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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Minimal Filling Architectures of Polynomial Neural Networks: Counterexamples, Frontier Search, and Defects

Authors:
Kevin Dao↗Jose Israel Rodriguez↗

arXiv:2605.09609v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We provide counterexamples to the unimodal minimal filling architecture conjecture for polynomial neural networks (PNNs) with power activation functions. Fixing the input and output widths, the conjecture states that any minimal filling architecture has unimodal widths for the hidden layers. We found counterexamples via a frontier search, recursive dimension bounds on neurovarieties, and symbolic computation. Notably, several subarchitectures of our main example exhibit large defect, in contrast with the predominantly small-defect behavior observed in prior literature.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Is It You or Your Environment? A Bayesian Inference Framework for Genomically-Anchored Personalized Physiological Interpretation

Authors:
Aruna Dey↗Suraj Biswas↗

arXiv:2606.13556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized health AI systems face a fundamental cold-start problem: machine learning models for physiological interpretation require weeks of individual behavioral data before they can distinguish constitutional variation from environmentally driven deviation. We propose a solution grounded in causal inference and Bayesian prior design. An individual's genomic profile serves as an exogenous genetic anchor – a domain-informed, personalized prior that is fixed at conception, immune to reverse causation, and available before a single behavioral observation is collected. The anchor initializes a Bayesian belief state over an individual's physiological set point G-hat = mu + sum(beta_i * g_i), where beta_i are GWAS-derived effect sizes and g_i are risk-allele counts. Each incoming physiological measurement P produces a non-constitutional deviation delta = P - G-hat that separates the signal attributable to environment and state from the constitutionally fixed baseline. As behavioral data accrue, the prior decays according to G-hat_t = w(t)*G-hat_genomic + [1-w(t)]*P-bar_t, transitioning from genome-dominated to empirical-baseline-dominated inference. The same observed HRV of 55 ms generates a suppression hypothesis for a person whose prior predicts 80 ms, and an enhancement hypothesis for a person whose prior predicts 30 ms – a reversal impossible without a personalized anchor. We develop this architecture across six physiological domains, grading genomic priors by evidence strength, distinguishing robustly replicated anchors (FTO, FADS1/2, FKBP5) from contested candidate genes (SLC6A4, MAOA, DRD2). We address the inference boundary between association, Mendelian randomization, and individual token causation, and define four constraints for deployment: evidence-graded priors, dynamic decay, ancestry-matched effect sizes, and attribution rather than deterministic output.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Federated Learning for Feature Generalization with Convex Constraints

Authors:
Dongwon Kim↗Donghee Kim↗Sung Kuk Shyn↗Kwangsu Kim↗

arXiv:2606.14416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated learning (FL) often struggles with generalization due to heterogeneous client data. Local models are prone to overfitting their local data distributions, and even transferable features can be distorted during aggregation. To address these challenges, we propose FedCONST, an approach that adaptively modulates update magnitudes based on the parameter strength of the global model. This prevents over-emphasizing well-learned parameters while reinforcing underdeveloped ones. Specifically, FedCONST employs linear convex constraints to ensure training stability and preserve locally learned generalization capabilities during aggregation. A Gradient Signal to Noise Ratio (GSNR) analysis further validates the effectiveness of FedCONST in enhancing feature transferability and robustness. As a result, FedCONST effectively aligns local and global objectives, mitigating overfitting and promoting stronger generalization across diverse FL environments, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

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

Experience Makes Skillful: Enabling Generalizable Medical Agent Reasoning via Self-Evolving Skill Memory

Authors:
Haoran Sun↗Wenjie Li↗Yujie Zhang↗Zekai Lin↗Fanrui Zhang↗Kaitao Chen↗Xingqi He↗Yichen Li↗Mianxin Liu↗Lei Liu↗Yankai Jiang↗

Medical agent systems are increasingly expected to support interactive clinical decision making rather than only static question answering. In such settings, effective agents must reuse prior experience across evolving cases, yet existing memory mechanisms often retain raw historical traces that are redundant, noisy, and difficult to govern. More importantly, they rarely distinguish which memories are truly useful for future reasoning. This limits their ability to accumulate compact and reliable experience for long-horizon clinical reasoning. To close this gap, we propose SkeMex, a post-deployment self-evolution framework that improves medical agents through a skill-based memory without updating model weights. SkeMex distills informative interaction trajectories into structured skills that encode reusable procedural knowledge, and organizes them into a multi-branch repository spanning general, task-specific, and action-level experience. To determine which memories should be reused and retained, SkeMex estimates context-dependent utility from environment feedback and uses it to guide value-aware retrieval and repository governance. A closed-loop ``Read–Write–Assess–Govern" lifecycle further supports continual evolution by writing new skills, updating utilities, promoting useful memories, and removing harmful entries. Experiments across diverse clinical tasks show that SkeMex consistently outperforms representative memory-based agents in both offline and online settings. It also generalizes across model backbones and supports transferable skill memory. All data and code will be released publicly.

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

A Unified Framework for Context-Aware and Relation-Aware Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Authors:
Haoyang Zhong↗Yifei Sun↗Antong Zhang↗Chunping Wang↗Lei Chen↗Yang Yang↗

arXiv:2606.18075v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a paradigm for enhancing large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge, yet existing graph-based methods face a fundamental limitation: entity-centric and chunk-centric approaches operate on representations anchored to original text without true knowledge fusion. While entity-centric methods connect logically related content and chunk-centric methods preserve context, both retrieve information separately through similarity search, missing emergent understanding from their synthesis. In this paper, we propose HyGRAG, a hierarchical graph RAG framework that transcends source documents by addressing three core challenges: constructing summaries that genuinely integrate contextual and relational information, leveraging these synthesized representations to access emergent knowledge during retrieval, and efficiently updating hierarchical structures for dynamic corpora. Specifically, we design hierarchical index structures over hybrid graphs with both chunk and entity nodes, then iteratively cluster them and generate LLM-based summaries. Then, we design context and relation-aware retrieval that searches across all abstraction levels while expanding through community membership. Moreover, we enable dynamic knowledge update through attachment-based algorithms with only local re-summarization. Experimental results show that HyGRAG improves the average accuracy of multi-hop reasoning tasks by 9.7%, while maintaining reasonable efficiency.

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

PermaVid: Consistent Video Generation Across Edits via Disentangled Context Memory

Authors:
Shuai Yang↗Bingjie Gao↗Ziwei Liu↗Jiaqi Wang↗Dahua Lin↗Tong Wu↗

Consistent video generation under editing operations requires persistence: when edits modify scene appearance or layout, subsequent generations should remain coherent across time and viewpoints. However, existing memory designs struggle to maintain long-term consistency after such modifications, as stored contexts may become outdated or invalid. To address this, we propose PermaVid, a novel framework built upon a multi-modal context memory that disentangles spatial context into semantic appearance and geometric structure, together with an edit-aware memory update and retrieval strategy that keeps memory evolution aligned with subsequent observations. Specifically, we develop two complementary memory banks: an RGB context memory that captures appearance-aware observations while implicitly encoding geometry, and a depth context memory that preserves geometry-only structure disentangled from semantics. Building on this design, we introduce a memory-guided video generation model that performs multi-modal feature fusion under reference conditions drawn from mixed-modality memory contexts. Experiments demonstrate that our method maintains strong long-term semantic and structural consistency after edits, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

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07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Nonlocal continuous-variable gates by amplified optical connections

Authors:
Michele N. Notarnicola↗Radim Filip↗

arXiv:2603.12866v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nonlocal quantum gates, coupling quantum systems located at a distance, are crucial for distributed quantum computing. To this aim, high-capacity optical noiseless connections between different processing units are essential for transmitting large amounts of information per mode. Simultaneously, optical quantum computing offers future high-speed multimode quantum processors. We propose a library of feasible protocols to implement a necessary nonlocal continuous-variable (CV) quantum nondemolition (QND) gate between two distant users sharing a quantum channel and exploiting classical communication. The users are endowed with a newly achieved high-fidelity and large-bandwith element - single-pass phase-sensitive optical parametric amplifier (OPA), that allows for both online squeezing and channel-loss compensation. The use of OPAs enhances quality of the resulting gate in terms of both excess noise and entangling capability. The proposed schemes are also applicable to CV cluster state fusion, providing a first step towards development of distributed CV measurement-based quantum computation.

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

Grids Often Outperform Implicit Neural Representations at Compressing Dense Signals

Authors:
Namhoon Kim↗Sara Fridovich-Keil↗

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have recently shown impressive results, but their fundamental capacity, implicit biases, and scaling behavior remain poorly understood. We investigate the performance of diverse INRs across a suite of 2D and 3D real and synthetic signals with varying effective bandwidth, as well as both overfitting and generalization tasks including tomography, super-resolution, and denoising. By stratifying performance according to model size as well as signal type and bandwidth, our results shed light on how different INR and grid representations allocate their capacity. We find that, for many tasks involving dense signals, a simple regularized grid with interpolation trains faster and to higher or comparable quality than any INR with the same number of parameters. We also find limited settings – namely fitting binary signals such as shape contours – where INRs outperform grids, to guide future development and use of INRs towards the most advantageous applications.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Efficient Zeroth-Order Federated Finetuning of Language Models on Resource-Constrained Devices

Authors:
Mohamed Aboelenien Ahmed↗Kilian Pfeiffer↗Ramin Khalili↗Heba Khdr↗J\"org Henkel↗

arXiv:2502.10239v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a promising paradigm for finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) across distributed data sources while preserving data privacy. However, finetuning such large models is challenging on edge devices due to its high resource demand. Zeroth-order Optimization (ZO) estimates gradients through finite-difference approximations, which rely on function evaluations under random perturbations of the model parameters. Consequently, ZO with task alignment provides a potential solution, allowing finetuning using only forward passes with inference-level memory requirements and low communication overhead, but it suffers from slow convergence and higher computational demand. In this paper, we propose a new ZO-based method that applies a more efficient technique to reduce the computational demand associated with using a large number of perturbations while preserving their convergence benefits. This is achieved by splitting the model into consecutive blocks and allocating a higher number of perturbations to the second block, enabling efficient reuse of intermediate activations to update the full network with fewer forward evaluations. Our evaluation on RoBERTa-large, OPT1.3B, LLaMa-3-3.2B models shows up to $3\times$ reduction in computation compared to the other ZO-based techniques, while retaining the memory and communication benefits over first-order federated learning techniques.

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

Generative AI and the future of scientometrics: current topics and future questions

Authors:
Benedetto Lepori↗Jens Peter Andersen↗Karsten Donnay↗

In this paper, we contribute to the debate on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in scientometrics. We argue that moving from a trial-and-error approach to an explainable and actionable use requires a principled understanding of strengths and weaknesses of GenAI as compared with other techniques and with human judgment. To this end, we introduce a conceptual framework based on the distinction between the semantic dimensions of texts, i.e. the meanings attributed to words, and their pragmatic dimension, i.e. their embedding within communicative situations. We leverage this framework to interpret the results of applications of GenAI in scientometrics and to provide guidance to users. Specifically, we conclude that key parameters to be considered are the nature of the task, the level of granularity of the analysis and whether the goal was descriptive, inferential or evaluative. These parameters lead to different strategies for using GenAI and human-machine integration. Finally, we suggest that, by generating large amounts of scientific language, GenAI might affect textual characteristics used to measure science, such as authors, words, and references. We argue that careful empirical work and theoretical reflection will be essential to remain capable of interpreting the evolving patterns of knowledge production in the age of AI.

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11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum ergodicity and semiclassical measures: mathematical results

Authors:
St\'ephane Nonnenmacher↗

arXiv:2606.12098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this chapter we review some results describing the high-frequency eigenmodes of the Laplacian on compact manifolds, or Euclidean domains, for which the geodesic flow is chaotic. We focus on the macroscopic distribution of these eigenmodes, which is described by the concept of semiclassical measure. The main result on the question is the Quantum Ergodicity theorem, originally due to Schnirelman. We provide the detailed proof of this theorem, including the adjustments necessary to treat the case of manifolds with boundary. We also discuss the Quantum Unique Ergodicity conjecture, and some progress towards this conjecture for strongly chaotic (Anosov) systems. In particular, we describe the constraints on admissible semiclassical measures, in terms of their Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy, as well as more recent delocalization results.

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12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Positive Conserved Quantities in the Klein-Gordon Equation

Authors:
Robert Lin↗

arXiv:2410.04666v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce an embedding of the Klein-Gordon equation into a pair of coupled equations that are first-order in time. The existence of such an embedding is based on a positivity property exhibited by the Klein-Gordon equation. These coupled equations provide a more satisfactory reduction of the Klein-Gordon equation to first-order differential equations in time than the Schrodinger equation. Using this embedding, we show that the ``negative probabilities" associated with the Klein-Gordon equation do not need to be resolved by introducing matrices as Dirac did with his eponymous equation. For the case of the massive Klein-Gordon equation, the coupled equations are equivalent to a forward Schrodinger equation in time and a backward Schrodinger equation in time, respectively, corresponding to a particle and its antiparticle. We show that there are two positive integrals that are conserved (constant in time) in the Klein-Gordon equation and thus provide a concrete resolution of the historical puzzle regarding the previously supposed lack of a probabilistic interpretation for the field governed by the Klein-Gordon equation. A significant consequence is that the Schrodinger equation is given a relativistic formulation, which does not require creation and annihilation operators, i.e. quantum fields. Physically, this corresponds to a theory in which the positive and negative energy parts do not directly interact, hence there will be no annihilation events–for example, particle-antiparticle collisions which do not result in photon emission. Thus, one practical consequence of this relativistically consistent theory is a simple explanation for dark matter.

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13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Image-based deep learning for emergency electrocardiogram classification

Authors:
Meneguitti Dias↗Ribeiro↗Olivetti↗Carvalho↗Krieger↗J. E↗Gutierrez↗

Automated electrocardiogram analysis has advanced largely through digital waveforms, yet many emergency-care workflows rely on ECGs available only as printed tracings, scanned reports, PDFs or mobile photographs. We developed an image-based deep learning system for emergency ECG classification and evaluated it in InCor-EMG, an expert-adjudicated dataset of 18,519 emergency ECGs spanning 12 ECG categories, with labels from 19 cardiologists. On the held-out test set, the final ConvNeXt ensemble achieved a macro F1-score of 0.807 (95% CI, 0.788-0.825), compared with 0.820 (95% CI, 0.805-0.832) for annotating cardiologists, and higher F1-scores than Mortara Veritas in most evaluated categories. Performance was associated more strongly with inter-reader agreement than with training sample size and remained informative across scanned and photographed ECGs, with supportive performance in model-enriched temporal and heterogeneous public-image evaluations. These findings support ECG image classification when digital waveforms are unavailable.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

One Jailbreak, Many Tongues: Learning Language-Insensitive Intention Representations for Multilingual Jailbreak Detection

Authors:
Shuyu Jiang↗Kaiyu Xu↗Xingshu Chen↗Hao Ren↗Rui Tang↗Yi Zhang↗Tianwei Zhang↗Hongwei Li↗

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications for global multilingual users, yet safety training remains concentrated in dominant languages and has not progressed in parallel with multilingual capability, creating exploitable gaps for jailbreak attacks. Current jailbreak defenses are largely developed and evaluated in dominant languages, and their effectiveness is limited by the scarcity of aligned multilingual supervision and representations dispersion caused by language variation. To address this issue, we propose MLJailDe, a multilingual jailbreak detection framework designed to improve both multilingual robustness and cross-lingual generalization. MLJailDe first introduces a multilingual back-translation data augmentation algorithm to construct a semantically consistent and functionally effective dataset spanning 11 languages, consisting of 2,232 benign and 1,239 jailbreak samples. On this basis, MLJailDe employs relative-distance constraints to reduce cross-lingual representation dispersion and encourage jailbreak prompts with similar intent to form consistent clusters across languages, while an imbalance-aware classification objective is further used to alleviate class imbalance and learn more reliable multilingual decision boundaries. Experimental results show that MLJailDe outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple languages, achieving an F1 score of 98.5\%, and obtains an average F1 score of 97.1\% on unseen languages, demonstrating strong effectiveness and cross-lingual generalization.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Mode-selective nonlinear interference for high-brightness and high-purity fiber-coupled SPDC sources

Authors:
Carlos Sevilla-Guti\'errez↗Purujit Singh Chauhan↗Varun Raj Kaipalath↗Fabian Steinlechner↗

arXiv:2606.23836v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-mode-fiber-coupled spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) sources are a key resource for photonic quantum technologies, but in single-crystal geometries brightness, heralding efficiency, and spectral purity remain constrained by intrinsic trade-offs. Here, we show how nonlinear interference in a cascaded two-crystal type-II SPDC source can be used to engineer the modal structure of SPDC emission, improving the brightness–heralding-efficiency trade-off by more than one order of magnitude beyond the single-crystal limit. We further demonstrate two routes to near-unity spectral purity while retaining high brightness and/or heralding efficiency, even with standard periodically poled crystals, and study the additional advantages of aperiodic poling with Gaussian phase matching. Using a spectrally resolved Laguerre–Gauss modal decomposition, we show that these improvements arise from mode-selective interference of spatial-spectral SPDC modes within the nonlinear interferometer. We experimentally validate the model through sum-frequency-generation measurements of the spatial-spectral state.

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16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Population-associated molecular variation in histologically normal breast tissue is context-dependent and associated with distinct transcriptional states

Authors:
Hulsy↗W. D↗Salazar↗Chalkia↗Chavez↗Zhao↗Halkia↗Razorenova↗O. V↗Nikolaidis↗

Population-associated molecular variation in breast tissue may contribute to differences in tissue biology and disease susceptibility, yet the extent to which such variation is shaped by underlying tissue states remains unclear. Here, we performed RNA-seq and lipidomic profiling of histologically normal breast tissue samples from African American (AA) and Caucasian White (CW) individuals, followed by conceptual integration of the resulting transcriptomic and lipidomic patterns. Unsupervised analysis revealed two distinct baseline transcriptional states (G1 and G2) that defined the primary axis of molecular variation across the cohort and corresponded to epithelial-enriched (G1) and vascular-enriched (G2) tissue contexts as determined by cell-type deconvolution. Global comparisons between AA and CW samples showed minimal transcriptomic differences, with only a single gene reaching significance after multiple testing correction. However, when stratified by baseline tissue state, 191 genes were differentially expressed within G1, with coordinated upregulation of extracellular matrix organization and proliferative/cytoskeletal processes in AA samples. These patterns were consistently supported across multiple enrichment approaches. No comparable population-associated differences were observed within G2. Lipidomic analyses showed partial but non-significant trends consistent with transcriptomic structure, suggesting that lipid variation provides complementary but limited support for baseline molecular differences, likely reflecting constraints of bulk tissue composition. Together, these findings suggest that population-associated molecular differences in normal breast tissue are context-dependent and emerge within specific baseline transcriptional states, where distinct biological programs can coexist and be differentially modulated. These findings highlight the importance of tissue heterogeneity in shaping molecular variation and its potential relevance to disease-associated tissue states.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Deep Temporal Modeling and Ensemble Fusion for Multimodal Emotion Recognition from Physiological Signals

Authors:
Desta Haileselassie Hagos↗Saurav Keshari Aryal↗Patrick Ymele-Leki↗Anietie Andy↗Legand L. Burge↗

Physiological stress and emotion recognition are important for health monitoring and affective computing. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of deep learning models such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN), and Transformer on the WESAD dataset for multimodal affect recognition using wrist and chest sensor signals. We perform ablation studies to assess the individual contributions of each modality by training models on wrist-only and chest-only inputs. In addition, we implement a late-fusion ensemble strategy that combines predictions from all three architectures trained on multimodal input. We also employ early fusion at the sensor level by concatenating wrist and chest signals before feeding them into each model. Our results show that Transformer models consistently achieve the highest accuracy in multimodal settings, while TCN models perform best in the wrist-only configuration. The ensemble method yields the highest overall accuracy (98.91 +/- 0.13%) and macro-F1 score (98.56 +/- 0.17%). These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of sensor fusion and ensemble-based fusion in developing robust systems for physiological emotion recognition.

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimizing Wigner Negativity in Scattering Processes Using Energetic Cost Functions

Authors:
Kian Hwee Lim↗Kiarn T. Laverick↗Sahil Sardar Jafar↗Samyak P. Prasad↗Maria Maffei↗Alexia Auff\`eves↗

arXiv:2606.15101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wigner negativities (WNs) are key signatures of non-Gaussian bosonic states and essential resources for quantum technologies. We study their generation in the scattering of coherent pulses by a two-level atom coupled to a one-dimensional reservoir, a unitary and energy-preserving platform. Optimization in this multimode setting is hindered by the complexity of evaluating Wigner functions. We overcome this challenge by introducing energetic cost functions that identify output modes most likely to host large negativities. First using incoherent energy and then isolating a genuinely non-Gaussian contribution, we demonstrate a strong correlation between these quantities and WNs. This correlation extends beyond short, intense pulses to encompass pulses of finite energy, where photons are scattered while the two-level atom is driven. Focusing on the energy-efficiency of the process, we show that maximally efficient generation takes place for one input photon, on average, spectrally mode-matched with the atom.

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

A Two-Stage Statistical Framework for Evaluating Associative Interference in Large Language Models

Authors:
Achraf Cohen↗Andrew Kincaid↗

arXiv:2606.14117v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated for bias using adaptations of human psychological paradigms, yet methodological limitations-particularly the conflation of refusal behavior with task performance-have hindered clear interpretation. Here, we adapt the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to a controlled, forced-choice framework and introduce a two-stage modeling approach that separates response compliance from task-consistent classification. Across three contemporary LLMs (Claude Sonnet-4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT-5), we evaluate associative interference, defined as reduced task-consistency in incongruent relative to congruent conditions. While compliance with the structured response format was uniformly high, interference effects varied substantially across models and domains. Claude Sonnet-4 exhibited strong interference in the Gender–Career domain (DeltaP = 0.086, 95% CrI [0.026, 0.173]) and smaller but credible effects in Gender–Science. Gemini 2.5 Pro showed attenuated interference, and GPT-5 exhibited minimal or no detectable interference across domains. These findings demonstrate that IAT-style associative asymmetries are not a universal property of LLMs, but instead depend on model-specific characteristics. By isolating interference from compliance and modeling item-level variability, this study provides a principled framework for evaluating structured response patterns in LLMs. The results highlight the importance of model-specific assessment and suggest that associative interference can be substantially mitigated in modern systems.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

SAGE: Stochastic Prompt Optimization via Agent-Guided Exploration

Authors:
Ziyi Zhu↗Luka Smyth↗Saki Shinoda↗Jinghong Chen↗

Context engineering has emerged as a primary lever for improving AI systems without parameter updates. Recent work showing that textual gradients do not function as real gradients motivates treating automatic prompt optimization (APO) as black-box search. We introduce SPO (Stochastic Prompt Optimization), a framework for stochastic search over prompt space, and compare three strategies of increasing sophistication: error-informed random search, a genetic algorithm with evolutionary operators, and SAGE (SPO via Agent-Guided Exploration), a multi-agent pipeline with diagnostic code execution. Across three benchmarks, no single strategy dominates; effectiveness depends on the interaction of landscape structure with error type. We further deploy SAGE on a mental-health chatbot under a continuous optimization paradigm, where it compounds eight cycles of individually-noisy A/B tests into a statistically robust gain in next-day retention. We argue that coupling qualitative diagnosis with quantitative validation is what makes agentic optimization effective for open-ended task-oriented dialogue.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Towards Spec Learning: Inference-Time Alignment from Preference Pairs

Authors:
Dhriti Krishnan↗Tejas Goyal↗Jaromir Savelka↗

Steering a large language model (LLM) toward a desired behavior typically relies on an iterative process of hand-crafting a prompt based on a careful inspection of the model's responses. This is an involved, brittle, and error-prone process. Preference-based fine-tuning is a more rigorous but often prohibitively expensive solution. We propose spec learning, a framework that relies on a brief user instruction and a small set of preference judgments. These are compiled into specifications in the form of natural-language prompts for an LLM. Specifications condition LLMs at inference time, and no parameter updates to the underlying models are required. We show that the responses generated based on the compiled specifications often outperform direct preference optimization (DPO) on datasets from specialized domains whose preference signal is dense. Unlike opaque weight updates, the resulting specifications are human-readable and double as interpretable and transparent written embodiments of the preference signal that produced them.

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

DuET: Dual Expert Trajectories for Diffusion Image Editing

Authors:
Lidia Troeshestova↗Alexander Ustyuzhanin↗Sergey Kastryulin↗

Recent diffusion editors perform diverse instruction-based edits while conditioning on the source image at every denoising step. Yet persistent source-image conditioning can limit how fully an edit is executed and how natural the result appears, especially when the target scene diverges substantially from the input. We introduce DuET (Dual Expert Trajectories), a training-free inference method that temporarily relaxes source-image conditioning by transitioning through a text-to-image phase before returning to edit mode, allowing the denoising trajectory to move toward the target distribution while retaining the structural benefits of image-conditioned editing. Without modifying model weights or increasing sampling cost, DuET consistently improves instruction relevance, semantic fidelity, and perceptual quality across diverse models and benchmarks. In some cases, these gains come with a modest reduction in source-image preservation, revealing a predictable trade-off between source preservation and edit fidelity.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

NEST3D: A High-Resolution Multimodal Dataset of Sociable Weaver Tree Nests

Authors:
Constanza A. Molina Catricheo↗Simon Boeder↗Ting-Jia Guo↗Giacomo May↗Cl\'ement Berthelot↗Devis Tuia↗Friedrich Fedor Reinhard↗Fabio Remondino↗Benjamin Risse↗

Sociable weaver nests function as complex ecological structures offering thermoregulatory microhabitats and sustaining diverse species; however, datasets used in prior studies lack fine-grained 3D structural detail. Producing usable and accurate 3D weaver nest data is challenging due to their irregular geometry and integration with complex host vegetation. We bridge this gap with an open-access, 1.4 TB multimodal drone dataset of 104 nest-bearing trees, comprising 27,945 RGB images, 111,780 multispectral images, approximately 781 million 3D points, and expert-annotated semantic segmentation labels. We benchmark semantic segmentation using KPConv, RandLA-Net, and Point Transformer V3, with PT-v3 achieving an mIoU of 86.35% on the test set. While the results demonstrate strong performance for transformer-based and point-wise methods, they also highlight architecture-dependent challenges, particularly for convolution-based approaches such as KPConv. By uniquely combining spectral, spatial, and structural information, the presented dataset advances 3D reconstruction, segmentation, and classification algorithms, enabling ecological applications from nest volume estimation to species conservation, and serves as a demanding benchmark that exposes architecture-dependent performance under extreme class imbalance.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Abstracting Cross-Domain Action Sequences into Interpretable Workflows

Authors:
Gaurav Verma↗Scott Counts↗

Sequential or time-stamped interaction logs provide objective records of digital application usage, yet their granularity and noise often obscure meaningful insights into people's work. Such insights are essential for improving digital products in ways grounded in real-world user interactions. Prior research has applied deep learning models to cluster user actions into high-level activities, but these approaches are highly sensitive to noise and struggle to generalize across applications. To address this limitation, we introduce WorkflowView, a framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to abstract low-level action sequences into high-level activities. We establish the effectiveness and generality of our approach across three distinct, challenging sequential tasks and diverse domains: (a) zero-shot task description reconstruction from browser logs (achieving high semantic similarity, $\mu_{sim} = 0.91$), (b) few-shot student dropout prediction using MOOC interaction logs (reaching weighted $F_1 = 0.90$ with only five few-shot examples), and (c) anonymized, privacy-preserving analysis of AI tool integration within document workflows in Microsoft Word. Our work demonstrates that LLM-based abstraction is a robust and efficient path forward for transforming low-level behavioral data into high-level, interpretable, and actionable insights. We also discuss practical considerations for deploying LLM-based inferences within logging infrastructures, including computational efficiency and user privacy.

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25.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

Challenges and progress in RNA velocity: Comparative analysis across multiple biological contexts

Authors:
Sarah Ancheta↗

by Sarah Ancheta, Leah Dorman, Guillaume Le Treut, Abel Gurung, Greg Huber, Loïc A. Royer, Alejandro Granados, Merlin Lange Single-cell RNA sequencing is revolutionizing our understanding of cell state dynamics, allowing researchers to capture and quantify the transcriptomic profile of a single cell at a specific timepoint. Among the computational techniques used to predict cellular trajectories, RNA velocity has emerged as a predominant tool for modeling transcriptional dynamics. RNA velocity leverages the mRNA maturation process to generate velocity vectors that predict the likely future state of a cell, offering insights into cellular differentiation, aging, and disease progression. Although this technique has shown promise across biological fields, the performance accuracy varies depending on the RNA velocity method and dataset. We established a comparative pipeline and analyzed the performance of five RNA velocity methods on three datasets based on local consistency, method agreement, identification of driver genes, and robustness to sequencing depth. This benchmark provides a resource for scientists to understand the strengths and limitations of different RNA velocity methods.

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