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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

GLARE: A Natural Language Interface for Querying Global Explanations

arXiv:2606.19735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While global explanations are crucial for understanding vision models across datasets, classes, and decision contexts, their complex and monolithic nature often hinders practical exploration. Because users typically seek targeted answers to specific questions rather than static artifacts, we present an LLM-based interactive interface that provides natural language access to global explanations for black-box image classifiers. The system's core LLM acts as a mediator, translating natural language questions into structured SQL queries over local explanation data. This enables flexible aggregation without exposing users to low-level representations. For each query, the interface outputs statistics-augmented natural language responses, supporting local explanations, and intent-aligned visualizations. We evaluate the system on intent interpretation, query mapping accuracy, generalization to novel queries and datasets, and robustness to linguistic errors. Our results demonstrate that LLM-mediated querying substantially improves the accessibility and usability of global explanations for human-centered XAI.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Who Pays the Price? Stakeholder-Centric Prompt Injection Benchmarking for Real-world Web Agents

arXiv:2606.13385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Web agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world environments, where they operate over untrusted web content and execute actions with direct consequences. This makes them vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks, in which seemingly benign content embeds adversarial instructions that manipulate agent behaviour. Existing security benchmarks adopt an attack-centric perspective, focusing on the technical feasibility of injections while overlooking the nuanced distribution of resulting harms. In practice, however, prompt-injection risk is victim-dependent: a single exploit can produce asymmetric consequences for different stakeholders, and the same attack pattern may exhibit substantially different effectiveness depending on whom it targets. To capture these properties, we introduce \sysname, a stakeholder-centric benchmark to systematically categorize and attribute harm in real-world web agent systems. It distinguishes between affected entities (e.g., user, seller, platform), decomposes the attacks into concrete objectives, and evaluates each case with complementary outcome- and process-level metrics. Our results reveal substantial and heterogeneous vulnerabilities: not a single attack objective is reliably resisted by current agents, and failures distribute across qualitatively distinct modes ranging from stealthy parasitism (attack succeeds without disrupting the user's delegated task) to misaligned disruption (task disrupted without attack success) and compounded failure (both adversarial objective and task integrity simultaneously violated). These patterns are missed by conventional evaluation, highlighting the need for stakeholder-aware assessment of LLM-based agents in real-world deployments. Benchmark is available at https://github.com/StakeBench/SBC.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AC-ODM: Actor–Critic Online Data Mixing for Sample-Efficient LLM Pretraining

arXiv:2505.23878v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Optimizing pretraining data composition is pivotal for LLM generalization. While dynamic mixing outperforms static strategies by capturing evolving training dynamics, current methods fail to reconcile computational efficiency with sample efficiency and structural flexibility for diverse pipelines.We introduce Actor–Critic Online Data Mixing (AC-ODM), which approaches data mixing from a reinforcement learning perspective with a parameterized policy that we theoretically prove to act as a dynamic linear surrogate maximizing the constructive interference of gradients. To enhance practical flexibility, AC-ODM supports two operational modes: (i) a proxy mode for fixed, pre-prepared corpora, where a policy learned on a small model is transferred to a larger target; and (ii) a non-proxy mode for direct end-to-end training from scratch without priors. Empirically, AC-ODM significantly outperforms prior methods in convergence speed and downstream accuracy across various architectures. On Pythia-1B, it reaches optimal validation perplexity using up to 66% fewer training steps than competitive baselines, delivering a 27.5% relative improvement in MMLU accuracy and a 2.23 x higher pass@1 on HumanEval, all while incurring a virtually negligible (0.4%) per-step wall-clock increase and only 2% additional memory overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/DANG-ai/AC-ODM.

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

Using Reinforcement Learning to Optimize the Global and Local Crossing Number

arXiv:2509.06108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graph drawing concerns the algorithmic visualization of graphs. A good drawing of a graph is easy to read and facilitates solving tasks on the graph. Several properties have been identified to occur in good drawings of graphs. Such properties include a low number of crossings, large angles between edges, short edges, and depicting symmetries. Many of these properties are explicitly measurable metrics. This brings us to the insight that graph drawing can be seen as a game. In this paper, we study a single-player optimization game in which the player iteratively moves vertices of a straight-line graph drawing to reduce edge crossings. This game arose naturally from the automatic track of the Graph Drawing Challenge, where solutions are obtained by repeatedly performing local vertex movements. We formalize this process as a game with full information and investigate whether reinforcement learning can discover effective strategies for playing it. Our reinforcement-learning agent observes the local geometric and structural context of a vertex and selects a movement direction with the goal of reducing either the global or the local crossing number, that is, the total number of crossings or the maximum number of crossings per edge. We compare the resulting strategies to existing methods and established crossing-minimization heuristics on standard benchmark graphs. While our approach does not out-compete state-of-the-art methods for minimizing the global crossing number, it is competitive and often superior for minimizing the local crossing number.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Associations Among Changes in Inflammatory Biomarkers, Pain Intensity, and Health-Related Quality of Life Following a 12-Week Aerobic Exercise Programme in Individuals with Non-Specific Chronic Low Back Pain

Abstract Background: Non-specific chronic low back pain (NSCLBP) is associated with persistent pain, reduced health-related quality of life (HRQoL), and low-grade systemic inflammation. This study examined associations among changes in inflammatory biomarkers, pain intensity, and HRQoL following a 12-week aerobic exercise programme. Methods: This secondary analysis used data from a randomized controlled trial involving 41 participants with NSCLBP (intervention, n = 21; control, n = 20). Participants received either supervised aerobic exercise plus health education or health education alone for 12 weeks. Change scores for tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-), interleukin-6 (IL-6), high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP), pain intensity, and HRQoL domains were analysed using correlation and multiple regression analyses. Results: Improvements in IL-6 (r = 0.434, p = 0.005) and hs-CRP (r = 0.444, p = 0.004) were significantly associated with improvements in pain intensity. No significant associations were observed between biomarker changes and HRQoL domains. Treatment allocation was the strongest independent predictor of improvement in physical HRQoL ({beta} = 0.492, p = 0.017) and pain intensity ({beta} = -0.512, p = 0.006). Conclusions: Improvements in IL-6 and hs-CRP were associated with reductions in pain intensity but not with improvements in HRQoL. Treatment allocation was the strongest predictor of clinical improvement, suggesting that mechanisms beyond systemic inflammation may contribute to the benefits of aerobic exercise in NSCLBP. Keywords: non-specific chronic low back pain; aerobic exercise; inflammation; interleukin-6; high-sensitivity C-reactive protein; pain intensity; health-related quality of life.

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

Structuring The Future: Diffusion LLM Speculative Decoding via Calibrated Draft Graphs

Diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful alternative to autoregressive LLMs (AR-LLMs) with the potential to operate at significantly higher token-generation rates. To unlock this potential, we present Spiffy, a speculative decoding algorithm to accelerate dLLM inference while provably preserving the model's output distribution. This work addresses the unique challenges involved in applying ideas from speculative decoding of AR-LLMs to dLLMs. Spiffy performs auto-speculation to eliminate the overheads of an independent draft model, structuring draft states in the form of a novel directed draft graph to take advantage of the bidirectional, blockwise nature of dLLM generation. These draft graphs are calibrated offline to maximize acceptance rates and are dynamically pruned during inference for improved computational efficiency. We present a detailed formulation of Spiffy and demonstrate its ability to accelerate LLaDA, Dream, and SDAR models in combination with KV caching and threshold-based dynamic unmasking leading to up to $8.6\times$ reduction in model inferences and $6.3\times$ acceleration in token rate.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Toward fault-tolerant quantum computation exploiting quantum spatial distribution and gauge symmetry

Authors:

arXiv:2604.25747v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We explore how the integrated use of quantum spatial distribution (QSD), or more specifically, a superposition of both spin and position states of particles, and gauge symmetry (GS) within Poulin's stabilizer formalism enhances quantum error correction. The study employs $3+2$ particles on nested squares proposed in the companion paper (arXiv:2504.07941), where three of them encode Shor's nine-qubit code and the remaining two detect errors in this code through their spin state measurements. The first result is that the GS offers resilience against three types of noise acting on a particle: arbitrary decoherence of its spin or position state, and dephasing of both states, which completely or partly destroys its QSD. To show that, we formulate a noise model unifying the above noise sources and prove the correctability of this unified model under our error-correcting scheme. The second result is that the QSD provides architectural flexibility, allowing us to stack the error-correcting systems both vertically and horizontally. Indeed, we present implementations of the error detection (stabilizer measurement), logical Hadamard and Toffoli gates, and a quantum adder with the required interactions only between nearest-neighbor and next-nearest-neighbor particles. Here, our treatment of the dynamics of particles, each having spin and position degrees of freedom, under nontrivial noise and gate operations indicates that the stabilizer formalism is a powerful tool for describing quantum many-body dynamics.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Validity and Limitations of the Empatica E4 Wristband for Autonomic and Thermoregulatory Sleep Monitoring Against Concurrent Polysomnography: A Wearanize+ Dataset Study

The Empatica E4 wristband provides continuous multi-modal physiological monitoring including blood volume pulse (BVP), electrodermal activity (EDA) and skin temperature (TEMP) but its validity for sleep-stage-specific autonomic and thermoregulatory monitoring has not been systematically evaluated against concurrent polysomnography (PSG). Using the Wearanize+ dataset which provides synchronised PSG, Empatica E4, and Zmax EEG recordings from 100 home-recorded participants; a systematic validation of Empatica E4 physiological signals against PSG ground truth across five sleep stages was conducted. Of 100 participants, 92 had Empatica data; 69 met Zmax EEG signal quality criteria and formed the analysis sample. Heart rate (HR) from the pre-computed Empatica HR channel showed valid stage-specific patterns (Wake: 70.9 bpm, N3: 61.2 bpm) and moderate inter-device MeanNN correspondence with PSG ECG (Spearman r=0.35-0.42 across stages). Skin temperature showed the expected thermoregulatory pattern (Wake: 33.92C, N3: 35.48C) and is recommended for downstream analyses. Tonic EDA showed an inverted stage pattern attributable to wrist sweat accumulation during deep sleep, representing a known confound for wrist-worn EDA during sleep. Phasic EDA showed plausible patterns and may be used with caution. These findings establish a validated feature set for Empatica E4 sleep research and directly inform multimodal psychiatric biomarker studies using the Wearanize+ dataset.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Interaction geometry and ground-state properties of sparse quantum lattice models

arXiv:2606.20387v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate how interaction geometry shapes the low-energy phases of sparse tunable long-range quantum models. We focus on a class of graphs whose degree grows logarithmically with system size, and show how symmetry and frustration in graph connectivity can drive, suppress, and reshape ground-state phase transitions. The central examples are power-of-$p$ graphs, where even and odd values of $p$ exhibit qualitatively distinct behaviour: even-$p$ graphs inherit the rich phase structure of the power-of-two model, while odd-$p$ graphs are governed by geometric frustration. Fibonacci graphs provide a contrasting case, lacking the discrete self-similarity of the power-of-$p$ family but exhibiting a direct geometric mapping between the short- and long-range limits. Across our models, we find that phase structure and criticality are governed by the same effective-geometry principle, unifying our framework for experimentally motivated long-range quantum systems.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

FEMOT: Multi-Object Tracking using Frame and Event Cameras

Conventional RGB cameras have been widely used in multi-object tracking due to their ability to capture rich appearance and semantic information. However, their performance is often degraded under complex real-world challenges, such as motion blur, low illumination, and overexposure. Bio-inspired event cameras offer high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, providing complementary cues under extreme scenarios. Nevertheless, RGB-event multi-object tracking remains underexplored due to the lack of large-scale and well-annotated datasets. To address this issue, we propose FEMOT, a large-scale RGB-event multi-object tracking dataset that covers diverse real-world scenarios and 14 challenging attributes. With both RGB and event data as well as high-quality annotations, FEMOT provides a reliable platform for systematically evaluating RGB-event multi-object tracking methods. Based on FEMOT, we retrain and evaluate over ten strong trackers, thereby establishing a comprehensive benchmark for future research. Furthermore, we propose FEMOTR, a multimodal tracking framework that decouples RGB and event features and fuses them in the frequency domain, thereby effectively exploiting their complementary characteristics for robust object localization and identity association. Extensive experiments on FEMOT and DSEC-MOT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code and benchmark dataset have been released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/FEMOT.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Re-feeding Is Not Replaying: Measuring Replay Noise in Counterfactual Token-Credit Estimation

Authors:

Per-token counterfactual credit estimation asks which token in a language-model rollout caused the final answer to be right or wrong: cut the transcript at a pivot, substitute an alternative token, replay continuations, and compare outcomes. Published methods re-feed the transcript prefix as a fresh prompt, assuming this reproduces the state the model passed through during generation. We measure what that assumption costs on a stock inference engine, with a three-pass design: continuations resumed from the verified decode-time KV state, an identical second exact pass (a replica noise floor), and a re-feed pass. Across six configurations and three models (including a GRPO-trained checkpoint), at low-margin decision tokens, re-feeding changes the credit estimate at rates 14-28 percentage points above the replica floor (7-21pp under a treatment-independent conditioning; problem-clustered t = 2.9-6.4). Most changes are zero-boundary crossings of the quantized estimator rather than polarity reversals, and the perturbation is consistent with mean-zero, so averaged quantities are largely safe; but selection is not: a critical-token set chosen by thresholding $|\hat{A}_t|$ under re-feed overlaps the exact-resume selection at Jaccard 0.34-0.90, versus a 0.63-0.96 replica ceiling. A causal confirmation closes the loop: under vLLM's batch-invariant kernels all three passes are identical on every measured channel, with both disagreement rates exactly zero. Replica passes themselves disagree on 9-23% of eligible estimates: single-sample credit measurements at decision tokens are unreliable under any replay. Settings were fixed in advance; exact-pass cache hits in the second campaign are instrumented (100% hit rate, 3,434 pivots); total compute was under 10 USD. We recommend that counterfactual credit studies resume decoder state or use batch-invariant kernels, and report a replica floor.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Sub-Poissonian Statistics and Quantum Non-Gaussianity from High-Harmonic Generation

arXiv:2602.10882v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum technologies are powered by platforms to generate complex non-classical states of matter or light to realize applications. We investigate the non-classical properties of high-harmonic generation in semiconductors, an emerging photonic platform. Measuring the click statistics of three double-digit orders, we evaluate witness operators to certify the non-classicality of the generated states. We show that higher-order harmonics driven by a coherent laser are squeezed and entangled. The properties of the emission are well retrieved with an entangled Gaussian state model, obtained by numerical state optimization to multiple observables. Additionally, we perform inter-order heralded measurements to engineer the quantum state of the emission. The heralded states have distinct properties, showing sub-Poissonian photon statistics. Further, we witness the generation of a quantum non-Gaussian state, a resource highly relevant for quantum information. With this, we establish high-harmonic generation as a platform for generating quantum optical resources.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

When Poison Fails After Retrieval: Revisiting Corpus Poisoning under Chunking and Reranking Pipelines

arXiv:2606.11265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to corpus poisoning attacks that manipulate downstream model outputs through malicious knowledge injection. Existing studies mainly evaluate poisoning under simplified retrieval settings, overlooking practical RAG pipelines involving document chunking, dense retrieval, reranking, and grounded generation. In this paper, we revisit corpus poisoning under realistic multi-stage retrieval pipelines and show that many existing attacks substantially degrade after reranking despite achieving high retrieval-stage relevance. We identify retrieval granularity mismatch as a key reason for this failure: document-level adversarial signals are often fragmented during chunking, while rerankers favor locally coherent and answer-bearing passages rather than globally optimized semantic similarity. Based on this observation, we propose Chunk-aware and Rerank-Consistent Poisoning (CRCP), a poisoning framework that jointly optimizes retrieval relevance, reranker consistency, and chunk-boundary robustness. CRCP explicitly models chunking transformations during optimization to generate locally self-contained adversarial passages that remain effective under varying chunking configurations. Experiments on standard RAG benchmarks with multiple retrievers and rerankers show that existing poisoning methods are highly sensitive to chunk size and reranking strategies, whereas CRCP achieves substantially higher attack success rates and stronger robustness across realistic retrieval pipelines. Our findings highlight an important realism gap in current RAG security evaluation and suggest that poisoning in modern RAG systems should be studied as a multi-stage retrieval consistency problem rather than a retrieval-only problem.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Martingale Solutions to a Stochastic Keller-Segel System with nonlocal Source and Super-linear Noise

arXiv:2606.11774v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Global nonnegative martingale solutions are shown to exist for a stochastic Keller-Segel system with a nonlocal Fisher-KPP source and super-linear multiplicative noise. The result is obtained for nonnegative initial data with no smallness assumption, provided that the nonlocal source term is dominant. The main difficulty stems from the absence of a coercive structure and the super-linear nature of the noise. An additional cut-off with finite L^2 norm in the classical Galerkin method is added to establish a well-posed approximation problem. Moreover, due to the nonlocal Fisher-KPP structure, it is necessary to prove the positivity of the approximating solution in order to obtain uniform estimates. In the compactness arguments, the usual tightness argument in the framework of Hilbert spaces cannot be directly applied to the uniform estimates obtained in this paper. As a result, we develop a more general version of the compactness argument and tightness criterion, presented in the appendix, which will be applied throughout the paper. This allows for the global existence of nonnegative martingale solutions to be derived from Jakubowski's version of the Skorokhod Theorem, along with a thorough discussion of the convergence properties.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

ADORE: Iterative Query Expansion with Retrieval-Grounded Relevance Feedback

LLM-based query expansion improves retrieval by enriching the original query with additional context. Yet most methods remain generation-driven, producing plausible pseudo-documents or expansions without checking how the target corpus responds. This can introduce retrieval drift, amplify misleading vocabulary, or miss terms that distinguish relevant from non-relevant documents. We argue that effective expansion requires retrieval-grounded feedback, not just single-pass generation or unverified iteration. We introduce ADORE (ADapt, Observe, Relevance Evaluate), an iterative framework that turns retrieval outcomes into feedback for the next expansion. At each round, an LLM generates pseudo-passages, a retriever exposes the corpus response, and a relevance assessor evaluates retrieved documents against the original query. These judgments identify what to reinforce, what remains undercovered, and what to suppress. Across TREC Deep Learning, BEIR, and BRIGHT, ADORE consistently outperforms strong query expansion baselines with notable improvements across nearly all evaluation settings, improving average nDCG@10 by 24.5% over BM25 and 3.6% over the strongest prior query expansion method on BEIR, and by 122.9% over BM25 and 9.2% over the best query expansion baseline on BRIGHT. Our code and data are publicly available.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Last-Iterate Convergence of Optimistic Multiplicative Weight Update

arXiv:2606.11773v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimistic Gradient Descent Ascent (OGDA) and Optimistic Multiplicative-Weights Update (OMWU) are two very popular algorithms to solve convex/concave saddle-point problems, where OMWU is the non-Euclidean, entropic version of OGDA. It is known since the '80s that the last iterate of OGDA asymptotically converges to a saddle point in smooth problems. On the other hand, it is unknown if OMWU has the same property. In this paper, I show that OMWU converges asymptotically for smooth convex-concave saddle-point problems, with a small enough constant learning rate. The result does not require uniqueness, strict complementarity, an error bound, or initialization near a solution. The main new ingredient is a boundary argument showing that every cluster point satisfies the inactive-coordinate KKT inequalities. The boundary argument was discovered with assistance from ChatGPT and is documented in the appendix.

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

SLUM-i: Semi-supervised Learning for Urban Mapping of Informal Settlements and Data Quality Benchmarking

Rapid urban expansion has fueled the growth of informal settlements in major cities of low- and middle-income countries, with Lahore and Karachi in Pakistan and Mumbai in India serving as prominent examples. However, large-scale mapping of these settlements is severely constrained not only by the scarcity of annotations but by inherent data quality challenges, specifically high spectral ambiguity between formal and informal structures and significant annotation noise. We address this by introducing a benchmark dataset for Lahore, constructed from scratch, along with companion datasets for Karachi and Mumbai, which were derived from verified administrative boundaries, totaling approximately 900 $km^2$ of urban area. This collection is supplemented by four cities from prior literature across Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, with comprehensive data quality assessments provided for each city. We also propose a semi-supervised segmentation framework designed to mitigate the class imbalance and distribution mismatch inherent in standard semi-supervised learning pipelines. Our method integrates a Class-Aware Adaptive Thresholding mechanism that dynamically adjusts confidence thresholds to prevent minority class suppression, and a DINOv2-based unlabeled pool filter that removes out-of-distribution tiles prior to training to reduce covariate shift. Extensive experiments across seven cities spanning three continents, repeated over five random seeds, demonstrate gains of up to +5.9 pp mIoU over state-of-the-art semi-supervised baselines, with both components being architecture-agnostic and adding no inference overhead.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

ToolSense: A Diagnostic Framework for Auditing Parametric Tool Knowledge in LLMs

arXiv:2606.12451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models deployed as agents over large tool catalogs face a critical tool-retrieval bottleneck. As embedding-based retrieval approaches rely on compact encoders that may under-capture specialized tool semantics, parametric tool retrieval addresses this by encoding each tool as a virtual token appended to the LLM vocabulary, fine-tuned in two stages (memorization then retrieval SFT) to use the LLM as a retriever, achieving strong performance on standard ToolBench retrieval benchmarks. Yet these benchmarks use verbose, fully-specified queries, and their evaluation applies constrained decoding that restricts outputs to valid token paths, neither reveals whether the model actually understands its tools. We introduce ToolSense, an open-source LLM-powered diagnostic framework that takes any tool catalog as input and automatically generates three benchmarks: a Realistic Retrieval Benchmark (RRB) with queries at three ambiguity tiers, an MCQ probing benchmark, and a QA probing benchmark. Applying ToolSense to ToolBench (~47k tools) and evaluating five parametric model training configurations reveals a knowledge-retrieval dissociation: on RRB queries, several configurations collapse by ~50-64 percentage points compared to fully-specified ToolBench benchmarks, falling below the embedding-model baseline. Additionally, despite strong retrieval performance, some models score near-random on factual probes, suggesting a knowledge-retrieval dissociation. We open-source the ToolSense framework and the ToolBench diagnostic benchmarks at https://github.com/SAP/toolsense.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Computational regimes in matrix-product-state-based quantum trajectory simulations

arXiv:2606.13779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient simulation of open quantum systems is central to modeling noisy quantum hardware and many-body dynamics. In trajectory-based tensor network methods, cost is often associated with trajectory-level quantities such as entanglement growth or bond dimension. However, the total cost of a fixed-accuracy simulation also depends on statistical sampling, and the interplay between per-trajectory complexity and sampling effort remains poorly understood. Here we introduce a cost-resolved framework for matrix product state (MPS)-based quantum trajectory simulations that decomposes total cost into memory per trajectory, runtime per trajectory, and sampling effort. We show that physically equivalent stochastic unravelings of the same Lindblad dynamics do not necessarily reduce total cost, but instead redistribute cost between trajectory complexity and statistical convergence. This trade-off is quantified by two dimensionless inflation factors: a bond dimension inflation $\alpha$ and a sampling inflation $\kappa$, which together determine the preferred unraveling under hardware-dependent memory and parallelism constraints. We provide a practical protocol for extracting $(\alpha,\kappa)$ from modest pilot simulations and demonstrate it using benchmarks across multiple noise channels. The resulting decision maps show that the computationally favorable unraveling can change with noise strength, time-step resolution, system size, and available parallelism. These results establish unraveling choice as a hardware-aware simulation design problem rather than an intrinsic optimization of trajectory entanglement alone.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Reward as An Agent for Embodied World Models

arXiv:2606.19990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While RL has become a promising tool for refining world models, existing methods largely rely on conservative rollouts near the training distribution, limiting exploration, behavioral diversity, and richer dynamic discovery. In this work, we challenge this conservative paradigm. We argue that the core limitation is not exploration itself, but the lack of reliable verification strategies to support broader exploration. Without reliable verification, expanded exploration becomes highly susceptible to reward hacking, where policies exploit imperfect rewards without achieving genuine improvement. To evaluate this motivation, we instantiate our method in embodied world models, where physical plausibility, and task completion provide a rigorous testbed for scalable RL under complex dynamics. On the verification side, we introduce Reward as an Agent, an agentic reward framework that actively evaluates generated behaviors to provide robust reward signals and mitigate reward hacking under distribution shifts. On the exploration side, we introduce Dynamic-Aware Rollout Diversification through DynDiff-GRPO, which explicitly expands action-space exploration to diversify trajectories, broaden state-action coverage, and encourage richer embodied behaviors beyond conservative rollout regimes. By unifying Reward as an Agent with DynDiff-GRPO, we enable RL on a more reliable reward foundation with substantially diversified sampling, effectively mitigating reward hacking while yielding significant accuracy gains across multiple open-source world models, thereby demonstrating that broader exploration can scale successfully when grounded in robust verification.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Prevalence and Correlates of Ideal Cardiovascular Health among Ugandan Adolescents: A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors often emerge during adolescence and track into adulthood, yet data on cardiovascular health (CVH) in sub-Saharan Africa remain limited. We assessed the prevalence and correlates of ideal CVH among Ugandan adolescents. Methods: We analysed baseline data of adolescents enrolled in a cluster-randomised controlled trial being conducted in urban (Kampala) and rural (Jinja) districts of Uganda. In this study, Ideal CVH was defined as meeting "ideal" status of 5-7 of the American Heart Association's Life's Simple 7 metrics. Random-effects logistic regression was used to identify factors associated with ideal CVH, accounting for village-level clustering. Results: We recruited 1316 participants with a mean age of 13.2 years, of whom 58.1% were female. Overall, the prevalence of ideal CVH was 66.8% (95% CI: 64.2% - 69.3%). The prevalence was higher in Jinja (74.4%, 95%CI: 70.9% - 77.7%) than Kampala (59.6%, 95%CI: 55.8%-63.2%) and the difference was evident (p

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A scaling limit theorem for controlled branching processes with a size-divisible term

arXiv:2508.17116v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper establishes general sufficient conditions for a sequence of controlled branching processes to converge weakly on the Skorokhod space. We focus on a class of control mechanisms that extend previous results by decomposing those random variables into the sum of two independent components: an immigration term, which depends on the current population size, and a size-divisible term, which can be expressed as the sum of random contributions from each individual. This extension allows us to capture a broad range of control functions including Poisson, binomial, and negative binomial distributions, commonly used in the literature. The assumptions are formulated in terms of probability generating functions of the offspring and control laws, distinguishing in this latter between the immigration and the size-divisible parts. The limit process is shown to be a continuous-state branching process with dependent immigration. The proof essentially relies on tightness arguments and the identification of a martingale problem. We also identify the special case in which the limit reduces to a classical Feller branching diffusion with immigration.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Hilbert space embeddings of independence tests and interaction measures of several variables

arXiv:2411.08653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present a unified theoretical framework for kernel-based measures of dependence on product spaces. Building on the ideas underlying distance covariance, distance multivariance, and the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC), we define a new family of kernels on an $n$-fold Cartesian product, termed positive definite independent of order $k$ (PDI$_{k}$ kernels). These kernels extend the concepts of positive definite and conditionally negative definite kernels to higher orders and provide the foundation for generalized independence and interaction tests, such as the generalized Lancaster interaction of order $k$ ($\Lambda_{k}^{n}$), and the Streitberg interaction ($\Sigma$). Our analysis focuses on the continuous setting, where we prove a Kernel Mean Embedding Theorem for PDI$_{k}$ kernels and establish the corresponding integrability restrictions. Based on these results, we characterize how the Kronecker products of PDI kernels behave.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Wearable-Grade Lead Reduction Disproportionately Degrades ECG AI Performance in Elderly Patients: Evidence from PTB-XL and MIT-BIH

Consumer wearable devices increasingly use single-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs) for cardiac monitoring, but these signals contain substantially less spatial information than the clinical 12-lead standard. Whether this reduction dispro- portionately affects older adults, who often present with more complex cardiac conditions, remains poorly understood. In this study, we evaluated the impact of lead reduction on AI-ECG diagnostic performance across age groups. A 1D resid- ual neural network was trained on 21,091 PTB-XL ECG recordings spanning five diagnostic superclasses and assessed using 12-, 6-, 2-, and 1-lead configurations. Under the full 12-lead setting, model accuracy declined from 84.5% in patients younger than 40 years to 66.2% in patients aged 75 years or older. Progressive lead reduction further widened this gap. Under the 1-lead configuration, accuracy decreased by 14.1 percentage points in the 75+ group but by only 0.4 percent- age points in the