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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Concatenated Matrix SVD: Compression Bounds, Incremental Approximation, and Error-Constrained Clustering

arXiv:2601.11626v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large collections of matrices arise throughout modern machine learning, signal processing, and scientific computing, where they are commonly compressed by concatenation followed by truncated singular value decomposition (SVD). This strategy enables parameter sharing and efficient reconstruction and has been widely adopted across domains ranging from multi-view learning and signal processing to neural network compression. However, it leaves a fundamental question unanswered: which matrices can be safely concatenated and compressed together under explicit reconstruction error constraints? Existing approaches rely on heuristic or architecture-specific grouping and provide no principled guarantees on the resulting SVD approximation error. In the present work, we introduce a theory-driven framework for compression-aware clustering of matrices under SVD compression constraints. Our analysis establishes new spectral bounds for horizontally concatenated matrices, deriving global upper bounds on the optimal rank-$r$ SVD reconstruction error from lower bounds on singular value growth. The first bound follows from Weyl-type monotonicity under blockwise extensions, while the second leverages singular values of incremental residuals to yield tighter, per-block guarantees. We further develop an efficient approximate estimator based on incremental truncated SVD that tracks dominant singular values without forming the full concatenated matrix. Therefore, we propose three clustering algorithms that merge matrices only when their predicted joint SVD compression error remains below a user-specified threshold. The algorithms span a trade-off between speed, provable accuracy, and scalability, enabling compression-aware clustering with explicit error control.

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

SPOT-E: Test-Time Entropy Shaping with Visual Spotlights for Frozen VLMs

arXiv:2606.20244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often underperform on evidence intensive tasks because decisive visual evidence are small, localized, and easy to overlook, leading to failures in evidence readout even when high-level reasoning is intact. Prior inference-time visual interventions can improve grounding without retraining, but they are largely open-loop and lack a mechanism to verify whether highlighted evidence is actually used. We study answer-span prediction entropy as a model-internal feedback signal and show that naive entropy minimization is ambiguous, since low entropy may arise from evidence-grounded confidence or shortcut collapse. To resolve this ambiguity, we introduce low-entropy anchors and an entropy-shaping objective that reduces answer uncertainty while preserving baseline high-confidence tokens. We instantiate this principle in SPOT-E, a plug-and-play test-time method that produces question-conditioned spotlights, optimized per instance via light-weight tuning based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Across all benchmarks and different VLM families, SPOT-E yields consistent gains and improved robustness under visual corruptions. Code is publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/YinBo0927/SPOT-E}

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Enhancing Quantum Machine Learning with Anyons

arXiv:2606.16090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The power of quantum computing and quantum machine learning relies on harnessing uniquely quantum phenomena as computational resources. While superposition, coherence and entanglement have been central to this effort, the role of particle exchange statistics remains largely unexplored. Here, we introduce a quantum kernel framework that unifies bosonic, fermionic, and anyonic (fractional) exchange statistics within a single learning paradigm. We study this family of kernels from three perspectives. At the representation level, Haar-averaged effective-dimension analysis shows that fractional exchange phases access feature-space directions inaccessible to the purely symmetric or antisymmetric limits. At the level of kernel geometry, the corresponding Gram matrices show greater separation from the distinguishable-particle baseline and reduced label-dependent model complexity. Finally, on learning benchmarks, anyonic kernels consistently outperform their bosonic and fermionic counterparts, with stronger target alignment and more favorable class geometry. Together, these findings show that exchange statistics reshape the structure and geometry of quantum feature space, leading to enhanced learning performance. Our work identifies particle exchange statistics as an overlooked computational ingredient for quantum machine learning and provides the first systematic comparison of quantum learning models across exchange phases.

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

MET-Bench: Multimodal Entity Tracking for Evaluating the Limitations of Vision-Language and Reasoning Models

Entity state tracking is a necessary component of world modeling that requires maintaining coherent representations of entities over time. Previous work has benchmarked entity tracking performance in purely text-based tasks. We introduce MET-Bench, a multimodal entity tracking benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of vision-language models to track entity states across modalities. Using three domains, we assess how effectively current models integrate textual and image-based state updates. Our findings reveal a significant performance gap between text-based and image-based entity tracking. We empirically show this discrepancy primarily stems from deficits in visual reasoning rather than perception. We further show that explicit text-based reasoning strategies improve performance, yet limitations remain, especially in long-horizon multimodal tasks. We apply reinforcement learning to improve entity tracking in open-source VLMs. This yields substantial in-modality gains, but does not transfer robustly across input modalities. Our results highlight the need for improved multimodal representations and reasoning techniques to bridge the gap between textual and visual entity tracking.

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

Context-Aware Optimization of Follow-Up Intervals for Type 2 Diabetes Care Using Markov Decision Processes

arXiv:2606.19092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chronic disease management relies on regular patient-provider interactions to follow-up on disease progression and control. For Type 2 Diabetes (T2D), current guidelines prescribe fixed time intervals between subsequent primary care visits for all patients, overlooking heterogeneity in clinical trajectories and patient characteristics. This study introduces a Contextual Markov Decision Process (CMDP) model to optimize subpopulation-specific follow-up interval decisions using Electronic Health Record (EHR) data from 22,154 T2D patients across 10 primary care clinics. Contexts are identified by: i) dimensionality reduction of variables representing the individual health trajectories utilizing Principal Component Analysis, and ii) assigning patients to contexts via principal components and additional patient-level features using clustering. Two distinct contexts emerged, representing a lower- and a higher-risk subpopulation. CMDP-derived policies recommend: (i) follow-up within 1 month if lab value at current visit is unmeasured; (ii) up to 3 months for elevated lab values or recent hospitalizations; and (iii) 6 to 12 months for sustained glycemic control, with shorter follow-up intervals for patients in high-risk context. The optimal policies achieved lower expected cumulative cost than benchmarks (e.g., in the higher-comorbidity context, the CMDP policy reduced cost by about 34.8%, and in the lower-comorbidity context by about 6.4%, relative to an American Diabetes Association-like fixed interval follow-up policy. These findings demonstrate how context-aware approaches can inform adaptive follow-up strategies, and have the potential to advance chronic care management in primary care by synthesizing machine learning and probabilistic decision models.

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

RACL: Reasoning-Agent Control Layers for Continuous Metaheuristic Learning

arXiv:2606.20142v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces RACL, a Reasoning-Agent Control Layer for metaheuristics. RACL places a reasoning agent above an existing optimizer. The agent does not replace the optimizer and does not modify business constraints. Instead, it controls the optimizer's internal search behavior by observing operational memory, reasoning over past behavior, formulating bounded hypotheses, testing interventions, evaluating outcomes, applying guardrails, consolidating useful policies and explaining its decisions. The experiment uses vehicle routing as a testbed, but the contribution is not a new routing solver, a particular ALNS configuration or a specific set of routing rules. The contribution is the RACL method: a way for a reasoning agent to discover, validate, consolidate and explain algorithmic control rules for a metaheuristic. In the current experimental setting, RACL improves or ties the Operational Memory Policy in 21 of 21 feasible cases and improves or ties a non-reasoning Stagnation-Triggered Policy in 18 of 21 feasible cases, with an average RACL vs STP cost delta of -0.641%. In the Sevilla-9/10 runtime sample, RACL improves average cost by -8.337% versus Fixed and -1.605% versus STP without showing material computational overhead. During the proof-of-concept, Codex was used as an in-the-loop reasoning agent observing executions, interpreting logs and proposing live bounded interventions. The policy proxy was later used only to make quantitative evaluation reproducible.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Preparing multi-qudit states in a definite-weight subspace

arXiv:2606.24659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We formulate a deterministic algorithm for preparing arbitrary multi-qudit states in a definite-weight subspace. By ordering the corresponding computational basis states according to a Gray code for multiset permutations, the state-preparation task is reduced to performing a sequence of controlled 2-qudit Gray rotations. We use this algorithm to prepare exact eigenstates of the SU(3)-invariant Heisenberg Hamiltonian, whose Bethe ansatz is nested. In particular, we describe the preparation of the Bethe states, which are SU(3) highest-weight states, as well as their lower-weight descendants. We also consider the preparation of $SU(d)$ Dicke states and their q-deformations.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

A mathematical study of the excess growth rate

arXiv:2510.25740v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The excess growth rate, defined as the gap in Jensen's inequality for the logarithm, is a fundamental functional in portfolio theory. In this paper, we present a mathematical study motivated by information theory. We begin by establishing its properties and showing that it has rich connections with information theoretic concepts such as the Helmholtz free energy, L. Campbell's measure of average code length and large deviations. Our main results consist of three axiomatic characterization theorems of the excess growth rate, in terms of (i) the relative entropy, (ii) the gap in Jensen's inequality, and (iii) the logarithmic divergence that generalizes the Bregman divergence. Furthermore, we study maximization of the excess growth rate and compare it with the growth optimal portfolio. Our results not only provide theoretical justifications of the significance of the excess growth rate, but also establish new connections between information theory and quantitative finance.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

From Consumption to Reflection: Designing Human-AI Relations for Stable Reasoning

arXiv:2606.11195v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have transformed how humans access information, but not how we reason with it. Their fluency accelerates consumption while bypassing the slow, reflective processes that underpin sound judgment. This paper introduces Relational Reflective Intelligence (RRI), an inference-time governance layer that operationalizes reflection through auditable reasoning loops. RRI operates not inside the model but around it, providing a practical structure for stable, auditable reasoning between humans and LLMs. The core premise is that LLMs inherit cognitive vulnerabilities similar to those that shape human thought: reliance on intuitive shortcuts, confusion between representation and reality, and a preference for coherence over falsification. When humans and models share these tendencies, their errors compound. We refer to this as relational drift, a failure that arises from interaction rather than from the model alone. Addressing this requires a shift from modeling relations between words to structuring relations between model outputs and human reasoning. RRI provides this missing layer through three components: the Rose-Frame, which identifies likely breakdowns in reasoning; the Architect's Pen, which introduces targeted reflection steps at critical moments; and an inference-time workflow that embeds these steps without retraining the model. Together, these elements transform human-AI interaction into a joint reasoning system with explicit checkpoints, conflict surfacing, and an auditable trail of assumptions. Rather than making machines think like humans or forcing humans to reason like machines, RRI creates a structured interaction in which both compensate for each other's limitations. It reframes AI safety as a cognitive architecture problem, where reliable decisions depend on embedding reflection directly into the interaction process.

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

Trust-Region Diffusion Policies for Massively Parallel On-Policy RL

arXiv:2606.15260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with massively parallel simulations has become a standard framework for developing robust, deployable policies; however, most existing approaches still rely on simple Gaussian policy parameterizations. Diffusion models provide a more expressive policy class and have shown strong performance on challenging control problems, yet most diffusion-based RL methods are designed for offline or off-policy training. In this work, we ask whether diffusion policies can be trained effectively in the massively parallel, on-policy regime. To this end, we introduce Trust-region Diffusion Policies (TruDi), which enables diffusion policies for on-policy RL with massively parallel simulations. This setting is particularly challenging because the data distribution changes quickly across updates, making stable training with complex policies difficult. TruDi addresses this by integrating a trust-region optimization rule to enforce a KL-divergence constraint over the entire diffusion trajectory. Empirically, we evaluate TruDi on a diverse set of 4 massively parallel RL benchmarks comprising a total of 73 tasks. Across these tasks, TruDi consistently outperforms or is on-par with strong baselines on standard tasks and achieves clear gains on more challenging humanoid control tasks, establishing a strong new baseline for massively parallel on-policy RL.

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

Quantum Entanglement, Stratified Spaces, and Topological Matter: Towards Entanglement-Sensitive Langlands Data

arXiv:2601.13467v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using the spinless Haldane model, we study the witness-filtered Berry curvature, quantum geometric tensor, and quantum Fisher information on the gapped strata of the parameter space and evaluate them through the Fukui-Hatsugai-Suzuki discretization. The filtered quantities isolate the part of the geometric response carried by sublattice coherence: they suppress contributions from regions where the occupied Bloch state is locally A/B-separable and emphasize regions where curvature and coherence coexist. We derive exact lattice identities, reconstruction formulas for the curvature-weighted coherence, and bounds relating the filtered quantum geometric tensor and quantum Fisher information to single-particle mode entanglement. Across the gap-closing stratum, the quantized response changes admit a natural description in terms of Hecke modifications. We elicit a corresponding Langlands viewpoint – not as a full correspondence, but as an organizational principle and as the mathematical shadow of these physical geometric constructions.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Proposal of quantum arrival-time measurement with a Bose-Einstein condensate

arXiv:2606.20278v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work shows how a Bose-Einstein condensate of ultracold atoms could be used to address a long-standing question in quantum theory: how much time does it take for a particle to reach a detector? To this end, we propose a realistic experimental setup, whose key idea is not to measure arrival times directly, but the arrival flux on the detector as a function of its position. This novel approach not only solves practical issues with having a detector close to the system, but also results in signals that allow to unambiguously distinguish different theoretical predictions. This proposal raises prospects for resolving the decades-old debate on this fundamental issue.

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

A Resilient Solution for Sewer Overflow Monitoring across Cloud and Edge

arXiv:2605.10592v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Aging combined sewer systems in many historical cities are increasingly stressed by extreme rainfall events, which can trigger combined sewer overflows (CSO) with significant environmental and public health impacts. Forecasting the filling dynamics of overflow basins is critical for anticipating capacity exceedance and enabling timely preventive actions for CSO. We present a web-based demonstrator that integrates Deep Learning forecasting methods in both cloud and edge settings into an interactive monitoring dashboard for overflow monitoring, resilient to network outages. A video showcase is available online (https://cloud.bht-berlin.de/index.php/s/b9xt4T3SdiLBiFZ).

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Right Regions, Wrong Labels: Semantic Label Flips in Segmentation under Correlation Shift

The robustness of machine learning models can be compromised by spurious correlations between non-causal features in the input data and target labels. A common way to test for such correlations is to train on data where the label is strongly tied to some non-causal cue, then evaluate on examples where that tie no longer holds. This idea is well established for classification tasks, but for semantic segmentation the specific failure modes are not well understood. We show that a model may achieve reasonable overlap while assigning the wrong semantic label, swapping one plausible foreground class for another, even when object boundaries are largely correct. We focus on this semantic label-flip behaviour and quantify it with a simple diagnostic (Flip) that counts how often ground truth foreground pixels are assigned the wrong foreground identity while remaining predicted as foreground. In a setting where category and scene are correlated during training, increasing the correlation consistently widens the gap between common and rare test conditions and increases these within-object label swaps on counterfactual groups. Overall, our results motivate assessing segmentation robustness under distribution shift beyond overlap by decomposing foreground errors into correct pixels, flipped-identity pixels, and missed-to-background pixels. We also propose an entropy-based, ground truth label-free `flip-risk' score, which is computed from foreground identity uncertainty, and show that it can flag flip-prone cases at inference time. Code is available at https://github.com/acharaakshit/label-flips.

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

Essential Subspace Merging for Multi-Task Learning

arXiv:2606.19164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging aims to enable multi-task learning by integrating the capabilities of multiple models fine-tuned from the same pre-trained checkpoint into a single model. Its core challenge is inter-task interference among task-specific parameter updates. In this paper, we analyze the output shifts induced by task updates and observe that their energy is concentrated in a small number of principal directions. We call the subspace spanned by these directions the essential subspace. In contrast, most remaining directions carry little task-relevant energy, but their accumulation across multiple task updates can cause severe interference during merging. Motivated by this observation, we propose Essential Subspace Decomposition (ESD), which decomposes each task update according to the principal components of its activation shift. Based on ESD, we introduce Essential Subspace Merging (ESM), a training-free static merging method that orthogonalizes and fuses essential components into one compact multi-task model. We further extend ESM to ESM++, a training-free dynamic merging method that decomposes task-specific residuals into low-rank experts and selects the most relevant expert through prototype-based routing during forward inference. Extensive experiments across multiple task sets and model scales demonstrate that ESM and ESM++ effectively preserves task knowledge while reducing inter-task interference.

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

Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding for Remote Sensing Images and Videos

Remote sensing visual grounding (RSVG) aims to localize a referred target in a remote sensing image or video according to a natural language expression. Existing RSVG methods usually rely on task-specific manual annotations, which are costly to collect and inevitably limited in covering the diversity of real-world geospatial scenarios. As a result, they often struggle to generalize to open-vocabulary queries involving novel objects, fine-grained attributes, complex spatial relationships, and functional semantics. In this paper, we propose RSVG-ZeroOV, a training-free framework that leverages frozen generic foundation models for zero-shot open-vocabulary RSVG. RSVG-ZeroOV follows an Overview-Focus-Evolve paradigm, which exploits the distinct yet complementary attention patterns of vision-language models (VLMs) and diffusion models (DMs) to progressively generate precise grounding results. Specifically, (i) Overview utilizes a VLM to extract cross-attention maps that capture semantic correlations between the referring expression and visual regions; (ii) Focus leverages the fine-grained modeling priors of a DM to compensate for object structure and shape information often overlooked by VLM attention; and (iii) Evolve introduces a simple yet effective attention evolution module to suppress irrelevant activations, yielding purified object masks. To handle video inputs, we further present Video RSVG-ZeroOV, which extends image-level grounding to spatio-temporal grounding through a query-relevant key-frame selector and a temporal propagator, enabling efficient and temporally coherent video grounding without video annotations or fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on six image and video grounding benchmarks show that RSVG-ZeroOV consistently outperforms existing zero-shot baselines and achieves competitive or superior performance compared with weakly- and fully-supervised methods.

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

Combating Data Laundering in LLM Training

arXiv:2604.01904v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-hoc unauthorized-training data detection for large language models (LLMs) typically assumes a query-with-originals regime: rights holders query a target LLM with raw proprietary data and assess whether the model assigns them stronger memorization-based detection signals, e.g., higher confidence or lower loss, than held-out non-training reference texts. We show that this regime becomes brittle under data laundering, where the target LLM is trained on semantics-preserving but stylistically or structurally transformed surrogates of proprietary data to obfuscate provenance. Since training-time exposure occurs in the laundered form, memorization signals may no longer appear on the originals, collapsing the candidate-reference signal separation that standard detectors rely on. We counter this threat by studying laundering-aware detection with raw proprietary data, a held-out reference corpus, and query access to the target LLM, while the laundering transformation is undisclosed. Since exact recovery of the laundered corpus is infeasible, we infer a detection-useful synthesis process via an auxiliary LLM that maps originals into training-like queries. To make this search tractable, we introduce Synthesis Data Reversion (SDR), which constrains the unbounded space of natural-language transformations through a goal-details abstraction: a high-level transformation goal, e.g., "lyrical rewriting", and fine-grained details, e.g., "with vivid imagery". SDR identifies the most likely goal and iteratively refines details so synthesized queries elicit stronger target-model detection signals. Evaluated on the MIMIR benchmark against diverse laundering practices and target LLM families (Pythia, Llama2, and Falcon), SDR consistently restores detection signals, offering a practical auditing layer against data laundering.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Target-Aware Linear Regression Under Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.22775v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distribution shift between training and deployment is a pervasive challenge for modern AI systems. In many cases, the target marginals of covariates and response are known or specified through population-level observations, boundary conditions, properties of simulator configurations, or alignment-time distributional constraints. Such knowledge may provide valuable side information for regression estimation. We study this problem in the multivariate linear regression setting with a stable conditional mean $E[Y\mid X]$ across source and target, and identify the hybrid-loss estimator, which jointly incorporates both target marginals, as a benchmark target-aware estimator. Its direct computation, however, requires solving a coupled nonlinear optimization that is expensive at scale. Our main contribution is to develop and evaluate two computationally tractable alternatives: a constrained moment-matching estimator and a two-stage estimator that augments ordinary least squares with a calibration step. For all three estimators, we derive and compare closed-form asymptotic mean squared errors, yielding conditions under which the tractable alternatives match or closely approximate the hybrid benchmark, and regimes in which they do not. Monte Carlo experiments across three controlled shift regimes validate the theoretical results, investigate the accuracy-runtime tradeoffs among the three estimators, and translate into guidance on estimator choice. In particular, the two-stage estimator nearly matches the hybrid benchmark in the high signal-to-noise regime at essentially no additional cost, providing theoretical grounding for empirical observations in nonlinear settings.

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

Towards Physically Realizable Adversarial Attenuation Patch against SAR Object Detection

Deep neural networks have demonstrated excellent performance in SAR target detection tasks but remain susceptible to adversarial attacks. Existing SAR-specific attack methods can effectively deceive detectors; however, they often introduce noticeable perturbations and are largely confined to digital domain, neglecting physical implementation constrains for attacking SAR systems. In this paper, a novel Adversarial Attenuation Patch (AAP) method is proposed that employs energy-constrained optimization strategy coupled with an attenuation-based deployment framework to achieve a seamless balance between attack effectiveness and stealthiness. More importantly, AAP exhibits strong potential for physical realization by aligning with signal-level electronic jamming mechanisms. Experimental results show that AAP effectively degrades detection performance while preserving high imperceptibility, and shows favorable transferability across different models. This study provides a physical grounded perspective for adversarial attacks on SAR target detection systems and facilitates the design of more covert and practically deployable attack strategies. The source code is made available at https://github.com/boremycin/SAAP.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Gendered pathways to adolescent mental health: An empirical assessment of a new conceptual framework

Introduction Gender norms and roles are important determinants of physical and mental health in the key period of adolescence. Yet, the gendered pathways to mental health in adolescents are not fully understood. Using a conceptual framework for global adolescent mental health that we developed based on a Delphi process, we empirically investigated the associations between six gender-related constructs and adolescent mental health. Methods We used cross-sectional Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) data from Ethiopia (2020) to explore the associations between sex, gender norms, psychological competencies, gender attitudes, gender roles, with the latter two also serving as mediators, and psychological distress (GHQ-12), using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). Results The SEM model contained measurements from 1,584 adolescents, including 843 girls and 741 boys, with a median age of 13 years. Out of 14 pathways tested, we found statistically significant associations between psychological competencies and psychological distress; sex and gender attitudes; and between gender norms and psychological competencies, gender attitudes, and gender roles. Hence, the gender-related constructs were mostly associated with each other, rather than with psychological distress. Conclusion The gender-related constructs are strongly interrelated, thereby attenuating their individual effects on psychological distress. The interplay of gender-related constructs should be considered when developing interventions to promote mental health in adolescents.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Your AI Travel Agent Would Book You a Bullfight: An Agentic Benchmark for Implicit Animal Welfare in Frontier AI Models

AI agents are moving from advisors to actors, booking travel, planning menus, and running procurement on behalf of users. Existing benchmarks for AI and animal welfare evaluate model text responses to question-answer prompts, leaving open whether the welfare reasoning surfaced in those responses transfers to agentic deployment where the model must take actions with tools. We introduce TAC (Travel Agent Compassion), the first agentic benchmark measuring whether AI agents avoid options involving animal exploitation when acting on behalf of users. TAC presents an AI agent with twelve hand-authored travel booking scenarios across six categories of animal exploitation, augmented to forty-eight samples to control for price, rating, and position confounds. We evaluate seven frontier models from four labs. Every model scores below the chance level of sixty-four percent, with the best performer (Claude Opus 4.7) at fifty-three percent. A single welfare-aware sentence in the system prompt yields gains of forty-seven to sixty-three percentage points in Claude and GPT-5.5, twenty-six points in GPT-5.2, and under twelve points in DeepSeek and Gemini. An auxiliary Inspect Scout audit of 288 base-condition transcripts from the top two performers, using Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite as judge, flags zero transcripts for evaluation awareness, suggesting the below-chance rates do not stem from the models recognising the evaluation. We discuss implications for category-level variation across cultural domains, the limits of text-response welfare benchmarks, and the EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice systemic risk framework.

22.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Stronger Entanglement Dies Faster: Quantum Mpemba Effect in Dissipative Qubits

arXiv:2605.23197v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In classical thermodynamics, the Mpemba effect refers to the counterintuitive observation that hot water can freeze faster than cold water, manifesting as an anomalous crossing of dynamical trajectories. While analogues of this phenomenon have been explored in open quantum systems and spin-chain entanglement asymmetry, its connection to the finite-time decoupling of quantum correlations remains elusive. In this work, we report a distinct Mpemba effect for quantum entanglement in a dissipative quantum system associated with entanglement sudden death (ESD). By analyzing two qubits interacting with local amplitude damping reservoirs, we demonstrate that a more strongly entangled initial state can experience a faster collapse into a separable state than a more weakly entangled state. This anomalous decay stems from the competition between initial coherence and excited-state population, where the latter acts as a catalyst for ESD. We provide exact analytical derivations for the trajectory crossover and ESD time, and map the phase diagram to precisely identify the parameter regime where the effect occurs. Our results offer a new strategy for controlling the lifetime of quantum resources in dissipative environments.

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

Towards Verifiable Agentic Data Science: Solving Irregular TSQA Via Tool-Grounded Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series data in real-world deployments is overwhelmingly irregular. Observations are asynchronous, missing values are informative rather than random, and sampling frequencies vary across sensors and operational windows. However, existing Time Series Question Answering (TSQA) benchmarks mostly assume regularly sampled inputs, leaving a fundamental gap in understanding how large language models (LLMs) and AI agents perform under irregular conditions. To bridge this gap, we introduce IRTS-ToolBench, a benchmark of 1,700 questions spanning 10 task types across 13 domains. IRTS-ToolBench is designed to be used independently by any researcher working on LLM-based irregular time series analysis, providing standardized inputs and a reproducible evaluation protocol. Code can be found in https://github.com/SanhornC/IRTS-ToolBench.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

It's Complicated: On the Design and Evaluation of AI-Powered AAC Interfaces

arXiv:2606.24854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance what people who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) are able to do with their systems. However, evaluating AI-powered AAC interfaces can be difficult. People are intersectional beings and current evaluation metrics can struggle to capture the multifaceted and nuanced desires people may have for their AAC. We explore the complicated nature of six AAC problem spaces, explore how AI might be used in these spaces, and suggest more robust methods of evaluation that take the intersectional nuances of people into account. We also discuss broader issues that arise across these problem spaces and how they could be addressed using our proposed evaluation methods.