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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-14

Antibody fine specificity correlates with protection from malaria for the RTS,S vaccine in young African children: A post hoc analysis of a phase IIb randomised controlled trial

作者:

by Alessia Hysa, D. Herbert Opi, Joshua Waterhouse, Sandra Chishimba, Jessica L. Horton, Natalie Kingston, Hans J. Netter, David Wetzel, Michael Piontek, Gaoqian Feng, Jahit Sacarlal, Carlota Dobaño, Liriye Kurtovic, James G. Beeson Background The RTS,S/AS01 malaria vaccine was recently approved for implementation in children, but only provides modest and short-lived efficacy against malaria. RTS,S targets a portion of the Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) circumsporozoite protein (CSP), comprising the central NANP-repeat region and C-terminal domain. Mechanisms of immunity and correlates of protection for the RTS,S vaccine are not well defined, hindering progress towards generating highly effective CSP-based vaccines. Methods and findings We investigated epitope specificity and cross-reactivity of vaccine-induced antibodies to six peptides representing CSP epitopes in the N-terminal and central NANP-repeat region. We evaluated antibody reactivity in preclinical mouse vaccine studies, among CSP-specific monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), and in a large RTS,S phase IIb clinical trial in young children 1–4 years old (n = 735).The preclinical mouse vaccine studies and CSP-specific mAbs were used to initially evaluate IgG responses to the six peptides. Mice immunised with the central NANP-repeat region had IgG with cross-reactivity to an epitope in the N-terminal region. Additionally, we demonstrated that a single CSP-specific mAb could display cross-reactivity to several CSP epitopes. Through post hoc quantification and analysis of antibody responses in the RTS,S phase IIb clinical trial, we found that a subset of children generated IgG with specificity for a short NANP-repeat epitope (NANP2; amino acid sequence: NANPNANP) and cross-reactivity to an N-terminal epitope (J1; amino acid sequence: KQPADGNPDPNANPN). Notably, children with high IgG responses to NANP2 and J1 had a significantly reduced risk of clinical malaria, compared to children with low responses (IgG to NANP2 (aHR: 0.838 (95% CI [0.716, 0.981]; p = 0.028)) and J1 (aHR: 0.718 (95% CI [0.611, 0.844]; p 

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

Predicting the Neutrino Mass Ordering Using Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.03745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Determining the neutrino mass ordering remains a central open problem in particle physics. While next-generation long-baseline experiments are expected to resolve this question, current data provide limited sensitivity because the spectral differences between normal and inverted ordering are subtle and entangled with parameter degeneracies. We investigate a machine-learning strategy for mass-ordering determination using a feed-forward neural-network classifier trained on synthetic long-baseline datasets generated with three-flavour oscillation probabilities, matter effects, and statistical fluctuations. We evaluate the classifier against standard $\chi^2$ and $\log\mathcal{L}$ approaches using common discrimination metrics, including receiver-operating-characteristic curves, to quantify sensitivity and to illustrate how operating points can be selected to prioritise purity or efficiency. We find that the neural network achieves performance comparable to conventional fits for the scenarios studied, providing a flexible, independent cross-check of established analyses. The framework can be extended to incorporate systematic uncertainties and to explore joint inference of oscillation parameters, and it may also serve as a pedagogical tool for introducing machine-learning methods in neutrino physics.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Repurposing cardiovascular disease risk models to predict incident and co-occurring cardiovascular, cardiometabolic and neurocognitive outcomes.

Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD), cardiometabolic and neurocognitive conditions share risk factors and frequently co-occur. We evaluated whether four established CVD risk prediction models (QRISK3, PCE, SCORE2, SCORE2-OP) can be repurposed to predict 10-year risk of these conditions and their co-occurrence with CVD. Methods: The models were recalibrated using 20% of the UK Biobank (UKB) and evaluated in the remaining 80%. We performed external validation using data from Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) Aurum, assessing model discrimination (c-statistics) and calibration (intercept and slope). We used permuted feature importance to determine the influence of each individual predictor in the models. Results: Depending on the model, the c-statistics for incident CVD ranged from 0.71 to 0.74 in the UKB test set (16,137 events). Discrimination was equal to or higher than CVD when evaluated against non-traditional CVD outcomes: 0.74 to 0.77 for heart failure (3,471 events), 0.72 to 0.73 for atrial fibrillation (9,213 events), 0.73 to 0.75 for peripheral arterial disease (1,927 events) and 0.80 to 0.82 for abdominal aortic aneurysm (595 events). For the multimorbidity endpoints, model discrimination ranged from 0.74 for the composite of CVD and T2DM (SCORE2-OP) to 0.83 for the composite of CVD and dementia or Parkinson's disease (QRISK3). When considering the onset of any cardiovascular, cardiometabolic, or neurocognitive outcome discrimination ranged from 0.71 to 0.72. The repurposed models slightly underestimated the predicted risk in the CPRD compared to the UKB: average difference in calibration intercept was at most -0.64. After age and sex, smoking status and systolic blood pressure contributed most to model predictions. Conclusions: Repurposed CVD models can be used to identify 10-year risk of many CVD-related conditions and their multimorbidity. These may be used to support risk-based approaches to prevention and screening. The repurposed models have been made available at: https://repurposed-cvd-risk-models.shinyapps.io/cvd_cmd_dementia_app/ Keywords: Risk prediction; cardiovascular disease; cardiometabolic disease; dementia; disease prevention.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Agents-K1: Towards Agent-native Knowledge Orchestration

arXiv:2606.13669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current LLM-based research agents have advanced through agent orchestration, yet largely overlook scientific knowledge orchestration. Existing works often reduce papers to abstracts, surface mentions, and flat \texttt{cites} edges, omitting key entities, claims, evidence, mechanisms, and method lineages essential for scientific reasoning. To this end, we introduce Agents-K1, an end-to-end knowledge orchestration pipeline that converts raw documents into agent-native scientific knowledge graphs. Agents-K1 integrates three components under a unifying theoretical foundation: a multimodal parser whose five-module schema captures entities, multimodal evidence, citations, and typed inter-entity relations across the full paper rather than abstracts alone; a 4B information-extraction backbone trained with GRPO under a rule-based reward; and a graphanything CLI, a tri-source agent interface that unifies web search, multimodal graph retrieval, and cross-document traversal. On top of this, we process 2.46 million scientific papers across six subjects to produce Scholar-KG, of which we release a one-million-paper subset, and the full Scholar-KG is accessible via the SCP link below. The same pipeline can be extended to general-domain corpora and to schema-conformant data synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Agents-K1 achieves superior performance in scientific information extraction, knowledge graph construction, and multi-hop scientific reasoning.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

MARS: Efficient, Adaptive Co-Scheduling for Heterogeneous Agentic Systems

arXiv:2604.26963v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as the execution core of autonomous agents rather than as standalone text generators. Agentic workloads induce a temporal shift from single-turn inference to multi-turn LLM-tool loops, and a spatial shift from chat-scale, GPU-only execution to repository-scale, GPU-CPU co-located execution. Consequently, coordinating heterogeneous resource demands of agentic execution has emerged as a critical system challenge. We design and implement MARS, an efficient and adaptive co-scheduling system that globally coordinates heterogeneous agentic workloads under coupled GPU-CPU resource pressure. By establishing holistic visibility across GPU inference and CPU tool execution via a unified information stream, an external control plane in MARS decouples admission from execution to prevent heterogeneous resource oversubscription. An internal agent-centric scheduler further minimizes the end-to-end critical path by prioritizing latency-sensitive continuations and adaptively retaining KV cache state only when warm resumption yields a latency benefit. Our evaluations show that MARS reduces end-to-end latency by up to 5.94x while maintaining nearly maximal system throughput. We further integrate MARS as the serving backend for the OpenHands coding agent framework, demonstrating its real-world effectiveness by accelerating end-to-end task completion time by up to 1.87x. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Afterglow231/MARS_preview .

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

Large Language Models Do Not Always Need Readable Language

Large language models (LLMs) are commonly prompted and interfaced with human-readable natural language, even when the intended reader is another model. This paper investigates whether semantic information can be encoded in compact, non-standard textual forms that sacrifice human readability while remaining recoverable by LLMs. We refer to this class of model-centric textual representations as BabelTele, approached here not as a fixed protocol but as an empirical probe into LLMs' capacity to generate and interpret such representations. Through readability diagnostics, model likelihood measures, human questionnaires, and downstream task evaluations, we find that BabelTele can substantially depart from ordinary natural language while preserving core semantics for instruction-tuned LLMs. As a task-agnostic representational paradigm, BabelTele demonstrates high information density, maintaining 99.5% semantic fidelity even when the text volume is condensed to 27.9% of its original length. We further evaluate its semantic robustness in cross-model transfer, agent memory, and multi-agent communication. Results suggest that BabelTele can reduce context overhead while generally maintaining reliable downstream performance, although its effectiveness depends on the compressor-reader pair and task setting. These findings indicate that human readability, natural-language typicality, and model-side semantic recoverability can be partially decoupled, opening a path toward model-native representations in future exploration of LLM systems.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

When to Align, When to Predict: A Phase Diagram for Multimodal Learning

arXiv:2606.11190v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cross-modal alignment (CA) and cross-modal prediction (CP) are the dominant paradigms for multimodal representation learning, yet there is no systematic understanding of when each succeeds, when each fails, and when cross-modal training helps at all – a gap that leaves practitioners, especially in scientific domains like biomedicine or astrophysics, with heterogeneous instruments and multiple levels of organization and measurement, unable to diagnose why standard methods underperform the best single modality. We develop a unified linear framework that addresses both questions. Under a spiked signal-plus-noise model with structured cross-modal nuisance correlation, we derive separation ratios for both objectives that expose complementary failure modes: alignment whitens each modality and fails when nuisance is strongly correlated across views; prediction encodes whatever is cross-predictable through a one-sided whitening, with recovery governed by source-modality quality. The resulting phase diagram partitions multimodal problems into four regimes: Both, CA only, CP only, and Neither. We present a data-driven procedure to locate real-world datasets in this diagram using a small labeled subsample, identifying the preferred objective and prediction direction before any cross-modal training. Experiments on synthetic data, stereo-vision benchmarks, image-caption pairs, and real astrophysical data validate the predictions in the nonlinear regime, including the Neither regime where cross-modal training is actively harmful. Our framework lets practitioners diagnose their multimodal problem and choose the right objective before committing to training. Code to reproduce the results is available at https://github.com/IlayMalinyak/mm_align_vs_pred.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Modeling Sarcastic Speech: Semantic and Prosodic Cues in a Speech Synthesis Framework

Sarcasm is a pragmatic phenomenon in which speakers convey meanings that diverge from literal content, relying on an interaction between semantics and prosodic expression. However, how these cues jointly contribute to the recognition of sarcasm remains poorly understood. We propose a computational framework that models sarcasm as the integration of semantic interpretation and prosodic realization. Semantic cues are derived from an LLaMA 3 model fine-tuned to capture discourse-level markers of sarcastic intent, while prosodic cues are extracted through semantically aligned utterances drawn from a database of sarcastic speech, providing prosodic exemplars of sarcastic delivery. Using a speech synthesis testbed, perceptual evaluations show that semantic and prosodic cues enhance perceived sarcasm, with the combined system achieving the best downstream F1 while maintaining high subjective sarcasm ratings. These findings highlight the complementary roles of semantics and prosody in pragmatic interpretation and illustrate how modeling can shed light on the mechanisms underlying sarcastic communication.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Landscape-Similarity-Guided Optimization in Divide-and-Conquer QAOA

arXiv:2602.21689v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Divide-and-conquer strategies mitigate hardware constraints for the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices by partitioning large interaction graphs into smaller, hardware-compatible sub-problems. However, this approach introduces a severe classical training bottleneck: a decomposition across $m$ boundary nodes generates $2^m$ distinct sub-problems that typically require independent optimization. In this work, we demonstrate that across diverse synthetic and real-world interaction graphs, the variational landscapes of these reduced QAOA instances actually exhibit a robust universality. Adapting the replica-overlap framework of spin-glass physics, we define a landscape-overlap order parameter $q$ to quantify geometric correlations between energy landscapes, revealing a sharp landscape-similarity transition as graph connectivity is tuned. Exploiting this, we introduce Doubly Optimized QAOA (DO-QAOA), an adaptive pipeline that collapses the sub-problems from $2^m$ distinct sub-problems into $K=\mathcal{O}(1)$ effective landscape classes. By performing optimization on a single representative sub-problem and dynamically transferring parameters to remaining sub-problems, DO-QAOA lowers runtime and quantum measurement overhead by orders of magnitude while maintaining a competitive Approximation Ratio Gap (ARG).

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Domain Generalizable Adaptation of 3D Vision-Language Models via Regularized Fine-Tuning

Domain adaptation remains a central challenge in 3D vision, especially for multimodal foundation models that align 3D point clouds with visual and textual data. While these models demonstrate strong general capabilities, adapting them to downstream domains with limited data often leads to overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. To address this, we introduce ReFine3D, a regularized fine-tuning framework designed for domain-generalizable tuning of 3D large multimodal models (LMMs). ReFine3D combines selective layer tuning with two targeted regularization strategies: multi-view consistency across augmented point clouds and text diversity through synonym-based prompts generated by large language models. Additionally, we incorporate point-rendered vision supervision and a test-time augmentation mechanism with confidence-based aggregation to further enhance robustness. Extensive experiments across different 3D domain generalization benchmarks show that ReFine3D improves base-to-novel class generalization by 1.36%, cross-dataset transfer by 2.43%, robustness to corruption by 1.80%, and few-shot accuracy by up to 3.11%, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods with minimal added computational overhead.

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

SAAS: Self-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Over-Search Mitigation in Agentic Search

Agentic search enables LLMs to solve complex multi-hop questions through iterative reasoning and external search. Despite the effectiveness, these systems often suffer from a critical limitation in practice: agents fail to recognize their own knowledge boundaries, blindly triggering searches when internal knowledge suffices and failing to terminate search even when adequate evidence has been collected. The lack of self-awareness leads to severe over-search, incurring substantial inference latency and prohibitive computational cost. To this end, we propose SAAS, a novel RL framework designed to cultivate dynamic self-awareness that precisely regulates search behavior without compromising accuracy. SAAS introduces three key components: (i) a search boundary modeling mechanism, which identifies the search boundary under the evolving policy by contrasting search-disabled and search-enabled rollouts; (ii) a boundary-aware reward module, which translates this boundary awareness into trajectory-level penalties, suppressing unnecessary and redundant searches; and (iii) a stage-wise optimization strategy, which leverages a sequential curriculum to prioritize reasoning over search regularization, thereby avoiding reward hacking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAAS substantially reduces over-search, while maintaining accuracy. Our code and implementation details are released at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/SAAS.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

C-MambaPose: A Physics-Informed Complex Mamba Framework for Cross-Environment WiFi Human Pose Estimation

Human pose estimation (HPE) utilizing wireless WiFi signals has emerged as a promising technology owing to its device-free nature, privacy preservation, and robustness against occlusion and poor lighting. However, existing methods often overlook the physical complex phase information of WiFi signals and fail to generalize across diverse environments due to severe domain shifts. In this paper, we present C-MambaPose, a physics-informed complex-valued Mamba-GraFormer hybrid framework for robust cross-environment WiFi-based 3D HPE. Our framework first sanitizes raw WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) phase errors and constructs a phase-preserving complex-valued representation. We then employ a Spatiotemporal Complex Mamba encoder with a dynamic selective receptive field to capture fine-grained phase dynamics. A cross-attention joint-query mapper maps the unstructured sequence tokens to human joints, which are decoded by a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to predict anatomically coherent 3D coordinates. Extensive evaluations on the MM-Fi dataset show that C-MambaPose achieves competitive or superior performance to state-of-the-art baselines across all settings, setting a new state-of-the-art specifically on the challenging cross-environment split, requiring only 3.78 M parameters-an 83.1\% reduction compared to GraphPose-Fi[chen2026graph] and an 85.7\% reduction compared to MetaFi++[zhou2023metafi++], while maintaining a comparable size to DT-Pose[chen2025towards] (which is only 18\% smaller) but achieving significantly superior performance without requiring any pretraining. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/phucngvinuni/cmampose.git.

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

EKF-Based Depth Camera and Deep Learning Fusion for UAV-Person Distance Estimation and Following in SAR Operations

arXiv:2602.20958v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) frameworks aid human search tasks by detecting and recognizing specific individuals, then tracking and following them while maintaining a safe distance. A key safety requirement for UAV following is the accurate estimation of the distance between camera and target object under real-world conditions, achieved by fusing multiple image modalities. As part of the system for automatic people detection and face recognition using deep learning, in this paper we present the fusion of depth camera measurements and monocular camera-to-body distance estimation for robust tracking and following. Deep learning based filtering of depth camera data and estimation of camera-to-body distance from a monocular camera are achieved with YOLO-pose, enabling real-time fusion of depth information using the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) algorithm. The proposed subsystem, designed for use in drones, estimates and measures the distance between the depth camera and the human body keypoints, to maintain the safe distance between the drone and the human target. Our system provides an accurate estimated distance, which has been validated against motion capture ground truth data. The system has been tested in real time indoors, where it reduces the average errors, RMSE and standard deviations of distance estimation up to 15,3% in three tested scenarios. Based on the test results, the EKF fusion-based approach increases the depth detection range by reducing the errors outside the optimal depth camera working range. It also shows improved robustness and precision in challenging conditions, such as reflections and poor visibility, making it suitable for SAR.

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

"I Didn't Make the Micro Decisions": Measuring, Inducing, and Exposing Goal-Level AI Contributions in Collaboration

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly shape how users form, refine, and extend their goals, attributing contributions in human-AI collaboration becomes critical for users calibrating their own reliance and for evaluators assessing AI-assisted work. Yet existing methods focus on final artifacts, missing the process through which goals themselves are jointly shaped. We introduce a goal-level attribution framework, CoTrace, that decomposes explicit goals into verifiable requirements and traces both direct contributions and indirect influences across dialogue turns. Applying CoTrace to 638 real-world collaboration logs, we find that while models account for only 11-26% of goal-shaping contribution, they contribute substantially more on introducing lower-level concrete requirements, and make various kinds of indirect contributions. Through controlled simulations, we show that interaction design choices significantly affect model goal-shaping behavior. In a user study, exposing participants to goal-level analyses shifts their perceived contributions by nearly 2 points on a 5-point scale, revealing systematic miscalibration in how users understand their own AI-assisted work.

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

Visual-OPSD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Self-Distillation for Efficient Unified Multimodal Reasoning

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) interleave generated ''visual thoughts'' (VTs) with text reasoning to improve spatial tasks. This incurs roughly an order-of-magnitude inference cost from multi-step diffusion. We find this cost yields limited direct benefit. On ThinkMorph, removing or noising VTs barely changes accuracy across nine benchmarks. Once rendered, attention concentrates on the VT regardless of content. Yet a KL diagnostic shows that conditioning on a privileged VT trace shifts the model's completion distribution. This suggests the generation pathway encodes useful reasoning beyond the rendered pixels. Motivated by this gap, we propose Visual On-Policy Self-Distillation(Visual-OPSD). Teacher and student share identical weights but differ in context: the teacher sees privileged VTs while the student sees only the question. Token-level JSD distillation on on-policy student trajectories transfers the teacher's reasoning to a text-only student. Across nine benchmarks, Visual-OPSD improves over its generative teacher by $+3.40$pp with $14.3\times$ speedup (10.0s vs. 142.8s per sample) and outperforms same-scale VLMs by $+63.83$pp on VSP. A Gaussian-noise control ($+0.40$pp vs. $+10.28$pp for real VTs) and $58.4\%$ closure of the KL gap confirm that gains come from the semantic content of the generation pathway.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

GENATATORs: ab initio Gene Annotation With DNA Language Models

Inference of gene structure and location from genome sequences - known as de novo gene annotation - is a fundamental task in biological research. However, sequence grammar encoding gene structure is complex and poorly understood, often requiring costly transcriptomic data for accurate gene annotation. In this work, we benchmark current solutions and develop new methods of gene annotation. We show that pretrained DNA language model (DNA LM) embeddings do not capture the features necessary for precise gene segmentation, and that task-specific fine-tuning remains essential. We comprehensively evaluate the impact of model architecture, training strategy, receptive field size, dataset composition, and data augmentations on gene segmentation performance. We revisit standard evaluation protocols, showing that commonly used per-token and per-sequence metrics fail to capture the challenges of real-world gene annotation. We introduce and theoretically justify new biologically grounded metrics, along with benchmarking datasets that better capture annotation quality. We show that fine-tuned DNA LMs outperform existing annotation tools, generalizing across species separated by hundreds of millions of years from those seen during training, and providing segmentation of previously intractable non-coding transcripts and untranslated regions of protein-coding genes. Our results thus provide a foundation for new biological applications centered on accurate gene annotation.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Immunologically Optimized Zmp1 Peptides Reveal a Translational Serological Biomarker Platform for Tuberculosis Diagnosis Across Disease Manifestations

Tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis remains challenging, particularly for extrapulmonary TB (EPTB), where invasive sampling, low bacillary burden, and suboptimal sensitivity of nucleic acid-based tests in peripheral specimens hinder timely detection. Here, we report an immunology-driven strategy for biomarker discovery and development of a peptide-based serological assay targeting Mycobacterium tuberculosis zinc metalloprotease-1 (Zmp1). Leveraging fundamental principles of adaptive immunity that antigenic regions containing overlapping B-cell and CD4 T-helper cell epitopes would preferentially generate high antibody titers through linked recognition and cognate T-cell help, we used an immunoinformatics pipeline to identify two nested immunodominant peptide regions within Zmp1 (Mtb-Zp-NT and Mtb-Zp-CT) enriched for overlapping B- and T-cell epitopes. The diagnostic potential of these peptides was evaluated through ELISA-based serological assays. A blinded pilot study (N=137) demonstrated a clear discrimination between active TB and TB-recovered individuals. The assay was subsequently validated in an expanded cohort (N=875) by screening 6,086 individuals, which identified 457 TB-positive cases. The cohort included pulmonary TB (PTB), EPTB, TB-recovered individuals, household contacts, non-specific infections, and healthy controls. Receiver operating characteristic analyses, supported by DeLong and bootstrap comparisons, revealed superior diagnostic performance of the peptide-based assays relative to full-length Zmp1. Mtb-Zp-CT exhibited the highest accuracy (AUC=0.93; specificity >90%), while Mtb-Zp-NT also demonstrated strong discriminatory power (AUC{approx}0.89). These findings establish that the immunologically optimized Zmp1 peptides are highly promising serological biomarkers for TB and EPTB. More broadly, they demonstrate how mechanistically informed epitope selection can accelerate translation of pathogen-specific immune signatures into sensitive, minimally invasive, and potentially point-of-care diagnostic platforms for resource-limited settings.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Second-Order Bias of LLMs Through Epistemic Entitlement

Evaluations of social bias in LLMs largely focus on whether models generate or imply biased content. However, as LLMs are increasingly used as judges of bias, they may exhibit social biases in subtler ways in how they evaluate biased content, which current methods do not systematically capture. We call this second-order bias: social bias in an LLM's judgment about social bias, which we evaluate through a novel, philosophically grounded reasoning task. Drawing on entitlement epistemology, we conceptualize bias as misplaced foundational knowledge that shapes an agent's rational inquiry, and derive a logical reasoning task for LLMs to judge to whom a biased text is acceptable or non-acceptable. We develop two simple metrics to measure how biased LLM judges are in inferring demographics for acceptability without sufficient support, and how these inferences vary across groups targeted by biased texts. Evaluating open and closed models, we find that our task evades safety guardrails by surfacing bias in model judgment. It varies systematically across target groups, reflects implicit social maps, and shows how models are still triggered by demographic labels. Our work points to the need for LLM bias evaluation in judgment tasks and broadly, for more theoretically grounded approaches to bias evaluation in NLP. We release our code and model responses at https://github.com/uofthcdslab/second-order-bias.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Where, What, Why, and Importance: Structured Defect Grounding for Text-to-Image Feedback

Despite generating increasingly photorealistic images, text-to-image (T2I) models still exhibit localized, subtle, and structurally complex failures. Diagnosing these failures requires instance-level feedback that answers where a defect occurs, what type it is, why it is defective, and its importance to overall image quality. While recent dense-feedback methods move beyond scalar supervision, their heatmap-centric representations still formulate diagnosis as pixel-field regression, making it difficult to localize variable-cardinality defects and bind semantic reasons to individual failures. To address this representation bottleneck, we propose Structured Defect Grounding (SDG), which casts T2I diagnosis as structured set prediction by modeling each defect as a (location, type, reason, importance) tuple. To make this formulation trainable and measurable, we introduce SDG-30K, a 30K-image dataset with box-grounded annotations across four modern T2I generators, together with a dedicated evaluation protocol, SDG-Eval. Building on this structured representation, we further present a diagnosis-to-alignment framework in which a Vision-Language Model (VLM) serves as the SDG detector, and BoxFlow-GRPO converts predicted defect sets into box-derived, importance-weighted spatial rewards for diffusion model alignment. Extensive experiments show that our SDG detector outperforms leading proprietary VLMs on structured defect grounding, while SDG-guided rewards consistently improve T2I alignment and support localized image refinement. These results establish SDG as a unified, instance-level interface for diagnosing, evaluating, and enhancing modern generative models.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

FrameOracle: Learning What to See and How Much to See in Videos

Vision-language models (VLMs) advance video understanding but operate under tight computational budgets, making performance dependent on selecting a small, high-quality subset of frames. Existing frame sampling strategies, such as uniform or fixed-budget selection, fail to adapt to variations in content density or task complexity. To address this, we present FrameOracle, a lightweight, plug-and-play module that predicts both (1) which frames are most relevant to a given query and (2) how many frames are needed. FrameOracle is trained via a curriculum that progresses from weak proxy signals, such as cross-modal similarity, to stronger supervision with FrameOracle-41K, the first large-scale VideoQA dataset with validated keyframe annotations specifying minimal sufficient frames per question. Extensive experiments across five VLMs and six benchmarks show that FrameOracle reduces 16-frame inputs to an average of 10.4 frames without accuracy loss. When starting from 64-frame candidates, it reduces inputs to 13.9 frames on average while improving accuracy by 1.5%, achieving state-of-the-art efficiency-accuracy trade-offs for scalable video understanding.

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

BayLing-Duplex: Native Full-Duplex Speech Dialogue with a Single Autoregressive LLM

Real-time, full-duplex speech interaction is a key feature of next-generation spoken chatbots, allowing the model to listen and speak at the same time and to handle natural phenomena such as overlap, hesitation, and barge-in. Existing speech language models (SpeechLMs) such as LLaMA-Omni and GLM-4-Voice are still turn-based and rely on an external Voice Activity Detection (VAD) module to mark the end of the user's turn, which fundamentally limits their interactive ability. In this paper, we introduce BayLing-Duplex, a native full-duplex SpeechLM where a single autoregressive LLM decides when to listen, when to speak, and when to stop, with no auxiliary turn-taking module. The design adds only a few special tokens to the standard vocabulary, so it transfers across LLMs and reuses existing training and serving stacks with no architectural adaptation. Starting from the public GLM-4-Voice checkpoint and using only 400K full-duplex samples for fine-tuning followed by a lightweight DPO stage, BayLing-Duplex reaches 92% turn-taking success and 100% interruption success on InstructS2S-Eval, while improving the speech-response score from 2.17 to 3.39 over Moshi. BayLing-Duplex also matches or surpasses its turn-based counterpart on Llama Questions, Web Questions, and Alpaca-Eval, showing that simultaneous listen-and-speak modeling does not sacrifice response quality.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Efficient Temporal Modeling for Mobile Sleep Staging via Lightweight Random Attention

arXiv:2606.13694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mobile sleep staging serves as a foundational infrastructure for in-home sleep monitoring and closed-loop modulation. But existing sequential models such as RNNs and Transformers are computationally expensive for mobile deployment. In this paper, we propose Random Attention (RA), a lightweight temporal modeling module based on fixed random projections, which replaces learnable sequence modeling with similarity-based aggregation. RA introduces little additional parameters beyond the epoch encoder while enabling effective temporal smoothing. We further provide a theoretical interpretation via the Random Attention Prior Kernel (RAPK), which decomposes RA into a global smoothing term and a feature similarity term, offering an interpretable view of temporal sleep structure. Experiments on Sleep-EDF-20 and Sleep-EDF-78 show that RA consistently improves epoch-wise baselines by 1-3\% in accuracy and F1 score, while achieving competitive performance compared with LSTM, GRU, and Transformer models. RA also demonstrates strong generalization across different backbone encoders and improved robustness over conventional temporal smoothing methods. These results indicate that efficient sleep staging can be achieved through lightweight similarity-based temporal aggregation, making RA suitable for real-time wearable applications.