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01.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Ten simple rules for turning your qualifying exam into an NIH-style fellowship proposal: A guide for graduate students

by Courtney Peña-Lima, Cameron S. Bader, Brendan K. Ball, Troy C. Dildine, Mekhala V. Dissanayake, Iris van ‘t Erve, Albina Ibrayeva, Amy Nippert, M.K. Quinn, Chelse Spinner, Samuel Thompson, Antonio Tomasso, Crystal M. Botham Qualifying exams, often referred to as “quals” or candidacy exams, are an important milestone in doctoral programs. Although the style of quals varies greatly by program and institution, it is usually a proposal that requires students to develop research ideas as well as their scientific writing skills. Many quals are modeled after funding mechanisms that graduate students can apply to and on a topic that the student will pursue in their dissertation. This paper offers graduate students a step-by-step guide on how to turn their quals into a fellowship-style research proposal, using National Institutes of Health (NIH) mechanisms as a benchmark, as this is the norm within US research institutions. This paper will be most useful for students who have completed or are in the process of completing proposal-based qualifying exams, usually in the second year of a doctoral program.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Learning Robust Pair Confidence for Multimodal Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction

Multimodal emotion-cause pair extraction (MECPE) requires reliable pair confidence over candidate pairs. Existing pair scorers commonly use pair-level cross entropy over valid candidates, which treats links mostly independently. This leaves the relative confidence geometry among competing causes under-constrained, allowing gold pairs to stay close to hard negatives or rely on incidental non-gold context. We study this vulnerability as pair-confidence brittleness and propose RPCL (Robust Pair Confidence Learning), a training-only framework for pair-confidence learning. RPCL encourages pair confidence to be both discriminative and stable: gold pairs are separated from row-wise hard negatives through a confidence-difference margin constraint, and clean pair predictions are aligned with predictions from a corrupted view where non-gold contextual utterance representations are partially corrupted. The original clean pair scorer and decoding pipeline are used unchanged at inference time. On ECF, MECAD, and MEC4, RPCL improves the three-seed mean Pair F1 over a matched base model by 2.58 to 2.83 percentage points in the full text-audio-video setting, and improves mean Pair AUPRC on all three datasets. Diagnostic analysis further shows larger gold-negative confidence gaps and lower margin-violation severity. These results suggest that explicitly shaping pair confidence is an effective training strategy for MECPE.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MemRefine: LLM-Guided Compression for Long-Term Agent Memory

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly expected to operate over long-term interactions, where information from past dialogues must be preserved and recalled to support future tasks. However, as interactions accumulate, the memory store grows without bound and fills with redundant entries that inflate storage cost and degrade retrieval by crowding out the most useful evidence. Furthermore, this is especially limiting on resource-constrained platforms with hard memory budgets, motivating us to formulate storage-budgeted memory management, the task of keeping an already constructed memory store within a fixed budget while preserving information useful for future interactions. To this end, we then propose MemRefine, an LLM-guided framework that, since surface similarity poorly reflects factual value, uses similarity only to propose candidate pairs and defers delete, merge, and preserve decisions to an LLM judge based on factual content, iterating until the budget is met. Across multiple memory frameworks and long-term conversation benchmarks, MemRefine consistently meets target budgets while preserving downstream performance and outperforming rule-based baselines under tight budgets.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

LLM-as-Code Agentic Programming for Agent Harness

arXiv:2606.15874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Every major LLM agent framework gives the LLM the role of orchestrator; the model decides what to do next, when to call tools, and when to stop. We argue that token explosion, control-flow hallucination, and unreliable completion are not implementation bugs but architectural consequences of assigning the deterministic work of looping, branching, and sequencing to a probabilistic system. A better prompt or a stronger model cannot guarantee the reliability of the LLM agent. We therefore propose Agentic Programming, in which the program governs all control flow, and the LLM is itself part of it, an adaptive component we call LLM-as-Code and invoke only where a task calls for reasoning or generation. Within each call the model keeps full flexibility, but it cannot alter the program's execution path. With control in the program, the LLM's context is built from the execution history's call tree and forms a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Each call's context length is then determined by its call depth rather than by accumulation over steps. A case study of computer-use agents shows that the design is practical, not just a theoretical stance, substantially improving the stability of long visual operation sequences.

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

A Geometric Profile of Semantic Information in Text: Frame-Conditional Uniqueness and a Trade-Off Triangle for Scalar Summaries

How much meaning does a text carry? Shannon's theory measures uncertainty over symbols and is intentionally indifferent to meaning, while pairwise metrics such as BERTScore compare two texts rather than characterizing one. We develop a geometric framework that measures semantic content from the structure of a text's sentence embeddings. The framework has three parts. First, within a fixed embedding and baseline, six natural axioms uniquely determine a scalar measure up to scale, a frame-conditional uniqueness theorem. The resulting scalar is empirically too coarse, motivating a richer representation. Second, we propose a three-coordinate semantic profile capturing novelty (displacement from generic discourse), breadth (diversity of distinct ideas), and integration (connectedness among them), together with a discrete minimal unit (the semantic quantum) whose resolution is fixed by a clustering threshold $\tau$. Third, we prove a no-go theorem: no scalar summary of the profile can simultaneously satisfy analytic stability under paraphrase and concatenation, ordinal robustness across text scales, and cross-representation comparability. We exhibit two practical scalars, $S_{\mathrm{minmax}}$ and $S_{\mathrm{rank}}$, each occupying a distinct corner of this trade-off triangle. Validation across 23 synthetic categories, 5 Project Gutenberg novels, and 3 embedding models confirms the trade-off. The recommended rank-normalized configuration passes 25 of 28 ordinal checks as point estimates (21 of 28 after Benjamini-Hochberg correction), outperforming seven baselines including unigram entropy and a BERTScore-based novelty signal. A separate variational result connects the breadth coordinate to the log-determinant of a determinantal point process (Spearman $\rho = 0.985$ over 507 Gutenberg chapters), giving an optimization-theoretic foundation for breadth.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Multi-component Causal Tracing in Large Language Models

Causal tracing systematically intervenes on a large language model's (LLM's) internal representations to uncover and quantify the causal pathways linking specific inputs or computations to specific metrics of interest, quantifying the LLM's behavior. Building on previous single-component or single-layer studies, this paper presents a unified framework for causally tracing multiple components simultaneously. This framework systematically identifies the subsets of components (e.g., attention heads and multi-layer perceptron neurons) most critical to a desired target performance metric (e.g., accuracy and fairness). This is achieved by incorporating flexible interventions applied to a wide range of desired metrics. To address the combinatorial complexity of the multi-component problem, an efficient algorithm is designed that leverages soft interventions and a carefully designed metric transformation, converting the combinatorial search problem into a continuous one that can be solved efficiently under proper constraints, thereby generating proper binary decisions for selecting components. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently identifies subsets of the model's components that have a high impact on the target metric, outperforming existing baseline approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZiruiYan/multi-component-causal-tracing.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

A network approach to DNA methylation clocks

Biological age predicts health and lifespan better than chronological age, but remains difficult to measure. One leading molecular proxy for biological age is DNA methylation, which underlies age predictors known as "clocks". These clocks use penalized linear regression to predict chronological age from methylation levels using selected cytosine–guanine pairs (CpGs) along DNA. Although they predict chronological age within a few years and track mortality risk, there are several issues. Different clocks share a vanishingly small number of CpG sites, many of which show weak associations with age. Also, the clocks often do not transfer across methylation array platforms. This paper takes a network approach to better understand these issues. By using 12 public datasets from human blood, we build a co-methylation network of the sites that show the strongest age correlation. After pruning weak links, we find that it has a small number of large modules of covarying CpGs surrounded by many small modules and singleton sites. These modules are biologically interpretable, as they are associated with CpG island contexts and enriched for distinct Gene Ontology functions. We also map five established clocks onto this network (Horvath, Hannum, AltumAge, Skin & Blood, and Han) and find that they select some CpGs from the same module. This suggests that they are more similar than they appear. The network structure also suggests new ways to build clocks. A simple clock that retains one CpG per module matches the performance of established clocks. A second one, built from module-level principal components, outperforms all five established clocks in three validation cohorts and is transferable across array platforms (Illumina Infinium Methylation 450K or EPIC arrays). Overall, the network perspective shifts attention from individual CpG sites to modules of covarying sites. This perspective helps explain why DNA methylation clocks perform so well despite their differences and provides a more systematic approach for developing the next generation of aging biomarkers.

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

Visual-Seeker: Towards Visual-Native Multimodal Agentic Search via Active Visual Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in many visual tasks, but they often struggle with factual grounding when confronted with complex, open-world scenarios. While recent multimodal deep search agents attempt to address this issue by utilizing external tools, the visual-native search paradigm remains underexplored. Existing methods primarily rely on simple images with explicit semantics and text-only evidence trajectories, limiting the agent's ability to perform multi-hop, cross-modal reasoning and search. To address these limitations, we propose Visual-Seeker, a visual-native multimodal deep search agent via active visual reasoning. Rather than treating vision as a static input, our agent actively attends to fine-grained visual details, dynamically harvests visual evidence throughout the search process. To unlock its visual-native potential, we design an active visual reasoning data pipeline and synthesize 5K high-quality multimodal trajectories for model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance across five challenging multimodal search benchmarks, even surpassing several proprietary models, validating robust visual-native reasoning and search in real-world web environments. The code and data can be accessed at: https://github.com/ZhengboZhang/Visual-Seeker.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

WildIFEval: Instruction Following in the Wild

Recent LLMs have shown remarkable success in following user instructions, yet handling instructions with multiple constraints remains a significant challenge. In this work, we introduce WildIFEval - a large-scale dataset of 7K real user instructions with diverse, multi-constraint conditions. Unlike prior datasets, our collection spans a broad lexical and topical spectrum of constraints, extracted from natural user instructions. We categorize these constraints into eight high-level classes to capture their distribution and dynamics in real-world scenarios. Leveraging WildIFEval, we conduct extensive experiments to benchmark the instruction-following capabilities of leading LLMs. WildIFEval clearly differentiates between small and large models, and demonstrates that all models have a large room for improvement on such tasks. We analyze the effects of the number and type of constraints on performance, revealing interesting patterns of model constraint-following behavior. We release our dataset to promote further research on instruction-following under complex, realistic conditions.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Towards a Unified Generative Model for Scarce Time Series with Domain Experts

arXiv:2606.15172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthesizing realistic time series with generative models has wide-ranging applications in real-world scenarios. Despite recent progress, most existing methods are trained under the assumption of abundant training data, which substantially limits their effectiveness in data-scarce settings. In this paper, we propose TimeMoDE, a novel framework that integrates Diffusion Transformers with Mixture-of-Experts to exploit both domain adaptability and diffusion-stage awareness for time series generation under data scarcity. It is pre-trained on a large-scale collection of multi-domain datasets to extract domain-agnostic temporal representations and domain-specific information benefiting generalization during fine-tuning. We propose Domain Prompts to condition expert assignment for indistinguishable noised tokens, mitigating the limitations of capturing inter-dataset relationships. Moreover, we incorporate diffusion timestep signals to equip the experts with awareness of time series degradation variations, facilitating adaptive calibrate to stage-dependent denoising requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TimeMoDE outperforms existing methods under diverse low-data settings. It establishes an innovative paradigm for advanced time series few-shot generation.

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

Simulation of Non-Markovian Quantum Accelerated Dynamics via Time-Fractional Schrödinger Equation

arXiv:2606.20024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Time-Fractional Schrödinger Equation (TFSE) is an effective tool for simulating the dynamics of non-Markovian quantum systems. The Quantum Speed Limit (QSL) time characterizes the minimum time required for the evolution of a non-Markovian quantum system. In this paper, Wei's TFSE is employed to simulate the non-Markovian quantum accelerated evolution process in the Resonant Dissipative Jaynes-Cummings (RDJC) model. By solving the QSL time of a time-fractional single-qubit open system, the enhancement mechanism of the system evolution speed induced by the non-Markovian memory effects of the environment is revealed. Further studies show that the optimized acceleration of the system evolution can be achieved by jointly regulating the fractional order, coupling strength, and photon number. Comparative analyses indicate that Wei's TFSE can accurately capture the non-Markovian accelerated dynamical features of the system over the entire fractional order range, whereas Naber's TFSE is applicable only within a limited fractional order interval. In addition, the comparisons of the average simulation time for calculating the dynamical trajectory of the excited-state probability demonstrate that Wei's TFSE has a significant simulation advantage in computational efficiency. Therefore, Wei's TFSE is more accurate and efficient for simulating the accelerated dynamics of non-Markovian quantum systems.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Regularized Machine Learning for System Identification of Ship Free-Running Manoeuvres from CFD-Based Synthetic Data: A Comparative Study

arXiv:2606.17121v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study investigates supervised machine learning techniques for identifying ship hydrodynamic coefficients from CFD-generated data from free-running simulations. Specifically, ordinary least squares and regularized regression methods are applied to Abkowitz-type manoeuvring models. Training and validation datasets are derived from URANS simulations of zig-zag and turning circle manoeuvres, which are validated against experimental benchmark data. The analysis evaluates the effects of coefficient set size, minimum training length required for predictive model training, and manoeuvre combinations on model performance. Results demonstrate the suitability of large-angle zig-zag manoeuvres for hydrodynamic system identification, provided that multicollinearity is addressed through appropriate coefficient selection, regression models, or input data variability. Larger coefficient sets offer greater model flexibility for variable conditions but are more prone to multicollinearity. Regularized regression techniques effectively mitigate multicollinearity and notably enhance prediction accuracy, as does incorporating more diverse manoeuvring data. Among tested models, Ridge regression provided the best compromise between computational efficiency and prediction accuracy.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

C-QUERI: Congressional Questions, Exchanges, and Responses in Institutions Dataset

Questions in political interviews and hearings serve strategic purposes beyond information gathering including advancing partisan narratives and shaping public perceptions. However, these strategic aspects remain understudied due to the lack of large-scale datasets for studying such discourse. Congressional hearings provide an especially rich and tractable site for studying political questioning: Interactions are structured by formal rules, witnesses are obliged to respond, and members with different political affiliations are guaranteed opportunities to ask questions, enabling comparisons of behaviors across the political spectrum. We develop a pipeline to extract question-answer pairs from unstructured hearing transcripts and construct a novel dataset of committee hearings from the 108th–117th Congress. Our analysis reveals systematic differences in questioning strategies across parties, by showing the party affiliation of questioners can be predicted from their questions alone. Our dataset and methods not only advance the study of congressional politics, but also provide a general framework for analyzing question-answering across interview-like settings.

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

MedLatentDx: Latent Multi-Agent Communication for Cross-Hospital Rare-Disease Diagnosis

Rare diseases affect over $300$ million patients across more than $7{,}000$ conditions, yet no single hospital encounters enough cases of any one condition for reliable diagnosis. Cross-hospital collaboration could help by allowing a diagnosing institution to use distributed, case-specific diagnostic evidence, but privacy regulations restrict the transmission of identifiable clinical text across institutional boundaries. This setting raises two challenges: existing medical agent systems often rely on textual evidence exchange, while raw latent states such as hidden states and KV caches may still reveal prompt-derived clinical content. We introduce MedLatentDx, a latent multi-agent communication framework in which hospital agents keep private clinical records and retrieved cases local, and send compact latent KV blocks to a host agent for rare-disease diagnosis. MedLatentDx supports two deployment settings: same-backbone hospital agents use latent KV distillation, while hospitals with different LLM backbones use cross-family latent alignment. On CrossRare-Bench, a self-built large-scale rare-disease benchmark with hospital-level partitions, MedLatentDx improves cross-hospital diagnostic performance while reducing reconstructable clinical content relative to raw-latent communication baselines.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Where a Quantum Reservoir Works: A Transferable Operating Band

arXiv:2606.13284v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In quantum reservoir computing, a fixed quantum system transforms an input signal, while learning reduces to training a simple linear readout on its measured outputs. Since the quantum dynamics themselves are never optimized, the method is well suited to today's hardware. Yet these dynamics must still be chosen carefully, because their settings remain fixed throughout training and inference. It therefore remains an open question where, in its control space, a fixed quantum system learns well. We address this question for a dissipative reservoir by mapping performance over three central physical controls: the strength of the input drive, the coupling between neighboring qubits, and the rate of dissipation. Good performance concentrates in a single, well-defined operating region of this control space. This region transfers across tasks and reservoir initializations, and the same memory-defined regime persists under architectural changes. It is also mechanistically grounded, since it disappears whenever any of the mechanisms that create it is removed. Finally, the region can be located cheaply before any task is run, using a simple memory diagnostic.

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

JADE: Expert-Grounded Dynamic Evaluation for Open-Ended Professional Tasks

arXiv:2602.06486v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating agentic AI on open-ended professional tasks faces a fundamental dilemma between rigor and flexibility. Static rubrics provide rigorous, reproducible assessment but fail to accommodate diverse valid response strategies, while LLM-as-a-judge approaches adapt to individual responses yet suffer from instability and bias. Human experts address this dilemma by combining domain-grounded principles with dynamic, claim-level assessment. Inspired by this process, we propose JADE, a two-layer evaluation framework. Layer 1 encodes expert knowledge as a predefined set of evaluation skills, providing stable evaluation criteria. Layer 2 performs report-specific, claim-level evaluation to flexibly assess diverse reasoning strategies, with evidence-dependency gating to invalidate conclusions built on refuted claims. Experiments on BizBench show that JADE improves evaluation stability and reveals critical agent failure modes missed by holistic LLM-based evaluators. We further demonstrate strong alignment with expert-authored rubrics and effective transfer to HealthBench and DR.BENCH, covering medical and 10-domain professional evaluation settings. Code and data are available at https://github.com/smiling-world/JADE.

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

Residual-Space Evolutionary Optimization via Flow-based Generative Models

arXiv:2606.20084v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data editing with generative methods typically requires differentiable objectives and gradient-based search. However, these assumptions break down in flow-based settings, where edits are performed through forward and backward integration and often involve non-differentiable or black-box objectives. We introduce residual-space evolutionary optimization, a model-agnostic framework that addresses this gap by combining flow-based generative editing with evolutionary algorithms. Building on the observation that conditional flow matching (CFM) can disentangle condition-controlled factors from instance-specific residuals, our framework directly operates in residual space and separates two complementary search regimes: self-pollination performs local exploitation through feature-preserving residual refinement, and cross-pollination promotes broader exploration by recombining residuals across heterogeneous samples. As a proof of concept, we validate on MorphoMNIST, a benchmark dataset for counterfactual generation, and on crystal data, demonstrating that this exploration–exploitation decomposition provides a useful mechanism for balancing target alignment, instance preservation, and diversity, and extends beyond images to real-world scientific domains.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

OPD-Evolver: Cultivating Holistic Agent Evolver via On-Policy Distillation

Memory has become a standard substrate for self-evolving agents, yet retaining experience is not the same as learning how to evolve through it. Existing memory agents can store trajectories, retrieve reflections, or accumulate skills, but often lack the holistic competence to select useful experience, act on it, write reusable knowledge, and maintain a growing repository. We introduce OPD-Evolver, a slow-fast co-evolution framework that cultivates such an agent evolver through on-policy self-distillation. In the fast loop, OPD-Evolver interacts with a four-level memory hierarchy to read, use, write, and maintain experience for rapid test-time evolution. In the slow loop, outcome-calibrated memory attribution and privileged hindsight distill these four abilities into the deployable policy. Across multi-domain benchmarks, OPD-Evolver surpasses memory systems such as ReasoningBank by up to 11.5%, and training-based methods such as Skill0 by ~5.8%. Further analysis shows that OPD-Evolver internalizes high-value experience and memory management, enabling OPD-Evolver-9B to challenge giant counterparts such as Qwen3.5-397B-A17B and Step-3.5-Flash, pointing beyond memory-augmented agents toward genuinely qualified agent evolvers.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

TurnGuide: Enhancing Meaningful Full Duplex Spoken Interactions via Dynamic Turn-Level Text-Speech Interleaving

Full-Duplex Speech Language Models (FD-SLMs) are specialized foundation models designed to enable natural, real-time spoken interactions by modeling complex conversational turn-taking such as interruptions, backchannels, and overlapping speech. End-to-end (e2e) FD-SLMs leverage real-world double-channel conversational data to capture nuanced two-speaker dialogue patterns for human-like interactions, but their conversational abilities often degrade compared to pure-text conversation due to prolonged speech sequences and limited high-quality spoken dialogue data. Although interleaved text-speech generation could mitigate this degradation, integrating discrete text tokens into continuous double-channel audio streams could disrupt the precise time alignment required for fluid interaction. To address this, we propose TurnGuide, a novel text-speech interleaved generation approach for e2e FD-SLMs that dynamically segments assistant speech into dialogue turns and interleaves turn-level text and speech generation. This approach allows FD-SLMs to integrate the semantic intelligence of LLMs without compromising the natural acoustic flow. Extensive experiments show that TurnGuide not only significantly improves e2e FD-SLMs to produce semantically meaningful, coherent speech but also achieves state-of-the-art performance on various turn-taking events. Demos are available at https://dreamtheater123.github.io/TurnGuide-Demo/. Code is available at https://github.com/dreamtheater123/TurnGuide.

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

Informative Missingness to Generate Irregular Clinical Time Series

arXiv:2606.17106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Laboratory tests in electronic health records are collected irregularly, and the absence of a test order can be as informative as the measurement itself. Such missingness reflects clinicians' decisions and patient physiology, making it important to model it directly rather than treat it as a preprocessing artifact. Here we present a diffusion-based approach for generating clinical time series that jointly models laboratory values and their observation patterns using the public Data Analytics Challenge on Missing Data Imputation (DACMI) benchmark derived from MIMIC-III. To preserve realistic sampling, we align chart times into 4-hour intervals and segment admissions into 7-day windows, producing trajectories that pair each lab value with a corresponding observation indicator. Standard transformations and normalization are applied to stabilize training. Our method extends the TimeDiff framework to learn continuous lab values and discrete missingness patterns through complementary diffusion objectives. Experiments show that the generated data closely match real patient trajectories across individual lab distributions and joint value-missingness embeddings, demonstrating that diffusion models can capture clinically meaningful dependencies between patient physiology and clinicians' testing behavior under MNAR-like (missing-not-at-random) missingness. These preliminary results indicate that our model can serve as an initial component toward developing clinical foundation models. By producing synthetic priors that preserve key physiology-missingness relationships, this work motivates the subsequent training of Prior-Data Fitted Networks capable of leveraging informative missingness, which we will investigate in the extended work.

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

PACT: Privileged Trace Co-Training for Multi-Turn Tool-Use Agents

Multi-turn tool-use agents must reason, call tools, and adapt to observations across several interaction turns. Post-training such agents is challenging, as reinforcement learning often suffers from sparse rewards and weak credit assignment despite matching the prompt-only inference setting, while supervised fine-tuning on expert traces provides dense process supervision but can over-constrain the model to fixed trajectories. To tackle this, we propose PACT, a Privileged trAce Co-Training framework for multi-turn tool-use agents. The key idea is to use expert traces only as training-time optimization signals rather than rollout-time hints. PACT keeps rollout generation prompt-only, then uses expert traces to guide optimization through two complementary signals: a trace-conditioned RL surrogate that evaluates prompt-only rollouts under expert-trace context, and a component-aware SFT loss that supervises reasoning prefixes and tool-calls with annealed strength. To reduce over-reliance on the training-only trace context, PACT further introduces a prompt-only anchoring. We also provide a latent-trace view that connects the two trace-based objectives and explains how expert traces can guide optimization without being used during rollout generation. Experiments on FTRL, BFCL, and ToolHop show that PACT consistently improves over strong SFT- and RL-based baselines, highlighting the value of privileged trace co-training for multi-turn tool-use learning.

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

Geometric Consistency Protocol for Foundation Model Features in Multi-View Satellite Imagery

Standardized evaluation protocols are indispensable for robust benchmarking in remote sensing, particularly as foundation features are increasingly transferred across diverse sensors and complex imaging geometries. In satellite multi-view reconstruction, conventional evaluations relying on unconstrained 2D global matching are often misleading. The Rational Function Model (RFM) and its Rational Polynomial Coefficients (RPC) dictate a curved, height-dependent epipolar geometry that render flat 2D search spaces physically inconsistent. We propose a geometry-faithful and reproducible protocol tailored for the RPC framework. Our approach integrates an RPC-projected 3D consistency metric with a geometry-constrained dense matching proxy, specifically evaluating whether similarity responses remain localized and unique under physically plausible search manifolds. A pivotal finding of our joint reporting strategy is the decoupling of semantic agreement and geometric localization: high cross-view similarity at a projected 3D point does not guarantee reliable matchability in practical inference. Our benchmark demonstrates that incorporating geometric constraints is fundamental to the problem definition in satellite imagery. Furthermore, we show that state-of-the-art 2D backbones remain remarkably competitive against specialized 3D-aware models when subjected to this RPC-consistent evaluation.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Discovery and inference beyond linearity for epidemiological data by integrating Bayesian regression, tree ensembles and Shapley values

arXiv:2505.00571v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) is gaining popularity in epidemiology and healthcare studies for hypothesis-free discovery of risk and protective factors. ML is strong at discovering nonlinearities and interactions, but this power is compromised by a lack of reliable inference. Although Shapley values provide local measures of features' effects, valid uncertainty quantification for these effects is typically lacking, thus precluding statistical inference. We propose RuleSHAP, a framework that addresses this limitation by combining a dedicated Bayesian sparse regression model with an improved tree-based rule generator and Shapley value attribution. RuleSHAP provides detection of nonlinear and interaction effects, with uncertainty quantification at the individual level as a key contribution. We derive an efficient formula for computing marginal Shapley values within this framework. We apply RuleSHAP to data from an epidemiological cohort to detect and infer several effects for high cholesterol and blood pressure, such as nonlinear interaction effects between features like age, sex, ethnicity, BMI and glucose level. To conclude, we demonstrate the validity of our framework on simulated data.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

LLM-based Embeddings: Attention Values Encode Sentence Semantics Better Than Hidden States

Sentence representations are foundational to many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. While recent methods leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to derive sentence representations, most rely on final-layer hidden states, which are optimized for next-token prediction and thus often fail to capture global, sentence-level semantics. This paper introduces a novel perspective, demonstrating that attention value vectors capture sentence semantics more effectively than hidden states. We propose Value Aggregation (VA), a simple method that pools token values across multiple layers and token indices. In a training-free setting, VA outperforms other LLM-based embeddings, even matches or surpasses the ensemble-based MetaEOL. Furthermore, we demonstrate that when paired with suitable prompts, the layer attention outputs can be interpreted as aligned weighted value vectors. Specifically, the attention scores of the last token function as the weights, while the output projection matrix ($W_O$) aligns these weighted value vectors with the common space of the LLM residual stream. This refined method, termed Aligned Weighted VA (AlignedWVA), achieves state-of-the-art performance among training-free LLM-based embeddings, outperforming the high-cost MetaEOL by a substantial margin. Finally, we highlight the potential of obtaining strong LLM embedding models through fine-tuning Value Aggregation.