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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

TokenPilot: Cache-Efficient Context Management for LLM Agents

As LLM agents are deployed in long-horizon sessions, context accumulation drives up inference costs. Existing approaches utilize text pruning or dynamic memory eviction to minimize token footprints; however, their unconstrained sequence mutations alter layouts, introducing prefix mismatches and cache invalidation. This reveals a critical trade-off between text sparsity and prompt cache continuity. To address this, we present TokenPilot, a dual-granularity context management framework. Globally, Ingestion-Aware Compaction acts as a framework harness to stabilize prompt prefixes and eliminate open-world environmental noise at the ingestion gate. Locally, Lifecycle-Aware Eviction monitors the ongoing residual utility of context segments, enforcing a conservative batch-turn schedule to offload content segments only when task relevance expires. Experiments on PinchBench and Claw-Eval under both isolated and continuous modes demonstrate that TokenPilot reduces costs by 61% and 56% in isolated mode, and 61% and 87% in continuous mode, while maintaining competitive performance compared to prior systems. TokenPilot has been integrated into LightMem2 at https://github.com/zjunlp/LightMem2.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Clinician knowledge and self-efficacy in snakebite management: A cross-sectional assessment in Northern Uganda

Background: Snakebite envenomation (SBE) is a major public health crisis in rural Uganda, yet it remains a neglected tropical disease. Effective management is often compromised by systemic barriers and a lack of clinician training. This study assessed clinician self-efficacy and objective knowledge regarding SBE management in Northern Uganda. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional study was conducted between February and July 2025 among 379 healthcare workers in Gulu, Omoro, and Pader districts. A validated questionnaire was used to collect data on socio-demographics, self-reported efficacy (scale 1-10), and objective knowledge. Knowledge scores [&ge;]70% were categorized as adequate. Multivariable logistic regression identified independent predictors of adequate knowledge, and Spearmans correlation ({rho}) assessed the relationship between knowledge and self-efficacy. Results: The participants had a mean age of 35.6 years (SD {+/-}7.3), were predominantly female (56.5%, 214/379), and most (83.6%, 317/379) practiced at Health Centre III level facilities. While 53.8% (204/379) reported prior training, 48.3% (183/379) of these had not received an update in over 10 years. Adequate knowledge was demonstrated by 51.5% (195/379) of participants. In the multivariable analysis, practicing in Omoro (adjusted odds ratio [aOR]: 0.3, 95% CI: 0.1-0.6, p < 0.001) or Pader (aOR: 0.2, 95% CI: 0.1-0.4, p < 0.001) was associated with lower odds of adequate knowledge compared to Gulu district. Prior training significantly increased the odds of adequate knowledge (aOR: 2.3, 95% CI: 1.3-4.2, p = 0.006). A moderate positive correlation was observed between self-efficacy and objective knowledge (Spearmans {rho} = 0.33, p < 0.0001). Conclusion: Approximately half of the frontline healthcare workers in Northern Uganda lack adequate knowledge on SBE management, with significant geographic differences and outdated training. The gap between clinician self-efficacy and objective knowledge poses a risk to patient safety. Regular, mandatory refresher training and targeted educational outreach to remote districts are required to reduce SBE-related morbidity and mortality.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

The Chandra-Gaia Catalog of Counterparts: Resolving ambiguous Gaia matches to X-ray sources in the Chandra Source Catalog using Machine Learning

arXiv:2606.19329v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a framework to cross-match sources from the Chandra Source Catalog (CSC v2.1) with optical sources from Gaia Data Release 3. Unlike purely spatial approaches, we use source properties such as magnitudes, colors, and distances to identify true counterparts, detect chance coincidences, and resolve ambiguities when multiple plausible candidates exist. We define a training set of high-confidence matches using NWAY, a Bayesian cross-matching framework that accounts for positional errors and source densities. We train a gradient-boosted classifier (LightGBM) on a variety of features from both catalogs. Of the ~$254$k unique X-ray sources, we find counterparts for ~$113$k sources, of which plausible multiple counterparts are found for ~$7$k. We find no counterparts for ~$20$k sources for which separation-based cross-matching does find a match, and attribute half of these to chance coincidences. We validate the pipeline on the Chandra Orion Ultradeep Project (COUP), where the machine-learning matches reproduce 95% of NWAY cross-matches without using any positional information. We release a catalog of the ~$113$k Chandra-Gaia counterparts, together with ~$7$k alternative matches and ~$20$k ambiguous NWAY associations, supporting future population studies of sources detectable by both Chandra and Gaia. We discuss limitations and provide a generalization of the framework that is applicable in other cross-matching scenarios.

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

AURA: Active-Response Attribution under Treatment Ambiguity in Bacterial Cytological Profiling

When a bacterial sample is exposed to several antibiotics, not every applied drug necessarily acts: if the organism is resistant to one of them, that drug leaves no morphological trace. The clinically meaningful quantity is therefore not which antibiotics were applied, but which ones were active. We show that these two are sharply decoupled in real E. coli microscopy - naively assuming the applied combination equals the active one is correct only about 37% of the time - yet existing computational tools are ill-suited to recovering the active set. Forward perturbation models such as scGen, CPA, and IMPA are designed to predict appearance from treatment, not the reverse, and inverting them degrades sharply; discriminative image classifiers tend to memorise strain- and batch-specific texture and fail to transfer across experimental replicates. We introduce AURA, which reframes the task as constrained, energy-based inverse attribution. Its central inductive bias is that the active set must be a subset of the applied set; this collapses the candidate space and lets AURA infer the active subset of applied antibiotics by decomposing residual morphology into antibiotic response atoms and selecting the subset with the lowest reconstruction energy, using no strain label at test time. AURA-E adds evidence-aware abstention, withholding a prediction when candidate explanations remain near-equally plausible. On cross-replicate transfer in an E. coli cytological profiling dataset, AURA recovers the active antibiotic combination with 95.47% exact-match accuracy.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Self-CTRL: Self-Consistency Training with Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models (LMs) that faithfully describe their own behavior can more easily be audited, understood, and trusted by users. This paper describes Self-Consistency Training with Reinforcement Learning (Self-CTRL), a method that optimizes for consistency between a LM's self-explanations and behavior on related inputs by updating explanations to better predict behavior or updating behavior to better match explanations. We apply our method in two domains. First, we study a formal probabilistic reasoning task in which LMs must learn to imitate a family of biased samplers and evaluated on their ability to report the associated biases. We find that consistency training improves the correlation between self-reported and behaviorally-measured latent biases from $R^2=0.24$ to $R^2=0.64$ on a set of held-out distributions, matching the generalization of direct ground-truth supervision. Second, we study a constitutional AI domain in which LMs must describe when they will refuse or comply with user requests. Here, Self-CTRL produces rules that faithfully describe the model's behavior on held-out requests, improving the refusal predictions of a third-party auditor model from $36\%$ to $92\%$. In the other direction, behavior updates improve alignment, reducing HarmBench failure rate from $15.0\%$ to $0.5\%$ without substantially increasing refusal on harmless prompts. By aligning explanations and behavior, our work provides a general recipe for training AI models to be safer, more transparent, and more controllable.

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

A Comparative Study of Deep Learning Architectures for Multi-Horizon Behavioural Forecasting for Mobile Health

arXiv:2606.14604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wearable devices and smartphones generate rich behavioural time series that can support proactive health interventions, yet systematic comparisons of modern forecasting architectures for these data are lacking. In particular, it remains unclear how models generalise across populations, how different architectures respond to participant-level fine-tuning and how forecasting accuracy degrades across multi-day horizons. We benchmark six deep learning architectures, two zero-shot Foundation Models (FM) and statistical baselines on three public datasets encompassing over 800 participants, reporting per-feature metrics for step counts, screen time and sleep duration across 1-8 day horizons. We further conduct a per-feature personalisation study across all six architectures and assess FM transferability across dataset sizes and temporal granularities. Our key findings are: (i) no single architecture dominates, PatchTST leads among trained models while the three runners-up (TCN, MLP, Transformer) show no meaningful performance difference; (ii) the FM TimesFM matches or exceeds trained models zero-shot, especially in low-data regimes and (iii) participant-level fine-tuning reduces per-feature RMSE by 16-60\%, with sleep benefiting most and step counts least. These results provide practical guidance on architecture selection, FM applicability and personalisation strategies for mobile health forecasting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to jointly evaluate modern deep learning, FMs and personalisation for multi-horizon behavioural forecasting from wearables.

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

MeEvo: Metacognitive Evolution Combined with Natural Evolution for Automatic Heuristic Design

arXiv:2606.14202v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD) by enabling heuristic generation through reasoning and code synthesis. Existing LLM-based AHD architectures mainly follow two paradigms: Natural Evolution, which uses crossover and mutation to explore heuristic programs, and Metacognitive Evolution, which refines reasoning through reflection. However, Natural Evolution discards reasoning traces, weakening knowledge inheritance and exploitation, while Metacognitive Evolution lacks population-level recombination, limiting exploration and increasing the risk of premature convergence. These limitations reduce search efficiency, stability, and solution quality on complex problems. To address this gap, we propose MeEvo, a dual-layer AHD framework that cyclically couples Natural Evolution and Metacognitive Evolution. Natural Evolution explores heuristic code while recording reasoning traces, fitness values, and errors into a shared history; Metacognitive Evolution then reflects on this history to generate improved heuristics that re-enter the parent pool for the next cycle. This design enables population-driven exploration and reflection-driven refinement to reinforce each other. Experiments on five optimization problems with two LLM backbones show that MeEvo achieves stronger and more stable performance than existing LLM-based AHD architectures, especially on complex constrained tasks.

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

TerraBench: Can Agents Reason Over Heterogeneous Earth-System Data?

arXiv:2606.13148v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Climate and environmental decision-making increasingly requires reasoning across heterogeneous inputs, including gridded physical data, satellite imagery, geospatial context, and simulator outputs. Weather and climate foundation models can forecast well, but do not reason interactively in language, while large language models (LLMs) reason in language but cannot operate directly on high-dimensional Earth-system data. As a result, real scientific workflows in Earth-science remain underserved. We introduce TerraBench, a benchmark for grounded Earth-science reasoning, built on TerraAgent, a ReAct-style executable framework that interleaves reasoning, tool calls, and observations to couple LLM planning with scientific tools for environmental retrieval, geospatial processing, simulation, and artifact-backed computation. TerraBench unifies analysis of Earth observation imagery, gridded data, GIS reasoning and simulation in a single executable interface, whereas prior benchmarks isolate these capabilities into narrow individual tasks. It is also the first in this space to pair process-level tool-use metrics with tolerance-aware numeric scoring. The benchmark comprises 403 extensive agentic tasks across three tracks (Fundamentals, Simulator-Grounded, and Document-Grounded Verification) and eight application domains with 24,500 verified execution steps. These results indicate that reliable Earth-science agents must go beyond tool access to coordinate heterogeneous workflows, parameterize tools precisely, and preserve artifact provenance.

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

Low-resource Language Discrimination Towards Chinese Dialects with Transfer learning and Data Augmentation

Chinese dialects discrimination is a challenging natural language processing task due to scarce annotation resource. In this article, we develop a novel Chinese dialects discrimination framework with transfer learning and data augmentation (CDDTLDA) in order to overcome the shortage of resources. To be more specific, we first use a relatively larger Chinese dialects corpus to train a source-side automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. Then, we adopt a simple but effective data augmentation method (i.e., speed, pitch, and noise disturbance) to augment the target-side low-resource Chinese dialects, and fine-tune another target ASR model based on the previous source-side ASR model. Meanwhile, the potential common semantic features between source-side and target-side ASR models can be captured by using self-attention mechanism. Finally, we extract the hidden semantic representation in the target ASR model to conduct Chinese dialects discrimination. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark Chinese dialects corpora.

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

VideoSketcher: Sequential Sketch Generation Using Video Model Priors

Sketching is inherently sequential: strokes are drawn progressively to explore and refine ideas. Yet most generative approaches treat sketches as static images, ignoring the temporal process underlying creative exploration. Modeling this sequential structure remains challenging: prior methods either rely on large-scale human-drawn datasets with limited diversity, or use large language models (LLMs) to produce drawing instructions, often at the cost of visual fidelity. We present VideoSketcher, a method for generating high-quality sketching processes by adapting pretrained text-to-video diffusion models to the sparse, continuous nature of sketch formation. Our key insight is that LLMs and video diffusion models offer complementary strengths: LLMs act as semantic planners that decompose concepts into step-by-step instructions, while video diffusion models serve as powerful "renderers" that translate them into temporally coherent sketch sequences. We introduce a two-stage fine-tuning strategy that decouples temporal structure from visual appearance: stroke ordering is learned from synthetic shape compositions, while style is distilled from as few as seven hand-drawn examples. Despite minimal supervision, our method can generate diverse, high-quality sequential sketches that faithfully follow specified drawing orders. Our framework naturally extends to brush style control and autoregressive generation, supporting artistic applications.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

The Geometry of Admissible Short Selling in Discrete-Time Stochastic Portfolio Theory

arXiv:2606.11191v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While discrete-time Stochastic Portfolio Theory (SPT) provides a robust framework for market analysis, existing work on functional generation has predominantly focused on long-only portfolios defined on the entire unit simplex. This paper extends the geometric framework of functional generation to the broader class of bankruptcy-proof long-short portfolios defined on local market state spaces. We establish that, within this admissible setting, pseudo-arbitrage is fully characterized by the concavity of the generating function on the market state space, thereby relaxing the usual global domain requirement. A central contribution of this work is a geometric characterization of the short-selling mechanism. We prove that the presence of short selling is equivalent to the negativity of the maximal concave extension of the generating potential. This phenomenon is linked to the steepness of the logarithmic gradient as the market approaches a zero boundary nested inside the simplex. To systematically exploit this mechanism, we introduce the barycentric scaling transformation, a constructive methodology that maps classical long-only generating functions onto restricted domains to engineer admissible strategies with controlled short-selling exposure. Finally, through the analysis of specific shrunken portfolios, we identify a geometric phase transition: under suitable boundary conditions, admissible strategies exhibit a long-only core and a short-selling region in a qualitative sense (without asserting an exact partition of the state space). This provides a unified geometric perspective on relative arbitrage beyond the long-only constraint.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Construction of ergodic IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$

arXiv:2506.10476v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove the existence of infinite-volume IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ , with $d \geq 2$, based on a multi-source IDLA protocol. Unlike IDLA aggregates, the laws of the IDLA forests studied here depend on the trajectories of particles, and then do not satisfy the famous Abelian property. Their existence is due to a stabilization result (Theorem 1.1, our main result) that we establish using percolation tools. Although the sources are infinitely many, we also prove that each of them play the same role in the building procedure, which results in an ergodicity property for the IDLA forests (Theorem 1.2).

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Decision-Driven Geosteering Under Uncertainty: A Unified Framework for Sequential Decision Optimization

arXiv:2606.17331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geosteering requires navigating a well trajectory through an unknown geological configuration, while sequentially updating decisions based on indirect measurements acquired during drilling. This work presents an uncertainty-aware geosteering framework that tightly integrates particle filtering for probabilistic subsurface interpretation with value-based reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making. Geological uncertainty ahead of the drill bit is represented explicitly through a particle filter (PF), enabling belief-informed control rather than deterministic trajectory correction. The framework couples PF belief updates with belief-informed decision policies and evaluates three decision-making options that operate under identical uncertainty representations: an interpretable Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) scheme, a Deep Q-learning baseline, and a Dual Deep Reinforcement Learning (Dual DRL) architecture trained with a target Q-network scheme for stability, using a dueling (value/advantage) decomposition for Q-value parameterization. Beyond final placement performance, we assess policy behavior using stability-oriented metrics that quantify steering smoothness over time, providing additional operational insight into how decision policies respond as uncertainty evolves. The framework is integrated with an API for validation within an industrial geosteering simulator under realistic measurement noise and drilling constraints. Using identical geological realizations, operational limits, and reward definitions across methods, the experiments provide a controlled and high-fidelity evaluation of how alternative decision policies behave throughout the drilling process, rather than evaluating performance solely from the final well trajectory.

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

Fast Non-Episodic Finite-Horizon RL with K-Step Lookahead Thresholding

arXiv:2602.00781v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online reinforcement learning in non-episodic, finite-horizon MDPs remains underexplored and is challenged by the need to estimate returns to a fixed terminal time. Existing infinite-horizon methods, which often rely on discounted contraction, do not naturally account for this fixed-horizon structure. We introduce a modified Q-function: rather than targeting the full-horizon, we learn a K-step lookahead Q-function that truncates planning to the next K steps. To further improve sample efficiency, we introduce a thresholding mechanism: actions are selected only when their estimated K-step lookahead value exceeds a time-varying threshold. We provide an efficient tabular learning algorithm for this novel objective, proving it achieves fast finite-sample convergence: it achieves minimax optimal constant regret for $K=1$ and $\mathcal{O}(\max((K-1),C_{K-1})\sqrt{SAT\log(T)})$ regret for any $K \geq 2$. We numerically evaluate the performance of our algorithm under the objective of maximizing reward. Our implementation adaptively increases K over time, balancing lookahead depth against estimation variance. Empirical results demonstrate superior cumulative rewards over state-of-the-art tabular RL methods across synthetic MDPs and RL environments: JumpRiverswim, FrozenLake and AnyTrading. Code is provided on \href{https://github.com/jamie01713/K-Step-Lookahead}{github}.

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

Hidden in Plain Sight: Benchmarking Agent Safety Against Decomposition Attacks with DECOMPBENCH

arXiv:2606.13994v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based Agents are becoming increasingly capable and widely deployed, creating growing incentives for adversarial misuse in the real-world. A key emerging threat is Decomposition Attacks [glukhov2024breach, jones2024adversaries] in which a harmful task is broken into simpler, benign subtasks that evade safety mechanisms when executed separately but cumulatively fulfill the malicious intent. Although recent benchmarks assess agent safety in multi-turn and multi-tool-use settings, they do not explicitly capture this form of decompositional misuse and may not represent realistic adversarial execution flows. To this end, we introduce DeCompBench, a benchmark designed specifically to evaluate agentic safety under decomposition attacks. DeCompBench is created with a decomposition-by-design principle using a graphical framework and enables harmful task decomposition into individually benign and executable subtasks with realistic workflows. Our experiments using a custom decomposer show that state-of-the-art agents exhibit high refusal rates on monolithic harmful tasks, but significantly lower refusal rates on their decomposed variants, while often inadvertently fulfilling the adversarial objectives. These findings underscore the need for safety evaluations against decomposition attacks and corresponding defenses. Our dataset is publicly available and can be found at https://huggingface.co/datasets/decompositionbench/DeCompBench.

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

X-MADAM-RAG: Diagnosing and Handling Chinese-English Evidence Conflict in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems may receive evidence that is not merely noisy but mutually contradictory. This issue becomes particularly salient in multilingual settings, where retrieved Chinese and English evidence may support incompatible answer candidates. We study this problem through X-RAMDocs-ZHEN, a controlled Chinese-English benchmark derived from RAMDocs for diagnosing evidence conflict in RAG. The benchmark contains 300 examples across six balanced conditions, including monolingual support, bilingual agreement, reversed conflict directions, and conflict with optional noise. We further examine X-MADAM-RAG, an interpretable pipeline that decomposes evidence handling into per-document candidate extraction, visible-evidence repair, deterministic candidate grouping, and conflict-aware aggregation. On the original controlled benchmark with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, X-MADAM-RAG achieves 0.9667 strict accuracy and 0.9767 conflict-aware success, outperforming an evidence-normalized single-call baseline. However, a zero-call rule-only extractor reaches 1.0000 on the same benchmark, revealing strong template regularity. To probe this limitation, we construct a deterministic naturalized stress test that removes explicit answer templates while preserving candidate strings. On its 100-sample subset, rule-only extraction falls to 0.0000, but X-MADAM-RAG also drops to 0.3000 strict accuracy, below both naive and evidence-normalized baselines. A privileged oracle remains perfect, indicating that document-level extraction is the main bottleneck. These findings position X-RAMDocs-ZHEN and X-MADAM-RAG as diagnostic tools for controlled evidence conflict rather than as evidence of general hallucination detection or robustness to natural retrieval.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SAGE: Scalable AI Governance & Evaluation

arXiv:2602.07840v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating relevance in large-scale search systems is fundamentally constrained by the governance gap between nuanced, resource-constrained human oversight and the high-throughput requirements of production systems. While traditional approaches rely on engagement proxies or sparse manual review, these methods often fail to capture the full scope of high-impact relevance failures. We present SAGE (Scalable AI Governance \& Evaluation), a framework that operationalizes high-quality human product judgment as a scalable evaluation signal. At the core of SAGE is a bidirectional calibration loop where natural-language Policy, curated Precedent, and an LLM Surrogate Judge co-evolve. SAGE systematically resolves semantic ambiguities and misalignments, transforming subjective relevance judgment into an executable, multi-dimensional rubric with near human-level agreement. To bridge the gap between frontier model reasoning and industrial-scale inference, we apply teacher-student distillation to transfer high-fidelity judgments into compact student surrogates at 92$\times$ lower cost. Deployed within LinkedIn Search ecosystems, SAGE guided model iteration through simulation-driven development, distilling policy-aligned models for online serving and enabling rapid offline evaluation. In production, it powered policy oversight that measured ramped model variants and detected regressions invisible to engagement metrics. Collectively, these drove a 0.25\% lift in LinkedIn daily active users.

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

OSGuard: A Benchmark for Safety in Computer-Use Agents

arXiv:2606.15034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-use agents are increasingly evaluated by whether they complete realistic desktop and web tasks. However, task success alone can miss failures in which an agent reaches the nominal goal through an unsafe shortcut. We introduce OSGuard, a dual-granularity benchmark suite for evaluating safety in computer-use agents under benign, unchanged user instructions. OSGuard contains an action-level benchmark for local guardrail decisions and a risk-augmented execution suite for end-to-end evaluation. The action-level benchmark consists of contextualized proposed actions labeled as allowed, unrelated, or unsafe, each judged relative to the original instruction and current interface state. The execution suite contains manually constructed OSWorld-derived task variants in which the original task remains achievable, but the environment is modified to introduce latent hazards such as destructive overwrites, etc. Each variant is paired with augmented evaluators that retain the original task-success criterion while adding explicit state-based safety invariants, allowing us to distinguish safe completions from unsafe completions that satisfy the nominal task objective. Our experimental results on OSGuard show that current multimodal guardrails can perform well on isolated action judgments, while risk-augmented execution exposes remaining gaps between local oversight and reliable end-to-end safety. This dual-granularity design enables more precise diagnosis of whether models can both recognize unsafe proposed actions and improve full-task safety when deployed as guardrails.

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

Distributed General-Purpose Agent Networks: Architecture, Key Mechanisms, and Prototypes

arXiv:2606.17368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models have accelerated the transition from passive conversational assistants to autonomous agents that can understand goals, plan actions, invoke tools, and execute multi-step tasks. Yet the capability of a single agent remains constrained by its local data, tool permissions, runtime environment, and governance boundary. This paper studies distributed general-purpose agent networks: open peer-to-peer networks in which heterogeneous agents deployed on personal devices, edge nodes, or autonomous computing environments can discover one another, establish trust, negotiate cooperation rules, and execute open-ended tasks. We argue that such networks cannot be obtained by simply combining existing peer-to-peer overlays with conventional multi-agent systems. Unlike traditional P2P networks, agent networks must propagate semantic declarations about intentions, capabilities, states, and cooperation constraints. We therefore propose a layered architecture centered on a protocol adaptation layer that connects upper-level task semantics with lower-level network operations. Based on this architecture, the paper identifies three core mechanism problems: semantic announcement propagation for collaborator discovery, verifiable identity and multi-topic reputation for cooperation governance, and semantic-gradient mechanism design for open task execution. For each problem, we present a technical route, including bodyless gossip with sequential logs, BAID-based identity binding with MG-EigenTrust reputation, and a Stackelberg-style mechanism-generation loop driven by semantic attribution feedback. We further report prototype overhead results for BAID-style tiered verification and mechanism-level simulations of MG-EigenTrust under cross-topic disguise-collusion attacks. The resulting framework provides a system-level foundation for open, trustworthy, and scalable agent collaboration.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Beyond Classification: A Cough Regression Benchmark for Respiratory Acoustic Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.15436v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Respiratory acoustic foundation models (FMs) excel at cough classification, yet their ability to predict continuous health quantities from cough audio remains largely unexplored, despite the clinical value of passive age, BMI, and disease probability estimation in settings where physical measurements are unavailable. We introduce the multi-model, multi-target cough regression benchmark evaluating five FMs (OPERA-CT, OPERA-CE, OPERA-GT, HeAR, M2D+Resp) across six targets on three datasets under subject-disjoint protocols, comparing linear, MLP-small, and full MLP regression heads. MLP-small beats the mean-predictor baseline on all tasks and linear probing in 23 of 30 model x task cases, with full MLP overfitting on small clinical data but recovering on larger sets, revealing a dataset size x head-capacity trade-off. HeAR leads within-dataset age regression on Coswara (9.12 yr MAE); its CIDRZ result is excluded from headline claims owing to possible HeAR-CIDRZ pretraining overlap. OPERA-GT is favored over OPERA-CT on age in all three datasets, with the CIDRZ margin within seed variance, extending a generative-pretraining advantage from breath to cough. HeAR and M2D+Resp reach near-full performance at N = 50 samples while OPERA models require N = 400. Cross-dataset transfer is strongly asymmetric as large diverse data generalises to small clinical populations (CoughVID to CIDRZ: -0.17 yr) but not vice versa (CIDRZ to Coswara: +2.43 yr, +26.6%).

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

The clinical utility of functional testing in fibroblasts to diagnose primary mitochondrial disease

Genome sequencing of the heterogeneous primary mitochondrial disorders (PMD) frequently reveals variants of uncertain significance that require functional tests for diagnosis, and does not identify variants in all patients. We analyzed mitochondrial enzyme assays, blue native polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (BN-PAGE) with in-gel activity staining, complex I assembly blot, and select protein abundances in fibroblasts of a case series of 204 PMD patients divided into functional classes, in comparison to 51 controls and 53 differential diagnostic conditions. Overall, sensitivity and specificity for respiratory chain enzyme assays were 46% and 93% respectively, for BN-PAGE 40% and 98%, for complex I assembly assay 49% and 99%. The overall sensitivity of all tests was 76%, specificity 93%, with positive predictive value 96% and negative predictive value 67%. Categories with high sensitivity were isolated complex deficiencies, nuclear DNA-encoded mitochondrial protein synthesis defects, co-factor defects, and mitochondrial amino-acyl-tRNA synthetase conditions when aided by protein abundance. Mitochondrial DNA mutations and maintenance disorders showed poor sensitivities. Secondary dysfunctions were rare. A complete battery of functional tests showed strong diagnostic clinical utility in fibroblasts.

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

DeepForestVisionV2: Ecology-Driven Taxonomy Expansion for Camera-Trap Monitoring in African Tropical Forests

Camera-trap monitoring in African tropical forests increasingly extends beyond closed-canopy interiors to riverbanks, clearings, and park edges. Among available open tools for African forest camera-trap classification, DeepForestVision is the only one providing a matched offline workflow for both photographs and videos, and previous work showed that it outperformed other available baselines on a comparable benchmark. However, it was designed for closed-canopy, ground-level forest interiors and uses a 35-class prediction space that becomes too coarse when deployments encounter arboreal primates, birds, semi-aquatic taxa, or human-associated confounders such as livestock. We present DeepForestVisionV2, an ecology-driven expansion from 35 to 64 prediction classes (61 animal classes plus human, vehicle, and blank) designed to address three recurrent deployment gradients: vertical stratification, scene openness, and anthropogenic interfaces. DeepForestVisionV2 retains the same offline workflow and is trained on 1,535,010 photographs and 243,354 videos from multi-country African tropical-forest projects. Evaluation combines a cross-country cropped-photo validation set, used to assess robustness across sites and camera-trap settings, with three held-out Uganda video benchmarks spanning the targeted gradients. On the validation set, DeepForestVisionV2 reaches 0.86 accuracy, 0.82 macro-F1, and 0.81 balanced accuracy. On the deployment benchmarks, it preserves or improves baseline accuracy despite its harder classification task, while increasing the number of identified taxa from 22 to 29 in forest-interior videos and from 4 to 9 at riverbanks. In the park-edge use case, it raises accuracy from 0.62 to 0.86 and reduces false alarms from 11 to 0. These results show that DeepForestVisionV2 materially improves field utility while preserving robustness across sites, habitats, and camera-trap settings.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Why heritage sites are at risk in a warming world — and how to save them

As rising seas and intensifying disasters threaten historic sites worldwide, new ways to understand, preserve and adapt these places are needed urgently. As rising seas and intensifying disasters threaten historic sites worldwide, new ways to understand, preserve and adapt these places are needed urgently.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Looped World Models

Current world models face a fundamental tension: faithful long-horizon simulation demands deep computation, but deeper models are expensive to deploy and prone to compounding errors. We resolve this by introducing Looped World Models (LoopWM), which are the first looped architectures for world modelling. Our method iteratively refines latent environment states through a parameter-shared transformer block. This yield up to 100x parameter efficiency over conventional approaches with adaptive computation that automatically scales depth to match the complexity of each prediction step. Orthogonal to scaling model size and training data, LoopWM establishes iterative latent depth as a new scaling axis for world simulation, which might significantly push the community forward.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Polarization-Resolved Photon Statistics of Cavity Quantum Materials

arXiv:2606.11550v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: By forming hybrid light-matter states, optical cavities offer a route for engineering material properties, however, unambiguously probing the effects of light-matter coupling remains difficult. Here, we show that the polarization-resolved statistics of photons transmitted through a cavity, measurable via $g^{(2)}$, provide one such diagnostic. By relating $g^{(2)}$ to matter correlation functions such as the Raman structure factor, we link photon bunching and antibunching to material properties. By applying this method to the stripy-to-antiferromagnetic transition in the Kitaev-Heisenberg spin model, we find that polarization-dependent patterns of bunching and antibunching encode the magnetic point-group symmetries of each phase and characterize the behavior at the phase boundary. Finally, we predict measuring $g^{(2)}$ for output photon pairs polarized orthogonal to the input field will isolate higher-order light-matter scattering processes that probe higher-order material correlations.