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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum codes and optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs via the MP construction

arXiv:2606.14253v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we employ MP codes whose defining matrices are $\tau$-optimal defining ($\tau$-OD) matrices to construct new quantum codes and quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs. Specifically, we report the following results: We establish a unified $\tau$-monomial decomposition theorem for invertible self-adjoint matrices over finite fields of arbitrary characteristic, which generalizes the result in "Quantum codes using the $\tau$-OD MP construction" where the characteristic was required to be odd. Based on this theorem, we prove the existence of $\tau$-OD matrices over $\mathbb{F}_{q^2}$ for any characteristic and demonstrate that there exist several new infinite families of $\tau$-OD matrices over $\mathbb{F}_{q^2}$ of characteristic $2$. As an application of MP codes involving $\tau$-OD matrices, we construct several infinite families of quantum codes with flexible parameters. Within this framework, we present $222$ record-breaking quantum codes that surpass the best-known records maintained in Grassl's database. We propose two effective schemes for constructing optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs via MP codes. Accordingly, we construct four new infinite families of optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs with flexible parameters. Notably, we report an interesting phenomenon by exhibiting $30$ optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs derived from our framework; that is, there exist quantum codes that are not only optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs but also, according to Grassl's database, best-known, optimal, or record-breaking quantum codes. To the best of our knowledge, the new discovery that quantum codes are simultaneously optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs and record-breaking quantum codes has not been previously reported in the literature.

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

Tunneling Dynamics and Time Delay in Electron Transport through Time-Dependent Barriers with Finite-Bandwidth Reservoirs

arXiv:2507.20649v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a model system consisting of a tunneling barrier driven by an external harmonic field and coupled to two leads with finite bandwidth. Avoiding Floquet expansions, we derive simple expressions for the time-dependent tunneling current in the adiabatic regime. Our approach relates the barrier modulation to a measurable time delay in the steady-state periodic current. It provides a physically consistent definition of the tunneling time inside the barrier by subtracting the time delay associated with the leads from the total time delay. We find that the tunneling time always vanishes for wide/high barriers. Remarkably, the time delay persists even when the barrier becomes static, i.e., in the limit where the modulation frequency vanishes. This indicates that the time delay obtained through the introduction of an external periodic perturbation actually reflects an intrinsic property of the tunneling dynamics, rather than an effect of the external drive or of a particular system. We apply our results to the analysis of tunneling times in optical experiments and find good agreement with the experimental data.

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

ALAS: An Automatic Latent Alignment Score for Audio Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are extended into Speech-LLMs, and the quality of the audio–text alignment they learn affects most downstream Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) behavior. Yet despite a growth of fusion strategies, there is no standard way to measure how well a Speech-LLM internally binds audio frames to text tokens. We introduce ALAS (Automatic Latent Alignment Score), a model and task-agnostic metric that probes the LLM's per-layer hidden states, scoring the cross-modal cosine similarity between audio and text representations against a Whisper-derived reference. ALAS needs only a frozen forward pass and an off-the-shelf ASR reference, with no training or fitted classifier, and is calibrated to an interpretable uniform baseline comparable across tasks. Applying ALAS to four open-source Speech-LLMs (AF3, Qwen2-Audio, Qwen-Omni, SALMONN) across emotion recognition (IEMOCAP), open-ended SQA (LibriSQA), and multi-choice audio understanding (MMAU-speech), we find that the depth and strength of alignment reflect each model's audio-encoder design and the acoustic-versus-semantic demands of the task, and that ALAS tracks but does not duplicate task accuracy, exposing models that score well without genuinely grounding in the audio. We release ALAS as an open-source library so that practitioners can probe their own Speech-LLMs or try it on new tasks.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

OpenTie: Open-vocabulary Sequential Rebar Tying System

Robotic practices on the construction site emerge as an attention-attracting manner owing to their capability of tackling complex challenges, especially in the rebar-involved scenarios. Most of existing products and research are mainly focused on the collection of large amounts of data with model training demands. To fulfill this gap, we propose OpenTie, a 3D training-free rebar tying framework utilizing a RGB-to-point-cloud generation and an open-vocabulary rebar detection on the real-world test. We implement the OpenTie via a robotic arm with a binocular camera and guarantee a high accuracy by applying the prompt-based object detection method on the image filtered by our proposed post-processing procedure for the image-to-point-cloud generation framework. Our pipeline requires no training efforts and outperforms the training-based object detection, i.e., YOLO-based method, with the verification on the real-world sequential rebar tying test. The system is flexible for horizontal and vertical rebar tying tasks and holds the potential application to the real construction site with possibility of commercialization.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Non-invertible symmetries out of equilibrium: Eigenstate order and Floquet physics

arXiv:2508.14213v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Through the study of the Rep($D_8$) non-invertible symmetry, we show how non-invertible symmetries manifest in dynamics. Results are presented for dynamics generated by Hamiltonians as well as Floquet unitaries. For both examples, the role of the non-invertible symmetry is studied through the appearance of non-invertible symmetry protected edge modes. In addition, the role of the non-invertible symmetry for the Hamiltonian is studied through eigenstate order. In particular, by considering the effect of symmetry preserving disorder, the non-invertible symmetry is shown to give rise to degeneracies in the spectra of the Hamiltonian that can only be completely lifted at orders of perturbation that scale with system size. The eigenstates of disordered Hamiltonians, whose ground state correspond to non-trivial symmetry protected topological (SPT) states, are shown to have either trivial or non-trivial SPT order that are detected as non-zero expectation value of string order-parameters. In contrast, non-trivial SPT order is absent in the eigenstates of trivial SPT Hamiltonians with disorder. The interface between two different SPT phases host edge modes whose dynamics is studied numerically and analytically. The edge mode is shown to oscillate at frequencies related to different effective chain lengths that are weighted by the temperature, becoming an exact zero mode in the limit of zero temperature. A Floquet model with the non-invertible symmetry is constructed whose edge mode is shown to exhibit period-doubled dynamics at low effective-temperatures. The zero and period-doubled edge modes differ from those in conventional SPTs by being symmetric under the invertible symmetry, while being charged under the non-invertible symmetry.

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

Confusion-Aware Transfer Teacher Curriculum Learning Framework: Disentangling Scoring and Pacing Effects

arXiv:2606.17706v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Curriculum learning couples two design choices, how samples are scored by difficulty and how harder samples are paced into training, making it difficult to attribute observed gains to either component. We disentangle these factors with two evaluation protocols: stage-wise test subsets that validate scoring functions independently of curriculum training, and a baseline that applies the same pacing schedule to randomly ordered data. Within the Transfer Teacher framework (TTF), we use these protocols to evaluate a confusion-aware difficulty score that considers both correct-class confidence and the probability distribution over incorrect classes. On CIFAR-10 with ResNet-18 and VGG-16, the proposed score produces model-interpretable difficulty rankings that align with human intuition. However, at full data, neither curriculum nor anti-curriculum ordering improves accuracy over standard training, indicating that improving the scoring function alone is insufficient to overcome the known failure modes of curriculum learning in TTF. In contrast, We find that confusion-aware curriculum ordering result in consistent data-efficiency benefits, outperforming random ordering by up to 8.7% points at the 20% data regime, suggesting the potential of TTF as a data-efficient training method.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Relational Retrieval: Leveraging Known-Novel Interactions for Generalized Category Discovery

In this study, we tackle Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) via a Relational Retrieval perspective, explicitly coupling labeled and unlabeled data through bidirectional knowledge transfer. While existing methods treat these sources separately, missing valuable interaction opportunities, we propose Relational Pattern Consistency (RPC) that enables mutual enhancement. RPC employs One-vs-All classifiers for soft ID/OOD decomposition, then introduces two mechanisms: (i) for known-class preservation, we transfer semantic behavioral alignment; (ii) for category discovery, we leverage the insight that samples from the same category maintain invariant relationships with known-class prototypes, transforming unreliable pseudo-labeling into well-defined relational pattern matching. This bidirectional design allows labeled data to guide unlabeled learning while discovering novel categories through their collective relational signatures. Extensive experiments demonstrate RPC achieves state-of-the-art performance on both generic and fine-grained benchmarks.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Real-Time Execution with Autoregressive Policies

arXiv:2606.13355v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time execution, enabled by asynchronous inference that ensures both smooth action trajectories and fast reactivity, is critical for realistic deployments of large-scale Vision-Language-Action models. However, recent work on real-time execution primarily focuses on variants of diffusion policies, even though it is more critical for autoregressive policies given their slower rollout speed in synchronous inference. In contrast, we demonstrate that autoregressive policies can achieve real-time execution by adjusting the tokenization horizon and applying constrained decoding, thereby guaranteeing strict latency bounds that enable multi-trajectory decoding to maximize performance. Across simulated and real-world environments, we find that the autoregressive policy consistently outperforms its equivalent-level flow-matching policy counterpart while achieving significantly improved task completion speeds from synchronous inference. Coupled with the inherent advantages of autoregressive policies, such as faster convergence and better generalizability in instruction-following, these results confirm that autoregressive policies can remain a competitive policy type supporting real-time execution.

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

Learning Robust Pair Confidence for Multimodal Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction

Multimodal emotion-cause pair extraction (MECPE) requires reliable pair confidence over candidate pairs. Existing pair scorers commonly use pair-level cross entropy over valid candidates, which treats links mostly independently. This leaves the relative confidence geometry among competing causes under-constrained, allowing gold pairs to stay close to hard negatives or rely on incidental non-gold context. We study this vulnerability as pair-confidence brittleness and propose RPCL (Robust Pair Confidence Learning), a training-only framework for pair-confidence learning. RPCL encourages pair confidence to be both discriminative and stable: gold pairs are separated from row-wise hard negatives through a confidence-difference margin constraint, and clean pair predictions are aligned with predictions from a corrupted view where non-gold contextual utterance representations are partially corrupted. The original clean pair scorer and decoding pipeline are used unchanged at inference time. On ECF, MECAD, and MEC4, RPCL improves the three-seed mean Pair F1 over a matched base model by 2.58 to 2.83 percentage points in the full text-audio-video setting, and improves mean Pair AUPRC on all three datasets. Diagnostic analysis further shows larger gold-negative confidence gaps and lower margin-violation severity. These results suggest that explicitly shaping pair confidence is an effective training strategy for MECPE.

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

Atlas: Orchestrating Heterogeneous Models and Tools for Multi-Domain Complex Reasoning

The integration of large language models (LLMs) with external tools has significantly expanded the capabilities of AI agents. However, as the diversity of both LLMs and tools increases, selecting the optimal model-tool combination becomes a high-dimensional optimization challenge. Existing approaches often rely on a single model or fixed tool-calling logic, failing to exploit the performance variations across heterogeneous model-tool pairs. In this paper, we present ATLAS (Adaptive Tool-LLM Alignment and Synergistic Invocation), a dual-path framework for dynamic tool usage in cross-domain complex reasoning. ATLAS operates via a dual-path approach: (1) training-free cluster-based routing that exploits empirical priors for domain-specific alignment, and (2) RL-based multi-step routing that explores autonomous trajectories for out-of-distribution generalization. Extensive experiments across 15 benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms closed-source models like GPT-4o, surpassing existing routing methods on both in-distribution (+10.1%) and out-of-distribution (+13.1%) tasks. Furthermore, our framework shows significant gains in visual reasoning by orchestrating specialized multi-modal tools.

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

WorkBench Revisited: Workplace Agents Two Years On

作者:

The best agent on WorkBench in March 2024, GPT-4, completed 43% of tasks and took an unintended harmful action, such as emailing the wrong person, on 26% of them. We re-visit the benchmark in June 2026 and find that the best agent to date, Claude Opus 4.8, completes 89% and takes an unintended harmful action on 2.5%. Aside from this considerable progress in frontier agent performance, three things stand out. First, capability and safety go together on WorkBench rather than trade off, so the models that finish the most tasks also do the least unintended damage. Second, while several classes of error have been totally eliminated, frontier models still make some basic mistakes that occasionally result in irreversible harm, such as sending an email to the wrong person. Third, the rise of open-weight models has drastically lowered costs for a performance level that was previously only accessible to proprietary models, while frontier costs have stayed relatively stable. We release an updated version of the benchmark with data and code quality improvements, new model scores, and analysis of agent progress on WorkBench since 2024.

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

Intrinsic Gradient Suppression for Label-Noise Prompt Tuning in Vision-Language Models

Contrastive vision-language models like CLIP exhibit remarkable zero-shot generalization. However, prompt tuning remains highly sensitive to label noise, as mislabeled samples generate disproportionately large gradients that can overwhelm pre-trained priors. We argue that because CLIP already provides a near-optimal initialization, adaptation should be inherently conservative, particularly against the extreme gradient updates common in noisy settings. To this end, we propose Double-Softmax Prompt Tuning (DSPT), a hyperparameter-free method for intrinsic gradient suppression. By applying a sequential probabilistic normalization, DSPT induces a self-adaptive saturation zone that suppresses gradients from high-error noisy samples while maintaining informative updates. We also provide both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence about how this mechanism achieves adaptive suppression. This design transforms ``gradient vanishing'', traditionally a training bottleneck, into a principled noise-filtering shield for label-noise prompt tuning. Extensive experiments confirm that this simple, drop-in design achieves state-of-the-art robustness across various noisy benchmarks, outperforming methods with complex architectures and handcrafted hyperparameters.

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

CoAgent: Concurrency Control for Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2606.15376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems – coding agents, devops agents, document agents – now routinely run several agents in parallel against the same git tree, Kubernetes cluster, or document. As soon as two of them mutate shared state, they enter the regime classical concurrency control has studied for decades, but classical mechanisms fit LLM agents poorly. A single agent transaction spans minutes of inference, read sets are broad and opaque rather than statically inferable, and the live state agents act on admits neither fork nor buffer, so writes take effect the moment they execute. Locks block long inference intervals; OCC abort-and-retry discards minutes of work on every conflict. This paper builds concurrency control on a capability classical transactions lack: the LLM inside each agent can judge whether a conflicting write invalidates its plan, and can repair exactly the operations that depended on it. Control therefore turns advisory: the runtime informs, the agent repairs. Our protocol, MTPO (Monotonic Trajectory Pre-Order), fixes a serialization order at launch, serves each read the order-filtered value, and applies writes speculatively in place; a one-way notification asks an affected reader to re-judge and patch its plan, while the framework mechanically undoes and reorders misplaced writes through the saga-style inverse each tool registers in advance. At quiescence the run is serializable in the pre-decided order. We realize MTPO as CoAgent, toolcall middleware whose privileged ToolSmith grows footprint-declared, undoable tools online. On ten contended workloads, CoAgent stays within 5\% of serial correctness at a $1.4\times$ speedup and near-serial token cost, where 2PL and OCC surrender nearly all concurrency gains; on a bash-only target system, it grows a 25-tool library online and lifts the task pass rate from 45/71 to 63/71 at $0.80\times$ the time and $0.86\times$ the cost.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Smarter edits? Post-editing with error highlights and translation suggestions

As MT quality increases, interest in enhanced post-editing features such as QE-derived error highlights is growing, yet evidence for their usefulness remains limited. In this work, we explore the usefulness of LLM-derived error highlights and correction suggestions based on automatic post-editing (APE). We conduct a study where professional translators (En-Nl) post-edit translations using APE error highlights and correction suggestions and compare productivity, quality and user experience to regular PE and PE with QE-derived highlights. While no condition yielded productivity or quality gains compared to regular PE, APE highlights were better received than QE-derived highlights, and correction suggestions improved overall user experience.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

ContinuumCellAgent: A Framework-Guided Agent for Long-Horizon Scientific Research

AI-scientist systems are beginning to automate parts of scientific research. We present ContinuumCellAgent, an autonomous agent that executes literature review, hypothesis formation, computational experimentation, manuscript drafting, and adversarial peer review as a single unattended run. Existing AI scientist systems remain difficult to diagnose because they lack modularity, systematic prompt grounding, and observability into long-running behavior. ContinuumCellAgent addresses these gaps with a modular supernode architecture for stage-wise backend swapping, protocols grounded in curated research-method checklists that also define reviewer rubrics, and a diagnostics layer that records file-based artifacts, message traces, and state transitions. We evaluate the system on open-domain QA benchmarks and biomedical/longevity case studies, showing that it can produce checkable research artifacts while exposing pipeline dynamics for rigorous AI co-scientist research.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A CEFR-Inspired Classification Framework with Fuzzy C-Means To Automate Assessment of Programming Skills in Scratch

arXiv:2604.00730v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Context: Schools, training platforms, and technology firms increasingly need to assess programming proficiency at scale with transparent, reproducible methods that support personalized learning pathways. Objective: This study introduces a pedagogical framework for Scratch project assessment, aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), providing universal competency levels for students and teachers alongside actionable insights for curriculum design. Method: We apply Fuzzy C-Means clustering to 2008246 Scratch projects evaluated via Dr.Scratch, implementing an ordinal criterion to map clusters to CEFR levels (A1-C2), and introducing enhanced classification metrics that identify transitional learners, enable continuous progress tracking, and quantify classification certainty to balance automated feedback with instructor review. Impact: The framework enables diagnosis of systemic curriculum gaps-notably a "B2 bottleneck" where only 13.3% of learners reside due to the cognitive load of integrating Logic Synchronization, and Data Representation–while providing certainty–based triggers for human intervention.

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

Mem-World: Memory-Augmented Action-Conditioned World Models for Persistent Robot Manipulation

Action-conditioned world models have emerged as a promising paradigm for robot learning, offering a scalable alternative to costly real-world experimentation by generating action-consistent video rollouts. However, persistent world modeling remains challenging in manipulation: frequent end-effector occlusions and rapid wrist-camera motion make the current observation insufficient for predicting future views, causing models to forget or hallucinate scene details seen in earlier frames. Existing memory retrieval strategies often fail to identify informative history in dynamic manipulation scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose Mem-World, a memory-augmented multi-view action-conditioned world model. At its core, we present W-VMem, a 4D wrist-view-centered surfel-indexed memory that anchors historical observations to temporally evolving surface elements. By explicitly modeling when and where scene elements are observed, W-VMem enables geometry-aware retrieval of relevant history frames conditioned on future actions. During generation, relevant history frames are selected via surfel-based rendering and scoring, providing informative and non-redundant context for prediction. Extensive experiments show that Mem-World generates persistent rollouts in complex manipulation scenarios, enables more reliable policy evaluation than Ctrl-World, improving the Pearson correlation with real-world performance by 14.5\%, and supports effective policy improvement through synthetic data generation, increasing success rates from 58\% to 72\% on long-horizon tasks.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Muon$^p$: Muon with Fractional Spectral Powers

arXiv:2606.13867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon is an increasingly widely used optimizer that replaces a gradient $G=USV^\top$ with its polar factor $UV^\top$, thereby flattening the singular spectrum. However, full flattening discards singular-value information that may matter for adaptation. We introduce Muon$^p$, a Muon-style optimizer that instead uses fractional spectral-power updates $US^pV^\top$ for rational $p\in(0,1)$, interpolating between Muon and gradient descent. To make it practical, we prove that fractional spectral powers cannot be computed by any fixed univariate polynomial iteration, and furthermore derive low-degree odd bivariate recurrences that approximate $US^pV^\top$ using only matrix multiplications, preserving Muon's matrix-multiplication-only structure and compute complexity. We show that Muon$^p$ maximizes the linear improvement in loss under the Schatten $q$-norm for $q=1+\frac{1}{p}$. Empirically, Muon$^p$ is especially effective for finetuning: on billion-scale models, Muon$^p$ improves validation perplexity and downstream task performance. We further analyze when Muon$^p$ is less suitable, through the lens of spectral geometry. Our results reveal important insights on when preserving the singular spectrum can bring significant gains, and introduce a principled way to achieve them.

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

MuseVLA: An Adaptive Multimodal Sensing Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation

Humans naturally leverage diverse sensing modalities to interact with the physical world, while most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robotics rely solely on RGB observations. This limits their ability to perceive physical properties that are difficult or impossible to infer from RGB cameras, such as temperature, sound, or radar response. We present MuseVLA, an adaptive multimodal sensing VLA model that integrates novel sensors as on-demand tools for robotic manipulation. Given a task instruction and visual context, MuseVLA first generates a sensor token and target description that select the sensing modality to invoke and what to attend to, analogous to a tool call with arguments. It then converts the selected sensor measurement into a grounded sensor image, a unified intermediate representation that encodes heterogeneous readings for multimodal fusion and action generation. This design decouples sensor-specific processing from the VLA backbone, enabling efficient integration of diverse modalities. To reduce the need for expensive multisensory robot datasets, we further introduce a data synthesis pipeline that augments existing RGB video datasets with grounded sensor images, enabling generalization to unseen sensor-guided tasks. We evaluate MuseVLA on a real-world robot across challenging dexterous hand manipulation tasks that require multimodal sensing inputs, including temperature-guided pick-and-place, audio-driven object search, and radar-assisted hidden object retrieval. MuseVLA achieves 80.6% success rate on average, outperforming RGB-only and multisensory VLA baselines significantly, and exhibits strong zero-shot capabilities on unseen tasks.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

The Lov\'{a}sz Local Lemma: Foundations and Applications

作者:

arXiv:2603.07245v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Lov\'{a}sz Local Lemma (LLL) is a central tool in probabilistic combinatorics, providing a sufficient condition under which a finite collection of undesirable events with limited dependencies can be simultaneously avoided with positive probability. This paper offers a self-contained expository treatment of the lemma and its strengthened versions, emphasizing mathematical foundations, conceptual clarity, and applications. We begin with a pedagogically motivated proof of the LLL based entirely on unconditional probability inequalities. Particular attention is given to the symmetric form of the lemma and several subsequent strengthenings. The paper also discusses a variety of classical applications of both the symmetric and asymmetric forms of the LLL in combinatorics and graph theory, including bounds for the edge-disjoint paths problem, satisfiability of Boolean formulas in conjunctive normal form, lower bounds on diagonal and off-diagonal Ramsey numbers, hypergraph coloring results, structural properties of directed graphs, and acyclic graph colorings. Additional observations and refinements are provided throughout. We also introduce the algorithmic framework of Moser and Tardos, highlighting its constructive counterpart to the LLL, together with an introduction to the entropy-compression principle. The lopsided LLL, a refinement of the LLL, is presented along with an application to the Latin transversal problem. We further discuss the cluster-expansion lemma and its relation to the LLL, and present an alternative treatment of the Latin transversal problem from the cluster-expansion perspective that yields an improved result. The paper concludes with a high-level overview of the iterated LLL, also known as the semi-random method.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

A controlled human infection model for symptomatic pertussis in North America using the pertactin-producing clinical isolate D420

Background Despite widespread vaccination, pertussis remains a poorly controlled disease globally and results in substantial annual morbidity and mortality, particularly in young children. Controlled human infection models (CHIMs) using the causative agent Bordetella pertussis are promising systems to enable the study of pertussis disease pathogenesis and immunology and to rapidly assess vaccines and therapeutics. While a pertussis CHIM that produces asymptomatic infection has been established in Europe, the development of a CHIM that leads to symptomatic illness would be advantageous for evaluating vaccine efficacy against both infection and disease. Methods Healthy participants 18-40 years of age were inoculated intranasally with one of eight doses (ranging from 104 to 108 colony forming units (CFU)) of the pertactin-producing B. pertussis isolate D420 at the challenge facility within the Canadian Center for Vaccinology (Nova Scotia, Canada). The study occurred in two stages. In stage one, the B. pertussis dose was escalated in cohort groups of five to six participants until reaching an endpoint where 70-90% of participants exhibited mild (non-severe, Grade 1 or 2) symptomatic infection, defined as the Human Infectious Dose 70-90 (HID70-90). In stage two, additional challenges were conducted for doses below, at, and above the identified HID70-90 to characterize the emerging pertussis model. For all challenge doses, participants were closely monitored during an inpatient stay of up to 24 days and post-discharge for laboratory-confirmed infection, pertussis symptoms, safety, and IgG antibody responses to four B. pertussis antigens including pertussis toxin, filamentous hemagglutinin, fimbriae, and pertactin. All participants received a five-day course of azithromycin, where timing of initiation depended on B. pertussis testing and symptoms. The study was conducted between July 4, 2022 and March 19, 2025. Findings Seventy-five participants were inoculated with one of the eight B. pertussis D420 challenge doses and completed the inpatient stay. From the stage-one dose escalation, we found that 107 CFU of B. pertussis D420 was the lowest dose that achieved the HID70-90, where 9 of 12 participants (75.0%) exhibited mild symptomatic infection. Following stage-two challenges, 16 of 22 total participants at 107 CFU (72.7%) developed mild symptomatic infection, thus verifying the HID70-90. The symptomatic infection rate below the HID70-90 at 5x106 CFU of D420 was 20.0% and above the HID70-90 at 5x107 and 108 CFU were 58.3% and 55.6%, respectively. Symptoms with elevated frequency for symptomatic infection (relative to background symptoms in non-infected) included nasal congestion, runny nose, fatigue, malaise, and cough. At the HID70-90, 50% of symptomatic infections included cough. Serological analyses of the four highest (stage-two) challenge doses (5x106, 107, 5x107, 108 CFU) revealed that antibody titres increased over time post-challenge. Seroconversion for at least one of the four studied antibodies was nearly twice as common for symptomatic (70.0%) than asymptomatic (35.7%) infection and was absent (0%) for non-infected. All infections were cleared following azithromycin treatment (100%) and there were no study-related serious adverse events. Interpretation A safe and reproducible symptomatic pertussis CHIM was achieved, providing a model for research on pertussis disease pathogenesis and immunology and for assessing vaccines and therapeutics. (Clinicaltrials.gov, NCT05136599).

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Tacit Coordination of Large Language Models

arXiv:2601.22184v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-agent settings that require coordination without communication, from human-AI interaction to safety-critical scenarios. Humans often overcome the absence of communication through focal points: salient solutions that naturally stand out to all participants. We present the first large-scale evaluation of how, when, and why focal points emerge in LLMs, comparing their behaviour with humans across cooperative and competitive games, including realistic search and rescue scenarios, demonstrating when focal points enable effective coordination. Across more than 20 open- and closed-source models, we find that LLMs exhibit a remarkable ability to coordinate without communication, often matching or outperforming humans. However, the same models consistently fail in tasks requiring numerical common sense or culturally nuanced notions of salience. We additionally evaluate simple learning-free strategies that substantially improve coordination both among LLMs and between humans and LLMs. Our results reveal striking coordination capabilities, as well as social limitations in modern LLMs, and offer new insight into the latent notions of salience encoded within them. Our findings caution against assuming that LLMs share humans' cultural and perceptual substrate when deployed in coordination settings.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Learner-based Concept Drift Detection: Analysis and Evaluation

arXiv:2606.20216v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning algorithms deployed for evolving streaming environments must handle the non-stationary data distributions, commonly referred to as concept drift. The presence of concept drift poses a major challenge for many real-world applications because it can severely degrade their predictive performance, hindering their ability to support robust decision-making. Consequently, the timely and efficient detection of drift events is critical for sustaining high accuracy over time. This study examines theoretically the concept drift characteristics and numerous drift detection algorithms across several categories. Furthermore, we evaluate their performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets exhibiting diverse streaming scenarios and drift characteristics, such as abrupt and gradual changes. This study aims to enhance understanding of the complex notion of concept drift characteristics and behavior of drift detectors, along with their applicability to diverse contexts.

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

Green SARC: Predictive Cost and Carbon Governance for Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.15954v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems act through tools and sub-agents, yet the controls meant to bound their financial and environmental cost still sit on dashboards evaluated beside or after execution. Green SARC applies the SARC governance-by-architecture framework – four enforcement sites in the agent loop – to FinOps and GreenOps, contributing the theory of what to enforce and how to predict it. We report four policy-independent results. (i) The unconstrained "State Snowball" is $\Theta(n^2)$ in loop depth; on 3,000 real multi-step plans (SWE-rebench) it holds on 100%, with median curvature $\hat{c}_2=216$ exceeding the linear-accretion prediction $p/2=134$ – real plans accrete faster than the model. (ii) On real residuals the Normal-$\sigma$ gate under-covers (92% at nominal 95%); split-conformal calibration holds (95.2%). (iii) A soft Lagrangian penalty tuned to the budget in expectation breaches it on 91.5% of seeds; the architectural gate breaches 0%. (iv) Under binding budgets the gate's over-budget incidence is 0% on synthetic and real (BurstGPT) arrivals. End-to-end token/USD/carbon savings (47–55%) are real but policy-dependent in magnitude – set by a scope-cap knob, not by gate rejections. The library is open-source, dependency-free, and ships a regeneration script for every cited number.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM: Element-Level Assessment of Randomized Controlled Trial Reporting Using Large Language Models

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) play a central role in assessing the benefits and harms of interventions. Incomplete reporting in RCT publications can compromise the verifiability and usefulness of RCTs. SPIRIT and CONSORT reporting guidelines aim to improve the completeness of RCT protocols and results publications, respectively. However, many RCTs are not reported completely. Checking manuscripts automatically could help authors improve the completeness of reports prior to publication. We previously annotated SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM, a corpus of 200 articles (comprising 100 protocol-results publication pairs) using 83 checklist items drawn from SPIRIT 2013 and CONSORT 2010. We also trained machine learning models to automatically assess reporting at the item level. Each checklist item can include multiple constituent elements (i.e., specific details required for that item), and an item might be considered fully reported when all of its elements are present. However, prior work does not explicitly capture or evaluate reporting at the element level. To address this gap, we extended SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM by incorporating element-level annotations and using them to assess reporting completeness (SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM). We formulated element-level assessment as a machine reading comprehension task, operationalized through 119 questions, where each question targets a specific reporting element within a checklist item. Using the 200 articles included in SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM, two annotators independently answered 119 questions for 50 articles (25 protocol-results pairs) and resolved any discrepancies through discussion; the remaining 150 articles (75 protocol-results pairs) were assessed by a single annotator. We then developed an automated pipeline for element-level assessment using SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM. The pipeline first applies a PubMedBERT-based model to identify sentences containing item-level reporting information, then it uses a generative large language model (LLM; GPT-5) with chain-of-thought reasoning to answer element-level questions based on the retrieved evidence. Agreement between the two annotators was high (Gwet's AC1: 0.782) and our pipeline achieved high accuracy in identifying element-level reporting evidence (F1: 0.822, Gwet's AC1: 0.796). Ablation studies indicate that chain-of-thought reasoning and the inclusion of illustrative in-context examples modestly improve LLM performance on the machine reading comprehension task. SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM provides a benchmark for evaluating reporting guideline completeness at the element level, enabling assessment of RCT transparency beyond the simple presence or absence of checklist items and is publicly available at https://osf.io/kznx4/. The automated pipeline establishes a robust baseline for assessing RCT reporting and demonstrates potential as a practical aid for authors, reviewers, and editors to identify and address gaps in completeness and transparency of RCT reports.