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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Randomized, Controlled, Double Blind Clinical Study to Evaluate Use of Hydron Alkaline Ionised Water (HAIW) in Healthy Participants

Background and Objectives: Alkaline Ionized Water (AIW) is considered among the highest quality healthy drinking water worldwide and is widely discussed for its various health benefits. Hydron Alkaline Ionized Water (HAIW) is produced through electrolysis, resulting in a stable pH of approximately 9.5 with a negative Oxidation Reduction Potential (ORP), making it an antioxidant beverage. The objective of this study was to evaluate the safety of HAIW and its effects on digestion, sleep, energy, and overall quality of life in healthy participants compared to Packaged Drinking Water (PDW). Materials and Methods: A randomized, controlled, double blind, prospective clinical study was conducted in which a total of 24 healthy participants between the age group of 21 to 40 years were randomized in a 1:1 ratio to either HAIW Group or Packaged Drinking Water Group with equal gender distribution. Participants were hospitalized for 7 days and asked to consume at least 3 litres of the assigned water daily. Primary outcomes were safety-related laboratory parameters and adverse event monitoring. Secondary outcomes included assessment of digestion (appetite, digestion, bowel habits), urine parameters, sleep quality, freshness after waking, fatigue, energy/stamina/strength, quality of life, and global assessment Results: All 24 participants completed the study with no dropouts. Baseline demographics were comparable between the two groups. Assessment of primary safety-related laboratory parameters including Complete Blood count, liver function tests, renal function tests, blood sugar, Electrocardiogram and serum electrolytes showed non-significant change from baseline to 7 days and remained within normal limits in both groups, with non-significant difference between groups (p>0.05). HAIW showed significantly better improvement in appetite, digestion, and bowel habits from Day 2 onwards compared to Packaged drinking water. Sleep quality and freshness after waking up showed significant improvement from Day 3 and Day 2 respectively in the HAIW and PDW group, with significantly better improvement in HAIW group. Fatigue scores showed significant reduction at Day 6 and 7 in both groups with non-significant difference between groups. A total of 5 adverse events were reported (3 in HAIW, 2 in PDW), all unrelated to study products and were mild in nature. Global assessment showed excellent to good overall safety and tolerability in both groups. Conclusion: HAIW was well tolerated by all participants without any adverse effects. All laboratory safety parameters remained within normal range. HAIW demonstrated significant improvements in digestive function (appetite, digestion, bowel habits), sleep quality, and freshness after waking as compared to PDW. The study concludes that HAIW can be safely consumed. HAIW improves digestive and sleep-related functions.

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

AI-Automation Tooling in Computer Engineering Education: Mixed-Methods TAM/UTAUT Evidence for a General Acceptance Attitude

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As generative AI and low-code workflow platforms become routine in software practice, a key educational question is whether the next generation of computer engineers will accept these tools as useful, usable, and worthy of sustained engagement. This paper reports a mixed-methods, cross-sectional study of undergraduate computer engineering students' acceptance of AI automation tooling, instantiated through the open-source platform n8n across three identically scripted workshops in Thailand (n = 103). A 12-item, five-point Likert instrument mapped to six TAM/UTAUT constructs - Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), Behavioral Intention (BI), Self-Efficacy (SE), Hedonic Motivation (HM), and Output Quality (OQ) - was complemented by inductive thematic analysis of open-ended feedback. Analyses combined ordinal reliability estimation, bootstrap confidence intervals, non-parametric tests, multiple-comparison-controlled correlations, polychoric dimensionality diagnostics, a common-method-bias check, and between-session comparisons. Acceptance was favorable across all six constructs with large effect sizes, with PE emerging as the strongest construct and HM as the weakest. Dimensionality diagnostics further revealed that canonical TAM/UTAUT sub-facets collapsed into a single general acceptance factor in this short-form post-workshop context, a finding with important methodological and theoretical implications. Qualitative themes converged with the quantitative profile regarding usefulness and enthusiasm but diverged on output quality, revealing a small yet articulate reliability-skeptical minority. The findings support the curricular adoption of AI automation tooling in undergraduate computing education and identify three theory-grounded instructional levers: instruction-sequencing scaffolds, self-efficacy supports, and trust-calibration interventions.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

SSH-Net: A Deep Neural Network for Predicting Failure Time Distribution Functions under Competing Risks with Application to GPU Data

arXiv:2606.20451v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Competing risks are commonly observed in engineering fields and can bring challenges to time-to-event data modeling when the application scenarios are complicated. Recently, deep neural networks have received great attention for prediction with competing risks, due to their flexibility and high learning capability. However, the complexity of neural network structure brings extra difficulty in hyperparameter tuning based on different data inputs. Additionally, when an engineered system has complex physical structures with multiple hierarchical levels, treating all structural levels as a single group of inputs may fail to capture critical information. To address the issues, we propose a Structured Segmented Hazard Deep Neural Network (SSH-Net) for failure time prediction under cause-specific competing risks framework. Our approach associates neural network structure with data structures, and allows different covariate groups to impact the failure prediction through separate sub-networks. The neural network is constructed based on a cause-specific competing risks model. The SSH-Net outputs cause-specific hazard functions, and utilizes the penalized log-likelihood as the loss function. The prediction accuracy of SSH-Net is validated through simulation studies by evaluating the Brier score, the area under receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC), and the root mean square error (RMSE) of the predicted cause-specific cumulative incident function. We further demonstrate the model's ability to predict failure time distribution functions using the Titan GPU failure time data.

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

StreamKL: Fast and Memory-Efficient KL Divergence for Boosting Attention Distillation

arXiv:2606.20005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention distillation, which trains one attention distribution to match another by minimizing their Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, is widely used in knowledge distillation, model compression, continual learning, and sparse-attention LLM training. However, existing approaches materialize both attention distributions before computing the KL reduction, incurring $O(N_QN_K)$ memory and IO costs that become prohibitive at long context lengths. We present StreamKL, the first fused GPU primitive for attention KL divergence that eliminates this quadratic materialization. StreamKL derives a novel online formulation for the coupled two-distribution KL reduction, enabling a single one-pass forward kernel that streams query-key tiles through on-chip SRAM. For the backward pass, StreamKL recomputes attention probabilities tile-by-tile, avoiding storage of quadratic intermediates. We further design and implement efficient GPU kernels with dedicated optimizations. Experiments show StreamKL delivers up to $43\times$ and $14\times$ speedups over baseline methods in the forward and backward passes, respectively. Most importantly, StreamKL reduces the extra HBM footprint of attention distillation from $O(N_QN_K)$ to $O(1)$, enabling long-context distillation on a single GPU.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Non-Parametric Ancestry Adjustment for Polygenic Scores

Modern polygenic risk scores (PRS) exhibit shifts correlated with ancestry, leading to erroneous predictions for non-European individuals when models are trained on predominantly European cohorts. Such shifts arise from, among other factors, (1) algorithmic limitations in the ability of PRS model training to detect causal variants, rather than nearby variants with ancestry-dependent correlations to the causal one, (2) under-representation of alleles with higher prevalence in non-European populations in the association study training, and (3) gene-by-environment interactions where the environment is correlated with genetic ancestry. Current ancestry-adjustment methodologies often discretize individuals into population categories and apply a simple affine mapping to reduce these genetic ancestry biases. However, such approaches provide suboptimal adjustments, particularly for admixed individuals. In this work, we introduce a detailed theoretical characterization of ancestry-dependent biases and propose novel methods based on non-parametric neighborhood techniques that provide more accurate empirical results and admit statistical consistency guarantees. Extensive experiments using the UK Biobank demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

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

Auditing Reward Hackability in Code RL Training Environments

arXiv:2606.16062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We measure the rate at which code RL environments accept incorrect solutions as correct. On a 49-task sample of SWE-bench Verified, 28.5% of tasks have test suites weak enough that a Docker-verified incorrect patch passes them. On 20 R2E-Gym tasks across 6 repositories, the same pipeline at single-shot exploit generation yields 25.0%. A random-effects meta-analysis over 134 frontier model submissions to SWE-bench Verified finds, within the same human-rated difficulty stratum, model Pass@1 is +14.14 percentage points higher on flagged-hackable tasks than on robust ones (95% CI [+11.80, +16.48]; one-sided p < 10^-6; I^2 = 0%; 123 of 134 models positive). We then describe a procedure for hardening the broken tasks. An inline LLM judge with a Docker gold-sanity gate runs each generated test against the gold solution before the judge is consulted. On the 11 broken tasks in the audit, the gate flags 65 of 105 decisive LLM-generated tests as failing on the gold patch itself, a 61.9% per-augmentation defect rate the LLM judge alone misses. With diversity-biased retry, the loop converges 9 of 11 tasks to a gated upgrade.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Motion Reinforces Appearance: RGB-Skeleton Gated Residual Fusion for Micro-Gesture Online Recognition

Micro-gesture analysis attracts increasing attention for inferring spontaneous emotion from subtle body movements. Micro-gesture online recognition, which localizes and classifies each gesture instance in untrimmed videos, is a core task in the 4th EI-MiGA-IJCAI Challenge. Compared with typical temporal action detection, MGR emphasizes the localization and classification of actions, requiring the model to output the start time, end time, and category of each micro-gesture. Moreover, since micro-gestures are highly spontaneous, relying solely on a single modality makes it difficult to capture the complete and accurate multi-modal cues. In this work, we propose DyFADet+, which extends DyFADet into a dual-stream RGB-skeleton framework. In our model, both modalities are projected into shared multi-scale temporal embeddings and fused through a gated residual module, which adaptively injects skeleton motion into the RGB representation rather than using naive concatenation. Finally, these fused features are decoded by a Dynamic TAD head for online classification and boundary regression. On the SMG dataset, our method achieves an F1 score of 40.88, ranking 2nd in the Micro-gesture Online Recognition track.

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

Vines-DB: An RGB image dataset for multi-species ornamental vine segmentation

The Vines-DB dataset contains 1,218 original high-resolution RGB images of seven ornamental vine species collected under field conditions at the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station's Greenville Research Farm in Logan, Utah, USA. The dataset was generated from 168 individual vine plants that were transplanted in 2022 and photographed repeatedly across multiple months during the 2023 and 2024 growing seasons (July-October). Images were captured with an iPhone 16 Pro equipped with a 48 MP camera between 10:00 AM and 12:00 PM under daylight. Vines were grown on 1.2m x 2.4m trellises and photographed from a distance of 1m against black or white Styrofoam backdrops to improve contrast and reduce background noise. The dataset includes Akebia quinata, Campsis radicans, Hydrangea anomala petiolaris, Lonicera x heckrottii, Campsis x tagliabuana 'Madame Galen', Parthenocissus quinquefolia, and Wisteria floribunda. All original images were manually annotated in Roboflow by trained annotators to produce polygon-based instance segmentation masks for eight classes, including seven species and background. After preprocessing and data augmentation, the working dataset was expanded to 2,307 images for model development and evaluation. The augmented dataset was divided into 2,019 training images, 192 validation images, and 96 test images using stratified sampling to maintain balanced representation. Vines-DB supports the development and evaluation of deep learning models for multi-class instance segmentation in precision horticulture and urban ecology. The dataset enables applications such as automated canopy cover estimation, species identification, and scalable field phenotyping. In addition, repeated monthly imaging of the plants captures temporal variation in canopy development and plant appearance, increasing the dataset's utility for segmentation benchmarking under realistic field conditions.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Strategic Non-Shareability of Quantum Correlations

Authors:

arXiv:2605.25516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Correlations distributed by a mediator can be useful for coordination but vulnerable to inheritance by a colluder. We formalize the obstruction to such inheritance as a source-certified resource theory of strategic non-shareability. The free objects are symmetrically extendible sources, the free operations are shareability-preserving maps, and the trace distance to the free set is a faithful convex monotone. For Werner and isotropic sources in arbitrary local dimension, the resource has the exact form $D_m=c(d)(p-p_m^{*})_{+}$, with $p_m^{*}$ the Johnson–Viola shareability threshold. For qubit Werner sources, tomographically complete Pauli measurements yield the exact one-colluder capacity\[ C^tomo_1(p)=\frac{1}{12}\Bigl[(3p-1)-\sqrt{(3p+1)(1-p)}\,\Bigr]_{+}.\] We prove that this anti-collusion resource is independent of Bellnonlocality: the Bell and shareability orderings cross, so some Bell-nonlocal states are strictly less collusion-resistant than Bell-local ones. Finally, we give an aligned Pauli coordination game whose observed behaviour has a local hidden-variable model for every visibility, making device-independent certification empty, while source-certified quantum anti-collusion is positive exactly above the extendibility threshold. These results identify symmetric non-extendibility, rather than Bell nonlocality, as the boundary of source-certified collusion resistance.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Spectro-Temporal Interference Confounds Phase Encoding in Spatial Audio Foundation Models

Recent spatial self supervised audio models achieve high performance on localization tasks, raising questions about their encoding of microsecond interaural phase fine structures. We propose a psychoacoustic benchmark based on the binaural masking level difference to evaluate this. Using an equalization cancellation baseline and a GCC PHAT positive control we evaluate nine frozen audio models spanning binaural SSL, monaural SSL, and neural audio codecs. Four monaural negative controls yield zero BMLD confirming binaural specificity. Two general purpose binaural SSL models exhibit minimal phase sensitivity while dedicated binaural spatial SSL models achieve BMLD comparable to the analytical baseline. Progressive physical ablations show that general purpose binaural SSL models rely on spectro temporal interference textures rather than cross channel phase computation. High detection rates in speech reflect a confounding reliance on broadband envelopes rather than genuine phase encoding.

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

SPADE: Split-and-Delay Embeddings for Autoregressive High-Granularity Calorimeter Simulation

arXiv:2606.11304v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce SPADE (SPlit And Delay Embeddings), an autoregressive transformer for sequences whose tokens carry multiple features. Rather than embedding these features jointly, SPADE embeds them independently. Delaying each feature stream relative to the previous one allows intra-token correlations to be learned by the standard self-attention mechanism. Applied to point-cloud calorimeter shower generation in the highly granular ILD detector, SPADE is competitive with the state of the art AllShowers model on photon showers, and substantially outperforms its VQ-VAE-based predecessor OmniJet-$\alpha_C$. The mechanism is applicable to any generative task with multi-feature tokens, enabling LLM-style pretraining workflows for higher-dimensional data.

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

PhaseWin: An Efficient Search Algorithm for Faithful Visual Attribution

Visual attribution is a fundamental tool for interpreting modern vision and vision-language models, particularly when their decisions must be inspected, diagnosed, or audited. Its goal is to explain how a model's decision depends on local regions of the visual input, typically by assigning an importance ordering over candidate image regions. Given an image partitioned into $n$ regions, faithful attribution can be cast as an ordered subset-search problem, in which progressively inserting the selected regions should recover the target model response as early as possible. Exhaustive search over region subsets incurs exponential cost, while the widely used greedy search still requires a quadratic number of model evaluations, because every selection step rescores all remaining candidates. We propose PhaseWin, an efficient subset-search algorithm for faithful visual attribution. PhaseWin reorganizes greedy region selection into a phased window-search procedure: rather than re-evaluating the full candidate set at every step, it alternates between global candidate screening, adaptive pruning, and localized window refinement, while preserving the essential region-ranking behavior of greedy search. We analyze PhaseWin under monotone evidence-accumulation conditions and show that, under feature-level structural assumptions, it attains controllable linear evaluation complexity together with near-greedy faithfulness guarantees. Extensive experiments on image classification, object detection, visual grounding, and image captioning show that, among all compared attribution methods, PhaseWin reaches high faithfulness with the fewest forward passes, empirically realizing the predicted reduction from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$. The code is available at https://github.com/Qihuai27/phasewin-va.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Learning aligned EEG representations with subject-specific encoders

arXiv:2606.16462v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-subject EEG decoding promises more training data, but it also exposes neural networks to strong inter-subject distribution shifts. We study whether task supervision and architecture alone can learn subject-aligned representations. We replace a shared EEG encoder with subject-specific encoders followed by a common classifier, and compare this hybrid model with standard EEGNet, AttentionBaseNet, and CTNet baselines with Euclidean Alignment (EA) on four motor-imagery datasets. EA improves shared encoders by recentering subject covariances, but the hybrid encoder largely internalises this role: validation-loss curves and latent-distance analyses change little when EA is removed. Subject-specific heads increase class distinctiveness and place each subject close to its own latent manifold, improving most subjects while leaving a method-sensitive subset. These results support subject-specific encoders as a learned alignment mechanism for EEG decoding and identify head selection for unseen subjects as the remaining bottleneck.

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

LLM Judges Have Dark Current: A Psychometric Datasheet for LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation

LLM-as-a-judge systems are now routinely used for open-ended model evaluation, where human preference annotation is costly, slow, and difficult to reproduce. Yet these judges are often reported as scalar accuracy, win-rate, or agreement devices. We argue that a judge should instead be reported as a measurement instrument. We introduce a Judge Datasheet protocol that measures dark current under true-vacuum inputs, stable cross-sensitivity to same-quality surface variation, positional false preference, target sensitivity on a controlled quality ladder, and the criterion or operating point induced by tie instructions. The direction-stability decomposition reveals that apparent Delta0 preference can be stable surface response or disguised position bias. In a three-judge open-weight case study, Llama-3.1-8B shows high dark current and presentation-conflicted Delta0 behavior, Qwen2.5-14B is vacuum-clean and target-sensitive but mixes stable and positional over-discrimination, and Qwen2.5-32B is vacuum-clean with low stable cross-sensitivity and low positional false preference. A strict tie criterion eliminates Qwen32B Delta0 false preference but absorbs marginal Delta1 target signals into ties while preserving Delta5 sensitivity. The results show that prompting moves the criterion, not the resolution. We do not claim that the downstream mechanism hypothesis that motivated this work is confirmed; the contribution is a metrological protocol for measuring the measuring device before downstream claims are made.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

From Values to Tokens: An LLM-Driven Framework for Context-aware Time Series Forecasting via Symbolic Discretization

arXiv:2508.09191v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time series forecasting plays a vital role in supporting decision-making across a wide range of critical applications, including energy, healthcare, and finance. Despite recent advances, forecasting accuracy remains limited due to the challenge of integrating historical numerical sequences with contextual features, which often comprise unstructured textual data. To address this challenge, we propose TokenCast, a large language model (LLM) driven framework that leverages language-based symbolic representations as a unified intermediary for context-aware time series forecasting. Specifically, TokenCast employs a discrete tokenizer to transform continuous numerical sequences into temporal tokens, enabling structural alignment with language-based inputs. To effectively bridge the semantic gap between modalities, both temporal and contextual tokens are embedded into a shared representation space via a pre-trained LLM, further optimized with generative objectives. Building upon this unified semantic space, the aligned LLM is subsequently fine-tuned in a supervised manner to predict future temporal tokens, which are then decoded back into the original numerical space. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and highlight its potential as a generative framework for context-aware time series forecasting. The code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/TokenCast.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Machine-learned, finite temperature Fermi-operator expansions suitable for GPUs and AI-hardware

arXiv:2605.08523v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present several finite-temperature recursive Fermi-operator expansion schemes based on the second-order spectral projection (SP2) method. Our approach builds on a previous observation that the electronic structure problem, as formulated through a recursive SP2 expansion, can be mapped onto the architecture of a deep neural network. Using this perspective, we generalize SP2 to finite electronic temperatures by constructing machine learning models that determine optimized recursive expansion coefficients. The same approach is also applied to the prediction of the electronic entropy for fractional occupation numbers. The coefficients are trained for a specified chemical potential and electronic temperature and are not available in closed analytical form. However, by employing an appropriate affine rescaling strategy to the Hamiltonian matrix, we eliminate the need to retrain the model for different temperatures and chemical potentials. Our approach avoids explicit diagonalization and relies solely on highly optimized matrix-matrix multiplication kernels. Compared to state-of-the-art diagonalization, we achieve an order-of-magnitude speedup in the single-particle finite-temperature density matrix calculation for small and moderately sized matrices on modern GPUs and dense matrix multiply units.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Use of the Pharmacy First service in England in the first 12 months: geographic variation and health system context

Objectives: The Pharmacy First (PF) service was introduced across England from 31 January 2024 to expand the clinical role of community pharmacies and improve access to primary care. This paper describes use of PF in its first 12 months, in terms of uptake, access routes, consultation outcomes, geographic variations, service costs and antimicrobial supply. Methods: A descriptive analysis of all PF consultations submitted for payment to NHS Business Services Authority in England between 31 January 2024 and 31 January 2025. Pharmacy-level consultation data were linked to national data on population, location and pharmacy characteristics. PF use was examined using population-standardised consultation rates and consultations per pharmacy. Results: During the first year of implementation, 2,205,731 PF consultations were recorded as delivered across 11,349 pharmacies, with payment of GBP123 million to pharmacies. Uptake increased steadily over time. Most consultations were for acute sore throat (33%) and uncomplicated urinary tract infection (27%), with corresponding antibiotics, phenoxymethylpenicillin and nitrofurantoin being the most supplied. Most people self-referred (74%) into the service, with 95% of consultations managed without onward referral. Substantial geographic variation was observed. Northern regions had higher use based on the eligible population. The South East and Midlands had higher activity per pharmacy. London showed a distinct pattern, with higher self-referral into the service, lower medication supply and higher referral to other healthcare services. Higher consultation volume was weakly associated with pharmacy characteristics, including opening hours, pharmacy type and retail setting, and local context, in terms of socio-economic and geographic factors. Conclusions: PF had immediate uptake and is operating primarily as a direct-access model for common acute conditions. Findings suggest that PF is contributing to improved access to care and may shift demand away from general practice. However, the service uptake appears to be shaped by geographic location, proximity to other healthcare services and pharmacy characteristics.

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

Gaussian Spatial Priors for Anatomy-Aware Object Detection in Surgical Videos

Detecting anatomical structures in surgical video is essential for intraoperative safety frameworks such as the Critical View of Myopectineal Orifice (CVMPO) in inguinal hernia repair. While prominent structures like the Cooper's Ligament and Triangle of Doom are reliably detected by standard methods, smaller structures such as the epigastric vessels remain challenging due to their visual ambiguity and intermittent visibility. We observe that the spatial relationship between structures is anatomically constrained, and propose a Gaussian Spatial Prior (GSP) module that encodes this relationship as a compact, parametric bias injected into the self-attention of a DAB-DETR decoder. The prior is computed offline from training annotations as a small set of frozen Gaussian parameters and recomputed at each decoder layer using the iteratively refined reference points. On a dataset of inguinal hernia repair videos with 5-fold cross-validation, GSP improves dependent class detection by $+33.5\%$ ($AP_{50}$) over DAB-DETR and $+53.9\%$ over YOLOv26, while also improving anchor detection by $+6.0\%$. These gains are statistically significant across all folds ($p=0.012$, paired $t-$test).

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Avatar V: Scaling Video-Reference Avatar Video Generation

Generating avatar videos that are not merely visually similar to a target individual but behaviorally recognizable, faithfully reproducing their talking rhythm, gestural tendencies, and expression dynamics, remains an open challenge. Existing methods predominantly condition on single static images, which provide insufficient identity information and cannot capture dynamic motion traits, while standard pixel-level objectives underserve the perceptually critical facial regions that determine avatar fidelity. We present Avatar V, a production-scale framework that addresses these limitations through video-reference-conditioned identity modeling. Rather than compressing identity into fixed-size embeddings, the model conditions directly on the full token sequence of a reference video, learning to reproduce both static identity attributes (facial geometry, skin texture) and dynamic behavioral patterns (talking rhythm, micro-expressions) through attention over the reference context. We introduce Sparse Reference Attention, an asymmetric mechanism achieving linear-complexity conditioning on arbitrarily long references; a motion representation stream enabling closed-loop talking style transfer; and an identity-aware super-resolution refiner inheriting the full reference conditioning. These are supported by a data engine curating 100M+ training clips from 50M raw videos, and a five-stage training pipeline with flow matching pre-training, personality fine-tuning, two-phase distillation (>10x acceleration), and RLHF alignment, deployed across thousands of GPUs. Avatar V generates 1080p videos of unlimited duration, achieving state-of-the-art identity preservation, lip synchronization, and generation quality on our cross-scene benchmark, consistently outperforming leading systems including Seedance 2.0, Kling O3 Pro, Veo 3.1, and OmniHuman 1.5 in both automated metrics and human evaluation.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Multi-Turn Reasoning When Context Arrives in Pieces: Scalable Sharding and Memory-Augmented RL

When a user reveals task-critical information across several conversation turns, LLM accuracy drops by up to 65% despite full context availability. We show that this Lost in Conversation degradation can be substantially mitigated by training models to maintain a compact rolling memory instead of attending to a growing history. To make such training scalable, we introduce a low-cost sharding pipeline that converts single-turn QA datasets into multi-turn fragmented-information episodes, eliminating the need for hours of manual annotation. Training only on sharded GSM8K, our memory-augmented policy significantly improves multi-turn accuracy and generalises zero-shot to harder math and out-of-domain long-context QA. Moreover, memory-trained models outperform full-history baselines even when given the full history at test time, suggesting that learning to compress induces more robust incremental reasoning than full-context exposure alone.

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

AI-Driven Test Case Generation from Natural Language Requirements: A Survey of Techniques and Research Gaps

arXiv:2606.06563v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Software testing is critical for verifying that systems meet specified requirements, yet remains among the most time-consuming and expensive activities in development. Requirements-based test generation allows test cases to be derived early from requirements artifacts, but generating them directly from natural language is challenging due to inherent ambiguity and imprecision. Recent advances in AI, natural language processing (NLP), and large language models (LLMs) have made automating this pipeline increasingly feasible, while introducing new risks including hallucination, reduced traceability, and inconsistent evaluation. This survey addresses four research questions: what AI and NLP techniques have been proposed for generating test cases from natural language requirements; what tools and frameworks support these approaches; how generated test cases are evaluated; and what research gaps remain. Following Kitchenham and Charters' systematic review guidelines, we searched major scholarly databases spanning 2000-2025 and, after applying strict inclusion criteria, identified 21 primary studies. The literature is organized into three evolutionary eras, revealing that no existing approach simultaneously satisfies six key quality dimensions: automation, ambiguity handling, domain applicability, traceability, evaluation thoroughness, and hallucination control. The survey makes three main contributions: a three-era evolutionary synthesis of AI-based test generation; a six-criteria gap analysis showing no current approach fully addresses all quality dimensions; and four actionable research guidelines targeting hallucination, traceability, complexity sensitivity, and compliance.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Multi-Agent system for Multi-Objective constrained optimization

arXiv:2606.20236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many decision-making problems in computing and networking systems can be naturally formulated as cost-minimization problems under performance constraints. In dynamic environments, reinforcement learning (RL) is often used to solve such problems at runtime by embedding both costs and constraint violations into a single scalar reward through weighted penalty terms, following a Lagrangian-inspired formulation. However, in this context the behavior of the learned policy critically depends on the choice of these weights, which are typically selected manually. This makes it difficult to identify an appropriate trade-off between optimizing the primary objective and effectively avoiding constraint violations, particularly in non-stationary environments where their relative importance may change. This paper presents MAMO (Multi-Agent system for Multi-Objective constrained optimization), an approach to tackle this balancing problem through multi-agent RL. MAMO decouples task execution from objective design by formulating the selection of reward weights as a learning problem, providing a !rst step towards more autonomous and robust RL-based solutions for constrained optimization problems in dynamic environments.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Indefinite Quantum Causality

arXiv:2606.19438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, operational approaches to quantum foundations have been developed as a means of understanding the core principles and distinctive features of quantum theory. Such approaches typically view physical processes as sequences of operations, with earlier operations serving as causes of later effects. However, a growing literature is emerging on the possibility of relaxing this assumption and allowing for quantum indefiniteness in the causal order. This development stems from a variety of motivations, both fundamental and applied, including exploring the role of causality in quantum theory, the interplay between quantum theory and general relativity, and higher-order quantum computing. A prominent offshoot of this development is the emergence of indefinite causal order as a feasible resource for quantum information processing. This review provides an overview of the current state of the art in the field, covering the methodology underlying indefinite quantum causality within the so-called "process matrix formalism", outlining key results and experimental implementations, and discussing recent advances.

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

Evolutionary Two-Stage Hyperparameter Optimization Strategies for Physics-Informed Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.20442v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) solve Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) by embedding physical laws into neural network training. However, their performance suffers from unstable convergence, training plateaus, and strong sensitivity to architectural and optimization hyperparameters due to the highly non-convex and multi-term structure of the physics-informed loss. In this setting, the outer-loop hyperparameter search is a noisy and black-box optimization problem over heterogeneous parameters, where classical local or gradient-based strategies are easily trapped in suboptimal regions. Evolutionary algorithms, with their population-based exploration and ability to handle mixed, non-differentiable search spaces, provide a more robust mechanism for discovering promising configurations. We propose and investigate a two-stage approach based on evolutionary algorithms that combines exploration and exploitation parts of PINNs training to improve solution accuracy and robustness under fixed computational budgets. In the first stage, we perform low-fidelity training runs with truncated epochs to rapidly screen candidate configurations, treating hyperparameter selection as a black-box outer-loop problem. In the second stage, only the most promising candidates are fully trained with standard gradient-based optimizers to refine the solution. Evaluated on three popular problems, namely Advection, Klein-Gordon and Helmholtz equations, our method consistently outperforms standard training and achieves significantly lower mean error within constrained computational resources.

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

Minimal Oversight: Uncertainty-Aware Governance for Delegated AI Systems

arXiv:2606.15563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems increasingly delegate decisions to specialized models, evaluators, tools, and supervisory controllers. The central AI problem is no longer only model accuracy, but uncertainty-aware governance: how much autonomy to grant, which evidence should calibrate trust, what performance ceiling a delegated AI system can sustain, and when human intervention becomes necessary. We propose the Minimum Sufficient Oversight Principle (MSO), a variational principle for principled autonomy delegation: minimize governance burden on the Fisher information manifold subject to a delivery constraint. The resulting Euler-Lagrange solution yields a water-filling allocation of governed delegation across the task space. Building on a revealed-action governed delegation channel model, we prove a capacity theorem for stationary symbolwise review policies, derive a local first-order approximation relating workflow complexity to quality degradation, and give a drift-dominated autonomy-time scaling law linking intervention timing to effective capacity, complexity, and drift. Within this framework, masking appears as a structural AI-governance pathology: corrected performance can hide the competence signal needed to calibrate trust. Synthetic simulations and a semi-real reconstructed workflow support design prescriptions including upstream-first correction, sensitivity-based intervention, and explicit feasibility checks before autonomy is expanded. The result is a computable framework for uncertainty, planning, and oversight in delegated AI systems. A companion Python package is available at https://github.com/crbazevedo/delegation-lab.