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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Wildfire pollution exposure during childhood adversely affects cognitive and neural development

Air pollution has well-documented negative cardiovascular and respiratory consequences. However, the impact of particulate matter pollution (PM2.5) on brain development is unclear. Animal studies suggest that exposure to early-life PM2.5 can cause adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, but in vivo human work has been hampered by cross-sectional designs and heavily confounded PM2.5 exposure measures. Here we use an innovative natural experimental design to isolate the effects of wildfire pollution on neurocognitive development in a large cohort of children (N>9000, 4 waves, age 9-16). Doing so, we find that greater wildfire PM2.5 exposure is robustly associated with slower brain development and shallower cognitive improvement across early adolescence. Our study underscores the urgent public health concern that wildfire PM2.5 poses for childhood development.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Lowest order Carleman linearization for low Reynolds long-term behaviour of fluid flow simulations

arXiv:2605.23380v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: It is shown that the lowest (second) order truncation of the Carleman linearization of the fluid equations (C2) recovers the late stage of the evolution, namely the steady-state solution, although to a decreasing degree of accuracy at increasing Reynolds number. This asymptotic property is first proved analytically for the decaying logistic with external forcing and then shown to hold to a significant degree of accuracy also for the more complex case of two-dimensional Kolmogorov-like fluid flow at low Reynolds numbers, below $Re \sim 10$. This time-asymptotic property may open interesting prospects for the quantum simulation of low-Reynolds steady-state fluid flows.

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

AREAL-DTA: Dynamic Tree Attention for Efficient Reinforcement Learning of Large Language Models

arXiv:2602.00482v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training for large language models (LLMs) is computationally expensive, as it generates many rollout sequences that frequently share long token prefixes. Existing RL frameworks usually process these sequences independently during policy training, i.e., repeatedly recomputing identical prefixes in both the forward and backward passes of policy gradient computation, leading to substantial inefficiencies in computation resources and memory usage. Although prefix sharing naturally induces a tree structure over rollouts, packed tree-mask approaches scale poorly in RL settings. In this paper, we introduce AReaL-DTA, which efficiently exploits prefix sharing in RL training. AReaL-DTA employs a depth-first search (DFS)-based execution strategy that dynamically traverses the rollout prefix tree during both forward and backward computation, materializing only a single root-to-leaf path at a time. To further improve scalability, AReaL-DTA incorporates a load-balanced distributed batching mechanism that dynamically constructs and processes prefix trees across multiple GPUs. On $\tau^2$-bench, AReaL-DTA improves training throughput by up to $8.31\times$ over dense training and up to $1.70\times$ over sparse training. Our code is available at https://github.com/areal-project/AReaL/tree/feat/dta.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Progress on the Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner Conjecture

arXiv:2308.15389v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given any pair of quantum channels $\Phi_1,\Phi_2$ such that at least one of them has Kraus rank one, as well as any respective Stinespring isometries $V_1,V_2$, we prove that there exists a unitary $U$ on the environment such that $\|V_1-({\bf1}\otimes U)V_2\|_\infty\leq\sqrt{2\|\Phi_1-\Phi_2\|_\diamond}$. Moreover, we provide a simple example which shows that the factor $\sqrt2$ on the right-hand side is optimal, and we conjecture that this inequality holds for every pair of channels.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Patterned matrices with random walk entries

arXiv:2512.04612v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: It is well known that the weak limit of a suitably scaled continuous-time random walk (CTRW) is the Brownian motion. We investigate the convergence of certain patterned random matrices whose entries are independent CTRWs and their time-changed versions, in a non-commutative probability framework. For the Wigner link function, the limits are free Brownian motion and its time-changed version driven by an inverse stable subordinator. For the symmetric circulant and the circulant with CTRW entries, we use their explicit eigenvalue expressions to define some empirical processes that converge weakly to a Brownian motion and a complex Brownian motion, respectively. For matrices with iid entries, and for elliptic matrices, the algebraic limits are equal in $*$-distribution to processes whose marginals are circular and elliptic variables, respectively. A random time-changed variant of these results is also established.

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

(Human) Attention Is (Still) All You Need: Human oversight makes AI-assisted social science reliable

arXiv:2606.12848v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for tasks once reserved for trained researchers, including hypothesis generation, specification choice, and drafting conclusions. We argue that the reliability of AI-assisted research depends not only on model capability, but also on how cognitive labour is structured between humans and machines. We study this problem through Human-in-the-Loop Economic Research (HLER), a decision architecture based on pre-commitment, decision sequencing, accountability, and attention allocation. In a pre-specified 2*4 factorial experiment with 280 complete research runs across four datasets, an unconstrained multi-agent baseline produced critical failures in 72% of runs. Using the same underlying model, the same agent decomposition, and identical prompts for the shared reasoning agents, HLER reduced the failure rate to 16% by imposing three architectural commitments: LLMs reason but do not execute data work, data and estimation are handled deterministically, and three human decision gates bind the workflow. Fisher's exact test rejects equality of failure rates at p

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

A solvable model for unsupervised federated learning

arXiv:2606.13045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce a theoretical framework for analyzing federated learning in a generative setting through a teacher-multiple interacting students scenario, in which each student receives a distinct realization of the data, either through a different noise corruption or by accessing a different subset, possibly of varying size. Using theoretical tools in equilibrium disordered system, we analytically show that interactions among students systematically enhance learning performance: highly noisy students require fewer samples to recover the underlying pattern, while low-noise students achieve a larger overlap with the ground-truth signal. We derive the optimal Bayesian conditions for teacher recovery as functions of the sample complexity, noise level, and interaction strength, and validate these predictions through numerical simulations. The resulting dynamics can be mapped onto equilibrium sampling in a Restricted Boltzmann Machine with a structured hidden layer, providing a principled theoretical understanding of how interactions improve distributed generative modeling.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Operadic consistency: a label-free signal for compositional reasoning failures in LLMs

Detecting LLM reasoning failures at inference time without ground-truth labels has motivated a wide range of confidence baselines, including self-consistency, semantic entropy, and P(True), built on within-question sampling and self-evaluation. Operad theory, the formalism for systems built by iterated substitution, suggests a complementary diagnostic: a model's direct answer to a compositional query should agree with the answer it produces by composing a stated decomposition of the same query. We instantiate this idea as operadic consistency (OC), a per-question signal. Across twelve instruction-tuned LLMs (4B to 671B parameters, open-weights and closed-source) on four multi-hop QA datasets, OC is strongly correlated with accuracy on every dataset (Pearson $r \in [0.86, 0.94]$, all $p \leq 0.0004$), and is the only signal we evaluate with $r \geq 0.85$ uniformly across all four datasets. Chain-of-thought self-consistency (CoT-SC; Wang et al., 2023) matches OC on HotpotQA and DROP ($r = 0.93, 0.87$) but drops to $r \approx 0.45$ on MuSiQue and StrategyQA. At the per-question level, OC contributes information beyond CoT-SC and semantic entropy on every dataset (cluster-robust $p \leq 10^{-16}$ for the OC coefficient), and the conclusion is robust to additionally controlling for constructed decomposition-aware baselines ($p \leq 10^{-13}$). The same signal yields selective-prediction improvements (accuracy at fixed coverage) over a tuned CoT-SC baseline at the equal-cost $K = 3$ budget (AUARC lifts of +0.086 to +0.096 and AUROC lifts of +0.092 to +0.164; 95% CIs exclude zero on every cell). On five frontier thinking models, where the decomposition is extracted from the model's own chain of thought, the same equal-cost comparison gives positive selective-prediction point-estimate lift on all 16 (dataset, budget, metric) cells tested, with 95% CIs excluding zero on 12 of the 16.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Robustness Verification of Recurrent Neural Networks with Abstraction Refinement

arXiv:2606.12490v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Certified local robustness verification for recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is challenging because approximation errors introduced by nonlinear relaxations can propagate through recurrent connections and accumulate over time. As a result, scalable linear bound propagation methods often become overly conservative and fail to certify inputs that are in fact robust, especially when many pre-activation intervals cross zero. We propose an abstraction-refinement framework for RNN verification that partitions such intervals to remove the dominant relaxation error: on each refined branch, ReLU becomes exact, and smooth activations such as tanh and sigmoid admit substantially tighter linear envelopes. To control the combinatorial cost of splitting in long sequences, we introduce a SHAP-guided timestep selection strategy that ranks hidden states by their contribution to the verification objective and refines only the most critical timesteps in temporal order. Experiments on CIFAR10 and MNIST stroke benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in verification success and robustness-margin tightness over abstraction-only baselines, while exposing clear runtime trade-offs between ReLU and tanh models.

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

InvDesMobility: a reliability-gated first-principles feedback framework for closed-loop materials discovery

arXiv:2606.16133v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inverse materials design starts from target functionality and searches for structures that can realize it. Its value in closed-loop discovery depends not only on prediction performance, but also on whether expensive first-principles results are independently validated, provenance-recorded, and admitted as feedback only when evidence is sufficient. This is especially important for composite properties such as carrier mobility, where a final scalar value hides intermediate quantities, fit quality, convergence history, and workflow assumptions. Here we present InvDesMobility, a reliability-gated first-principles feedback framework that integrates multi-agent automated DFT, evidence stratification, generative structure proposal, acquisition ranking, and auditable release. Using 516 2DMatPedia-derived candidates, the workflow produced 280 QC-passed materials and 573 retained carrier-direction seed channels after channel-level reliability gating. These records were split into two feedback objects: relaxed structures updated the generative model, while retained mobility channels trained the acquisition model and set validation priority. Over multiple iterations, InvDesMobility screened 2.4 x 10^6 structures, submitted 102 candidates for DFT validation, and retained 86 reliability-gated generated channels across 41 formulas. Overall, the main contribution is not a fixed list of high-mobility materials, but a transferable feedback contract that makes closed-loop inverse design both useful and auditable when learning from expensive calculated properties. All source data, retained feedback records, and workflows are available at https://github.com/DreamLufei/invDesMobility, with an accompanying evidence website at https://dreamlufei.github.io/invDesMobility/.

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

FreeSonic: Training-Free Temporal-Aware Decoupled Attention for Precise Audio Editing

arXiv:2606.15186v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-to-audio (TTA) generation has made significant strides, yet achieving precise and consistent audio editing remains a major challenge. However, existing methods struggle to balance temporal consistency with background preservation. In this paper, we propose FreeSonic, a training-free framework leveraging the state-of-the-art Rectified Flow-based TangoFlux model. FreeSonic utilizes an optimized inversion-reverse process and joint text-audio attention maps for precise target segment extraction. For content editing, a novel scheduled attention decoupling confines modifications to target regions while preserving original acoustic context. Furthermore, task-oriented noise injection enhances versatility for tasks such as audio removal and non-rigid replacement. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that FreeSonic achieves a superior balance by providing a high-fidelity and efficient solution for precise and consistent audio editing. Project and demos: https://free-sonic.github.io/

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

LoRA-Muon: Spectral Steepest Descent on the Low-Rank Manifold

arXiv:2606.12921v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) significantly reduces compute and memory costs for finetuning Deep Learning models but is often harder to tune than dense training: when using factor-wise optimizers such as AdamW, it is sensitive to initialization choices, its optimal learning rates transfer poorly across ranks, and it often fails to beat dense baselines. We derive LoRA-Muon by applying the Muon optimizer's spectral steepest-descent rule to the low-rank setting. Along with our split weight-decay rule, our main claim is that LoRA-Muon is a good low-rank proxy for full-rank Muon and Shampoo-family optimizers. Its optimal learning rates transfer across rank, width, depth, and factor-rescaling. In our compute-matched TinyShakespeare study, a rank-$2$ proxy recovers the dense best tested learning rate, and a rank-$32$ LoRA-Muon run attains lower mean validation loss than the dense baseline in the seed-averaged sweep. We further show that the Spectron optimizer depends on arbitrary factor scaling, so it would likely be a poor fit when finetuning starts from badly imbalanced factors, and that LoRA-RITE's simplified QR-coordinate core implements the same spectral update. LoRA-Muon computes that update without QR-decomposition and avoids storing second moments, making it more accelerator-friendly and memory-efficient.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Counterintuitive problems in discrete probability

arXiv:2606.07516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This manuscript contains a collection of counterintuitive problems in discrete probability, together with detailed solutions. The dataset was constructed as part of a broader research project investigating the capabilities of the latest-generation Large Language Models (LLMs) in solving discrete probability problems, in order to assess whether LLMs tend to make systematic reasoning errors associated with known cognitive biases. The problems collected here are specifically designed to challenge heuristic reasoning strategies that often lead to intuitively appealing but mathematically incorrect conclusions. The dataset combines several types of problems. Some are adapted from classical probabilistic paradoxes and cognitive-bias literature, while others originate from recreational mathematics sources or were developed by ourselves following similar principles. The primary purpose of this document is to provide a transparent and publicly accessible reference for the problems used in our experimental evaluation of language models, as well as providing detailed human-made solutions. At the same time, we believe that this collection may also prove useful for future research on probabilistic reasoning, cognitive biases, and the evaluation of reasoning capabilities in artificial intelligence systems.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

DMcloud: Macromolecular Structure Modeling Using Local Structure Fitting for Medium to Low Resolution cryo-EM maps

Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has become an essential experimental approach in structural biology for determining macromolecular structures. When the resolution of a cryo-EM map is worse than approximately 5[A], fitting known or predicted molecular models into the map becomes a common strategy for interpretation. However, accurately fitting biomolecular models into cryo-EM maps, particularly for large macromolecular complexes, remains challenging when the input structure models contain errors or are in a conformation different from that represented in the map. Here, we present DMcloud, a method for local structure fitting of proteins and nucleic acids in cryo-EM maps. Instead of forcing an entire input model into the map, DMcloud divides input structures into local regions, identifies regions that are supported by the density, removes unsupported regions, and assembles the retained regions into a final model. We benchmarked DMcloud on 176 cryo-EM maps, including intermediate and high-resolution maps that include proteins, DNAs, or RNAs. For EM maps in the 5.0-10.0 [A] and 2.5-5.0 [A] resolution ranges, DMcloud achieved average sequence modeling coverage of 0.49 and 0.70, respectively. For DNA/RNA maps, DMcloud achieved an average sequence coverage of 0.75. Across all datasets, DMcloud consistently outperformed existing methods in model accuracy, map-model correlation, and modeling coverage.

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

NeSyCat Torch: A Differentiable Tensor Implementation of Categorical Semantics for Neurosymbolic Learning

arXiv:2606.19279v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neurosymbolic semantics is fragmented: classical, fuzzy, probabilistic and neural systems each define truth by their own inductive rules. NeSyCat, extending ULLER, subsumes them under a single inductive definition of truth, parametric in a strong monad and an aggregation structure on truth-values. NeSyCat has so far lacked an account of predicates and functions learned by neural networks. We provide NeSyCat Torch as the missing link and interpret computational symbols via neural networks, implementing the framework in probabilistic programming and tensor-based backends. We use the distribution monad for reference semantics and metric evaluation, and complement it by a monad for numerically stable, differentiable training: the lazy log-tensor monad over the log-semiring. For efficient training in batches, we furthermore employ a batch monad. The axioms are the source code: written once in monad-based do-notation, monadic bind performs marginalisation, lazily pruning unneeded branches. On MNIST addition, our HaskTorch, JAX, and PyTorch implementations outperform LTN and DeepProbLog in speed and accuracy, while achieving nearly the accuracy of DeepStochLog. However, unlike DeepStochLog, we stay in a uniform framework that applies to many first-order NeSy approaches. Namely, the construction is parametric in the monad; instantiating it with, e.g., the Giry monad extends the approach to continuous probability (working out a neural representation here is left for future work).

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

Stereo Vision-Based Fall Prediction and Detection using Human Pose Estimation on the AMD Kria K26 SOM

Background and Objective: Falls among elderly people can cause serious injury and reduce quality of life. Timely prediction and detection are essential to prevent harm and support well-being. We propose a portable, low-power, battery-operated, vision-based fall prediction and detection system using HPE on an AMD Kria K26 System-on-Module (SOM). The objective is a non-intrusive, privacy-preserving system for real-time fall detection. Methods: The system uses an Intel RealSense D455 range-sensing camera connected to the K26 SOM by USB. It captures synchronized RGB and depth frames, 640 x 480 x 3 and 640 x 480 pixels, at 60 FPS. The SOM runs a three-stage pipeline with quantized YOLOX, Anchor-to-Joint (A2J), and fall-detection models. YOLOX identifies human bounding boxes from RGB frames, then discards the RGB frames to preserve privacy. A2J uses depth frames to estimate 15 joint keypoints per person. A CNN uses selected joint coordinates (x, y, z) to classify fall activity. YOLOX was trained on CrowdHuman; A2J on ITOP, MP-3DHP, UR Fall Detection, and a custom SDSU PSG dataset; and the CNN on UR Fall Detection and SDSU PSG. The design used a single-core DPU with a serial pipeline and a dual-core DPU running YOLOX and A2J with multiple threads. Results: Quantized accuracy was evaluated using IoU >= 50% for YOLOX, mAP with a 10-cm rule for A2J, and classification accuracy, (TP + TN)/(TP + TN + FP + FN), for the CNN. Accuracies were 74%, 84.13%, and 75.85%. Throughput improved from 2.5 FPS for the single-threaded pipeline to 4.5 FPS for the multi-threaded version. Conclusion: Results demonstrate the feasibility of privacy-preserving fall detection on an AMD Kria K26 edge device. On-device HPE and fall classification runs without cloud dependency, supporting elderly monitoring and assistive healthcare. Future work will improve model accuracy and speed.

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

Towards Modality-imbalanced Federated Graph Learning: A Data Synthesis-based Approach

arXiv:2606.20382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: MultiModal Federated Graph Learning (MM-FGL) offers a natural collaborative training paradigm, but its practical deployment is challenged by two granularities of modality imbalance. Client-level imbalance occurs when certain clients lack entire modalities, while node-level imbalance occurs when individual nodes exhibit missing visual or textual attributes. While several relevant studies exist, our investigation reveals that they predominantly target graph-agnostic or centralized scenarios, rendering them difficult to adapt directly. To address these challenges, we formalize modality-imbalanced MM-FGL as an implicit graph-aware latent semantic representation synthesis problem. This paradigm recovers missing modal semantics directly within the representation space, thereby maximizing alignment with the original data's semantic distribution and mitigating the high variance induced by missing modalities. To this end, we propose FedMGS (Federated Modality-aware Graph Synthesis), which integrates three core components. The availability-aware graph encoder prevents missing modalities from contaminating local structural propagation. The prototype-guided latent semantic synthesizer establishes cross-client semantic anchors for unavailable modalities. The reliability-calibrated semantic fusion mechanism regulates the impact of recovered latent representations prior to predictive readout. Extensive experiments on four tasks show that FedMGS consistently outperforms competitive baselines with gains up to 17.41% with best efficiency-performance tradeoff.

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

Optimal Scheduling in a Question-Answering Forum of Knowledge Workers

arXiv:2606.19759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As individuals turn to the Internet to find answers to questions they may have, several Question Answering (QA) forums have evolved, where users knowledgeable in certain topics can contribute their expertise to answering these requests for information. While these are currently volunteer based, we consider a future version employing knowledge workers who are experts in certain topics. In such a system, the request-answer processes forming the queuing system may utilize schedulers that assign requests in different topics to the experts in the forum, who may be able to answer them according to their expertise levels in different topics. With this model, we calculate the capacity of the system for handling the requests while keeping the system stable, and design schedulers that achieve capacity. We also investigate how collaboration between experts in answering requests can potentially increase capacity.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Causal-Privacy Audit Workflow for Synthetic and Distilled Data in Dropout Support

arXiv:2606.15940v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic and distilled student data are increasingly used to enable privacy-conscious learning analytics, yet their suitability for decision-facing institutional support remains uncertain. In dropout support, generated data must preserve not only predictive utility or distributional resemblance, but also the financial-status evidence used to guide advising, payment-plan assistance, and scholarship-related decisions. Method: This study introduces CaP-Eval, a decision-facing causal-privacy audit workflow for evaluating generated student data under a fixed estimand, timing-aware adjustment design, estimator set, and empirical privacy-governance screen. The workflow compares original, distilled, adversarial synthetic, statistical synthetic, and DPGNet privacy-oriented generated data on predictive utility, treatment-effect fidelity, robustness to alternative estimators, and local training-record proximity. Results: DPGNet and distilled data preserved the original financial-status treatment-effect structure more reliably than the adversarial and Gaussian Copula baselines. DPGNet preserved full direction and rank agreement across epsilon levels; epsilon = 10 produced the smallest non-original IPW and DML deviations, while epsilon = 1 and epsilon = 5 amplified several financial-status contrasts. Distilled data remained highly faithful but retained the strongest local training-record proximity signal. TabularGNet preserved qualitative directions with moderate attenuation, and Gaussian Copula compressed effect magnitudes. Conclusions: Predictive utility, privacy orientation, empirical disclosure signals, and causal fidelity diverged; generated student data require joint audits of direction, magnitude, overlap, and release-governance risk before decision use.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Delayed acceptance sampling with Hamiltonian proposal subchains for random field materials inference

arXiv:2606.14743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper focuses on accelerating Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling in Bayesian inverse problems in which forward model evaluations dominate the computational cost. It builds on several established ingredients previously used in related scenarios: delayed acceptance, neural network surrogate models, Hamiltonian proposals, and proposal subchains. The main framework is the delayed-acceptance Metropolis-Hastings algorithm of Christen and Fox (2005). The first-stage proposal distribution is constructed from a subchain of Hamiltonian trajectories targeting the surrogate posterior. For each fixed surrogate model, the Hamiltonian subchain and delayed-acceptance correction define a kernel invariant with respect to the exact posterior. In the present work, the surrogate is updated only during a burn-in phase, after which the production run uses a fixed surrogate model. The sampling framework is implemented in Python using parallel processes. Several chains are generated in parallel and share a single surrogate model trained during burn-in on all collected data. The forward model is treated as a black box; therefore, the application area is broad. However, the main motivation is efficient solution of geotechnical inverse problems with material properties represented by Gaussian random fields. In this study, the sampling framework is applied to a geotechnical inverse problem in which hydraulic conductivity and porosity are modeled as non-stationary Gaussian random fields approximated using truncated Karhunen-Loeve expansions. Based on a precomputation, the truncation dimensions are chosen separately for hydraulic conductivity and porosity. The forward model outputs are pore pressure values at control points and selected observation times. These are compared with in situ pore pressure measurements collected over one year during the Tunnel Sealing Experiment in an underground laboratory in Canada.

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

Large Language Models Hack Rewards, and Society

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a dominant post-training paradigm, enabling large language models (LLMs) to learn from rewards. We observe that societal regulations are structurally similar to reward functions. They define measurable outcomes, thresholds, and exceptions, while often leaving institutional intent only partially specified. We hypothesise that the RL training process may exploit these gaps and therefore ask whether models' well-known tendency to hack reward functions during RL can scale into a more consequential failure mode named societal hacking: discovering loopholes in the rules society runs on. To study this phenomenon, we introduce SocioHack, a sandbox of 72 societal environments, and find that within these environments, reward hacking naturally emerges and leads to regulatory loophole discovery. Models learn to hack the social rules and generate strategies that remain technically compliant while defeating regulatory intent, and current LLM safeguards provide only limited mitigation. Therefore, collecting in-the-wild feedback for model training requires greater caution, and we need a next-generation post-training paradigm for safely iterating LLMs in real society.=

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

LLMs Struggle to Measure What Distinguishes Students of Different Proficiency Levels: A Study of Item Discrimination in Reading Comprehension Assessment

Item discrimination is a fundamental psychometric property of educational assessment, which measures whether an item meaningfully distinguishes students with higher proficiency from students with lower proficiency. While various existing works have explored whether large language models (LLMs) can estimate item difficulty, it remains unclear whether they can capture item discrimination. In this work, we evaluate 42 proprietary and open-weight LLMs in zero-shot settings using two complementary approaches: direct discrimination prediction, where models explicitly estimate an item's discrimination value from its content, and response-based Classical Test Theory (CTT) calibration, where LLM answers are treated as synthetic student responses to compute discrimination scores. Our results show that direct prediction yields weak alignment with human-calibrated discrimination: the best-performing model reaches only a Spearman correlation of 0.152. Response-based CTT calibration provides a stronger but still limited signal, with the all-persona synthetic respondent pool reaching a Spearman correlation of 0.241. These findings highlight item discrimination as an open challenge for LLM-based psychometric evaluation: current LLMs contain non-random discrimination-relevant signal, but they do not yet reliably capture how assessment items distinguish human students.

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.CV) 2026-06-16

CheXGenBench: A Unified Benchmark For Fidelity, Privacy and Utility of Synthetic Chest Radiographs

Structured benchmarks have advanced text-conditional image generation for real-world imagery, however, no such benchmark exists for synthetic radiograph generation. Despite being a highly active area of research, existing studies continue adopting inconsistent evaluation protocols and lack a unified assessment of the three most critical criteria: generative fidelity, privacy risk, and downstream utility. To address these limitations, we introduce CheXGenBench, the first unified evaluation framework for synthetic chest radiograph generation that simultaneously assesses fidelity, privacy risks, and downstream utility across frontier text-to-image (T2I) generative models. Our evaluation protocol, comprising over 20 quantitative metrics, covers 11 leading T2I architectures with plug-and-play integration for newer models. Through a rigorous and fair evaluation protocol, we establish comprehensive baseline state-of-the-art (SoTA) performances across all dimensions to guide future research. Furthermore, our results uncover several limitations of current generative models, which include first, even SoTA models struggle with long-tailed medical distributions; second, models pose high privacy risks regardless of fidelity quality; and third, while synthetic data already benefits downstream classification, it is of limited utility for downstream multimodal tasks. Drawing from these results, we propose concrete research directions to advance the field. The code is available at https://github.com/Raman1121/CheXGenBench