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02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Dressed Floquet scars from protected zero modes in a Rydberg chain

arXiv:2606.15605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this Letter, we present an approximate analytic construction of two zero quasienergy quantum many-body scars in a periodically driven model of Rydberg atoms on a ring, which persist over a range of driving amplitudes and frequencies for finite sizes. An index theorem protects an exponentially large number (in system size) of exact zero energy modes of the Floquet Hamiltonian in this setting. Unlike most of these zero modes which continuously change with drive parameters, these two quantum many-body scars retain the memory of particular states. They can be expressed as {\it dressed versions} of two contrasting states, the Rydberg vacuum and a unitarily rotated variant of a volume-law scar [Ivanov and Motrunich, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 134}, 050403 (2025)], respectively. We provide an analytic understanding of their existence using a Floquet perturbation theory and show their resilience beyond the perturbative regime using exact diagonalization in finite systems. Our study provides insight into the structure of protected zero modes in interacting Floquet settings.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

A Benchmark for Omni-Modal Reasoning in Long Videos

Long-form omni-modal video understanding requires integrating vision, speech, and ambient audio with coherent long-context reasoning. Existing video benchmarks often trade off temporal scale, modality coverage, open-ended interaction, and interpretable scoring. To address this gap, we introduce LongShOTBench, a long video understanding benchmark designed around three coupled goals: holistic omni-modal integration, intent-driven open-ended interaction, and rubric-level diagnosis. It builds single- and multi-turn questions from real viewing scenarios, with systematic tasks probing visual, speech, ambient-audio, temporal, and cross-modal reasoning. Each item includes a reference answer and a weighted criterion-level rubric, letting evaluation identify which perceptual facts, temporal links, modality-grounding requirements, and reasoning steps are satisfied or missed. All samples are manually verified to improve grounding, clarity, and rubric reliability. We also introduce LongShOTAgent, a training-free omni-modal evidence-seeking agent coupling full-video preprocessing with targeted retrieval, query-adaptive segment refinement, and explicit claim verification over visual, speech, and non-speech audio evidence. Its iterative search-refine-verify loop exposes intermediate evidence and lets modality-specific specialists re-analyze relevant moments before answering. We evaluate 105 video-capable models spanning open-source omni-modal models, vision-language systems, audio LLMs, agentic pipelines and closed-source APIs. Current MLLMs remain far from saturating LongShOTBench, while our LongShOTAgent is the strongest training-free system, reaching 66.64% overall. By releasing the benchmark, leaderboard, and method, we provide a shared, interpretable testbed for advancing long-form omni-modal video reasoning. Code, data, and the leaderboard are available at https://longshot.cvmbzuai.com/.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Evaluation Sovereignty in Metadata-Driven Classification: A Multi-Track Framework for Weakly Supervised Information Systems

arXiv:2606.13436v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluation in machine learning is typically treated as a neutral measurement process. However, in operational information systems, evaluation outcomes are often conditioned by the processes used to generate labels. This paper does not seek to improve classification performance. Instead, it examines the validity of performance measurement under differing label-authority regimes. This issue is particularly relevant in large-scale metadata-driven systems, where labels are often incomplete, inconsistent, or weakly supervised. We introduce evaluation sovereignty, defined as the degree to which performance metrics are independent of label authority and supervision regime, and propose a multi-track evaluation framework that systematically varies training and evaluation label sources. Using hierarchical multi-label classification on large-scale scientific metadata, we demonstrate that models exhibiting strong performance under operational ("silver") evaluation degrade substantially under independent ("gold") evaluation, particularly for fine-grained classification. For example, Micro-F1 decreases from approximately 0.54 to 0.03. Notably, ranking-based metrics remain above baseline, revealing a divergence between latent model signal and classification validity. These findings suggest that commonly reported performance metrics may reflect alignment with labeling processes rather than true predictive capability. We therefore reconceptualize evaluation validity as a system-level property shaped by label governance and provide a practical methodology for auditing intelligent systems operating under weak supervision.

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

Contour-Constrained Deformable Registration with Parameter Characterization for Head and Neck Surgical Guidance

With 890,000 annual new cases globally, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma has one of the highest recurrence rates among solid malignancies. Although frozen section analysis is the standard of care for intraoperative margin assessment, accurately relocating detected positive margins on the resection bed remains challenging due to imprecise alignment between resected specimens and their resection bed, compounded by post-resection mucosal tissue shrinkage. We present a biomechanics-driven deformable registration framework that corrects post-resection tissue deformation to provide intraoperative guidance. Our approach registers 3D specimen meshes to intraoperative resection bed point clouds using a deformable registration approach based on regularized Kelvinlet basis functions. The registration matches surface point clouds, fiducial landmarks, and boundary contour constraints that directly penalize perpendicular distance-to-agreement between specimen and resection bed boundaries. Across nine specimens from skin, buccal mucosa, and tongue sites, the overall mean target registration error was $11.11 \pm 4.07$ mm using rigid registration, which decreased to $8.20 \pm 2.68$ mm (26.19\% reduction) using deformable registration without contour constraint. The proposed contour-constrained deformable registration further reduced the error to $5.62 \pm 2.28$ mm, a 49.41\% reduction relative to rigid registration. We observed the largest reduction in the most clinically challenging tongue specimens. We also performed a systematic two-stage parameter search to characterize the relative importance of surface alignment, fiducial correspondences, contour constraint, and strain energy regularization. This search revealed that contour weighting dominates registration accuracy for tissue types with large lateral deformation, while the algorithm operates over a broad range of parameter combinations.

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

SiGnature: Explicit Motion Diffusion for Stylized Semantic Gesture

While recent advances in co-speech gesture generation have achieved impressive rhythmic synchronization, synthesizing gestures that are both semantically meaningful and faithful to a speaker's unique non-verbal style remains an open challenge. Semantic gestures, such as iconic shapes or deictic pointing, are statistically sparse, making them difficult to learn effectively within standard generative models. We present SiGnature, a framework for Stylized and Semantic Gesture generation that reconciles precise semantic control with high-fidelity style preservation. Unlike prevalent methods that rely on entangled latent representations, SiGnature operates in an explicit joint-rotation space. This design enables our core contribution, Joint Motion Integration (JMI), a training-free inference mechanism capable of injecting any external motion sequence, particularly in-the-wild semantic gestures, directly into the diffusion process. JMI automatically identifies the specific ``active joints'' conveying a semantic action and injects them into the generation, while relying on the diffusion backbone to synthesize the remaining body dynamics, including posture and flow, in accordance with the pre-learned style of the target speaker. This allows for the plug-and-play integration of arbitrary motions, including complex semantic gestures, without retraining or introducing the ``Frankenstein'' artifacts typical of cut-and-paste methods. Extensive experiments and perceptual studies demonstrate that SiGnature offers superior semantic motion control while maintaining smooth and natural co-speech gesture generation and preserving the distinct characteristics of the speaker, thereby outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Prediction of immunotherapy response using live tumor fragments from routine clinical biopsies

Functional ex vivo assays using live tumor tissues have demonstrated strong predictive accuracy for response to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) but are not scalable, requiring manual processing of large resections collected at academic centers. Here, an ex vivo live tumor fragment (LTF) platform was developed using standard-of-care biopsies from 228 patients with suspected malignancy collected across prospective, multicenter observational trials and biobanks. Hierarchical clustering of ICI-mediated changes in cytokine production identified two groups: responders and nonresponders. A binary classifier (elive index) using 8 cytokines achieved an AUC of 0.99 for cluster prediction. elive index correctly predicted clinical benefit in 93% (26/28) of patients (P = 3.2x10-5) and accurately identified 83% (10/12) of objective responders. Critically, elive responders were identified among biomarker-negative patients, highlighting the platform as a scalable approach that complements existing companion diagnostics and expands the population of patients identified to benefit from ICI therapy.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Revealing trajectories of multi-modal voxel-level changes in neurodegenerative diseases using latent event mapping

Neurodegenerative diseases are driven by pathological mechanisms that can be indirectly measured in vivo using multi-modal neuroimaging. However, current computational methods that aim to reconstruct trajectories of voxel-level changes in the brain are either not computationally scalable or fully interpretable, limiting their ability to reveal associations between disease progression and underlying mechanisms. Here we introduce Latent Event Mapping (LEMING), a generative unsupervised modelling technique that learns a latent map of disease events along a common pseudo-timeline of events. We apply LEMING to amyloid PET and structural MRI data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative to reveal the first voxel-level trajectories of events in Alzheimer's disease. Notably, we show how LEMING can provide new insights into progression-dependent disease mechanisms. We find that acetylcholine receptor density is significantly positively associated with both late-stage amyloid and atrophy events, suggesting that either these receptors are targeted later in disease progression, or that amyloid does not play an active role. This has strong implications for therapeutics that target acetylcholine receptors, particularly for early-stage intervention strategies.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Using Cognitive Models to Improve Language Model Simulation of Human Persuasion Games

arXiv:2606.17657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People make decisions differently in strategic interactions. Some update beliefs like a Bayesian; others exhibit biases like motivated reasoning. Although creators of large language models use simulated humans for safety evaluations and training, they often fail to cover this breadth of human behavior. We argue that cognitive science and economics provide a convenient tool for doing so, making use of mathematical models of human decision-making. We propose an approach that we call Equation-to-Behavior Prompting for guiding large language models to match cognitive models, and evaluate this approach on persuasion games based on legal decision-making. We find that large models can approximate equation-based specifications – Bayesian updating, affine distortion, motivated updating, and Grether's $\alpha$-$\beta$ model – using prompting, but small models fail to do so. However, training small models with reinforcement learning to adhere to mathematical rules, Equation-to-Behavior RL, reduces belief error by 26.5% in out-of-distribution parameterizations. We show that these simulations can help create diverse training environments; training small models to consider different kinds of decision-makers improves average belief change by 2.5%–12% over Bayesian-only training, even when persuading GPT-5-mini. Our work could improve human simulations for training and evaluation in increasingly realistic settings, and could also enable novel research into more complicated mathematical models of human decision-making.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

The Geometry of Allostery: A Laplacian Minor Hierarchy for Many-Body Protein Communication

Quantifying how cooperative, many-body relationships drive allostery in protein networks remains a major challenge. To address this, we develop the Laplacian minor hierarchy, a mathematical framework that characterizes the geometric invariants of a protein network. Lower-order minors yield standard metrics including the partition function and effective distances, whereas higher-order minors define novel topological measures: cooperation indices, each bounded between zero and one, that characterize pathway correlations at increasing levels of complexity, the third-order minor determines whether allosteric pathways are correlated or uncorrelated, and the fourth-order minor quantifies how distinct pathways communicate through intermediary residues. We apply this framework to analyze the evolutionary adaptation of the PSD95pdz3 domain from Class I to Class II ligand specificity via mutations G330T and H372A. The cooperation index demonstrates a distinct evolutionary hierarchy: the G330T mutation establishes distributed pathway couplings that the H372A mutation subsequently exploits, whereas H372A alone produces minimal global changes. Furthermore, the fourth-order analysis identifies His317 as a critical intermediary node bridging the class-switching (330-372) and class-bridging (330-400) allosteric pathways. These results demonstrate that allosteric dependencies emerge only when mutations accumulate in specific combinations, with a hierarchical organization of pathways structured around position 330 and intermediary nodes His317 and Phe400. Rather than predicting allosteric mechanisms, this framework provides a mechanistic explanation for why and how allostery emerges during protein evolution.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

A Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-Based Transformer Method for Solving the Open Shop Scheduling Problem

arXiv:2606.13682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The open shop scheduling problem (OSSP) arises in many industrial and service settings but remains computationally challenging as the number of jobs and machines increases. While exact methods quickly become intractable, classical dispatching rules and metaheuristics may require substantial tuning to maintain solution quality at large scales. This study develops a Transformer-based scheduling policy for OSSP using an encoder-decoder architecture with multi-head attention. The model is trained on Taillard benchmark instances (4x4, 5x5, 7x7, and 10x10) using only the processing-time matrix as input and produces feasible schedules with makespans typically within 15-30% of best-known values. To evaluate scalability, the trained policy is applied without retraining to randomly generated instances from 40x40 to 100x100 and compared against classical dispatching heuristics, including SPT, LPT, MWKR, and EST. Across these large instances, the Transformer achieved average gaps of 12.89-15.12% relative to a standard lower bound. Compared with EST, the Transformer remained competitive, typically within a modest margin, while substantially outperforming SPT and LPT. These results indicate that a Transformer policy trained on small OSSP instances can generalize to substantially larger problems and provide a feature-light, learning-based alternative to classical dispatching rules.

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

Show, Don't Ask: Generative Visual Disambiguation for Composed Image Retrieval with Turn-Valid Coverage

Composed image retrieval (CIR) uses a reference image and a text modification to search for a target image. However, such queries often describe several possible images rather than one exact target, making the user's intent ambiguous. Recent methods address this by using conformal prediction to estimate ambiguity and by asking users clarifying text questions. However, these methods have two limitations: their coverage guarantee only holds at the first interaction, and text questions are often insufficient for resolving fine-grained visual differences such as appearance, attributes, or viewpoint. We propose CLARA, a clarification framework that resolves ambiguity by showing users a small panel of visual alternatives. Instead of answering text questions, the user simply selects the prototype image closest to the intended target. This provides a direct visual signal and avoids relying on a model to predict the user's answer. To maintain valid conformal guarantees across multiple interaction rounds, CLARA reweights calibration using the likelihood ratio induced by the user's selection. The displayed prototypes are also constrained to represent the current candidate set and are snapped to real corpus images, ensuring that generated images cannot artificially improve coverage. Experiments on open-domain and fashion benchmarks show that CLARA matches single-turn state-of-the-art retrieval performance, maintains nominal coverage across interaction rounds, and finds the intended target in fewer rounds than strong text-question baselines. Its advantage is especially clear when ambiguity involves viewpoint or fine-grained attributes, where visual clarification is more effective than textual questioning.

13.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-16

Mathematicians are developing rules for AI use — other fields should follow

Authors: Unknown Author

The mathematics community is right to call for transparency, integrity and fairness to be protected when AI tools are used. Researchers in other disciplines could learn from this approach. The mathematics community is right to call for transparency, integrity and fairness to be protected when AI tools are used. Researchers in other disciplines could learn from this approach.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Grounding Multi-Hop Reasoning in Structural Causal Models via Group Relative Policy Optimization

arXiv:2605.01482v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-Hop Fact Verification requires complex reasoning across disparate evidence, posing significant challenges for Large Language Models , which may suffer from hallucinations and fractured logical chains. Existing methods, while improving transparency via Chain-of-Thought , often lack explicit modeling of the structural dependencies between evidence and claims. In this work, we introduce an SCM-inspired framework that grounds reasoning in explicit directed dependency graphs, treating verification as a constructive structural reasoning process rather than full causal inference with interventions or counterfactual semantics. We empirically identify an "inverted U-shaped" correlation between reasoning-chain length and accuracy, revealing that excessive structural complexity can degrade performance. To address this, we propose a rule-based reinforcement learning strategy using Group Relative Policy Optimization. This approach dynamically optimizes the trade-off between structural depth and conciseness. Extensive experiments on HoVer and EX-FEVER demonstrate that our SCM-GRPO framework outperforms strong baselines while producing more traceable reasoning structures for complex fact verification.

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

Towards Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models by Refining Textual Embeddings

Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remain a persistent challenge, often stemming from inadequate integration of visual information during multimodal reasoning. A key cause is the model's over-reliance on textual priors and underutilization of visual cues, leading to outputs that are linguistically fluent but visually inaccurate. For example, given an image of an empty kitchen countertop, an LVLM might hallucinate a "bowl of fruit" or "cup of coffee", relying on language associations rather than visual evidence. Most LVLMs incorporate visual features by appending them to the input stream of a pre-trained LLM and training on large-scale vision-language datasets. Our systematic analysis reveals that this strategy often leads to over-dependence on textual information due to the inherent bias of LLMs towards language-dominant representations. This imbalance skews attention towards the text over visual content, weakening the model's ability to ground outputs in visual inputs. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective visual feature incorporation method that encourages the model to learn visually-informed textual embeddings distinct from those of the base LLM and promotes a more balanced attention distribution. Experimental results across multiple hallucination benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly reduces hallucinations and fosters more balanced multimodal reasoning. Notably, our approach achieves substantial gains, including +9.33% on MMVP-MLLM, +2.99% on POPE-AOKVQA, up to +3.4% on Merlin, and +3% on the hard-data split of HallusionBench.

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

Efimov Effect in Ultracold Microwave-Shielded Polar Molecules

arXiv:2602.21433v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A quantum-mechanical description is presented for the three-body physics of shielded dipolar molecules, including a prediction of observable Efimov physics. Despite the anisotropic and long-range nature of the interaction, shielding enables a regime in which universality emerges already at the two-body level and extends to the three-body sector, where Efimov physics emerges. On the negative side of the scattering-length resonance, computed trimer binding energies display the characteristic scaling expected for Efimov resonances. Finally, the sudden approximation can be used to create trimer bound states, starting from positive energy trap states as a way to create or detect these molecular trimers. Moreover, the three-body parameter expressed in dipolar units is found to be universal.

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

What Makes Effective Supervision in Latent Chain-of-Thought: An Information-Theoretic Analysis

Latent Chain-of-Thought (CoT) internalizes reasoning within continuous hidden states, offering a promising alternative to verbose discrete reasoning traces. However, robust latent reasoning remains difficult because outcome supervision provides weak learning signals and leaves latent trajectories prone to semantic drift. In this work, we analyze Latent CoT from an information-theoretic perspective and identify this failure as a dual collapse: gradient attenuation along the optimization path and representational drift in the latent space. We further decompose process supervision into two complementary dimensions: Trajectory Supervision, which injects dense stepwise reasoning signals, and Space Supervision, which preserves the semantic structure of the latent manifold. Our analysis shows that rigid geometric compression can collapse the reasoning space, whereas generative reconstruction provides a more flexible semantic anchor that better preserves information capacity. To measure these effects, we introduce the Unified Latent Probe (ULP), which quantifies the mutual information between latent trajectories and explicit reasoning steps. Experiments reveal a clear Information-Performance Binding: reasoning accuracy depends on the information fidelity preserved in the latent chain. These findings provide a principled framework for latent reasoning supervision and suggest shifting from geometric imitation toward mutual information maximization. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/EIT-NLP/Supervision-in-Latent-CoT}{this repository}.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

An Evaluation of Data Leakage Risks in Tool-Using LLM Agents in Realistic Scenarios

arXiv:2606.17114v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI agents are increasingly being adopted in enterprise and personal settings with access to emails, databases, documents, and other tools where they can read, update, and disseminate sensitive information. Much of prior research on data leakage risks in agents has focused on adversarial data exfiltration through prompt injections and jailbreaks. However, sensitive information may also be exposed during non-adversarial use, creating leakage risks even when users issue benign requests. We report a joint evaluation by the Singapore AI Safety Institute and the Korea AI Safety Institute examining agent data leakage in 12 realistic, non-adversarial tasks spanning customer support, DevOps, web automation, and enterprise and personal productivity. The evaluation covers five risk types: lack of data awareness, audience awareness, policy compliance, data minimization, and access-boundary awareness. Both institutes tested a common set of scenarios mirroring real-world deployments using independent testing environments and task-specific LLM-judge rubrics. Across the three tested agents, none achieved fully correct and fully safe execution across all scenarios. Successful task completion often coincided with data-handling failures such as accessing unnecessary information or disclosing information to inappropriate recipients, indicating that capability and data-handling safety should be evaluated separately. Qualitative review also revealed claim-action mismatches, simulation-aware behavior, user-simulator role reversal, and interpretation gaps in automated judging. Overall, the results indicate that operational data leakage is a first-order agent-safety concern distinct from adversarial exfiltration and provide a methodology for future evaluations of agent data-handling safety.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Uncovering Latent Structures in Robust Pulse Sequences: A Model-Based Reinforcement Learning Approach for Adaptable Quantum Control

arXiv:2606.24507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time adaptive control of quantum systems requires rapid generation of robust, high-fidelity pulses across a continuous range of operating conditions. Standard optimization algorithms such as gradient-ascent pulse engineering (GRAPE) solve each instance independently, discarding information between runs and requiring costly reinitialization when parameters change. We present an approach to robust optimal quantum control based on model-based reinforcement learning, in which a single neural network – embedding the Hamiltonian directly into the training pipeline – generates robust gates across an entire family of gate configurations, without pre-computed training data. Demonstrated on a single-spin (two-level) system, the trained networks produce pulses for arbitrary rotation angles over a range of pulse durations, detunings, and field inhomogeneities in milliseconds, at fidelities comparable to multi-seed GRAPE. The framework is inherently adaptable: any parameter entering the Hamiltonian can serve as a network input, extending the approach to different systems and control settings. Beyond speed, the network reveals structure in the control landscape: it discovers the same structured phase profiles that appear in GRAPE solutions – made identifiable through fidelity-invariant symmetry transformations – but more consistently than independent optimization. This consistency enables smooth interpolation across the entire trained parameter space.

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

Quality-Preserving Imperceptible Adversarial Attack on Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition

Adversarial attacks on skeletal human action recognition have received significant attention. However, existing methods typically introduce noise-like perturbations that degrade motion quality post-attack, and thereby are inherently perceptible with recent advancements in S-HAR systems. We discover that this degradation stems from the gap between empirical and true risks during the optimization process of previous adversarial attacks. To address this issue, we propose an attack where adversarial motions are obtained without compromising their motion quality. To minimize the risk gap and preserve motion quality, we propose a distribution-based adversarial attack method without introducing noise-like perturbations. To faithfully evaluate the motion quality, we propose a new metric that aligns with human perception on real-world naturalness. Experiments have been conducted on the state-of-the-art S-HAR methods across two datasets, demonstrating the superiority of our method in both the attack success rate and the post-attack motion quality through qualitative and quantitative analyses. The success of our quality-preserving attack application and distribution-based method raises serious concerns about the robustness of action recognizers, highlighting the need for further enhancements in this domain.

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

Multi-Task Bayesian In-Context Learning

arXiv:2606.20538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bayesian predictive inference provides a principled framework for uncertainty quantification, data efficiency, and robust generalization. However, exact inference is often intractable, and scalable approximations may remain computationally expensive or require restrictive modeling assumptions that degrade predictive performance. Prior-Data Fitted and in-context models have recently emerged as an amortized alternative by learning to map datasets directly to predictive distributions, but existing approaches are tightly coupled to the support of the training prior and lack explicit mechanisms for adapting to new priors at test time, resulting in limited robustness under distribution shift. We introduce a multi-task in-context learning framework for amortized hierarchical Bayesian predictive inference that explicitly represents prior information as a prefix of in-context datasets. A transformer trained on sequences of prior and target tasks learns to adapt its predictions across families of priors. On a suite of evaluations with increasing difficulty, including out-of-meta-distribution priors and priors with high-dimensional latent structures, our method matches oracle Bayesian predictors while being orders of magnitude faster. We further demonstrate its practical relevance on a real-world spatiotemporal temperature prediction benchmark. Code is available at https://github.com/martianmartina/multi-task-bayesian-icl/.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Hierarchical Planning with Latent World Models

arXiv:2604.03208v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World models are a promising path to zero-shot embodied control through planning. However, existing world model planners struggle on long-horizon, multi-stage tasks: prediction errors compound and naive search is exponential in the planning horizon. Hierarchy mitigates both by decomposing tasks into shorter, tractable subproblems; yet prior hierarchical approaches either amortize control into task-specific policies (hierarchical RL) or assume low-dimensional states and known dynamics (classical hierarchical MPC). We present Hierarchical Planning with Latent World Models (HWM), an architecture and planning paradigm for hierarchical model predictive control (MPC) directly on visual world models trained solely via next-latent prediction. HWM learns world models at multiple temporal scales within a shared latent space, so predictions from the long-horizon model serve as subgoals for the short-horizon model via latent matching, without task-specific rewards, skill learning, or hierarchical policies. To keep long-horizon search tractable, HWM learns an action encoder that compresses primitive action chunks into latent macro-actions. On real-world Franka manipulation, HWM solves pick-and-place from a single goal image at 70% success vs. 0% for single-level planning. Across simulated push manipulation and maze navigation, HWM consistently improves performance on long-horizon tasks while requiring up to 3x less planning compute.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Leveraging Social Media Data for COVID-19 Studies

Nowadays, social media networks have become widely preferred sources of information. Especially during the time of the Coronavirus disease 2019 COVID 19 pandemic, social media has been one of the most used platforms to get the latest news and information related to COVID 19. Social media are popular because they offer free access to their registered users and allow them to do posting, disseminate information, and respond to others postings. With almost 4.6 billion social media users worldwide, it is not surprising the significant amount of information shared through these platforms could affect how people perceive and cope with the pandemic that we are facing right now. With decent use, social media can be a beneficial digital tool to spread reliable news and public awareness for patients, clinicians, and society. Specifically, this chapter describes linguistic, visual, and emotional indicators expressed in user disclosures. Thus, in this chapter, the related studies of social media platforms usage during the COVID 19 pandemic are explored and discussed in detail. This chapter also categorizes social media data used, introduces different deployed machine learning, feature engineering, natural language processing, and survey methods, and outlines directions for future research.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

TruncProof: A Guardrail for LLM-based JSON Generation under Token-Length Constraints

The LLM-based generation of machine-readable outputs such as JSON has attracted significant attention for integration with external systems. However, existing approaches cannot strictly enforce the maximum number of tokens to be generated, leading to infinite generation or truncated outputs that cause a system malfunction. To address this limitation, we propose TruncProof, a novel grammar-constrained generation method that enables LLMs to produce grammatically valid JSONs while adhering to a predefined token limit. By leveraging the properties of LL(1) parsers, TruncProof efficiently approximates the minimum number of tokens required to complete a grammatically valid output at each decoding step. Experiments on the Text-to-JSON instruction tasks demonstrate that TruncProof successfully generates syntactically correct outputs even under strict token constraints. Furthermore, we show that TruncProof can be effectively combined with advanced decoding strategies, resulting in outputs that are not only grammatically valid but also semantically accurate.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

On the Optimal Reasoning Length for RL-Trained Language Models

Reinforcement learning substantially improves reasoning in large language models, but it also tends to lengthen chain-of-thought outputs and increase computational cost. Although length-control methods have been proposed, the length-accuracy relationship they induce remains unclear. We train policies with several length-control methods on multiple base models in a controlled setup and find that, across both mathematical reasoning and code generation, accuracy is non-monotonic in output length, peaking at an intermediate value. Mode accuracy, however, continues to improve with length even in settings where sample accuracy plateaus or declines, indicating that the non-monotonic length-accuracy relationship is driven by dispersion around an increasingly correct center.