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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Certifying Nonclassical Proper-Time Histories with a Quantum Clock

Authors:
Shuai Zeng↗

arXiv:2606.12755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum clocks can acquire relativistic phases from motional or gravitational proper-time differences, but reduced clock dephasing alone does not certify nonclassical proper-time histories. We formulate this distinction as a channel-certification problem. First, we show that any two-level single-time dephasing signal, including one generated by an effective quantum proper-time label, admits a classical random proper-time representation. We then define the convex set of classical mixtures of experimentally specified proper-time histories and prove a Choi-rank separation criterion for conditioned coherent history recombination. A two-branch Ramsey protocol gives explicit bright- and dark-port population witnesses outside this classical set. The certification is operational and relative to the specified history set: it rules out classical mixtures of the same implemented proper-time histories, not arbitrary classical protocols with different histories or controls.

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

Do as I Do: Dexterous Manipulation Data from Everyday Human Videos

Authors:
Bhawna Paliwal↗Haritheja Etukuru↗William Liang↗Pieter Abbeel↗Nur Muhammad Mahi Shafiullah↗Jitendra Malik↗

How can we scalably generate data for robotic manipulation, especially on human-like platforms such as dexterous multi-fingered hands? Learning from human videos has recently emerged as a likely answer to this question. However, difficulties in estimating hand-object interaction and crossing the human-to-robot embodiment gap have hindered the adoption of abundant monocular RGB-only human videos as the primary source of robot manipulation data. In this work, we present DO AS I DO, an algorithm to reconstruct and retarget monocular RGB human videos to multi-fingered dexterous robotic hands. DO AS I DO reconstructs hand-object interactions from various egocentric and exocentric in-the-wild video sources. The algorithm then retargets these hand-object interaction estimates into a sequence of actions executable in the real world, yielding robot-complete manipulation data from disparate human videos. Overall, DO AS I DO outperforms previous state of the art in estimating hand-object interactions and extracting dexterous manipulation trajectories from RGB videos, as we show in experiments on datasets with ground truths and on a dataset of video clips collected online. Our experiments enable us to propose an efficacy playbook for practitioners collecting human data for manipulation.

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03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Why drinking episodes escalate differently: Event-level pathways linking hazardous alcohol consumption and sexual risk

Authors:
Ngo↗T. P↗Dunham↗A. E↗Santos↗G.-M↗

Background: Alcohol-involved drinking episodes vary in whether they involve hazardous alcohol consumption alone, near-miss sexual risk, or sexual risk behavior, but the within-event mechanisms underlying this variability remain unclear. Methods: Guided by syndemic theory, we conducted a qualitative event-level analysis using modified grounded theory among adults in the San Francisco Bay Area who reported hazardous alcohol consumption, defined as an Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test score [≥]16. In-depth interviews elicited narratives of recent heavy drinking episodes and yielded 64 discrete drinking events across 22 participants. We focused on 35 events with evidence of within-event interaction between biopsychosocial and contextual factors. Using constant comparison, we identified escalation pathways, characterized interruption, and examined how events diverge into three outcomes: hazardous alcohol consumption only, hazardous alcohol consumption with near-miss sexual risk (when risk was plausible but not enacted), and hazardous alcohol consumption with sexual risk behavior. Results: Two primary escalation pathways emerged. Dose-driven escalation involved cumulative alcohol or substance exposure that progressively impaired awareness and self-regulation. Meaning-driven escalation involved prioritizing connection, intimacy, or belonging despite awareness of risk. Time-driven continuation extended exposure across contexts and amplified both pathways. Hazardous alcohol consumption-only events more often followed dose-driven pathways, whereas events involving sexual risk behavior more often followed meaning-driven pathways. Near-miss events occurred across both pathways and illustrated how interruption before the escalation constraint point, when the capacity to modify behavior became reduced, could redirect escalation before sexual risk behavior occurred. Across events with similar levels of intoxication narratives, outcomes diverged according to when the interruption occurred and whether it altered escalation. Conclusion: Hazardous drinking episodes diverge into different outcomes based on escalation pathways and the timing and effectiveness of interruption. Early and effective interruption before the escalation constraint point may represent a key target for harm-reduction strategies to prevent progression to sexual risk behavior.

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04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Gen Z scepticism towards AI is a wake-up call — universities must take it seriously

Authors:
Mim Rahimi↗

The challenge for universities is not adopting artificial intelligence, but doing so in ways that the current generation of students can trust. The challenge for universities is not adopting artificial intelligence, but doing so in ways that the current generation of students can trust.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Multi-Head Attention-Based Feature Extractor Integration with Soft Actor-Critic for Porosity Prediction and Process Parameter Optimization in Additive Manufacturing

Authors:
Kianoush Aqabakee↗Leonardo Stella↗

arXiv:2606.20087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Additive manufacturing process optimization requires precise parameter control to minimize defects such as porosity. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) approaches using discrete action spaces suffer from slow convergence and susceptibility to local optima, limiting their effectiveness for high-precision manufacturing tasks. This study addresses these limitations by employing a continuous action space combined with a novel architecture that integrates a multi-head attention mechanism with the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm. The attention-based feature extractor enhances the agent's ability to capture subtle variations in low-dimensional input features, enabling more effective exploration-exploitation balance for navigating value spaces with local minima. We validate our approach on porosity prediction and process parameter optimization in laser powder bed fusion, demonstrating faster convergence and higher final reward values compared to standard RL methods including DQN, PPO, TD3, and vanilla SAC. The proposed methodology achieves a convergence value of 322.79 within 14 episodes, outperforming existing approaches while maintaining stability throughout training.

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

The Language You Ask In: Language-Conditioned Ideological Divergence in LLM Analysis of Contested Political Documents

Authors:
Oleg Smirnov↗

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as analytical tools across multilingual contexts, yet their outputs may carry systematic biases conditioned by the language of the prompt. This study presents an experimental comparison of LLM-generated political analyses of a Ukrainian civil society document, using semantically equivalent prompts in Russian and Ukrainian administered to two frontier models from different developers, ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude Opus 4.5. Despite identical source material and parallel query structures, both models diverged along the same axis: Russian-language outputs leaned toward delegitimizing framings, characterizing civil society actors as externally funded elites constraining a democratic mandate, while Ukrainian-language outputs treated the same actors as legitimate stakeholders in democratic contestation. The magnitude of this divergence, however, was model-dependent. ChatGPT's Russian output reproduced vocabulary characteristic of Russian state discourse; Claude Opus's stayed in a mainstream critical idiom and hedged its judgments in both languages. These findings demonstrate that prompt language alone can systematically shift the ideological orientation of an unchanged model analyzing identical content. The shift is a general property of multilingual LLMs whose severity, and whose alignment with propaganda narratives, varies across systems. The implications reach AI deployment in polarized information environments, cross-lingual research, and AI governance in multilingual societies.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Scaling Self-Play for End-to-End Driving

Authors:
Luke Rowe↗Roger Girgis↗Rodrigue de Schaetzen↗Daphne Cornelisse↗Alaap Grandhi↗Felix Heide↗Eugene Vinitsky↗Christopher Pal↗Liam Paull↗

End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on offline human-demonstration datasets that provide limited state coverage and often no closed-loop feedback, making them prone to compounding errors when deployed in closed-loop and brittle to long-tail agent interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose an alternative strategy for training end-to-end driving models: large-scale self-play directly from pixels in simulation. While prior self-play approaches have shown promising transfer to real-world driving, they typically assume vectorized Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) observations that are incompatible with end-to-end policies operating directly on sensor observations. To this end, we introduce Gigapixel, a high-throughput batched driving simulator with perspective rendering, enabling scalable self-play directly from pixel observations. Rather than targeting compute-costly photorealistic sensor simulation, Gigapixel renders a simplified bounding-box world that preserves essential scene structure while achieving throughput at 50k agent steps per second. Since direct pixel-space self-play RL is prohibitively sample-inefficient at end-to-end model scale, we propose self-play DAgger training: we train pixel-based policies in self-play via on-policy distillation from a privileged RL teacher. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we subsequently transfer the self-play trained policies to real-world sensor data through lightweight perception adaptation. Policies trained in Gigapixel and adapted to real-world sensor data achieve competitive performance on the HUGSIM and NAVSIM-v2 benchmarks without human trajectory supervision. Moreover, scaling self-play training yields proportional gains in policy performance, establishing self-play as a practical and scalable strategy for training end-to-end models.

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

When Does Trajectory-Level Supervision Permit Efficient Offline Reinforcement Learning?

Authors:
Xuanfei Ren↗Tengyang Xie↗

arXiv:2606.18531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning is typically analyzed under process-level reward supervision, yet many sequential decision datasets record only trajectory-level outcomes. We develop a statistical theory for offline policy optimization from such outcome-level supervision. We first study the canonical setting where the target remains the expected cumulative reward, but each offline trajectory provides only a scalar label whose conditional mean is the cumulative return. We propose OPAC, a pessimistic actor-critic algorithm that learns a latent reward model and optimizes a policy from trajectory-level labels. We prove a high-probability guarantee of order $\widetilde O(H^2\sqrt{C_{sa}(\pi^\star)/n})$ and a matching lower bound, characterizing the sharp statistical cost of replacing process-level rewards with one trajectory-level label. We then extend the principle to preference-based feedback, preserving the leading horizon and concentrability dependence up to preference-model constants. Finally, we study generalized outcome-based offline RL, where both the supervision and the objective are trajectory-level quantities induced by a nonlinear aggregation of latent per-step rewards. This problem is not learnable in general: for all-success objectives, any offline learner may require $\Omega(2^H)$ trajectories even with deterministic transitions and constant concentrability. We then identify a tractable regime through two structural coefficients, $\kappa_\mu(\sigma)$ and $\chi_\mu(\sigma)$, capturing information loss in outcome aggregation and generalized Bellman updates, under which generalized OPAC achieves polynomial sample complexity. Together, our results delineate when outcome-level supervision enables sample-efficient offline control and when missing process-level rewards create fundamental statistical barriers.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Communication Policy Evolution for Proactive LLM Agents

Authors:
Xinbei Ma↗Jiyang Qiu↗Yao Yao↗Zheng Wu↗Yijie Lu↗Xiangmou Qu↗Jiaxin Yin↗Xingyu Lou↗Jun Wang↗Weiwen Liu↗Weinan Zhang↗Zhuosheng Zhang↗…

arXiv:2606.14314v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents have rapidly evolved into autonomous systems, yet a persistent information gap remains between users and agents: communication is costly, while users' identical preferences further limit information exchange. To investigate how agents should communicate across modalities, this paper formalizes Communication Policy, establishes textual and UI-based policies, and then evaluates communication policies across diverse environments, personas, and model combinations. Building information asymmetry for proactive agents, we set up two complementary settings, User-Agent and Planner-Executor. Experimental results reveal complementary strengths between interaction channels: text-based interaction often facilitates task performance, while structured UI improves agents' response quality and persona compliance. Motivated by that, a hybrid method combines these advantages. We further propose Communication Policy Evolution (CPE), a self-evolution framework for refining communication policies through rollout and prompt-level evolving. Without model modification, CPE achieves the best task success across multiple settings using prompt refinement alone. Our findings identify communication behavior as a critical yet underexplored design dimension for LLM agents.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

ParkingTransformer: LLM-Enhanced End-to-End Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Parking

Authors:
Hauteng Wu↗Xu Li↗Dong Kong↗Zihang Wang↗Xieyuanli Chen↗Benwu Wang↗Wenkai Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.17082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous parking has emerged as a critical task within the realm of autonomous driving. However, existing methods suffer from black-box characteristics, lacking high-level semantic understanding and interpretability, which impedes the realization of seamless long-distance autonomous parking from the road to the target spot. To address these limitations, we propose ParkingTransformer, a novel framework that leverages multi-view perception and the scene understanding capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). By combining trajectory queries with LLMs implicit state features, our method interacts directly with historical information and raw sensor data to output planning trajectories, eliminating the need for dense Bird's-View (BEV) representations. To compensate for the inadequate spatial reasoning ability of LLMs, we introduce 3D positional encoding to explicitly inject spatial geometric awareness. Furthermore, a fixed-window streaming mechanism is designed for historical information processing, significantly improving long-term temporal processing efficiency and inference speed. Additionally, a coarse-to-fine decoding strategy is employed to progressively enhance trajectory precision. Extensive closed-loop experiments are conducted on the CARLA simulator and real-world vehicle platforms. The results demonstrate that our method achieves a driving score of 61.32 in CARLA simulator and an average success rate of 88.70% in real-world experiments, validating the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Human-on-the-Loop Orchestration for AI-Assisted Legal Discovery

Authors:
Anushree Sinha↗Srivaths Ranganathan↗Abhishek Dharmaratnakar↗Debanshu Das↗

arXiv:2606.19812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in electronic discovery (e-discovery), where compounding errors across multi-step reasoning chains can constitute legal malpractice. Unlike single-turn retrieval, agentic workflows operating over privileged document corpora exhibit a class of failure we term "trajectory collapse": an early misclassification silently propagates, rendering an entire privilege review invalid. This paper makes three contributions. First, we propose a structured taxonomy of agentic failures in legal information retrieval, organized by functional stage. Second, we introduce a four-layer verification architecture – spanning planning, reasoning, execution, and uncertainty quantification – designed to intercept these failures before they compound. Third, we present a preliminary simulation study on a synthetic e-discovery corpus that demonstrates how mandatory Human-on-the-Loop (HOTL) escalation thresholds reduce privilege-waiver risk relative to fully autonomous baselines. Our results suggest that calibrated uncertainty thresholds can reduce privilege-waiver risk by up to 61% versus fully autonomous deployment, while routing fewer than one quarter of documents to attorney review.

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

Steady-state entanglement of spin qubits mediated by nonreciprocal and chiral magnons

Authors:
Martijn Dols↗Mikhail Cherkasskii↗Victor A. S. V. Bittencourt↗Carlos Gonzalez-Ballestero↗Durga B. R. Dasari↗Silvia Viola Kusminskiy↗

arXiv:2509.13094v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a hybrid quantum system in which a magnet supporting non-reciprocal magnons, chiral magnons, or both mediates the dissipative and unidirectional coupling of spin qubits. By driving the qubits, the steady state of this qubit-qubit coupling scheme becomes the maximally entangled Bell state. We devise a protocol where the system converges to this entangled state and benchmark it including qubit decay and dephasing. The protocol is numerically tested on a hybrid system consisting of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers coupled to magnon surface modes of an yttrium iron garnet (YIG) film. We show that the dephasing time of the NV centers forms the bottleneck for achieving the entanglement of NV centers separated by a distance within the magnon coherence length. Our findings identify the key technological requirements and demonstrate a viable route toward steady-state entanglement of solid-state spins over distances of several microns using magnonic quantum networks, expanding the toolbox of magnonics for quantum information purposes.

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13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Consensus on Dynamic Stochastic Block Models: Fast Convergence and Phase Transitions

Authors:
Haoyu Wang↗Jiaheng Wei↗Zhenyuan Zhang↗

arXiv:2209.03999v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce two models of consensus following a majority rule on time-evolving stochastic block models (SBM), in which the network evolution is Markovian or non-Markovian. Under the majority rule, in each round, each agent simultaneously updates their opinion according to the majority of their neighbors. Our network has a community structure and randomly evolves with time. In contrast to the classic setting, the dynamics is not purely deterministic, and reflects the structure of SBM by resampling the connections at each step, making agents with the same opinion more likely to connect than those with different opinions. In the Markovian model, connections between agents are resampled at each step according to the SBM law and each agent updates their opinion via the majority rule. We prove a power-of-one type result, i.e., any initial bias leads to a non-trivial advantage of winning in the end, uniformly in the size of the network. In the non-Markovian model, a connection between two agents is resampled according to the SBM law only when at least one of them changes opinion and is otherwise kept the same. We identify the phase-transition threshold, up to the second-order leading term, between halting and fast convergence to consensus. We also give sufficient initial-lead conditions for consensus to occur within one, two, or three rounds.

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14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Population-Scale, Genotype-First Characterization of Monogenic Diabetes in 374,973 Multi-Ancestry Individuals from the All of Us Research Program

Authors:
Hasebe↗Yoshiji↗

OBJECTIVE To characterize the prevalence and penetrance of maturity-onset diabetes of the young (MODY) in a multi-ancestry population using a genotype-first design. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We analyzed whole-genome sequencing and clinical data from 374,973 unrelated All of Us participants (42.0% non-European ancestry). We identified pathogenic or likely pathogenic (P/LP) variants in 10 established MODY genes and assessed carrier prevalence, diabetes penetrance, and glycemic profiles. We evaluated age-dependent diabetes risk by comparing carriers with non-carriers stratified by type 2 diabetes polygenic risk score (T2D PRS). RESULTS We identified 370 carriers of P/LP MODY gene variants (0.099%; 1 in 1,013), with similar carrier prevalence among European- and African-ancestry participants (0.105% in both groups). Diabetes penetrance was incomplete (13.4% by age 40; 43.5% by age 60) and varied by etiology: highest for GCK (56.0% by age 60), intermediate for HNF genes (HNF1A/HNF1B/HNF4A; 45.4%), and lowest for non-GCK/HNF genes (ABCC8/INS/KCNJ11/NEUROD1/PDX1/RFX6; 29.0%). In multivariable Cox models using non-carriers in the middle 80% of the T2D PRS as the reference, non-GCK/HNF gene variant carriers had modestly increased diabetes risk (HR, 1.57), similar to non-carriers in the top 10% of T2D PRS (HR, 1.64). These associations were observed in both European- and non-European-ancestry individuals. HbA1c profiles differed by etiology, with stable mild hyperglycemia in GCK variant carriers and greater variability among HNF and non-GCK/HNF gene variant carriers. CONCLUSIONS MODY gene variants showed incomplete, etiology-dependent penetrance across ancestries. Carriers of P/LP variants in lower-penetrance genes had diabetes risk comparable to that of non-carriers with high polygenic susceptibility.

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

Exploring How Agent Voice Accents Shape Human-AI Collaboration in K-12 Group Learning

Authors:
Prerna Ravi↗Car\'umey Stevens↗Ben Hurt↗Brandon Hanks↗Grace Lin↗Emma Anderson↗

arXiv:2606.12805v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collaboration is widely recognized as a cornerstone of 21st-century education, yet teachers still encounter persistent challenges in fostering productive peer interaction. LLM conversational peer agents introduce new possibilities for mediating in-person group work, raising questions about how persona design, particularly their voice characteristics, shapes learners' perceptions, trust, and interactional dynamics. While prior work has examined agent accent effects in one-to-one settings, little is known about how these effects manifest in groups. We conducted a between-subjects mixed-methods study with 33 teachers examining how a GenAI voice agent with different accents (British, Indian, and African American) influenced collaboration and agent perception. Across surveys, group interaction analyses, and artifacts, we find that accent shaped participants' mental models and the roles the agent assumed in group interaction. The British-accented agent was largely treated as a tool and engaged in detached, utility-based ways, whereas Indian- and African American-accented agents were more readily anthropomorphized and integrated as peers. These role expectations influenced trust, engagement, and reliance over time. This work advances understanding of how GenAI's sociolinguistic design features shape group dynamics in CSCL, with implications for designing culturally inclusive AI partners in group learning.

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

FitText: Evolving Agent Tool Ecologies via Memetic Retrieval

Authors:
Kyle Zheng↗Han Zhang↗Renliang Sun↗Chenchen Ye↗Wei Wang↗

arXiv:2605.02411v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A semantic gap separates how users describe tasks from how tools are documented. As API ecosystems scale to tens of thousands of endpoints, static retrieval from the initial query alone cannot bridge this gap: the agent's understanding of what it needs evolves during execution, but its tool set does not. We identify this retrieval interface, not planning, as the binding constraint on end-to-end agent performance, and introduce FitText, a training-free framework that makes retrieval dynamic by embedding it directly in the agent's reasoning loop. FitText treats retrieval as test-time evolution of hypotheses: the agent generates natural-language pseudo-tool descriptions (revisable beliefs about the tool it needs), refines them iteratively using retrieval feedback, and explores diverse alternatives through stochastic generation. Memetic Retrieval adds evolutionary selection pressure over candidate descriptions, guided by a tool memory that avoids redundant search. On ToolRet (three domains), FitText's reformulation strategies improve NDCG@5 by 2.7 to 10.6 points over static query retrieval across all base models; on StableToolBench (16,464 APIs) with GPT-5.4-mini, Memetic reaches an 84.3% pooled pass rate, a 26.7-point absolute gain over static query retrieval.

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

Facial Affect Analysis for Service-Oriented Systems: Advances, Challenges, and Future Visions

Authors:
Spyridon Georgiou↗Aggelos Psiris↗Thomas Lagkas↗Vasileios Argyriou↗Panagiotis Sarigiannidis↗Iraklis Varlamis↗Georgios Th. Papadopoulos↗

Facial Affect Analysis (FAA) is evolving from a stand-alone recognition task into a reusable perception capability for Service-Oriented Software Ecosystems (SoSE). This paper preserves the FAA methodological core while reframing recent advances through systems-engineering requirements for composable and dependable services. We review representative progress in static and dynamic expression analysis, action-unit and micro-expression modeling, and modern CNN, Transformer, graph, and hybrid architectures, then interpret these advances by their operational fit in edge, cloud, and hybrid service pipelines. The synthesis emphasizes SoSE concerns that determine deployability: service contracts for uncertainty-aware outputs, latency and availability envelopes, lifecycle monitoring and recalibration, governance-aware integration, and interoperability across independently evolving components. Our analysis shows that benchmark gains alone are insufficient for SoSE readiness; robustness under shift, intervention stability, fairness, privacy posture, and runtime guarantees are equally critical. We conclude with a roadmap for treating FAA as an operational service component with explicit interfaces, measurable quality attributes, and accountable lifecycle management.

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18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

(Non)-hyperuniformity of perturbed lattices

Authors:
David Dereudre↗Daniela Flimmel↗Martin Huesmann↗Thomas Lebl\'e↗

arXiv:2405.19881v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We ask whether a stationary lattice in dimension $d$ whose points are shifted by identically distributed but possibly dependent perturbations remains hyperuniform. When $d = 1$ or $2$, we show that it is the case when the perturbations have a finite $d$-moment, and that this condition is sharp. When $d \geq 3$, we construct arbitrarily small perturbations such that the resulting point process is not hyperuniform. As a side remark of independent interest, we exhibit hyperuniform processes with arbitrarily slow decay of their number variance.

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

Semantic Robustness Certification for Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Peiyu Yang↗Paul Montague↗Feng Liu↗Andrew C. Cullen↗Amardeep Kaur↗Christopher Leckie↗Sarah M. Erfani↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) are now widely used in downstream tasks. However, real-world applications often expose VLMs to distribution shifts induced by semantic variation (e.g., shape, size, and style). Robustness certification determines if a model's prediction changes when transformations are applied to its input. While most certification frameworks study geometric or pixel-level transformations over inputs, this work proposes a novel framework that enables certifying VLM robustness under semantic-level transformations. Leveraging the open-vocabulary capability of VLMs, we use text prompts as semantic proxies to construct transformations parameterized by an extent that controls the degree of semantic variation. By characterizing the VLM decision boundary in closed form, our framework quantitatively certifies extent intervals for which the predicted class remains unchanged under the semantic transformation. Our framework is the first to certify VLM robustness under semantic-level variations without requiring additional data for each variation, making it practical to apply. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show that our framework enables certifying robustness under diverse semantic variations across scenarios.

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

Online Reward-Punishment Learning from Fixed-Channel Perceptual Event Streams without Environment Rewards

Authors:
Zirong Li↗

arXiv:2606.18963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study online reward-punishment learning when the environment provides no scalar reward or evaluative label. At each step the agent receives only a fixed-channel perceptual packet, and quantities such as pain, energy, contact, damage, or cognitive error are treated as perceptual dimensions whose valence must be inferred from transition consequences. OHIRL separates four roles: M_psi learns next-packet prediction, D_omega models residual dynamics, C_eta is a fixed internal post-transition trajectory evaluator, and B_xi learns to use the resulting value evidence for later policy updates and action scoring. C_eta uses a recovery-positive and persistence/growth-negative residual-regulation orientation; a coefficient-origin audit shows that equal-unit, raw-equal, and random monotone variants preserve more than 92% of the released top-action rankings, while sign inversion preserves 0%. The reward-free protocol exposes observation transitions while withholding environment rewards, delayed external evaluators, success labels, and action-goodness labels. A conditional error decomposition separates B_xi evidence-estimation error from residual policy-optimization error. In a 2x2-XOR packet task, medicine and chili acquire opposite value under visual XOR contexts, and the same pain or spice increase can be positive or negative depending on consequence structure; B_xi reaches 0.952 balanced reward-sign accuracy. In a full online-interleaved audit, M_psi reaches holdout R2=0.907, B_xi reaches 0.940 sign accuracy, and the policy reaches 0.979 optimal-action accuracy, while immediate packet scores, prediction-error rewards, shuffled targets, zero reward, and error-reduction controls collapse. Hidden-reward CartPole and Taxi controls, public-context no-leakage audits, and module-role ablations further test information boundaries and component necessity.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

LLMZero: Discovering Adaptive Training Strategies for RL Post-Training via LLM Agents

Authors:
Haoyang Fang↗Wei Zhu↗Boran Han↗Alex Zhang↗Zhenyu Pan↗Shuo Yang↗Shuai Zhang↗Jiading Gai↗Peng Tang↗Cuixiong Hu↗Xuan Zhu↗Huzefa Rangwala↗…

RL post-training strategies are dataset-dependent and reveal a recurring empirical pattern: capacity parameters accumulate monotonically across stages, while regularization parameters predominantly oscillate in response to shifting training dynamics. This distinction matters because fixed schedules commit all parameters to fixed trajectories and therefore cannot express the non-stationary exploration-exploitation tradeoffs that regularization must track; the principle provides actionable design rules for multi-stage training. We discover this through LLMZero, a system where LLM agents search over training trajectories via tree search, diagnosing pathologies at each checkpoint and proposing coordinated multi-parameter transitions. Across 4 diverse GRPO tasks, LLMZero discovers strategies that improve over the base model by 9% to 140% relative and over grid search by 6% to 15% relative, consistently outperforming random search and the skill-based agent. The structural principle transfers across tasks, providing an explanation for why discovered strategies take qualitatively different forms yet share similar parameter dynamics.

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

Precision Is Not Faithfulness: Coverage-Aware Evaluation of Grounded Generation with a Complete Oracle

Authors:
Juan S. Santillana↗

Reference-free faithfulness metrics verify each atomic claim a model makes against ground truth, and are increasingly used to evaluate grounded generation. We show they share a blind spot: they measure only precision – are the stated claims supported? – and therefore reward abstention, since a model can score near-perfect faithfulness by saying almost nothing. We make this measurable using Formula 1 telemetry, a domain where strategic ground truth is derived deterministically and, crucially, completely: for each decision we know the full set of facts that mattered. This completeness – absent in open-domain faithfulness benchmarks – lets us measure recall (coverage of the relevant facts) exactly, alongside precision. On a multilingual (EN/ES/PT) benchmark of 7,253 decision instances spanning 157 races, the most precise frontier model covers under half of the relevant facts and ranks last by F1, so requiring coverage reorders the systems; the same effect reappears in a second complete-oracle domain (NOAA weather forecasts). Fine-tuning small models (1B-7B) on the complete oracle closes the precision-recall gap entirely (F1 ~0.98), beating every zero-shot frontier system regardless of scale. We pair faithfulness with coverage into a single score, validate the metric (controlled perturbation; agreement across a model-free regex extractor and a cross-family LLM extractor, system-level Spearman 1.0), and give a verifier-guided generation method that improves precision and recall without references. We release the benchmark, structured annotations, metric, baselines, and an interactive demo.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Blended Chart Surfaces: A Seamless Explicit Representation for Smooth Surface Fitting

Authors:
Romy Williamson↗Niloy Mitra↗

A surface representation suitable for geometry processing should be compact and explicit, provide global smoothness guarantees, support a wide range of surface topologies, and offer reliable access to differential quantities such as normals and surface energies, while remaining compatible with modern differentiable optimization. Existing neural representations typically sacrifice one or more of these properties: implicit fields typically require iso-surfacing for downstream use, while explicit neural maps are constrained by canonical-domain parametrizations or exhibit seam artifacts between local charts. We introduce Blended Chart Surfaces, a compact, network-free, explicit representation that is smooth by construction and anchored to user-provided topology. Given a coarse proxy mesh encoding the intended surface topology and approximate geometry, Blended Chart Surfaces jointly optimize for a polynomial map at each proxy vertex using an off-the-shelf optimizer to fit to an implicit target shape, avoiding the need for an input parametrization. Neighboring maps are fused using a smooth 'one-ring coordinate' blending scheme, decoupling topology and coarse geometry (carried by the proxy) from geometric details (carried by the local patches). The surface is globally smooth, fully differentiable, and enables stable evaluation of derivatives, making differential quantities and surface energies directly accessible. Additionally, our construction is equivariant to rigid motions and scaling of the proxy mesh. We evaluate Blended Chart Surfaces on various topologies and geometric complexity, and compare against explicit alternatives including interpolating-function baselines and mesh-displacement MLPs. Across these, Blended Chart Surfaces achieve a favorable trade-off among compactness, simplicity, access to differential quantities, and expressivity while remaining smooth across patch boundaries.

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