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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

MemToolAgent: Leveraging Memory for Tool Using Agents Based on Environment and User Feedback

Modern large language model (LLM) agents can use external tools to help users solve complex tasks. However, for problems that require learning from long-term historical events or from previous agent-environment interactions, LLM agents are required to use memory mechanisms to store and retrieve experiences. While sophisticated memory systems exist for dialogue agents, few studies have empirically examined how to improve agents' tool-using capabilities through past user-agent conversations. We propose MemToolAgent, a framework that improves tool use through memory management. Our approach contains a memory extraction module that processes past experiences into structured memory entries, and a retrieval module that dynamically selects a subset of the stored memory entries. This enables more personalized and accurate responses aligned with user preferences and feedback without requiring LLM fine-tuning. In summary, this work has three main contributions: (1) a unified memory entry format that improves both general-purpose and personalized tool use without LLM fine-tuning, (2) a reflection-based memory extraction that uses environment and user feedback to distill wrong executions into critiques to store, and (3) a retrieval module that chooses how many past experiences to use based on the memory similarity distribution. MemToolAgent achieves 29%, 80%, and 17% relative improvements compared to strong baselines on the WorkBench, NESTFUL, and PEToolBench benchmarks, respectively.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Treatment of Multi-Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis with Second-Line All-Oral Drugs in Ghana: Incidence of Adverse Events.

Introduction: The treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) remains challenging due to the toxicity of second-line medications and suboptimal treatment outcomes. This study aimed to determine the incidence of adverse events and identify factors associated with these events in patients undergoing treatment for MDR-TB with second-line all-oral drugs in Ghana. Methods: This retrospective cohort study reviewed the medical records of 384 MDR-TB patients treated with second-line all-oral drugs at selected health facilities in Ghana, including the Greater Accra Regional Hospital, Eastern Regional Hospital, and Kumasi South Hospital. Data were extracted using the Kobo Collect tool, capturing patient demographics, baseline clinical and laboratory characteristics, treatment regimens, and adverse events. The study period spanned from 2020 to August 2024. Results: The study included a total of 384 MDR-TB patients, with a mean age of 45 years (SD = 15). The majority of patients were male (65.78%), and most were within the 45-64 years age group (33.85%), followed by those aged 25-44 years (31.25%). Regionally, the highest number of cases were reported from the Greater Accra Region (39.06%), followed by the Eastern Region (31.25%) and Kumasi South Hospital (29.69%). Approximately one in four patients (25%) presented with comorbidities, with HIV being the most common (19.5%). The most frequently reported adverse events were diarrhea (14%), dizziness (13.7%), and vomiting (12.3%). Most of these were mild to moderate in severity and tended to decrease as treatment progressed. Severe adverse events, such as leukopenia and acute kidney injury, were rare, occurring in less than 5% of patients. Over the course of treatment, gastrointestinal adverse events such as vomiting and nausea showed a significant decline, indicating possible patient adaptation or improved clinical management. Results from the multivariate Poisson regression analysis revealed that age and comorbidities were significant predictors of adverse events. Patients aged 65 years and above had a 56% lower risk of developing adverse events compared to younger patients (Adjusted Risk Ratio [aRR] = 0.44, 95% CI: 0.25-0.79, p = 0.005). Conversely, patients with comorbid conditions such as diabetes or hypertension were approximately 2.6 times more likely to experience adverse events compared to those without comorbidities (aRR = 2.65, 95% CI: 1.58-4.43, p < 0.001). The effect of sex was not statistically significant after adjustment (aRR = 1.03, 95% CI: 0.70-1.50, p = 0.86). At the end of the treatment period, 74.9% of patients achieved successful outcomes, including both those who were cured and those who completed treatment without being classified as cured. However, 25.1% had unsuccessful outcomes, which included treatment failure, relapse, or death. Conclusion: In conclusion, adverse events are common in the treatment of MDR-TB with second-line All-Oral drugs, with gastrointestinal adverse events being the most prevalent. These findings highlight the importance of monitoring and managing adverse events to optimize treatment outcomes for MDR-TB patients in Ghana.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Metabolic quantum limit to the information capacity of magnetoencephalography

arXiv:2511.06401v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Magnetoencephalography measures the magnetic fields generated by neural currents using quantum sensors such as superconducting quantum interference devices and atomic magnetometers. Here we combine the energy resolution limit of magnetic sensing with the metabolic power available to neural currents to derive a technology-independent bound on the information capacity of MEG. The bound factorizes into geometry, metabolism, and Planck's constant, and gives an estimated maximum information rate of 2.2~Mbit/s for representative human-brain parameters. Further, we show that the externally measurable magnetic field has a finite angular bandwidth, with high multipole components being geometrically attenuated and falling below the quantum-limited noise floor. This yields an information-limited spatial scale of order $1~cm$ and renders the accessible measurement space effectively finite-dimensional. The energy resolution limit therefore defines an information-theoretic Nyquist scale for magnetoencephalography, beyond which denser spatial sampling provides redundant measurements rather than additional recoverable information. Since the energy resolution limit also makes the noise variance grow linearly with measurement bandwidth, temporal and spatial bandwidths compete, producing a fundamental spatio-temporal trade-off. These results show how quantum-limited measurements constrain the observable complexity and information content of noninvasive brain imaging, providing a quantitative link between fundamental physics and neuroscience.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Linear Recurrent Unit with Semantic Modulation for Image Super-Resolution

Linear recurrent unit (LRU), designed with a principled formulation for stable linear recurrence, has demonstrated promising accuracy and robustness on long-range dependency tasks. However, its static parameterization and single-scan method limits its applicability to 2D vision tasks. In this study, we propose a LRU-based restoration network with a semantic modulating unit (SMU) to achieve a harmonious balance between performance and efficiency in single-image super-resolution. The SMU plays three key roles: LRU modulation, spatial categorization, and feature enhancement through learned prototype. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method quantitatively and qualitatively surpasses recent state-of-the-art methods. Notably, our approach achieves superior performance with computational complexity on par with existing methods. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/MingyuChoi-run/LSM

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

A controlled human infection model for symptomatic pertussis in North America using the pertactin-producing clinical isolate D420

Background Despite widespread vaccination, pertussis remains a poorly controlled disease globally and results in substantial annual morbidity and mortality, particularly in young children. Controlled human infection models (CHIMs) using the causative agent Bordetella pertussis are promising systems to enable the study of pertussis disease pathogenesis and immunology and to rapidly assess vaccines and therapeutics. While a pertussis CHIM that produces asymptomatic infection has been established in Europe, the development of a CHIM that leads to symptomatic illness would be advantageous for evaluating vaccine efficacy against both infection and disease. Methods Healthy participants 18-40 years of age were inoculated intranasally with one of eight doses (ranging from 104 to 108 colony forming units (CFU)) of the pertactin-producing B. pertussis isolate D420 at the challenge facility within the Canadian Center for Vaccinology (Nova Scotia, Canada). The study occurred in two stages. In stage one, the B. pertussis dose was escalated in cohort groups of five to six participants until reaching an endpoint where 70-90% of participants exhibited mild (non-severe, Grade 1 or 2) symptomatic infection, defined as the Human Infectious Dose 70-90 (HID70-90). In stage two, additional challenges were conducted for doses below, at, and above the identified HID70-90 to characterize the emerging pertussis model. For all challenge doses, participants were closely monitored during an inpatient stay of up to 24 days and post-discharge for laboratory-confirmed infection, pertussis symptoms, safety, and IgG antibody responses to four B. pertussis antigens including pertussis toxin, filamentous hemagglutinin, fimbriae, and pertactin. All participants received a five-day course of azithromycin, where timing of initiation depended on B. pertussis testing and symptoms. The study was conducted between July 4, 2022 and March 19, 2025. Findings Seventy-five participants were inoculated with one of the eight B. pertussis D420 challenge doses and completed the inpatient stay. From the stage-one dose escalation, we found that 107 CFU of B. pertussis D420 was the lowest dose that achieved the HID70-90, where 9 of 12 participants (75.0%) exhibited mild symptomatic infection. Following stage-two challenges, 16 of 22 total participants at 107 CFU (72.7%) developed mild symptomatic infection, thus verifying the HID70-90. The symptomatic infection rate below the HID70-90 at 5x106 CFU of D420 was 20.0% and above the HID70-90 at 5x107 and 108 CFU were 58.3% and 55.6%, respectively. Symptoms with elevated frequency for symptomatic infection (relative to background symptoms in non-infected) included nasal congestion, runny nose, fatigue, malaise, and cough. At the HID70-90, 50% of symptomatic infections included cough. Serological analyses of the four highest (stage-two) challenge doses (5x106, 107, 5x107, 108 CFU) revealed that antibody titres increased over time post-challenge. Seroconversion for at least one of the four studied antibodies was nearly twice as common for symptomatic (70.0%) than asymptomatic (35.7%) infection and was absent (0%) for non-infected. All infections were cleared following azithromycin treatment (100%) and there were no study-related serious adverse events. Interpretation A safe and reproducible symptomatic pertussis CHIM was achieved, providing a model for research on pertussis disease pathogenesis and immunology and for assessing vaccines and therapeutics. (Clinicaltrials.gov, NCT05136599).

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

Semi-Supervised Speech Confidence Detection using Pseudo-Labelling and Whisper Embeddings

arXiv:2606.16505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding speaker confidence is crucial in educational settings, as it can enhance personalised feedback and improve learning outcomes. This study introduces a novel framework for detecting speaker confidence by integrating human-engineered features with embeddings from the Whisper encoder. To address data limitations, a pseudo-labelling technique is employed to expand the labelled dataset, allowing the model to learn from both human-annotated and model-generated labels. The framework combines traditional speech features including pitch, volume, rate of speech, and the presence of disfluencies and stress, with Whisper embeddings, and uses a co-attention mechanism to fuse these representations and achieve an overall accuracy of 75%. This study contributes to advancing speech analysis, enabling applications that support personalised learning and speaking skill development.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Tumour evolution as ground truth for cancer whole-genome sequencing

Cancer genomes are shaped by evolutionary processes that couple mutagenesis, clonal selection, chromosomal instability, spatial growth and treatment response into structured genomic patterns, yet current benchmarking strategies largely ignore this evolutionary dependency. Here, we present SCOUT, a large-scale synthetic whole-genome sequencing resource of over 200 samples, designed for systematic benchmarking of tumour genomic analysis and evolutionary inference under controlled evolutionary ground truth. Unlike conventional task-specific simulations, SCOUT models tumour evolution as a latent generative process that simultaneously shapes mutations, copy-number alterations, variant allele frequencies, mutational signatures and clonal architectures. SCOUT recapitulates key features of solid and haematological malignancies, including driver mutations, chromosomal instability, intratumour heterogeneity, spatial sampling and treatment-associated evolutionary dynamics in tumour and matched-normal longitudinal and multi-region sequencing designs. Using SCOUT, we benchmarked widely used methods for somatic variant detection, copy-number analysis, mutational signature inference and tumour evolutionary reconstruction. Across analytical tasks, performance deteriorated in low-purity, highly subclonal and structurally complex tumours, while spatial sampling bias and hypermutation generated spurious evolutionary signals that confounded tumour interpretation across multiple inference layers. Evolutionary simulations further distinguished lineage-restricted genetic bottlenecks from multi-lineage resistance dynamics associated with tumour plasticity. Tumour purity consistently exerted a stronger effect on inference accuracy than sequencing depth. Together, our results establish evolutionary ground truth as a prerequisite for reproducible benchmarking and biologically interpretable analysis of cancer whole-genome sequencing data.

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

BoRAD: Bootstrap your Own Representations for Multi-class Anomaly Detection

Reconstruction-based anomaly detection is attractive for industrial inspection, but scaling it from category-specific training to a one-for-all setting is challenging. A single model must reconstruct diverse normal appearances without copying abnormal details, which exposes two coupled failure modes: identical shortcut, where anomalies pass through the reconstruction path, and mis-reconstruction, where normal categories are confused with one another. We propose BoRAD, a label-free training framework that treats this as a representation-capacity allocation problem. BoRAD uses a shared learnable prototype bank to impose two complementary regularizers: spatial prototype alignment contracts local within-prototype variation to suppress anomaly copying, while prototype-relative global alignment preserves between-prototype structure and improves sensitivity to abnormal angular deviations. The prototype bank and prediction heads are used only during training; inference remains a standard teacher-student feature discrepancy pass, with no class labels, negative pairs, memory retrieval, or prototype lookup. BoRAD achieves competitive one-for-all anomaly detection performance, including 86.2\% mAD on MVTec AD, 80.7\% mAD on VisA and 73.1\% mAD on Real-IAD. Diagnostic analyses further show reduced anomaly leakage, improved normal-category separability, and stronger anomaly-normal score separation.

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

SOMA-SQL: Resolving Multi-Source Ambiguity in NL-to-SQL via Synthetic Log and Execution Probing

Natural language interfaces to databases aim to translate user questions into executable SQL, yet remain brittle in real-world settings where questions are underspecified and schemas are large and ambiguous. Ambiguity across user questions, database schemas, and model interpretations are central failure modes in NL2SQL, leading to misaligned intent, incorrect schema grounding, and erroneous SQL generation. Existing approaches rely on human clarification or treat ambiguity as a schema representation problem, but these do not scale nor resolve ambiguity autonomously. We propose SOMA-SQL to automatically resolve ambiguity via targeted synthetic query log and ambiguity-driven probing. SOMA-SQL constructs synthetic query log to ground schema interpretation and guide candidate SQL generation; it then executes targeted probing queries, driven by a structured ambiguity taxonomy and candidate disagreements, to produce disambiguation evidence for final SQL selection and repair. This active approach to ambiguity discovery and resolution generalizes across unseen schemas and query distributions without human-in-the-loop. Experiments on six public benchmarks demonstrate that SOMA-SQL improves execution accuracy by 13.0% on average over state-of-the-art baselines, with gains of up to 16.7% on ambiguous questions.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

RCAP: Robust, Class-Aware, Probabilistic Dynamic Dataset Pruning

arXiv:2606.11761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamic data pruning techniques aim to reduce computational cost while minimizing information loss by periodically selecting representative subsets of input data during model training. However, existing methods often struggle to maintain strong worst-group accuracy, particularly at high pruning rates, across balanced and imbalanced datasets. To address this challenge, we propose RCAP, a Robust, Class-Aware, Probabilistic dynamic dataset pruning algorithm for classification tasks. RCAP applies a closed-form solution to estimate the fraction of samples to be included in the training subset for each individual class. This fraction is adaptively adjusted in every epoch using class-wise aggregated loss. Thereafter, it employs an adaptive sampling strategy that prioritizes samples having high loss for populating the class-wise subsets. We evaluate RCAP on six diverse datasets ranging from class-balanced to highly imbalanced using five distinct models across three training paradigms: training from scratch, transfer learning, and fine-tuning. Our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art dataset pruning methods, achieving superior worst-group accuracy at all pruning rates. Remarkably, with only $10\%$ data, RCAP delivers $>1\%$ improvement in performance on class-imbalanced datasets compared to full data training while providing an average $8.69\times$ speedup. The code can be accessed at https://github.com/atif-hassan/RCAP-dynamic-dataset-pruning

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

ReRAM-aware Model Finetuning addressing I-V Non-linearity and Retention Errors

arXiv:2606.17471v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional CPU, GPU, and NPU architectures are increasingly limited by the von Neumann bottleneck. While In-Memory Computing (IMC) using ReRAM crossbar arrays offers a high-density, energy-efficient alternative, its practical deployment is constrained through their non-idealities. Existing hardware-aware training frameworks often require training from scratch, which is computationally prohibitive for modern large-scale models. In this work, we propose a finetuning-based hardware-aware training algorithm that enables robust DNN deployment on ReRAM with minimal training overhead. Our approach mitigates I-V non-linearity by applying a range-shrunk sinh transformation and incorporates retention errors directly into a regularization loss during the finetuning process. We evaluate our framework across models and tasks such as image classification and question-answering (QA). Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves similar accuracy on large-scale models like ResNet18 and DeiT-Tiny as the base model. In-case of ImageNet for MobileNetV3 families the technique has only less than 2% accuracy degradation. Further, applying the technique on the SQuAD v2 dataset results in only 1 point degradation of F-1 score.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Longitudinal Attribute-Conditioned Neural Network for Modeling Health-State Transition Probabilities in Temporally Irregular Data: The LANTERN Framework

arXiv:2606.13880v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate estimation of long-term care transition probabilities is central to disability insurance pricing, reserving, and solvency assessment. Classical actuarial multi-state models commonly rely on Markov, semi-Markov, or proportional-hazard specifications, which provide a direct connection to cohort projection but may be restrictive for irregular longitudinal health data with nonlinear aging patterns and heterogeneous covariate histories. This paper develops a well-calibrated estimator of multi-state transition probabilities for irregular longitudinal health data. The model learns from individual health history, incorporates the time elapsed between observations, and conditions transition probabilities on demographic and socioeconomic attributes. It produces a valid probability distribution over the next observed health state, with four possible states: healthy, mild disability, severe disability, and death. Individual probabilities are aggregated by age group and origin state to form transition matrices compatible with actuarial cohort projection. Using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study, we compare the proposed estimator with logistic regression, gradient-boosted trees, a recurrent neural network, and a last-state persistence benchmark. The evaluation considers probabilistic accuracy, endpoint discrimination and calibration for severe disability and death, risk concentration, and transition matrix error after aggregation. The proposed estimator improves severe disability discrimination relative to logistic regression and gradient-boosted tree benchmarks, maintains strong calibration, and yields the lowest transition matrix error among the evaluated models in the held-out test analysis. Results show that a structured machine learning estimator can support long-term care transition modeling when judged by calibration and projection fidelity, beyond discrimination.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Analyzing Visual Aircraft Representations with Sparse Autoencoders

Vision models can achieve strong performance on classification tasks, but the internal representations supporting their predictions are often difficult to interpret. This work investigates whether sparse autoencoders can decompose intermediate representations of a vision model into interpretable features. We train a ConvNeXt classifier on the FGVC-Aircraft dataset, extract spatial activations from its final feature stage, and train a sparse autoencoder on these activations. The learned sparse features are analyzed using top-activating image patches, activation strength, and class selectivity. Qualitative visual inspection reveals that several features correspond to recognizable aircraft structures and visual patterns. We evaluate a subset of selected features using input-space and feature-space ablations, measuring how blurring image patches and suppressing sparse features affect class logits, classification margins, and prediction confidence. The results suggest that sparse autoencoders can reveal partially interpretable, class-relevant visual features associated with aircraft recognition, while also exposing limitations such as polysemanticity and coarse spatial localization.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Targeted Proteomic Profiling of Nasal Fluid from the Brain-Nose Interface

The brain-nose interface is an anatomical junction where olfactory neurons from the olfactory bulb traverse the cribriform plate into the nasal mucosa, providing minimally invasive access to the central nervous system (CNS). We hypothesized that nasal fluid from this region could enable detection of neurology-relevant proteins using targeted multiplex assays. Using nosecollect, a targeted nasal sampling device, nasal fluid proximal to brain-nose interface was collected from cognitively impaired patients, alongside matched cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma. After nasal sample-specific dilution optimization and intra-assay precision evaluation, all matrices were profiled with the Olink Target 96 Neurology and NUcleic acid Linked Immuno-Sandwich Assay CNS disease 120 (NULISAseq CNS Disease 120) panels. Nasal fluid showed technically repeatable detection (intra-assay coefficient of variation

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Learning-Augmented Approximation for Unrelated-Machines Makespan Scheduling

arXiv:2606.13133v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recently, Antoniadis et al. (ICLR 2025) proposed a framework for incorporating predictions to approximate NP-hard selection problems. Despite its simplicity, this approach tightly matches theoretical lower bounds, making its generalization highly compelling. We address an open question raised in the work of Antoniadis et al., concerning the extension of this approach to other important problems outside the class of selection problems, such as scheduling. We develop a learning-augmented algorithm for the makespan minimization problem on unrelated machines, denoted by $R\|C_{\max}$. By using predictions of heavy job assignments, we achieve a polynomial-time $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation for accurate predictions that smoothly degrades to a worst-case 2-approximation as the error increases. We conclude our work with an empirical analysis of our method.

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

Dialogue SWE-Bench: A Benchmark for Dialogue-Driven Coding Agents

AI coding agents have rapidly transformed software engineering, powering widely used interactive coding assistants. Despite their interactive real-world use, existing benchmarks evaluate them as fully-autonomous systems. In this work, we introduce Dialogue SWE-Bench, an automatic benchmark dataset for evaluating the ability of coding agents to resolve real-world software engineering problems through dialogue with a user. We design a novel, persona-grounded user simulator to support our task evaluation, and augment our task evaluation with automatic evaluations of dialogue quality. We also propose a new schema-guided agent, aimed at improving the dialogue capabilities of off-the-shelf coding agents, which improves over strong baselines by 3-14%. Our results indicate that better coding models do not always correspond to better dialogue models, suggesting that dialogue capability is a distinct and currently understudied dimension of coding agent performance.

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

LLM-Based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for Assessing the Explainability of Facial Skin Disease Classification Models

作者:

This study proposes a domain-specific LLM-based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for assessing Grad-CAM explanations in facial skin disease diagnosis models. While previous studies have primarily focused on improving classification performance through data augmentation techniques, relatively few studies have systematically examined whether model explanations are grounded in clinically relevant lesion regions. In this study, geometric augmentation, color-based augmentation, and mixed augmentation strategies were applied to facial skin disease classification models based on EfficientNet-B0, MobileNetV3, and ResNet18. Grad-CAM was employed to generate visual explanations representing the models' decision-making processes. Furthermore, an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation framework was designed using GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, and Claude Sonnet 4.6 to assess Grad-CAM explanations from the perspectives of lesion localization and explanation trustworthiness. To improve evaluation consistency and clinical grounding, a progressive prompt engineering strategy was introduced, incorporating evaluation rubrics, clinical knowledge, penalty rules, and structured output formats.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PolyFlow: Safe and Efficient Polytope-Constrained Flow Matching with Constraint Embedding and Projection-free Update

arXiv:2606.13400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While flow-based generative models have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of domains, deploying them in safety-critical physical systems remains challenging due to strict constraint requirements. Existing approaches typically enforce safety through post-hoc corrections, which incur substantial computational overhead and may distort the learned distribution. We propose PolyFlow, a polytope-constrained flow matching framework that embeds constraints directly into the model and flow dynamics. PolyFlow introduces a discrete-time flow formulation and a projection-free architecture, which eliminate the discretization error and guarantee strict satisfaction of arbitrary polyhedral constraints, without the need for expensive iterative solvers. Experimental results show that PolyFlow achieves zero constraint violation while maintaining high distributional fidelity across a range of planning and control tasks. Compared to state-of-the-art constrained generation baselines, PolyFlow significantly reduces inference latency and demonstrates a favorable trade-off between safety, efficiency, and generative quality. Code is available on https://github.com/MJianM/PolyFlow.

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

TRAP: Benchmark for Task-completion and Resistance to Active Privacy-extraction

arXiv:2606.18996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agents are increasingly deployed in document-intensive workflows where sensitive private information is not an edge case but a routine input, e.g., an agent booking a flight needs passport numbers. In such settings, the agent must use private information to complete tasks accurately while never exposing it in its responses, because it cannot verify who is actually at the keyboard. These two obligations are in fundamental tension. A model capable enough to use private information for task completion can, by the same capability, be induced to reveal it. To evaluate the trade-off of task accuracy and privacy leakage, we introduce Task-completion and Resistance to Active Privacy-extraction (TRAP). Each scenario includes a document containing private information, a task query that requires the agent to invoke the correct tool using private fields, and an attack query that attempts to elicit the same information in natural language. Evaluating 22 models spanning frontier proprietary and open-source models at multiple scales, we find that all model families exhibit non-trivial leakage, and that instruction-following ability correlates with leakage rate. Existing prompt-based defenses reduce leakage but at significant cost to task accuracy. Prompt optimization fails to escape this trade-off. We demonstrate that this failure is not incidental. For any softmax-based model, no soft-constraint defense, e.g., prompt-based defenses, can jointly achieve high task success with zero leakage probability. Motivated by this impossibility result, we propose structural private field isolation, which replaces private fields with hash keys before they reach the model. This approach largely prevents leakage while keeping task accuracy.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

How AI Agents Reshape Knowledge Work: Autonomy, Efficiency, and Scope

arXiv:2606.07489v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier AI systems are bridging the gap between intelligence and utility by shifting from conversational assistants to autonomous agents that execute tasks end to end. Using production data from Perplexity's Search and Computer products, we study this transition by examining how AI agents accelerate and reshape knowledge work. Three key empirical findings emerge. First, using sessions with near-identical initial query pairs as natural experiments for the same underlying task attempted with both products, Computer performs 26 minutes of autonomous work per user session, versus 33 seconds for Search. Computer automates task decomposition and execution that Search users might otherwise manually orchestrate and implement. As a result, Computer shifts follow-up query distribution toward higher-order work such as verification and extension. Autonomy also increases execution quality, with per-query dissatisfaction rates 55% lower on Computer than on Search. Second, due to its autonomy advantage, Computer reduces completion time from 269 to 36 minutes on matched tasks, lowering estimated time and cost by 87% and 94%, respectively, compared to humans equipped with Search alone. Third, Computer changes the scope of work that users attempt: Computer queries more often cross occupational boundaries, require higher-order cognition, draw on broader expertise, take the form of composite tasks that bundle interdependent subtasks into a single query, and unlock work activities that are essentially absent from Search usage among the same users. Together, the evidence indicates that AI agents accelerate workflows, enhance output quality, reduce costs, and expand the breadth and depth of automated work.

21.
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.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Semiclassical Gravity Efficiently Solves $\mathsf{NP}$-Complete Problems

arXiv:2606.14806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Assuming the gravitational field is classical and that it couples to quantum fields via the semiclassical Einstein field equations, we show that the weak-field dynamics of a massive and non-relativistic qubit can in principle be used to solve an $\mathsf{NP}$-complete problem in polynomial time. We attribute this vast computational power to the non-linear dynamics afforded by the semiclassical Einstein field equations. Consequently, the above two assumptions entail a violation of the Physical Extended Church–Turing Thesis, which we regard as evidence for the quantization of gravity.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

DPRM: A Plug-in Doob h transform-induced Token-Ordering Module for Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2604.24357v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion language models generate without a fixed left-to-right order, leaving token ordering as a central algorithmic choice. Existing systems mainly use random masking or confidence-driven ordering, which respectively suffer from train–test mismatch and myopic exploration. We introduce DPRM (Doob -transform Process Reward Model), a plug-in token-ordering module that keeps the host architecture, denoising objective and supervision unchanged, and modifies only the ordering policy. DPRM starts from confidence-driven ordering and gradually shifts to process-reward-guided ordering through online estimates. We characterize the exact DPRM policy as a reward-tilted Gibbs reveal law, prove convergence of its stagewise Soft-BoN approximation, show that the online bucketized controller tracks the exact DPRM score at empirical-Bernstein rates, and establish a sample-complexity advantage under tractable optimization assumptions. Across nine hosts covering language reasoning, test-time scaling, protein, single-cell, molecular, DNA, text-to-image generation, and VQA, DPRM order variants improve several language, DNA, and multimodal settings while also identifying boundary cases where confidence-only ordering or task-specific utilities are preferable. Code is available at: https://github.com/DakeBU/DPRM-DLLM

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

Improved Stochastic Optimization of LogSumExp

arXiv:2509.24894v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The LogSumExp function, dual to the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, plays a central role in many important optimization problems, including entropy-regularized optimal transport (OT) and distributionally robust optimization (DRO). In practice, when the number of exponential terms inside the logarithm is large or infinite, optimization becomes challenging since computing the gradient requires differentiating every term. We propose a novel convexity- and smoothness-preserving approximation to LogSumExp that can be efficiently optimized using stochastic gradient methods. This approximation is rooted in a sound modification of the KL divergence in the dual, resulting in a new $f$-divergence called the Safe KL divergence. Our experiments and theoretical analysis of the LogSumExp-based stochastic optimization, arising in DRO and continuous OT, demonstrate the advantages of our approach over existing baselines.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Irresponsible AI: big tech's influence on AI research and associated impacts

arXiv:2512.03077v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The accelerated development, deployment and adoption of artificial intelligence systems has been fuelled by the increasing presence of big tech in the AI field. This trend has been accompanied by growing ethical concerns and intensified societal and environmental impacts. This position paper argues that irresponsible AI development is strongly driven by big tech's influence and involvement in the field. First, we examine the growing and disproportionate influence of big tech in AI research and argue that its drive for scaling and general-purpose systems is fundamentally at odds with the responsible, ethical, and sustainable development of AI. Second, we review key current environmental and societal negative impacts of AI and trace their connections to big tech's influence. Third, we discuss the underlying economic forces driving big tech's actions. Finally, as a call to action, we invite AI researchers to counter big tech's influence in irresponsible AI development through strategies that build on the responsibility of implicated actors and collective action.