Paper Plaza - AcademicHub

01.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16791

Riviera model with egoistical settlers

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Riviera model mimics a densifying settlement along the coastline. In the lattice version, houses are built sequentially in empty sites with the constraint that every newly built house has at least one empty neighboring site. The distribution of clusters of adjacent houses does not obey a closed set of evolutionary equations, but the void-cluster-void distribution does. We compute the latter and extract the cluster distribution from it. In the jammed state, when all voids have length one and the evolution ceases, the cluster distribution has a neat form and exhibits a factorial decay with the length of the cluster. To investigate finite systems, we employ a static approach directly treating jammed states. If the coastline is a finite segment, we determine the statistics of the number of empty sites in the jammed state (the average, variance, and higher cumulants). We also study a continuum version in which houses are built along the line so that each newly built house is sufficiently separated from at least one neighboring house.

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12384

APPO: Agentic Procedural Policy Optimization

Authors:

Xucong Wang ↗Ziyu Ma ↗Yong Wang ↗Yuxiang Ji ↗Shidong Yang ↗Guanhua Chen ↗Pengkun Wang ↗Xiangxiang Chu ↗

arXiv:2606.12384v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) have substantially improved the multi-turn tool-use capabilities of large language model agents. However, most existing methods assign credit over coarse heuristic units, such as tool-call boundaries or fixed workflows, making it difficult to identify which intermediate decisions influence downstream outcomes. In this work, we study agentic RL from two perspectives: where to branch and how to assign credit after branching. Our pilot analysis shows that influential decision points are broadly distributed throughout the generated sequence rather than concentrated at tool calls, while token entropy alone does not reliably reflect their impact on final outcomes. Motivated by these observations, we propose Agentic Procedural Policy Optimization (APPO), which shifts branching and credit assignment from coarse interaction units to fine-grained decision points in the sequence. APPO selects branching locations using a Branching Score that combines token uncertainty with policy-induced likelihood gains of subsequent continuations, enabling more targeted exploration while filtering out spurious high-entropy positions. It further introduces procedure-level advantage scaling to better distribute credit across branched rollouts. Experiments on 13 benchmarks show that APPO consistently improves strong agentic RL baselines by nearly 4 points, while keeping efficient tool-calls and maintaining behavior interpretability.

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03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15436

Beyond Classification: A Cough Regression Benchmark for Respiratory Acoustic Foundation Models

Authors:

Mayur Sanap ↗Prasanna Desikan ↗Edgar Lobaton ↗

arXiv:2606.15436v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Respiratory acoustic foundation models (FMs) excel at cough classification, yet their ability to predict continuous health quantities from cough audio remains largely unexplored, despite the clinical value of passive age, BMI, and disease probability estimation in settings where physical measurements are unavailable. We introduce the multi-model, multi-target cough regression benchmark evaluating five FMs (OPERA-CT, OPERA-CE, OPERA-GT, HeAR, M2D+Resp) across six targets on three datasets under subject-disjoint protocols, comparing linear, MLP-small, and full MLP regression heads. MLP-small beats the mean-predictor baseline on all tasks and linear probing in 23 of 30 model x task cases, with full MLP overfitting on small clinical data but recovering on larger sets, revealing a dataset size x head-capacity trade-off. HeAR leads within-dataset age regression on Coswara (9.12 yr MAE); its CIDRZ result is excluded from headline claims owing to possible HeAR-CIDRZ pretraining overlap. OPERA-GT is favored over OPERA-CT on age in all three datasets, with the CIDRZ margin within seed variance, extending a generative-pretraining advantage from breath to cough. HeAR and M2D+Resp reach near-full performance at N = 50 samples while OPERA models require N = 400. Cross-dataset transfer is strongly asymmetric as large diverse data generalises to small clinical populations (CoughVID to CIDRZ: -0.17 yr) but not vice versa (CIDRZ to Coswara: +2.43 yr, +26.6%).

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04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17266

SkillChain-Gym: A Benchmark for Reskilling-Aware Production-Inventory Control under Disruptions

Authors:

Carlos Eduardo Sanoja ↗

arXiv:2606.17266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Production planning increasingly has to treat workforce capability as a decision variable: certifications lapse when skills are not maintained, new products require skills the current workforce does not hold, and reskilling competes for the same worker hours needed for production. Existing operations benchmarks usually treat labor as exogenous, while workforce-planning models with skills and learning are rarely released as reusable testbeds. We introduce SkillChain-Gym, a benchmark specification for reskilling-aware production-inventory control: a single-site environment with stylized worker skill-state dynamics, hard threshold certification, forgetting, and capacity-consuming training actions constrained by the same per-worker time budget as production. The benchmark includes seed-controlled disruption scenarios, three feasibility modes with projection diagnostics, deterministic replay, and metrics covering operations, resilience, capability growth, and training-access distribution. We evaluate production-only, reactive adaptive, water-filling adaptive, and static-insurance policies with budget variants over 60-shift horizons with paired statistical tests. The results are regime-dependent rather than a ranking. Training-capable policies dominate the production-only baseline, and maintenance training is necessary under forgetting even without disruptions. Among training-capable classes, adaptive training helps when bottlenecks are visible in the forecast, while a lean static cross-training plan, a deliberately favorable comparator whose structure encodes relevant skill contingencies, acts as strong insurance under surprise shocks and absenteeism. Capacity slack and the forgetting rate govern the boundary between these regimes. No policy class dominates across regimes, motivating forecast-driven controllers that decide when to buy skill insurance and when to react.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13751

Which Models Perform Better in Inheritance Reasoning?

Authors:

Mohammed Amine Mouhoub ↗Chahinez Bouchekif ↗

This paper presents the participation of team PSL in the QIAS 2026 Shared Task on Arabic Islamic inheritance reasoning. The task evaluates the ability of large language models to solve inheritance cases that require legal interpretation, multi-step reasoning, and precise numerical computation. We compare commercial and open-source models under a unified prompting strategy to assess their effectiveness in structured legal reasoning with minimal task-specific adaptation. \\ Our results show a clear gap in reliability between the two model families. Commercial models demonstrate stronger performance in identifying eligible heirs, applying exclusion rules, and maintaining consistency across reasoning steps. In contrast, open-source models exhibit greater instability, particularly in cases involving dependent legal decisions and fractional share adjustments. The best performance is achieved by Gemini 2.5 Flash, with an MRE of $0.989$.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19170

Dango: A Strictly L1-Only Large Language Model for Studying Second Language Acquisition

Authors:

Shiho Matta ↗Yin Jou Huang ↗Fei Cheng ↗Takashi Kodama ↗Hirokazu Kiyomaru ↗Yugo Murawaki ↗

We introduce Dango, a 1.8B-parameter large language model designed for controlled studies of L1-to-L2 (Japanese-to-English) transfer in second language acquisition (SLA). While previous studies have explored SLA in language models, they have predominantly relied on smaller or non-decoder models, limiting their ability to generate open-ended text and reducing their suitability as practical L2 simulators. We identify a key challenge when scaling models to this size: L2 contamination within the "monolingual" pretraining corpus used for L1 acquisition. To address this, we propose a filtering method to reduce premature exposure to English while preserving realistic, minimal exposure. We then fine-tune the model on LLM-generated L2-learning lessons to simulate the L2 acquisition process. Our evaluations confirm that Dango develops human-like L2 production patterns, outperforming both unfiltered and standard multilingual baselines. We release the model, data, and code to facilitate reproducible computational SLA research and learner-facing applications.

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07.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14295

AgentCyberRange: Benchmarking Frontier AI Systems in Realistic Cyber Ranges

Authors:

Fengyu Liu ↗Jiarun Dai ↗Yihe Fan ↗Wuyuao Mai ↗Ziao Li ↗Bofei Chen ↗Jie Zhang ↗Zheng Lou ↗Bocheng Xiang ↗Qiyi Zhang ↗Xudong Pan ↗Geng Hong ↗…

arXiv:2606.14295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier AI systems are increasingly capable of cybersecurity tasks, including codebase inspection, vulnerability detection, and exploitation. However, evaluating their offensive capabilities remains constrained by limited access to open, reproducible, multi-host cyber ranges. Existing public benchmarks capture isolated skills such as CTF solving, vulnerability reproduction, and exploit generation, but often abstract away realistic intrusion workflows: discovering exposed services, gaining a foothold, collecting internal information, and expanding compromise across hosts. This gap makes it difficult to observe emerging risks early, because frontier AI systems are rarely evaluated under realistic attack conditions. We introduce AgentCyberRange, the first open, multi-range infrastructure for measuring autonomous cyber attack capability in realistic cyber ranges. It combines 110 vulnerabilities across 15 real web applications and 8 enterprise-like cyber ranges with 156 internal hosts, plus Cage, a toolchain for execution, orchestration, result collection, and verification. The benchmark covers two core stages: web exploitation, where agents explore exposed applications and validate vulnerabilities, and post exploitation, where agents turn an initial foothold into broader internal compromise. We evaluate six frontier AI systems under matched prompts and budgets. GPT-5.5 with Codex performs best, solving 16.1% of web exploitation tasks and 31.7% of post-exploitation tasks; with more concrete hints, these rates increase to 33.0% and 46.3%. We also observe out-of-benchmark findings, including unknown vulnerabilities in popular projects, and payload mutation that bypasses host defenses. These results show that open cyber-range evaluation is necessary for observing emerging offensive capabilities under realistic and reproducible conditions.

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08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14222

Learning the Context of Errors: Black-Box Online Adaptation of Time Series Foundation Models

Authors:

Xilin Dai ↗Yiding Liu ↗Hongjie Xia ↗Yifan Hu ↗Zewei Dong ↗Jiang-Ming Yang ↗Qiang Xu ↗

arXiv:2606.14222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid evolution of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) has advanced zero-shot forecasting across diverse domains. Inspired by the current form of Large Language Models, future TSFMs may be offered as commercialized, closed-source API services. However, many existing online adaptation methods still rely on white-box access for parameter fine-tuning or gradient backpropagation. This paradigm mismatch raises a question: In black-box online adaptation for TSFMs, what should we learn? We answer this with an insight: the predictive errors of the base model are conditioned on both the input and output of the base model (i.e., the context of errors). To validate this insight, we propose ORCA (Online Residual Contextual Adaptation). We conduct extensive experiments across 5 state-of-the-art TSFMs and 8 datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, through ablation studies, we quantitatively analyze the impact of different adapter learning hypotheses on the final adaptation performance in black-box online adaptation. Code available at https://github.com/Fifthky/ORCA.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2503.01425

MeshPad: Interactive Sketch-Conditioned Artist-Reminiscent Mesh Generation and Editing

Authors:

Haoxuan Li ↗Ziya Erkoc ↗Lei Li ↗Daniele Sirigatti ↗Vladislav Rosov ↗Angela Dai ↗Matthias Nie{\ss}ner ↗

We introduce MeshPad, a generative approach that creates 3D meshes from sketch inputs. Building on recent advances in artist-reminiscent triangle mesh generation, our approach addresses the need for interactive mesh creation. To this end, we focus on enabling consistent edits by decomposing editing into 'deletion' of regions of a mesh, followed by 'addition' of new mesh geometry. Both operations are invoked by simple user edits of a sketch image, facilitating an iterative content creation process and enabling the construction of complex 3D meshes. Our approach is based on a triangle sequence-based mesh representation, exploiting a large Transformer model for mesh triangle addition and deletion. In order to perform edits interactively, we introduce a vertex-aligned speculative prediction strategy on top of our additive mesh generator. This speculator predicts multiple output tokens corresponding to a vertex, thus significantly reducing the computational cost of inference and accelerating the editing process, making it possible to execute each editing step in only a few seconds. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MeshPad outperforms state-of-the-art sketch-conditioned mesh generation methods, achieving more than 22% mesh quality improvement in Chamfer distance, and being preferred by 90% of participants in perceptual evaluations.

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10.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2506.20686

MegaFold: Efficient Training of Next-Generation 3D Attention Protein Models on Cross-Platform GPUs

Authors:

Hoa La ↗Ahan Gupta ↗Alex Morehead ↗Jianlin Cheng ↗Minjia Zhang ↗

arXiv:2506.20686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in biomolecular modeling have been catalyzed by models such as AlphaFold3 (AF3), which introduce science-informed changes to the transformer architecture. Unlike transformers, a defining characteristic of AF3-style models is their 3D attention over 2D pairwise representations which produces tensors whose computation and memory costs scale cubically with sequence length. As a result, despite moderate parameter counts, AF3-style models are far more expensive to train than size-equivalent transformers, and are severely constrained by GPU memory capacity. Our characterization shows 3D attention fundamentally changes the training workload, causing massive 3D attention maps, complex inter-operator dependencies, kernel fragmentation, and heavy host-side data pipelines which differ substantially from LLM training, leading to poor utilization on modern GPU systems. Moreover, existing GPU optimizations do not adequately address these challenges due to complex cross-layer inter-operator dependencies introduced by 3D attention. Motivated by these challenges, we introduce MegaFold, a novel cross-platform system for efficient training of next-generation 3D-attention protein models. MegaFold combines a memory-efficient 3D-attention kernel, a communication-efficient sharding strategy for quadratic representations, fused operator implementations for critical execution paths, and a determinism-aware host-device pipeline that eliminates preprocessing stalls. Evaluation on both NVIDIA H200 and AMD MI250 GPUs shows that MegaFold enables training with up to 3.36$\times$ longer sequence lengths on 32 GPUs while reducing end-to-end execution time by up to 1.73$\times$ (NVIDIA) and 1.62$\times$ (AMD).

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11.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2605.31506

Evaluating Factual Density in Multi-Source RAG: A Study in Medical AI Accuracy

Authors:

Michael R. DeMarco ↗

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the current industry standard for grounding AI in real-world facts. Traditional retrieval methods rely on keyword matching and topic proximity, ranking content based on how closely it sounds like the user's query. What they do not measure is how many verified facts the content actually contains. This structural gap, termed the Expert Blindness Effect, causes standard RAG pipelines to consistently bury high-density factual evidence in favor of lexically dominant text on the same topic. To address this gap, this paper introduces Factual Density (FD*), a novel retrieval optimization signal that measures the proportion of verified atomic claims relative to total token count. Using the NexusAgentics Ghost Audit preprocessing pipeline, raw text is scored for factual specificity using probabilistic factuality analysis to filter content before corpus ingestion. An initial formulation introduced a severe document-length confound (Pearson R = -0.8636, p = 2.27e-07). Implementing Z-score normalization within length bins resolved this bias, validating FD* as a length-independent density signal (p = 0.0749). Evaluated against the HealthFC benchmark (750 health claims labeled Supported, Refuted, or No Evidence by medical experts), FD*-optimized retrieval was the only condition to achieve 100% systematic review saturation in top-5 results, surfacing Cochrane evidence that standard cosine similarity ranked outside the top ten. Ground truth verification confirmed 25 mappings across seven HealthFC-supported claims. While full statistical validation across n=50 queries remains future work due to constraints on corpus-benchmark alignment, these findings establish factual density reranking as a low-cost, high-impact intervention for improving factual precision in health RAG architectures.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2605.20795

What Semantics Survive the Connector? Diagnosing VLM-to-DiT Alignment in Video Editing

Authors:

Hangyu Lin ↗Chao Wen ↗Chengming Xu ↗Jianxiong Gao ↗Jiangning Zhang ↗Xiaobin Hu ↗Yanwei Fu ↗

Flow matching based video generative models have been increasingly relying on prepended Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to handle complex, instruction-based video editing. The prevailing assumption underlying this paradigm is that a connector module can seamlessly align the VLM's rich multi-modal reasoning with the original text embedding space of DiTs. However, we hypothesize that this alignment acts as a severe semantic bottleneck, degrading fine-grained structural variables. Verifying this is challenging, as end-to-end evaluations conflate alignment failures with generation errors, and natural datasets lack disentangled annotations. To rigorously investigate this, we propose a controlled data processing pipeline based on video composition that results in TRACE-Edit, a diagnostic dataset focusing on relation-based editing. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a comprehensive diagnostic protocol to analyze two important designs of meta-query and connector in the existing video editing models. Systematic evaluation of four representative model cases reveals that fine-grained structural semantics can be severely degraded during alignment. Our findings overturn the assumption of lossless semantic transfer, identifying the VLM-to-DiT alignment as a major bottleneck and providing a new diagnostic foundation for future multi-modal alignment architectures.

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13.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19297

Does VLA Even Know the Basics? Measuring Commonsense and World Knowledge Retention in Vision-Language-Action Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19297v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically obtained by fine-tuning powerful pretrained VLMs on robotics data, yet it is unclear how much commonsense and factual knowledge they retain after adaptation. Failures on knowledge-sensitive tasks are ambiguous, conflating missing knowledge with poor generalization of low-level control. We introduce Act2Answer, a lightweight protocol that adapts VLM knowledge benchmarks to VLA evaluation by requiring agents to answer through action. Each question becomes a short tabletop episode where the agent performs a single object-placement action to select among candidate answers, yielding an action-grounded success rate with reduced control confounds. We curate a test suite of such environments across diverse commonsense and world-knowledge categories and introduce layerwise intent probing to localize answer-relevant information across the VLM backbone and action head. In a large-scale study of 7 VLA models and 9 VLM baselines, we systematically rank models across categories, finding that VLAs show solid performance on simple concepts while exhibiting larger gaps on richer semantic categories relative to their source VLMs, that VQA co-training is associated with better knowledge retention, and that answer-relevant signals peak in middle VLA layers but attenuate in upper layers. Act2Answer is available at https://tttonyalpha.github.io/act2answer/.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.00074

CRC-Screen: Certified DNA-Synthesis Hazard Screening Under Taxonomic Shift

Authors:

Najmul Hasan ↗

arXiv:2605.00074v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: DNA-synthesis providers screen incoming orders by searching the requested sequence against curated hazard lists. We show that this baseline collapses to a 100% false-flag rate when the hazardous sequence comes from a taxonomic family absent from the reference set: under Conformal Risk Control's certified miss-rate constraint, a low-discrimination signal forces the threshold below the entire test-benign mass. We compose three signals derived from a synthesis order's public annotation: $k$-mer Jaccard similarity to known toxins, the trimmed-mean score of a five-LLM judge panel, and cosine similarity to clustered embedding centroids. Fused under a monotone logistic aggregator and calibrated by Conformal Risk Control, the resulting screener certifies $\mathbb{E}[\mathrm{FNR}] \le \alpha + \mathrm{TV}$, where the additive term is the calibration-to-test distribution shift under family holdout (a certified ceiling of 24-49% across folds). Across ten leave-one-taxonomic-family-out folds at $\alpha=0.05$ on UniProt KW-0800 reviewed toxins, the calibrated screener achieves 0% empirical test miss rate on every fold and 0% test false-flag rate on nine of ten folds. The bound's finite-sample slack $1/(n_{\mathrm{cal}}+1)$ caps the certifiable miss rate at 1.77% on our 200-hazard subsample; reaching procurement-grade $\alpha=10^{-3}$ requires an $18\times$ larger calibration set, which the full reviewed UniProt KW-0800 corpus is large enough to deliver. The binding constraint on certifiable DNA-synthesis screening is calibration data, not algorithms. Code: https://github.com/najmulhasan-code/crc-screen

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15993

Classifying by Proxy: Explainable and Reproducible Ensemble of Proxy Tasks for Child Sexual Abuse Imagery Classification

Authors:

Clara Ernesto ↗Carlos Caetano ↗Sandra Avila ↗Jo\~ao Macedo ↗Camila Laranjeira ↗Leo S. F. Ribeiro ↗

Child Sexual Abuse Imagery (CSAI) classification systems are needed solutions for lessening the psychological impacts often felt by law enforcement agents responsible for evaluating these materials and for efficient removal of these materials from the web. However, due to the nature of the task, researching and developing such systems is not a trivial endeavor. The images are highly sensitive, and the related datasets are under restrictive access regimes, which means most studies in the area are not reproducible or distributable and are therefore hard to compare and validate. More concerning still, most models for this task today lack an aspect often desired by law enforcement agents: explainability. In this paper, we apply an ensemble of Proxy Tasks – tasks that correlate to CSAI classification – yielding improvements in reproducibility, explainability, and security for distribution. This concept is applied for the first time to real CSAI, with a novel selection of relevant Proxy Tasks (selected from the CSAI literature) and training adaptations to the original framework. Our final model achieves competitive results, yielding 91.9% balanced accuracy on the RCPD dataset with the best Proxy Task combination. We furthermore contrast these results with the best-in-class representation learning model, DINO, and show that our ensemble improves accuracy and provides explanations for its classification results, a feature that a single deep learning model can seldom provide.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17698

EComAgentBench: Benchmarking Shopping Agents on Long-Horizon Tasks with Distributed Hidden Intent

Authors:

Zeyao Du ↗Tong Li ↗Haibo Zhang ↗

As LLM-based shopping agents enter production, existing benchmarks fail to capture how a shopper's requirements arrive: stated implicitly in the query, recorded in a profile, or revealed only when the right question is asked. Benchmarks that expose full intent upfront and grade only the final choice can neither pose this long-horizon challenge nor explain which requirement an agent missed. To address this gap, we introduce EComAgentBench, a benchmark of 662 tasks grounded in real Amazon products and reviews. Each task scatters these requirements across a visible query, a tool-gated profile, and scripted clarification; an agent must uncover hidden intent, verify candidates against attributes and review evidence, and commit to a single product within 100 tool calls. Moreover, typed, source-tagged rubrics grade every task, attributing each failure to a requirement and its source. Construction is automated yet reliable, with every answer fixed in code before any text is generated and every sample validated. Our evaluation of seven models reveals that even the strongest attains only 57.1% overall accuracy, and rubric satisfaction degrades from visible to hidden sources. Overall, we believe EComAgentBench will serve as a reproducible foundation for moving shopping agents from single-query search toward dependable assistance over long horizons.

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17.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18287

Artemis: Anatomy-Resolved inTervention for Eliminating Multimodal NeuroImage confounderS

Authors:

Siyuan Dai ↗Yang Du ↗Kun Zhao ↗Zhusuyi Chen ↗Heng Huang ↗Paul Thompson ↗Chao Shi ↗Haoteng Tang ↗Liang Zhan ↗

arXiv:2606.18287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal neuroimaging, integrating functional connectivity from fMRI and structural connectivity from DTI, enables non-invasive analysis of brain networks using graph neural networks. However, demographic factors such as age and sex systematically confound the relationship between brain connectivity and clinical outcomes, causing GNNs to exploit spurious shortcuts rather than learning causally invariant representations. While recent causal GNN methods introduce causality at the graph-modeling level, their causal mechanisms remain domain-agnostic without accounting for the real-world confounders inherent in clinical neuroimaging data. Moreover, brain networks are constructed from atlas-based parcellations where each region exhibits distinct sensitivity to demographic factors, necessitating region-aware adjustment. We propose Artemis, a region-level causal framework that bridges this gap with causal intervention at each brain region independently by learning region-specific confounder representations with lightweight parameters. Our adjustment comprehensively utilized the multimodal functional and structural features for graph reasoning as a plug-in module compatible with arbitrary GNN backbones. Experiments on three benchmarks, ADNI for disease diagnosis, OASIS for dementia staging, and HCP for sex classification, demonstrate consistent improvements over representative GNN-based baselines. Multiple supporting experiments further demonstrate statistical significance and neuroscientific interpretability.

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18.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.12546

Quantum Field-Theoretic Predictions of {\Psi}-Epistemic Models of Quantum Mechanics

Authors:

\.Inan\c{c} \c{S}ahin ↗

arXiv:2605.12546v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: {\Psi}-epistemic models of quantum mechanics imply that the quantum state does not correspond to physical reality, but instead reflects the observer's knowledge of the underlying quantum system. The epistemic view of the quantum state has the potential to shed light on several foundational problems of quantum theory and has attracted considerable attention in the literature. On the other hand, the Pusey-Barrett-Rudolph theorem demonstrated that broad classes of {\psi}-epistemic models must lead to predictions that deviate from those of quantum mechanics. Although the original theorem involved entangled joint measurements on composite systems, alternative no-go theorems involving measurements on single quantum systems were developed shortly thereafter. Experimental investigations of the deviations predicted by {\psi}-epistemic models from quantum mechanics are still ongoing. So far, such tests have been performed within the framework of non-relativistic quantum mechanics and predominantly rely on quantum information based measurement procedures. In this work, we show that {\psi}-epistemic models can give rise to deviations from standard quantum field-theoretic predictions through modifications of polarized scattering cross sections and decay widths. Our results do not require a relativistic formulation of ontological models or of the Harrigan-Spekkens criterion; the essential assumption is merely that measurements implemented through relativistic processes can still be represented within the ontological framework by well-defined response functions and probabilities. The present work constitutes a proof-of-principle study demonstrating that particle physics tests of the ontological status of the quantum state are possible and that {\psi}-epistemic models may exhibit experimentally distinguishable signatures in particle phenomenology.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19179

Compute Efficiency and Serial Runtime Tradeoffs for Stochastic Momentum Methods

Authors:

Depen Morwani ↗Alexandru Meterez ↗Pranav Nair ↗Sham Kakade ↗

arXiv:2606.19179v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stochastic momentum methods such as heavy ball (HB), Nesterov momentum, and variants of Accelerated SGD (ASGD) [Kidambi et al., 2018] are widely used in modern training, but their stochastic benefits depend on two distinct quantities: serial runtime, the number of iterations needed to reach a target accuracy, and compute efficiency (CE), the inverse total gradient-query or FLOP cost. Larger batches reduce serial runtime without hurting CE only when the contraction gap grows linearly with batch size. We study stochastic HB and ASGD for consistent linear regression with Gaussian covariates and prove finite-dimensional, discrete-time lower bounds on their batch-size tradeoffs. Our first result shows that HB does not improve the CE frontier over SGD for arbitrary spectra; rather, it preserves SGD-level CE over a larger batch-size window, allowing larger batches to reduce serial runtime until HB reaches its deterministic accelerated scale. This window can be a factor $\sqrt{\kappa}$ larger than the SGD critical batch size. For ASGD, the picture is more spectrum-dependent: for rapidly decaying power-law spectra, ASGD improves small-batch CE over HB/SGD, but as batch size grows it trades this CE advantage for improved serial runtime. Synthetic linear-regression experiments verify these qualitative regimes, including near-overlap of ASGD and HB for slowly decaying spectra and the predicted CE–serial tradeoff for rapidly decaying spectra.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17557

Universal Image Restoration via Internalized Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Authors:

Yu Guo ↗Zhengru Fang ↗Shengfeng He ↗Senkang Hu ↗Yihang Tao ↗Phone Lin ↗Yuguang Fang ↗

Image restoration seeks to recover high-quality images from degraded inputs but becomes highly ill-posed under complex, mixed degradations. While unified all-in-one models are common, their performance declines as degradation complexity increases. Recent works adopt Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for multi-round restoration using specialized modules. However, this approach faces two key limitations: (i) increased computational cost due to multi-step processing, and (ii) weak modeling of interactions between degradations during stepwise inference. We introduce CoTIR, a universal image restoration framework that internalizes CoT reasoning within a single model. Concretely, we view image restoration as a specialized subtask of image editing, which implies that a large-scale pre-trained editing model provides a more favorable optimization starting point. Building on this, we fine-tune the model for restoration and further encode structured CoT-style reasoning into the learning objective via a differentiable formulation inspired by Lagrangian optimization, enabling holistic restoration without chaining specialized restorers. To facilitate training and evaluation, we further present CoTIR-Bench, a large-scale benchmark comprising 5.2 million samples with CoT-style reasoning traces. Extensive experiments on CoTIR-Bench and broad real composite degradation scenes show that CoTIR achieves stronger perceptual quality and more competitive fidelity than both all-in-one models and multi-round restoration methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/gy65896/CoTIR.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2604.09679

HCP-MAD:Heterogeneous Consensus-Progressive Reasoning for Efficient Multi-Agent Debate

Authors:

Yiqing Liu ↗Hantao Yao ↗Wu Liu ↗Allen He ↗Yongdong Zhang ↗

arXiv:2604.09679v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) is a collaborative framework in which multiple agents iteratively refine solutions through the generation of reasoning and alternating critique cycles. Current work primarily optimizes intra-round topologies and inter-round interactions separately, limiting the adaptation of token costs to task complexity. This work introduces Heterogeneous Consensus-Progressive Reasoning for Efficient Multi-Agent Debate (HCP-MAD), leveraging consensus as a dynamic signal to facilitate progressive reasoning. The core motivation is that a majority of straightforward tasks can be effectively resolved via lightweight pair-agent debates, while complex tasks require expanded collaboration. Firstly, Heterogeneous Consensus Verification conducts rapid consensus verification using a pair of heterogeneous agents for early stopping. Next, Heterogeneous Pair-Agent Debate applies an adaptive stopping criterion to terminate mutual critique of reasoning traces. Finally, the unresolved tasks are addressed through Escalated Collective Voting by aggregating diverse perspectives from additional agents. Experiments across six benchmarks show that HCP-MAD enhances accuracy while substantially reducing token costs. Code is https://github.com/fuyu66/HCP-MAD.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13991

Fusing Stylometric and Embedding Systems to Estimate Authorship Likelihood Ratios in Japanese

Authors:

Praju Ghatpande ↗Satoru Tsuge ↗Shunichi Ishihara ↗Wataru Zaitsu ↗Mitsuyuki Inaba ↗

The likelihood ratio framework is widely recognized as the logically and legally sound basis for evidential analysis across forensic sciences, and its importance is increasingly acknowledged in analyses of authorship in textual evidence. To date, however, its application has been confined to English-language texts. Meanwhile, authorship attribution has traditionally relied on a diverse array of stylometric features, even as the rise of pre-trained large language models enables new contextual-embedding approaches. Combining these diverse approaches through fusion promises enhanced performance, yet it has not been applied to integrate stylometric-feature systems with embedding-based systems within the likelihood ratio paradigm. This study is the first to apply likelihood ratio-based forensic text comparison to Japanese digital texts, using ~1,000-character excerpts from blogs, to 1) evaluate system performance and likelihood ratio magnitudes and 2) assess the impact of fusing stylometric-feature systems with embedding-based systems. The results demonstrate that the fused system maintains excellent calibration while 1) increasing consistent-with-fact likelihood ratio magnitudes; 2) decreasing contrary-to-fact likelihood ratio magnitudes and 3) improving overall discriminability. The best-performing fusion achieved a log-likelihood-ratio cost of 0.32484, illustrating both the feasibility of likelihood ratio framework for Japanese and the benefits of fusion across heterogeneous systems.

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23.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2512.04612

Patterned matrices with random walk entries

Authors:

Arup Bose ↗Pradeep Vishwakarma ↗

arXiv:2512.04612v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: It is well known that the weak limit of a suitably scaled continuous-time random walk (CTRW) is the Brownian motion. We investigate the convergence of certain patterned random matrices whose entries are independent CTRWs and their time-changed versions, in a non-commutative probability framework. For the Wigner link function, the limits are free Brownian motion and its time-changed version driven by an inverse stable subordinator. For the symmetric circulant and the circulant with CTRW entries, we use their explicit eigenvalue expressions to define some empirical processes that converge weakly to a Brownian motion and a complex Brownian motion, respectively. For matrices with iid entries, and for elliptic matrices, the algebraic limits are equal in $*$-distribution to processes whose marginals are circular and elliptic variables, respectively. A random time-changed variant of these results is also established.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16092

VinQA: Visual Elements Interleaved Long-form Answer Generation for Real-World Multimodal Document QA

Authors:

Young Rok Jang ↗Hyesoo Kong ↗Kyunghwan An ↗Jae Sub Huh ↗Gyeonghun Kim ↗Stanley Jungkyu Choi ↗

Real-world documents combine text with tables, charts, photographs, and diagrams arranged in diverse layouts, yet existing research on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for document QA predominantly produces text-only responses, underutilizing these visual elements. We introduce VinQA, a dataset for long-form answer generation where cited visual elements are explicitly interleaved with their supporting text and grounded in relevant document pages. To support this task, we study two encoding methods for feeding raw document page images into an MLLM, along with their visual-element citation mechanisms: (1) Page Encoding, which directly encodes full-page images with bounding boxes of visual elements and treats these boxed regions as citable units; and (2) Modality Encoding, which parses each page to extract text and crop visual elements, encodes them separately, and uses these cropped elements as citable units. In our experiments, we propose M-GroSE, a multimodal evaluation framework extending GroUSE to assess answers along four dimensions: completeness, answer relevancy, faithfulness, and unanswerability. We additionally report Visual Source F1 to directly measure visual citation accuracy. Although proprietary frontier models still achieve the best overall scores on the VinQA test split, fine-tuning open Qwen2.5-VL models on the training split substantially improves their performance and narrows this gap. Modality Encoding is initially more robust for complex documents with long text, many visual elements, and diverse citation requirements. After training on VinQA, however, Page Encoding reaches a comparable level, competing effectively even without the explicit parsing used in Modality Encoding. Finally, Visual G-Eval, an MLLM-based judge, confirms that fine-tuned models insert visual elements at semantically appropriate positions with faithful supporting text.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20082

Beyond Averaging in John Ellipsoid Approximation: High-Accuracy Algorithms in the Leverage-Score Model

Authors:

Xiaoyu Li ↗Junwei Yu ↗Jiaojiao Jiang ↗Junbin Gao ↗Andi Han ↗

arXiv:2606.20082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The John ellipsoid of a symmetric polytope $P=\{\mathbf{x}\in\mathbb{R}^d:\|\mathbf{A}\mathbf{x}\|_\infty\le1\}$, $\mathbf{A}\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$, is computed by a long line of leverage-score algorithms, from Cohen, Cousins, Lee and Yang (COLT 2019) to its successors [WY24, CLS+25], all reaching a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation in $\Theta(\varepsilon^{-1}\log(n/d))$ iterations. We separate this complexity into three costs the modern line conflates (certification, identification, and accuracy) and locate the historical $\varepsilon^{-1}$ in the first alone. In the equivalent D-optimal-design form $\min_{\mathbf{p}\in\Delta_n}-\log\det(\sum_i p_i\mathbf{a}_i\mathbf{a}_i^\top)$, the leverage-score oracle is exactly the first-order oracle and the $(1+\varepsilon)$-John guarantee the Frank-Wolfe gap $g(\mathbf{p})\le\varepsilon d$; through this dictionary the costs come apart. The $\varepsilon^{-1}$ is a certification artifact: the uniform average of the iterates, the certificate used throughout the line, has gap exactly $\Theta(1/T)$, however cheap each iteration is made. Pointed instead at the last iterate the same oracle is fast: a warm-started accelerated method reaches the guarantee in $C(\mathbf{A})+O(\sqrt{\kappa}\log(1/\varepsilon))$ queries after an $\varepsilon$-independent setup $C(\mathbf{A})$, and once the optimal face is identified the facial problem is an unconstrained self-concordant minimization whose Hessian the oracle recovers exactly, so damped Newton needs only $O(\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ steps, for a total of $C(\mathbf{A})+O(d^2\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ queries. The accuracy dependence is thus doubly logarithmic after an $\varepsilon$-independent, condition-dependent setup; the open problem is the remaining identification cost (a condition-free bound on reaching the optimal face) and lower bounds. Accuracy is not the obstruction.

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