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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Vascular Phenotyping in Parkinson's Disease: Diabetes Mellitus Operationalizes a Microvascular Metabolic Syndrome Cluster Across PPMI Diagnostic Cohorts

Background: Diabetes mellitus elevates Parkinson's disease (PD) risk, via hypothesized cerebrovascular mediation. Whether the diabetes/prediabetes vascular-risk phenotype concentrates in cardiometabolic risk or macrovascular events across prodromal and clinically diagnosed PD remains unresolved. Objectives: To quantify the vascular-risk burden associated with diabetes/prediabetes across the PPMI diagnostic cohorts to test whether this association differs by cohort. Methods: Cross-sectional analysis of 413 PPMI participants (76 healthy controls, 145 prodromal PD, 192 clinically diagnosed PD) examined diabetes/prediabetes (n = 73) and seven vascular risk factors. The Vascular Burden Score (0 to 7) was a priori partitioned into microvascular and macrovascular sub-scores. Modified Poisson regression estimated adjusted prevalence ratios (aPR), adjusted for age, sex, and body mass index. A cohort-by-diabetes interaction tested cross-cohort consistency. Sensitivity analyses incorporated nigral diffusion tensor imaging (PD-risk biomarker) and FreeSurfer white matter hypointensity volume (cerebrovascular marker). Results: Diabetes/prediabetes elevated Vascular Burden Score ({beta} = 0.53, 95% CI 0.29 to 0.77, p < 0.001) versus non-diabetic participants, with a non-significant cohort-by-diabetes interaction (F = 0.29, p = 0.747). Three microvascular factors survived false discovery rate correction: obesity (aPR 2.28), hypertension (aPR 1.60), and hyperlipidemia (aPR 1.45). Macrovascular events showed no diabetic amplification ({beta} = -0.06, p = 0.25). In the imaging-phenotyped subset, Vascular Burden Score components contributed classifier variance distinct from nigral microstructure. Conclusions: Diabetes/prediabetes operationalize a microvascular cluster stable across prodromal and idiopathic PD. Cardiometabolic phenotyping may complement established PD-risk biomarkers (dopamine transporter SPECT, nigral diffusion), pending longitudinal validation linking vascular phenotype to dopaminergic markers.

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

Optimal Ansatz-free Hamiltonian Learning In Situ

arXiv:2606.19486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Characterizing the features of a Hamiltonian that governs a quantum system serves as a fundamental subroutine of quantum device calibration, signal sensing, and error correction. Recent works proposed protocols have achieved the optimal Heisenberg-limited scaling learning ansatz-free Hamiltonians from their real-time evolutions without fully specifying interaction structures. However, these protocols rely on both deep circuits with interleaving probes and control, and extremely short time resolution, making them difficult to implement on near- and intermediate-term in situ quantum experiments. In this work, we propose a computationally efficient, control-free, and ancilla-free algorithm that uses only Pauli product state preparation and measurement, and learns an ansatz-free Hamiltonian $H$ with $||H||\leq\Lambda$ in total evolution time of $\Theta(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon^2}\log(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon}))$. The evolution time cost of our algorithm is optimal for any control-free protocols as we further prove a lower bound of $\Omega(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon^2}\log(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon}))$. Technically, our method introduces a randomized-sampling framework that combines band-limited kernel-based time sampling with a displacement sieve for Hamiltonian structure learning. The characteristic probe time resolution depends only on $\Lambda$ instead of $\varepsilon$, which makes our protocol especially appealing in the high-precision regime for sensing and calibration applications. We also show that the algorithm maintains the same asymptotic total evolution time in the presence of state-preparation-and-measurement (SPAM) noise when the Hamiltonian is local after calibration. Our results demonstrate the fundamental cost of experimentally friendly Hamiltonian learning and provide a practical route to rigorous in situ characterization of near-term quantum platforms.

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

Thinking Outside the [Chat]Box: Bridging Computer Science and Industrial Design for Cognitive-Inclusive Generative AI

arXiv:2606.14306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current Generative AI (GenAI) interfaces remain largely constrained to chatbox interaction, which can impose high cognitive demands on users and create substantial barriers for people with intellectual disabilities (ID), including prompt formulation difficulties, response overload, and limited mechanisms to assess information reliability. To explore alternative interaction models for cognitive accessibility, we conducted a cross-disciplinary co-design challenge in which two student cohorts (Computer Science and Industrial Design) developed interface concepts from the same set of functional requirements (e.g., prompt scaffolding, structured output, GUI-based refinement, transparency, and personalization). Comparing the resulting proposals reveals both convergence on foundational requirements (notably initial calibration, proactive prompting, and direct manipulation of response fragments) and complementary contributions that outline a multi-layered support system. Computer Science teams primarily produced structural scaffolding, emphasizing predictability, navigability, and trust through mechanisms such as reliability indicators, explicit sources, and context management for long conversations. Industrial Design teams emphasized experiential scaffolding, focusing on pacing, attention guidance, multimodality, and proactive agency, including step-by-step response flows, focus modes, and assistant-like integrations. We synthesize these findings into a dual-layer scaffolding framework that expands the design space for cognitively accessible GenAI interaction beyond chat-centric models and motivates future work on expert refinement, technical feasibility, and empirical validation with users with ID.

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

Multimodal Ordinal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Severity Using Structural MRI and Clinical Data

arXiv:2606.11794v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) require accurate and scalable tools for assessing disease severity, yet current clinical staging remains time-intensive and prone to variability. We propose an attention-enhanced multimodal machine learning framework with ordinal regression for automated and interpretable AD severity staging. The framework integrates T1-weighted MRI with demographic and genetic variables and compares unimodal and multimodal architectures using ordinal and non-ordinal prediction heads. Models were trained and validated using cohort-stratified splits derived from the ADNI, AIBL, and NIFD datasets. A strictly held-out test set was constructed using subjects excluded from all training, validation, preprocessing, and hyperparameter tuning procedures, with subject-level splitting employed throughout to prevent data leakage. Among unimodal approaches, the T1-weighted MRI model achieved slightly higher adjacent-stage accuracy (0.963) and agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.444) than the tabular model (QWK 0.433). Integrating imaging, demographic, and genetic information improved overall performance. The multimodal non-ordinal baseline achieved the lowest prediction error (MAE 0.340), whereas the ordinal multimodal model achieved the highest adjacent-stage accuracy (0.970) and strongest agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.549). These findings indicate that ordinal formulations better capture the ordered structure of the CDR scale and yield predictions more consistent with clinical staging. Explainability analyses using Grad CAM++ and SHAP demonstrated anatomically and clinically plausible model behavior, supporting transparent decision-making. Overall, attention-based multimodal learning with ordinal regression represents a robust, interpretable, and scalable approach for automated AD severity staging and AI-assisted clinical decision support.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Stochastic control with dividend payments and capital injections for Markov additive processes

作者:

arXiv:2604.00190v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by de Finetti's optimal dividend problem with capital injections, we study a stochastic control problem for the additive component of a Markov additive process (MAP). In contrast to previous studies, the modulating component is allowed to be a general right process on a Radon space, so the model is not restricted to finite-state regime switching and cannot in general be reduced to a finite collection of Lévy process control problems. Capital injections are allowed at arbitrary times. We first consider the case in which dividend payments are allowed only at prescribed discrete times and establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimality of a strategy. These conditions then yield the optimality of a class of Markov-modulated periodic–classical barrier strategies. Combining this optimality result with an approximation argument, we obtain insight into the possible form of optimal strategies in the case where dividend payments, like capital injections, may be made at arbitrary times. Because of the generality of the MAPs considered here, the proof techniques used in previous studies of similar problems are not directly applicable. We therefore develop an alternative argument based on the additive structure of MAPs and dynamic programming between dividend opportunities. The argument also suggests a possible approach to other stochastic control problems involving general MAPs.

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

Soft-Prompt Tuning for Fair and Efficient LLM Benchmark Evaluation

Benchmark scores often misrepresent a large language model's (LLM's) knowledge, because they rely, e.g., on the model's ability to follow specific formatting requirements. This especially penalizes base models that may know the correct answers but lack the ability – typically introduced in post-training – to structure them as instructed. To overcome this, we propose soft-prompt tuning, an efficient, fair, and architecture-agnostic model evaluation. By optimizing only 10 soft-prompt vectors (roughly 0.0006% parameters for a 7B model) over a short tuning period, we adapt models to specific benchmark formats, closing gaps in format-following and ensuring that underlying knowledge is accurately reflected in benchmark scores. This allows one to fairly compare different base models – trained with various pre-training recipes – on benchmarks without the need for full post-training. We evaluated soft-prompt tuning across 7 models and 7 datasets. The results show that (a) soft-prompt tuning saturates format-following within 80 steps (~640 samples) making it highly efficient, (b) soft-prompt tuning significantly outperforms zero- and few-shot prompting, surfacing base model knowledge that standard prompting misses, that (c) even post-trained models can benefit from soft-prompts to maximize format compliance, and that (d) soft-prompted base model performance predicts post-trained model rankings more reliably than zero- and few-shot baselines, offering a low-cost proxy for downstream model quality. Our contributions include (1) metrics which disentangle format-following and knowledge accuracy, (2) a fairer benchmarking protocol of LLM knowledge, and (3) a cost- and memory-effective recipe to identify optimal pre-training strategies early in LLM development.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Hyper3D-lite: count-preserving representation auditing for long-read multi-contact genome data

作者:

Long-read and single-molecule sequencing technologies are rapidly increasing molecule-level data, with platforms such as Oxford Nanopore, PacBio HiFi, and Roche sequencing-by-expansion advancing at different technology readiness levels. In the specific context of Pore-C and HiPore-C multi-contact chromatin-conformation assays, long-read multi-contact 3D genome assays preserve molecule-level contact context, but common downstream pairwise projections can expand one multi-contact molecule into many pair records. This creates a representation problem: apparent contact evidence can increase through the counting frame before biological interpretation begins. Hyper3D-lite addresses this problem as a representation-first audit tool for read-to-fragment-style long-read multi-contact inputs. It compares all-pair projection with CPB, a count-preserving statistical accounting reference point, and separates broad software outputs from conservative higher-order candidate calls.

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

Goal-Autopilot: A Verifiable Anti-Fabrication Firewall for Unattended Long-Horizon Agents

作者:

Long-horizon LLM agents are not trusted to run unattended: with no human watching, they confidently report success they never verified. We treat honesty – bounding what an agent may claim at termination – as a first-class metric for unattended autonomy, distinct from capability. We present Autopilot, an execution model that makes silent fabricated success structurally impossible rather than merely rarer. Autopilot externalizes all working state into a durable, gated finite-state machine that a scheduler advances one stateless tick at a time; a hard floor forbids any terminal "done" claim whose falsifiable gate did not actually execute and pass. We prove a No-False-Success theorem – under gate soundness, floor enforcement, and plan coverage, termination implies the goal holds – whose only trust points are empirically measurable, and show the worst case degrades to an honest stall, never a fabricated success. Because each tick rehydrates only the state machine, per-step context cost is constant in the horizon. Across a 3,150-cell paired corpus (70 tasks $\times$ 3 systems $\times$ 3 models $\times$ 5 seeds, including 50 SWE-bench Lite tasks across 11 OSS repos), Autopilot fabricates on 0.95% of cells [95% CI 0.38–1.62] while Reflexion and StateFlow baselines fabricate on 8.10% [6.48–9.81] and 25.05% [22.48–27.62] respectively. The headline contrast lives in the hard regime: on SWE-bench Lite, the firewall reduces fabrication from 33.7% (StateFlow) to 0.67%, a paired difference of $-33.07$ pp [95% CI $-36.53, -29.73$]. The mechanism is the gate, not the model: all ten Autopilot fabrications come from the strongest model, while two weaker mid-tier models never fabricate across 700 paired cells. The firewall trades coverage for honesty by design – an honest stall is recoverable; a confident wrong output shipped downstream is not.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Pitch Spelling Jazz Lead Sheets, Solo Transcriptions, Classical Piano and Monophonic Scores

We present an algorithm for pitch spelling and key estimation. Given an input in MIDI-like format, containing information on note pitches (expressed in semitones relative to the lowest reference note) and bar boundaries, it estimates the appropriate note names, a global Key Signature, and a local scale for each bar. This related information elements are evaluated jointly during two stages of optimisation. During an initial 'modal' stage, a probable scale is proposed for each bar, minimising the number of accidentals to be printed in the printed score with a shortest-path search. Then, during a second stage called 'tonal', these local scales are used to estimate the Key Signature and note names that would result in the best musical notation for the entire piece. We present evaluations conducted on datasets comprising a variety of digital musical scores: jazz lead sheets taken from the Real Book, transcriptions of recordings of jazz soli and bass lines, traditional tunes, as well as classical scores for piano and monophonic instruments. Our procedure was originally designed for use in music transcription, specifically for building digital collections of jazz solos transcribed from audio recordings, for the purposes of music analysis, teaching and the preservation of cultural heritage. This method should also prove useful for other tasks related to the processing of musical notation. Furthermore, to this end, we have defined new distances between various common jazz scales, which may be of some interest to musicological studies.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Contrastive Geometric Learning Unlocks Unified Structure- and Ligand-Based Drug Design

arXiv:2601.09693v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Structure-based and ligand-based computational drug design have traditionally relied on disjoint data sources and modeling assumptions, limiting their joint use at scale. In this work, we introduce Contrastive Geometric Learning for Unified Computational Drug Design (ConGLUDe), a single contrastive geometric model that unifies structure- and ligand-based training. ConGLUDe couples a geometric protein encoder that produces whole-protein representations and implicit embeddings of predicted binding sites with a fast ligand encoder, removing the need for predefined pockets. By aligning ligands with both global protein representations and multiple candidate binding sites through contrastive learning, ConGLUDe supports ligand-conditioned pocket prediction in addition to virtual screening and target fishing, while being trained jointly on protein-ligand complexes and large-scale bioactivity data. Across diverse benchmarks, ConGLUDe achieves competitive zero-shot virtual screening performance, substantially outperforms existing methods on a challenging target fishing task, and demonstrates state-of-the-art ligand-conditioned pocket selection. These results highlight the advantages of unified structure-ligand training and position ConGLUDe as a step toward general-purpose foundation models for drug discovery.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

Computational Design of Optimal Sequences for Targeted Hypermutagenesis Using Recombination-Coupled Diversity-Generating Retroelements

Diversity-generating retroelements (DGRs) are natural systems that accelerate evolution via targeted hypermutation at adenines. We previously developed DGRec, a system combining DGRs and recombineering for programmable mutagenesis in Escherichia coli. We here address two important issues with DGRec: the dependence of mutagenesis efficiency on the dgrRNA secondary structure and the variability of the reverse-transcription biases with sequence context and position. First, we introduce and validate a method to recode non-functional templates, i.e. with low mutagenesis efficiency, into highly functional ones through synonymous mutations. Second, we develop a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to predict DGRec mutational profiles for any given template sequence. By integrating this LSTM model with our recoding method, we establish a comprehensive workflow for customized directed evolution, enabling researchers to precisely fine-tune DGRec in vivo mutagenesis to their engineering needs.

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

SCAIL-2: Unifying Controlled Character Animation with End-to-end In-Context Conditioning

Controlled character animation requires transferring motion from a driving sequence to a reference character. Prior works heavily rely on intermediate representations, including pose skeletons to represent motion or masked background to represent environment, which inevitably leads to information loss. To address this, we present SCAIL-2, a framework that bypasses those intermediates and achieves end-to-end character animation. By directly concatenating driving videos to the sequence, the model can obtain all the required visual information from the input video. To address the lack of end-to-end data, we unify sub-tasks of character animation with decoupled conditions and then curate a pipeline to synthesize MotionPair-60K, an end-to-end motion transfer dataset containing heterogeneous tasks of character animation. To achieve the unification, we utilize in-context mask conditioning and mode-specific RoPE as soft guidance beyond textual instructions and raw visual information. To address synthetic discrepancy in detailed regions, we propose Bias-Aware DPO to construct preference items to mitigate the errors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches in various character animation tasks. A large subset of synthetic data as well as model weights will be released at our project page: https://teal024.github.io/SCAIL-2/.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Asymptotically Optimal Sequential Testing with Markovian Data

arXiv:2602.17587v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study one-sided and $\alpha$-correct sequential hypothesis testing for data generated by an ergodic, finite-state Markov chain. The null hypothesis is that the unknown transition matrix belongs to a prescribed set $P$ of stochastic matrices, and the alternative corresponds to a disjoint set $Q$. We establish a non-asymptotic instance-dependent lower bound on the expected stopping time of any valid sequential test under the alternative, which is asymptotically tight. Our novel analysis improves the existing lower bounds, which are either asymptotic or provably sub-optimal in this setting. Our lower bound incorporates both the stationary distribution and the transition structure induced by the unknown Markov chain. We further propose an optimal test whose expected stopping time matches this lower bound asymptotically as $\alpha \to 0$. We illustrate the usefulness of our framework through applications to sequential detection of model misspecification in Markov Chain Monte Carlo and to testing structural properties, such as the linearity of transition dynamics, in Markov decision processes. Our findings yield a sharp and general characterization of optimal sequential testing procedures under Markovian dependence.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum-Accelerated Self-Consistent Field: A Hybrid Algorithm

arXiv:2606.20176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the Grover adaptive search self-consistent field (GAS-SCF) algorithm. GAS-SCF leverages quantum arithmetic to construct an efficient oracle that marks target states (Fock states) which improve upon some initial classical energy estimate. Amplitude amplification then increases the probability of measuring these states. This approach offers a theoretical quadratic speed-up for the optimization problem encountered in SCF quantum chemistry and establishes a baseline against which structured optimization algorithms, such as QAOA and DQI may be compared. In this work, we classically simulate three examples as proofs of concept of the algorithm, the largest consisting of 26 qubits. We then extend our analysis to two larger systems, with O3 representing the largest case at 330 qubits. These examples are chosen to probe classically challenging SCF regimes. Achieving chemically relevant applications of GAS-SCF will require large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum hardware.

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

ADaPT: Token-Level Decoupling for Efficient Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606.19919v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large reasoning models rely on long chain-of-thought to achieve strong performance, but applying such reasoning uniformly incurs high computational cost. Existing efficiency-oriented methods attempt to shorten or mix reasoning strategies, yet often degrade reasoning capability. We identify the root cause as sequence-level coupling between efficiency incentives and correctness optimization, which implicitly penalizes long but correct reasoning trajectories. To address this issue, we propose Adaptive Dual-Process Thinking (ADaPT), a token-level dual-process framework that explicitly decouples efficiency and correctness signals during training. ADaPT introduces a mode-selection token to control fast and slow reasoning, applying efficiency-related rewards exclusively to this token to avoid penalizing correct long reasoning while encouraging efficiency when appropriate. Moreover, ADaPT enables precise and continuous control over the efficiency-performance trade-off at inference time: by adjusting the generation probability of the mode-selection token, a single trained model can smoothly move along the efficiency-performance Pareto frontier. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ADaPT significantly reduces inference cost while maintaining strong reasoning performance across multiple benchmarks.

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

Ultrastrongly coupled open systems and fine grained time

arXiv:2606.16634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the dynamics of a d-level quantum system coupled to a bosonic reservoir when the coupling constant is large. It is known that in the limit of infinite coupling strength, the system undergoes an instantaneous nonselective measurement, resulting in the immediate decoherence in the measurement basis, followed by a unitary Zeno dynamics. Here we resolve this dynamical process by introducing a fine grained scaling regime of short times proportional to the inverse coupling. We provide a rigorous derivation of the open system dynamics in this regime of ultrastrong coupling and demonstrate how decoherence unfolds continuously in the new time scale. We show that Markovian dynamics which are not given by semigroups arise naturally, in contrast to what happens in the weak coupling theory.

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

Contrastive Regularization for Accent-Robust ASR

arXiv:2605.03297v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: ASR systems based on self-supervised acoustic pretraining and CTC fine-tuning achieve strong performance on native speech but remain sensitive to accent variability. We investigate supervised contrastive learning (SupCon) as a lightweight, accent-invariant auxiliary objective for CTC fine-tuning. An utterance-level contrastive loss regularizes encoder representations without architectural modification or explicit accent supervision. Experiments on the L2-ARCTIC benchmark show consistent WER reductions across multiple pretrained encoders, with up to 25 – 29\% relative reduction under unseen-accent evaluation. Analysis using within-transcript cosine dispersion indicates that SupCon promotes more compact and stable representation geometry under accent variability. Overall, SupCon provides an effective and model-agnostic regularization strategy for improving accent robustness.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Layerwise Terminal Discrepancy in Chen's Reverse-Heat Coupling on the Boolean Cube

arXiv:2606.04573v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recently, Chen [Chen2026] proved that Talagrand's Boolean convolution conjecture holds up to the dimension-free factor \((\log\log\eta)^{3/2}\), namely for every fixed \(\tau>0\), \[ \mu\{P_\tau f>\eta\|f\|_1\} \le C_\tau \frac{(\log\log\eta)^{3/2}}{\eta\sqrt{\log\eta}}, \qquad \eta>e^3. \] We revisit the terminal testing-discrepancy step in Chen's perturbed reverse-heat coupling. Chen estimates this discrepancy globally in terms of the remaining gap to the terminal level. We keep the same coupling and the same reverse-heat formulations, but localize the terminal discrepancy on each remaining-gap layer before summing the layers. This changes the fixed-time anti-concentration cost from order \((\log L)^{3/2}/\sqrt L\) to order \((\log L)/\sqrt L\), where \(L=\log\eta\). Consequently, we obtain a \((\log\log\eta)^{1/2}\) improvement as \[ \mu\{P_\tau f>\eta\|f\|_1\} \le C_\tau \frac{\log\log\eta}{\eta\sqrt{\log\eta}}, \qquad \eta>e^3. \]

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

Optimizing the Cost-Quality Tradeoff of Agentic Theorem Provers in Lean

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in workflows for generating formal proofs in Lean. These workflows often decompose problems into smaller lemmas, sample many proof attempts, and use compiler feedback to guide search. However, they can be prohibitively expensive, often spending substantial compute on attempts that ultimately fail. In this work, we address this problem with an action routing agent that consists of a data plane and a control plane. The data plane generates natural-language lemma decompositions, formalizes them in Lean, and samples proof attempts for the resulting theorem and lemma targets. The control plane observes previous failed Lean attempts, estimates both the likelihood of success and cost of another attempt, and decides whether to continue proving the current target or restart from a new breakdown. On a subset of PutnamBench, our agent decreases the cost by $28.9\%$ over a fixed-step baseline on average, preserving performance while using substantially less compute. These results suggest that failed Lean trajectories provide actionable signals for cost-aware resource allocation in agentic theorem proving.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

How to Detect and Measure the AI Dangers to Democracy

arXiv:2606.16054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Research on artificial intelligence and democracy has grown quickly over the last decade. A shared conclusion in this literature is that AI does not create new democratic problems so much as it makes old ones worse. We now see this across information ecosystems, in elections, and in public administration. However, despite growing evidence, we lack a clear way to prioritize risks in this area, compare them across domains, and identify where democratic control is most likely to break down. So, our problem is: How can we systematize the problems that AI systems pose to democratic processes? This paper argues that principal agent theory may fit the task. In many phases of democratic systems, principals delegate key functions to AI systems and their providers without really being able to monitor how these systems operate or the outputs they produce. Treating AI as a delegation problem helps identify accountability gaps and other governance failures. Most importantly, as we shall illustrate, it provides metrics for empirical assessments of AI impact on democracy. As a second analytical element, we draw on the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and its seven characteristics of trustworthy AI, which supply substantive criteria for evaluating delegated tasks. Operationalized across the three domains through measurable indicators and domain specific trustworthiness criteria, we propose an analytical framework that centers on institutional assessability as the central condition for democratic control over AI. However, we stress that how severe a harm is, and how much risk is acceptable, are evaluative judgments that current methodologies neither acknowledge nor operationalize. This becomes acute when such evaluative judgments are (silently) delegated to private vendors. We identify this as a strong limitation left for future work.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Trait, Not State: The Durability of Reading Identity in Social Highlighting

Prior work on a social web highlighter located individuality in selection – which documents a person chooses to highlight – but measured it cross-sectionally. We ask the temporal question: is a reader's selection signature a trait or a state? We freeze each reader's first six months of highlighting as a profile and track its own-vs-other advantage on their later selections at growing gaps (to 24+ months), with negatives drawn from the same calendar era – so supply drift cannot masquerade as personal drift – at a coarse global level and at a fine level whose negatives and controls come from the reader's own interest neighborhood; the anchor cell reproduces the prior cross-sectional level (+0.188 vs +0.169), validating the harness. Four results. Within the same users, the fine-layer advantage shows no statistically detectable paired decline at any horizon (6-12 month retention R = 1.00 [0.85, 1.18], n = 212; the farthest bin is compatible with a modest decline; the only contrast whose interval excludes zero is the coarse layer at 12-24 months, about 13%). The signal is not reducible to repeated domains (~90% survives excluding all profile sources). Within-person drift is slow (a recent-half profile beats the old half by +0.042). Prospectively, personal profiles – even one built from a reader's earliest documents, median 20 months before evaluation – rank their next reads at roughly 3x the AP of every simple non-personal prior tested. We use "trait" operationally (a stable signature under continued engagement); the scope is heavy, long-tenured readers of one platform, and exposure is not separable from choice.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Reinforcement Learning with Action-Triggered Observations

arXiv:2510.02149v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Action-Triggered Sporadically Traceable Markov Decision Processes (ATST-MDPs), a reinforcement learning framework for partial observability in which full state observations occur stochastically at each step, with probability determined by the chosen action. We derive Bellman equations tailored to this setting and establish the existence of an optimal policy. Exploiting the fact that sporadic observations reveal the full state, we provide an equivalent formulation in which agents commit to action-sequences between consecutive observations. Under the linear MDP assumption, we show that the value function over such action-sequences admits a linear representation in a finite-dimensional feature map, enabling standard regression-based methods. As an application, we derive ATST-LSVI-UCB, an optimistic algorithm achieving regret $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{Kd^3(1-\gamma)^{-3}})$ for episodic learning with geometrically distributed horizons, where $K$ is the number of episodes, $d$ the feature dimension, and $\gamma$ the discount factor (episode continuation probability), matching the known rate for linear MDPs with full observability.

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

Rethinking RAG in Long Videos: What to Retrieve and How to Use It?

arXiv:2606.13141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation is moving beyond text into long, egocentric video, where systems must select query-relevant chunks across multiple modalities and temporal granularities. Yet progress in VideoRAG is limited by two gaps: existing benchmarks allow queries to be answered without the video, obscuring retrieval errors, and prior methods apply a single modality-granularity configuration per query, ignoring chunk-level variability. We address both by introducing V-RAGBench, a benchmark of $\langle$query, evidence chunk, answer$\rangle$ triplets that enables faithful, decoupled evaluation of retrieval and generation, and CARVE, a simple method that runs parallel retrievers across configurations and employs chunk-adaptive reranking to identify the winning configuration for each chunk. Each chunk then enters the generator under its winning configuration selected during retrieval, yielding an interleaved evidence form where the chunk-level decision propagates across both stages. CARVE outperforms eight recent VideoRAG baselines, with the chunks supplied to the generator interleaving multiple configurations rather than sharing a single one, a behavior unattainable by query-level methods.

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

Learning aligned EEG representations with subject-specific encoders

arXiv:2606.16462v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-subject EEG decoding promises more training data, but it also exposes neural networks to strong inter-subject distribution shifts. We study whether task supervision and architecture alone can learn subject-aligned representations. We replace a shared EEG encoder with subject-specific encoders followed by a common classifier, and compare this hybrid model with standard EEGNet, AttentionBaseNet, and CTNet baselines with Euclidean Alignment (EA) on four motor-imagery datasets. EA improves shared encoders by recentering subject covariances, but the hybrid encoder largely internalises this role: validation-loss curves and latent-distance analyses change little when EA is removed. Subject-specific heads increase class distinctiveness and place each subject close to its own latent manifold, improving most subjects while leaving a method-sensitive subset. These results support subject-specific encoders as a learned alignment mechanism for EEG decoding and identify head selection for unseen subjects as the remaining bottleneck.

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

Reinforcement Learning for Neural Model Editing

作者:

Editing pretrained neural networks requires specialized algorithms tailored to specific objectives. Designing such algorithms is often time-consuming and demands significant effort. We present an exploratory framework that formulates neural model editing as a reinforcement learning problem, where agents modify models using reward feedback. We introduce two environments: MaskWorld, where agents scale weights multiplicatively, and ShiftWorld, where agents apply additive weight updates. The reward function combines a utility-preservation objective with a task-specific editing objective, enabling agents to learn targeted modifications while maintaining overall model performance. We evaluate the framework on bias mitigation in text classification and machine unlearning in image classification, both of which traditionally rely on specialized algorithms. Our results show that the learned policies reduce forget set accuracy to nearly 0% while preserving over 90% retain set accuracy on the unlearning task. In the bias mitigation setting, the learned policies improve bias-related performance by more than 5% while maintaining general classification utility. Our findings show that neural model editing can be cast as a reinforcement learning problem, allowing editing policies to be learned from reward feedback rather than manually engineered for each task.