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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-11

Connected or chained by social media? Child and adolescent mental health in a digital era

作者:

by Silja Kosola Social media has evolved from connection to compulsion, disproportionately harming children and adolescents. Addictive designs together with developmental vulnerability fuel mental health risks and highlight the urgent need for stricter age limits and stronger protections. In this Perspective, Silja Kosola outlines how social media disproportionately harms child and adolescent mental health, and argues that while recent policy changes aimed at protecting youth from social media are welcome, stricter age limits and greater accountability of social media companies are needed.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

VinQA: Visual Elements Interleaved Long-form Answer Generation for Real-World Multimodal Document QA

Real-world documents combine text with tables, charts, photographs, and diagrams arranged in diverse layouts, yet existing research on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for document QA predominantly produces text-only responses, underutilizing these visual elements. We introduce VinQA, a dataset for long-form answer generation where cited visual elements are explicitly interleaved with their supporting text and grounded in relevant document pages. To support this task, we study two encoding methods for feeding raw document page images into an MLLM, along with their visual-element citation mechanisms: (1) Page Encoding, which directly encodes full-page images with bounding boxes of visual elements and treats these boxed regions as citable units; and (2) Modality Encoding, which parses each page to extract text and crop visual elements, encodes them separately, and uses these cropped elements as citable units. In our experiments, we propose M-GroSE, a multimodal evaluation framework extending GroUSE to assess answers along four dimensions: completeness, answer relevancy, faithfulness, and unanswerability. We additionally report Visual Source F1 to directly measure visual citation accuracy. Although proprietary frontier models still achieve the best overall scores on the VinQA test split, fine-tuning open Qwen2.5-VL models on the training split substantially improves their performance and narrows this gap. Modality Encoding is initially more robust for complex documents with long text, many visual elements, and diverse citation requirements. After training on VinQA, however, Page Encoding reaches a comparable level, competing effectively even without the explicit parsing used in Modality Encoding. Finally, Visual G-Eval, an MLLM-based judge, confirms that fine-tuned models insert visual elements at semantically appropriate positions with faithful supporting text.

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

Physics-Distilled Neural Network enabled by Large Language Models for Manufacturing Process-Property Predictive Modeling

arXiv:2606.11605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting process-property relationships in manufacturing is often challenged by high experimental costs and the limited interpretability of complex 'black-box' models. This paper proposes a novel knowledge distillation framework designed to achieve high-accuracy predictions in data-scarce scenarios. The framework integrates analytical physics priors, which are systematically extracted from scientific literature via Large Language Models, into a privileged teacher model. We employ a Graph-Masked Attention layer to capture the complex physical dependencies among input variables showing strict setpoints or a combination of static and high-frequency temporal signatures. This privileged knowledge is distilled into a lightweight student predictor for inference. The feasibility and robustness of the framework are evaluated through a comprehensive experiment across five diverse manufacturing processes. To ensure statistical reliability, given the small dataset sizes, a repeated K-fold cross-validation technique is employed to quantify model stability and generalization. Results indicate that the proposed framework consistently achieves high predictive accuracy across all evaluated domains. Most importantly, the architecture demonstrates significant fault tolerance by maintaining robust predictive performance even in scenarios where LLM-derived analytical priors are suboptimal or incomplete. Furthermore, the student predictor achieves an inference frequency exceeding 6000 Hz, which facilitates real-time edge deployment on standard industrial hardware. This work provides a scalable solution for bridging the gap between theoretical physics and real-time industrial monitoring in data-limited environments.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

DemoDiffusion: One-Shot Human Imitation using pre-trained Diffusion Policy

arXiv:2506.20668v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose DemoDiffusion, a simple method for enabling robots to perform manipulation tasks by imitating a single human demonstration, without requiring task-specific training or paired human-robot data. Our approach is based on two insights. First, the hand motion in a human demonstration provides a useful prior for the robot's end-effector trajectory, which we can convert into a rough open-loop robot motion trajectory via kinematic retargeting. Second, while this retargeted motion captures the overall structure of the task, it may not align well with plausible robot actions in-context. To address this, we leverage a pre-trained generalist diffusion policy to modify the trajectory, ensuring it both follows the human motion and remains within the distribution of plausible robot actions. Unlike approaches based on online reinforcement learning or paired human-robot data, our method enables robust adaptation to new tasks and scenes with minimal effort. In real-world experiments across 8 diverse manipulation tasks, DemoDiffusion achieves 83.8\% average success rate, compared to 13.8\% for the pre-trained policy and 52.5\% for kinematic retargeting, succeeding even on tasks where the pre-trained generalist policy fails entirely. Project page: https://demodiffusion.github.io/

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

Trust Between AI Agents: Measuring Formation, Breakage, and Recovery, with Implications for Governing Multi-Agent Systems

作者:

arXiv:2606.14923v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As language-model agents increasingly work in teams, each agent must decide how much to trust its teammates. Yet we lack a standard way to measure trust between AI agents. We propose a behavioral measure based on costly verification. In a cooperative survival game, checking a teammate's work consumes resources, while trusting a wrong answer can be fatal. Relative to a memoryless version of the same model, reduced verification provides an observable measure of trust. Using this framework, we study trust formation, breakage, and recovery across six frontier model snapshots. When paired with a consistently reliable teammate, four snapshots (Claude Opus 4.6, Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.1, and Gemini 3.1 Pro) reduce verification by roughly 60-85%, whereas two smaller snapshots show little or no such adjustment. Failures reverse this discount, but models differ in how they respond. Some concentrate renewed scrutiny on the culprit, while others become more cautious toward the entire team. Recovery is slower than formation, and clustered failures sustain suspicion far longer than the same number of failures spread apart. These differences have practical consequences. Models that form trust verify less, decide more quickly, and achieve higher payoffs in our environment. By contrast, persistent over-verification is associated with indecision rather than safety. Our results show that trust dispositions can be measured before deployment and suggest that calibration, rather than maximal suspicion, should be the central concern in the governance of multi-agent AI systems.

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

Anomaly Detection for Sparse and Irregular Multivariate Time Series with Latent SDEs

arXiv:2606.18898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD) is critical for a wide range of application areas, such as industrial monitoring, cybersecurity, or healthcare. Real-world data is often sparse, irregularly sampled or partially observed, yet existing methods assume uniformly sampled time series. We propose a generative approach based on Latent SDEs that projects the observed time series on a continuous-time stochastic dynamical system, directly being able to handle missing observations and irregular sampling, while also naturally capturing possible cyclic behavior that many real-world use cases inherently possess. Experiments on six anomaly benchmark datasets show that our proposed method ranks first among state-of-the-art baselines. We further demonstrate that our method remains robust under severe data sparsity, while performance significantly degrades for the tested baseline methods. These results highlight latent SDEs as a natural inductive bias for anomaly detection in multivariate time series, especially in presence of real-world irregularities.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

PhysMetrics.Weather: An Evaluation Framework for Physical Consistency in ML Weather Models

arXiv:2606.10642v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning weather prediction (MLWP) models have achieved impressive forecasting performance at a small fraction of the computational costs required for traditional physics-based methods. However, they are primarily (1) data-driven and (2) evaluated using pixel-wide error metrics (e.g., RMSE), so there are no guarantees that their forecasts are consistent with known physical laws. We introduce PhysMetrics$.$Weather, an evaluation framework that assesses the physical realism of MLWP models across three types of metrics: conservation, spectral, and dynamical. By quantifying physical realism, this tool guides the development of physics-informed architectures and helps evaluate whether MLWP models are reliable for operational use. Our framework is available on Github at https://github.com/Emmakast/PhysMetrics.Weather.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A High-Resolution Landscape Dataset for Concept-Based XAI With Application to Species Distribution Models

arXiv:2604.13240v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mapping the spatial distribution of species is essential for conservation policy and invasive species management. Species distribution models (SDMs) are the primary tools for this task, serving two purposes: achieving robust predictive performance while providing ecological insights into the driving factors of distribution. However, the increasing complexity of deep learning SDMs has made extracting these insights more challenging. To reconcile these objectives, we propose the first implementation of concept-based Explainable AI (XAI) for SDMs. We leverage the Robust TCAV (Testing with Concept Activation Vectors) methodology to quantify the influence of landscape concepts on model predictions. To enable this, we provide a new open-access landscape concept dataset derived from high-resolution multispectral and LiDAR drone imagery. It includes 653 patches across 15 distinct landscape concepts and 1,450 random reference patches, designed to suit a wide range of species. We demonstrate this approach through a case study of two aquatic insects, Plecoptera and Trichoptera, using two Convolutional Neural Networks and one Vision Transformer. Results show that concept-based XAI helps validate SDMs against expert knowledge while uncovering novel associations that generate new ecological hypotheses. Robust TCAV also provides landscape-level information, useful for policy-making and land management. Code and datasets are publicly available.

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

See First, Answer Later: Visual Evidence Pre-Alignment via Sufficiency-Driven RL

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) integrate strong text reasoning with visual inputs, yet their responses can be inconsistent with the underlying images, indicating ineffective utilization of visual evidence during inference. The prevailing training paradigm relies on large-scale caption-based pretraining for general alignment, followed by supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to enable instruction following and complex reasoning. However, such pretraining provides only weak visual grounding: short, coarse captions bias models toward salient objects while neglecting fine-grained visual evidence. In this paper, we introduce Visual Evidence Pre-Alignment (VEPA), an intermediate stage between pretraining and post-training that explores a novel sufficiency-driven objective with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to optimize question-conditioned visual evidence descriptions. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks show that our VEPA consistently enhances performance on visually demanding evaluations and complements standard supervised post-training. Further analyses show that the income stems from strengthened, transferable visual grounding, rather than from additional task-specific training.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

How Much Do Reviews Really Contribute? A Study on Text-Enriched Matrix Factorization for Recommendations

arXiv:2606.16973v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Incorporating textual reviews into a Recommender System has become a prominent strategy for enriching collaborative signals with semantic information. However, the actual contribution of review-derived representations remains an open question, particularly when strong collaborative baselines are employed. In this work, we systematically investigate the impact of textual information on Matrix Factorization by introducing and comparing three enrichment strategies over a common collaborative backbone. First, we propose a learnable gating mechanism that adaptively balances collaborative and textual signals during training. This mechanism is applied to two distinct review representations: (i) aggregated topic profiles extracted from user and item histories, and (ii) full text embedding representations derived from reviews. Additionally, we explore a cross-attention mechanism that identifies and emphasizes the most informative dimensions of the textual representation before fusion with collaborative factors. We evaluate six variants: pure, enriched with topic profiles and text via gating; enriched with topics and text via gating; and enhanced with cross-attention over textual features. Experiments across multiple review-based datasets reveal that although adaptive fusion mechanisms improve representation flexibility, the marginal contribution of textual signals remains limited compared to the collaborative backbone. These findings suggest that, under typical rating-prediction settings, collaborative information continues to dominate performance, raising important considerations for the effective integration of semantic review signals into recommendation models.

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

TouchThinker: Scaling Tactile Commonsense Reasoning to the Open World with Large-scale Data and Action-aware Representation

arXiv:2606.11637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Touch is a key modality for embodied agents to understand the physical world. Although recent work has incorporated tactile signals into language systems for tactile commonsense reasoning, scaling such systems to realistic open-world settings remains challenging due to two key bottlenecks: (1) current tactile reasoning datasets remain limited in format and scale, providing insufficient supervision for reasoning from tactile observations to physical commonsense and hindering the learning of transferable tactile commonsense; (2) Tactile signals are inherently redundant and action-specific, yet existing methods often overlook these properties, resulting in inefficient representations with limited semantic expressiveness. To address these limitations, we propose TouchThinker, a tactile-language framework that scales tactile commonsense reasoning to the open world from both data and representation perspectives. First, we construct TouchThinker-1M, a million-scale, multi-source tactile reasoning dataset covering 415 objects, 8 scenarios, and 7 sensor types, providing a solid data foundation for open-world generalization. We further introduce TouchThinker-Bench, an open-world benchmark with more realistic and diverse tasks. Then, we propose action-aware modeling mechanism to improve tactile representation efficiency and enable efficient reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that TouchThinker achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art models across multiple datasets. Our code and dataset will be made available at: https://github.com/lvkailin0118/TouchThinker.

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

Is Spurious Correlation Removal Always Learnable?

arXiv:2606.12930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Invariant learning can fail even when the invariant structure is statistically identifiable. We show a conditional computational barrier: under a black-box samplable supervised sparse recovery primitive motivated by average-case sparse-recovery reductions, there exist samplable multi-environment instances with a one-dimensional predictive invariant subspace ($k=1$) that are learnable with polynomial samples by exhaustive search, while any polynomial-time constant-accuracy recovery algorithm would contradict the primitive. We further quantify environment diversity by a separation parameter $\gamma$, which controls identifiability and the curvature of invariance objectives. Under sufficient diversity and local Gaussian regularity, the minimax risk is $\mathbb{E}[\dist(\hat{V},V_{\mathrm{inv}})^2]=\Theta(k(d-k)/(n|\mathcal{E}|))$, and under label-induced shifts a phase transition occurs at $n^*\propto k(d-k)/(|\mathcal{E}|\gamma^2)$ with refined estimation error scaling proportional to $1/\gamma^2$. Synthetic and real datasets illustrate the predicted gaps and transitions and motivate simple diversity diagnostics.

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

The Machine Learning Approach to Moment Closure Relations for Plasma: A Review

arXiv:2511.22486v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The requirement for large-scale global simulations of plasma is an ongoing challenge in both space and laboratory plasma physics. Any simulation based on a fluid model inherently requires a closure relation for the high order plasma moments. This review compiles and analyses the recent surge of machine learning approaches developing improved plasma closure models capable of capturing kinetic phenomena within plasma fluid models. We survey two methodological families: neural-network surrogates (from multilayer perceptrons to Fourier neural operators, the latter recently reproducing both linear and non-linear Landau damping online within a fluid solver) and equation-discovery methods such as sparse regression; and organise the studies by whether they are tested offline against reference data or online within a time-evolving solver. We outline the challenges associated with machine-learning closures, including off-diagonal pressure-tensor accuracy, generalisation beyond the training distribution, and stable integration into large-scale simulations, and the directions future research might take to address them.

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

Instance-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Semi-Supervised Learning of an On-Board Multi-Task Dense Prediction Model for Collision Avoidance System

Collision avoidance systems have evolved toward camera-based deep learning approaches for driving scene understanding. However, deployment in edge environments such as country clubs is constrained by limited computational resources and unreliable communication infrastructure. Moreover, constructing large-scale datasets for the target domain involves substantial annotation cost. To address these limitations, we propose an instance-aware knowledge distillation framework for semi-supervised learning. Specifically, we generate pseudo labels that mitigate teacher bias by leveraging domain priors from the teacher and instance-centric knowledge from foundation models. The trained lightweight student is deployed in the proposed collision avoidance system and performs multiple dense prediction tasks in real-time. The system detects frontal obstacles and encodes their spatial information into controller area network messages for automated guided vehicle operation. To achieve this, we construct a large-scale country club dataset and perform field validation of the proposed system. Experimental results demonstrate that the student outperforms the large teacher in instance segmentation while mitigating performance degradation in monocular depth estimation. Compared with the teacher, the student reduces FLOPs by 22.68$\times$ and parameters by 14.33$\times$, achieving 6.46 FPS on a low-cost edge device.

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

AuAu: A Benchmark for Auditing Authoritarian Alignment in Large Language Models

The worldwide surge of authoritarianism, combined with the increasing central role in users' everyday lives, raises the question of to what extent specific models exhibit or promote authoritarian attitudes and characteristics. We introduce AuAu, a comprehensive benchmark that aims to assess the risk of LLMs generating responses with authoritarian tendencies. This benchmark combines three evaluation approaches: (i) psychometric questions from an extensive pool of 15 human validated instruments; (ii) contextual behavior vignettes probing intended actions in concrete situations; and (iii) responses to realistic user prompts. Unlike prior work, AuAu evaluates not only a general closeness towards authoritarianism but also the established sub-concepts Authoritarian Aggression, Authoritarian Submission, and Conventionalism. Evaluating 17 models from China, the EU, Russia, and the USA, we find that all tested models exhibit substantial authoritarian response rates under the psychometric evaluation, though rates drop significantly in increasingly more realistic downstream task. We further find that an authoritarian system prompt easily manipulates 15 out of 17 models to promote increased authoritarianism. Our results underscore the need for continued, systematic auditing of LLM-based AI systems to detect and ultimately mitigate undesired authoritarian tendencies in generated output. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/andreaseinwiller/AuAu

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Home-based binocular serious games in virtual reality to treat visual acuity and stereovision in residual amblyopia: AMBER study

Objectives: Amblyopia is a pediatric visual disorder traditionally treated by patching the fellow eye, though many patients retain residual amblyopia post-treatment. Increasing evidence suggests that visual plasticity allows treat-ment beyond the classical therapeutic window. AMBER evaluated the efficacy of binocular serious games in virtual reality (VR) in residual amblyopia. Methods and Analysis: The monocentric, prospective, randomized, crossover trial (reported as case series) includ-ed 14 anisometropic, strabismic, or mixed residual amblyopia patients (6-35 years; 5 children, 9 adults). Participants underwent two 2-month intervention phases: optical correction (standard care) and standard care plus VR games (2.5 h/week), each with a 2-month follow-up. Best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), stereoacuity, and reading speed were assessed (5 timepoints) using the Sloan and Landolt charts, the Titmus, TNO, Lang II, Asteroid, and Mnread tests. Compliance and adverse events (AE) were recorded. Results: VR training improved BCVA in 10 amblyopic eyes (Landolt and Sloan), with more pronounced effects in anisometropic patients. Six patients showed improved stereoacuity (Titmus; 4x mixed, 1x anisometropic, 1x stra-bismic amblyopia), persistent only in children (1x strabismic, 1x mixed amblyopia). Four improvements were ob-served with TNO (1x), Lang II (1x), Asteroid (0x), and MNread (1x). Despite positive trends, when comparing re-sults of individual patients, between both eyes, and with standard treatment, consistency of improvements cannot be conclusively demonstrated. One non-severe AE (dizziness) was reported. Conclusions: Following individual cases, VR training improved BCVA and stereoacuity, particularly in children and patients with high compliance. However, considering the cohort as a whole, consistency of effects has to be confirmed in larger groups. Thus, the methodologically sophisticated AMBER study revealed differences in VR treatment efficacy between amblyopia types, children/adults, endpoints and tests, offering precious data for the design of meaningful future studies. It shows that neurovisual plasticity gauged by VR-games offers safe, engaging treatment options for residual amblyopia.

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

AI4SE and SE4AI Exploration: A Decade Looking Back and Forward

arXiv:2606.19630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The March 2020 INCOSE INSIGHT special issue on AI and Systems Engineering (SE) became the most downloaded issue in the publication's history and launched a research community that now draws over 250 registrants to its annual workshop. In this article, we trace the progress in AI and SE across three phases (labeled here foundational, applied, and LLM inflection) based on the authors' reading of the field's core papers, and describe our opinions of where the community has converged and where critical gaps remain. Separately, a human-AI agreement literature review leveraging both human expertise and six AI models was performed to assess the relevance of 1,712 INCOSE INSIGHT articles and 889 SERC publications. The results identify five critical research gaps and offer guidance for practitioners navigating AI adoption, assurance, and workforce transformation in SE. We share the agreement data and the AI4SE/SE4AI Explorer web application so readers can compare their own relevance judgments with the human and AI raters.

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

DepthMaster: Unified Monocular Depth Estimation for Perspective and Panoramic Images

While monocular depth estimation has achieved significant progress, achieving generalized metric depth estimation for both narrow field-of-view (FoV) perspectives and $360^\circ$ panoramas remains an unsolved challenge. Existing methods are often tailored to specific camera types and struggle to produce accurate metric depth that generalizes across diverse settings. This limitation stems from two key challenges: the inherent geometric discrepancy between perspective and panoramic cameras, and the scarcity of panoramic training data with metric annotations. In this work, we introduce DepthMaster, a unified metric depth estimation framework. Rather than employing specialized networks to learn spherical distortions, we reformulate the problem by decomposing panoramic images into overlapping perspective patches. Crucially, distinct from prior projection-based methods that rely on ad-hoc architectural modifications to handle boundaries, we introduce a novel Correspondence Consistency Loss (CCL) and inject virtual projection cameras as geometric priors, allowing us to seamlessly stitch the patches while avoiding specialized operators and keeping the backbone largely compatible with standard Transformer designs. This strategy also resolves the geometric differences by unifying all inputs into a canonical perspective representation, and effectively circumvents data scarcity by directly unlocking powerful metric priors from vast perspective datasets. Trained on a mixed dataset that contains only one panorama dataset, DepthMaster achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on 13 diverse datasets, outperforming not only universal methods but also leading specialist models in both perspective and panoramic domains.

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

From Static Inference to Dynamic Interaction: A Survey of Streaming Large Language Models

Standard Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly designed for static inference with pre-defined inputs, which limits their applicability in dynamic, real-time scenarios. To address this gap, the streaming LLM paradigm has emerged. However, existing definitions of streaming LLMs remain fragmented, conflating streaming generation, streaming inputs, and interactive streaming architectures, while a systematic taxonomy is still lacking. This paper provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of streaming LLMs. First, we establish a unified definition of streaming LLMs based on data flow and dynamic interaction to clarify existing ambiguities. Building on this definition, we propose a systematic taxonomy of current streaming LLMs and conduct an in-depth discussion on their underlying methodologies. Furthermore, we explore the applications of streaming LLMs in real-world scenarios and outline promising research directions to support ongoing advances in streaming intelligence. We maintain a continuously updated repository of relevant papers at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/Awesome-Streaming-LLMs.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Dual-Channel Grounded World Modeling (DCGWM): Structural Prevention of Objective Interference Collapse via Heterogeneous External Grounding with Inward-Only Gradient Flow

arXiv:2606.18688v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) are a leading approach to world model representation learning. We identify a failure mode in JEPA-based world models grounded against two qualitatively distinct external signals: physical dynamics (sparse, high-magnitude, constraint-satisfying gradient corrections) and social-behavioral dynamics (diffuse, distribution-matching corrections). We term this Objective Interference Collapse (OIC): we argue that joint learning in a shared latent space causes the dominant channel to systematically collapse the subordinate channel's representational subspace, in a manner not resolvable by loss weighting alone. We propose Dual-Channel Grounded World Modeling (DCGWM), designed to structurally prevent OIC through a partitioned latent space (physical subspace Z_p, behavioral subspace Z_b) with inward-only gradient flow. A Physical Grounding Channel updates only Z_p via VICReg-style alignment to physical measurements; a Social-Behavioral Grounding Channel updates only Z_b via alignment to trajectories from an emergent multi-agent simulation. An Inter-Channel Interface Module couples the subspaces at the task level without cross-subspace gradients. An Asymmetric Grounding Adherence Loss penalizes rollout drift with a hard hinge for physical violations and a soft KL for behavioral divergence. A Generative Rendering Layer is architecturally isolated from the latent world model. We present three theoretical results: the partition removes the gradient-interference pathway implicated in OIC; each grounded subspace inherits anti-collapse guarantees from its alignment objective; and generative isolation is necessary under a stated assumption on the generative objective's geometry. This manuscript establishes the problem formulation and architecture; experimental validation is ongoing and will be reported in a future revision.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Mosaic: Data-Free Knowledge Distillation via Mixture-of-Experts for Heterogeneous Distributed Environments

arXiv:2505.19699v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine learning paradigm that enables clients to collaboratively train models while preserving data privacy. However, the coexistence of model and data heterogeneity gives rise to inconsistent representations and divergent optimization dynamics across clients, ultimately hindering robust global performance. To transcend these challenges, we propose Mosaic, a novel data-free knowledge distillation framework tailored for heterogeneous distributed environments. Mosaic first trains local generative models to approximate each client's personalized distribution, enabling synthetic data generation that safeguards privacy through strict separation from real data. Subsequently, Mosaic forms a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) from client models based on their specialized knowledge, and distills it into a global model using the generated data. To further enhance the MoE architecture, Mosaic integrates expert predictions via a lightweight meta model trained on a few representative prototypes. Extensive experiments on standard image and multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that Mosaic consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches under both model and data heterogeneity. The source code has been published at https://github.com/Wings-Of-Disaster/Mosaic.

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

Better Adherence, Richer Context: A Field Evaluation of LLM-Powered Conversational Voice Diaries for Sleep

arXiv:2606.18596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sleep diaries are central to behavioral sleep medicine and cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, yet daily completion is difficult to sustain, and static forms often provide limited context for interpreting night-to-night sleep variation. We designed an LLM-powered conversational voice diary that delivers clinically grounded morning and evening sleep diary questions through proactive smart-speaker prompts, structured conversational intake, and adaptive follow-up dialogue. We evaluated the system in a four-week between-subjects field study with 30 university students, comparing it with a text-based mobile diary using matched diary items, reporting windows, and reminder intervals. Compared with the text-based diary, the conversational voice diary showed higher adherence and elicited more detailed contextual self-report about routines, stressors, environmental conditions, and other sleep-related factors. Participants also described the voice diary as easier to integrate into daily routines, despite longer perceived completion time. However, voice-based conversational intake produced lower completeness for some structured diary fields, revealing a trade-off between expressive richness and structured precision. These findings show both the promise and the challenge of using LLM-powered conversational voice assistants for longitudinal health self-report.

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

Prefill Awareness in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.12747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety-relevant studies of language models, including alignment and jailbreaking evaluations and AI control protocols, often rely on prefilling model outputs. If AI models can recognize and act on the fact their prior assistant messages have been inserted or edited, the effectiveness and validity of these methods could be compromised. We investigate whether frontier language models can distinguish between tampered and untampered assistant-side context, a capability we call prefill awareness. To do so, we construct a binary preference benchmark across three prefill mechanisms, filtering for cases where models show consistent stances. We find that frontier models show substantial prefill awareness: Claude Opus 4.5 detects prefills opposing its preferences in 9-35% of cases with a 0% false positive rate when prompted; additionally, models often revert towards baseline behavior without explicitly reporting that the prefill was foreign. Controlled ablations later also show that detection and resistance rely on different cues, where stylistic mismatch mainly affects whether models flag a prefill as foreign, while preference mismatch mainly affects whether they revert toward their baseline answer. We also examine more realistic agentic settings such as misalignment-continuation evaluations and SWE-bench trajectories, where frontier models sometimes disavow prefilled assistant turns in ways that depend strongly on dataset, task success, and hidden formatting artifacts. Our results indicate that prefill awareness is already a substantial confound for some prefill-based methods. We recommend that model developers track this capability in frontier systems.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Validation of an Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Mobile Application for Dietary Oxalate Assessment in Kidney Stone Prevention

Background: Calcium oxalate nephrolithiasis is the most common type of kidney stone disease. Dietary oxalate intake is an important modifiable factor. Assessing dietary oxalate exposure in clinical practice poses challenges due to limitations of traditional dietary recall tools and variability in food composition data. Artificial intelligence (AI) applications in mobile health may offer scalable solutions for better dietary monitoring and kidney stone prevention. We examined the ability of StoneFree AI to estimate dietary oxalate from verbal and image-based food inputs. Objective: To evaluate the accuracy and limitations of StoneFree AI, for estimating dietary oxalate intake from verbal food descriptions and meal images, and to evaluate errors from entries that may inform future clinical use in kidney stone prevention. Methods: StoneFree AI is a cross-platform mobile application that uses a multimodal large language model (Google Gemini) to interpret verbal food descriptions and visual food images. The identified foods were mapped to oxalate values using the Harvard Oxalate Database. System performance was evaluated using 804 verbal food entries and 276 portion-size food images obtained from the ASA24 dietary assessment database. Verbal inputs were compared with reference oxalate values using absolute error and predefined agreement thresholds ({+/-}1, {+/-}5, {+/-}10 mg). Image-based inputs were evaluated against mutually exclusive primary error categories, including food identification, portion estimation, ingredient recognition, oxalate reference selection, and non-analyzable cases. Results: For verbal food entries, the AI system showed strong agreement with reference oxalate values. Overall, 82.1% of estimates were within {+/-}1 mg, 91.5% within {+/-}5 mg, and 94.5% within {+/-}10 mg of reference values. The mean absolute error was 3.32 mg, the median absolute error was 0.10 mg, and the concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) was 0.860. Image-based inputs showed a higher overall error rate of 63.0%, primarily due to food identification errors (33.0%), inaccurate portion estimation (11.0%), and ingredient recognition errors (9.8%). Most errors occurred with visually complex meals, such as mixed dishes and grain-based foods. Conclusions: AI-assisted estimation of dietary oxalate intake demonstrated high accuracy when structured verbal inputs were used but was less reliable for image-based meal analysis. These findings suggest AI-enabled mobile tools may support dietary monitoring for kidney stone prevention, particularly when user input is structured. Further refinement of computer vision models and prospective clinical validation are required before widespread clinical implementation.

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

The Impossibility of Eliciting Latent Knowledge

arXiv:2606.12268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advanced AI systems have extensive knowledge of their environments; in fact, their knowledge may (far) exceed that of their developers or users. Consequently, a desirable property for an AI system is that it is honest – that it accurately reports its beliefs about the world. Designing an AI system to be honest may be difficult, especially if we want to ask it questions about latent variables in the environment – variables which are hidden from the human interacting with it. This gives rise to the problem of eliciting latent knowledge (ELK): the problem of training an AI agent to honestly report its beliefs. In this paper, we make ELK formally precise using Causal Influence Diagrams (CIDs). CIDs can be used to describe the relationship between an agent's training environment and its subjective representation of the world. We use CIDs to formalise the distinction between observable and latent variables, to specify what exactly it means for an agent to be honest, and to formally define goal misgeneralisation. We show that, under certain circumstances, developers can incentivise an agent to honestly answer questions by providing correct feedback during training. However, a natural, but undesirable, way for an agent to generalise is to provide answers which humans would evaluate as true, rather than honest answers. We prove an impossibility theorem stating: There is no feedback-based training strategy that depends only on agent behaviour and with certainty produces an honest agent, even if feedback is perfect during training.