster R-CNN, and YOLOS, \method{} achieves strong suppression on CNN-based detectors and substantial suppression on the transformer-based detector, using compact patches and exposing clear query–footprint trade-offs relative to fixed-size and heuristic baselines. A print–capture pilot further shows transfer across unseen physical objects and viewpoints.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Flash-GRPO: Efficient Alignment for Video Diffusion via One-Step Policy Optimization

Authors:
Xiaoxuan He↗Siming Fu↗Zeyue Xue↗Weijie Wang↗Ruizhe He↗Yuming Li↗Dacheng Yin↗Shuai Dong↗Haoyang Huang↗Hongfa Wang↗Nan Duan↗Bohan Zhuang↗…

Group Relative Policy Optimization has emerged as essential for aligning video diffusion models with human preferences, but faces a critical computational bottleneck: training a 14B parametered model typically demands hundreds of GPU days per experiment. Existing efficiency methods reduce costs through sliding window subsampling training timesteps, but fundamentally compromise optimization, exhibiting severe instability and failing to reach full trajectory performance. We present Flash-GRPO, a single-step training framework that outperforms full trajectory training in alignment quality under low computational budgets while substantially improving training efficiency. Flash-GRPO addresses two critical challenges: iso-temporal grouping eliminates timestep-confounded variance by enforcing prompt-wise temporal consistency, decoupling policy performance from timestep difficulty; temporal gradient rectification neutralizes the time-dependent scaling factor that causes vastly inconsistent gradient magnitudes across timesteps. Experiments on 1.3B to 14B parameter models validate Flash-GRPO's effectiveness, demonstrating substantial training acceleration with consistent stability and state-of-the-art alignment quality.

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Benchmarking Quantum Computers via Protocols, Comparing IBM's Heron vs IBM's Eagle

Authors:
Nitay Mayo↗Tal Mor↗Yossi Weinstein↗

arXiv:2603.04377v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As quantum computing hardware rapidly advances, objectively evaluating the capabilities and error rates of new processors remains a critical challenge for the field. A clear and realistic understanding of current quantum performance is essential for guiding research priorities and driving meaningful progress. In this work, we apply and extend a protocol-based benchmarking methodology (Meirom, Mor, Weinstein Arxiv 2505.12441) that utilizes well-defined \underline{quantumness} thresholds. By evaluating performance at protocol level rather than the gate level, this approach provides a transparent and intuitive assessment of whether specific quantum processors, or isolated sub-chips within them, can demonstrate a practical quantum advantage. To illustrate the utility of this method, we compare two generations of IBM quantum computers: the older Eagle architecture and the newer Heron architecture. Our findings reveal the genuine operational strengths and limitations of these devices, demonstrating substantial performance improvements in the newer Heron generation. This work was made possible by IBM Quantum policies that enable independent and objective assessment of its quantum computers and sub-chips. We strongly encourage other companies to emulate the independent qubit availability and the fair pricing that allow researchers to perform such assessments.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

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

Authors:
Qinjian Zhao↗Zhihao Dou↗Dinggen Zhang↗Xiangyu Li↗Chaoda Song↗Zhongwei Wan↗Xinpeng Li↗Yanyan Zhang↗Kaijie Chen↗Qingtao Pan↗Chengcheng Feng↗Zhiqiang Gao↗…

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.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Context-Aware Feature-Fusion for Co-occurring Object Detection in Autonomous Driving

Authors:
Binay Kumar Singh↗Niels Da Vitoria Lobo↗

Object detection in autonomous driving requires precise localization and an inherent understanding of the relational context between co-occurring objects. In extremely complex heterogeneous environments rare classes, small-scale objects, and frequently appearing objects are difficult for standard object detection frameworks to handle. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Context-Centric Feature Fusion (CCFF), which utilizes two attention-based modules, Local Context Fusion Module (LCFM) uses the RoI-to-RoI self-attention mechanism to resolve spatial interactions, mainly considering small and partially obscured objects, while Global Context Attention Module (GCAM) converts the co-occurrence of objects priors by pooling top-K RoI features into a global context attention token, avoiding the computational overhead of pixel-level global pooling. This fusion of local and object-centric global features yields contextualized embeddings that enhance classification results and co-occurring objects detection. Our method is evaluated on two datasets, Cityscapes and BDD100K which demonstrate significant improvement on relational consistency, achieving a Category-level Consistency Strategy (CCS) of 0.973 and 0.969, respectively. Furthermore, our approach produces substantial gains in small object detection (AP_S: 14.1%) and successfully recovers rare classes such as "Train" that are typically lost in large distributions. Our efficiency report shows that the framework processes images in real time with a 0.2 FPS overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/BinayKSingh/CCFF.

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

Reliability of Probabilistic Emulation of Physical Systems

Authors:
Sam F. Greenbury↗Radka Jersakova↗Paolo Conti↗Marjan Famili↗Christopher Iliffe Sprague↗Edwin Brown↗Jason D. McEwen↗

arXiv:2606.12997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two dominant approaches have emerged for generating probabilistic forecasts of physical systems: generative models, such as diffusion or flow matching; and ensembles of deterministic models with stochasticity injected, trained using the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) loss. While both approaches have demonstrated strong predictive accuracy, the reliability of their uncertainties has not been systematically assessed. We address this gap by developing a framework to evaluate both approaches across diverse 2D spatiotemporal physical systems, under matched model size and computational budget. We assess the reliability of probabilistic emulation by inspecting the empirical coverage of predictive intervals, while also considering accuracy and computational efficiency metrics. CRPS-trained ensembles typically achieve more reliable uncertainties on both single-step prediction and autoregressive rollouts, demonstrating better coverage than the standard alternative of training generative models in a latent space. Moreover, the CRPS approach offers significantly faster inference. When generative models are trained in ambient rather than a compressed latent space, which is often infeasible for high-dimensional problems, they exhibit comparable coverage to CRPS-trained ensembles, though with substantially larger inference latency. In contrast, when CRPS-trained ensembles are trained in latent space they do not show a marked degradation in coverage with respect to ambient space. Both generative models and CRPS-trained ensembles demonstrate good predictive accuracy. To facilitate future research and application, we release AutoCast, a modular framework implementing both generative models and CRPS-trained ensembles, alongside AutoSim, a flexible dataset generation package for rapid prototyping.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

On the Optimal Reasoning Length for RL-Trained Language Models

Authors:
Daisuke Nohara↗Taishi Nakamura↗Rio Yokota↗

Reinforcement learning substantially improves reasoning in large language models, but it also tends to lengthen chain-of-thought outputs and increase computational cost. Although length-control methods have been proposed, the length-accuracy relationship they induce remains unclear. We train policies with several length-control methods on multiple base models in a controlled setup and find that, across both mathematical reasoning and code generation, accuracy is non-monotonic in output length, peaking at an intermediate value. Mode accuracy, however, continues to improve with length even in settings where sample accuracy plateaus or declines, indicating that the non-monotonic length-accuracy relationship is driven by dispersion around an increasingly correct center.

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

Kolmogorov Regression for Robust Diffusion Policies

Authors:
Lekan Molu↗

arXiv:2606.18186v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finite-dimensional (FD) diffusion policies exhibit temporal drift owing to discretization artifacts that degrade long-horizon performance (when deployed on physical systems). We introduce a backward Kolmogorov equation that lifts diffusion policies to a Cameron-Martin space – a subset of the Hilbert space. Essentially, replacing stochastic score matching with a deterministic boundary-value PDE problem. Our core innovation thrives on Gaussian measure theory whereupon the diffusion noise covariance operator is realized from a colored noise distribution which prescribes a notion of regularity on samples from the model at inference time. We train the diffusion model with a derived precision-weighted Cameron- Martin loss and a Kolmogorov residual is introduced as a PDE diagnostic during inference. These substitutions yield (i) convergence guarantees where the bound's constants depend on the effective rank of the kernel rather than action dimension, (ii) improved trajectory regularity via spectral weighting, and (iii) a deterministic failure detector without reward signals. Validation across two application domains demonstrates substantial improvements: on the PushT manipulation benchmark, the Cameron-Martin loss achieves a 17% improvement in maximum episode reward (0.95 vs. 0.78 for MSE) and 67.6% reduction in inter-step drifts during inference via the introduced residual magnitude. Similarly, on a 6-station manufacturing line with constant work-in-process (CONWIP) flow control, we achieve 28.4% lower RMSE than classical LSTM baselines; a high starvation-event recall (1.0 in test cycles), and effective bottleneck identification (Precision@1 = 1.0 in test set, 13x signal-to-noise ratio). We then certify the dispatch policies with Hamilton-Jacobi reachability theory which reduces deadlock events by 96% compared to uncontrolled dispatch over 100 simulated runs (351 events prevented).

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

Gender Bias in LLM Hiring Decisions: Evidence from a Japanese Context and Evaluation of Mitigation Strategies

Authors:
Serena A. Hoffstedde↗Machiko Hirota↗Akshara Nadayanur Sathis Kanna↗Rihito Kotani↗Ujwal Kumar↗Gabriele Trovato↗Phan Xuan Tan↗

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in hiring workflows, yet most research on gender bias in LLM hiring decisions has focused on English-language, Western-format resumes. This study examines whether pro-female gender bias extends to a Japanese corporate context and evaluates two practical mitigation strategies. Using a counterfactual resume design with 60 Japanese rirekisho-format resumes, 12 name pairs selected on linguistically grounded gender-signal criteria, and five state-of-the-art LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Llama 3.3 70B), we conducted 43,200 API calls across baseline, prompt instruction, and privacy filter conditions. A crossed random-effects linear mixed model confirms a significant pro-female bias across all five models, replicating Western findings in a non-Western context. A prompt-level gender-neutrality instruction produces no meaningful reduction in bias. A name-reliance analysis formally identifies the candidate name as the primary gender channel: removing the name from the prompt reduces the female effect by nearly its full magnitude. An unexpected incompatibility between the privacy filter and GPT-4o's content safety filter, resulting in a 42% refusal rate, highlights a practical deployment challenge for name anonymization in LLM-assisted recruitment pipelines.

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

Ellipse Meets Bit-Planes: A Novel Approach to RNFL based Glaucoma Detection Using Advanced Image Processing and Deep Learning

Authors:
Snigdha Paul↗Sambit Mallick↗Anindya Sen↗

This work proposes an integrated pipeline for automatic glaucoma detection method from easily available colour fundas images based on an adaptive algorithm for ellipse-based polar transformation, to enhance the analysis of the Retinal Nerve Fiber Layer (RNFL) as the primary biomarker for observing glaucomatous changes, regardless of optic disc and macula position. Utilizing this transformation, we introduce two distinct frameworks tailored to different operational needs. The first framework, a deep learning-inspired feature fusion approach, achieves a 99.3% detection rate, ideal for settings where high precision is essential, despite higher computational demands. The second framework employs a novel image-processing algorithm based on bit-plane slicing, offering 92.31% accuracy and optimized for environments requiring rapid inference with minimal resource consumption. Both frameworks provide scalable and cost-effective solutions for early glaucoma detection. This study highlights the potential of RNFL-based diagnostic tools in addressing the global challenge of glaucoma, particularly in underserved regions.

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

Memory-Efficient Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Safety-Critical Control in Adversarial Spacecraft Proximity Operations

Authors:
Alejandro Posadas-Nava↗Richard Linares↗Minduli Wijayatunga↗

arXiv:2606.17414v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous spacecraft rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) require controllers that guarantee safety under thrust constraints while minimizing fuel expenditure. Input-constrained control barrier functions (ICCBFs) provide a control method for nonlinear systems with actuation constraints that construct a forward-invariant safe set. Previous work has shown that learning class-$\mathcal{K}$ functions defining the ICCBF recursion via meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) yields a robust, non-greedy approach to safety-critical control in RPO. This paper extends that framework further by investigating the performance of three recurrent network architectures (Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Selective State Space Model (Mamba)) and two training algorithms (Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor Critic (SAC)) to identify the best setup for tuning ICCBF class-K functions via meta-RL. In addition to cooperative test cases, performance is evaluated in the presence of adversarial behavior where the target spacecraft behaves in a way that worsens the safety of the chaser spacecraft. Results indicate that state space models such as Mamba when used with PPO achieve superior task completion, safety, and fuel-savings compared to other architectures, across all cooperative and uncooperative scenarios tested.

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

Hybrid Uncertainty Sensitivity Analysis Based on the HSIC for High-Dimensional Responses with Aleatory–Epistemic Separation

Authors:
Shijie Zhong↗Jiangfeng Fu↗Pengfei Wei↗

arXiv:2606.14053v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantifying the influence of hybrid aleatory and epistemic uncertainties on high-dimensional system responses remains a major challenge in global sensitivity analysis (GSA). Existing Hilbert–Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC)-based approaches are primarily restricted to single-output settings and lack a rigorous decomposition of heterogeneous uncertainty sources and their interactions. To address this limitation, a novel double-space tensor-product RKHS framework is proposed for sensitivity analysis under hybrid uncertainty. By constructing factorized kernels over both the latent input space and the multidimensional output space, a concurrent double Möbius inversion is derived to orthogonally decompose the global dependence measure into pure aleatory effects, pure epistemic effects, and their interaction contributions. The resulting dimension-wise sensitivity indices preserve the uncertainty attribution structure across all output dimensions. To satisfy the independence assumptions required by the decomposition, an auxiliary-variable representation based on the inverse probability integral transform is introduced, enabling the treatment of hierarchical uncertainties and Copula-induced correlations within a unified latent space. A fully vectorized single-loop implementation is further developed to avoid the computational burden of nested Monte Carlo simulation. Statistical significance and estimation uncertainty are quantified through permutation testing and Bootstrap confidence intervals. Numerical studies on a modified multi-output Ishigami function and an aerodynamic pressure-field problem demonstrate the accuracy, scalability, and practical applicability of the proposed framework.

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20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A thalamus–brainstem attractor network drives history-biased decisions

Authors:
Shan Zhao↗

Natural environments often change gradually, making it adaptive to bias decisions on the basis of the recent past — a phenomenon known as serial dependence1–3. Large-scale recordings during behaviour have identified that serial dependence is a common motif for decision-making, with neural representations of past experiences found throughout the brain4–11. However, it remains unclear whether this bias arises from dedicated neural circuits with history-specific computations. Using whole-brain, cellular-resolution imaging in zebrafish performing memory-guided evasive manoeuvres12–14, we identified a hierarchical circuit that maintains past information and biases future choices. Discrete attractors in the dorsal thalamus encoded the position of the most recent obstacle, maintaining a categorical memory via persistent activity lasting 10–20 s. Optogenetic manipulation of the dorsal thalamus abolished or imposed serial bias. A downstream hindbrain integrator received input from the thalamus and combined it with current sensory cues to produce graded responses reflecting multi-trial history. Leveraging a comprehensive brain atlas in zebrafish15, we constructed a whole-brain computational model that recapitulated behaviour and also predicted a key role for heterogeneous inhibitory subtypes in enabling flexible state transitions. This attractor–integrator architecture reveals a hierarchical and modular computation that unifies robust memory retention with flexible sensory integration, providing a general principle for history-biased decisions. Whole-brain, cellular-resolution imaging reveals a hierarchical thalamus–brainstem attractor network that encodes recent history and shapes behavioural bias in zebrafish.

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

Knowing When to Quit: A Principled Framework for Dynamic Abstention in LLM Reasoning

Authors:
Hen Davidov↗Nachshon Cohen↗Oren Kalinsky↗Yaron Fairstein↗Guy Kushilevitz↗Ram Yazdi↗Patrick Rebeschini↗

LLMs utilizing chain-of-thought reasoning often waste substantial compute by producing long, incorrect responses. Abstention can mitigate this by withholding outputs unlikely to be correct. While most abstention methods decide to withhold outputs before or after generation, dynamic mid-generation abstention considers early termination of unpromising reasoning traces at each token position. Prior work has explored empirical variants of this idea, but principled guidance for the abstention rule remains lacking. We present a formal analysis of dynamic abstention for LLMs, modeling abstention as an explicit action within a regularized reinforcement learning framework. An abstention reward parameter controls the trade-off between compute and information. We show that abstaining when the value function falls below this reward strictly outperforms natural baselines under general conditions. We further derive a principled and efficient method to approximate the value function. Empirical results on mathematical reasoning and toxicity avoidance tasks support our theory and demonstrate improved selective accuracy over existing methods.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CoMo: Learning Continuous Latent Motion from Internet Videos for Scalable Robot Learning

Authors:
Jiange Yang↗Yansong Shi↗Haoyi Zhu↗Mingyu Liu↗Kaijing Ma↗Yating Wang↗Gangshan Wu↗Tong He↗Limin Wang↗

Unsupervised learning of latent motion from Internet videos is crucial for robot learning. Existing discrete methods generally mitigate the shortcut learning caused by extracting excessive static backgrounds through vector quantization with a small codebook size. However, they suffer from information loss and struggle to capture more complex and fine-grained dynamics. Moreover, there is an inherent gap between the distribution of discrete latent motion and continuous robot action, which hinders the joint learning of a unified policy. We propose CoMo, which aims to learn more precise continuous latent motion from internet-scale videos. CoMo employs an early temporal difference (Td) mechanism to increase the shortcut learning difficulty and explicitly enhance motion cues. Additionally, to ensure latent motion better captures meaningful foregrounds, we further propose a temporal contrastive learning (Tcl) scheme. Specifically, positive pairs are constructed with a small future frame temporal offset, while negative pairs are formed by directly reversing the temporal direction. The proposed Td and Tcl work synergistically and effectively ensure that the latent motion focuses better on the foreground and reinforces motion cues. Critically, CoMo exhibits strong zeroshot generalization, enabling it to generate effective pseudo action labels for unseen videos. Extensive simulated and real-world experiments show that policies co-trained with CoMo pseudo action labels achieve superior performance with both diffusion and auto-regressive architectures.

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23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A Unified Approach to Beta Moments, Combinatorial Identities, and Random Walks

Authors:
Puja Pandey↗Palaniappan Vellaisamy↗

arXiv:2605.05420v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The study of random walks has increasingly been popular across diverse disciplines such as statistics, mathematics, quantum physics, where they are used to model paths consisting of successive random steps in a mathematical space. A fundamental quantity of interest is the probability that a simple symmetric random walk returns to the origin after 2n steps. In this paper, we develop a unified probabilistic approach that connects the return probabilities in arbitrary dimensions with moment representations. Using this framework, we provide probabilistic proofs of several combinatorial identities involving beta and gamma functions, and derive new combinatorial identities in general dimensions.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SLUM-i: Semi-supervised Learning for Urban Mapping of Informal Settlements and Data Quality Benchmarking

Authors:
Muhammad Taha Mukhtar↗Syed Musa Ali Kazmi↗Khola Naseem↗Muhammad Ali Chattha↗Andreas Dengel↗Sheraz Ahmed↗Muhammad Naseer Bajwa↗Muhammad Imran Malik↗

Rapid urban expansion has fueled the growth of informal settlements in major cities of low- and middle-income countries, with Lahore and Karachi in Pakistan and Mumbai in India serving as prominent examples. However, large-scale mapping of these settlements is severely constrained not only by the scarcity of annotations but by inherent data quality challenges, specifically high spectral ambiguity between formal and informal structures and significant annotation noise. We address this by introducing a benchmark dataset for Lahore, constructed from scratch, along with companion datasets for Karachi and Mumbai, which were derived from verified administrative boundaries, totaling approximately 900 $km^2$ of urban area. This collection is supplemented by four cities from prior literature across Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, with comprehensive data quality assessments provided for each city. We also propose a semi-supervised segmentation framework designed to mitigate the class imbalance and distribution mismatch inherent in standard semi-supervised learning pipelines. Our method integrates a Class-Aware Adaptive Thresholding mechanism that dynamically adjusts confidence thresholds to prevent minority class suppression, and a DINOv2-based unlabeled pool filter that removes out-of-distribution tiles prior to training to reduce covariate shift. Extensive experiments across seven cities spanning three continents, repeated over five random seeds, demonstrate gains of up to +5.9 pp mIoU over state-of-the-art semi-supervised baselines, with both components being architecture-agnostic and adding no inference overhead.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

How Useful is Causal Invariance for Domain Adaptation in Finite-Sample Settings?

Authors:
Julia Kostin↗Kasra Jalaldoust↗Elias Bareinboim↗Samory Kpotufe↗Fanny Yang↗

arXiv:2606.12680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models often degrade when they are deployed on a target distribution that differs from the source distributions they were trained on. Recent work in causality-based domain generalization has shown how shared causal structure between domains can induce invariant predictors, e.g., models on a subset of features which have stable risk across structured domain shifts. However, the extent to which such population-level causal invariances can lead to gains in finite-sample settings remains underexplored. In particular, in practice we often have access to a few labeled target samples, a setting called supervised domain adaptation (sDA). In this paper, we explore when (full or partial) causal knowledge can provably improve supervised domain adaptation. As a first step, we study linear regression, where full or partial causal knowledge specifies a collection of invariant or possibly invariant feature subsets, each yielding a source-trained candidate predictor. We derive matching upper and lower bounds showing that finite-sample gains are governed by the target-risk margins separating the candidates, together with the finite-source estimation error. When these margins are sufficiently large relative to $n_Q$, an adaptive aggregation procedure can match the best candidate predictor while avoiding negative transfer relative to target-only learning. On the other hand, when the margins are too small, no algorithm can reliably exploit the candidate collection to obtain faster finite-sample rates. We further connect these margins to structural shift magnitude in linear SCMs and validate the theory on real-world causal benchmarks.

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