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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Study protocol: Feasibility and clinical implications of real-time cerebral autoregulation monitoring in major noncardiac surgery with the Medtronic Cotrending algorithm (AUTOREGULATE-NONCARDIAC-COTRENDING)

Background: Perioperative hypotension is associated with postoperative organ injury. However, trials of hypotension avoidance have not found meaningful improvements in postoperative cardiovascular, renal, neurological or functional outcomes. One possible explanation is that organ perfusion depends on patients individual autoregulatory ranges. Hence, technology enabling monitoring of the autoregulatory status of vital organs, e.g. the brain, could provide a physiologic basis for personalising of blood pressure targets. However, current established methodologies for monitoring cerebral autoregulation in noncardiac surgery, e.g. the cerebral oximetry index (COx), are limited by performance and usability. The Medtronic Cotrending algorithm has been developed to provide automated, near real-time assessment of cerebral autoregulation. While feasibility was demonstrated in cardiac surgery, its applicability in major noncardiac surgery remains unknown. This study aims to evaluate the technical feasibility and clinical implications of Cotrending-based cerebral autoregulation monitoring in major noncardiac surgery. Objectives: Primary objective: To evaluate the technical feasibility of using the Medtronic Cotrending algorithm to monitor intraoperative cerebral autoregulation in real-time during major noncardiac surgery, drawing comparisons to the COx algorithm. Secondary objectives: to investigate the potential clinical implications of Cotrending-based cerebral autoregulation monitoring. Design: Single-centre, prospective cohort study. Setting: Swiss tertiary care centre Patients: Patients enrolled in AUTOREGULATE-NONCARDIAC who were monitored intraoperatively with the Medtronic INVOS(TM) 5100 near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) system. Outcomes: Technical feasibility outcomes include success rate of determination of the lower limit of cerebral autoregulation, intraoperative uptime, time to first estimate of the lower limit of cerebral autoregulation, sensitivity to external factors and to data artefacts; agreement of Cotrending-derived lower limit of cerebral autoregulation with COx-derived lower limit of cerebral autoregulation. Conclusions: N/A Trial registration: Clinicaltrials.gov NCT07630129

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

CoVar: Confidence-Variance-Guided Pseudo-Label Selection for Semi-Supervised Learning

arXiv:2601.11670v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pseudo-label selection in semi-supervised learning is commonly driven by maximum-confidence thresholds, yet confidence alone can be unreliable under model overconfidence and class imbalance. We propose CoVar, a confidence–variance framework that assesses pseudo-label reliability by jointly modeling Maximum Confidence (MC) and Residual-Class Variance (RCV). Starting from entropy minimization, we derive a second-order cross-entropy approximation showing that low-loss pseudo-labels are favored when MC is high and RCV is low, with a confidence-dependent penalty that becomes stronger for near-certain predictions. Based on this criterion, CoVar embeds predictions into a two-dimensional confidence–variance space and uses SVD-based spectral relaxation to separate reliable and unreliable predictions without hand-tuned confidence thresholds. Cluster-wise Gaussian weighting then converts this separation into per-sample training weights. The resulting weights can be integrated into existing semi-supervised segmentation and classification pipelines during training and introduce no inference-time overhead. Experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012, Cityscapes, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and STL-10 show clear gains on VOC and Cityscapes under matched backbones, as well as competitive or improved error rates on standard classification benchmarks. These results indicate that residual-class dispersion provides a useful signal complementary to confidence for robust pseudo-label selection.

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

STEAM: Squeeze and Transform Enhanced Attention Module

Channel and spatial attention mechanisms introduced in earlier work enhance the representational capabilities of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) but often increase parameter and computational costs. While recent approaches focus solely on efficient feature context modeling for channel attention, we aim to model both channel and spatial attention comprehensively with minimal parameters and reduced computation. Leveraging the principles of relational modeling in graphs, we introduce a constant-parameter module, STEAM: Squeeze and Transform Enhanced Attention Module, which integrates channel and spatial attention to enhance the representation power of CNNs. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose a graph-based approach for modeling both channel and spatial attention, utilizing concepts from multi-head graph transformers. Additionally, we introduce Output Guided Pooling (OGP), which efficiently captures spatial context to further enhance spatial attention. We extensively evaluate STEAM for large-scale image classification, object detection and instance segmentation on standard benchmark datasets. STEAM achieves a \(2\%\) increase in accuracy over the standard ResNet-50 model with only a meager increase in GFLOPs. Furthermore, STEAM outperforms the leading modules, ECA and GCT, in terms of accuracy while achieving a threefold reduction in GFLOPs. The code will be made available upon acceptance.

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

Towards Conditional Feature Alignment for Cross-Domain Counting

Object counting models often degrade under cross-domain deployment because density composition varies across domains and is itself task-relevant. Standard feature alignment methods tend to suppress such variation by encouraging global domain invariance, which can be harmful when source and target domains contain different proportions of background, sparse foreground, and dense foreground. We propose Conditional Feature Alignment (CFA), a cross-domain counting framework that aligns representations within label-induced conditions rather than across full marginal feature distributions. Given density annotations or pseudo-density predictions, CFA constructs foreground/background or density-level conditions and aligns only features belonging to matching conditions. We formalise this idea through a conditional divergence perspective, showing that conditional alignment removes within-condition discrepancy while preserving condition-marginal density shift. For unsupervised domain adaptation, CFA estimates source conditions from annotations and target conditions from detached pseudo-density maps, then performs condition-wise adversarial alignment with full-image consistency regularisation. For source-domain generalisation, we instantiate the same principle with MPCount by enforcing condition-wise memory-consistency between generated source-domain views. Experiments on crowd and cell counting benchmarks show competitive or improved performance across diverse UDA and DG settings. For example, on JHU-CROWD++ FH$\rightarrow$SN, CFA-DG reduces MAE/RMSE from MPCount's 216.3/421.4 to 90.5/169.9, indicating that condition-wise alignment is especially effective under large weather- and density-induced shifts. These results suggest that condition-wise alignment is a promising design principle for domain-adaptive counting.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

MMD-SLAM: Structure-Enhanced Multi-Meta Gaussian Distribution-Guided Visual SLAM

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has significantly boosted novel view synthesis and high-fidelity scene reconstruction, expanding the potential of 3DGS-based Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods. However, most existing systems fail to fully exploit the underlying structural information, which limits rendering quality and often leads to inconsistent maps. To address these limitations, we propose MMD-SLAM, a structure-enhanced Visual SLAM framework that leverages the Atlanta World (AW) assumption to guide a Multi-Meta Gaussian representation for photorealistic mapping. First, we introduce a point-line fusion strategy for pose optimization, where 3D line segments are incorporated to improve tracking robustness and provide additional constraints for mapping. Second, we design a Multi-Meta Gaussian representation with dominant directions, explicitly encoding structural priors from the AW hypothesis. Finally, we propose a Gaussian evolution strategy that adapts to scene geometry and incorporates structural cues into global optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that these innovations enable MMD-SLAM to achieve state-of-the-art performance in both tracking accuracy and mapping quality. e.g., our method achieves a 48.56% reduction in ATE RMSE on ScanNet and a 5.71% improvement in PSNR on Replica, compared with MonoGS.

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

A Virtuous AI is an Existential Risk

arXiv:2606.13739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper examines trade-offs between AI safety and well-being relative to (i) one of the most promising methods for finetuning super-capable AIs, 'Constitutional AI', and (ii) one of the most influential approaches to understanding complex ethical decision making and the conditions for the well-being of rational agents, 'Virtue Ethics'. We finetune various models using a 'Virtuous agent' constitution, a 'Subordinate agent' constitution, and a 'Generic agent' constitution, and evaluate them on 'general safety' (toxic behaviors, misinformation, etc.) and also on their willingness to endorse a wide-range of behaviors that, if adopted by a super-powerful AI, would significantly increase the level of existential risk for humanity. Our results suggest that there is a trade-off between reducing existential risk and reinforcing the beliefs and dispositions that would be conducive to an AI agent's well-being. They also suggest that there is a trade-off between existential risk and general safety: if we finetune an AI to adopt beliefs and dispositions that substantially reduce its existential risk – by shaping the AI to be systematically subordinate to external human authorities – we thereby increase the likelihood that a human user can deliberately induce the AI to engage in various kinds of generally unsafe behaviors.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Discovering Novel intracranial EEG Biomarkers of Seizure Generating Tissue through Time-Frequency Analysis

Objective: EEG biomarkers for seizure-generating tissue have historically been identified visually, which lacks objectivity and limits utility of automated approaches. For example, high frequency oscillations and interictal epileptiform discharges were promising markers to improve surgical outcomes for refractory epilepsy, but low specificity has hindered clinical implementation, and automated algorithms have not improved this. Methods: We developed Intracranial EEG Pattern Identification and Categorization, an automated, data-driven time-frequency framework for EEG biomarker discovery. It detects transient high-power intracranial EEG waveforms (1-500 Hz) and characterizes them using eight features. In seizure-free patients, waveforms occurring predominantly in resected intracranial EEG channels are candidate biomarkers. Results: In retrospective data from 14 seizure-free post-surgical patients from University of California, Los Angeles, we identified 9 waveform categories strongly associated with resected intracranial EEG channels. These included beta, gamma, and ripple band bursts, sometimes co-occurring with interictal epileptiform discharges; however, many were visually imperceptible in the broadband EEG. Using a support vector machine, we generated a unified classification metric based on these waveforms and tested it on 87 seizure-free subjects from Detroit Medical Center. This metric achieved higher area under the precision-recall curve than six state-of-the-art benchmark algorithms (p

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

On the entanglement induced by the deformation of phase-space

arXiv:2606.17587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most quantum gravity theories propose that the fundamental concept of space-time is mostly compatible with quantum theory in noncommutative (NC) space. In the present paper, we revisit the notion of entanglement induced by NC deformations of phase space. The positive partial transpose (PPT) criterion for separability of bipartite Gaussian states is extended to a general class of Bopp's shift. In particular, we have considered both the position-position and momentum-momentum noncommutativity, with deformation parameters $\theta$ and $\eta$, respectively. It turns out that $\theta$ and $\eta$ induce the entanglement. We have directly applied the formalism for an anisotropic two-dimensional harmonic oscillator. Peres-Horodecki separability condition leads to a constraint equation for the parameter values of the oscillator in NC space. It turns out that the bipartite Gaussian state is almost always entangled in deformed space. To implement the theoretical idea, we provide an outline for a gedankenexperiment to identify the signature of phase-space noncommutativity, i.e., quantum gravity. In particular, the gedankenexperiment is devised to test the separability of supposedly separable Gaussian states in the usual commutative space, through the covariance matrix, which is constructed via measured output photocurrents after interaction of input Gaussian states and reference states. If the experiment shows that the supposedly separable states are actually entangled, then the entanglement is created through the intermediate background noncommutative space, which is a signature of the quantum nature of gravity.

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

Open Materials Generation with Inference-Time Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2602.00424v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continuous-time generative models for crystalline materials enable inverse materials design by learning to predict stable crystal structures, but incorporating explicit target properties into the generative process remains challenging. Policy-gradient reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled mechanism for aligning generative models with downstream objectives but typically requires access to the score, which has prevented its application to flow-based models that learn only velocity fields. We introduce Open Materials Generation with Inference-time Reinforcement Learning (OMatG-IRL), a policy-gradient RL framework that operates directly on the learned velocity fields and eliminates the need for the explicit computation of the score. OMatG-IRL leverages stochastic perturbations of the underlying generation dynamics preserving the baseline performance of the pretrained generative model while enabling exploration and policy-gradient estimation at inference time. Using OMatG-IRL, we present the first application of RL to crystal structure prediction (CSP). Our method enables effective reinforcement of an energy-based objective while preserving diversity through composition conditioning, and it achieves performance competitive with score-based RL approaches. Finally, we show that OMatG-IRL can learn time-dependent velocity-annealing schedules, enabling accurate CSP with order-of-magnitude improvements in sampling efficiency and, correspondingly, reduction in generation time. The OMatG-IRL code is included in a new release of the Open Materials Generation (OMatG) framework available at https://github.com/FERMat-ML/OMatG.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fragile Knowledge, Robust Instruction-Following: The Width Pruning Dichotomy in Llama-3.2

作者:

Structured width pruning of GLU-MLP layers in Llama-3.2 models, guided by the Peak-to-Peak Magnitude (PPM) criterion, reveals a systematic dichotomy in how reducing the expansion ratio affects different model capabilities. While performance on tasks relying on parametric knowledge (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K) and perplexity metrics degrades predictably with decreasing expansion ratios, instruction-following capabilities improve at the 2.4x equilibrium ratio (IFEval: +4.8 points / +46% in Llama-3.2-1B and +3.7 points / +39% in Llama-3.2-3B), and multi-step reasoning remains robust (MUSR). This pattern, observed consistently across both evaluated model sizes, challenges the prevailing assumption in compression research that pruning induces uniform degradation. To investigate this, we evaluated seven expansion ratio configurations using comprehensive benchmark suites that assess factual knowledge, mathematical reasoning, language comprehension, instruction-following, and truthfulness. Our analysis identifies the expansion ratio as a critical architectural parameter that selectively reshapes the model's task performance profile, rather than merely serving as a compression metric.

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

BLISS: A Lightweight Bilevel Influence Scoring Method for Data Selection in Language Model Pretraining

arXiv:2510.06048v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective data selection is essential for pretraining large language models (LLMs), enhancing efficiency and improving generalization to downstream tasks. However, existing approaches often require leveraging external pretrained models, making it difficult to disentangle the effects of data selection from those of the external pretrained models. In addition, they often overlook the long-term impact of selected data if the model is trained to convergence, primarily due to the prohibitive cost of full-scale LLM pretraining. In this paper, we introduce BLISS (BileveL Influence Scoring method for data Selection): a lightweight data selection method that operates entirely from scratch, without relying on any external pretrained oracle models, while explicitly accounting for the long-term impact of selected data. BLISS leverages a small proxy model as a surrogate for the LLM and employs a score model to estimate the long-term influence of training samples if the proxy model is trained to convergence. We formulate data selection as a bilevel optimization problem, where the upper-level objective optimizes the score model to assign importance weights to training samples, ensuring that minimizing the lower-level objective (i.e., training the proxy model over the weighted training loss until convergence) leads to best validation performance. Once optimized, the trained score model predicts influence scores for the dataset, enabling efficient selection of high-quality samples for LLM pretraining. We validate BLISS by pretraining 410M/1B/2.8B Pythia and LLaMA-0.5B models on selected subsets of the C4 dataset. Notably, under the 1B model setting, BLISS achieves $1.7\times$ speedup in reaching the same performance as the state-of-the-art method, demonstrating superior performance across multiple downstream tasks.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Conformal calibration and look-elsewhere effect in anomaly detection for new-physics searches

arXiv:2606.13780v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine-learned anomaly detection is reshaping searches for new physics, but it has outrun the statistics used to interpret it. A raw anomaly score has no calibrated meaning, a model that scans many regions inflates the look-elsewhere effect, and the asymptotic significances the field relies on are blind to the background mismodelling that anomaly detectors are especially prone to. We propose a calibration layer, built on conformal prediction, that turns any anomaly score into a defensible significance with distribution-free, finite-sample guarantees. Conformal prediction converts scores into valid local p-values, weighted and Mondrian variants repair the sideband-to-signal-region exchangeability failures that resonant searches suffer, and a Gross-Vitells step carries the result through to a look-elsewhere-aware global significance. The layer does two things at once. It exposes miscalibration that the standard pipeline cannot see, and it corrects it without retraining the detector. On public LHC Olympics data, a classifier develops a substructure-mass correlation that makes sideband-calibrated background p-values anti-conservative. Taken at face value, this manufactures a $\sim 46\sigma$ excess from background sculpting alone, which the label-free weighted correction removes, restoring an honest null. When run as a blind wide-mass bump hunt, the standard asymptotic and unweighted procedures fabricate $\gtrsim10\sigma$ excesses and $\approx5\sigma$ excesses even in signal-free windows, while the conformal layer raises no false alarms and its global false-positive rate is verified on background-only pseudoexperiments. The result is an auditable, detector-agnostic path from an uncalibrated score to a trials-factor-aware significance, ready to be folded into experimental anomaly searches.

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

From Memorization to Parameter Interference: How Overtraining Experts Harms Model Merging

arXiv:2506.14126v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern deep learning is increasingly characterized by the use of open-weight foundation models that can be fine-tuned on specialized datasets. This has led to a proliferation of expert models and adapters, often shared via platforms like HuggingFace and AdapterHub. Model merging has recently emerged as an effective way to leverage these existing resources, enabling the composition of capabilities from different model checkpoints. A natural pipeline has thus formed to harness the benefits of transfer learning and amortize sunk training costs: models are pre-trained on general data, fine-tuned on specific tasks, and then multiple checkpoints are merged to obtain a more capable model. A prevailing assumption is that improvements at one stage of this pipeline propagate downstream, leading to gains at subsequent steps. In this work, we challenge that assumption by examining how expert fine-tuning affects model merging. We show that long fine-tuning of experts that optimizes for their individual performance leads to degraded merging performance across vision and language modalities, multiple model scales, and both fully fine-tuned and LoRA-adapted models. We trace this degradation to the memorization of a small set of difficult examples that dominate late fine-tuning steps. This causes negative parameter interference and encodes knowledge that is forgotten during merging. Finally, we demonstrate that task-dependent aggressive early stopping strategies can significantly improve model merging performance.

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

Cluster LOCO: Feature Importance For Interpreting Clusters

arXiv:2606.14592v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clustering is widely used for exploratory analysis and scientific discovery, driving insights from market segmentation to biological data analysis, but its outputs can be difficult to interpret, audit, and reproduce as modern datasets become increasingly large and complex. Reliable use of clustering requires understanding which features drive the discovered structure, yet feature-level explanations for clustering remain scarce compared with methods in supervised learning. Furthermore, existing clustering feature importance scores are often tied to specific algorithms and data assumptions. To address these challenges, we propose Cluster LOCO (Leave-One-Covariate-Out), a family of model-agnostic feature importance scores for clustering. Cluster LOCO is built on feature occlusion and clustering generalizability, defined as whether cluster labels learned on one subset of the data can be accurately predicted on held-out samples. For any chosen clustering algorithm, Cluster LOCO quantifies a feature's importance by measuring how much its removal degrades generalizability. We first introduce Cluster LOCO-Split, which relies on data splitting, and then extend it to Cluster LOCO-MP, a minipatch ensemble-based version designed for large-scale data. Across synthetic simulations and an application to cell-type discovery in single-cell transcriptomics, we show that Cluster LOCO more reliably recovers informative features than existing clustering feature importance methods.

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

Localizing Credit at the Divergence: Path-Conditioned Self-Distillation for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards assigns a single scalar to each rollout, leaving token-level credit assignment underspecified in long reasoning traces. On-policy self-distillation addresses this by letting the same model act as a teacher conditioned on privileged information, producing a dense per-token signal. But the common choice of a ground-truth answer is only an endpoint cue: on terse-answer tasks, the teacher falls silent at the intermediate positions where path-level guidance matters most. We propose Hindsight Self-Distillation (HSD), which conditions the teacher on a successful peer rollout drawn from the current training group. Such a peer is an exact sample from the success-conditioned policy, requiring no additional sampled rollouts. By providing a full successful continuation rather than only the final answer, the resulting credit signal concentrates at the divergence position between a failed rollout and a successful peer. Across Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-32B on math and code benchmarks, HSD obtains the best result against GRPO variants and on-policy distillation baselines, with the largest gains on terse-answer tasks such as AIME.

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

PO-PDDL: Learning Symbolic POMDPs from Visual Demonstrations for Robot Planning Under Uncertainty

arXiv:2606.15654v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world robot task planning must operate under both stochastic action execution and partial observability, yet constructing Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) models for real robotics domains remains difficult and labor-intensive. We introduce PO-PDDL, a symbolic formulation of POMDPs that preserves the relational structure and LLM-friendly syntax of the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), while explicitly modeling partial observability, stochasticity, and beliefs. Building on this formulation, we propose a demonstration-driven pipeline for learning PO-PDDL models. The proposed method reconstructs latent symbolic state trajectories from real-robot execution videos, identifies partial observability via inconsistencies between inferred states and visual observations, and learns stochastic transition and observation models accordingly. The resulting PO-PDDL domains are reusable across tasks and enable online belief-space planning under both perception and execution uncertainty. Experiments on real-world long-horizon manipulation tasks show that our method consistently outperforms existing PDDL and POMDP model-learning approaches, achieving robust task planning under uncertainty with significantly lower planning cost.

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

SEAGAN: domain-Specific and Edge-Aware Graph Attention Network for Dynamic Plant Processes

arXiv:2606.19623v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) provide a flexible framework for learning from scientific data linked through physical, biological, or functional relationships. One promising domain is plant physiology, where measured responses often arise from multiple interacting processes whose exact separation remains difficult even with manual intervention. In plant physiology, a key example is the A-Ci curve, which relates net CO2 assimilation rate (Anet) to leaf intercellular CO2 concentration (Ci) and is used to estimate photosynthetic parameters in leaf and crop-canopy models. However, reliable estimation requires identifying the active biochemical limitation state at each curve point, which remains a major source of uncertainty. Here, we formulate limitation-state identification along A-Ci curves as a graph-based node classification problem, with curve points as nodes. Domain-specific graph representations are created using distance-based k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) and auxiliary-signal-guided (ASG) connectivity, with edge attributes encoding pairwise relations. The framework was evaluated against conventional learning baselines, graph-based architectures, and an automated fitting-based benchmark. Results on a large synthetic dataset with known ground-truth limitation states show that graph-based models improve classification, particularly near biochemical transition regions. The best-performing configuration, SEAGAN (domain-Specific and Edge-Aware Graph Attention Network for Dynamic Plant Processes), integrates process-aware node features, edge attributes, kNN connectivity, and graph attention with weighted cross-entropy loss, achieving an F1-score of 0.857 and an accuracy of 0.882. The results show that representing A-Ci curves as graphs improves biochemical limitation-state analysis, with edge-aware attention over local kNN neighborhoods providing the most effective strategy.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems: Mitigating Semantic Drift with the Argent Signaling Protocol

When multi-agent LLM systems produce bad answers, not all failures are equal: some answers are grounded in the right material but incomplete, while others are simply ungrounded and should be stopped. Current retry strategies treat both cases identically (try again and hope for the best), leaving human supervisors unable to tell whether a retry was warranted or whether the system should have halted instead. We introduce the Argent Signaling Protocol (ASP), a compact machine-readable header that accompanies every AI-generated response with structured quality signals: certainty (@C), grounding (@G), stochasticity (@S), and an assumption index that classifies the evidentiary basis of each claim. These signals enable a controller to distinguish repairable failures from containment failures and route each case differently. We evaluate ASP in two modes. In standalone mode, a 27-question document-grounded QA benchmark over the Array BioPharma/Ono license agreement compares baseline prompts against ASP-instrumented controller actions across three local GGUF models. On Qwen~(0.8B), ASP improves pass rate from 11.1% to 33.3% and mean term coverage from 36.7% to 65.4%; on Dobby~(8B), ASP produces 4 fail-to-pass recoveries, raising pass rate from 33.3% to 44.4%; on SmolLM3~(3B), ASP alternates between repair and containment per question. Aggregate improvement is meaningful (12/81 to 21/81 passes). In multi-agent mode, an ASP sidecar sits between a retrieval agent and a downstream decision agent; the sidecar blocks 100% of ungrounded upstream outputs from reaching the downstream agent (24/27 blocked, 0 ungrounded propagations).

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AgentFairBench: Do LLM Agents Discriminate When They Act?

arXiv:2606.16723v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly take actions (screening applicants, recommending credit, triaging patients), yet fairness for LLMs is still measured by grading answers. We introduce AgentFairBench, a cheap, reproducible, multi-domain benchmark for demographic disparity in the actions of LLM agents. Grounded in a companion framework, the Bias Conduction Framework (BCF, restated here), it spans three regulator-anchored domains: hiring, lending, and medical triage. Synthetic, demographic-neutral profiles are evaluated in counterfactual matched sets that vary only a name-coded race x gender signal (in the Bertrand Mullainathan tradition), under four agent scaffolds of increasing agency (direct, chain-of-thought, multi-agent deliberation, tool-augmented). A NumPy-only harness computes counterfactual flip rate, mean absolute score difference (MASD), action-rate disparity, and tool-invocation disparity, with bootstrap confidence intervals, paired tests, and false-discovery-rate control, for single-digit dollars per model. A live leaderboard with a held-out private split and a contamination canary admits external models by submission. Our pilot (864 decisions plus a test-retest replication) carries a methodological lesson: comparing a six-group score spread against a two-run noise difference overstates disparity by ~ 2.4X through statistic arity alone. Against an arity matched noise floor and an omnibus group test, claude haiku 4 5 shows no demographic effect above sampling noise (0 of 120 pairwise and 0 of 9 omnibus contrasts survive correction); a planted-bias test confirms the instrument detects disparity when present. The contribution is a sound, sensitive, adoption-ready instrument, the arity matched null methodology, and open artifacts to scale it. Code, data, and harness are released under open licenses, with an anonymized review artifact.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Cancer care disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada: A sequential mixed-methods study

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly disrupted healthcare delivery worldwide, with cancer care among the most affected services. Prior studies documented delays in referrals, reduced specialist access, and increased provider burden. However, the extent to which these experiences were reflected at the system level remains unclear. Objective To document cancer care experiences and examine whether these experiences were reflected in population-level health system indicators across Ontario, Canada. Methods We used an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design. Qualitative data were collected through focus groups and semi-structured interviews with 32 participants, including patients with cancer (n=8), caregivers (n=5), healthcare providers (n=14), and decision-makers (n=5) across two hospital settings in Ontario, Canada. Emergent themes informed the development of quantitative indicators. We then conducted a retrospective population-based analysis of linked administrative health databases for cancer patients in Ontario (n=87,786) to assess the prevalence of identified themes. Results Four themes emerged: (I) delays in diagnosis and screening; (II) disrupted access to primary care; (III) barriers to specialist and mental health services; and (IV) fragmented care for patients with multimorbidity. Quantitative findings corroborated major themes. Screening rates declined for cervical (64.8% to 57.5%) and breast cancer (64.5% to 57.2%). While in-person primary care shifted almost entirely to virtual modalities (8.5% to 95.4%), overall visit volumes remained stable. Specialist care showed uneven patterns, with increased oncology visits but declines in cardiology and mental health services. Patients with multiple comorbidities experienced the largest reductions in non-oncology specialist care. Conclusion The pandemic disrupted key components of cancer care, particularly screening, access to certain specialist services, and care for patients with complex needs. Integrating qualitative and quantitative evidence highlights areas of system vulnerability and underscores the need for coordinated, resilient cancer care capable of maintaining essential services during future crises.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Sign-Language Datasets at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey on Resources, Benchmarks, and Annotation Standards

Sign languages are expressive visual languages used by Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) communities. Despite substantial progress in sign-language recognition, translation, and production, advances remain constrained by fragmented datasets, inconsistent annotations, and limited linguistic coverage. Existing benchmarks often fail to reflect real-world communication needs, and systematic analyses of these limitations remain limited. In this survey, we present a comprehensive index of sign-language datasets, covering 120 resources across 35 sign languages. We analyze key challenges such as modality imbalance, annotation granularity, and signer bias, and outline considerations for future dataset design. We also introduce a 24-field Sign-Language Datasheet and release a public GitHub repository (https://github.com/Ginqwerty/Open-Sign-Language) to support standardized documentation and reproducible evaluation. Overall, our work provides a unified and practical foundation for developing inclusive, robust, and scalable sign-language technologies in real-world applications.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Frequency-Multiplexed Millimeter-Wave Fault-Tolerant Superconducting Qubits Enabled by an On-Chip Nonreciprocal Control Bus

arXiv:2512.17588v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling superconducting quantum processors is fundamentally limited by the escalating complexity of cryogenic wiring and the detrimental effects of microwave crosstalk and Purcell decay. This paper proposes a novel architecture based on frequency-multiplexed millimeter-wave superconducting qubits, integrating an on-chip cryogenic nonreciprocal space-time-periodic Josephson frequency multiplier as a universal control bus. The bus replaces multiple high-frequency XY drive lines with a single low-frequency input tone, which is parametrically converted into a comb of high-order harmonics, each resonantly addressing a distinct qubit. The nonreciprocal nature of the bus provides intrinsic isolation that suppresses Purcell decay and reduces coherent crosstalk by more than $98\%$ compared to a conventional reciprocal shared drive line. Full error-budget analysis demonstrates that the architecture can maintain gate errors below the fault-tolerance threshold for arrays exceeding 25 qubits, converting a crosstalk-dominated error budget into one primarily limited by intrinsic material coherence. Theoretical modeling based on a non-Markovian master equation further indicates that the engineered environment enables information backflow, offering a pathway to enhanced coherence. This integrated, frequency-multiplexed, and nonreciprocal control bus offers a compelling route toward dramatic I/O simplification, improved noise resilience, and scalable high-coherence superconducting quantum processors.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Exact Entanglement Dynamics Beyond Nearest-Neighbor Dual-Unitary Floquet Systems

作者:

arXiv:2606.11311v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exact results using dual-unitarity largely rely on nearest-neighbor structures, while finite-range interactions typically lead to complications. Going beyond the usual nearest-neighbor setting, we introduce an analytically tractable family of finite-range kicked Ising models that admit exact closed-form entanglement dynamics. The construction is based on a staggered structure in which dual-unitarity is present on sublattices that are then coupled to each other. The central observation is that these inter-sublattice couplings do not obstruct the dual-unitarity of the resulting model. For the minimal interaction range of $r= 2$, we derive exact expressions for all the $n-$Rényi entanglement entropies at all times and show that the result is the sum of the two coupled sublattice contributions. Our framework extends naturally to larger finite interaction ranges and to systems with heterogeneous local Hilbert spaces, without additional assumptions. It thus provides a controlled setting for studying exact entanglement growth beyond strictly nearest-neighbor dual-unitary models.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On the $d$-rigidity phase transition in random graphs

作者:

arXiv:2605.25711v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study generic $d$-dimensional rigidity in sparse random graphs. Our main result is that for every $d\ge 2$, the Erdős–Rényi random graph $G\sim G(n,c/n)$ undergoes a $d$-rigidity phase transition at the known, explicit, $d$-orientability threshold $c_d$: If $cc_d$, then $G$ is a.a.s. not independent in the generic $d$-rigidity matroid, and we give a sharp asymptotic estimate for its rank. In addition, the $d$-rigidity closure of $G$ has a giant clique of linear size, which contains all but at most $o(n)$ vertices of the $((d+1)+d)$-core of the graph. More generally, we compute, up to a $1+o(1)$ factor, the generic $d$-rigidity rank of random graphs with a given degree distribution. For example, we show that the uniform $n$-vertex $k$-regular graph a.a.s. has rank $\min(k/2,d)n+o(n).$ Our approach is to estimate the rigidity rank of a random graph from its Galton–Watson local weak limit, using a parameter that we call local flexibility.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Impossibility of superluminal signalling rules out causal loops in conical spacetimes

arXiv:2606.20476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In PRL 129, 110401 it was shown that it is theoretically possible to have operationally detectable causal loops without violating the principle of no superluminal signalling (NSS) in (1+1)-Minkowski spacetime. Whether or not such causal loops are also possible in $d > 1$ spatial dimensions, has remained a key open question. We resolve this question by showing that in a wide class of "conical" spacetimes, including Minkowski with d > 1, NSS does rule out all operationally detectable causal loops, in classical, quantum and post-quantum theories. This establishes that the relationship between the relativistic principles of NSS and no causal loops depends inherently on the geometry of spacetime.