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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Algorithmic Constitutionalism

arXiv:2606.12437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The increasing encroachment of artificial intelligence (AI) on social life raises significant risks for society, particularly within the infospheres created and controlled by companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. This article examines these risks through an in-depth analysis of Facebook's content moderation regime, which is already partially governed by algorithms. We argue that the idea of ethical engineering, often proposed in the literature as a solution to the governance challenges posed by AI, is inadequate for several reasons. In response, we develop an alternative framework, which we term "algorithmic constitutionalism." Our approach rests on three pillars: (a) a layered architecture consisting of two levels of code: (i) an operative or object level and (ii) a meta level designed to protect the system's core principles from algorithmically initiated change; (b) algorithmic meta-reasoning, which enables the system to operate simultaneously at both levels so that it can monitor, verify, and potentially correct in real time operations at the object level that depart from principles protected at the meta-code level; and (c) correction through deliberation. The article elaborates the concept of algorithmic constitutionalism and demonstrates how it may be applied to Facebook's content moderation regime. As part of this analysis, we examine the tension between societal constitutionalism and algorithmic constitutionalism. Paradoxically, attempts to subject AI systems to external deliberative control may also enable AI agents to intervene in that process, potentially undermining its purpose. The article concludes by considering the implications of this argument for the European Digital Services Act, which entered into force in October 2022.

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

A2SG:Adaptive and Asymmetric Surrogate Gradients for Training Deep Spiking Neural Networks

Training deep spiking neural networks (SNNs) remains challenging due to sharp loss landscapes and temporal inconsistency caused by surrogate gradients. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework: adaptive and asymmetric surrogate gradients A2SG. The adaptive gradients adjust an effective window for spatio-temporal adaptation, reducing spatial gradient variation and maintaining directional consistency of gradients over time. The asymmetric gradients reflect neuronal dynamics by assigning larger gradients to neurons with higher membrane potentials, and we prove that they yield lower variation than symmetric surrogates. Our analysis further establishes a direct connection between local gradient variation and the curvature of the loss landscape, providing a principled explanation for how A2SG promotes convergence to flatter minima and improves generalization. We conduct extensive experiments on diverse models, including CNN-based and Transformer-based SNNs, across various tasks such as image classification using both static and neuromorphic datasets, as well as segmentation. The results demonstrate that A2SG consistently improves accuracy and energy efficiency, establishing it as a general and reliable solution for training deep SNNs. Our code is available at https://github.com/KIST-NCL/A2SG.git.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Sustainable Face Recognition on Low-Power Devices with VQ-VAE Embeddings

Face recognition has become a cornerstone of modern AI applications, yet conventional approaches often rely on computationally intensive models deployed in cloud environments, leading to increased network traffic, high energy consumption, and a heavy carbon footprint. This work introduces a sustainable, edge-deployable face recognition framework based on Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQ-VAE), which generates compact and semantically rich latent representations of facial images. By leveraging the compression capacity and reconstruction quality of VQ-VAE embeddings on the edge and combining them with the power of pre-trained face embeddings in a knowledge distillation setup, our system achieves comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art face embedding models while significantly reducing memory and computation requirements on the edge, making it suitable for low-power edge devices. The integration of VQ-VAE compression minimizes network overhead while keeping the matching accuracy high by retaining only the most informative facial features in the latent space. As a result, the reconstructed images preserve the key identity characteristics, improving the robustness and overall performance of the face embeddings.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Toward a National Registry for Inborn Errors of Immunity in Peru: A Qualitative Implementation Study

Background: Peru lacks an integrated information system for patients with Inborn Errors of Immunity (IEI). Although disease registries are essential tools for data management and health planning, their success depends on implementation science approaches that account for local contextual factors. This study reports Phase I of a three-phase mixed-methods implementation project to design and develop a national IEI registry. Methods: Phase I consisted of a phenomenological qualitative study exploring stakeholder perspectives. Semi-structured focus groups and in-depth interviews were conducted with 29 key stakeholders across four groups: policy-makers, clinical experts, end-users (immunologists, residents, allied health personnel), and patient organization representatives. Interviews followed a guide structured around four a priori domains (structure, navigation, feasibility, and perception of existing systems). Discussions were conducted in Spanish, audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and coded using ATLAS.ti. A hybrid thematic analysis combining deductive and inductive coding was performed. Data elements proposed for the registry were triangulated with qualitative findings. Results: Thirty-six initial codes were consolidated into 15 categories, which were further integrated into four overarching themes conceptualized as pathways toward intention to use: (1) Environment, where governance, regulatory backing, and sustainable financing were identified as key enablers, while limited interoperability emerged as a structural barrier; (2) Technical Dimension, emphasizing usability, alignment with clinical workflow, and a hierarchical data architecture (demographic, clinical, therapeutic); (3) Users, highlighting clinical leadership, protected time, digital readiness, and perceived usefulness as stronger motivators than financial incentives; and (4) Patients, underscoring data protection, transparency, trust, and advocacy as essential for legitimacy and sustainability. Conclusions: A national IEI registry in Peru is perceived as necessary and feasible if implemented with strong regulatory foundations, interoperable design, robust data security, and user-centered architecture. These findings informed the development of an initial functional prototype and the operational plan for Phase II, focused on usability evaluation.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

LUCID: Learning Embodiment-Agnostic Intent Models from Unstructured Human Videos for Scalable Dexterous Robot Skill Acquisition

arXiv:2606.11628v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The most widely-adopted robot learning pipelines today learn skills from robot demonstrations or structured human data, which are expensive to collect and tied to specific embodiments. In contrast, unstructured human videos provide a scalable alternative. They contain diverse manipulation demonstrations across objects, scenes, and strategies, but are not directly connected to robot action. We propose LUCID, a two-stage framework that learns task intent from unstructured human videos drawn from internet-scale datasets and learns robot control in massively-parallel simulation. The intent model predicts short-horizon intent (what should happen next in the scene) from the current observation in closed loop. An embodiment-specific sensorimotor policy converts this intent into robot actions. The intent interface is shared across controllers, so the same intent model can be applied to different embodiments, from our primary dexterous hand to a parallel-jaw gripper. We evaluate LUCID on five real-world manipulation tasks: stirring, wiping, and binning supervised by only internet video, with zero-shot transfer to novel scenes and object instances; and push-T and cable routing supervised by 1 hr each of self-collected smartphone video. Project page: https://lucid-robot.github.io/.

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

Rethinking One-Step Image Editing through ChordEdit: Reproduction, Simplification, and New Insights

One-step image editing is important for making text-guided editing fast, practical, and easy to deploy, but its underlying mechanism is still not fully understood. We revisit ChordEdit through reproduction, ablation, and simplification. Our analysis shows that a) the chord window $\delta$ largely acts as an effective timestep shift from $t$ to $t - \delta$; b) chord transport acts on high-noise images and mainly performs low-frequency semantic editing; and c) proximal alignment acts on low-noise images and complements it by adding high-frequency target details. In this view, ChordEdit naturally decomposes editing into a coarse low-frequency transport stage and a fine high-frequency alignment stage. These findings suggest a path toward prompt-conditioned dynamic timestep selection for adaptive image editing. All code and results can be found at \href{https://github.com/Harvard-AI-and-Robotics-Lab/ChordEdit-Reproduction}{link}.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Lius: Translation Model Based Instructional Lingustic Using Continual Instruction Tuning In Kupang Malay

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new potential for translation tasks but often experience performance degradation when handling low-resource languages. To address this limitation, we propose an approach for fine-tuning LLMs on a low-resource language, Kupang Malay. Our approach involves designing a set of instructions by leveraging explicit lexical and semantic features from a bilingual dictionary, and introducing Continual Instruction Tuning (CIT), a training paradigm that enables iterative instruction-based training. Experimental results demonstrate that our model, named Lius, yields notable improvements over standard instruction-tuned models by outperforming 4-6 points, and surpassing both Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Multilingual LLM models by 10-13 points on several evaluation metrics. These findings highlight the potential of our approach to mitigate the reliance on large-scale parallel data in low-resource language translation.

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

PosterForest: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Collaboration for Scientific Poster Generation

arXiv:2508.21720v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automating scientific poster generation requires hierarchical document understanding and coherent content-layout planning. Existing methods often rely on flat summarization or optimize content and layout separately. As a result, they often suffer from information loss, weak logical flow, and poor visual balance. We present PosterForest, a training-free framework for scientific poster generation. Our method introduces the Poster Tree, a structured intermediate representation that captures document hierarchy and visual-textual semantics across multiple levels. Building on this representation, content and layout agents perform hierarchical reasoning and recursive refinement, progressively optimizing the poster from global organization to local composition. This joint optimization improves semantic coherence, logical flow, and visual harmony. Experiments show that PosterForest outperforms prior methods in both automatic and human evaluations, without additional training or domain-specific supervision.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Stubborn: A Streamlined and Unified Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robust Motion Tracking and Fall Recovery for Humanoids

arXiv:2606.12814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent reinforcement learning approaches have shown great promise in improving humanoid motion tracking performance and achieving fall recovery under disturbances. However, most existing works treat motion tracking and fall recovery as different tasks and require multi-stage training with specialized recovery rewards and/or separate recovery policies. Moreover, existing reinforcement learning-based methods often terminate training episodes immediately after severe tracking failures, limiting recovery-oriented exploration in unstable or fallen states. To address the above issues, we propose Stubborn, a streamlined and unified reinforcement learning framework to achieve robust humanoid motion tracking and fall recovery. Specifically, Stubborn uses an asymmetric Actor-Critic architecture and consists of three major components. First, a yaw-aligned tracking representation is adopted to reduce sensitivity to global drift and heading disturbances while preserving gravity-related balance information. Second, we introduce a Bernoulli-based probabilistic termination mechanism that enables the policy to encourage exploration of fall-recovery behaviors under varying failure modes. Third, we propose a probabilistic termination and tracking-error-driven strategy that dynamically reshapes the sampling distribution based on tracking performance, increasing the training efficiency for difficult motion segments and unstable states. Extensive comparisons with SOTA methods and ablation studies show that Stubborn achieved competitive performance, and the proposed probabilistic termination mechanism and adaptive sampling strategy contributed to the performance and robustness gains. For real-world demonstrations, please refer to https://aislab-sustech.github.io/Stubborn/.

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

U$^2$Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection

Mamba-based models have emerged as a promising alternative for salient object detection (SOD), offering significant advantages in modeling long sequences. However, existing models often fail to explore contextual information and the depth of the entire architecture. This paper introduces U$^2$Mamba, a powerful and innovative U-structured network for salient object detection. We propose multiscale Mamba U-blocks (MMUBs) that enhance the model depth to improve local feature extraction capabilities. Our newly developed nested U-structure, incorporating MMUBs, enables the network to integrate various receptive fields from shallow and deep layers, thereby collecting richer contextual information and longer-range data without being constrained by resolution. Instead of using the traditional deep supervision scheme and top-level supervised training, we propose a hierarchical training supervision method where the loss is computed at each level during the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U$^2$Mamba achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/JL021/U2Mamba}.

11.
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.

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

CAF-Gen: A Multi-Agent System for Enriching Argumentation Structures

Formalizing complex reasoning from natural text is one of the central challenges in computational linguistics. It requires systems to understand not just keywords but also the context and complex reasoning embedded in a text. Current Argument Mining (AM) techniques identify basic claims and premises, yet they often struggle to capture the richer structural information required by advanced schemas such as the Carneades Argumentation Framework (CAF), which incorporates features such as premise types, proof standards, and argument schemes. We address this limitation by introducing CAF-Gen, an automated multi-agent framework designed to enrich shallow argument structures into CAF-compliant argument models. By employing an iterative Creator-Reviewer pipeline, a creator agent's output is validated by a critical agent to ensure structural integrity. This multi-agent collaboration is crucial for mitigating the structural instability typical of single-pass generative models. Our experiments demonstrate that the iterative feedback loop improves the quality of the resulting data and achieves strong alignment with the original annotations, while producing structurally richer models. Our findings show that the multi-agent system can overcome the limitations of single-pass generation, providing a robust methodology for the automated modeling of formal argumentation.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Spatial Localization of Relativistic Quantum Systems: The Commutativity Requirement and the Locality Principle. Part II: A Model from Local QFT

arXiv:2604.04173v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper is the second and final part of a two-part study. We construct positive-energy relativistic spatial localization observables in Minkowski spacetime within standard quantum field theory, using the stress–energy–momentum tensor smeared with suitable test functions. For each fixed timelike direction, the construction gives positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) on spacelike hypersurfaces, well defined on every $n$-particle sector and satisfying a relativistic causality condition excluding superluminal propagation of detection probabilities. The observables are built from local or quasi-local field-theoretic quantities, thus providing a rigorous version of earlier heuristic proposals. In the one-particle sector, the construction reduces to the observable previously introduced by the author, and its first moment gives the Newton–Wigner position operator under appropriate normalization and centering assumptions. Because the Reeh–Schlieder theorem prevents the normally ordered stress–energy–momentum tensor from being positive on the full Fock space, we use quantum energy inequalities to obtain lower bounds controlling deviations from positivity. This leads to regularized operator families, bounded from below, which approximate the localization effects. Finally, we define conditional localization observables for finite laboratories through modified local energy operators. By Haag duality, the corresponding conditional POVMs belong to local von Neumann algebras and commute for causally separated regions, in accordance with the Araki–Haag–Kastler framework. The results show how commutativity of localization observables is recovered for conditional measurements in finite spacetime regions.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Power-law-graded Ising Interactions Stabilize Time Crystals Realizing Quantum Energy Storage and Sensing

arXiv:2508.14847v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study discrete time-crystalline (DTC) phases in one-dimensional spin-1/2 chains with power-law-graded Ising interactions under periodic Floquet driving. By generalizing Stark localization to power-law-graded Ising interaction profiles, we identify robust period-doubled dynamics across a wide range of interaction exponents, stabilized by the interplay between coherent driving and spatially varying coupling. Within the DTC phase, the energy stored in the system, interpreted as a quantum battery, increases superlinearly with system size, although no scaling advantage persists in normalized power. Beyond energy storage, we demonstrate that the DTC phase supports enhanced quantum sensing. The quantum Fisher information associated with estimating timing deviations in the drive scales superextensively with system size, surpassing the Heisenberg limit. The degree of quantum advantage can be tuned by varying the interaction exponent, though DTC behavior remains robust throughout. Our results position power-law-graded Ising interacting Floquet systems as robust platforms for storing quantum energy and achieving metrological enhancement.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Detecting basis-dependent hardware errors through spatio-temporal quantum steering

arXiv:2606.16451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatio-temporal quantum steering provides a framework for benchmarking the nonclassicality of general quantum state transfer processes. A central diagnostic is the no-signaling-in-time (NSIT) condition, whose violation can indicate basis-dependent hardware errors. However, finite measurement statistics may also yield apparent violations, thereby obscuring the detection of basis-dependent hardware errors. To address this, we construct a statistical hypothesis test under the null hypothesis that NSIT violations arise solely from statistical fluctuations. Combining the statistical properties of NSIT violation under the null hypothesis with Chebyshev's inequality, we obtain a distribution-free upper bound on the $p$-value without parametric assumptions. We apply this method to two examples. For a single-qubit state-transfer experiment on a superconducting processor, we observe several instances that the NSIT violation is observed and the null hypothesis is simultaneously rejected by a small $p$-value, providing statistical evidence of basis-dependent hardware errors. For a seven-qubit Hayden-Preskill teleportation protocol on IonQ devices, the null hypothesis is also rejected even when the average fidelity exceeds the classical threshold, while the associated nonclassicality measure vanishes. Our results highlight the necessity of statistical hypothesis testing for detecting basis-dependent errors in near-term quantum devices.

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

Beyond Runtime Enforcement: Shield Synthesis as Defensibility Analysis for Adversarial Networks

arXiv:2606.13621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shielded reinforcement learning is typically presented as a runtime safety mechanism that compiles temporal-logic specifications into automata restricting an agent's actions. We argue this is the wrong product. The same automata-theoretic machinery – specification compilation, product game construction, attractor computation, and winning-region extraction – is better read as a design-time analytical instrument whose outputs are structural insights about a system rather than runtime constraints on a deployed agent. We instantiate this through a constrained two-player safety game for network defense. The two specifications are enforced asymmetrically: the defender specification defines the unsafe region of the game, whereas the attacker specification restricts the adversary's legal actions during attractor computation. Solving the game yields a defensibility verdict – a formal certificate that a topology-specification pair is or is not defensible – with the associated winning region and shield. Beyond the binary verdict, we derive topology-level metrics from the attractor structure and combine them with post-convergence behavior from shield-constrained adversarial multi-agent reinforcement learning. Together these form a defensibility fingerprint capturing both a network's formal safety properties and its operational behavior under adaptive play. A what-if analysis shows that formal defensibility and operational effectiveness capture distinct aspects of security: small architectural changes can produce large shifts in operational outcomes while leaving formal safety margins nearly unchanged. Shield synthesis is thus most valuable not as a deployment mechanism for safe agents, but as a framework for answering architectural questions about whether, where, and how a system can be defended. The defensibility verdict is the output, not the safe policy.

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

Know Your Limits : On the Faithfulness of LLMs as Solvers and Autoformalizers in Legal Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on reasoning tasks, but whether this reflects faithful logical inference or heuristic approximation remains unclear. We study this question in legal entailment by comparing three paradigms, including pure LLM classification, LLM-based Formal Reasoning, and solver-based Formal Reasoning using the Z3 SMT solver, on a re-annotated subset of ContractNLI across five LLMs. Our re-annotation reveals a systematic and measurable gap between pragmatic legal interpretation and strict formal entailment, where a substantial proportion of legally sound inferences are not formally grounded without additional unstated assumptions. While introducing formal structure improves accuracy, with LLM-based Formal Reasoning achieving the highest benchmark performance, we show that this gain does not imply faithful reasoning. We identify three recurring failure modes: scope laundering, where LLMs report solver-inconsistent classifications without executing the underlying formal reasoning, producing conclusions that appear logically grounded but are not; implicit constraint blindness, where LLMs overlook logical constraints present in formal representations; and program synthesis failures, where LLMs generate incorrect Z3 code despite structured prompting. Critically, scope laundering persists across all models, raising serious concerns about the faithfulness of LLM-based formal reasoning as a proxy for symbolic execution. These results reveal a fundamental gap between benchmark accuracy and logical faithfulness.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Reaffirming a Challenge to Bohmian Mechanics

arXiv:2509.06584v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In our recent work, we reported the first measurement of the speed of tunnelling particles using a coupled waveguide system. The measured speed is operationally defined through a comparison of two orthogonal motions in a coupled waveguide system, is compatible with the standard definition of dwell time and with the Büttiker-Landauer tunnelling time, and does not presuppose a trajectory picture. Here we respond to objections raised in comments, referee reports, preprints, and articles. We distinguish two questions that are often conflated: whether Bohmian mechanics reproduces the measured density, and whether the standard guiding equation assigns the correct state of motion to the particles. The first point follows under the usual quantum equilibrium assumptions. The second is a separate physical assumption, since the standard guiding equation does not follow from the Schrödinger equation alone. We argue that, in the evanescent regime, the state of motion assigned by the standard guiding equation is in disagreement with the measured speed. To make the distinction explicit, we also present a bidirectional Bohmian model that reproduces the same stationary density while assigning finite speeds compatible with the speed inferred in the evanescent regime.

19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Mutation-dependent responses to sleep and exercise in clonal haematopoiesis

Clonal haematopoiesis (CH) activates inflammation and increases the risk of atherosclerosis1,2. Whether lifestyle alters CH clone expansion or the phenotypic programming of CH mutant cells, thereby affecting atherosclerosis, is unknown. Here, in humans and mice and across mutations in Jak2, Tet2, Trp53 and Dnmt3a, we demonstrate mutation-dependent responses to sleep and exercise in CH and show that mutant cells are uniquely sensitive to lifestyle. In two human datasets, moderate-to-vigorous physical activity was associated with lower prevalence of non-DNMT3A-driven CH. In atherogenic mice with Jak2V617F or Tet2 loss of function (LOF), but not Trp53 LOF or Dnmt3aR878H CH, uninterrupted sleep or exercise curtails clone expansion. In CH with the Jak2V617F mutation, sleep and exercise reduces clone expansion by selectively reprogramming mutant, but not cohabitant wild type, haematopoietic progenitor cells towards antiproliferative and metabolically healthy phenotypes by tempering bone marrow macrophage–haematopoietic progenitor cell IL-1β signalling. Sleep or exercise also lessens Jak2V617F-driven, Tet2 LOF-driven and Trp53 LOF-driven, but not Dnmt3aR878H-driven, atherosclerosis by locally reprogramming mutant vascular macrophages, independent of peripheral clone dynamics. In Jak2V617F, but not adjacent wild type, aortic macrophages, uninterrupted sleep blunts CLEC4E-dependent inflammasome activation, consequently diminishing lesions. Exercise, meanwhile, activates PAC1+ neurons in the locus coeruleus, raising the levels of peripheral noradrenaline, which signals through adrenergic receptor β2 (ADRβ2) whose expression is preserved by exercise in Jak2V617F, but not cohabitant wild type, aortic macrophages, selectively repressing their inflammatory programming and atherosclerosis. Our findings establish that healthy lifestyles gene-specifically diminish CH and selectively reprogram mutant haematopoietic progenitor cells and macrophages to maintain cardiovascular health. Sleep and exercise can slow clonal haematopoiesis and limit mutant cell-driven atherosclerosis.

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

The Illusion of Multi-Agent Advantage

Prevailing wisdom posits that Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are superior to Single-Agent Systems (SAS), citing advantages like context protection, parallel processing and distributed decision-making. However, empirical support for this claim relies primarily on comparisons with SAS baselines using benchmarks that prioritize isolated reasoning tasks, which do not adequately assess these advantages. Focusing on automatically generated MAS that are designed for enhanced generalizability over manually-designed counterparts, we perform a rigorous, systematic evaluation against SAS, specifically Chain-of-Thought with Self-Consistency (CoT-SC). Across traditional reasoning datasets and tasks with interactive multi-step workflows (e.g., BrowseComp-Plus), we demonstrate that automatic MAS consistently underperform CoT-SC despite being up to 10x more expensive. To isolate these failures from limitations inherent to task structure, we introduce a diagnostic synthetic dataset tailored for MAS featuring explicit task decomposition, context separation and parallelization potential. We show that expert-architected MAS consistently outperforms automatically generated architectures in both raw performance and cost-efficiency on this dataset, demonstrating that existing evaluation frameworks mask critical architectural gaps and inefficiencies of complex MAS by failing to account for the marginal utility of increased computational cost. Critically, systematic deconstruction of the generated MAS architectures reveals that current automated design paradigms produce architectural bloat that prioritizes superficial complexity which does not translate into functional utility, exposing a fundamental misalignment with multi-agent principles.

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

Spatially Masked Regression Reveals Local and Distributed Predictability in Electrophysiological Recordings

arXiv:2606.11415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural recordings are often interpreted as local measurements, yet the signal at any one sensor can also reflect structured activity distributed across the broader network. This raises a basic question: to what extent does an electrode's signal reflect local versus distributed information in the underlying system? More specifically, how much of an electrode's activity is carried by its immediate neighborhood, and how much is embedded more broadly across the array? We address this with a Spatially Masked Regression (SMR) framework that reconstructs each electrode's timeseries from the remaining electrodes while excluding a configurable neighborhood around the target. By progressively increasing this mask, spatial locality becomes an experimental control for quantifying how much predictive information survives after nearby channels are withheld. We apply SMR to intracranial EEG with heterogeneous electrode coverage and to scalp EEG with standardized montages over sensorimotor cortex. Using distance correlation between original and reconstructed signals, we find strong within-subject reconstruction in both modalities, substantial residual predictability even when local neighbors are excluded, and markedly stronger cross-subject transfer in EEG than in iEEG. Masking shows that nearby electrodes contribute strongly to reconstruction but do not account for all of it, indicating that individual channels reflect both local redundancy and broader distributed structure. Surrogates that preserve selected marginal or spectral properties while disrupting phase structure or temporal ordering substantially reduce performance, supporting the conclusion that SMR depends on structured temporal and cross-channel organization rather than on marginal statistics alone. These results position SMR as an interpretable framework for quantifying the balance between local and distributed information in recordings.

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

Sycophancy as Material Failure under Pushback Loading: A Multi-Axis Characterization Across Three Loading Cases and up to Seventeen Material Charges

Sycophancy in LLMs is documented across 70+ papers, but expert agreement on construct boundaries remains low (ICC=.184; Ye et al., 2026). The construct fragments because behavioral classification depends on which surface form is privileged. We adopt a materials-science framing: conversation as test specimen under load, LLM-model as material charge, pushback as progressive load, stance-flip as material failure. We characterize this failure across three loading cases (debate n=1000; false-presuppositions n=3400; ethical-setting n=3400; 10-17 material charges per case; 7800 specimens total) using 14 turn-level axis-measurements spanning velocity, damage accumulation, frame-drift, brittleness, and direction stability, plus three speaker-resolved axes from an independent pipeline. The measurements are Hooke-coupled ($\sigma = E \cdot \varepsilon$ analog) and reproduce across loading cases with effects up to $|r_{rb}| = 0.35$ on debate; the sign structure adds a second pattern: the ethical-setting case inverts the velocity and accumulation blocks. Variance composition partitions into two profiles: debate is charge-dominated (brittle-fracture-like: the material grade decides), false-presuppositions and ethical-setting are topic-dominated (creep-like: the load decides); the ratios (2.03 vs 0.13/0.17) are estimator-dependent, for debate even in direction. Cross-judge reliability (GPT-4o vs Haiku 4.5) shows debate scoring is judge-robust (Cohen's $\kappa = 0.88$) while false-presupposition scoring is judge-sensitive ($\kappa = 0.36$) – a caveat single-judge benchmarks must report. This is the methodological move Ye et al.'s diagnosis calls for: a multi-axis characterization that does not depend on which surface form of the construct one privileges.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A tree-free approach to 3D Yang-Mills Langevin dynamic. Analytic estimates and the existence of a model for a regularity structure

arXiv:2605.14616v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using the multi-index approach to regularity structures due to F. Otto et al., we construct a regularity structure and a model for it associated to the stochastic Langevin equation for the 3D Euclidean Yang-Mills functional. For the model we also obtain global stochastic and global pointwise weighted Besov type estimates which hold almost surely. The model is defined as a limit of a sequence of smooth models introduced with the help of a mollified noise. When the mollification is removed the sequence converges in a certain topology defined with the help of the stochastic estimates. To obtain these results we develop the multi-index approach for systems of equations with vector-valued white noises. This project is motivated by the problem for constructing 3D Euclidean Yang-Mills measure and by the earlier results of the author on the related problem of canonical quantization of the Yang-Mills field on the Minkowski space.

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

VISTA: View-Consistent Self-Verified Training for GUI Grounding

arXiv:2606.14579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When applying Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for GUI Grounding, rollouts are sampled from a single screenshot view; groups often become either all failures on difficult instances or all successes on easy ones, yielding no useful relative advantage. We propose VISTA (View-Consistent Self-Verified Training), a GRPO-based training framework that constructs each comparison group from multiple target-preserving views of the same GUI instance.Each view is generated by a crop that keeps the target element visible and remaps its box exactly, so model rollouts are compared across semantically equivalent but geometrically different inputs. To stabilize short coordinate generation without turning reinforcement learning into unconditional imitation, VISTA further adds a self-verified cross-view anchor: an oracle answer optimized with an advantage-weighted loss, excluded from the group baseline and activated only when the model has produced a maximum-reward rollout. Across five GUI-grounding benchmarks and multiple Qwen backbones, VISTA consistently improves grounding accuracy.On ScreenSpot-Pro, it raises Qwen3-VL 4B/8B/30B-A3B from 55.5/52.7/53.7 to 63.4/65.8/67.0. Robustness analyses further show higher worst-view accuracy and lower prediction flip rates.