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

Generative modelling powered by room-temperature polariton condensates

arXiv:2606.15344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative modelling requires efficient stochastic nonlinear transformations and physical platforms that can naturally realise them. We experimentally demonstrate that nonlinear optical systems operating in the strong light-matter coupling regime can serve as physical transformation layers for conditional generative modelling. Specifically, we develop a workflow in which room-temperature exciton-polariton condensates formed in organic dye microcavities act as a physical stochastic transform within a generative adversarial network and enable conditional digit-to-image translation. By using the nonlinear many-body dynamics and intrinsic stochasticity of polariton condensates, the workflow outperforms baseline approaches based on digitally injected perturbations. We find that polariton-enabled sampling via generative adversarial network (Polariton GAN) yields improved inception score, digit preservation accuracy and structural similarity compared with both digital sampling and laser-based systems. We further show that spatially correlated output variations can naturally regularise adversarial training and enhance output diversity. Our results establish polariton condensation as a new computational resource for generative modelling, opening a pathway towards physics-enhanced machine learning systems.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Mitigating Simplicity Bias in OOD Detection through Object Co-occurrence Analysis

arXiv:2605.07821v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for ensuring the reliability of deep learning models. Existing methods mostly focus on regular entangled representations to discriminate in-distribution (ID) and OOD data, neglecting the rich contextual information within images. This issue is particularly challenging for detecting near-OOD, as models with simplicity bias struggle to learn discriminative features in disentangled representations. The human visual system can use the co-occurrence of objects in the natural environment to facilitate scene understanding. Inspired by this, we propose an Object-Centric OOD detection framework that learns to capture Object CO-occurrence (OCO) patterns within images. The proposed method introduces a new OOD detection paradigm that understands object co-occurrence within an image by predicting disentangled representations for the test sample, then adaptively divides patterns into three scenarios based on object co-occurrence patterns observed in ID training data, and finally performs OOD detection in a divide-and-conquer manner. By doing so, OCO can distinguish near-OOD by considering the semantic contextual relationships present in their images, avoiding the tendency to focus solely on simple, easily learnable regions. We evaluate OCO through experiments across challenging and full-spectrum OOD settings, demonstrating competitive results and confirming its ability to address both semantic and covariate shifts. Code is released at https://github.com/Michael-McQueen/OCO.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Implicit Neural Representations of Individual Behavior

arXiv:2606.12200v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study policy representation learning from unlabeled multi-policy behavioral data. Each episode is generated by a fixed policy, but policy labels are unavailable. This setting appears in robotics play, demonstrations, games, racing, and other datasets where heterogeneous behaviors are mixed without annotations. We introduce Behavioral INR, a self-supervised generative model that adapts implicit neural representations (INRs) from vision to behavior. Instead of mapping coordinates to RGB values, Behavioral INR represents a policy as a state-action function mapping states to subsequent actions. An episode-level latent modulates this function through FiLM layers, yielding a generative prior over policies and allowing policy identity to be inferred without supervision. Because INRs treat each datapoint as samples from an underlying function, the same model naturally accommodates variable episode lengths and different sampling granularities, as in vision INRs with different image resolutions. We also define policy-level out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts along state-distribution and action-distribution axes, which arise when policies overlap in states or actions but are not captured by standard behavioral OOD settings based only on new agents or environments. We evaluate on synthetic Gaussian random field data, MuJoCo demonstrations with controlled OOD splits, and real-world chess, Formula 1 racing, robotics, and Seek-Avoid datasets. Behavioral INR most consistently improves policy identifiability in the hardest continuous state-action settings, especially when longer episodes, more policies, and OOD splits reduce the usefulness of marginal shortcuts; amortized history encoders remain competitive when policy identity can be recovered from symbolic repetition or low-dimensional action statistics. We release code and checkpoints.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Closing the Feedback Loop: From Experience Extraction to Insight Governance in Verbal Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.17591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training-free verbal reinforcement learning enables LLM agents to learn from world feedback – objective signals such as dynamic task outcomes, market returns, or demand forecasts – by extracting verbal rules from experience and injecting them as context, updating the agent's behavior without parameter changes. However, in non-stationary environments these agents face a retention-forgetting dilemma: retaining stale insights causes negative transfer, while discarding them causes catastrophic forgetting when conditions recur. We identify four requirements for navigating this dilemma – outcome-driven evaluation, persistent structured evidence, non-monotonic knowledge lifecycle, and compositional governance – and show that existing methods invest heavily in experience extraction while underinvesting in insight governance. We propose a three-layer architecture – rules, evidence, and skills – connected by a feedback-driven curation loop that closes the governance gap. Rules capture distilled experience from world outcomes; evidence logs track each rule's reliability across episodes; skills govern which rules to apply, how to resolve conflicts, and when to abstain. On financial forecasting as a case study, where world feedback is naturally abundant, noisy, and non-stationary, we show that the same accumulated experience either degrades performance below the zero-shot baseline or dramatically improves accuracy and risk-adjusted returns, depending on whether the curation loop is present.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mitigating Visual Hallucinations in Multimodal Systems through Retrieval-Augmented Reliability-Aware Inference

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in vision-language understanding and natural-language response generation. However, these systems can still produce overconfident predictions and hallucination-like outputs, particularly when the visual evidence is weak, ambiguous, or semantically inconsistent. Most existing approaches focus on improving multimodal representation alignment or retrieval-augmented generation, while providing limited mechanisms to quantify instance-level prediction reliability or identify incorrect visual outputs. This work proposes a retrieval-augmented reliability-aware inference framework for trustworthy multimodal visual understanding. The proposed framework constructs an external visual evidence database using pretrained visual embeddings and nearest-neighbor retrieval over normalized feature representations. Retrieved evidence is used to estimate prediction trustworthiness through multiple reliability indicators, including similarity strength, class-support agreement, evidence margin, entropy-based uncertainty, and an aggregate reliability score. Based on these signals, a decision gate determines whether the system should accept the prediction, answer with caution, or abstain/fallback when evidence is insufficient. A multimodal response-generation layer then produces a final user-facing response conditioned on the reliability decision. Experiments on ImageNet-100 demonstrate that the proposed reliability-aware framework improves accepted prediction accuracy from 85.84\% to 88.88\% at 89.04\% coverage. The hallucination-like accepted wrong-answer rate is reduced from 14.16\% to 11.12\%. These results show that integrating retrieval evidence, reliability estimation, and selective decision gating can improve calibration and reduce overconfident visual errors without retraining large multimodal models.

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

Operator Calculus for Population-Based Optimization: A Mean-Field Convergence Theory

arXiv:2606.14289v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Population-based and distributional optimization methods, from evolution strategies and consensus-based optimization to covariance-matrix adaptation and stochastic gradient methods viewed as distributional dynamics, are widely used for nonconvex or black-box problems, yet their convergence analyses remain fragmented across algorithm-specific techniques. We introduce an operator calculus in which a broad class of such methods, after choosing an appropriate state space and, where necessary, augmenting the state by memory or strategy variables, is described as a composition of three elementary operators (mutation, selection, and recombination) acting on probability measures. Under explicit stability and regularity conditions, the composite operator admits a pre-generator whose continuous-time limit is a transport-reaction-jump (TRJ) PDE that preserves the operator splitting. On this foundation we establish a modular Lyapunov principle. If a state-space Lyapunov function both dissipates under the full generator and controls the relevant search-space gauges, then the state-space Lyapunov functional and the induced search errors decay exponentially. The additive generator structure allows dissipation estimates to be assembled operator by operator, providing a toolkit for certifying convergence of composite mean-field algorithms.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Enteral docosahexaenoic and arachidonic acid supplementation and retinopathy of prematurity: a re-analysis of randomized controlled trials in preterm infants

Background. A recent meta-analysis by Dang et al. [1] concluded that enteral supplementation with docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), with or without arachidonic acid (ARA) did not significantly affect retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) outcomes in preterm infants. Of four eligible trials that supplemented both DHA and ARA, only two contributed to each ROP outcome analyzed, and severe ROP was not assessed. Methods. We replicated the eligibility criteria and search strategy of Dang et al., restricted to trials that supplemented both DHA and ARA, and reanalyzed three ROP endpoints (any ROP, ROP requiring treatment, and severe ROP [stage 3 and/or treated]) using complete outcome records from all eligible trials. Crude risk ratios (RR) were pooled by Mantel-Haenszel fixed-effect meta-analysis. Gestational age-adjusted odds ratios (adjOR) were pooled on the log scale by inverse-variance random-effects meta-analysis with restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimation of between-study variance and Hartung-Knapp confidence intervals. Results. Five trials were included; one trial was identified in our replicated search but was excluded by Dang et al. without a stated rationale. The pooled estimate for any ROP was consistent with Dang et al. (RR 0.87 [95% CI 0.71-1.08]; adjOR 0.70 [0.46-1.08]). For ROP requiring treatment, the crude RR suggested a lower risk but did not reach statistical significance (RR 0.60 [0.35-1.04]), whereas the gestational age-adjusted estimate indicated lower odds (adjOR 0.47 [0.23-0.94]). For severe ROP, DHA+ARA supplementation produced a significant protective effect in both unadjusted and adjusted models (RR 0.56 [0.36-0.86]; adjOR 0.42 [0.19-0.96]). Conclusions. When all eligible trials contribute to each endpoint and severe ROP is included as an outcome, enteral DHA+ARA supplementation reduces severe ROP and is associated with lower odds of ROP requiring treatment after adjustment for gestational age. These findings differ from the conclusions of Dang et al. and support reconsideration of DHA+ARA supplementation as a strategy to reduce sight-threatening ROP in preterm infants.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

TAHOE: Text-to-SQL with Automated Hint Optimization from Experience

arXiv:2606.12387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have democratized database access through Text-to-SQL, but moving from prototypes to production remains difficult. Real deployments must handle strict SQL dialects, massive schemas, and evolving user preferences, while supervised fine-tuning is costly and rigid and agentic test-time scaling is expensive. We present Tahoe, a system that treats prompt optimization as a dynamic data management problem. Tahoe uses an error-driven hint learning pipeline across Development and Deployment to consolidate debugging traces into a structured Hint Bank. Compiler feedback is distilled into reusable Syntax Hints for dialect-specific rules, while execution and user feedback are converted into Semantic Hints for schema- and user-specific logic. Tahoe further introduces a Strategy Layer that models conflicting user intents as competing strategies under shared natural-language triggers, with recency signals and post-learning attribution statistics that summarize empirical success, harm, inertness, and support. At inference time, Tahoe retrieves relevant hints and guides the LLM through Logic Planning followed by SQL Synthesis. We implement and evaluate the development-phase workflow, leaving deployment-time human-feedback updates for future work. On Spider 2.0-Snow, Tahoe substantially improves Text-to-SQL without updating model parameters. On 113 supervised Spider 2.0-Snow-0212 examples using GPT-5.5, Tahoe raises pass rate from 61.95 percent to 79.42 percent and pass-at-4 from 72.57 percent to 87.61 percent, achieves 100 percent Snowflake syntax pass rate, and reduces average compiler-feedback critic rounds from 2.79 to 0.12 per sampled candidate. The same Hint Bank also transfers to weaker backbones, including a 19.7 percentage-point pass-rate gain on Doubao-2.0-lite.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Motion Reinforces Appearance: RGB-Skeleton Gated Residual Fusion for Micro-Gesture Online Recognition

Micro-gesture analysis attracts increasing attention for inferring spontaneous emotion from subtle body movements. Micro-gesture online recognition, which localizes and classifies each gesture instance in untrimmed videos, is a core task in the 4th EI-MiGA-IJCAI Challenge. Compared with typical temporal action detection, MGR emphasizes the localization and classification of actions, requiring the model to output the start time, end time, and category of each micro-gesture. Moreover, since micro-gestures are highly spontaneous, relying solely on a single modality makes it difficult to capture the complete and accurate multi-modal cues. In this work, we propose DyFADet+, which extends DyFADet into a dual-stream RGB-skeleton framework. In our model, both modalities are projected into shared multi-scale temporal embeddings and fused through a gated residual module, which adaptively injects skeleton motion into the RGB representation rather than using naive concatenation. Finally, these fused features are decoded by a Dynamic TAD head for online classification and boundary regression. On the SMG dataset, our method achieves an F1 score of 40.88, ranking 2nd in the Micro-gesture Online Recognition track.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A fast direct solver based neural network for solving PDEs

arXiv:2606.19895v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The matrices arising from large scale $N$-body problems can be efficiently represented using hierarchical matrices, whose key idea is that the admissible off-diagonal sub-matrices can be well approximated by low-rank matrices across a hierarchy of matrix partitions. HODLR (Hierarchical Off-Diagonal Low-Rank) matrices are a subclass of hierarchical matrices in which all off-diagonal submatrices at every level of a recursive binary partition are low-rank. In this article, we present a neural network that learns the inverse operation of HODLR matrices based on the fast direct solver for HODLR matrices developed by Ambikasaran and Darve (2013). We further extend the architecture to learn nonlinear solution operators associated with PDEs by replacing some of the linear layers with deep sub-networks. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed architecture by performing a comprehensive set of experiments that include (i) solving a linear problem such as the Fredholm integral equation of the second kind, (ii) solving PDEs such as the nonlinear Schrödinger equation, Burgers' equation, and the steady-state Darcy's flow equation, (iii) generalization study across varying parameter values, (iv) comparing the inference time of the proposed network with the run time of a classical numerical solver, and (v) comparing the proposed network with some of the existing neural operator learning networks.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

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

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

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Method comparisons for differentiation of Schizophrenia and Bipolar based on rs-fMRI Intrinsic and Functional Networks

Psychosis as a symptom manifests in schizophenia and bipolar disorder, two highly heterogeneous psychiatric illnesses with overlapping clinical manifestations. Resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rsfMRI), represents a promising tool for identifying objective biomarkers of functional brain alterations to aid differential diagnosis. In this work, we comparatively evaluate multiple rs-fMRI representations for differentiating schizophrenia and bipolar disorder using intrinsic connectivity network (ICN) temporal profiles and several functional network connectivity (FNC) approaches, including static, dynamic, and high-order connectivity analyses. The study was conducted on a cohort of 371 subjects with psychosis, while evaluation was performed using a separate held-out cohort of 315 subjects. We investigated convolutional neural network architectures applied to ICN temporal profiles, spectrograms, and scalograms, alongside classical machine learning models trained on connectivity-derived features. Across the evaluated approaches, ICN temporal profiles provided the most consistent discriminative performance, with a 1D convolutional neural network achieving the strongest overall results under the benchmark protocol. Among connectivity-based methods, static functional connectivity generally outperformed dynamic and high-order representations, suggesting that increased representational complexity did not necessarily translate into improved generalization. Although the obtained classification performance remained modest, the results highlight the challenges of robust psychosis differentiation using rs-fMRI while emphasizing the relative stability of low-order connectivity representations and temporal ICN features. These findings contribute to ongoing efforts toward reproducible and interpretable neuroimaging biomarkers for psychiatric disorders.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A non-asymptotic bound on the TV distance between a Wishart matrix and an appropriately scaled GOE matrix

arXiv:2606.16018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this note, we prove a non-asymptotic version of a theorem by Bubeck, Ding, Eldan, and Rácz, showing that a Wishart matrix is close in total variation to an affine transformation of a GOE matrix. The proof mirrors the proof given by Bubeck et al., with some changes made to make it non-asymptotic.

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

Effective and Low-cost Lane-based Map Localization for Vehicle-Centric Route Generation

Driver-centric route representation plays a vital role in intuitive driving guidance systems. This paper presents OLRA, a low-cost, map-localization-based framework that derives driver-view-aligned routes by matching map-based navigation routes with camera-detected lane markings. This alignment process mutually enhances vehicle localization accuracy and visual route consistency. To bridge the evaluation gap across different paradigms, we introduce practical route evaluation metrics and benchmark OLRA against OpenPilot, a representative direct-generation approach. Experimental results on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that OLRA outperforms OpenPilot in complex road segments and in route estimation at distance beyond 20 meters, achieving lower overall Euclidean error. This study is expected to promote future research in low-cost, maplocalization-based route generation methods.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DifferAD-R1: A Difference-Guided IndustrialAnomaly Localization with Multimodal LargeLanguage Models

Industrial anomaly localization aims to accurately identify and localize abnormal regions in industrial products, addressing the critical challenge of detecting unseen defect categories in real-world scenarios. Traditional closed-set methods often suffer from poor cross-scenario generalization, while existingMultimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approachesface two core limitations: they either adopt QA-style paradigmsmisaligned with the practical demands of localization, or relyon standard optimization techniques such as Group RelativePolicy Optimization (GRPO), which fails to deliver effectivelearning signals for subtle defects. To tackle these issues, thispaper proposes DifferAD-R1, an MLLM-augmented reinforcement learning framework tailored for industrial anomaly localization. We design a Difference-Guided dual-image paradigm,which reformulates the localization task as a one-shot difference grounding problem to effectively explore cross-scenarioanomalies. A Dual-Consistency Localization Reward is developedfor hard-to-detect anomalies, enhancing optimization stabilityand robustness. Additionally, we integrate a difficulty-awarestrategy with adaptive reweighting and group-wise resamplingto prioritize learning on challenging instances. To facilitateevaluations in real-world industrial settings, we construct theAD-DualDiff dataset, comprising 13K paired images across 20categories. Experimental results demonstrate that DifferADR1 significantly outperforms existing baselines and achievescompetitive performance compared to large-scale models likeQwen3-VL (235B parameters). Our code is publicly availableat: https://github.com/Rong2026/work-1.

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

CRAG: Can 3D Generative Models Help 3D Assembly?

Most existing 3D assembly methods treat the problem as pure pose estimation, rearranging observed parts via rigid transformations. In contrast, human assembly naturally couples structural reasoning with holistic shape inference. Inspired by this intuition, we reformulate 3D assembly as a joint problem of assembly and generation. We show that these two processes are mutually reinforcing: assembly provides part-level structural priors for generation, while generation injects holistic shape context that resolves ambiguities in assembly. Unlike prior methods that cannot synthesize missing geometry, we propose CRAG, which simultaneously generates plausible complete shapes and predicts poses for input parts. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across in-the-wild objects with diverse geometries, varying part counts, and missing pieces. Project Page: https://ai4ce.github.io/CRAG/

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

SCALE: Self-uncertainty Conditioned Adaptive Looking and Execution for Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2602.04208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for general-purpose robotic control, with test-time scaling (TTS) gaining attention to enhance robustness beyond training. However, existing TTS methods for VLAs require additional training, verifiers, and multiple forward passes, making them impractical for deployment. Moreover, they intervene only at action decoding while keeping visual representations fixed-insufficient under perceptual ambiguity, where reconsidering how to perceive is as important as deciding what to do. To address these limitations, we propose SCALE, a simple inference strategy that jointly modulates visual perception and action based on 'self-uncertainty', inspired by uncertainty-driven exploration in Active Inference theory-requiring no additional training, no verifier, and only a single forward pass. SCALE broadens exploration in both perception and action under high uncertainty, while focusing on exploitation when confident-enabling adaptive execution across varying conditions. Experiments on simulated and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that SCALE improves state-of-the-art VLAs and outperforms existing TTS methods while maintaining single-pass efficiency.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Detecting Functional Memorization in Code Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate code at scale. Meanwhile, prior work has investigated whether training data may be recoverable from model outputs, by auditing the textual overlap between training examples and model generations. Code, however, can be functionally equivalent while textually dissimilar. In this work, we study functional memorization: extraction of functional logic beyond what verbatim metrics detect. We construct a counterfactual setup for Olmo-3-32B, comparing a midtrained model (exposed to target code) against a pretrained reference (not exposed). We prompt both models with Python function signatures and measure both textual and functional similarity (i.e., LLM-as-a-judge, execution-based). Our results show clear evidence of functional memorization, highlighting the need for auditing metrics that go beyond textual overlap.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Why drinking episodes escalate differently: Event-level pathways linking hazardous alcohol consumption and sexual risk

Background: Alcohol-involved drinking episodes vary in whether they involve hazardous alcohol consumption alone, near-miss sexual risk, or sexual risk behavior, but the within-event mechanisms underlying this variability remain unclear. Methods: Guided by syndemic theory, we conducted a qualitative event-level analysis using modified grounded theory among adults in the San Francisco Bay Area who reported hazardous alcohol consumption, defined as an Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test score [≥]16. In-depth interviews elicited narratives of recent heavy drinking episodes and yielded 64 discrete drinking events across 22 participants. We focused on 35 events with evidence of within-event interaction between biopsychosocial and contextual factors. Using constant comparison, we identified escalation pathways, characterized interruption, and examined how events diverge into three outcomes: hazardous alcohol consumption only, hazardous alcohol consumption with near-miss sexual risk (when risk was plausible but not enacted), and hazardous alcohol consumption with sexual risk behavior. Results: Two primary escalation pathways emerged. Dose-driven escalation involved cumulative alcohol or substance exposure that progressively impaired awareness and self-regulation. Meaning-driven escalation involved prioritizing connection, intimacy, or belonging despite awareness of risk. Time-driven continuation extended exposure across contexts and amplified both pathways. Hazardous alcohol consumption-only events more often followed dose-driven pathways, whereas events involving sexual risk behavior more often followed meaning-driven pathways. Near-miss events occurred across both pathways and illustrated how interruption before the escalation constraint point, when the capacity to modify behavior became reduced, could redirect escalation before sexual risk behavior occurred. Across events with similar levels of intoxication narratives, outcomes diverged according to when the interruption occurred and whether it altered escalation. Conclusion: Hazardous drinking episodes diverge into different outcomes based on escalation pathways and the timing and effectiveness of interruption. Early and effective interruption before the escalation constraint point may represent a key target for harm-reduction strategies to prevent progression to sexual risk behavior.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Coverage Guarantees for Pseudo-Calibrated Conformal Prediction under Distribution Shift

arXiv:2602.14913v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conformal prediction (CP) offers distribution-free marginal coverage guarantees under an exchangeability assumption, but these guarantees can fail if the data distribution shifts. We analyze the use of pseudo-calibration as a tool to counter this performance loss under a bounded label-conditional covariate shift model. Using tools from domain adaptation, we derive a lower bound on target coverage in terms of the source-domain loss of the classifier and a Wasserstein measure of the shift. Using this result, we provide a method to design pseudo-calibrated sets that inflate the conformal threshold by a slack parameter to keep target coverage above a prescribed level. Finally, we propose a source-tuned pseudo-calibration algorithm that interpolates between hard pseudo-labels and randomized labels as a function of classifier uncertainty. Numerical experiments show that our bounds qualitatively track pseudo-calibration behavior and that the source-tuned scheme mitigates coverage degradation under distribution shift while maintaining nontrivial prediction set sizes.

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

The Value Axis: Language Models Encode Whether They're on the Right Track

We investigate whether language models internally track the value of their current trajectory, defined as the likelihood that their ongoing strategy will achieve their goals. Using synthetic, in-context reinforcement learning data, we construct a "value" axis for Qwen3-8B. We find that activations along this axis distinguish between high vs. low verbalized confidence, rollouts without and with backtracking, and correct vs. corrupted code. Steering towards high value causally suppresses self-correction and reduces explanatory verbosity, while steering towards low value induces backtracking and exploration. We demonstrate that direct preference optimization (DPO) can increase the internal value of rewarded behaviors (e.g. use a certain word), causing the model to act more confidently after exhibiting them. Finally, we apply the value axis to study in-the-wild settings. For example, we find that Qwen assigns low value to politically sensitive chat queries after post-training and that supervised fine-tuning increases internal confidence within the training domain. Our results suggest that language models linearly encode an estimate of expected goal success that modulates their confidence in pursuing a direction.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Trusting Right Predictions for Wrong Reasons: A LIME Based Analysis of Deep Learning Interpretability in Lung Cancer Diagnosis

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality, with approximately 2.5 million new cases and 1.8 million deaths annually, making reliable diagnosis a clinical priority. Although deep learning models have achieved strong performance in lung cancer classification, evaluation has largely focused on predictive accuracy, leaving their decision-making processes insufficiently examined. This study compares three architecturally distinct models: a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a pretrained ResNet50, and a Vision Transformer (ViT), trained on the IQ-OTH/NCCD lung cancer CT dataset. Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) were applied to investigate model reasoning. In addition to standard performance metrics, a dual-correlation framework was introduced to measure both prediction agreement and explanation agreement across model pairs. All three models achieved strong classification performance, with ResNet50 attaining 98.61% accuracy, CNN 97.91%, and ViT 93.75%, while all achieved ROC-AUC scores of 0.99. Prediction correlations exceeded 0.99 across all model pairs, indicating highly consistent outputs. However, LIME explanation correlations remained below 0.26, revealing substantial differences in the image regions used to reach those predictions. Analysis of misclassified samples further identified a consistent spatial pattern: incorrect predictions were associated with attention outside the lung parenchyma, whereas correct predictions focused primarily within lung regions. These findings demonstrate that prediction agreement is a poor proxy for reasoning consistency, and that interpretability evaluation must be treated as an independent validation criterion alongside predictive performance in clinical AI systems.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Online LLM Selection via Constrained Bandits with Time-Varying Demand

arXiv:2606.17489v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in edge-cloud inference systems to handle diverse user tasks with heterogeneous accuracy, latency, and cost profiles. Selecting the appropriate LLM for each incoming task is critical for ensuring service quality and efficient resource utilization. However, model heterogeneity, stochastic and unknown performance characteristics, and time-varying task demands make static selection strategies inadequate. Real-world deployments often impose hard resource budgets such as monetary expenditure limits, along with soft service-level requirements such as latency guarantees. These constraints introduce additional challenges for online decision-making. We formulate this problem as a constrained stochastic bandit learning task, where the learner sequentially selects models under both packing-type (hard) and covering-type (soft) constraints, while adapting to time-varying task demand. The learner operates without access to the underlying reward, cost, or latency distributions and must rely on partial feedback. We develop a novel online learning algorithm that leverages confidence-bound estimates and demand predictions to balance reward maximization with long-term constraint satisfaction. We provide theoretical guarantees showing sublinear regret and sublinear covering constraint violations compared to an offline benchmark with full information. Experimental results on synthetic workloads demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach in dynamic, resource-constrained environments.

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

Pre-Deployment Robustness Stress Testing for CT Segmentation Systems Using Clinically Motivated Multi-Corruption Augmentation

Deep learning-based CT segmentation systems often achieve high accuracy on clean benchmark images, but their performance may degrade under heterogeneous clinical imaging conditions such as noise, resolution loss, contrast variation, intensity shift, and artifacts. This instability can limit reliable deployment in real-world medical imaging workflows. We propose Robustness via Augmented Multi-corruption Pipeline (RAMP), a robustness-oriented augmentation framework for CT segmentation. RAMP combines anatomically constrained spatial perturbations, CT intensity transformations, and stochastic multi-corruption composition to expose models to clinically plausible image degradation during training. Across two CT segmentation evaluation settings, RAMP achieved the strongest corrupted-image performance and the smallest clean-to-corrupted robustness gap. In the five-organ noisy evaluation benchmark, RAMP improved mean corrupted Dice from 0.610 to 0.753 and reduced the robustness gap from 0.264 to 0.064 compared with the nnU-Net baseline. In Abdomen1K, RAMP improved mean corrupted Dice from 0.633 to 0.789 and reduced the robustness gap from 0.290 to 0.070. Although RAMP did not achieve the highest clean-image Dice, it substantially mitigated worst-case segmentation collapse under severe image degradation. These results suggest that multi-corruption augmentation can serve as a practical pre-deployment strategy for improving the reliability of CT segmentation systems in heterogeneous clinical environments.