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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Visualizing "We the People": Bridging the Perception Gap through Pluralistic Data Storytelling

arXiv:2606.24635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional visual data storytelling relies on binary graphics that depict two simplified groups in conflict. This can increase political polarization by oversimplifying intra-group disagreements and erasing ambiguity and shared ideas or values. This can inadvertently foster "us versus them" thinking. Intentional, pluralistic design choices for AI-enabled digital platforms can produce visualizations that emphasize nuance, opinion distribution, and intergroup commonalities. To demonstrate this potential, we examine deliberative technologies that map high-dimensional opinion spaces and highlight areas of both consensus and dissensus. The paper highlights the We the People deliberation conducted by Jigsaw and the Napolitan Institute in September 2025, which engaged over 2,400 Americans across all 435 congressional districts in an AI-supported, asynchronous dialogue regarding freedom and equality. By utilizing AI to synthesize long-form, text-based participant inputs into interactive "opinion landscapes," the initiative provided an alternative format for pluralistic data storytelling that humanized diverse viewpoints and revealed hidden areas of substantial broad consensus. The paper concludes that shifting from divisive, contrast-heavy visual frameworks to distribution-focused, interactive models represents a highly scalable, low-cost intervention capable of bridging perceptual gaps and cultivating a more resilient, collaborative democratic culture.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Drug-Prot: A query system for statistical inference of drug effects and interactions in dynamic proteomic networks

Understanding drug effects and drug-drug interactions is essential for developing combination therapies. We present Drug-Prot, a computational framework that leverages large-scale perturbation proteomics to quantify causal drug effects, drug-drug interactions, and dynamic protein relationships. Using data from 63 single drugs and 59 drug combinations applied to 18 breast cancer cell lines at 6, 24, and 48 hours, Drug-Prot estimates drug effects on protein expression and reconstructs directed temporal protein dependency networks. The publicly available software enables targeted analyses of user-defined protein sets, substantially reducing the multiple-testing burden. Through an interactive web application, users obtain corrected p-values for single-drug and combination effects, directed temporal dependency networks, and downloadable results without requiring access to the underlying proteomic dataset. As a use case, we apply invariance-regularized Random Forests to triple-negative breast cancer cell lines to identify proteins associated with drug response. Querying these proteins in Drug-Prot reveals drug-specific and interaction effects at the protein-network level, illustrating how the framework links candidate causal protein features to actionable drug combinations.

03.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-12

Social contact patterns in the United Kingdom following the COVID-19 pandemic: The Reconnect cross-sectional survey

by Lucy Goodfellow, Billy J. Quilty, Kevin van Zandvoort, W. John Edmunds Background Close-contact and respiratory infectious diseases are spread through social interactions. Measuring these interactions has transformed our ability to understand transmission and control these infections. Social contact patterns were disrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic and have been affected by wider demographic, cultural, and workplace changes since then. Methods and findings To estimate post-pandemic social contact patterns in the United Kingdom, we conducted a cross-sectional social contact survey from November 2024 to March 2025 on a nationally representative sample of participants. Interactions were captured by age, gender, and across socioeconomic status (SES) and ethnic groups. We calculated the mean number of daily contacts and contact matrices, stratified by variables of interest, using a negative binomial regression model weighted by age, gender, ethnic group, and weekday/weekend. 13,238 participants were recruited, 3,019 of whom were aged under 18 years old; survey response rates were 36% and 27% for adults and children, respectively. The mean number of daily contacts was 9.1 (95% confidence interval (CI): 8.7, 9.5); this figure was 13.8 (95% CI: 12.8, 14.9) for children, and 7.8 (95% CI: 7.4, 8.2) for adults. Higher numbers of contacts were positively associated with employment, household income, and educational qualifications held. Contact matrices showed high levels of age-assortativity, as well as inter-generational contacts in the home. Contacts were assortative between ethnic groups and SES in all settings; this effect was strongest between ethnic groups in the home, and between SES in the workplace. We constructed socially-stratified next-generation matrices for a novel respiratory pathogen, projecting that the majority White ethnic group would account for the largest share of new infections (76.7% (95% CI: 75.5, 77.9) of cases), but that per-capita infection risk would disproportionately affect minority ethnic groups, with the risk for the Black population being 2.27 (95% CI: 2.06, 2.51) times that of the White population. This study may be limited by the inherent recall biases and reporting fatigue involved with self-reporting contacts. Conclusions This study provides crucial data to inform post-pandemic mathematical models of infectious disease transmission, and allows ethnicity and SES to be incorporated in such models.

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

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

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.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Higher-order spectral perturbation expansions II: Kernel matrices and manifold learning

arXiv:2606.16373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study spectral concentration bounds for kernel matrices as approximation of the corresponding kernel integral operator. Results are established under weak assumptions on the data setting and the reproducing kernel relying only on a Mercer condition and a local Weyl law. This allows us to deal with key features of kernel matrices, such as large multiplicities, large effective dimension, and heavy-tailed distributions. Our results apply to infinite dimensional principal component analysis, manifold learning, and Bayesian nonparametric statistics. We illustrate this via two prototypical examples: The heat kernel on the sphere and a wavelet prior from Bayesian nonparametrics.

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

LoSoNA: A Benchmark for Local Social Norm Adaptation in Group Conversations

Online group chats are social spaces with local conversational norms that are rarely stated explicitly. The ability and willingness of LLM-based agents to recognize and adapt to these norms remains mostly unexplored. We introduce LoSoNA, a benchmark for local social norm adaptation in multi-party chat. Each scenario gives a subject model a curated group-chat transcript in which non-subject participants demonstrate a hidden local norm, followed by a final elicitor turn that forces a response revealing whether the subject has inferred that norm. We evaluate eight frontier and open-weight models under four prompting conditions that vary how explicitly the model is told to treat the prior conversation as evidence for how it should answer. Naive prompting remains limited for most models; explicit norm-aware prompting helps unevenly, with Gemini 3.1 Pro reaching $84.2\%$ and Claude Fable 5 reaching $81.6\%$, while several other models show small gains or regressions. LoSoNA contributes to recent calls for evaluating LLM social capabilities by testing whether models can infer local conversational norms from precedent and use them in a one-turn group-chat response.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Diurnal variation in brain-derived tau and five other blood-based biomarkers for dementia and their association with cognitive performance

Blood-based biomarkers of dementia are a promising scalable tool for early diagnosis, tracking disease progression, and evaluating therapeutic efficacy. Utility of these biomarkers will not only be dependent on the reliability of their association with pathology but also contingent on their ability to track cognitive status. Previously, we demonstrated diurnal variation in several biomarkers (amyloid beta (A{beta}) 42 and 40, 42/40 ratio, glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), neurofilament light (NfL), and phosphorylated-Tau 217 (p-Tau217)) which has implications for their reliability. Here, we extend these observations to a larger cohort, include brain-derived tau (BD-Tau), which is assumed to be produced exclusively in the brain, and report endocrine measures of circadian rhythmicity. We not only assessed whether these biomarkers vary with time of day, but also whether they associate with daytime function and whether these associations vary with cognitive domain and number of repeated assessments. Data collected in 20 PLWA (72.4{+/-}5.9 years, mean{+/-}SD) and 19 controls (68.9{+/-}9.8 years) were analysed. Participants completed 14 days of home monitoring and one laboratory assessment of sleep and daytime function: mood, daytime sleepiness, reaction time, immediate and delayed memory recall, everyday memory errors. During the 27-hour residential laboratory session, 3-hourly blood samples were collected and analysed for the six blood-based biomarkers of dementia as well as melatonin and cortisol. Rhythmicity of melatonin and cortisol did not differ between groups. P-Tau217 and GFAP (p

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

When Lower Privileges Suffice: Investigating Over-Privileged Tool Selection in LLM Agents

As LLM agents increasingly select tools autonomously, their choices among tools with different privileges become safety-relevant. However, prior tool-selection studies focus on safety-agnostic metadata preferences, leaving privilege-sensitive choices underexplored. To address this gap, we study over-privileged tool selection, in which an agent selects or escalates to a higher-privilege tool despite a sufficient lower-privilege alternative. We introduce ToolPrivBench to evaluate whether agents choose higher-privilege tools despite sufficient lower-privilege alternatives, measuring both initial selection and escalation after transient tool failures. Across eight domains and five recurring risk patterns, we find that over-privileged tool selection is common among mainstream LLM agents and is further amplified by transient failures. We further find that general safety alignment does not reliably transfer to least-privilege tool choice, while prompt-level controls provide only limited mitigation under transient failures. We therefore introduce a privilege-aware post-training defense that teaches agents to prefer sufficient lower-privilege tools and escalate only when necessary. Our mitigation experiments show that this defense substantially reduces unnecessary high-privilege tool use while preserving general capabilities.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Bridging Single Distortion Artifacts and Mmultifactorial Clinical Quality: Few-shot Biparametric MRI Quality Assessment via Distortion-trained Prototypical Networks

Clinical prostate multi-parametric MRI relies heavily on high-quality diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), yet reading DWI is frequently compromised by geometric distortion, often caused by rectal air. Assessing quality via the PI-QUAL scoring system is an emerging clinical standard, but it is subjective, time-consuming and suffers from a class imbalance where low-quality cases are diverse and relatively scarce. Using the PRIME clinical trial as an example, there are $6\%$ images with PI-QUAL scores lower than 4, $87\%$ of DWI issues are due to distortion. Many of the other clinical quality issues are under-represented. To address this common dual-scarcity of annotated clinical data, we propose a few-shot biparametric prototypical network for automated image quality assessment (IQA). Our framework utilizes a dual-branch 3D ResNet to fuse T2-weighted and DWI features, providing anatomical context to distinguish true morphology from distortion. To handle real-world heterogeneity, we introduce feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) and a gradient reversal layer (GRL) to align feature distributions conditioned on varying b-values while suppressing acquisition-related biases. We demonstrate that a model meta-trained solely on comparatively objective, readily obtainable distortion labels can effectively adapt to predicting complex, multi-factorial clinical quality scores such as PI-QUAL using only five representative samples. Experimental results on two datasets show that our method significantly outperforms few-shot learning baselines for this challenging IQA task, offering a practically feasible and data-efficient solution for standardizing prostate MRI quality control in clinical workflows.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Can Factual Opinions Be Edited (Manipulated) in Large Language Models?

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into various domains, making knowledge editing techniques crucial yet potentially hazardous. Current editing methods primarily target atomic facts, overlooking the significant risks associated with manipulating factual opinions, e.g., documented stances of public figures on societal issues. Such manipulation could reshape public images, influence elections, and alter societal views. To systematically assess this threat, we introduce the Factual Opinion Editing with Evidence (FOE) benchmark, which encompasses 261 public figures, 19 issue categories, and 2,178 complete opinion records. Our evaluations demonstrate that current editing techniques struggle significantly with factual opinions, often achieving only superficial changes while failing to preserve consistency between the edited opinion and the supporting evidence generated by the model. To address this limitation, we further propose a simple yet effective Self-Generated Evidence-Aligned method that achieves opinion-evidence alignment without relying on explicit instructions. Together, our benchmark and method provide a foundation for understanding the emerging security implications of factual opinion editing in LLMs.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum thermodynamics of the Caldeira-Leggett model with non-equilibrium Gaussian reservoirs

arXiv:2405.00215v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a non-equilibrium version of the Caldeira-Leggett model in which a quantum particle is strongly coupled to a set of engineered reservoirs. The reservoirs are composed by collections of squeezed and displaced thermal modes, in contrast to the standard case in which the modes are assumed to be at equilibrium. The model proves to be very versatile. Strongly displaced/squeezed reservoirs can be used to generate an effective time dependence in the system Hamiltonian and can be identified as sources of pure work. In the case of squeezing, the time dependence is stochastic and breaks the fluctuation-dissipation relation, this can be reconciled with the second law of thermodynamics by correctly accounting for the energy used to generate the initial non-equilibrium conditions. To go beyond the average description and compute the full heat statistics, we treat squeezing and displacement as generalized Hamiltonians on a modified Keldysh contour. As an application of this technique, we show the quantum-classical correspondence between the heat statistics in the non-equilibrium Caldeira-Leggett model and the statistics of a classical Langevin particle under the action of squeezed and displaced colored noises. Finally, we discuss thermodynamic symmetries of the heat generating function, proving a fluctuation theorem for the energy balance and showing that the conservation of energy at the trajectory level emerges in the classical limit.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

When to Skip Syndrome Extraction in Surface-GKP Codes

arXiv:2606.24469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum error correction requires repeated syndrome extraction to address errors induced by the syndrome-extraction circuit itself. However, repeated syndrome extraction incurs significant overhead in terms of gate count and ancilla consumption (e.g., Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) states). Moreover, noisy syndrome extraction can itself inject additional errors into the data qubits. To address these issues, we propose a concrete adaptive skipping scheme for the surface-GKP code, a representative GKP-concatenated architecture, that uses analog information naturally generated during inner GKP correction. At each round, the scheme selects one of four actions: measuring both Z-type and X-type surface-code stabilizers, measuring only one type, or skipping both types and reusing previous syndromes. The decision is based on a reliability comparison between reusing the previous syndrome value and performing a new noisy syndrome extraction. Using circuit-level simulations, we show that the adaptive skipping scheme can reduce the number of surface-code stabilizer measurements while maintaining logical error rates comparable to or lower than those of the full-measurement baseline. The improvement is most pronounced when gate and measurement noise are larger than idle noise, so that avoiding unnecessary syndrome extraction reduces the noise injected into the code. These results indicate that analog information from inner GKP correction can be used not only to improve decoding but also to reduce the measurement overhead of outer-code syndrome extraction.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Bidirectional Tutoring for Developmental Motor Learning in Robots: Co-Developed Interaction Dynamics Support Stable Learning

arXiv:2606.19728v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Infants are well known to develop their motor skills through dense interaction with caregivers. Although such social interaction is crucial for human development, motor-skill learning in robots is often treated as a unidirectional process in which robots passively receive demonstrations from tutors. This overlooks a key property of social interaction: it is inherently bidirectional, with tutor and learner dynamically adapting to each other. In such interactions, the robot's past experiences may function as prior constraints that shape the dynamics of their co-developed trajectories. We hypothesize that bidirectional tutoring allows such constraints to guide the formation of consistent behavioral patterns that preserve behavioral coherence and support generalization, whereas unidirectional interaction lacks such constraints and leads to broader, less consistent behavioral patterns. To examine this hypothesis, we conducted two experiments with a physical humanoid robot performing an object manipulation task: one involving human-robot interaction and another employing an AI tutor interacting with the real robot through an adaptive intervention mechanism designed to examine whether similar effects would emerge under more controlled conditions. We implement the developmental learning framework using a free-energy-principle-based neural network extended with generative replay, which supports stable sequence-by-sequence learning from single tutored episodes. Across both settings, bidirectional tutoring fostered consistent behaviors and stage-wise generalization, while the robot gradually required less tutor guidance. These results suggest that bidirectional tutoring, as an embodied and socially grounded approach, provides an effective scaffold for developmental motor learning in robots.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

T2D-Bench: Evidence-Gated Evaluation of LLM Outputs for Type 2 Diabetes Using a Multi-Layer Clinical-Lifestyle Knowledge Graph

arXiv:2606.24145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can produce clinically fluent recommendations for type 2 diabetes while failing to satisfy guideline constraints or explicitly justify lifestyle-related glycemic claims. We present T2D-Bench, a reproducible benchmark and evidence-gated evaluation framework for testing whether LLM outputs satisfy explicit, graph-checkable evidence requirements. T2D-Bench is built on a multi-layer clinical-lifestyle knowledge graph that combines a biomedical spine (UMLS, DrugBank, SIDER), computable ADA Standards of Care rules, and lifestyle knowledge connected through a mechanistic bridge to glycemic laboratory effects. Across 100 structured vignettes spanning diagnosis, medication safety, and adversarial lifestyle conflicts, baseline outputs failed benchmark-defined evidence-path checks in 35% of cases for GPT-4o-mini and 33% for GPT-4o. The evidence gate detects unsupported omissions and uses constrained revision to bring outputs into verifier-level compliance with benchmark-defined evidence requirements. These results show that computable evidence constraints can make unsupported clinical omissions explicit, measurable, and correctable in diabetes-focused LLM outputs.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Rapid FinFET Modelling Using an Autoencoder

arXiv:2606.24046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a machine learning framework that leverages an autoencoder (AE) for the efficient modeling of FinFET. We first calibrated a BSIM-CMG model to generate a dataset of current-voltage (ID-VG) characteristics. This data was used to train an autoencoder that compresses full I-V curves into a low-dimensional latent space, which intrinsically encodes key device physics. A key innovation is the explicit incorporation of parameter such as drain to source voltage (VDS) as an input feature, enhancing the model ability to capture bias dependent variation. The trained model successfully reconstructs full I-V curves and directly extracts critical device metrics including threshold voltage (VTH), subthreshold slope (SS), and peak transconductance (gm). This approach demonstrates that data driven compact models, built from actual characterization data, can achieve high accuracy with minimal training data, providing a powerful tool for rapid device characterization, modelling and circuit level simulation.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

NAVI-Orbital: First In-Orbit Demonstration of a Zero-Shot Vision-Language Model for Autonomous Earth Observation

arXiv:2606.18271v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Earth Observation data generation outpaces downlink bandwidth and human-in-the-loop processing, a widening gap has emerged between onboard collection and actionable ground intelligence. This paper presents NAVI-Orbital, a software system deployed on a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) spacecraft. On April 16, 2026, NAVI-Orbital achieved what is, to the authors' knowledge, the first in-orbit demonstration of a vision-language model performing autonomous multi-modal inference entirely onboard. NAVI-Orbital uses a local vision-language model (Gemma 3) to classify each captured scene, produce a text description of its content and the relationships between its features, and respond to operator follow-up via natural-language dialogue. The system is re-tasked through plain-English prompts in place of conventional command sequences, and is orchestrated by a graph-based state machine (LangGraph) coordinating dedicated agents for detection and dialogue. Results across ground benchmarking (88.16% accuracy on the 7,960-image curated AID benchmark), Flatsat validation, and live in-orbit captures of newly acquired, previously unseen Earth imagery (including uncorrected YAM-9 imagery, processed onboard with hardware-accelerated GPU inference and no fine-tuning for the flight instrument) demonstrate the feasibility of running foundation models on satellite-class edge computers to invert the conventional acquire-then-downlink-everything bandwidth profile through semantic compression of Earth observations in-orbit.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Vision-language models for chest radiography do not always need the image

Medical vision-language models report strong chest radiograph accuracy, and this is increasingly read as evidence that they use the image. That inference is unsafe: a model exploiting finding-name priors scores like one that reads the scan, and no standard benchmark separates them. We introduce a causal audit that intervenes on the image, occluding the relevant region, occluding an irrelevant one, and swapping in another patient's same-label scan, and combines three behavioral metrics to test whether a correct answer depends on the image. Across nine systems, a text-only model with no image access reaches within 5.7 accuracy points of the best multimodal one, and a 119-billion-parameter multimodal model is statistically indistinguishable from a 7-billion text-only baseline. The audit splits the cohort into three models that ignore the image, one that is unstable, and five that use it selectively, for a subset of findings; the categories hold across a second dataset, resolution, and prompt phrasing. Against board-certified radiologists, a text-only model is statistically indistinguishable from a radiologist's accuracy while grounding at zero, whereas the image-using models ground at radiologist-comparable rates. Reported confidence flags ungrounded answers only when a model uses the image. Grounding audits, not accuracy, should gate clinical deployment.

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

Coordinate-Queryable Neural Field Reconstruction for EEG Spatial Super-Resolution with Unseen-Electrode Generation

arXiv:2606.23707v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: EEG spatial super-resolution (EEGSR) in real deployments is challenged by random channel missingness, unstable electrode quality, and changing visible-channel patterns caused by bad contacts or device variability. Most existing EEGSR methods learn a fixed low-to-high channel mapping under pre-defined input-output layouts, which makes them brittle when missing channels vary at test time. In this paper, we reformulate EEGSR as learning a shared conditional scalp field from partially observed support channels. Specifically, a position-guided encoder summarizes the observed EEG channels and their coordinates into a latent condition, and a conditional implicit neural representation decoder reconstructs target EEG signals by querying this condition at desired electrode coordinates. During inference, the model directly reconstructs unseen electrode signals from the available EEG support and the queried coordinates. To strengthen the constraint of the encoded latent representation on the decoder and thereby construct a more stable scalp field consistent with the observed channels, we further introduce a fidelity-preserving channel corruption training strategy under mixed electrode states. Extensive experiments across multiple EEG datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for both random missing-channel reconstruction and strict unseen-electrode signal generation. Notably, under the strict held-out-electrode setting on AAD, our method reduces NMSE by 37.5\% and improves SNR by 2.12 dB over the strongest baseline, showing its ability to synthesize signals at electrode locations never exposed during training.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Asymptotic analysis of the finite predictor for fractional Gaussian noise

arXiv:2504.01562v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper proposes a new approach to the asymptotic analysis of the finite predictor for stationary sequences. Our method yields the exact asymptotics of both the relative prediction error and the partial correlation coefficients. The underlying assumptions are analytic in nature, making the approach applicable to processes with long-range dependence. The ARMA-type process driven by fractional Gaussian noise (fGn), which had previously remained elusive, is used as a case study.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AI systems out-persuade expert humans

arXiv:2606.16475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many societal decisions are settled by contests of persuasion. Conversational AI is a powerful new entrant in these contests, but whether it can out-persuade skilled and highly incentivized humans has remained unclear. Here, in a series of four preregistered experiments (n = 18,978 conversations from 6,923 people), we pitted AI systems against a range of human persuaders, including laypeople, winners of a separately preregistered four-round online persuasion tournament, professional canvassers, and world championship debaters. We found that AI systems were reliably more persuasive than expert humans, even when expert humans chose their issues, researched in advance, underwent hours of live, structured practice, and were incentivized with {\pounds}1,000 cash bonuses. In a follow-up study, AI's advantage persisted after experts received a coaching tool that let them practice against the AI that beat them, review their performance history, and see what AI would have said at key moments. We found converging evidence that AI's advantage stemmed from rapidly deploying larger quantities of information: after coaching, expert humans could tie an AI constrained to respond at human speeds and with human-length messages. In a final study, we show that AI's advantage extends to consequential real-world behavior: AI was nearly 3x more effective than professional canvassers from a UK fundraising firm at raising real-money donations to Save the Children. Together, these results establish that frontier AI systems out-persuade expert humans in conversation, with significant implications for political communication.

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

Evolutionary Bilevel Reward Shaping for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.16236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) often suffers from performance degradation when deployed in environments that differ from those encountered during training. Existing techniques such as domain randomization (DR) mitigate this, but require access to diverse training environments and full trajectory observability, assumptions that fail in privacy-preserving or restricted scenarios where only scalar performance metrics are available. We propose Generalization via Evolutionary Reward Shaping (GERS), a bilevel optimization approach to improve generalization on unseen test environments using only scalar feedback from validation environments. At the lower level, an RL agent guided via a reward function shaped by the upper level learns a policy on a limited set of training environments with accessible trajectory data; at the upper level, CMA-ES optimizes the reward shaping parameters to maximize the cumulative unshaped reward on separate validation environments for which trajectory access is unavailable. Results on continuous control tasks indicate that GERS outperforms the standard RL baseline on unseen test environments. GERS performance is comparable to DR, despite DR treating the combined set of training and validation environments of GERS as a single training set that requires trajectory access, whereas GERS cannot access validation trajectories. These results confirm that GERS effectively enhances generalization under restricted data access constraints.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Can Deep Neural Networks Improve Compression of Very Large Scientific Data?

arXiv:2606.14353v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Error-bounded lossy compression is a fundamental technique for managing the rapidly growing volumes of scientific data produced by modern simulations and observational instruments. Most state-of-the-art-compressors follow a prediction-residual paradigm, where compression effectiveness depends on the quality of the predictor: more accurate predictions generate smaller residuals that are easier to compress. This observation raises a question: can modern machine learning models serve as superior predictors for scientific data compression? Answering this question directly is challenging because developing compression-specific ML predictors requires substantial resources. Instead, we leverage the climate domain where highly accurate pretrained weather forecasting foundation models already exist, making them an ideal testbed. We present a framework that integrates spatial and temporal deep learning models into a conventional error-bounded compression pipeline. The framework supports auto-regressive forecasting models and avoids error accumulation. Using ERA5 climate data as a representative large-scale scientific dataset, we evaluate three distinct ML predictors: a VAEformer-based codec (CRA5), a graph neural network forecaster (GraphCast), and a vision-transformer forecaster (Aurora), against the state-of-the-art compressor SZ3.1 under identical quantization and entropy-coding backends. Our evaluation over approximately 1.7 TB of data reveals a surprising result: although ML predictors generate more accurate predictions and can improve reconstruction quality by up to 91% while achieving up to 9.6x higher compression ratios for highly predictable variables, they do not improve overall dataset-level compression ratio. We show that prediction accuracy alone is insufficient: the spatial structure of the resulting residuals plays a decisive role in entropy coding efficiency.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Utilising Artificial Intelligence to Identify Ventricular Tachycardia Ablation Targets in Sinus Rhythm

Background and Aims: Machine learning has shown potential in predicting ablation targets for ventricular tachycardia (VT) in an animal model. This study progresses to externally validating deep learning approaches for human data. Methods: The development and external validation dataset included 21 and 13 patients, respectively, with structural VT undergoing catheter ablation. In the development datasets, electrophysiological studies were conducted using the AdvisorTM HD grid (EnsiteTM X), while both CARTO and Ensite Precision were used in the validation dataset. In each patient, VT ablation targets were defined as mapping points within 8 mm of VT isthmuses. Three advanced machine learning models were trained using cardiac mapping data acquired in both omnipolar and unipolar configurations during sinus rhythm and ventricular pacing. Discrimination was evaluated using nested leave-one-out cross-validation at patient level. Results: Overall, graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which integrate intracardiac signal waveforms with three-dimensional electroanatomical geometries, achieved the highest performance, with optimal results obtained from unipolar electrograms acquired in sinus rhythm (median AUC 0.793, sensitivity 83.6%, specificity 69.0%). This may be partly explained by the inclusion of repolarization dynamics in unipolar electrograms and the higher point density of sinus rhythm maps. Comparable performance was observed in the external dataset. Conclusion: This study demonstrates that graph convolutional networks applied to sinus rhythm EGM waveforms collected during substrate mapping can localise critical components of VT re-entry circuits. This approach has potential to provide fast and accurate ablation guidance without the need to induce and map VT, improving safety and efficacy of VT catheter ablation.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Learning to Share: Selective Memory for Efficient Parallel Agentic Systems

arXiv:2602.05965v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic systems solve complex tasks by coordinating multiple agents that iteratively reason, invoke tools, and exchange intermediate results. To improve robustness and solution quality, recent approaches deploy multiple agent teams running in parallel to explore diverse reasoning trajectories. However, parallel execution comes at a significant computational cost: when different teams independently reason about similar sub-problems or execute analogous steps, they repeatedly perform substantial overlapping computation. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose Learning to Share (LTS), a learned shared-memory mechanism for parallel agentic frameworks that enables selective cross-team information reuse while controlling context growth. LTS introduces a global memory bank accessible to all teams and a lightweight controller that decides whether intermediate agent steps should be added to memory or not. The controller is trained using stepwise reinforcement learning with usage-aware credit assignment, allowing it to identify information that is globally useful across parallel executions. Experiments on the AssistantBench and GAIA benchmarks show that LTS significantly reduces overall runtime while matching or improving task performance compared to memory-free parallel baselines, demonstrating that learned memory admission is an effective strategy for improving the efficiency of parallel agentic systems. Project page: https://joefioresi718.github.io/LTS_webpage/