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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Agentic Artificial Intelligence for Hospital Readmission Review: A Single-Center Blinded Evaluation and Exploratory Qualitative Analysis

Background: Manual review of 30-day hospital readmissions can identify actionable quality and safety problems, but it is labor-intensive. We developed and evaluated an agentic AI workflow for evidence-grounded readmission review. Materials and methods: We studied adult patients with unplanned 30-day readmission after discharge from a medicine hospitalist service at a single academic health system. An AI agent using a large language model queried a database containing notes, encounters, procedures, laboratory results, and other clinical data, and completed the same structured readmission-review rubric used by physicians. In the primary comparative evaluation, 20 randomly selected readmissions from 2025 were each reviewed by two physicians and the AI system. Blinded physician evaluators rated review quality. After rubric refinement, the AI workflow was applied to 100 recent readmissions in an exploratory expanded-cohort analysis of recurring improvement opportunities. Results: In the primary comparative evaluation, the AI classified 9/20 readmissions (45%) as preventable, compared with 19/40 physician reviews (47.5%). Blinded overall quality ratings were similar for AI and physician reviews (4.35 vs. 4.20 on a 1-5 scale; mean difference 0.15, 95% CI -0.20 to 0.48; p=0.49), as were factuality/support and usefulness/actionability ratings. No AI hallucinations were identified during factuality review. Agreement on preventability and primary readmission category was low for both AI-human and human-human comparisons. The AI system cost $0.23 per chart; physician reviewers took a median of 15 minutes, corresponding to an estimated $42.43 per chart. In the exploratory expanded-cohort analysis, AI-assisted review identified recurring vulnerabilities in post-discharge follow-up plans, incomplete inpatient workups, medication-safety transitions, and indwelling-device transitions. Conclusions: Agentic AI produced readmission reviews with similar blinded quality ratings to physician reviews in this small single-center primary comparative evaluation and supported identification of recurring quality-improvement themes in the exploratory expanded-cohort analysis. Preventability judgments remained variable among both AI and physicians, underscoring the need for human oversight and prospective evaluation before operational use.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Steering Where to Listen: Instruction-Based Activation Steering Redirects Temporal Attention in Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606.11400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) excel at audio understanding but expose little about where in an audio signal they attend. We introduce instruction-based vector steering, which constructs a steering vector by contrasting activations from differently instructed prompts while keeping the audio fixed. Through a systematic probe of LALM attention, we find that - unlike standard prompting or audio-based steering - this intervention significantly redistributes the temporal attention allocated to audio tokens, concentrating it on acoustically relevant regions. We then show that this attention shift is behaviorally meaningful: in a controlled three-event setting, reading out the temporal position of maximal steering-induced attention change recovers the location of a queried sound event without any training, attaining 60.87% and 68.72% overlap with ground-truth intervals on Qwen2-Audio and Audio Flamingo 3, far above direct prompting (31.84%, 46.75%) and random baselines (27.74%). Our results characterize a mechanistic property of instruction-based steering in LALMs and provide a training-free probe for the latent temporal structure these models encode.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Beyond Layer Importance in Layer-wise Sparsity: An Inter-Layer Perturbation-Absorption Perspective

The considerable layer-wise redundancy in large language models (LLMs) has established non-uniform sparsity allocation across layers as the standard pruning approach for efficient compression. Existing layer-wise allocation methods that estimate allocation strategy from local signals such as activation outliers or weight spectra mainly derive from local layer importance, whereas the final post-pruning performance is also influenced by the network's subsequent compensatory capacity. In this paper, we directly characterize this property through controlled perturbation experiments. We make the following empirical findings. First, layers exhibit highly heterogeneous responses to pruning-scale perturbations. In most cases, early layers amplify perturbations, while middle and late layers actively absorb them, with relative L2 drift decreasing monotonically across depth and direction realigning toward the unperturbed hidden-state trajectory. Second, absorption is a large-perturbation phenomenon. Under small perturbations the network exhibits amplification across all layers, and the transition to absorption occurs smoothly as perturbation magnitude grows to pruning scale. This enriches the linearized accumulation theory underlying related works. Building on these findings, we define an absorption coefficient per layer and propose absorption-aware correction, an orthogonal augmentation that improves OWL and AlphaPruning by reducing perplexity by 7.13% and boosting zero-shot accuracy by 1.02% across multiple model families at 70% sparsity.

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

Probabilistic Contrastive Pretraining for Multi-task ADME Property Prediction

arXiv:2606.11508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) properties is critical to drug discovery, but remains challenging because ADME endpoints are noisy, interdependent, and often data-limited. We propose a molecular graph-transformer pretraining framework that combines chemistry-specific self-supervision with contrastive mutual information machine learning (cMIM). Our method encodes molecular graphs into latent variables, reconstructs SMILES strings from the graph-derived latent codes, and augments the contrastive objective with domain-specific self-supervised chemistry tasks. Rather than treating these tasks as auxiliary regularizers with separately tuned loss weights, we formulate reconstruction, contrastive discrimination, and chemistry-specific supervision as unit-weighted log-probability factors in a single probabilistic latent-variable objective. For fine-tuning, we propose a multi-task GNN readout architecture with task-specific multilayer perceptron heads, preserving shared representation learning while mitigating negative transfer and improving the modeling of heterogeneous, nonlinear task relationships. Across Biogen, ExpansionRX, and ChEMBL-MT, the resulting Contrastive KERMT pretraining improves over the KERMT baseline by 7.6%, 9.9%, and 9.5% respectively (averaged over significantly-improved endpoints). Adding ADME-adjacent molecules to the pretraining corpus further improves transfer, and the contrastive component sharpens chemically meaningful latent neighborhoods.

05.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-12

Social contact patterns in the United Kingdom following the COVID-19 pandemic: The Reconnect cross-sectional survey

by Lucy Goodfellow, Billy J. Quilty, Kevin van Zandvoort, W. John Edmunds Background Close-contact and respiratory infectious diseases are spread through social interactions. Measuring these interactions has transformed our ability to understand transmission and control these infections. Social contact patterns were disrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic and have been affected by wider demographic, cultural, and workplace changes since then. Methods and findings To estimate post-pandemic social contact patterns in the United Kingdom, we conducted a cross-sectional social contact survey from November 2024 to March 2025 on a nationally representative sample of participants. Interactions were captured by age, gender, and across socioeconomic status (SES) and ethnic groups. We calculated the mean number of daily contacts and contact matrices, stratified by variables of interest, using a negative binomial regression model weighted by age, gender, ethnic group, and weekday/weekend. 13,238 participants were recruited, 3,019 of whom were aged under 18 years old; survey response rates were 36% and 27% for adults and children, respectively. The mean number of daily contacts was 9.1 (95% confidence interval (CI): 8.7, 9.5); this figure was 13.8 (95% CI: 12.8, 14.9) for children, and 7.8 (95% CI: 7.4, 8.2) for adults. Higher numbers of contacts were positively associated with employment, household income, and educational qualifications held. Contact matrices showed high levels of age-assortativity, as well as inter-generational contacts in the home. Contacts were assortative between ethnic groups and SES in all settings; this effect was strongest between ethnic groups in the home, and between SES in the workplace. We constructed socially-stratified next-generation matrices for a novel respiratory pathogen, projecting that the majority White ethnic group would account for the largest share of new infections (76.7% (95% CI: 75.5, 77.9) of cases), but that per-capita infection risk would disproportionately affect minority ethnic groups, with the risk for the Black population being 2.27 (95% CI: 2.06, 2.51) times that of the White population. This study may be limited by the inherent recall biases and reporting fatigue involved with self-reporting contacts. Conclusions This study provides crucial data to inform post-pandemic mathematical models of infectious disease transmission, and allows ethnicity and SES to be incorporated in such models.

06.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-05

Heuristic multi-site optimization for protein sequence design using Masked Protein Language Models

作者:

by Lijuan Wang, Yuze Wang, Chen Qiu, Liwei Xiao, Xianliang Liu, Junjie Chen Protein sequence design for tailored functional properties is a fundamental task in protein engineering, with critical applications in drug discovery and therapeutic development. Efficient navigation of the combinatorial vastness of protein sequence space to identify functional variants remains a formidable challenge. Conventional approaches, which predominantly rely on template-based local search or single-residue mutagenesis, are constrained by their susceptibility to local optima and their potential risk of destabilizing native structural stability. In this study, we introduce ProtHMSO, a heuristic multi-site optimization framework leveraging masked protein language models (ProtLMs) for context-aware sequence exploration. ProtHMSO mimics natural evolutionary mechanisms by employing ProtLM-derived substitution probabilities to guide heuristic searches for synergistic mutations, thereby constraining combinatorial search spaces through evolutionary and biophysical priors. ProtHMSO is further applied to replace the exploration strategies in genetic algorithms (GAs) and Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) for improving their convergence efficiency. Benchmark experiments demonstrate that protein sequences generated by ProtHMSO exhibit superior functional performance and closer alignment with natural sequence distribution, compared with state-of-the-art methods. These advancements highlight that ProtHMSO has strong potential and compatibility to accelerate functional protein discovery, offering a robust framework for efficient and context-aware exploration of protein sequence space.

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

Enhancing Many-Body Chaos via Entropy Injection from Environment

arXiv:2606.11784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In closed quantum systems, local information spreads throughout the entire system and becomes highly complex under unitary evolution. In contrast, when the system is embedded in an environment, system-environment coupling can transfer information from the system into the environment, thereby reducing the rate of complexity growth within the system. This leads to the environment-induced scrambling transition established in previous works. In this work, we identify entropy injection from the environment as a different physical process that instead enhances many-body chaos. Our setup consists of coupling a system that is already in equilibrium with one environment to another environment, which serves as an entropy reservoir and drives the system into a non-equilibrium state. When entropy flows into the system through either heat transfer or particle transfer, the effective Hilbert space explored by the system enlarges, a mechanism that can enhance many-body chaos. We explicitly demonstrate this idea by constructing a solvable complex Brownian SYK model, in which both the relaxation toward the steady state and the steady-state quantum Lyapunov exponent can be computed analytically. Our results provide a controllable mechanism for tuning quantum scrambling through entropy flow in quantum many-body systems coupled to environments.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

JetFlow: Breaking the Scaling Ceiling of Speculative Decoding with Parallel Tree Drafting

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) by drafting multiple tokens and verifying them in parallel, but it faces a scaling limitation: increasing the draft budget improves speed only when acceptance remains high and drafting overhead stays low. This ceiling has been difficult to break because prior head-based SD methods face a causality-efficiency dilemma. Autoregressive drafters produce path-conditioned candidates that are effective for tree speculative decoding with higher acceptance length, but their drafting cost grows with tree depth. Bidirectional block-diffusion drafters generate all positions in one pass, but their branch-agnostic marginals can form individually plausible yet mutually inconsistent trees, wasting budget and reducing acceptance. We propose JetFlow, a head-based SD framework that combines one-forward drafting efficiency with branch-wise causal conditioning. JetFlow trains a causal parallel draft head over fused hidden states from the frozen target model, producing candidate trees whose scores align with the target model's autoregressive factorization. This enables JetFlow to convert larger draft budgets into longer accepted prefixes and higher end-to-end speedup. Across math, coding, and chat benchmarks on dense and MoE Qwen3 models, JetFlow consistently outperforms bidirectional-head and tree-based SD baselines. On H100 GPUs, JetFlow achieves up to 9.64x speedup on MATH-500 and 4.58x on open-ended conversational workloads, with further latency gains demonstrated through vLLM integration under realistic serving loads. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/hao-ai-lab/JetFlow.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Formalizing and Mitigating Structural Distortion in LLM Attention for Zero-Shot Graph Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15633v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for reasoning over Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs). However, applying LLMs to graphs requires linearizing their structure into sequences, introducing distortion rooted in the graph bandwidth problem. While this distortion has been shown to degrade performance, it is often attributed to prompt design or model scale, leaving the underlying mechanism unclear. In this work, we show how rotary positional embeddings turn graph linearization into bandwidth-dependent attention decay, suppressing attention between graph-adjacent nodes that are forced far apart in the serialized sequence. This shifts the focus of LLM-based graph reasoning from prompt engineering and scaling toward correcting attention misalignment. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Graph-aligned Language Attention (GaLA), a lightweight, inference-time modification for LLMs. GaLA biases attention toward graph-adjacent nodes while preserving the LLM's sequential inductive biases. Across TAG benchmarks, GaLA improves performance with negligible overhead, demonstrating that distortion is a correctable bottleneck in LLM-based graph reasoning.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

TW-LegalBench: Measuring Taiwanese Legal Understanding

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their performance on jurisdiction-specific legal reasoning remains underexplored. We present TW-LegalBench that utilizes Taiwanese legal system's rich official corpus open to the public to fill the gap in evaluating LLMs on Taiwanese law, among common-law benchmarks that focus on English sources and civil-law benchmarks focusing on sources of Simplified Chinese. TW-LegalBench comprises three task types: (1) over 16,000 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) across five years of official examinations in 18 professional domains; (2) 117 open-ended essay questions (OEQs) from examinations for legal professionals with official scoring rubrics; and (3) more than 14,000 legal judgment prediction (LJP) instances covering hundreds of crime categories. We evaluate 13 LLMs using accuracy for MCQs, a decomposed LLM-as-Judge framework based on the scoring rubric points for OEQs, and metrics for sentencing accuracy and statute citation for LJP. Our results reveal that top-performing models exceed the passing threshold for qualified lawyers (passing rate: 11%) but fall short of that for judges and prosecutors (passing rate: 1~2%). For LJP, while models demonstrate reasonable verdict type accuracy and sentence prediction capability, they struggle to cite exact legal articles. These findings highlight that reliable legal text generation remains challenging for LLMs, even though their performance on qualification examinations approaches human level.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

SteerAF: Distogram-based Steering of AlphaFold2 toward Alternative Conformations

End-to-end structure predictors, such as AlphaFold2, typically output only the dominant conformational state of a given protein, which is biased by the training data set. Existing strategies for recovering alternative conformations are often computationally expensive and offer limited biological interpretability. Here, we present SteerAF, an inference-time optimization framework based on AlphaFold2 that leverages information encoded in the distogram derived from deep multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) to predict alternative protein conformations. Across four benchmark datasets, SteerAF matches or surpasses existing methods in predicting alternative conformations for the majority of systems. Sparse MSA-feature modifications generated via block gradient ascent exhibit a strong correlation with experimentally characterized functional residues, recovering them with approximately 50% precision in the tested proteins. Furthermore, SteerAF enables effective decoy selection in the absence of experimental structures, and its predictions can serve as seed structures for molecular dynamics simulations to map conformational landscapes. Thus, SteerAF provides an efficient and interpretable approach for predicting alternative conformations, offering a framework that can be extended to other similar predictors and problems.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DVANet: Degradation-aware Visual-prior Alignment Network for Image Restoration

All-in-One image restoration aims to develop a unified restoration framework for handling diverse degradation types. Existing end-to-end methods usually regard the restoration process as a black-box mapping, lacking an explicit optimization interpretation. Although deep unfolding provides an interpretable iterative modeling paradigm for image restoration, existing methods mostly rely on fixed degradation assumptions or predefined degradation information, making them difficult to adapt to unified restoration requirements under complex degradations and locally damaged content. This limitation restricts their performance in degradation suppression and structural detail recovery. To address these issues, this paper proposes DVANet, a deep unfolding network inspired by the half-quadratic splitting optimization algorithm, which formulates unified image restoration under complex degradations as a collaborative unfolding process between degradation-aware observation consistency and visual-prior-guided reconstruction. Specifically, in the degradation-aware observation consistency branch, a degradation representation module is employed to extract global degradation attributes and local degradation cues, and degradation-conditioned mapping is used to enhance the model's adaptability to different degradation types. In the visual-prior-guided reconstruction branch, DINOv3 is introduced to provide structural and semantic information as hierarchical visual priors, thereby complementing the missing structural information in damaged regions and improving detail recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVANet achieves superior or competitive performance on multi-scenario degradation and cross-domain image restoration tasks, showing favorable degradation adaptability and generalization ability.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

An Empirical Study of Automating Agent Evaluation

Agent evaluation requires assessing complex multi-step behaviors involving tool use and intermediate reasoning, making it costly and expertise-intensive. A natural question arises: can frontier coding assistants reliably automate this evaluation process? Our study shows that simply prompting coding assistants is insufficient for this task. Without domain-specific evaluation knowledge, frontier coding assistants achieve only a 30% execution success rate and produce over-engineered evaluations averaging 12+ metrics per agent, indicating that strong coding ability does not automatically translate to reliable agent evaluation. We introduce EvalAgent, an AI assistant that automates the end-to-end agent evaluation pipeline. EvalAgent encodes evaluation domain expertise as evaluation skills (procedural instructions, reusable code and templates, and dynamically retrieved API documentation) that compose into a trace-based pipeline producing complete evaluation artifacts including metrics, executable code, and reports. To systematically assess generated evaluations, we introduce a meta-evaluation framework alongside AgentEvalBench, a benchmark comprising 20 agents, each paired with evaluation requirements and test scenarios. We further propose the Eval@1 metric to measure whether generated evaluation code both executes and yields meaningful results on the first run. Our experiments show that EvalAgent produces focused evaluations, improving Eval@1 from 17.5% to 65%, and achieving 79.5% human expert preference over baseline approaches. Further ablation studies show that evaluation skills are critical for handling complex evaluation: removing them causes Eval@1 to drop significantly from 65% to 30%.

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

PRISM: Perception Reasoning Interleaved for Sequential Decision Making

arXiv:2605.05407v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling LLM-based embodied agents from text-only environments to complex multimodal settings remains a major challenge. Recent work identifies a perception-reasoning-decision gap in standalone Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which often overlook task-critical information. In this paper, we introduce PRISM, a framework that tightly couples perception (VLM) and decision (LLM) through a dynamic question-answer (DQA) pipeline. Instead of passively accepting the VLM's description, the LLM critiques it, probes the VLM with goal-oriented questions, and synthesizes a compact image description. This closed-loop interaction yields a sharp, task-driven understanding of the scene. We evaluate PRISM on the ALFWorld and Room-to-Room (R2R) benchmarks. We show that: (1) PRISM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art image-based models, (2) our Interactive goal-oriented perception pipeline yields systematic and substantial gains, and (3) PRISM is fully automatic, eliminating the need for handcrafted questions or answers.

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

Automatic ply-specific analyses of CFRP micrographs using shortest-path-based ply distinction

We present an automated approach to distinguish between ply instances in semantic segmentation masks of high-resolution carbon-fiber reinforced polymer micrographs. Interpreting the segmentation mask as a graph with pixels as vertices, enables us to use a shortest-path algorithm yielding the ply-separating paths. Thereby, we bridge the gap between semantic segmentation and ply instance segmentation using global information. We successfully apply our approach on high-resolution micrographs featuring a broad range of characteristics like artificially added gaps in single or multiple plies, different stacking sequences and ply traversing cracks. Assigning each fiber pixel to a ply based on the calculated paths, allows for a comprehensive, quantitative ply analysis with respect to its microstructural properties like the local fiber volume fraction as well as locally resolved ply and interleaf layer thickness. These insights help to reveal manufacturing-induced inhomogeneities, draw conclusions on manufacturing parameters and link mechanical properties to underlying microstructural imperfections.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Convergence Analysis of the Random Bisection Method

arXiv:2603.20483v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a generalized version of the bisection method where the cutting point between the two subintervals is chosen at random following an arbitrary distribution. We compute expected convergence rates with respect to any arbitrary a priori distribution for the position of the root in the initial interval and proved that it depends only on the the expectation $\mathbb{E}[c(1-c)]$ of the cut $c$. We also provide a generalization of the method for $K$ random cuts and study its convergence properties. Most probabilistic derivations are kept fairly simple for the ease of understanding of a larger audience. Our theoretical results are then validated numerically using statistical simulation.

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

The Vision Encoder as a Privacy Boundary: Visual-Token Side Channels in Encoder-Free Vision-Language Models

A vision encoder compresses image pixels into semantic embeddings, implicitly acting as a privacy boundary by preserving semantic content while attenuating pixel-local detail required for exact text recovery. Encoder-free vision-language models (VLMs) remove this boundary by routing image patches directly into the language-model token stream, thereby exposing an architectural privacy attack surface: intermediate visual tokens become a pre-output side channel. Under a token-access adversary, decoders invert visual-token streams from two encoder-free VLMs, Gemma4 and Fuyu, recovering recognizable image structure and readable held-out access codes, whereas matched encoder-based controls localize target regions but recover no exact strings. Within-model ablations show that the operative factor is spatial sampling fidelity of the visual-token grid, especially character-direction sampling density, rather than token or value count. The leakage is not limited to exported tokens: Gemma4 layer-0 key-value cache tensors are directly invertible, placing the side channel within KV caches commonly persisted by production serving stacks for decoding efficiency. The attack survives clutter, realistic document degradation, and zero-shot transfer to public document images, and it resists value-level defenses such as additive noise and quantization. Effective mitigation must therefore reduce spatial sampling, making removal of the vision encoder a first-class privacy decision in VLM deployment.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

VrySure: A Multi-Task AI Scientific Fraud Detection Platform for Identifying Manipulated and AI-Generated Biomedical Research Images

Integrity of scientific data is critical in biomedical research, where images often serve as primary evidence for experimental observations and conclusions. Advances in image-editing technologies and generative artificial intelligence (AI) have increased the accessibility and realism of visual manipulation, making detection through manual review increasingly challenging. To empower our laboratory researchers to continuously monitor and uphold scientific rigor and data integrity, and serve the global scientific community, we developed VrySure, an easy-to-deploy, AI-driven multi-task platform for automated image-integrity screening in biomedical research. VrySure integrates four detection modules: cross-image transformation detection, within-image copy-move detection, splicing detection in blot and gel images, and AI-generated image detection. The system identifies potentially manipulated images and, when possible, localizes suspicious regions using bounding-box outputs to support downstream verification. To support development and evaluation, we constructed task-specific datasets by combining public biomedical image resources, curated manipulated examples, and synthetic images generated by multiple generative AI systems. We evaluated VrySure using region-level F1 score, recall, precision, false negative rate (FNR), and false discovery rate (FDR) across multiple manipulation categories and compared its performance with two commonly used commercial image-integrity screening platforms under a predefined benchmark protocol. Under the tested conditions, VrySure achieved a higher F1 score and recall, lower FNR, and maintained a low FDR for within-image copy-move detection, splicing detection, and AI-generated image detection, while showing comparable performance in transformation detection. Beyond automated screening, VrySure is designed to support source-data comparison and evidence-based assessment in scientific integrity investigations. By integrating multiple detection capabilities into a unified and scalable workflow, VrySure provides a practical framework to improve the efficiency and consistency of image-integrity screening in biomedical research.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

QMFOL: Benchmarking Large Language Model Reasoning via Quantifiable Monadic First-Order Logic Test Case Generation

arXiv:2606.20227v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in reasoning, particularly in deductive reasoning, which is crucial for high-stakes decision-making. As models improve, evaluation benchmarks should evolve to keep pace. However, existing benchmarks lack fine-grained control over logical complexity and struggle to balance semantic diversity with logical consistency. To address these issues, we propose QMFOL, an automated framework for generating monadic first-order logic reasoning tasks with quantifiable and controllable complexity. It constructs formal logical structures using conjunction and disjunction patterns, enabling precise control over reasoning depth, width, label types, and distractors. These structures are then translated into natural language via LLMs, with logical consistency ensured through round-trip verification using an external prover. Based on our framework, we build QMFOLBench, a benchmark comprising 2880 instances with 960 configurations across diverse logical and semantic dimensions. Evaluations on six large reasoning models (LRMs) and two LLMs show that performance degrades and computational overhead increases with rising logical complexity. Models perform better on True-labeled tasks than on False or Unknown ones, and exhibit sensitivity to semantic variation. Overall, QMFOL offers a scalable and reliable approach for constructing deductive reasoning benchmarks with controllable complexity, enabling more precise evaluation of reasoning capabilities in modern language models.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

When Iterative RAG Beats Ideal Evidence: A Diagnostic Study in Scientific Multi-hop Question Answering

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) extends large language models (LLMs) beyond parametric knowledge, yet it is unclear when iterative retrieval-reasoning loops meaningfully outperform static RAG, particularly in scientific domains with multi-hop reasoning, sparse domain knowledge, and heterogeneous evidence. We provide the first controlled, mechanism-level diagnostic study of whether synchronized iterative retrieval and reasoning can surpass an idealized static upper bound (Gold Context) RAG. We benchmark eleven state-of-the-art LLMs under three regimes: (i) No Context, measuring reliance on parametric memory; (ii) Gold Context, where all oracle evidence is supplied at once; and (iii) Iterative RAG, a training-free controller that alternates retrieval, hypothesis refinement, and evidence-aware stopping. Using the chemistry-focused ChemKGMultiHopQA dataset, we isolate questions requiring genuine retrieval and analyze behavior with diagnostics spanning retrieval coverage gaps, anchor-carry drop, query quality, composition fidelity, and control calibration. Across models, Iterative RAG consistently outperforms Gold Context, with gains up to 25.6 percentage points, especially for non-reasoning fine-tuned models. Staged retrieval reduces late-hop failures, mitigates context overload, and enables dynamic correction of early hypothesis drift, but remaining failure modes include incomplete hop coverage, distractor latch trajectories, early stopping miscalibration, and high composition failure rates even with perfect retrieval. Overall, staged retrieval is often more influential than the mere presence of ideal evidence; we provide practical guidance for deploying and diagnosing RAG systems in specialized scientific settings and a foundation for more reliable, controllable iterative retrieval-reasoning frameworks.

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

GUMP-Net: An interpretable model-data-driven intelligent algorithm for multi-class pelvic segmentation

Pelvic segmentation is one of the most important and fundamental research problems in precise and intelligent diagnosis and treatment, as well as surgical planning and navigation for pelvic fractures. By combining an improved geodesic active contour model with deep neural networks, we propose GUMP-Net, an interpretable model-data-driven intelligent algorithm for multi-class pelvic segmentation, in which three network modules are designed to constitute the overall segmentation framework together: the object detection module for automatic level set initialization, the edge detector module for learning an anatomy-aware edge detector function and the iteration module for deep level set evolution. Leveraging the advantages of level set representation and deep learning, GUMP-Net shows more accurate, robust and consistent segmentation performance, especially in small training data situation, compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments on pelvic datasets demonstrate the rationality and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Further experiments extended to ankle dataset indicate broader applications to other anatomies. The proposed algorithm not only provides an efficient segmentation method for complex fracture reduction, but also gives an interpretable geometric perspective for understanding deep learning segmentation.

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

GeoNatureAgent Benchmark: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Environmental Geospatial Analysis Across Frontier and Open-Weight Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.12821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Environmental scientists spend disproportionate effort on data wrangling rather than analysis, and AI agents that automate geospatial workflows remain unvalidated: no benchmark evaluates agents operating through structured tool calling against real APIs. We introduce the GeoNatureAgent Benchmark, the first benchmark for environmental analysis agents that operate via structured tool calls to a production-style geospatial API. It comprises 93 tasks across 18 categories, covering municipality analysis, multi-turn conversation, spatial reasoning, cross-indicator synthesis, error handling and recovery, ranking, comparison, multilingual understanding, habitat analysis, and task rejection. Tasks are evaluated against an open, self-hostable API serving three environmental indicators across Spain and Portugal via sixteen tools. We evaluate seven LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4, DeepSeek V3.2, GLM-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Qwen3-235B, GPT-OSS-120B, Llama 4 Scout) under three temperature-1.0 seeds, reporting capability and per-case cost as orthogonal axes. We find: (1) Claude Sonnet 4 leads at 60.8% +/- 0.8%, followed by DeepSeek V3.2 at 56.3% +/- 3.1%, with no other model above 51%; (2) the cost-accuracy Pareto frontier is occupied mostly by open-weight models, with DeepSeek V3.2 offering 93% of Claude's capability at 11x lower cost ($0.011/case); (3) comparison tasks remain universally unsolved (0% on close-value comparisons), exposing systematic reasoning limits; and (4) structured tool calling against a real API is more discriminative than general-purpose GIS benchmarks, with accuracies 25-35 points lower. We further show extensibility by integrating BigEarthNet V2 land cover for Portugal alongside Spanish CO2 and erosion indicators. The benchmark, harness, and self-hostable API are publicly available.

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

LLM-Evolved Domain-Independent Heuristics for Symbolic AI Planning

arXiv:2605.29649v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Heuristic search is the dominant paradigm in symbolic AI planning, and the strongest heuristics are the result of decades of work by planning researchers. Recent work has shown that large language models (LLMs) can design heuristics for individual planning domains, but no LLM-generated heuristic has so far worked on arbitrary planning tasks. In this paper, we use evolutionary search to produce the first LLM-generated domain-independent heuristics that exceed the hand-engineered state of the art. We let an LLM mutate parent heuristics written in C++, store candidates in a MAP-Elites archive keyed on informedness and speed and calculate fitness scores by blending coverage with solving time. To place the evolved programs in context, we additionally benchmark a broad set of hand-engineered heuristics on their informedness-speed tradeoff, which to our knowledge has not been done before. On unseen testing domains, our best evolved heuristic solves more tasks than even the strongest baseline, with our full heuristic suite spanning the Pareto frontier of said tradeoff. We also find that seeding evolution from the trivial blind heuristic outperforms seeding from the strong FF heuristic, even when the resulting program is itself an FF variant, and that LLM reasoning effort affects how often candidates compile much more than the quality of those that do. Because the evolved programs are plain C++, they slot into existing planners as drop-in replacements and inherit the soundness and completeness guarantees of the underlying search.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Universality in the target arrival statistics of non-conservative search processes

arXiv:2606.16025v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stochastic search processes in which searchers are continuously introduced to and removed from a target search domain are fundamental to a wide class of physical and artificial systems. The theory of such non-conservative search processes is, however, much less developed than for search processes with a fixed number of particles. Here we exploit a natural mapping between non-conservative stochastic search and queueing theory to derive the full time-dependent distribution of target arrivals under minimal assumptions on the underlying search process. Remarkably, we find that the steady-state inter-arrival time distribution is exactly exponential, regardless of the details of the search process, showing a robust universality that emerges directly from the queueing framework. Thus, counterintuitively, the arrival statistics of a non-conservative search process are much simpler than sequential search-and-capture processes involving a fixed number of searchers. This has major implications for target resource accumulation, where the delivery of resources is counter-balanced by their downstream consumption.