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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Specific epigenetic age acceleration measures are associated with oral health outcomes in U.S. adults

Objectives: Oral health conditions impact a significant proportion of the global population. Chronological age is a known risk factor; however, characterization of epigenetic age remains limited and is expected to provide additional insight into biological mechanisms. Materials and Methods: The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) was used to analyze the effect of epigenetic age measures of DunedinPoAm, and epigenetic age acceleration (EAA) of Horvath, Hannum, Weidner, Lin, VidalBralo, PhenoAge, GrimAge, and GrimAge2, on various oral health outcomes from survey and examination results. Univariable and multivariable logistic regression were performed, adjusting for sex, race-ethnicity, education, poverty income ratio categories, and dental insurance coverage status. Results: DunedinPoAm was associated with the last dental appointment being for an existing issue (p=0.0093), poor general oral condition (p=0.0226), limiting food due to teeth problems (p=0.0031), and recommendation to see a dentist within the next two weeks (p=0.0171). EAAs for PhenoAge, GrimAge, and GrimAge2, were associated with a smaller number of oral health outcomes, whereas EAAs for Horvath, Hannum, Weidner, Lin, and Vidal-Bralo showed no associations. Conclusions: In a representative U.S. population, DunedinPoAm was most consistently positively associated with different adverse oral health outcomes compared with other epigenetic aging measures. Tracking specific epigenetic ages such as DunedinPoAm, EAA GrimAge, EAA GrimAge2, and PhenoAge, may aid in additional monitoring of oral health outcomes. Understanding specific aging-related CpGs associated with oral health may aid in elucidating underlying molecular mechanisms.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Whose hotel does the AI recommend? An algorithm audit of reputation signals in LLM-assisted hotel selection

Travelers increasingly ask large language model (LLM) assistants which hotel to book, making these systems gatekeepers of property visibility – yet what moves their recommendations is undocumented. We conduct a pre-specified algorithm audit using a randomized choice-based conjoint: across personas, prompt templates, and twelve open-weight and proprietary models, assistants choose among five hotels whose guest rating, review volume and recency, management response, chain affiliation, price, eco-certification, and list position are independently randomized. We estimate the average marginal component effect of each signal on the probability of recommendation. Guest rating and price dominate (a top rating raises selection by 31.6 percentage points; a high price lowers it by 30.0), reproducing human valence-and-price primacy but over-weighting eco-certification and ignoring management response. List position – a content-free artifact – shifts recommendations causally, worth about \$12 per night. Stated reasons track revealed weights imperfectly. The findings ground generative engine optimization and the accountability of AI infomediaries in causal evidence.

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

NEST: Narrative Event Structures in Time for Long Video Understanding

Recent progress in vision-language models has enabled the processing of increasingly long video sequences, but the ability to handle extended token streams does not translate to understanding of narrative structure in long videos. Existing long video benchmarks focus on needle-in-a-haystack retrieval rather than evaluating how low-level actions form events, how events interact across time, and how narratives progress, for example, whether a model can connect an early setback, such as a job loss to a later relationship breakup, despite long gaps, intervening scenes, or flashbacks that reframe what occurred. We introduce NEST (Narrative Event Structures in Time for Long Video Understanding), a dataset of 1005 full-length movies (avg. 98 minutes), each annotated with 102 multimodal narrative events grounded in visual content, dialogue, and audio. NEST captures multimodal narrative events with structured annotations grounded in visual content, dialogue, and audio, and links them through relations that reflect narrative structure, including temporal ordering, hierarchical composition, and long-range dependencies. We introduce baselines for event trigger detection (ETD), event localization (EL), event argument extraction (EAE), and event relation extraction (ERE). The benchmark is highly challenging for grounded event discovery, with ETD below 8%, EL under 6%, and EAE below 11%. In contrast, ERE is more tractable once events are given, reaching 35.45% F1 zero-shot and 44.42% F1 after fine-tuning.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

Antibody-Antigen Affinity Prediction with Chain-Aware Protein Language Modeling

Motivation: Antibody-antigen affinity determines which antibodies advance in therapeutic discovery, repertoire analysis and affinity maturation, but experimental measurements are sparse relative to the scale of sequence libraries. Structure-based predictors can exploit interface geometry when reliable complexes are available, yet early discovery often requires ranking many heavy-light chain pairs against antigens for which no complex structure exists. Existing sequence-based models are scalable, but frequently compress heavy and light chains into a single antibody representation or concatenate antibody and antigen features obscuring the chain-specific and epitope-specific signals that drive binding. Results: We present AbAffinity, a sequence-only chain-aware three-stream architecture that maintains heavy chain, light chain and antigen as distinct streams. It integrates frozen ESM-2 embeddings with heavy-chain CDR-focused pooling, heavy-light self-attention, adaptive fusion gating and gated cross-attention, training only a compact interaction module. On the SAAINT-DB benchmark, AbAffinity achieves strong predictive performance under ten-fold cross-validation and maintains robust accuracy on novel antigens. It consistently outperforms recent sequence-based models across external benchmarks including SAbDab, AB-Bind and SKEMPI 2.0. Ablation studies highlight the contributions of chain-specific representations, CDR-focused pooling and the gated interaction pathway. Integrated Gradients attributions recover known paratope and epitope residues at structurally validated interfaces. AbAffinity provides a lightweight, explainable sequence-first framework for antibody triage and prioritisation when structural information is limited or unavailable.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Resource-Aware LLM Reasoning for Mobile Edge General Intelligence

arXiv:2509.23248v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enabled an emergence of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) with powerful reasoning and autonomous decision-making capabilities. This integration with edge computing has led to the development of Mobile Edge General Intelligence (MEGI), which brings real-time, privacy-preserving reasoning to the network edge. However, deploying LLM-based agentic AI reasoning in MEGI environments poses significant challenges due to the high computational demands of reasoning and the limited resources of edge devices. To address these challenges, we propose a joint optimization framework for efficient LLM reasoning deployment in MEGI. First, we systematically review enhancement methods to identify mechanisms suitable for edge adaptation. Subsequently, we present a distributed framework that synergizes reasoning enhancement via adaptive CoT prompting with scalable deployment through a distributed MoE architecture. An important innovation of this approach involves modeling reasoning depth as a dynamic network resource variable, which is optimized jointly with expert activation and transmission power. This mechanism allows the system to dynamically regulate expert networks and reasoning complexity according to task requirements and device capabilities. Experimental evaluations in mobile edge environments demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively balances reasoning quality and resource efficiency. The results show that with less than one second of additional inference time, both accuracy and latency satisfaction rate can reach 90\%, validating the practical viability of deploying sophisticated LLM reasoning in resource-constrained MEGI systems.

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

SciHorizon-GENE: Benchmarking LLM for Life Sciences Inference from Gene Knowledge to Functional Understanding

Large language models (LLMs) have shown growing promise in biomedical research, particularly for knowledge-driven interpretation tasks. However, their ability to reliably reason from gene-level knowledge to functional understanding, a core requirement for knowledge-enhanced cell atlas interpretation, remains largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce SciHorizon-GENE, a large-scale gene-centric benchmark constructed from authoritative biological databases. The benchmark integrates curated knowledge for over 190K human genes and comprises more than 540K questions covering diverse gene-to-function reasoning scenarios relevant to cell type annotation, functional interpretation, and mechanism-oriented analysis. Motivated by behavioral patterns observed in preliminary examinations, SciHorizon-GENE evaluates LLMs along four biologically critical perspectives: research attention sensitivity, hallucination tendency, answer completeness, and literature influence, explicitly targeting failure modes that limit the safe adoption of LLMs in biological interpretation pipelines. We systematically evaluate a wide range of state-of-the-art general-purpose and biomedical LLMs, revealing substantial heterogeneity in gene-level reasoning capabilities and persistent challenges in generating faithful, complete, and literature-grounded functional interpretations. Our benchmark establishes a systematic foundation for analyzing LLM behavior at the gene scale and offers insights for model selection and development, with direct relevance to knowledge-enhanced biological interpretation.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Instrumental and Proximal Causal Inference with Gaussian Processes

arXiv:2603.02159v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Instrumental variable (IV) and proximal causal learning (Proxy) methods are central frameworks for causal inference in the presence of unobserved confounding. Despite substantial methodological advances, existing approaches rarely provide reliable epistemic uncertainty (EU) quantification. We address this gap through a Deconditional Gaussian Process (DGP) framework for uncertainty-aware causal learning. Our formulation recovers popular kernel estimators as the posterior mean, ensuring predictive precision, while the posterior variance yields principled and well-calibrated EU. Moreover, the probabilistic structure enables systematic model selection via marginal log-likelihood optimization. Empirical results demonstrate strong predictive performance alongside informative EU quantification, evaluated via empirical coverage frequencies and decision-aware accuracy rejection curves. Together, our approach provides a unified, practical solution for causal inference under unobserved confounding with reliable uncertainty.

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

Localizing Anchoring Pathways in Language Models

Irrelevant numbers in a prompt can shift language model judgments, producing anchoring effects in numerical reasoning. We study where this anchor-sensitive signal is carried inside language models using a controlled multiple-choice setup with shared answer options. We define a logit-difference metric comparing the correct answer option with the answer option corresponding to the anchor, and validate that it tracks behavioral anchoring. Using attribution-based circuit localization on 7B–8B Qwen and Llama base and instruction-tuned models, we find that edge-level methods recover this signal more faithfully than node-level methods. Low- and high-anchor circuits transfer strongly within a model, suggesting shared pathway structure across anchor direction. However, sparse transfer across base and instruction-tuned variants is less reliable, indicating that post-training changes which pathways matter most. Overall, our results provide a mechanistic account of how anchoring-related decision signals are carried inside language models.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Reversal Q-Learning

arXiv:2606.17551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Iterative generative modeling techniques, such as flow matching, provide powerful tools to model complex behaviors for effective offline reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we propose a new off-policy RL algorithm that trains a flow policy based on prior data. Our idea starts from the "expanded" Markov decision process (MDP) framework, which treats individual flow refinement steps as separate actions in an MDP. To enable off-policy RL within this framework, we apply two techniques: we generate virtual on-policy trajectories (by "reversing" flows) to make this framework compatible with prior data, and we apply a bias-and-variance reduction technique to mitigate the curse of horizon in off-policy RL. We call the resulting algorithm Reversal Q-learning (RQL). RQL has several advantages over previous flow-based RL methods: it does not suffer from backpropagation through time, makes better use of the learned value function, and directly trains the full, expressive flow policy. Through our experiments on 50 challenging simulated robotic tasks, we show that RQL leads to the best average offline RL performance compared to state-of-the-art flow-based offline RL algorithms.

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

Latent Thought Flow: Efficient Latent Reasoning in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.16222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on intermediate reasoning, yet explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) suffers from a linguistic space bottleneck: each thought must be decoded into tokens, causing high inference overhead. Latent reasoning moves deliberation into continuous space, but existing methods mostly learn deterministic or reward-maximizing paths, lacking a principled way to allocate probability across trajectories with different correctness and costs. We propose Latent Thought Flow (LTF), which models reasoning as variable-length continuous trajectories and trains a sampler to match a reward-induced posterior over answer quality and computation cost. We instantiate this with a continuous GFlowNet using stochastic latent transitions. To handle sparse answer supervision, we introduce an Entropy-Weighted Subtrajectory Balance objective for intermediate rewards and a reference-prior regularizer to anchor exploration. Experiments under finetuning and transfer learning settings show that LTF outperforms explicit CoT and latent reasoning baselines, improving accuracy by 9.5% while reducing reasoning length by 27.2% on average compared with strong latent reasoning baselines.

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

From Isolation to Entanglement: When Do Interpretability Methods Identify and Disentangle Known Concepts?

A goal of interpretability is to recover disentangled representations of latent concepts (features) from the activations of neural networks. The quality of features is typically evaluated in isolation, and under implicit independence assumptions that may not hold in practice. Thus, it is unclear to what extent common featurization methods such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and probes disentangle one concept from another. We propose a multi-concept evaluation setting using concepts including sentiment, domain, voice, and tense. We evaluate how well featurizers produce disentangled representations of each concept, observing that features are typically sensitive to only one concept, but also that concepts are distributed across many features. Then, we steer these features, measuring whether each concept is independently manipulable, and whether features interact. Even in idealized settings, steering a feature often affects many concepts, despite a near absence of interaction effects. These results suggest that correlational metrics are insufficient to establish steering selectivity, and that demonstrating that two features operate in separate spaces is insufficient to claim that they will be selective for one concept. These results underscore the importance of multi-concept evaluations in interpretability research.

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

Text-Driven Fusion for Infrared and Visible Images: Achieving Image Scene Adaptation on Hyperbolic Space

Infrared and visible image fusion aims to integrate complementary modalities, while existing Euclidean methods impose rigid distance metrics that distort multi-modal interactions and parent-to-child semantic hierarchies. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a text-driven fusion framework empowered by hyperbolic manifold learning. During training, BLIP-extracted text prompts serve as topological anchors within the hyperbolic space, guiding vision-attribute alignment through hyperbolic embeddings that naturally accommodate varying semantic granularities. By exploiting the exponential volume growth dictated by the Poincaré ball's negative curvature, this approach seamlessly embeds hierarchical trees to encode coarse-to-fine semantics without metric saturation, while the vast peripheral space prevents texture distortion during cross-modal fusion. At inference, the fusion process autonomously adapts to input content using the learned text-attribute priors, completely eliminating the need for textual input. Experimental results show our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on benchmark datasets, with code available at https://github.com/Shaoyun2023/TEDFusion.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Within-host pathogen population diversity predicts treatment response in tuberculosis

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) treatment outcomes remain suboptimal, and standard clinical diagnostics cannot reliably identify patients at high risk of treatment failure or relapse at the time of diagnosis. While within-host Mycobacterium tuberculosis genetic diversity is hypothesized to reflect the viable bacterial burden and adaptive capacity of the infection, its clinical prognostic value remains unknown. Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 364 patients with newly diagnosed, rifampicin-susceptible pulmonary TB in South Africa. Patients received standard 6-month therapy and were monitored for up to two years to ascertain composite unfavorable outcomes (treatment failure, death, or relapse). To accurately detect low-frequency (unfixed) genetic variants and eliminate reference bias artifacts, we mapped medium to high depth short-read sequences against matched, patient-specific long-read assemblies. The association between baseline pathogen genetic diversity and clinical outcomes was evaluated using multivariable Cox proportional-hazards models. Results: After bioinformatic filtering, true unfixed variants were relatively rare but significantly enriched in genes mediating pathogen adaptation and drug tolerance, including transporter proteins and two-component regulatory systems. Within-host bacterial genetic diversity (i.e., the total number of unfixed variants) ranged from 0-20, with a median of 1 per patient. In survival analysis adjusting for known clinical risk factors–including HIV status, prior TB, baseline smear positivity, and radiographic lung involvement–baseline within-host genetic diversity emerged as a strong, independent predictor of unfavorable treatment outcomes. For patients with greater than 3 unfixed variants at diagnosis, each increase of 5 unfixed variants was associated with more than double the risk of a composite unfavorable outcome (adjusted Hazard Ratio, 2.36; 95% CI, 1.27 to 4.39; p=0.007). Conclusions: Baseline within-host pathogen genetic diversity is an independent predictor of unfavorable TB treatment outcomes. As sequencing becomes increasingly integrated into routine diagnostics, quantifying unfixed variants is an accessible approach that promises to risk-stratify patients and guide the duration of individualized regimens.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Entanglement Scaling and Problem Structure in Quantum Approximate and Adiabatic Optimization Algorithms

arXiv:2606.19502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement is widely regarded as a key resource underlying the power of quantum algorithms and their potential to achieve quantum advantage. With the emergence of variational quantum algorithms, however, questions have arisen regarding how entanglement relates to problem structure and algorithmic performance in near-term quantum applications. Here, we examine this relationship through the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), a specific class of variational algorithms, applied to the MaxCut problem. We show that suboptimal variational parameter training can significantly modify the observed entanglement profile, obscuring its scaling behavior. By employing a high-performance optimizer, we find empirical evidence that QAOA exhibits entanglement scaling consistent with that of fermionic Gaussian states (up to a scaling factor) across a broad range of MaxCut instances. We further compare these results with adiabatic quantum computation, observing annealing-schedule-dependent entanglement profiles whose scaling behavior differs markedly from that of QAOA. Together, these findings provide new insight into how entanglement manifests in and distinguishes these two algorithmic paradigms, highlighting its connection to both computational performance and application structure.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Multimodal LLM-Empowered Re-Ranking for Generalizable Person Re-Identification

Domain Generalizable (DG) person re-identification (Re-ID) has attracted growing research interest due to its potential for deployment in unseen real-world scenarios. Most existing approaches address DG Re-ID by focusing on training domain-generalizable encoders but ignore the possible refinements in inference stage. In contrast, this work explores an alternative direction which improves inference re-ranking to enhance DG Re-ID. Conventional re-ranking methods typically rely on neighborhood-based distances to refine the initial ranking list, inherently depending on features produced by the Re-ID encoder. However, they deteriorate on target domains since the encoder lacks sufficient generalizability to produce reliable feature distances on unseen scenarios. Inspired by the remarkable generalization capabilities of recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we propose an MLLM-empowered distance metric to improve re-ranking in DG Re-ID. Specifically, we first adapt an MLLM to Re-ID data through supervised fine-tuning, which incorporates a domain-agnostic prompt and a query-candidate hard mining scheme. Then, the adapted MLLM is employed to compute a $\mu$-distance during inference, which is robust to domain gap and significantly enhances subsequent re-ranking performance. Our approach is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into previous re-ranking frameworks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently yields substantial performance improvements across multiple DG Re-ID benchmarks. The code of this work will be released at https://github.com/RikoLi/MUSE soon.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Did You Forget What I Asked? Prospective Memory Failures in Large Language Models

作者:

Large language models often fail to satisfy formatting instructions when they must simultaneously perform demanding tasks. We study this behaviour through a prospective memory inspired lens from cognitive psychology, using a controlled paradigm that combines verifiable formatting constraints with benchmark tasks of increasing complexity. Across three model families and over 8,000 prompts, compliance drops by 2-21% under concurrent task load. Vulnerability is highly type-dependent: terminal constraints (requiring action at the response boundary) degrade most, with drops up to 50%, while avoidance constraints remain comparatively robust. A salience-enhanced format (explicit instruction framing plus a trailing reminder) recovers much of the lost compliance, restoring performance to 90-100% in many settings. Interference is bidirectional: formatting constraints can also reduce task accuracy, with one model's GSM8K accuracy dropping from 93% to 27%. In additional stacking experiments, joint compliance declines sharply as constraints accumulate. All results use deterministic programmatic checkers without an LLM-as-judge component on publicly available datasets.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

What Drives Test-Time Adaptation for CLIP? A Controlled Empirical Study from an Update Perspective

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have become a standard backbone for open-vocabulary recognition, yet their zero-shot predictions remain vulnerable to distribution shifts encountered at deployment. Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) has recently been extended to CLIP as a lightweight solution, leading to a rapidly growing body of TTA4CLIP methods. However, empirical progress in this area has largely outpaced our understanding of what truly drives adaptation, where their gains originate, and under which shifts they remain reliable. In this paper, we take a step back from the pursuit of state-of-the-art accuracy and conduct a systematic controlled study of TTA4CLIP. We first organize existing methods into three unified paradigms according to what is updated at test time. We then introduce TTABC, an open-source TTA Benchmark for CLIP, which standardizes evaluation protocols and integrates more than 20 representative methods. Our controlled empirical analysis focuses on three key areas. First, we determine the driving factors in parameter-based methods, revealing that adaptation gains are primarily driven by test-time evidence and reliable proxies rather than heavy optimization. Second, we explore evidence utilization beyond heavy parameter tuning, showing that competitive and efficient performance can be achieved through cross- or current-sample evidence and lightweight prototype updates. Finally, we demonstrate that there is no silver bullet for TTA: no single adaptation paradigm is universally optimal, and the preferred paradigm depends on the nature of shift. We hope our benchmark and study provide a clearer understanding of the current TTA4CLIP landscape and establish a foundation for further research.

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

SkillMoV: Mixture-of-View Routing with Prototype-Conditioned Gating for Unified Multi-View Proficiency Estimation

Estimating human proficiency from video is a key challenge for automated skill assessment, with applications in sports coaching, music pedagogy, surgical training, and workplace learning. Existing approaches often focus on individual scenarios or rely on shared multi-view aggregation, limiting their ability to adapt to heterogeneous camera viewpoints and activity domains. We introduce SkillMoV, a unified, parameter-efficient framework for multi-scenario proficiency estimation from synchronized multi-view video. At its core, SkillMoV introduces a Mixture-of-View Projector (MoVP), which adapts the mixture-of-experts paradigm to camera-specific view features. MoVP is composed of four stages: (i) a Mixture-of-View soft router with twelve expert MLPs that learns view-dependent expert preferences without camera-identity supervision; (ii) cross-view attention to align synchronized cameras; (iii) learnable prototype anchoring to condition the representation on class-level reference vectors; and (iv) a prototype-conditioned gated projection that produces the final skill embedding. We evaluate SkillMoV on EgoExo4D across six skill domains and three separately trained view configurations: Ego, Exos, and Ego+Exos. SkillMoV reaches 50.17% overall accuracy in the Exos setting with a single model trained jointly across all scenarios, surpassing the strongest reported Exos result among the compared methods by 3.57 percentage points. In Ego+Exos, SkillMoV remains close to the best reported result in that setting (47.63% versus 48.20%). Ablations on the selected Exos configuration validate each component: MoV routing contributes +6.61 pp over attentive aggregation, cross-view attention +4.92 pp, prototype anchoring +4.07 pp, and stochastic view dropout +3.90 pp. Through LoRA adaptation, SkillMoV trains only 23.32% of its parameters and adds limited measured overhead relative to a LoRA-only baseline.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mutual Distillation of Dual-Foundation Models for Semi-Supervised PET/CT Segmentation

Organ segmentation from PET/CT is critical for quantitative analysis and radiotherapy planning in oncology. To ease the high annotation cost of PET/CT segmentation, semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides a practical and effective solution for developing deep models with limited labeled data. Recent developments in visual foundation models have demonstrated remarkable adaptability with improved efficiency. In this work, we propose a mutual distillation framework that seamlessly exploits both structural and functional foundation models, which act as modality-specific generalists for distilling knowledge from structural CT and metabolic PET imaging. By bridging the gap between the task-specific precision of student models and the segmentation priors of generalist foundation models, we propose MuDuo, a mutual distillation framework that synergistically leverages SAM-Med3D for CT and SegAnyPET for PET to distill their knowledge into a lightweight student network. Our approach eliminates the need for manual prompts while maximizing the utility of unlabeled data for automatic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the AutoPET dataset with only 5 labeled cases. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Wu-beining/MuDuo.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A prior-free blind detection of information leakage from model predictions

arXiv:2606.11267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data leakage – contamination of a model with information unavailable at baseline – is the dominant reproducibility failure in machine-learning-based science, yet detection tools require training code, external data, or domain expertise. None operates on the artifact an auditor most often holds: the model's output. We ask what can be decided about leakage from predictions and outcomes alone. We give a decision-theoretic framework in which leakage diagnostics are functionals of the predicted-risk/outcome law, parameterized by a threshold-weighting linked to proper scoring rules and decision-curve analysis. We prove a sharp impossibility: a recalibrated leak matching an honest model's calibration and discrimination is indistinguishable from honest performance by any function of the predictions, so the broad class is detectable only against an externally supplied ceiling on achievable discrimination. We then prove what leakage cannot hide: a near-deterministic subgroup – the signature of a near-label leak – produces a sustained unit-purity head that no legitimate predictor of a non-deterministic outcome can manufacture, yielding a prior-free test. These results organize leakage into a trichotomy – miscalibrated, broad-calibrated, and deterministic – each with a matched detector and failure mode. We validate on UK Biobank using time-windowed comorbidity leakage with known, graded severity, measuring a detection floor of $\Delta\cstar \approx 0.007$ on this endpoint, below which residual leakage is undetectable from output and too small to alter conclusions. The numerical floor is cohort- and endpoint-specific; the structural lesson is general: output-only detection fails where residual leakage is indistinguishable from an honestly stronger predictor. The test returns a verdict on a prediction vector in under a second on commodity hardware.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Accelerating physics-informed neural networks for full waveform inversion using a hybrid quantum-classical finite-basis architecture

arXiv:2606.01110v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Full waveform inversion (FWI) reconstructs heterogeneous material properties from receiver data but remains computationally demanding. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and their domain-decomposed variants (FBPINNs) offer a mesh-free alternative but face convergence challenges when representing complex velocity fields. We present a hybrid quantum-classical FBPINN for acoustic FWI, bringing together quantum computing and classical machine learning, in which the decomposed wavefield network and the global velocity network are implemented as classical-to-quantum pipelines terminating in parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). The PQCs are realized as differentiable JAX statevector simulators, enabling end-to-end automatic differentiation through the classical PINN, the quantum circuit, and the physics-informed loss. On a geophysical anomaly benchmark, the quantum hybrid reaches a lower L1 velocity error than the primary classical FBPINN baseline in approximately 8x fewer training iterations, despite using approximately 33% fewer trainable parameters, and it outperforms all 15 classical hyperparameter variants tested. A second benchmark (checkerboard) demonstrates the generality of the inversion pipeline, confirming that the quantum hybrid architecture can recover structured spatial variations beyond the localized anomaly benchmark. Our framework is broadly applicable to wave-based inverse problems beyond geophysics, including medical ultrasound tomography and non-destructive evaluation.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Not What, But How: A Framework for Auditing LLM Responses across Positioning, Generalization, Anthropomorphism, and Maxims

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly used to answer subjective, information-seeking questions, where users are sensitive to how responses are communicated, not just whether the answers are correct. Existing LLM evaluations for subjective cultural queries largely focus on factual correctness, ignoring how the response is framed. To this end, we introduce FRANZ, an automated FRAmework for respoNse characteriZation to conduct communicative audit of LLM responses along four dimensions: cultural positioning, use of generalizing language, anthropomorphic cues, and adherence to conversational maxims. To enable this evaluation, we contribute SQUARE - a corpus of 376k subjective questions sourced from 57 subreddits, and mapped to 7 countries and 19 question categories. We demonstrate FRANZ's applicability by scoring responses from three open-weight LLMs. We observe that LLMs show statistically significant differences in the frequency with which they employ each response characteristic. Unlike single-dimensional audits, FRANZ reveals that insider positioning and anthropomorphism are positively coupled, with the degree of coupling varying by country, providing a diagnostic lens for identifying framing divergences.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AIChilles: Automatically Uncovering Hidden Weaknesses in AI-Evolved Systems

arXiv:2606.15834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The computer systems community has recently seen growing interest in AI-driven system evolution, where AI agents iteratively rewrite systems. Frameworks such as AdaEvolve and Engram report 12-60% score improvements over human-designed algorithms. While these results are promising, there are practical concerns if these AI-evolved programs can perform worse on unseen workloads and exhibit scalability regressions. Given the speed and scale of AI-generated code, we need automated mechanisms to uncover such identify hidden weaknesses in AI-evolved systems programs. To this end, we develop AIChilles that takes as input a baseline program $P$ and an AI-evolved program $P'$, AIChilles searches for valid workloads where $P'$ regresses relative to $P$ in correctness, runtime, memory usage, or output quality. To tackle the diversity in system applications, weakness types and potential bugs, AIChilles combines deterministic workload-parameter extraction, agent-based constraint inference, differential oracles, and code-frequency coverage to discover diverse failures. Across five system applications and 30 AI-evolved programs, AIChilles finds 49 distinct hidden weaknesses. We also show that explicitly including AIChilles in the AI-driven development lifecycle can mitigate several of these weaknesses.

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

Bounded Difference Concentration for Infinitely Exchangeable Sequences with Applications to AI Benchmark Uncertainty

arXiv:2606.17426v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the concentration properties of functions of infinitely exchangeable random variables. By conditioning on the de Finetti directing measure, we show that the deviation of any function with bounded-difference constants $c_1, \dots, c_n$ decomposes into a conditional sampling fluctuation and a latent mixture fluctuation. When this latent mixture is $\sigma_{\mathrm{mix}}^2$-subgaussian, we establish a concentration inequality with an effective variance proxy of $\frac{1}{4}\sum_i c_i^2 + \sigma_{\mathrm{mix}}^2$. Crucially, we demonstrate that for zero-sum linear contrasts, such as the difference between a subsample mean and a full population mean, the latent mixture term cancels exactly. This cancellation yields a tight, mixture-free Hoeffding-type bound that provides a direct de Finetti mechanism for the infinite-extendibility limit of recent finite-exchangeable concentration results. We apply this framework to quantify uncertainty in composite AI benchmarks, such as MMLU, where question items naturally exhibit exchangeable dependence across domains. Our results provide both a domain-stratified hierarchical model for bounding the uncertainty of accuracy scores, and a distribution-free, cost-saving statistical guarantee for accurately estimating full benchmark scores from random subsets.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Direct/adaptive-mixture phase-gradient learning for neural-network quantum states with complex phase structure

arXiv:2606.13912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural-network quantum states (NQS) are a leading variational tool for quantum many-body physics, yet their optimization is fragile whenever the ground state carries a non-trivial sign or complex phase structure, a situation generic to gauge fields, broken time-reversal symmetry, and fermionic statistics. We trace this fragility to the stochastic estimator of the phase gradient rather than to network expressiveness. The phase sector of the Monte Carlo energy gradient is a noisy score-function estimator; differentiating the local energy instead yields a direct estimator that is unbiased for the same phase force, has far lower variance, and requires only a separated amplitude–phase ansatz. Demonstrated on a 100-site flux ladder, a small network trained this way reaches $0.89\%$ median error, where tuned standard baselines plateau at $1.8\%$ and wider or deeper standard-gradient networks degrade from $8.4\%$ to $24.6\%$. The advantage carries over to chiral XXX chains: the direct estimator again converges to a markedly lower error than the standard one, across $\alpha$ and size; it grows with flux and vanishes in zero-flux controls. An adaptive-mixture of the two estimators is provably never worse in variance than the better endpoint at the optimal mixing coefficient, with seed-resolved diagnostics tracing much of the gain to eliminating failed runs. Estimator design thus emerges as a first-class lever for complex-valued neural quantum states.