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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

StepGuard: Guarding Web Navigation via Single-Step Calibration

arXiv:2606.17871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Web navigation requires agents to follow natural language goals, interact with web pages, and produce accurate answers. While recent advances leverage vision-language models and reinforcement learning, existing methods still suffer from single-step fragility due to reward misalignment and error propagation. To tackle the reward entanglement, we design Dynamic Dual-Policy Optimization (DDPO), which dynamically switches between a navigation-first mode for exploration and an answer-first mode for question-answering to mitigate reward conflict. To calibrate the single-step error, we propose Confidence-Guided Adaptive Navigation Reflection (CANR), a mechanism that estimates per-step confidence, triggers reflection only when necessary, and uses contrastive rewards to encourage self-correction to calibrate the single-step inaccuracy. With the above as the main components, we finally develop our StepGuard, a new framework of Guarding Web Navigation via Single-Step Calibration. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves navigation and answer accuracy, setting new state-of-the-art performance on standard web navigation benchmarks.

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

SPICE: Synergy and Partial Information Based Curriculum Evolution

arXiv:2606.16639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal learning exploits complementary information across heterogeneous modalities. The informativeness of each modality can vary widely across samples and training stages. Existing multimodal curriculum learning strategies often assume that the relative complexity of samples remains unchanged throughout training and therefore cannot adapt to model evolution. We propose SPICE (Synergy and Partial Information based Curriculum Evolution), a novel progressive curriculum framework for multimodal interaction learning. Guided by Partial Information Decomposition (PID) theory, our approach decomposes multimodal interactions into redundant, unique, and synergistic information components, enabling an interpretable and dynamic characterization of sample complexity. Building on this decomposition, we design a progressive curriculum that evolves throughout training, allowing the model to transition from learning shared cross-modal cues to modality-specific patterns and, finally, to complex synergistic interactions. Adapting to model evolution, sample ordering is refined in real-time using PID information estimates derived from unimodal and multimodal predictions. Experiments across multiple multimodal benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over conventional training and state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of PID information decomposition and adaptive sample ordering for multimodal curriculum learning.

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

Quantum-classical hybrid models based on error correction for time series forecasting

arXiv:2606.15213v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting largely benefits from combining the strengths of different models, especially using a scheme where a model corrects another model by capturing supplementary patterns from forecasting errors. Concurrently, quantum models are providing a means to augment the classical capacity, including in time series forecasting, by acting alongside classical models in hybrid architectures. In this work, we propose the first forecasting system based on error correction that jointly uses quantum and classical models. Here, quantum models first extract patterns by exploring quantum phenomena, and classical models capture the remaining patterns from the quantum errors. Compared to classical single models and classical-classical hybrid models based on error correction, the complementary capacity that emerges from this quantum-classical system provided the best results in most of the addressed problems. Therefore, this work paves the way to introduce quantum models in established hybridization schemes for time series forecasting.

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

Rethinking Robust Adversarial Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models

Concept erasure aims to selectively unlearning undesirable content in diffusion models (DMs) to reduce the risk of sensitive content generation. As a novel paradigm in concept erasure, most existing methods employ adversarial training to identify and suppress target concepts, thus reducing the likelihood of sensitive outputs. However, these methods often neglect the specificity of adversarial training in DMs, resulting in only partial mitigation. In this work, we investigate and quantify this specificity from the perspective of concept space, i.e., can adversarial samples truly fit the target concept space? We observe that existing methods neglect the role of conceptual semantics when generating adversarial samples, resulting in ineffective fitting of concept spaces. This oversight leads to the following issues: 1) when there are few adversarial samples, they fail to comprehensively cover the object concept; 2) conversely, they will disrupt other target concept spaces. Motivated by the analysis of these findings, we introduce S-GRACE (Semantics-Guided Robust Adversarial Concept Erasure), which grace leveraging semantic guidance within the concept space to generate adversarial samples and perform erasure training. Experiments conducted with seven state-of-the-art methods and three adversarial prompt generation strategies across various DM unlearning scenarios demonstrate that S-GRACE significantly improves erasure performance 26%, better preserves non-target concepts, and reduces training time by 90%. Our code is available at https://github.com/Qhong-522/S-GRACE.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

EPM-JEPA: Operator-Side Experience Modulation in JEPA-Family World Models

arXiv:2606.12979v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: JEPA-family world models use a static predictor whose weights do not adapt when test-time dynamics diverge from training. We compare two mechanisms for incorporating accumulated experience into a JEPA predictor under distribution shift: operand-side injection, where a compressed experience representation is added as a residual to the predictor's hidden state (EI-JEPA), and operator-side modulation, where the same representation generates low-rank weight deltas via LoRA applied to the predictor's weights (EPM-JEPA). On a pre-registered comparison (Moving MNIST, gravity shift), EPM-JEPA (D_shift^{n=50} = 0.7848 +/- 0.0078, three seeds) differs from EI-JEPA (0.8238) by delta = 4.74% - Outcome C: a null result - by our stated criterion, a valid outcome. As a secondary, non-pre-registered observation, EPM-JEPA improves 1.90% over a no-memory baseline (0.8000), consistently across seeds, while EI-JEPA underperforms the baseline, indicating the benefit is specific to weight-level modulation. Our primary contribution is a mechanism analysis: the D_shift^{n=50} trajectory reflects three independent dynamical processes - buffer cycling, EMA target drift, and an intrinsic LoRA settling transient of +0.021 - rather than convergence to equilibrium. These findings motivate PEM-JEPA, a physics-grounded successor addressing this dynamical-peak limitation.

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

LibriConvo: Simulating Conversations from Read Literature for ASR and Diarization

We introduce LibriConvo, a synthetic conversational speech corpus for speaker diarization and automatic speech recognition (ASR), built by instantiating the previously proposed Speaker-Aware Simulated Conversation (SASC) framework in a dataset and benchmarking setting. The main contribution of this paper is a corpus construction pipeline and benchmark derived from that framework. To make the data more suitable for downstream ASR and diarization, conversational timing statistics are estimated from English CallHome using external voice activity detection, long pauses are compressed, LibriTTS utterances are grouped by book to improve local semantic continuity, and room impulse responses are selected with a spatial-plausibility heuristic. The resulting corpus contains 240.1 hours of audio across 1,496 dialogues involving 830 speakers, partitioned into speaker-disjoint train, validation, and test splits. We report baseline results for both diarization and ASR. On the test split, Sortformer outperforms the pyannote pipeline in diarization (11.1\% vs.~24.4\% DER). For ASR, a Fast Conformer-CTC XLarge model fine-tuned with Serialized Output Training achieves 7.29\% WER and 6.97\% cpWER, outperforming zero-shot Whisper-large-v3. These results position LibriConvo as a practical benchmark for studying synthetic conversational speech and for evaluating multi-speaker speech processing systems.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Descriptive versus Regulatory Uncertainty in Bounded Predictive Systems

arXiv:2605.18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Any system that models the world under finite representational capacity must compress; any compression entails a prior; and the prior is the system's bias. What has not been established is whether uncertainty participates in the dynamics governing future behavior, or merely describes the output distribution without consequence. We introduce a structural distinction between descriptive uncertainty, which does not recursively modulate the system's policy, and regulatory uncertainty, which directly enters the optimization landscape and drives persistent adaptive restructuring. We prove formally that current transformer architectures are confined to descriptive uncertainty at inference. We ground this in thermodynamics via Landauer's principle: for uncertainty to be regulatory, epistemic error must cost real energy; in a decoupled system, hallucinations and correct derivations dissipate identical energy. We test this empirically across three locally-deployed language models (3B, 8B, 70B parameters). Token-level Shannon entropy is statistically invariant across tasks spanning pattern retrieval, causal operator application, and out-of-distribution causal generalization in all three models (all pairwise p >= 0.568; within-model ranges 0.011-0.028 nats), while task accuracy varies substantially across the same conditions (0%-100%). Entropy and accuracy are orthogonal. The decoupling is scale-invariant: larger models achieve higher accuracy but identical entropy flatness. This structural incapacity is not resolvable by additional parameters or training data. Genuine epistemic grounding requires physical coupling between thermodynamic substrate state and information processing cost.

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

Spatiotemporal downscaling and nowcasting of urban land surface temperatures with deep neural networks

arXiv:2605.13566v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a key variable for various applications, such as urban climate and ecology studies. Yet, existing satellite-derived LST products provide either high spatial or high temporal resolution, resulting in a fundamental trade-off between the two. To address this trade-off, we combine observations from a geostationary and a polar orbiting satellite and provide LST fields at high spatial and high temporal resolution (1 km at 15-min intervals). We demonstrate their application for intraday forecasting of LSTs. To estimate LST fields at high spatiotemporal resolution, a U-Net model is trained to map LST fields from SEVIRI/MSG (3 km and 15 min resolution) to LST fields from Terra/Aqua MODIS (1 km, 4 overpasses per day) that are collocated in space and time. The presented model has been trained on LSTs across large European cities with a population exceeding 1 million inhabitants, and achieves an RMSE = $1.92${\deg}C and near-zero bias MBE = $0.01${\deg}C on the hold-out test set. As a second step, we present an LST nowcasting model based on ConvLSTM architecture, trained across downscaled LST fields with forecast lead times of 15 to 75 minutes. The nowcasting model outperforms a persistence and a Climatological Rolling Median benchmarks, with RMSEs of $0.57$ to $1.15${\deg}C for the considered lead times and biases ranging from $-0.1$ to $0.14${\deg}C. An additional validation conducted against independent MODIS overpasses confirms robust performance. Our LST forecast model at high spatiotemporal resolution is directly applicable to operational satellite-based LST monitoring.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Cluster sizes in subcritical soft Boolean models

arXiv:2404.13730v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the soft Boolean model, a model that interpolates between the Boolean model and long-range percolation, where vertices are given via a stationary Poisson point process. Each vertex carries an independent Pareto-distributed radius and each pair of vertices is assigned another independent Pareto weight with a potentially different tail exponent. Two vertices are now connected if they are within distance of the larger radius multiplied by the edge weight. We determine the tail behaviour of the Euclidean diameter and the number of points of a typical maximally connected component in a subcritical percolation phase. For this, we present a sharp criterion in terms of the tail exponents of the edge-weight and radius distributions that distinguish a regime where the tail behaviour is controlled only by the edge exponent from a regime in which both exponents are relevant. Our proofs rely on fine path-counting arguments identifying the precise order of decay of the probability that far-away vertices are connected.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MooMIns – Monocular 3D Reconstruction and Object Pose Estimation from Multiple Instances

Simultaneous 3D reconstruction and 6D object pose estimation from a single monocular image is an inherently ill-posed problem. In industrial settings, however, multiple instances of an object are often randomly arranged in bins, implicitly providing several views of the same object within a single image. We show that this implicit multi-view geometry can be exploited to simultaneously reconstruct the object in 3D and estimate the 6D pose of each visible object instance. We present MooMIns, a new Gaussian-splatting-based approach that inverts the original Gaussian splatting formulation: instead of rendering a single scene from multiple cameras, we render multiple object instances from a single camera. Our method is initialized with SAM3 instance segmentation masks and a modified Structure from Motion (SfM) pipeline. In contrast to learned monocular depth estimation, we perform true geometry-based reconstruction from image evidence, avoiding hallucinations caused by training data priors. We evaluate MooMIns on synthetic and real bin-picking scenarios, and demonstrate accurate reconstruction of previously unseen objects as well as reliable pose estimation of individual instance

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

The Truth Stays in the Family: Enhancing Contextual Grounding via Inherited Truthful Heads in Model Lineages

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have produced many specialized multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) that share common foundational LLMs, forming distinct model lineages. It remains unclear whether a fundamental behavioral link exists between the foundational LLMs and downstream variants. We investigate this question by quantifying head-level context-truthfulness scores. Across diverse LLM and MLLM lineages, including Vicuna-, Qwen2.5-, LLaMA2-, and Mistral-based models, we find that Truth Scores are strongly preserved within model families, even after instruction tuning or multimodal adaptation. We further show that this inheritance is consistent with attention-head weight preservation, and that context-truthful heads attend to query-relevant evidence. Building on this finding, we propose TruthProbe, a soft-gating strategy that amplifies context-truthful heads while preserving other head contributions. TruthProbe improves contextual truthfulness on HaluEval and reduces multimodal hallucination on POPE and CHAIR, with base-LLM Truth Scores transferring effectively to their fine-tuned LLM and MLLM descendants. Code is available at https://github.com/miso-choi/TruthProbe.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy with expert-guided foundation models

Automated pollen identification from microscopy remains a bottleneck in aerobiology, palaeoecology and biodiversity monitoring, because scalable systems must generalise across specimen preparation, scanner settings and geographic origins while retaining palynological interpretability. To address this gap, we present a million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy resource, Pollen AI Atlas, assembled from pure-species whole-slide bright-field images spanning four geographic origins, four scanner settings and 46 taxon labels across 31 botanical families. Seeded by one manually selected exemplar per source slide, token-level mining and filtering produced 1,511,390 released grain detections with 99.6\% proposal precision in expert-curated test regions. Each detection was paired with machine-generated grain-level morphological captions from five open-weight vision-language models, guided by expert-verified palynological anchors, yielding structured descriptions of aperture systems, wall ornamentation, shape and size. Among the evaluated models, Gemma4 provided the most controlled primary caption set, combining tight length control, no leakage and the strongest text-retrieval performance. Baseline benchmarks with frozen visual features reached 88.16\% top-1 accuracy, while cross-regional retrieval showed that caption-derived text embeddings remained robust when image similarity degraded (mAP@20 0.811 versus 0.262). Released data, annotations, captions, splits, code, and weights provide a benchmark for pollen recognition, cross-regional domain adaptation and domain-specific multimodal microscopy learning.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Predicting gestational age at birth in the context of preterm birth from multi-modal fetal MRI

arXiv:2606.20172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preterm birth is associated with significant mortality and a risk for lifelong morbidity. The complex multifactorial aetiology hampers accurate prediction and thus optimal care. A pipeline consisting of bespoke machine learning methods for data imputation, feature selection, and regression models to predict gestational age (GA) at birth was developed and evaluated from comprehensive multi-modal morphological and functional fetal MRI data from 333 control cases and 93 preterm birth cases. The GA at birth predictions were classified into term and preterm categories and their accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity were reported. An ablation study was performed to further validate the design of the pipeline. Performance was evaluated using stratified 10-fold cross-validation. The pipeline achieves an R2 score of 0.13 and a mean absolute error of 2.74 weeks. It also achieves a 0.77 accuracy, 0.59 sensitivity, and 0.82 specificity across folds. The predominant features selected by the pipeline include cervical length and statistics derived from placental T2* values. The confluence of fast, motion-robust and multi-modal fetal MRI techniques and machine learning prediction allowed the prediction of the gestation at birth. This information is essential for any pregnancy. To the best of our knowledge, preterm birth had only been addressed as a classification problem in the literature. Therefore, this work provides a proof of concept. Future work will increase the cohort size to allow for finer stratification within the preterm birth cohort. Our code is available at https://github.com/dfajardorojas/ml-for-preterm-birth-.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

KGEdit: Ambiguity-Aware Knowledge Graphs for Training-Free Precise Video Generation and Editing

In recent years, training-free video generation has progressed remarkably. However, when handling complex textual instructions, existing methods still suffer from semantic ambiguity, incorrect concept binding, and cross-frame inconsistency. To address these issues, we propose KGEdit, a structured semantic control framework for text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models. Specifically, we first construct an ambiguity-aware knowledge graph (AAKG) to disentangle and disambiguate the input prompt, converting it into four types of structured semantics: identity, relation, attribute, and negative constraints. We then design a structured semantic injection module (SSIM) to inject these semantic signals into key layers of the diffusion Transformer, enabling fine-grained semantic control. In addition, we introduce a temporal-aware semantic control (TASC) module that dynamically schedules semantic objectives according to the stage-wise characteristics of the denoising process, further improving semantic alignment and temporal consistency. Experiments show that KGEdit outperforms existing methods in editing precision and temporal stability, while offering higher efficiency and controllability in text-driven interaction scenarios.

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

InnoEval: On Research Idea Evaluation as a Knowledge-Grounded, Multi-Perspective Reasoning Problem

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models has catalyzed a surge in scientific idea production, yet this leap has not been accompanied by a matching advance in idea evaluation. The fundamental nature of scientific evaluation needs knowledgeable grounding, collective deliberation, and multi-criteria decision-making. However, existing idea evaluation methods often suffer from narrow knowledge horizons, flattened evaluation dimensions, and the inherent bias in LLM-as-a-Judge. To address these, we regard idea evaluation as a knowledge-grounded, multi-perspective reasoning problem and introduce InnoEval, a deep innovation evaluation framework designed to emulate human-level idea assessment. We apply a heterogeneous deep knowledge search engine that retrieves and grounds dynamic evidence from diverse online sources. We further achieve review consensus with an innovation review board containing reviewers with distinct academic backgrounds, enabling a multi-dimensional decoupled evaluation across multiple metrics. We construct comprehensive datasets derived from authoritative peer-reviewed submissions to benchmark InnoEval. Experiments demonstrate that InnoEval can consistently outperform baselines in point-wise, pair-wise, and group-wise evaluation tasks, exhibiting judgment patterns and consensus highly aligned with human experts.

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

PosterForest: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Collaboration for Scientific Poster Generation

arXiv:2508.21720v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automating scientific poster generation requires hierarchical document understanding and coherent content-layout planning. Existing methods often rely on flat summarization or optimize content and layout separately. As a result, they often suffer from information loss, weak logical flow, and poor visual balance. We present PosterForest, a training-free framework for scientific poster generation. Our method introduces the Poster Tree, a structured intermediate representation that captures document hierarchy and visual-textual semantics across multiple levels. Building on this representation, content and layout agents perform hierarchical reasoning and recursive refinement, progressively optimizing the poster from global organization to local composition. This joint optimization improves semantic coherence, logical flow, and visual harmony. Experiments show that PosterForest outperforms prior methods in both automatic and human evaluations, without additional training or domain-specific supervision.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum Horizon: An evaluation of quantum computing as a threat to Bitcoin and Ethereum

arXiv:2606.14484v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum computing poses a real, broad-based, but bounded and substantially mitigable threat to Bitcoin and Ethereum. We separate the two quantum algorithms that public discussion routinely conflates: Shor's algorithm breaks the elliptic-curve signatures (ECDSA over secp256k1, BLS over BLS12-381) that authorize spending, whereas Grover's algorithm does not meaningfully threaten proof-of-work mining, which is protected by a merely quadratic speedup, fault-tolerant per-operation costs, a square-root parallelization wall, and difficulty adjustment. Folding hardware scaling, the falling resource requirement, a fault-tolerance readiness lag, and expert surveys into a single Monte-Carlo forecast yields a wide, bimodal arrival distribution for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer: about a one-in-six chance by 2035, near 30% by 2040, and about 60% by 2050. Exposure is concentrated and mostly migratable: of Bitcoin's roughly six million quantum-exposed coins only about 2.3 million are irreducibly at risk, while 50 to 65% of Ether sits at key-revealed accounts that can adopt post-quantum signatures. A timely migration beats even an optimistic 2035 machine, so the binding constraint is governance, not technology. A survey of the top twenty cryptocurrencies finds none fully post-quantum. Reproducible models accompany every quantitative claim.

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

Trade-offs in Medical LLM Adaptation: An Empirical Study in French QA

The development of large language models (LLMs) has led to an increased focus on their adaptation to specialized domains and languages, yet the effectiveness of domain adaptation strategies remains unclear. We present a study of medical domain adaptation using French medical question-answering (QA) as a case study. We compare continual pretraining (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and their combination across three model families, multiple sizes, and three initialization types, explicitly disentangling adaptation effects from base model choice. We evaluate both multiple-choice (MCQA) and open-ended QA (OEQA) under greedy and constrained decoding using automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. For MCQA, CPT+SFT most often achieves the best scores, but gains over SFT are small and frequently not statistically significant, making SFT a strong and cost-effective default. For OEQA, CPT consistently improves overlap-based metrics, while SFT often degrades generation quality; instruction tuning and CPT+SFT are preferred by LLM-based evaluation. Cross-lingual experiments further show effective transfer from French adaptation to English benchmarks. Overall, we provide practical guidelines for selecting adaptation strategies under computational constraints.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A Pfaffian quantum Hall state of ultracold bosons

arXiv:2606.12409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fractional quantum Hall states are a cornerstone of topological physics, hosting fractionally charged quasiparticles with exotic statistics that promise to enable topologically protected quantum information processing. Among these, the Pfaffian state introduced by Moore and Read implements a p-wave pairing structure that supports excitations with non-Abelian exchange statistics. Despite extensive study in electronic systems, direct access to its pairing structure has remained limited. Here we realize a three-particle bosonic Pfaffian state of ultracold $^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ atoms in an optical lattice subject to a Floquet-engineered synthetic magnetic field. Using a Bayesian-optimized adiabatic protocol, we prepare a state exhibiting Pfaffian pairing correlations. Site-resolved measurements of multi-point density correlations reveal a pronounced suppression of short-range three-body coincidences, reflecting the underlying pairing structure. We further probe the state's transport response through Hall drift measurements. Our results establish a bottom-up approach to engineering non-Abelian topological order and lay the groundwork for future explorations of anyonic braiding in synthetic matter.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Domain Generalizable Adaptation of 3D Vision-Language Models via Regularized Fine-Tuning

Domain adaptation remains a central challenge in 3D vision, especially for multimodal foundation models that align 3D point clouds with visual and textual data. While these models demonstrate strong general capabilities, adapting them to downstream domains with limited data often leads to overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. To address this, we introduce ReFine3D, a regularized fine-tuning framework designed for domain-generalizable tuning of 3D large multimodal models (LMMs). ReFine3D combines selective layer tuning with two targeted regularization strategies: multi-view consistency across augmented point clouds and text diversity through synonym-based prompts generated by large language models. Additionally, we incorporate point-rendered vision supervision and a test-time augmentation mechanism with confidence-based aggregation to further enhance robustness. Extensive experiments across different 3D domain generalization benchmarks show that ReFine3D improves base-to-novel class generalization by 1.36%, cross-dataset transfer by 2.43%, robustness to corruption by 1.80%, and few-shot accuracy by up to 3.11%, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods with minimal added computational overhead.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Womens intentions and motivations towards health behaviour change before pregnancy: a cross-sectional survey of pregnant women in Australia

Introduction: The preconception period (i.e. the weeks and months before pregnancy) is a critical window during which parental health behaviours can influence pregnancy outcomes and the childs long-term health. Modifiable factors such as nutrition, physical activity, substance use, and environmental exposures play a key role, yet womens ability to adopt and sustain healthy behaviours is shaped by complex psychological, social and environmental influences. This study applies the Theory of Planned Behaviour to identify the beliefs underpinning womens preconception behaviours, with the aim of informing support for effective and sustained health behaviour change. Methods: An Australian national retrospective cross-sectional survey of pregnant women (18-49 years), recruited through social media platforms. The 92-item survey captured respondent socio-demographics, pregnancy status and health conditions, health behaviours, and beliefs regarding preconception health behaviours. Respondents level of pregnancy planning was categorised using the London Measure of Unplanned Pregnancy (LMUP). Items regarding preconception beliefs were structured in accordance with the Theory of Planned Behaviour, with a focus on regular exercise, healthy diet, and alcohol avoidance. These beliefs variables were analysed using structured equation modelling to identify paths between latent variables and the items used to estimate each concept. Results: The study was completed by 430 pregnant women of whom 72.7% had a planned pregnancy. Most had a partner, were university educated and in good health. Structural equation modelling showed intention strongly predicted exercise ({beta}=0.65), healthy diet ({beta}=0.54) and alcohol avoidance ({beta}=0.64). Perceived control and partner norms influenced intentions, whereas health professional norms had limited effect. Positive beliefs were associated with folate supplement use and smoking cessation. Conclusion: These findings highlight intention as a key driver of preconception health behaviours, with perceived control and partner influences playing a more significant role than individual beliefs or health professional input. Effective interventions should therefore address structural barriers and actively involve partners, while respecting womens autonomy. Overall, couples-focused, multi-level strategies are likely essential to support meaningful and sustained preconception health behaviour change.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Threshold Group Testing

arXiv:2606.11353v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the Threshold Group Testing (TGT) problem in the noiseless and non-adaptive setting, where the objective is to exactly recover a sparse binary vector from pooled tests, using as few tests as possible. In TGT, each test applied to a subset of items returns a positive outcome if the number of 1's (defective items) in that subset meets or exceeds a specified threshold, and has a negative outcome otherwise. We investigate how the complexity of TGT compares to that of Classical Group Testing (CGT), corresponding to the special case of the threshold equal to one, and analyse the impact of increasing the threshold on the required number of tests. Our main contribution is the derivation of a sharp information-theoretic phase transition at $c_{\mathrm{inf}}^{\mathrm{TGT}}k\log(n/k)$ (non-adaptive) tests for TGT within the constant-column test design. The threshold constant $c_{\mathrm{inf}}^{\mathrm{TGT}}$ is expressed as a function of the prevalence of defectives and the threshold value. Our upper bound is derived under an analytic assumption, and we verify that this assumption is satisfied for a threshold value of 2. The value of $c_{\mathrm{inf}}^{\mathrm{TGT}}$ reveals that TGT on the constant-column design has the same information-theoretic behaviour as CGT in the low-prevalence regime. Yet, strikingly, at higher prevalences, the threshold leads to a significant reduction in the number of tests. On the other hand, we provide evidence that when the asymptotic proportion of defective items is positive, TGT actually becomes strictly harder than CGT (excluding trivial reductions).

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

TokenRatio: Principled Token-Level Preference Optimization via Ratio Matching

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used RL-free method for aligning language models from pairwise preferences, but it models preferences over full sequences even though generation is driven by per-token decisions. Existing token-level extensions typically decompose a sequence-level Bradley-Terry objective across timesteps, leaving per-prefix (state-wise) optimality implicit. We study how to recover token-level preference optimality using only standard sequence-level pairwise comparisons. We introduce Token-level Bregman Preference Optimization (TBPO), which posits a token-level Bradley-Terry preference model over next-token actions conditioned on the prefix, and derive a Bregman-divergence density-ratio matching objective that generalizes the logistic/DPO loss while preserving the optimal policy induced by the token-level model and maintaining DPO-like simplicity. We introduce two instantiations: TBPO-Q, which explicitly learns a lightweight state baseline, and TBPO-A, which removes the baseline through advantage normalization. Across instruction following, helpfulness/harmlessness, and summarization benchmarks, TBPO improves alignment quality and training stability and increases output diversity relative to strong sequence-level and token-level baselines.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Systematic Evaluation of Black-Box Uncertainty Estimation Methods for Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.19868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks, their outputs often remain unreliable and may contain hallucinations, making uncertainty estimation (UE) essential for building trustworthy LLMs. In practice, many mainstream LLMs are only accessible through restricted APIs, where internal signals such as logits and hidden states are unavailable, making black-box UE especially important. However, existing work on black-box UE for LLMs remains fragmented in methodology and lacks a unified empirical comparison. To address this gap, we present a systematic review of black-box UE methods and organize them into five categories: verbalization-based, sampling-based, explanation-based, multi-agent, and hybrid methods. We further build a unified evaluation framework and benchmark 24 representative methods across 4 models and 4 dataset settings. Our results show that no single method consistently dominates across all settings. Nevertheless, methods that reason over and compare candidates in the answer space are generally effective, and hybrid methods that combine multiple uncertainty signals perform well under most conditions. By releasing the benchmark data and a unified evaluation framework, we aim to facilitate reproducible comparisons and support future research, while our empirical findings provide practical guidance for developing future black-box UE methods for LLMs.