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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Objective Quality Assessment of Point Clouds Using Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity

The unstructured and irregular nature of points poses a significant challenge for accurate point cloud quality assessment (PCQA), particularly in establishing accurate perceptual feature correspondence. To tackle this, we propose the Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity Measurement (MS-ISSM). Unlike traditional point-to-point matching, MS-ISSM utilizes radial basis function (RBF) to represent local features continuously, transforming distortion measurement into a comparison of implicit function coefficients. This approach effectively circumvents matching errors inherent in irregular data. Additionally, we propose a ResGrouped-MLP quality assessment network, which robustly maps multi-scale feature differences to perceptual scores. The network architecture departs from traditional flat multi-layer perceptron (MLP) by adopting a grouped encoding strategy integrated with residual blocks and channel-wise attention mechanisms. This hierarchical design allows the model to preserve the distinct physical semantics of luma, chroma, and geometry while adaptively focusing on the most salient distortion features across High, Medium, and Low scales. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MS-ISSM outperforms state-of-the-art metrics in both reliability and generalization. The source code is available at: https://github.com/ZhangChen2022/MS-ISSM.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Nocturnal Respiratory Rate and Variability Predict Long-term Mortality in Stable Outpatients with Cardiovascular Disease

Background: Respiratory rate (RR) predicts short-term mortality in acute care settings, yet its prognostic significance in clinically stable outpatients remains poorly defined. Objectives: To determine whether the median and variability of nocturnal respiratory rate (NRR) are independently associated with long-term cardiovascular and all-cause mortality in outpatients with cardiovascular disease. Methods: We analyzed overnight chest belt waveforms from elective polysomnography in 5,679 older adults with cardiovascular disease enrolled in the Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS). NRR was quantified at 30-second resolution, and per-subject median NRR and within-night variability (standard deviation) were derived. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and Cox proportional hazards models were used to evaluate associations with cardiovascular and all-cause mortality over 3-year and 15-year follow-up periods, adjusting for demographic characteristics, cardiopulmonary comorbidities, and sleep apnea severity. Results: Higher median NRR and greater NRR variability were each associated with increased cardiovascular and all-cause mortality. Combining these metrics identified a high-risk group characterized by elevated median and high variability of NRR, with approximately five-fold higher 3-year all-cause mortality compared with a low-risk group; this association remained significant in Cox models (unadjusted HR: 2.61; 95% CI: 1.65, 4.14; p

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

On-Manifold Variational Learning with Heat-Kernel Priors

Learning unsupervised representations of medical imaging cohorts can reveal clinically meaningful prototypes without expert labels, which are often noisy and fail to capture true pathological heterogeneity. However, existing deep latent-variable models estimate Gaussian mixture priors via Euclidean averaging, producing prototypes that drift off the curved data manifold and degenerate as the number of sub-populations grows. We propose a manifold-anchored variational framework built on a geometry-aware Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, whose M-step selects each sub-population prototype as the graph medoid with the highest diffusion centrality on a heat-kernel-weighted latent graph, ensuring that every prototype remains on-manifold. A Dirichlet energy regularizer enforces geometric smoothness of the latent space, and a per-sub-population uncertainty score enables label-free quality assessment. \rev{The manifold-anchored EM is a general-purpose geometric tool that extends standard EM and applies readily to other latent-variable models beyond this setting.} On cardiac scar and brain MRI benchmarks, our framework attains the highest accuracy among all compared methods, produces the sharpest prototypes reported to date, and remains stable at large sub-population counts where all baselines degenerate.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

CineOrchestra: Unified Entity-Centric Conditioning for Cinematic Video Generation

Cinematic video depicts multiple subjects acting or interacting at specific moments, captured with deliberate camera movement, and stitched together by shot transitions. Together, these elements demand a level of fine-grained control beyond current text-to-video models. Existing work addresses each axis in isolation: multi-subject personalization, temporal control, multi-shot synthesis, or camera control; no prior framework jointly integrates all four. We present CineOrchestra, a unified video diffusion model that controls subjects, events, cameras, and shot transitions simultaneously. Our key insight is that these heterogeneous cinematic elements share a fundamental structure: each is an entity acting over a specific temporal interval, which can therefore all be expressed through one shared structure of entity-centric conditioning primitives, augmented with reference images for visual entities. This formulation reduces the architectural challenge to a single positional encoding problem, which we solve with two parameter-free coordinated rotary embeddings: (a) an interval-sampled temporal RoPE that yields consistent attention behavior across events of dramatically varying duration, and (b) a 2D entity-temporal cross-attention RoPE that disambiguates per-entity conditions and routes each to its corresponding spatiotemporal region. On two new benchmarks, CineOrchestra outperforms six per-axis specialists on dense caption following and shot-transition timing, with consistent gains in a pairwise user study and component ablations.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

BioMedVR: Confusion-Aware Mixture-of-Prompt Experts for Biomedical Visual Reprogramming

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have demonstrated strong generalization across natural-image domains. However, adapting these models to biomedical imaging is non-trivial: full-model fine-tuning is computationally expensive, while medical data are often scarce and exhibit subtle, fine-grained inter-class differences, making parameter-efficient adaptation particularly critical. Visual Reprogramming (VR) offers a parameter-efficient alternative by injecting learnable perturbations into the input space, but existing VR approaches for VLMs mainly focus on positive class prompts and overlook confusing negatives, leading to miscalibrated predictions in fine-grained medical scenarios. We present BioMedVR, the first VR-based framework for biomedical imaging, enabling few-shot adaptation of pretrained VLMs through compact learnable VR modules. To mitigate class confusion, we introduce a Confusion Minimization Mechanism that leverages LLM-generated confusion-aware attributes together with a Confusion-Suppression Loss to explicitly reduce false-positive alignment. Moreover, the designed Mixture-of-Prompt Experts combines a positive expert for main-class discrimination and a negative expert for confusion suppression, balanced via adaptive gating. Extensive experiments on 18 datasets, including 11 biomedical datasets and 7 natural image benchmarks, demonstrate that BioMedVR achieves superior accuracy and generalization, effectively bridging VR and VLMs in biomedical domains.

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

A Formal Framework for Declarative Agentic AI in Business Process Analysis

arXiv:2606.15291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI opens new opportunities for automating Business Process (BP), enabling autonomous decision-making and dynamic adaptation. However, realising this potential requires BP entities and their interactions to be defined with formal precision. This paper presents a formal framework for Agentic BP analysis through the AGO methodology. AGO captures the modelling perspective in terms of who is acting (Agents), why it is carried out (Goals), and what the relevant entities are (Objects). Grounded in set theory and mathematical logic, we formally define the AGO entity types and their interactions, organising all definitions into a BP Knowledge Base (BPKB). The resulting BPKB supports structured querying, incremental updates, and automatic generation of BP workflows, while ensuring soundness and completeness of the derived paths.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Deep-Unfolded Coordination

arXiv:2606.19920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distributed optimization is a highly scalable and structurally transparent technique to solve multi-agent robotics problems; however, such methods often suffer from the need for highly-specialized, problem-specific hyperparameter tunings. In this work, we propose Deep Coordinator, a deep-unfolding framework that learns to dynamically adjust the hyperparameters of ADMM-DDP, a popular distributed solver for robotics tasks, at solve-time in response to optimizer performance. Our architecture consists of unrolling a fixed number of ADMM-DDP iterations into a neural network with learnable functions between layers mapping the optimizer state to the next hyperparameters. To the best of our knowledge, Deep Coordinator is the first deep-unfolding framework to adapt the penalty parameters of a non-convex optimizer at solve-time; we show that the mainstream supervised approach can yield degenerate solutions when training such models, and propose an unsupervised learning scheme. On simulations with fleets of cars and quadrotors, Deep Coordinator produces trajectories of comparable quality 6.18-9.44x faster than conventional solvers. Furthermore, Deep Coordinator retains its performance benefits when deployed to systems up to 8x larger than trained on.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Association of Genetic Liability to Psychiatric Disorders with Peripheral Metabolic Dysregulation

Importance: Individuals with psychiatric disorders face elevated cardiometabolic risk which is linked to increased mortality. The extent to which this reflects shared pathogenesis or the downstream effects of illness and treatment remains poorly understood. Objective: To characterize the direct pleiotropic effects of psychiatric genetic liability on circulating metabolites and aggregate cardiometabolic risk, independent of psychiatric diagnosis and psychotropic medication use. Design: Cohort study. Setting: Mass General Brigham Biobank (MGBB). Participants: MGBB participants with metabolomic profiling, genomic data, and linked electronic health records. Exposures: Genetic liability to nine psychiatric disorders quantified using polygenic risk scores (PRS): attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anorexia nervosa (ANO), anxiety disorder (ANX), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), bipolar disorder (BD), major depressive disorder (MDD), PTSD, schizophrenia (SCZ), and substance use disorder (SUD). Main Outcomes and Measures: 249 circulating metabolites and four metabolomic risk scores (MRS) for type 2 diabetes, myocardial infarction, ischemic stroke, and vascular dementia. PRS-metabolite associations were estimated using nested models adjusting for lifetime psychiatric diagnosis and psychotropic medication use. Results: Across 25,290 participants, we identified 604 significant PRS-metabolite associations (Bonferroni p< 1.36 x 10-4), of which 89% persisted after adjustment for lifetime diagnosis and medication use, suggesting that the direct genetic effects on metabolism are largely independent of illness or treatment. PRS for MDD, PTSD, and ADHD showed the most extensive dysregulation, with a transdiagnostic pattern of elevated lipids and systemic inflammation, specifically triglycerides ({beta} = 0.04 to 0.05, all p< 4.4 x10-13) and glycoprotein acetyls ({beta} = 0.05, all p< 2.2 x10-16). Notably, PRS for SCZ and BD showed minimal metabolite dysregulation despite having the strongest association with their target diagnoses. PRS for MDD, PTSD, ADHD, and SUD were associated with increased MRS across cardiometabolic conditions ({beta} = 0.03 to 0.08, all p< 2.1 x10-4). Sensitivity analyses controlling for BMI or excluding participants without any psychiatric history (N: 21,305 and 11,150, respectively) showed a similar pattern. Conclusions and Relevance: Psychiatric genetic liability is associated with systemic metabolic dysregulation independent of illness onset or treatment, supporting a partially pleiotropic basis for psychiatric-cardiometabolic comorbidity.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

CellOS: Learning a World Model of Cellular State through Joint Embedding Prediction

Foundation models learned from single-cell transcriptomes are central to the prospect of AI virtual cell that can represent, query and predict cellular state. However, most current single-cell foundation models learn from a single view of gene expression and are optimized primarily through reconstruction or next-token prediction. As a result, they capture expression abundance but can-not explicitly reconcile complementary views of cellular state. Here we present CellOS, a multi-view foundation model that learns cellular representations from paired expression and perception views. CellOS integrates complementary views through a scalable three-stage training strategy that combines causal cell-sentence language modelling, function-preserving dense-to-mixture-of-experts expansion and latent-space alignment via an LLM-JEPA objective. Using this framework, we trained a 12-billion-parameter model on 390.5 million single-cell transcriptomes. Across diverse benchmarks spanning cell-state annotation, batch integration and perturbation-response prediction, CellOS consistently outperformed state-of-the-art single-cell foundation models in cell-state annotation and perturbation-response prediction while preserving robust batch integration. Together, these results suggest that predictive alignment between complementary cellular views provides a scalable path toward representation-centric cellular world models and transferable AI virtual cells.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Unifying Quantum Smoothing Theories with Extended Retrodiction

arXiv:2510.08447v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Estimating the state of an open quantum system monitored over time requires incorporating information from past measurements (filtering) and, for improved accuracy, also from future measurements (smoothing). While classical smoothing is well understood within a Bayesian framework, its quantum generalization has been challenging, leading to distinct and seemingly incompatible approaches. In this work, we demonstrate that quantum state smoothing hinges on a uniquely quantum feature: the fundamental dependence of retrodiction on prior correlations. We introduce auxiliary systems into the prior belief to capture correlations formed during preparation and evolution and develop a comprehensive framework for quantum state smoothing based on extended Bayesian retrodiction. This framework identifies all previous approaches as different choices of the extended prior, and naturally extends it to other choices that have not been considered before. We also give an information-theoretic characterization of the choices of prior, in terms of the average entropy of the smoothed states. Our results establish quantum state smoothing as a fundamentally retrodictive process just like classical smoothing, with proper quantum features clearly identified.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

DynamicPTQ: Mitigating Activation Quantization Collapse via Residual-Stream Dynamics

arXiv:2606.12487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training quantization (PTQ) is essential for efficient large language model inference, but reliably quantizing activations remains challenging when weights, activations, and KV caches are all quantized to 4-bit precision. A key difficulty lies in massive activations, whose extreme values dominate the activation range and amplify quantization errors. State-of-the-art methods mainly mitigate massive activations through transformation-based smoothing, such as orthogonal rotations and affine scaling, but overlook the cross-layer dynamics of the residual stream. In this paper, we show that massive activations emerge and disappear in a phase-wise pattern across network depth, triggering large residual changes. These changes cause newly injected layer-wise updates to dominate the 4-bit quantization scale and weaken historical residual information. To characterize this behavior, we introduce Jump Ratio and Historical Feature SNR. This suggests that static transformation-based smoothing cannot fully resolve dynamic quantization instability caused by cross-layer residual changes. Based on this analysis, we propose DynamicPTQ, a Dynamic Post-Training Quantization policy for phase-aware mixed-precision activation quantization. DynamicPTQ identifies quantization-sensitive layers from residual-stream dynamics and assigns 8-bit activation precision only to these layers, while keeping weights, KV caches, and other activations in 4-bit precision. It can be directly integrated with strong PTQ baselines such as QuaRot, SpinQuant, and FlatQuant. Experiments on LLaMA-2 and LLaMA-3 show that DynamicPTQ consistently improves perplexity and zero-shot QA performance under W4A4KV4 quantization, while achieving 1.05 to 1.07 times throughput improvement with modest memory overhead. These results demonstrate a practical path toward robust low-bit LLM inference.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Confidence-Aware Automated Assessment of Student-Drawn Scientific Models

arXiv:2606.20264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Student-generated drawings are widely used in science education to assess learners' conceptual understanding in modeling-based tasks aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). However, scoring such drawings requires expert human judgment to interpret complex visual representations, making large-scale assessment costly to implement and sustain in classroom settings. In this work, we study automated scoring of student-generated scientific drawings using a vision-based model. We evaluate a Vision Transformer (ViT) with parameter-efficient adaptation and propose a confidence-aware scoring framework that derives response-level confidence from test-time predictive distributions. This confidence signal enables selective automation by scoring high-confidence responses automatically while deferring uncertain cases for human review. Experiments on six NGSS-aligned middle school assessment items show that the proposed approach improves scoring reliability while supporting a practical trade-off between automated coverage and scoring risk, highlighting the value of confidence-aware methods for trustworthy educational assessment.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

BehaviorBench: Benchmarking Foundation Models for Behavioral Science Tasks

Foundation models have been increasingly applied to behavioral science domains such as psychology, sociology, and economics. While these models show promise in individual tasks such as survey response prediction and human-subject experiment simulation, there remains no systematic understanding of how well they perform across diverse behavioral science tasks, contexts, and populations. We introduce BehaviorBench, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates foundation models along four core capabilities: (1) behavior prediction and simulation, (2) strategic decision-making, (3) subject-trait inference, and (4) behavioral knowledge application. Crucially, BehaviorBench evaluates model outputs at both the individual and distributional levels, capturing not only per-subject accuracy but also population-level alignment, an essential requirement for behavioral validity. Leveraging the tasks in BehaviorBench, we further develop Be.FM-1.5, extending the Be.FM family of behavioral foundation models fine-tuned on behavioral data. Our results reveal a considerable gap: proprietary general-purpose models excel at individual-level prediction and knowledge-intensive tasks, whereas behavioral foundation models, fine-tuned on behavioral data, achieve substantially stronger distributional alignment. Notably, Be.FM-1.5 leads on distributional metrics and remains competitive on individual-level metrics, suggesting that proper behavioral adaptation can close the gap. Our results highlight the importance of distributional evaluation, establish BehaviorBench as a foundation for developing and assessing behaviorally aligned AI systems, and demonstrate Be.FM-1.5's potential for a broad range of behavioral science studies. Our BehaviorBench and Be.FM-1.5 models can be accessed via https://umich-foreseer.github.io/behaviorbench/.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Bridging Modal Isolation in Interleaved Thinking: Supervising Modality Transitions via Stepwise Reinforcement

Interleaved thinking, where a unified multimodal model alternates between textual reasoning and visual generation, has shown promise on spatial and physical tasks. However, in complex long-chain scenarios, we identify a fundamental failure mode: generated images diverge from the textual context while subsequent text ignores the visual evidence, causing the two modalities to alternate without genuinely informing each other. We term this Modal Isolation and attribute it to compounding information loss at modality boundaries. We decompose each reasoning cycle into atomic operations and define modality transition loss, quantifying cross-modal hallucination (text-to-image) and visual utilization deficit (image-to-text) at each boundary. We propose MoTiF (Modality Tiransition Fidelity), a two-stage training framework that directly optimizes these transitions: Reflective SFT trains the model to detect and recover from erroneous visual outputs; Flow-GRPO improves image generation fidelity via reinforcement learning. All training signals in MoTiF derive from transition-level fidelity rather than end-task accuracy. Across four visual puzzle benchmarks, this transition-level supervision substantially improves both cross-modal coherence and final task accuracy. The results demonstrate that effective interleaved reasoning requires explicit structural supervision at modality boundaries, not merely scaling or end-task optimization.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Code-Switching Reveals Language Anchoring in Multilingual LLMs

Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly expected to handle Code-Switched (CS) inputs, yet mixing languages frequently degrades performance relative to source- or target-language monolingual counterparts. To understand this degradation, we use grammar-forced CS as a controlled diagnostic setting for locating CS representations relative to their source and target counterparts. We introduce Anchor Bias, a geometric measure that quantifies language anchoring, whether a CS hidden state aligns closer to its source or target language counterpart. Across diverse MLLMs, Anchor Bias reveals a consistent grammar-frame effect: source-framed CS stays source-anchored, whereas target-framed CS shifts target-ward and shows larger Question Answering (QA) degradation. Motivated by this representational pattern, we propose CANVAS (Contextual Anchor-based Neural Vector Alignment Steering), an inference-time intervention that extracts a source-side canvas from the input and softly steers target-language hidden states toward the source anchor during prefill. CANVAS consistently recovers QA F1 across MLLMs and CS conditions, showing that internal anchoring signals provide an actionable target for mitigating CS inference failures.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Secondary terms for first moments of Selmer groups of twists of elliptic curves over global function fields

作者:

arXiv:2606.14274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let $E$ be a non-isotrivial elliptic curve over a global function field $\mathbb{F}_q(t)$ of characteristic coprime to $2$ and $3$. Under some explicit conditions, we determine the secondary terms for the first moments of prime Selmer groups of cyclic prime twist families of $E$ over $\mathbb{F}_q(t)$.

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

LVLMs and Humans Ground Differently in Referential Communication

For generative AI agents to partner effectively with human users, the ability to accurately predict human intent is critical. But this ability to collaborate remains limited by a critical deficit: an inability to model common ground. We present a referential communication experiment with a factorial design involving director-matcher pairs (human-human, human-AI, AI-human, and AI-AI) that interact with multiple turns in repeated rounds to match pictures of objects not associated with any obvious lexicalized labels. We show that LVLMs cannot interactively generate and resolve referring expressions in a way that enables smooth communication, a crucial skill that underlies human language use. We release our corpus of 356 dialogues (89 pairs over 4 rounds each) along with the online pipeline for data collection and the tools for analyzing accuracy, efficiency, and lexical overlap.

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

Regression Language Models for Code

We study code-to-metric regression: predicting numeric outcomes of code executions, a challenging task due to the open-ended nature of programming languages. While prior methods have resorted to heavy and domain-specific feature engineering, we show that a single unified Regression Language Model (RLM) using a frozen LLM encoder can simultaneously predict directly from text, (i) the memory footprint of code across multiple high-level languages such as Python and C++, (ii) the latency of Triton GPU kernels, and (iii) the accuracy and speed of trained neural networks represented in ONNX. In particular, a relatively small 300M parameter RLM based on T5Gemma, obtains >0.9 Spearman-rank on competitive programming submissions from APPS, and a single unified model achieves >0.5 average Spearman-rank across 24 different programming languages from CodeNet. Furthermore, the RLM can obtain the highest average Kendall-Tau of 0.46 on five classic NAS design spaces previously dominated by graph neural networks, and simultaneously predict architecture latencies on numerous hardware platforms.

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

PaAno+: Multiscale Encoding and Cross-Variable Attention for Time Series Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2606.20055v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series anomaly detection has significant practical value for industrial and medical monitoring, as well as other critical domains. Current Transformer- and large-model-based detection approaches incur excessive computational overhead, while existing lightweight alternatives are constrained by insufficient feature extraction and inadequate modeling of dependencies across multivariate variables. To mitigate the above drawbacks, this study develops a lightweight, efficient anomaly detection model, dubbed PaAno, within the patch-oriented representation learning paradigm. In the encoder module, a multiscale feature-extraction backbone is constructed using convolutional kernels with differentiated receptive fields to capture hierarchical temporal characteristics; subsequent cross-scale adaptive attention aggregation, combined with residual connection optimization, further stabilizes feature representation learning. A cross-variable fusion attention module is embedded to explicitly characterize inter-variable correlations, empowering the model to identify anomalous patterns amid intricate operational conditions. Moreover, a novel pretext task based on temporal patch-window sorting is customized to uncover intrinsic structural properties of time series, and triplet loss is leveraged to optimize the patch embedding space for enhanced feature discrimination. Extensive experiments on the TSB-AD benchmark demonstrate that the proposed PaAno achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy on both univariate and multivariate tasks, yielding significant performance gains across evaluation metrics, including VUS-PR, relative to the original PaAno. Leveraging a compact network design, the presented model achieves favorable computational efficiency, enabling deployment on resource-limited terminals for real-time anomaly inference.

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

When Agent Automation Becomes Profitable: Quantifying and Insuring Autonomous AI Risk through Trace-Economic Underwriting

arXiv:2606.16465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents can now take irreversible actions in operational systems, but agent-caused losses are still not clearly assigned, priced, or transferred. Providers often disclaim consequential damages, users are left with uncompensated losses, and default human review limits the efficiency gains of automation. We ask when autonomous AI deployment can become economically acceptable despite failure risk. Our answer is to quantify risk at the customer-task-trace episode level and transfer it through insurance. Automation is acceptable when its expected benefit exceeds the premium, control cost, and remaining risk. This requires a defined role with bounded permissions and comparable traces. We introduce trace-economic underwriting, which maps tool-use traces to customer exposure and claimable loss, then uses this representation for pricing, control, and risk transfer. It uses deterministic economic labels rather than an LLM judge. In our trace-to-loss testbed, trace-economic pricing reduces pricing MAE from $17.7K to $569 and removes regressive cross-subsidy. A 300-trace expert audit accepts 295 labels unchanged. On 1,000 real SWE-smith traces, trace-conditioned controls reduce CVaR95 by 72%. Theorem~1 gives a finite-sample scope condition. We release code, labels, and audit sheets.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

CALIBER: Calibrating Confidence Before and After Reasoning in Language Models

Reasoning language models are increasingly asked not only to answer difficult questions, but also to estimate their likelihood of success. Existing methods typically elicit confidence only once: either before thinking or after answering. We argue that confidence in reasoning models is state-dependent: before thinking, confidence should estimate the chance of the model correctly solving the prompt, while after thinking it should predict whether the realized answer is likely to be correct. This distinction determines the appropriate supervision target: prompt-level success should supervise confidence estimates made after seeing the prompt, while individual answer-level correctness should supervise confidence estimates made after answering. We introduce CALIBER (Calibration Before and After Reasoning), which elicits both estimates and supervises each with the target matched to its information state. Under this unified protocol, CALIBER reduces Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by 52.5% over the strongest single-confidence baseline on BigMathDigits for the 7B model, while achieving the best Brier score and AUROC, and remains within 2.1 points of the best accuracy. Further, on a larger 30B model, CALIBER achieves the best ECE on BigMathDigits while remaining competitive in Brier score and AUROC. Out of distribution, it achieves the best ECE and Brier score on GPQA and TriviaQA, and remains competitive on SimpleQA. Ablations further show that this position-target alignment is most beneficial under distribution shift where it consistently reduces calibration error across all out-of-distribution benchmarks.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Utility-Constrained Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.14029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constrained MDPs (CMDPs) are a widely adopted framework for incorporating safety into RL agents; however, the framework does not support risk-sensitive constraints. This can be problematic: For example, CMDPs allow for optimal solutions that, in order to satisfy the risk-neutral constraints, mix infrequent catastrophic behaviors and frequent, overly conservative ones. Moreover, prior empirical results suggest that enforcing stricter, risk-sensitive constraints can improve performance even under risk-neutral evaluation. The natural framework to incorporate risk-sensitive constraints is utility-constrained MDPs (UCMDPs), but no practical solutions for this problem existed. In this work, we introduce a simple yet powerful methodology for UCMDPs and constrained RL. Besides allowing for risk-sensitive constraints, our framework does not require us to fix constraint limits in advance of training the agent, provided that a sensible range is known. This increases policy flexibility and, in practice, allows for adjustments to these limits at no extra training cost. Besides benefiting from the generality of the framework, our agent shows strong performance in practice, consistently matching or outperforming existing baselines in several Safety Gymnasium benchmark tasks.

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

A green solvent screening tool for emerging materials via uncertainty aware, transformer enhanced transfer learning

arXiv:2606.13060v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of solubility remains a central challenge across materials science and sustainable chemistry. In particular due to emerging technologies like organic and hybrid photovoltaics, batteries, and catalysis, solvent usage is expected to increase significantly within the coming years. Therefore, substituting solvents with greener alternatives is vital. This is where machine learning can have substantial impact. However, the limited data on critical parameters of solubility significantly constraints machine learning efficacy. In this work, we transfer a pre-trained foundational model on QM9 targets to our application with minimal data requirements. Additionally, the pipeline integrates uncertainty quantification, allowing the user to gauge the confidence of the predictions. As baseline, we succeed in predicting the Hansen solubility parameters and Dielectric Constant for which extensive databases exist. Importantly, we achieve high model performance on additional targets, such as Gutmann Donor and Acceptor numbers, where the available data is extremely limited. Overall, we augment data on solubility descriptors by orders of magnitude with high quality predictions. For effective dissemination, we deploy easy-to-use, easily integrateable with high throughput labs, customizable tool for ranking and screening possible solvent substitutes. Finally, we rediscovered known green solvent alternatives and proposed new candidates proving its relevance for finding eco-friendly solvents.

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

ProvenanceGuard: Source-Aware Factuality Verification for MCP-Based LLM Agents

Tool-using LLM agents increasingly use the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to answer from heterogeneous evidence sources, including search, APIs, databases, clinical records, and formulary tools. Standard factuality metrics usually test whether an answer is supported by pooled evidence, missing a provenance-sensitive failure mode: a claim may be supported somewhere while being attributed to the wrong source. We call this cross-source conflation. We introduce ProvenanceGuard, a source-aware verifier for MCP-grounded answers. It consumes captured MCP traces with stable tool IDs, source IDs, and raw outputs; decomposes answers into atomic claims; routes claims to source-specific evidence; checks support with NLI and a token-alignment proxy; compares stated attribution with the routed source; and returns per-claim verdicts plus an answer-level allow/block decision. Blocked answers can be repaired with retrieval-augmented answer revision and re-verified. We evaluate on 281 medical-domain MCP-agent traces. A 266-trace adjudicated subset yields 2,325 LLM-assisted claim labels split by trace; 361 held-out labels are human-verified. On the 40-trace held-out split, ProvenanceGuard achieves block F1 0.802 and source accuracy 0.858 over 260 source-eligible claims, outperforming source-blind baselines that do not emit claim-to-source IDs. On a harder multi-source benchmark it reaches block F1 0.846, while source-plus-relation accuracy drops to 0.229, showing that exact source ownership remains difficult with semantically close sources. Repair-and-reverify resolves all blocked answers in the full trace set, often via conservative fallback. In 50 controlled clinical conflation probes, ProvenanceGuard detects all injected attribution swaps with no retained wrong attribution. These results show that source attribution is an independent axis for factuality verification in MCP-based agents.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Worst-case depth hierarchy for shallow quantum circuits

arXiv:2606.16425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Circuit depth is a central resource in complexity theory. While bounded-depth classical circuits admit well-understood hierarchy theorems, the internal structure of constant-depth quantum computation remains comparatively unexplored. We prove an explicit depth hierarchy theorem for $\mathsf{QNC}^0$. For each $d\ge 12$, we construct a family of two-round interactive problems on which no depth-$(d-1)$ quantum circuit can achieve near-perfect success, regardless of gate set, circuit size, or ancillary qubits. In contrast, we prove that our construction admits realizations by simple bounded fan-in quantum circuits of depth larger than $d$ by a small constant factor. Moreover, all bounded fan-in classical circuits of sublogarithmic depth (in the input size) fail to achieve perfect success on these tasks for every $d$, yielding a hierarchy of problems that show unconditional quantum advantage of $\mathsf{QNC}^0$ over $\mathsf{NC}^0$. A key obstacle is the scarcity of lower bound techniques for quantum circuits. To address this, we develop methods to analyze how depth affects a circuit's ability to realize nonlocal correlations amongst its output qubits in a fine-grained manner. Our approach exploits the correspondence between constraint systems and nonlocal games, translating group-theoretic constructions into rigid operator-valued constraint systems and then into non-local games. In particular, we construct constraint systems whose unique faithful operator-valued solutions require every perfect strategy, and every near-perfect strategy to a fixed precision, to implement multi-controlled phase operations. This reduces to a nonlocal unitary-synthesis problem, yielding depth lower bounds for both shallow quantum and classical circuits. These results show that increasing depth strictly increases computational power within $\mathsf{QNC}^0$, establishing a genuinely quantum hierarchy.