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01.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

Expanding the GUSome: Structure-guided identification and characterization of gut microbial β-glucuronidases

The gut microbiome-encoded {beta}-glucuronidase (GUS) enzymes have a significant effect on human physiology through their deglucuronidation activity on endogenous and exogenous glucuronides. GUS activity also significantly influences the pharmacokinetics, efficacy and toxicity of various drugs including chemotherapeutic drugs. Given their crucial role in drug metabolism, GUS enzymes have emerged as promising targets for therapeutic intervention. Here, we have identified and characterized 79 unique GUS enzymes through a structure-guided approach. Structural modelling of these GUS enzymes revealed a conserved core and active-site residues with significant variations in the number and nature of the C-terminal domains. A new classification system based on the number and type of additional C-terminal domains is presented for the GUS proteins. Further, GUS enzymes have been categorized into different loop categories linked to their substrate preferences. The relationship between domain architecture and loop-type is explored by sequence similarity network analysis. We could successfully express, purify and validate GUS processing capability of a panel of identified GUS proteins. The nature of oligomer organization has been deciphered by SEC and DLS studies. Further, we have identified additional GUS enzymes capable of processing SN-38G, glucuronidated form of anticancer drug, irinotecan. These newly identified GUS enzymes will offer valuable insights into gut microbial GUS diversity and their role in understanding the population-specific drug-induced adverse effects on human health.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

A Survey of On-Policy Distillation for Large Language Models

As Large Language Models continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become an important engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains a common technique for this transfer. The prevailing recipe in industrial pipelines, static imitation of teacher-generated text, carries a structural weakness that grows more severe as tasks become longer and more reasoning-intensive. Because the student is trained on flawless teacher prefixes but generates its own at inference, small errors tend to accumulate into trajectories it has rarely been trained to recover from, and the resulting exposure bias has been shown to scale roughly with the square of sequence length. On-Policy Distillation reorganizes the training loop around this observation by having the teacher provide feedback on what the student actually produces, with the goal of reducing the compounding term toward linear and reframing distillation as an iterative correction process rather than single-pass imitation. The resulting literature has expanded along divergence design, reward-guided optimization, and self-play, yet contributions remain scattered across the knowledge distillation, RLHF, and imitation learning communities without a unified treatment. This survey provides such a treatment. We formalize OPD as f-divergence minimization over student-sampled trajectories, organize the field along three design axes (what to optimize, where the signal comes from, and how to stabilize training in practice), and consolidate success conditions, recurring failure modes, and the connection between OPD and KL-constrained reinforcement learning. We close with open problems that emerge from this synthesis, including distillation scaling laws, uncertainty-aware feedback, agent-level distillation, and the growing overlap between knowledge distillation and RL.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

One Probe Won't Catch Them All: Towards Targeted Deception Detection

arXiv:2602.01425v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Linear probes are a promising approach for monitoring AI systems for deceptive behaviour. Previous work has shown that a linear classifier trained on a contrastive instruction pair and a simple dataset can achieve good performance. However, these probes exhibit notable failures even in straightforward scenarios, including spurious correlations and false positives on non-deceptive responses. In this paper, we demonstrate that deception detection is inherently heterogeneous: while a single universal probe achieves modest improvements (+0.032 AUC), post-hoc oracle analysis reveals substantially higher potential (+0.108 AUC) when probes are matched to specific deception types, and synthetic validation experiments suggest this ceiling is achievable a priori when the deception type is known in advance. Our findings reveal that instruction pairs capture deceptive intent rather than content-specific patterns, explaining why prompt choice dominates probe performance (70.6% of variance). Given this heterogeneity, we conclude that organizations should define their specific threat models and deploy appropriately matched probes rather than seeking a universal deception detector.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

An XAI View on Explainable ASP: Methods, Systems, and Perspectives

arXiv:2601.14764v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a popular declarative reasoning and problem solving approach in symbolic AI. Its rule-based formalism makes it inherently attractive for explainable and interpretive reasoning, which is gaining importance with the surge of Explainable AI (XAI). A number of explanation approaches and tools for ASP have been developed, which often tackle specific explanatory settings and may not cover all scenarios that ASP users encounter. In this survey, we provide, guided by an XAI perspective, an overview of types of ASP explanations in connection with user questions for explanation, and describe their coverage by current theory and tools. Furthermore, we pinpoint gaps in existing ASP explanations approaches and identify research directions for future work.

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

Optimal Scheduling in a Question-Answering Forum of Knowledge Workers

arXiv:2606.19759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As individuals turn to the Internet to find answers to questions they may have, several Question Answering (QA) forums have evolved, where users knowledgeable in certain topics can contribute their expertise to answering these requests for information. While these are currently volunteer based, we consider a future version employing knowledge workers who are experts in certain topics. In such a system, the request-answer processes forming the queuing system may utilize schedulers that assign requests in different topics to the experts in the forum, who may be able to answer them according to their expertise levels in different topics. With this model, we calculate the capacity of the system for handling the requests while keeping the system stable, and design schedulers that achieve capacity. We also investigate how collaboration between experts in answering requests can potentially increase capacity.

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

Geometric Action Model for Robot Policy Learning

Generalist robot policies must follow user instructions while reasoning about how objects, cameras, and robot actions interact in the 3D physical world. Recent vision-language-action models (VLAs) and video world-action models (WAMs) inherit strong semantic or temporal priors from large-scale foundation models, but they still operate primarily on 2D image frames or 2D-derived latent spaces, leaving implicit the 3D geometry required for contact-rich manipulation. We propose the Geometric Action Model (GAM), a language-conditioned manipulation policy that directly repurposes a pretrained geometric foundation model (GFM) as a shared substrate for perception, temporal prediction, and action decoding. GAM splits the GFM at an intermediate layer: the shallow layers serve as an observation encoder, and a causal future predictor inserted at the split layer forecasts future latent tokens conditioned on language, proprioception, and action history. The predicted future tokens are then routed through the remaining GFM blocks for feature propagation and decoding, allowing a single backbone to produce both future geometry and actions. This design equips the GFM with language-conditioned temporal world modeling through minimal architectural modification while preserving its rich geometric priors. Across a broad suite of simulation and real-robot manipulation benchmarks, GAM is more accurate, more robust, faster, and lighter than current foundation-model-scale baselines.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Logical error estimation from syndrome data of surface-code experiments

arXiv:2606.11496v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decoders for quantum error correction (QEC) experiments rely on detector error models (DEMs), which encode, for each error, its probability and the detectors and logical observables it flips. Here we show that estimating DEM event probabilities from experimental syndromes is feasible, avoids independent device benchmarking, and produces useful decoder priors for estimating and reducing decoded logical error probabilities. We evaluate our methods using open-source data from surface-code memory experiments performed on Google's Willow chip, and we carry out analogous surface-code experiments on IBM's \texttt{ibm\_miami} processor. Despite the different physical error scales of the Google and IBM devices, in both cases our estimated DEMs improve logical error probabilities relative to baseline device-informed DEMs, typically at the $5\%-10\%$ level and with larger gains in some IBM cases, without additional calibration circuits, decoder fine-tuning, or supervised fitting to logical outcomes.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

VHDLSuite: Unified Pipeline for LLM VHDL Generation with Data Synthesis and Evaluation

arXiv:2606.13735v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLM) have shown impressive capabilities in Register Transfer Level (RTL) code generation, particularly for Verilog. However, evaluating their performance with other Hardware Description Languages (HDL), especially VHDL, remains limited although its distinct language characteristics, such as stricter semantic rules, introduce evaluation considerations that differ from Verilog. This lack of coverage restricts fully understanding of how well current models generalize across hardware design languages with differing structures and semantics. To address this gap, we introduce VHDLSuite, a benchmark-centered infrastructure for scalable VHDL generation evaluation, integrating automated benchmark synthesis, executable validation, and multi-model diagnostic analysis. First, we propose a data pipeline that automatically converts Verilog designs and their accompanying testbenches into executable VHDL benchmark instances, followed by VUnit/GHDL-based validation to ensure each released task is compilable, runnable, and consistently checkable in the VHDL environment. Second, we introduce VHDLBench, a benchmark with over 200 VHDL problems with complete and validated testbenches across a wide range of complexity levels. Third, we extensively evaluate cutting-edge LLMs and uncover key challenges specific on LLM-aided VHDL generation. Our findings provide important insights and support future work in multi-language hardware design automation.Our data pipeline, benchmark, and evaluation framework will be open-sourced.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Numbers Already Carry Their Own Embeddings

arXiv:2606.14108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Adelic operation-preserved embeddings (AOE), a training-free representation that captures both a number's real value and its modular (p-adic) signatures. This construction preserves additive and multiplicative structure by design, turning numerical input into embeddings that "speak in the language of mathematics." Unlike prior approaches that rely on task-specific retraining, AOE is plug-and-play and drops seamlessly into existing architectures. On algebraic combinatorics benchmarks, it delivers consistent gains including the first-ever perfect accuracy on the Weaving Pattern task-while suggesting a principled path forward for overcoming the long-standing "number problem" in AI.

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

The Quality-Utility Paradox: Why High-Reward Data Impairs Small Model Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.16152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge distillation from powerful reasoning models is widely used to improve Small Language Models (SLMs) on mathematical reasoning, often assuming that traces with higher reward model scores provide more useful supervision. We identify a counterintuitive Quality-Utility Paradox in mathematical reasoning distillation. Data refined or synthesized by a stronger Oracle obtains higher perceived quality according to reward models, yet consistently underperforms traces generated by the SLM itself and selected through rejection sampling across Qwen2.5, LLaMA-3, and DeepSeek families. Our analysis shows that Oracle refinement couples logical repair with distributional drift away from the SLM's native reasoning distribution. This drift increases the learner's adaptation cost and can outweigh the benefit of improved reasoning logic. To test this mechanism, we introduce Style-Aligned Refinement, which preserves the native trajectory of the SLM while retaining logical repair from the Oracle. This intervention lowers adaptation cost and restores downstream utility. These findings suggest that effective mathematical reasoning distillation should jointly optimize perceived solution quality and learner-data compatibility, rather than relying solely on reward-model scores. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/Dracoqhl/Quality-Utility-Paradox.

11.
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.

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

From Simulation to Real-World: An In-Field 6D Pose Dataset and Baseline for Robotic Strawberry Harvesting

Robotic strawberry harvesting requires precise 6D pose estimation; however, collecting 6D pose ground truth in real agricultural fields is inherently challenging. Existing 6D pose estimation methods have therefore relied solely on synthetic data that lacks scene-level realism, leaving their performance under real agricultural field conditions unquantified. In this work, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first real-world 6D pose ground truth dataset of strawberries collected in actual agricultural fields (12,040 images). We also introduce a synthetic dataset rendered in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, featuring scene-level realism and domain randomization. Nevertheless, our experiments reveal that a significant sim-to-real gap persists, underscoring the necessity of real agricultural field data for reliable evaluation. We further quantify the sim-to-real gap through baseline 6D pose estimation results across backbone encoders, serving as a reference for future work. The real-world dataset will be made available upon acceptance.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Tensor Methods: A Unified and Interpretable Approach for Material Design

arXiv:2602.10392v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When designing new materials, it is often necessary to tailor the material design to have some desired properties. As the set of design parameters grow, the search space grows exponentially, making the actual synthesis and evaluation of all material combinations virtually impossible. Even using traditional computational methods such as Finite Element Analysis becomes too computationally heavy to search the design space. Recent methods use machine learning (ML) surrogate models to more efficiently determine optimal material designs; unfortunately, these methods often (i) are notoriously difficult to interpret and (ii) under perform when the training data comes from a non-uniform sampling of the design space. We suggest the use of tensor completion methods as an all-in-one approach for interpretability and predictions. We observe classical tensor methods are able to compete with traditional ML in predictions, with the added benefit of their interpretable tensor factors (which are given completely for free, as a result of the prediction). In our experiments, we are able to rediscover physical phenomena via the tensor factors, indicating that our predictions are aligned with the true underlying physics of the problem. This also means these tensor factors could be used by experimentalists to identify potentially novel patterns, given we are able to rediscover existing ones. We also study the effects of both types of surrogate models when we encounter training data from a non-uniform sampling of the design space. We observe more specialized tensor methods that can give better generalization in these non-uniforms sampling scenarios. We find the best generalization comes from a tensor model, which is able to improve upon the baseline ML methods by up to 5% on aggregate $R^2$, and halve the error in some out of distribution regions.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Evolutionary Two-Stage Hyperparameter Optimization Strategies for Physics-Informed Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.20442v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) solve Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) by embedding physical laws into neural network training. However, their performance suffers from unstable convergence, training plateaus, and strong sensitivity to architectural and optimization hyperparameters due to the highly non-convex and multi-term structure of the physics-informed loss. In this setting, the outer-loop hyperparameter search is a noisy and black-box optimization problem over heterogeneous parameters, where classical local or gradient-based strategies are easily trapped in suboptimal regions. Evolutionary algorithms, with their population-based exploration and ability to handle mixed, non-differentiable search spaces, provide a more robust mechanism for discovering promising configurations. We propose and investigate a two-stage approach based on evolutionary algorithms that combines exploration and exploitation parts of PINNs training to improve solution accuracy and robustness under fixed computational budgets. In the first stage, we perform low-fidelity training runs with truncated epochs to rapidly screen candidate configurations, treating hyperparameter selection as a black-box outer-loop problem. In the second stage, only the most promising candidates are fully trained with standard gradient-based optimizers to refine the solution. Evaluated on three popular problems, namely Advection, Klein-Gordon and Helmholtz equations, our method consistently outperforms standard training and achieves significantly lower mean error within constrained computational resources.

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

Where to Place the Query? Unveiling and Mitigating Positional Bias in In-Context Learning for Diffusion LLMs via Decoding Dynamics

While In-Context Learning (ICL) is extensively studied in Autoregressive (AR) LLMs, its mechanism within Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) remains largely unexplored. Unlike AR models restricted by unidirectional causal masking, dLLMs intrinsically utilize bidirectional attention, offering extensive spatial flexibility for query placement. Unfortunately, current practices conventionally inherit AR-style trailing-query templates, often overlooking the structural paradigm shift. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis unveiling that query position is actually a first-order variable in dLLMs. Through empirical decoupling, we demonstrate that positional variance impacts generation quality on par with example semantic quality. Internally, this positional sensitivity stems from a spatial ``Recency Effect'' in attention flow and task-dependent shifts in decoding trajectories. To mitigate this instability without ground-truth labels, we reveal that traditional single-step confidence ($C_{decoded}$) fails in dLLMs. Instead, we propose Average Confidence ($\overline{C}$), a novel metric tracking the iterative decoding process. By establishing the foundational spatial ICL baselines, we introduce Auto-ICL, a training-free adaptive routing strategy that dynamically optimizes query placement, robustly approaching oracle performance across heterogeneous reasoning and perception tasks.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

An Exploratory Study of Blood Glucose Estimation from Photoplethysmography Signals using Machine Learning

arXiv:2606.15927v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diabetes and extreme blood sugar levels are some of the major health problems faced by humans today across the world. While Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) has emerged as an effective technology for management of diabetes as well as for monitoring blood sugar levels, this technology has traditionally been invasive (that is, requiring the piercing of the skin) and carries the risk of irritation, induration, etc. This highlights the need for accurate and non-invasive CGM methods that can be deployed at scale. With the emergence of various sensing technologies and their integration in wearables like the smart-watch, we now have the capability to continuously monitor body signals like the Photoplethysmogram (PPG) in a non-invasive manner. Having the ability to continuously monitor blood glucose through CGMs and continuously monitor PPG signals through a smart-watch offers an opportunity to get dense data on these two, opening the possibility of building machine learning and deep learning based models to estimate blood glucose level from PPG signals. In this work, we first present a paired dataset comprising continuous PPG signals from a smartwatch along with glucose values recorded using a CGM device. We also present the results of some preliminary experimental explorations performed on our dataset. These preliminary results suggest that some predictive signals may exist, though more exploration is needed with more data from a larger number of individuals. The dataset can be accessed at https://zenodo.org/records/20577959

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FFinRED: An Expert-Guided Benchmark Generation and Evaluation Framework for Financial LLM Red-Teaming

arXiv:2606.19887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing safety benchmarks target general adversarial scenarios but miss finance-specific risks. Financial LLMs face regulatory compliance violations, fraud facilitation, and systemic trust erosion that require targeted evaluation. We introduce FinRED, an expert-guided red-teaming framework for financial LLM safety evaluation developed with financial experts. FinRED uses a novel two-level taxonomy mapping global standards (e.g., FATF and EU DORA) to threats ranging from regulatory evasion to complex fraud, integrated with a scalable pipeline that converts real financial documents into context-rich red-teaming Behavioral Prompts (seeds) through an expert-defined schema. Rigorous expert validation confirms seed plausibility and realism for meaningful LLM safety evaluation. We also provide an expert-validated, finance-specific rubric that goes beyond disclaimer checks, aligns more closely with human experts than static one-size-fits-all rubrics, and reduces critical false negatives from 28 to 12. Aligned with internationally adopted risk-management and information-security standards (e.g., ISO/IEC 27001), FinRED is deployed in South Korea's Financial Security Institute (FSI) regulatory sandbox for generative AI security evaluation in real financial services. To mitigate dual-use risks, the dataset, generation pipeline, prompt template, and evaluation framework are gated for qualified researchers at https://github.com/selectstar-ai/FinRED-paper and https://huggingface.co/datasets/datumo/FinRED.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Towards Robust Optimal Measurements Against Noise in Quantum Metrology

arXiv:2606.25638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum parameter estimation utilizes quantum mechanical effects to attain higher measurement precision than classical schemes. In practical implementations, however, noise is inevitably present during the measurement process, causing a decrease in precision. Quantifying the impact of noise on different measurements is of considerable significance. Here, we experimentally investigate robust optimal measurements based on the theory of Fisher information measurement noise susceptibility (FI MENOS), which quantifies how susceptible a measurement is to noise. By constructing a polarizing Mach-Zehnder interferometer, we implement phase estimation under controlled noise. Our results indicate that different measurements exhibit distinct sensitivities to noise. To assess the influence of diverse noise types on precision, we further construct an experimental setup capable of introducing various forms of noise. The experimental results affirm that FI MENOS represents the worst-case scenario for estimation precision, enabling us to evaluate the noise immunity of optimal measurements. Our work provides a deeper insight into quantum metrology with noise, marking a notable advancement in quantifying the robustness of quantum estimation schemes against measurement noise effects.

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.LG) 2026-06-11

On Subquadratic Architectures: From Applications to Principles

arXiv:2606.12364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers dominate modern sequence modeling, but their quadratic attention incurs substantial computational cost. Subquadratic architectures offer a scalable alternative. However, it remains unclear which designs yield the most effective sequence models. We compare three leading approaches: xLSTM, Mamba-2, and Gated DeltaNet. We evaluate these models on tasks with complex dependencies: (1) code-model pre-training, (2) distillation of code models from large language models, and (3) pre-training of time-series foundation models. Across these settings, xLSTM delivers the strongest overall performance. To explain xLSTM's advantage, we present a unified formulation and analyze the underlying architectural mechanisms, focusing on state tracking and memory dynamics. Our results show that xLSTM enables more flexible and stable memory correction via its gating scheme. We corroborate these findings on controlled synthetic length-generalization tasks. Overall, our findings indicate that xLSTM's gains on complex tasks stem from robust state tracking and accumulation.

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

TopBench: A Benchmark for Implicit Predictive Reasoning in Tabular Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced Table Question Answering, where most queries can be answered by extracting information or simple aggregation. However, a common class of real-world queries is implicitly predictive, requiring the inference of unobserved answers from historical patterns rather than mere retrieval. These queries introduce two challenges: recognizing latent intent and reliable predictive reasoning over massive tables. To assess LLMs in such Tabular questiOn answering with implicit Prediction tasks, we introduce TopBench, a benchmark consisting of 779 samples across four sub-tasks, ranging from single-point prediction to decision making, treatment effect analysis, and complex filtering, requiring models to generate outputs spanning reasoning text and structured tables. We evaluate diverse models under both text-based and agentic workflows. Experiments reveal that current models often struggle with intent recognition, defaulting to just lookups. Deeper analysis identifies that accurate intent disambiguation serves as the prerequisite for leading these predictive behaviors. Furthermore, elevating the upper bound of prediction precision requires the integration of more sophisticated modeling or reasoning capabilities.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Randomized, Controlled, Double Blind Clinical Study to Evaluate Use of Hydron Alkaline Ionised Water (HAIW) in Healthy Participants

Background and Objectives: Alkaline Ionized Water (AIW) is considered among the highest quality healthy drinking water worldwide and is widely discussed for its various health benefits. Hydron Alkaline Ionized Water (HAIW) is produced through electrolysis, resulting in a stable pH of approximately 9.5 with a negative Oxidation Reduction Potential (ORP), making it an antioxidant beverage. The objective of this study was to evaluate the safety of HAIW and its effects on digestion, sleep, energy, and overall quality of life in healthy participants compared to Packaged Drinking Water (PDW). Materials and Methods: A randomized, controlled, double blind, prospective clinical study was conducted in which a total of 24 healthy participants between the age group of 21 to 40 years were randomized in a 1:1 ratio to either HAIW Group or Packaged Drinking Water Group with equal gender distribution. Participants were hospitalized for 7 days and asked to consume at least 3 litres of the assigned water daily. Primary outcomes were safety-related laboratory parameters and adverse event monitoring. Secondary outcomes included assessment of digestion (appetite, digestion, bowel habits), urine parameters, sleep quality, freshness after waking, fatigue, energy/stamina/strength, quality of life, and global assessment Results: All 24 participants completed the study with no dropouts. Baseline demographics were comparable between the two groups. Assessment of primary safety-related laboratory parameters including Complete Blood count, liver function tests, renal function tests, blood sugar, Electrocardiogram and serum electrolytes showed non-significant change from baseline to 7 days and remained within normal limits in both groups, with non-significant difference between groups (p>0.05). HAIW showed significantly better improvement in appetite, digestion, and bowel habits from Day 2 onwards compared to Packaged drinking water. Sleep quality and freshness after waking up showed significant improvement from Day 3 and Day 2 respectively in the HAIW and PDW group, with significantly better improvement in HAIW group. Fatigue scores showed significant reduction at Day 6 and 7 in both groups with non-significant difference between groups. A total of 5 adverse events were reported (3 in HAIW, 2 in PDW), all unrelated to study products and were mild in nature. Global assessment showed excellent to good overall safety and tolerability in both groups. Conclusion: HAIW was well tolerated by all participants without any adverse effects. All laboratory safety parameters remained within normal range. HAIW demonstrated significant improvements in digestive function (appetite, digestion, bowel habits), sleep quality, and freshness after waking as compared to PDW. The study concludes that HAIW can be safely consumed. HAIW improves digestive and sleep-related functions.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

GEN-Guard: Correcting Generalization Failures for Deployable Federated Surgical AI

Federated Learning (FL) in surgical video AI enables collaborative model training without sharing sensitive data. However, standard evaluation practices - selecting the "best" global model based only on validation data from participating hospitals - can lead to suboptimal deployment choices. We identify this critical failure mode as performance leakage, where the selected model overfits internal federation data and fails to generalize to unseen institutions. We propose GEN-Guard, a practical post-hoc framework to detect and correct generalization failures in federated surgical AI. It integrates Generalization Detection via Client-Blocked Evaluation (CBE), which validates performance on isolated client distributions to prevent performance leakage, and Generalization Correction through Disagreement-Aware Distillation (DAD), which learns adaptive feature-level corrections for cross-institutional robustness. Both components operate after standard FL convergence while providing robust support for zero-shot adaptation to unseen environments. We first quantify the severity of performance leakage, observing Model Selection Failures (MSFs) exceeding 80% under standard evaluation. GEN-Guard is evaluated on two multi-center clinical challenges: surgical phase recognition in laparoscopic cholecystectomy and polyp segmentation in colonoscopy. Across both datasets, GEN-Guard consistently corrects these failures, improving in-federation F1 scores by up to 2 points, unseen-institution performance by up to 3 points, and worst-case institutional performance by 3-9 points. Performance leakage represents a systematic and previously under-recognized risk in federated surgical AI. GEN-Guard provides a practical solution for detecting and correcting such failures. By improving cross-institutional robustness and zero-shot generalization, it strengthens the reliability of FL for real-world surgical deployment.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

A geometric and deep learning reproducible pipeline for monitoring floating anthropogenic debris in urban rivers using in situ cameras

The proliferation of floating anthropogenic debris in rivers has emerged as a pressing environmental concern, exerting a detrimental influence on biodiversity, water quality, and human activities such as navigation and recreation. The present study proposes a novel methodological framework for the monitoring the aforementioned waste, utilising fixed, in-situ cameras. This study provides two key contributions: (i) the continuous quantification and monitoring of floating debris using deep learning and (ii) the identification of the most suitable deep learning model in terms of accuracy and inference speed under complex environmental conditions. These models are tested in a range of environmental conditions and learning configurations, including experiments on biases related to data leakage. Furthermore, a geometric model is implemented to estimate the actual size of detected objects from a 2D image. This model takes advantage of both intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics of the camera. The findings of this study underscore the significance of the dataset constitution protocol, particularly with respect to the integration of negative images and the consideration of temporal leakage. In conclusion, the feasibility of metric object estimation using projective geometry coupled with regression corrections is demonstrated. This approach paves the way for the development of robust, low-cost, automated monitoring systems for urban aquatic environments.