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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

The Standard Model, The Exceptional Jordan Algebra, and Triality

作者:

arXiv:2006.16265v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Jordan, Wigner and von Neumann classified the possible algebras of quantum mechanical observables, and found they fell into 4 "ordinary" families, plus one remarkable outlier: the exceptional Jordan algebra. We point out an intriguing relationship between the complexification of this algebra and the standard model of particle physics, its minimal left-right-symmetric $SU(3)\times SU(2)_{L}\times SU(2)_{R}\times U(1)$ extension, and $Spin(10)$ unification. This suggests a geometric interpretation, where a single generation of standard model fermions is described by the tangent space $(\mathbb{C}\otimes\mathbb{O})^{2}$ of the complex octonionic projective plane, and the existence of three generations is related to $SO(8)$ triality.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum mechanics in configuration space in context

arXiv:2606.17622v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To enhance the way in which wave-particle duality is implemented in the modelling of quantum mechanical systems, Bukhari et al. [New J. Phys. 27, 084501 (2025)] recently introduced an alternative approach to quantum mechanics, namely quantum mechanics in configuration space. This formalism is based on a physically motivated quantisation of Newtonian mechanics and promotes the classical position-velocity states (x,v) to pairwise distinguishable quantum states. The resulting |x,v> states form the basis of the Hilbert space of individual quantum mechanical particles and evolve along classical trajectories. In this paper, we consider the modelling of a mechanical particle in free space and put quantum mechanics in configuration space into context. It is shown that this formalism increases the continuity between quantum and classical mechanics by avoiding a conceptual inconsistency associated with the definition of momentum in canonical quantisation. In addition, we emphasise that standard quantum mechanics and quantum mechanics in configuration space are based on two distinct formulations of classical mechanics.

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

Benchmarking Agentic Review Systems

A new class of agentic review systems are emerging as a remedy to the pressure placed on peer review systems by AI-assisted research, but it is unclear how they should be evaluated. We evaluate two open-source systems (OpenAIReview and coarse), one proprietary system (Reviewer3), and a zero-shot baseline, across six LLMs spanning frontier and efficient models. First, we study whether AI reviews on ICLR/NeurIPS papers track with papers' quality as approximated by external signals such as citations and acceptance decisions. Every system performs above chance in pairwise accuracy, and the best is OpenAIReview + GPT-5.5 at 83.0%. Second, to test whether systems can catch errors with known ground truth, we construct a perturbation benchmark that injects four categories of errors into papers across eight arXiv subject classes and measure detection recall. The strongest configuration (OpenAIReview + GPT-5.5) catches 71.6% of injected errors, leaving substantial room for improvement. The union of detections across six models reaches 83.3% recall, suggesting different models detect different errors and better harness design can potentially increase performance. Beyond these benchmarks, we study a public deployment of OpenAIReview with real users. Votes on its comments skew positive at 1.44 to 1, and the most common complaints are about false positives and minor nitpicks. Together, by evaluating full review systems backed by state-of-the-art models on real research papers, we show that while AI reviews still have room for improvement, they can already track human quality judgments well, catch important errors, and earn positive feedback from real users.

04.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-09

Adjuvanted inactivated rabies virus-vectored Lassa virus vaccine in healthy adults: a phase 1 trial

Lassa fever causes substantial morbidity and mortality in West Africa, and no licensed vaccine is available. We evaluated LASSARAB, an inactivated rabies virus-vectored Lassa virus (Josiah strain) glycoprotein complex vaccine. We conducted a randomized, controlled, dose-escalation phase 1 trial. Participants (total n = 54) received two intramuscular doses of LASSARAB containing 700 (n = 15), 1,400 (n = 15) or 2,800 (n = 14) relative units of antigen formulated with the TLR-4 agonist 3D-6-acyl PHAD-SE adjuvant, or licensed rabies vaccine control (n = 10), administered 28 days apart. This protocol-defined interim analysis reports the primary safety evaluation and secondary immunogenicity assessments through day 61. There were no prespecified hypotheses or formal power calculations. All primary safety end points demonstrated an acceptable safety profile. After dose 1, local solicited adverse events occurred in 86.7–100.0% of LASSARAB groups and 80% of controls; systemic events in 33.3–71.4% and 60.0% of controls. After dose 2, local solicited adverse events occurred in 66.7–86.7% of LASSARAB groups and 55.6% of controls; systemic events in 53.3–71.4% of LASSARAB groups and 55.6% of controls. Events were predominantly mild and self-limited. Unsolicited adverse events occurred in 28.6–60.0% of LASSARAB groups and 20.0% of controls. No serious adverse event, immune-mediated condition or sensorineural hearing loss occurred. Safety laboratory abnormalities occurred in 13.3–66.7% of LASSARAB groups and 30.0% of controls (14 mild, 6 moderate and none severe). After two doses, Lassa virus GPC IgG ELISA seroconversion (≥fourfold rise) was achieved in 100.0% (44 of 44) of LASSARAB recipients and 0.0% (0 of 10) of controls. Rabies glycoprotein IgG ELISA seroconversion (≥fourfold rise) and neutralizing antibody by rapid fluorescent focus inhibition test (RFFIT) seroprotection (≥0.5 IU ml−1) were also 100% across all groups, including controls. LASSARAB + 3D-6-acyl phosphorylated hexaacyl disaccharide (PHAD)-SE demonstrated a favorable safety profile and immunogenicity against Lassa and rabies viruses. The per-protocol final study report will include safety and durability through day 394. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT06546709 . An interim report of a first-in-human phase 1 trial found an adjuvanted, combination inactivated rabies-vectored, Lassa fever vaccine (LASSARAB + 3D-6-acyl PHAD-SE) to be safe and induced immunogenicity to both Lassa and rabies viruses in healthy participants.

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

Deep Learning-Based Lunar Crater Terrain Relative Navigation

arXiv:2606.14776v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate position estimation is crucial for the successful implementation of future lunar landings using autonomous vehicles, especially in dangerous environments with sparse terrain features. In this paper, we propose a terrain relative navigation (TRN) algorithm combining our deep-learning crater detector, which was designed specifically for the NASA Crater Detection Challenge problem, and an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Our detector analyzes crater features from the monocular images acquired from orbit, and their matches with craters from a global database are identified via a Hungarian assignment approach followed by the consensus-based outliers removal method. The estimated measurements are then used to refine an EKF, where spacecraft pose estimation in the Lunar-Centered Lunar-Fixed (LCLF) frame of reference, augmented with altitude aiding information, constrains radial drift. The simulation results indicate that even if the spacecraft is off from its actual location up to 5 km, TRN could recover from this situation, achieving navigation error reduction to a few hundred meters. It should be noted that in order to maintain crater feature correspondences, it is important to match the image resolution and the scales within the scene to the detector training set distribution.

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

Sharp freezing time estimates for the subcritical Facilitated Exclusion Process

arXiv:2606.15233v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the exact transience time of the Facilitated Exclusion Process (FEP) on the one-dimensional torus with $N$ sites. The FEP exhibits an active/inactive phase transition at critical density $1/2$, such that in the subcritical density regime $(0,1/2)$, it becomes frozen after a finite time period – the transience time or freezing time. We first show that for the FEP starting from a Bernoulli product measure of marginal density $\rho \in (0,1/2)$, the transience time has exactly the scale of $\Theta(\log^3 N)$. Secondly, we prove that in the near-critical case $\rho \simeq 1/2 - N^{-\alpha}$ for $\alpha \in (0,1)$, the transience time is polynomial and has a scale of $N^{1 \wedge (2\alpha)}$. The key idea is to estimate the typical size of locally supercritical intervals of the initial distribution, which has order $\log N$ in the subcritical case and $N^{1 \wedge (2\alpha)}$ in the near-critical case. In the subcritical case this is enough, whereas in the near-critical case we need additional dynamical decorrelation inequalities to apply this static result to estimate the freezing time.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Privacy from Symmetry: Orthogonally Equivariant Transformers for LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.16461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Running large language models locally is often impractical, pushing inference on sensitive text to third-party providers. Split inference partially mitigates this by keeping tokens on the client and sending only hidden representations, but these representations can still be recovered via nearest-neighbor search against the public embedding table. We propose an orthogonal obfuscation procedure in which the client multiplies embeddings by a secret orthogonal matrix before transmission. To enable correct inference under arbitrary rotations, we introduce ConjFormer, a transformer variant that is exactly $\mathrm{O}(d)$-equivariant via a lightweight normalization change (scalar RMSNorm) together with blockwise orthogonal conjugation of all linear weights. As a result, the server performs the full forward pass entirely in the rotated basis and never observes unrotated hidden states. Experiments on GPT-2 and Llama 3.2 1B models fine-tuned on PubMed show that orthogonal obfuscation eliminates direct cosine nearest-neighbor inversion and reduces token recovery from over 35% top-10 to at most 1.3%, while increasing perplexity by only 0.4% after fine-tuning. These results indicate that enforcing symmetry at the architectural level can provide a practical defense for privacy-preserving LLM inference without noise injection or heavy cryptographic machinery.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

DRA-GRPO: Your GRPO Needs to Know Diverse Reasoning Paths for Mathematical Reasoning

Post-training LLMs with Reinforcement Learning, specifically Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has emerged as a paradigm for enhancing mathematical reasoning. However, standard GRPO relies on scalar correctness rewards that are often non-injective with respect to semantic content: distinct reasoning paths receive identical rewards. This leads to a Diversity-Quality Inconsistency, where the policy collapses into a narrow set of dominant modes while ignoring equally valid but structurally novel strategies. To bridge this gap, we propose Diversity-aware Reward Adjustment (DRA), a theoretically grounded framework that calibrates the reward signal using the semantic density of sampled groups. By leveraging Submodular Mutual Information (SMI), DRA implements an Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) mechanism that effectively de-biases the gradient estimation. This creates a repulsive force against redundancy, driving the policy to achieve better coverage of the high-reward landscape. Our method is plug-and-play and integrates seamlessly with GRPO variants. Empirical evaluations on five math benchmarks demonstrate that DRA-GRPO consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving an average accuracy of 58.2% on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B with only 7,000 training samples and $55 cost, highlighting the critical role of diversity calibration in data-efficient alignment. The code is available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/DRA-GRPO.

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

QC-GAN: A Parameter-Efficient Quaternion Conformer GAN for High-Fidelity Speech Enhancement

arXiv:2606.18611v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a parameter-efficient speech enhancement framework, Quaternion Conformer GAN (QC-GAN), which combines a Quaternion Conformer generator with MetricGAN-based training. The Hamilton product encodes the magnitude and phase via structured weight sharing, reducing the number of layer parameters while preserving their interdependencies. A metric-learning discriminator was employed to maximize perceptual quality by optimizing the approximate perceptual evaluation scores. On the VoiceBank+DEMAND dataset, QC-GAN achieved a Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) score of 3.48 with only 0.89M parameters, delivering a performance comparable to state-of-the-art models at less than half their size. A 35K-parameter variant achieved a PESQ score of 3.23, surpassing conventional methods with significantly fewer parameters. Evaluation on the DNS-Challenge 3 dataset further confirmed generalization to real-world conditions.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Visuals Lie, Consistency Speaks: Disentangling Spatial Attention from Reliability in Vision-Language Models

Multimodal Foundation Models are increasingly used as reasoning agents, making reliability, knowing when a model may hallucinate, critical. A common intuition, which we call the Attention-Confidence Assumption, holds that reliability follows from "structural" visual perception: tight attention on relevant regions should signal a trustworthy answer, while scattered attention signals confusion. We challenge this through the VLM Reliability Probe (VRP), a systematic cross-family study of reliability signals in contemporary Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce structural-attention metrics, cluster counts (C_k) and spatial entropy (H_s), to quantify the visual encoder's gaze, and track its evolution (Delta H_s) across layers. This reveals a "Symbolic Detachment": models often "Early Lock" visual features only to diffuse attention later, severing early perception from final generation. Contrary to the grounding hypothesis, we find a "Cluster Failure": spatial attention has near-zero correlation (R approx 0.001) with accuracy. Instead, reliability is a phenomenon of generation dynamics and internal-state distributions. Self-Consistency, the agreement rate across sampled reasoning paths, is the dominant predictor of truth (R = 0.429). Scaling causal interventions exposes a sharp architectural divergence: LLaVA locks its prediction in a fragile late-stage bottleneck, whereas PaliGemma and Qwen2-VL distribute reliability globally, staying resilient even when ~50% or more of their most predictive layer is destroyed. For current VLMs, reliability signals are detached from visual grounding maps and are best inferred from generation-time dynamics and hidden-state probes.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

LandslideAgent with Multimodal LandslideBench: A Domain-Rule-Augmented Agent for Autonomous Landslide Identification and Analysis

Intelligent landslide hazard interpretation is critical for disaster prevention, yet current paradigms struggle to simultaneously extract visual features and high-level geoscientific semantics, while general-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) suffer from perceptual limitations and domain hallucinations in complex geological scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose an instruction-driven agentic framework comprising three components. First, LandslideBench, a multimodal fine-grained dataset with seven subtype labels, high-resolution imagery, pixel-level masks, and high-quality textual descriptions, is constructed via multi-VLM cross-validation and interactive annotation. Then, LandslideVLM, a landslide-oriented VLM, is fine-tuned via LoRA on LandslideBench to enhance geological semantic understanding. Finally, LandslideAgent, a domain rule-enhanced agent taking LandslideVLM as its cognitive backbone, employs a dual-rule controller incorporating structured report metadata constraints and cross-validation identification constraints to regulate automated tool invocation. Experiments demonstrate that LandslideBench provides effective baselines across five mainstream models on fine-grained classification and semantic segmentation. LandslideVLM achieves accuracy improvements of 10.96%, 32.87%, and 15.91% on landslide discrimination, fine-grained classification, and semantic description quality, respectively. LandslideAgent further enables autonomous multi-source spatial data inference, realizing full-process intelligence for landslide identification and analysis.

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

RSRCC: A Remote Sensing Regional Change Comprehension Benchmark Constructed via Retrieval-Augmented Best-of-N Ranking

Traditional change detection identifies where changes occur, but does not explain what changed in natural language. Existing remote sensing change captioning datasets typically describe overall image-level differences, leaving fine-grained localized semantic reasoning largely unexplored. To close this gap, we present RSRCC, a new benchmark for remote sensing change question-answering containing 126k questions, split into 87k training, 17.1k validation, and 22k test instances. Unlike prior datasets, RSRCC is built around localized, change-specific questions that require reasoning about a particular semantic change. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first remote sensing change question-answering benchmark designed explicitly for such fine-grained reasoning-based supervision. To construct RSRCC, we introduce a hierarchical semi-supervised curation pipeline that uses Best-of-N ranking as a critical final ambiguity-resolution stage. First, candidate change regions are extracted from semantic segmentation masks, then initially screened using an image-text embedding model, and finally validated through retrieval-augmented vision-language curation with Best-of-N ranking. This process enables scalable filtering of noisy and ambiguous candidates while preserving semantically meaningful changes. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/google/RSRCC.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Majority-of-Three is Optimal

arXiv:2606.13614v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We give a short proof that the majority vote of three independent consistent classifiers is an optimal learner in the realizable PAC setting. This proves optimality for the simplest voting scheme, while simplifying both the algorithmic structure and the probabilistic analysis of previous voting learners, including the algorithm of S. Hanneke and the analysis of bagging by K. Green Larsen.

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

ALCL: An Adaptive Log-Correntropy Loss for Robust Learning under Non-Gaussian Noise

arXiv:2606.16050v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robust deep learning under heavy-tailed and impulsive noise remains challenging because conventional losses such as mean squared error (MSE) exhibit unbounded sensitivity to outliers. Although correntropy-based objectives improve robustness, existing formulations rely on fixed kernel parameters that must be empirically tuned and remain static during training. To address these limitations, we propose an Adaptive Log-Correntropy Loss (ALCL), a heavy-tailed loss formulation that adaptively learns its robustness geometry during optimization. ALCL introduces a logarithmic residual model whose shape and scale parameters are learned jointly with network weights through differentiable reparameterization. This yields a principled maximum likelihood formulation whose influence function is formally bounded and redescending, allowing the loss geometry to adapt dynamically to evolving residual statistics while suppressing extreme outliers. Comparative experiments on four widely used benchmark datasets spanning grayscale and red-green-blue (RGB) image data under mixed heavy-tailed and impulsive noise demonstrate that ALCL consistently outperforms MSE and optimally tuned generalized correntropy losses in both reconstruction fidelity and downstream classification accuracy. While performance differences remain small under low-noise conditions, under high-noise regimes ALCL improves median accuracy by up to 4.75% on grayscale benchmarks and 4.51% on RGB datasets, with reduced variance across runs. These results demonstrate that adaptive robustness through joint learning of loss parameters provides a computationally efficient alternative to static correntropy-based losses for deep learning in non-Gaussian environments.

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

TERMS-Bench: Diagnosing LLM Negotiation Agents Beyond Deal Rate

arXiv:2605.13909v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Negotiation is a central mechanism of economic exchange, shaping markets, procurement, labor agreements, and resource allocation. It is also a canonical testbed for agentic language models, requiring multi-turn interaction under hidden preferences, strategic communication, and binding constraints. These properties make negotiation hard to evaluate: unlike math or code, it has no intrinsic verifier. Existing LLM negotiation evaluations rely on LLM-vs.-LLM interaction or aggregate outcomes such as deal rate, leaving failures opaque. We introduce Terms-Bench, short for Testbed for Economic Reasoning in Multi-turn Strategy, a Bayesian-game framework that makes the environment itself the verifier by specifying the counterpart's latent type, policy, and payoff structure. We instantiate it in bilateral price negotiation, where the counterpart's private state and simulator policy are hidden from the agent but observable to the evaluator. This turns the counterpart from a black-box opponent into a diagnostic instrument, enabling agent-attributable failure analysis and oracle-reference optimality gaps. Evaluating 13 LLM agents spanning frontier systems from major providers, Terms-Bench turns negotiation evaluation from aggregate ranking into actionable diagnosis: where agents fail, why they fail, and what to strengthen. Empirically, frontier models saturate deal rate yet diverge in surplus extraction, cue use, belief calibration, and compliance, revealing agent-specific bargaining bottlenecks masked by prior benchmarks.

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

Attention Alignment Between Humans and Vision-Language Models

Visual perception depends on top-down goals and bottom-up sensory mechanisms. Vision-language models implement both, allowing us to treat each component as a separable hypothesis about what drives where we look. We compared spatial attention maps from six vision-language models against human fixation heatmaps recorded on 200 images during two tasks (general description and social captioning). The six models spanned a 2$\times$2 factorial of CNN vs.\ ViT encoders crossed with LSTM vs.\ Transformer decoders, plus Molmo 7B-D and Qwen3.5 9B. We found that both decoder and encoder architecture shaped alignment, but decoder choice dominated. LSTM vs.\ Transformer decoders increased alignment by 40–50 percentage points (80–87\% vs.\ 40–59\% of the human noise ceiling). In contrast, CNN vs.\ ViT encoders contributed a secondary 5–20 point advantage depending on decoder family, with CNN-LSTM the most aligned model overall (85–87\%). Despite their alignment advantage, LSTM-decoder attention maps were spatially diffuse and minimally task-differentiated; ViT-Transformer, the weakest in alignment, showed the sharpest spatial concentration and strongest task differentiation. A hemispatial-neglect simulation confirmed that ablating attention impacted LSTM decoders more than Transformer decoders. In an exploratory extension using TRIBE-simulated synthetic neural responses, fixation alignment and neural relevance dissociate: CNN-Transformer attention maps better predicted synthetic brain activity despite lower fixation alignment, with attention maps best predicting early visual cortex. Together, top-down and bottom-up components trade off what they predict in behavioral and synthetic neural data.

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

FlowRL: A Taxonomy and Modular Framework for Reinforcement Learning with Diffusion Policies

arXiv:2603.27450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Thanks to their remarkable flexibility, diffusion models and flow models have emerged as promising candidates for policy representation. However, efficient reinforcement learning (RL) upon these policies remains a challenge due to the lack of explicit log-probabilities for vanilla policy gradient estimators. While numerous attempts have been proposed to address this, the field lacks a unified perspective to reconcile these seemingly disparate methods, thus hampering ongoing development. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing a comprehensive taxonomy for RL algorithms with diffusion/flow policies. To support reproducibility and agile prototyping, we introduce a modular, JAX-based open-source codebase that leverages JIT-compilation for high-throughput training. Finally, we provide systematic and standardized benchmarks across Gym-Locomotion, DeepMind Control Suite, and IsaacLab, offering a rigorous side-by-side comparison of diffusion-based methods and guidance for practitioners to choose proper algorithms based on the application. Our work establishes a clear foundation for understanding and algorithm design, a high-efficiency toolkit for future research in the field, and an algorithmic guideline for practitioners in generative models and robotics. Our code is available at https://github.com/typoverflow/flow-rl.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Toward Entanglement Bootstrap for Conformal Field Theory in Any Dimension

arXiv:2606.12540v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Given a quantum critical wavefunction in any dimension, we propose a reconstructed Hamiltonian, analogous to the ones previously found for 1+1d CFT and for 2+1d bosonic liquid topologically-ordered states. We test numerically that, for known regularized approximate CFT groundstates (on the icosahedron and the fuzzy sphere), (1) they are close to the groundstate of their reconstructed Hamiltonian, and (2) the spectrum of their reconstructed Hamiltonian on the unit sphere has CFT properties (integer spacing of descendants) and matches known low-lying energies. We show that this provides an automated method to improve the finite-size effects in a fixed Hilbert space.

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

When Agent Automation Becomes Profitable: Quantifying and Insuring Autonomous AI Risk through Trace-Economic Underwriting

arXiv:2606.16465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents can now take irreversible actions in operational systems, but agent-caused losses are still not clearly assigned, priced, or transferred. Providers often disclaim consequential damages, users are left with uncompensated losses, and default human review limits the efficiency gains of automation. We ask when autonomous AI deployment can become economically acceptable despite failure risk. Our answer is to quantify risk at the customer-task-trace episode level and transfer it through insurance. Automation is acceptable when its expected benefit exceeds the premium, control cost, and remaining risk. This requires a defined role with bounded permissions and comparable traces. We introduce trace-economic underwriting, which maps tool-use traces to customer exposure and claimable loss, then uses this representation for pricing, control, and risk transfer. It uses deterministic economic labels rather than an LLM judge. In our trace-to-loss testbed, trace-economic pricing reduces pricing MAE from $17.7K to $569 and removes regressive cross-subsidy. A 300-trace expert audit accepts 295 labels unchanged. On 1,000 real SWE-smith traces, trace-conditioned controls reduce CVaR95 by 72%. Theorem~1 gives a finite-sample scope condition. We release code, labels, and audit sheets.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Allocating Human Oversight in AI-Enabled Analytics

arXiv:2604.12497v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Organizations increasingly deploy AI as a low-cost prediction layer in customer-facing decision processes, including demand sensing, service-quality monitoring, product testing, and market research, but AI-generated signals are unevenly reliable across tasks, products, and customer segments. Firms therefore still need scarce human validation (labels, audits, survey responses, or follow-up measurements) to anchor AI outputs to ground truth. Because human ground truth is itself noisy, varying across labelers and even across repeated judgments, the firm must collect and average several human labels per task, which makes human validation costly. We study how to allocate a limited human-validation budget across many AI-assisted tasks when reliability is heterogeneous and unknown before deployment. We cast this within tuned prediction-powered inference. Each human label both sharpens the AI-assisted estimate and reveals the task's rectification difficulty, the variance that remains after the AI prediction is optimally used as a control variate. If difficulties were known, the optimal allocation would follow a Neyman square-root rule; because they are unknown, we propose a policy based on upper confidence bounds that learns them online and steers validation toward tasks where AI is least reliable. We prove that the policy's terminal efficiency loss relative to the oracle allocation vanishes as the budget grows. In synthetic experiments and a real digital-twin survey with 68 tasks and over 2000 respondents, it closes most of the gap to the oracle when reliability is heterogeneous, outperforming uniform and epsilon-greedy allocation; on the survey data it also outperforms explore-then-commit pilot designs and cuts uniform's 10–12% gap to 2–6%. The value of AI depends not only on model accuracy but also on the operational policy that targets human oversight where AI errors matter most.

21.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

On the evolution of the company we keep: Implications for infectious disease modeling

by Joël Mossong Whom we meet shapes how infections spread. Where earlier focus of mathematical epidemiology was on incorporating age, more recent work has begun to reveal the importance of socioeconomic aspects for understanding and managing future epidemics. In this Perspective, Joël Mossong discusses the importance of understanding social contacts and how they have evolved for infectious disease modeling, and the need to factor in additional considerations such as ethic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

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

A Survey of On-Policy Distillation for Large Language Models

As Large Language Models continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become an important engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains a common technique for this transfer. The prevailing recipe in industrial pipelines, static imitation of teacher-generated text, carries a structural weakness that grows more severe as tasks become longer and more reasoning-intensive. Because the student is trained on flawless teacher prefixes but generates its own at inference, small errors tend to accumulate into trajectories it has rarely been trained to recover from, and the resulting exposure bias has been shown to scale roughly with the square of sequence length. On-Policy Distillation reorganizes the training loop around this observation by having the teacher provide feedback on what the student actually produces, with the goal of reducing the compounding term toward linear and reframing distillation as an iterative correction process rather than single-pass imitation. The resulting literature has expanded along divergence design, reward-guided optimization, and self-play, yet contributions remain scattered across the knowledge distillation, RLHF, and imitation learning communities without a unified treatment. This survey provides such a treatment. We formalize OPD as f-divergence minimization over student-sampled trajectories, organize the field along three design axes (what to optimize, where the signal comes from, and how to stabilize training in practice), and consolidate success conditions, recurring failure modes, and the connection between OPD and KL-constrained reinforcement learning. We close with open problems that emerge from this synthesis, including distillation scaling laws, uncertainty-aware feedback, agent-level distillation, and the growing overlap between knowledge distillation and RL.

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

Toward Instructions-as-Code: Understanding the Impact of Instruction Files on Agentic Pull Requests

arXiv:2606.13449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-agents (e.g., GitHub Copilot) collaborate as teammates in different software engineering tasks, including code generation proposed through pull requests (Agentic-PRs). For better agent efficiency, developers create instruction files that guide the AI-agents, including how to navigate the project, locate the right components, run tests, respect best practices, and more. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the creation of these instructions and the performance of AI-agents in creating better pull requests, which have a higher chance of success (i.e., the merge rate), address more complex tasks (e.g., code churn), and require less effort to be merged (e.g., time to merge). To this end, we analyze 15,549 agentic PRs from 148 projects in the AIDev dataset. Using the three dimensions, we compare each project before and after the creation of the instruction files. We find that specifying instructions for AI-agents does not necessarily lead to better results. With the instruction files, 27.7\% of the projects increased their merge rate by at least 20\%, while 26.35\% decreased it. The same observation is seen with the amount of changes (e.g., code churn, number of modified files) and with the efforts to merge an agentic PR (e.g., merge time and number of comments). From a first exploration, we find that projects that managed to increase their merge rate have substantially longer instruction files, which are also well structured into a higher number of sections and sub-sections. Our results motivate the need for research to assist practitioners in framing the development of instruction files as a software engineering activity (aka, Instructions-as-Code).

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

On a class of reflected McKean-Vlasov Stochastic Differential Equations with jumps

arXiv:2606.18433v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates a class of reflected McKean-Vlasov Stochastic Differential Equations driven by both Brownian motion and a compensated Poisson random measure. We establish the existence and uniqueness of solutions and provide moments estimates for the state processes.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

segSHAPE: RNA secondary structure prediction from nanopore direct RNA sequencing

RNAs adopt complex structures that regulate key biological processes, making accurate structure prediction essential. Chemical probing coupled with Nanopore direct RNA sequencing (DRS) offers a route to single-molecule structural inference, but current tools are limited by inaccurate signal-to-sequence alignment, which degrades modification-rate estimation and downstream structure prediction. Here we introduce segSHAPE for RNA secondary structure prediction from Nanopore DRS data (both RNA002 and RNA004 chemistries), a probe-agnostic framework that improves signal alignment using prior information of basecalling and per-read signal baseline shift correction, learns position-specific k-mer raw signal parameters, and estimates per-nucleotide modification rates with an unsupervised anomaly detector. On three public RNA002 DRS datasets spanning different chemical probes (AcIm, NAI-N3) and RNAs from 421 to 1552 nt, segSHAPE achieves the highest F1 score and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) on all RNAs, exceeding the strongest baseline by 3.4 to 5.8 percentage points in MCC. It additionally captures the ligand-induced conformational change of the thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) riboswitch RNA directly from RNA002 DRS data using the DEPC probe. On a public RNA004 DRS dataset, segSHAPE improves over the sm-PORE-cupine baseline by 17 ROC-AUC points in modification rate estimation and by 6.7 MCC points in structure prediction. These results establish segSHAPE as a unified, probe-agnostic pipeline for RNA structure prediction from Nanopore DRS data.