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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Integral Formulation of QENDy for Robust Nonlinear System Identification

arXiv:2606.11629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This manuscript proposes an integral formulation of the newly defined quadratic embedding method for identifying nonlinear systems (QENDy). In the original algorithm, trajectory data points along with their time derivatives are used. Methods for calculating time derivatives make the algorithm sensitive to noise. Our integral formulation does not use the time derivatives. This results in a more robust method to learn the dynamics.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

Generalisable tissue-wide molecular reconstruction from histology

Spatial transcriptomics technologies measure gene expression within intact tissues but remain difficult to scale across large tissue sections and patient cohorts. Consequently, many studies rely on tissue microarrays (TMAs) or sparse spatial profiling designs, where molecular measurements are available for only limited tissue regions and are often generated using heterogeneous gene panels. Existing H&E to spatial gene expression prediction methods remain challenged by sparse molecular measurements, partially overlapping gene panels and tissue-wide reconstruction across heterogeneous spatial datasets. Here, we present GHIST+, a framework for tissue-wide reconstruction of single-cell molecular states from H&E histology. GHIST+ integrates cellular morphology, local tissue context and shared tissue representations to extend sparse molecular measurements into tissue-wide molecular maps across heterogeneous spatial datasets. Across multiple cancer types and GTEx breast tissues, GHIST+ reconstructs biologically meaningful tissue-wide molecular organisation from sparse TMA-derived measurements while preserving spatial tissue structure, cell-type organisation and age-associated tissue states across cancer and non-cancer settings. GHIST+ establishes a scalable framework for transforming sparse spatial profiling experiments into tissue-wide molecular maps, enabling cohort-scale molecular reconstruction from routine histology under heterogeneous spatial transcriptomic settings.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

ReCal: Reward Calibration for RL-based LLM Routing

arXiv:2606.12479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) routing has emerged as an effective paradigm for leveraging the complementary strengths of multiple LLMs through dynamic model and reasoning-strategy selection. Recent reinforcement learning (RL)-based routing methods further improve routing quality by optimizing routing policies from interaction feedback. However, they still struggle to provide informative and comparable learning signals under heterogeneous tasks with varying difficulty. In practice, multiple objectives (e.g., correctness, format behavior) are aggregated into a single scalar reward, leading to ambiguous credit assignment and conflicting optimization signals. Moreover, reward signals exhibit significant variability across instances, where some instances produce higher or more variable rewards, introducing optimization bias that favors trivial samples over informative ones. To address these issues, we propose ReCal, a \underline{Re}ward \underline{Cal}ibration framework for RL-based LLM routing. We first introduce a hierarchical reward decomposition mechanism with component-wise advantage estimation. We further propose a distribution-aware optimization strategy that calibrates optimization variability through variance-aware reweighting and per-dataset normalization. Experiments on seven datasets demonstrate that ReCal consistently improves routing performance, and training stability over baselines. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ReCal.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Bidirectional associations between cannabis use, oddball performance, and P3 event-related potential

Importance: Cannabis use remains prevalent in youth despite concerns regarding its potential impact on cognitive function. Unraveling whether the association between cannabis use and cognition is partially due to preexisting differences or primarily related to use is vital to understanding underlying mechanisms. Objective: To estimate the longitudinal association between cannabis initiation and cognitive trajectories, indexed by task performance and P3 event-related potential (ERP), and to estimate whether baseline cognition is associated with cannabis initiation. Design: Data were analyzed from the ongoing longitudinal Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) cohort, which was followed up approximately every 2-5 years from 2004 to 2025. Setting: 6 sites across the United States. Participants: Adolescent and young adult offspring of past COGA participants and control families who reported on their cannabis use and who had Visual Oddball (VOP) performance and P3 ERP data (N=4814; 52.4% female, 68.4% white) were grouped based on the timing of cognitive data collection relative to cannabis initiation into Pre-onset (n=2,449; [&ge;]1 assessment) and Post-onset (n=998; [&ge;]3 assessments) subsamples. Main Outcomes and Measures: VOP measures include performance accuracy (%), reaction times (ms), and P3 amplitude (V) and latency (ms) during target trials. Cannabis measures included lifetime use of cannabis (i.e., ever used) and age at first use. Results: High P3 amplitude, and prolonged P3 latency and reaction time were associated with a reduced hazard of cannabis initiation (All Hazards Ratio, [H.R.s]< 0.91, p's

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

MyPCBench: A Benchmark for Personally Intelligent Computer-Use Agents

Current benchmarks for computer-use agents evaluate models in impersonal environments. This leaves a gap between evaluation and deployment where personal assistants are expected to work across a user's whole digital life, including their context, historical data, and logged-in accounts. This gap is widest on web tasks, where live web evaluations cannot exercise sites that require logging in or personal information, the kind of site a real personal assistant has to drive. We introduce MyPCBench, which tests computer-use agents as personal assistants on a Linux desktop populated with 17 simulated real-world web applications and a full desktop stack, all seeded for one canonical persona, Michael Scott from The Office. We define 184 tasks in this environment, each inspired by a real request drawn from the OpenClaw community, and benchmark six closed and open-weight models with a uniform computer+bash tool surface. We find that the best model, Claude Opus 4.6, fully solves 55.4\% of the tasks, the only model above 50\%. Model failures cluster on tasks that span many applications and on long trajectories, where personalization stresses an assistant the most. We release the environment, task set, and agent harness at https://mypcbench.com.

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

NightFeats @ MMU-RAGent NeurIPS 2025: A Context-Optimized Multi-Agent RAG System for the Text-to-Text Track

We present NightFeats, a structured multi-agent retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system submitted to the MMU-RAGent competition at NeurIPS 2025, where it was awarded Best Dynamic Evaluation in the text-to-text track. Rather than targeting benchmark maximization, this work proposes a principled pipeline that decomposes knowledge synthesis into three coordinated phases: retrieval, curation, and composition, each governed by explicit intermediate representations and handoff contracts. Inspired by Agentic Context Engineering (ACE), the system introduces temporal-semantic reranking, bounded contradiction reconciliation, and citation-preserving composition as core architectural primitives. Competition results show that NightFeats surpasses proprietary baselines including Claude-SonnetV2 and Nova-Pro on LLM-as-a-Judge and Human Likert evaluations, confirming that architectural transparency and verifiable evidence grounding are better aligned with human preferences than systems optimizing narrowly for automatic similarity metrics.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Detecting basis-dependent hardware errors through spatio-temporal quantum steering

arXiv:2606.16451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatio-temporal quantum steering provides a framework for benchmarking the nonclassicality of general quantum state transfer processes. A central diagnostic is the no-signaling-in-time (NSIT) condition, whose violation can indicate basis-dependent hardware errors. However, finite measurement statistics may also yield apparent violations, thereby obscuring the detection of basis-dependent hardware errors. To address this, we construct a statistical hypothesis test under the null hypothesis that NSIT violations arise solely from statistical fluctuations. Combining the statistical properties of NSIT violation under the null hypothesis with Chebyshev's inequality, we obtain a distribution-free upper bound on the $p$-value without parametric assumptions. We apply this method to two examples. For a single-qubit state-transfer experiment on a superconducting processor, we observe several instances that the NSIT violation is observed and the null hypothesis is simultaneously rejected by a small $p$-value, providing statistical evidence of basis-dependent hardware errors. For a seven-qubit Hayden-Preskill teleportation protocol on IonQ devices, the null hypothesis is also rejected even when the average fidelity exceeds the classical threshold, while the associated nonclassicality measure vanishes. Our results highlight the necessity of statistical hypothesis testing for detecting basis-dependent errors in near-term quantum devices.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Stream3D: Sequential Multi-View 3D Generation via Evidential Memory

View-conditioned 3D generators such as SAM 3D, TRELLIS, and Hunyuan3D produce high-quality object reconstructions from a single view, but real-world visual observation often arrives as long monocular streams. Naively applying these generators to each streaming frame independently leads to severe temporal inconsistency in the generated results. To address this problem, we propose Stream3D, the first training-free streaming mechanism that turns a frozen view-conditioned 3D generator into a streaming generator with constant cross-chunk memory. Stream3D achieves this by maintaining a compact evidential memory, which selectively caches the most informative historical frames based on a proposed evidence score mechanism. As the stream progresses, the memory dynamically updates to retain a fixed number of informative frames, preventing the memory footprint from growing linearly with sequence length. This also prevents degradation over long sequences and keeps the underlying generator completely unchanged without retraining, architectural modifications, or auxiliary losses. Evaluated on both realistic and synthetic streaming benchmarks, Stream3D outperforms latent-transport baselines, including KV-cache reuse and flow-based feature editing, across both photometric and geometric metrics. More details can be found at: https://stream-3d.github.io/stream3d.github.io/.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ERQA-Plus: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Reasoning in Embodied AI

Generalist embodied agents require more than object recognition: they must reason about spatial relations, actions, procedures, human intentions, environmental constraints, and commonsense consequences from situated visual observations. Yet existing visual and embodied question answering benchmarks often provide limited control over the reasoning dependencies being tested, making it difficult to distinguish grounded embodied reasoning from shortcut-driven visual or linguistic pattern matching. We present ERQA-Plus, a diagnostic benchmark for reasoning in embodied AI. ERQA-Plus contains 1,766 question-answer instances grounded in 711 robot-centric images and organized according to a structured taxonomy spanning perceptual, action-centric, social-interaction, navigation-environmental, and contextual commonsense reasoning. The dataset is constructed using a multi-stage generation and validation pipeline that combines taxonomy-guided question generation, automatic quality judging, iterative revision, and human assessment to improve visual grounding, answer validity, and reasoning quality. We benchmark representative general-purpose vision-language models and embodied models, including LLaVA-NeXT-8B, Prismatic-7B, MiniCPM-V-4.5-8B, Qwen3-VL, RoboRefer-8B, and RoboBrain2.5-8B. Although the strongest model, Qwen3-VL-32B, achieves 83.4% overall accuracy and 61.4 SBERT score, category-level results reveal persistent weaknesses in spatial reasoning, procedural reasoning, event prediction, and intention inference. ERQA-Plus therefore provides a fine-grained evaluation framework for measuring not only whether embodied agents answer correctly, but also which forms of embodied reasoning they can and cannot perform reliably. The dataset is available https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingdas/erqa-plus and the project page at https://github.com/LUNAProject22/erqa-plus.

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

Continuous Audio Thinking for Large Audio Language Models

Large audio language models (LALMs) have shown impressive capabilities on diverse audio understanding tasks, ranging from speech transcription to music analysis. However, because LALMs are typically trained to produce text-aligned responses, their hidden states are progressively shaped for text generation rather than for preserving acoustic information. As a result, the diverse acoustic content that audio carries, such as phonetic detail, prosody, sound events, affect, and pitch, is lost along the way and difficult to leverage in the response. We introduce Continuous Audio Thinking (CoAT), a framework that equips audio language models with a continuous latent workspace for organizing acoustic information prior to response generation, grounded by distillation from audio experts. Within the thinking space, the model can utilize the rich acoustic information provided by expert distillation when generating its response. Furthermore, the proposed continuous thinking block can be processed in a single prefill, so CoAT does not require additional autoregressive decoding cost over the baseline. Across three LALMs, Qwen2-Audio, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, and Audio Flamingo~3, performance gains on a broad benchmark suite spanning audio reasoning, audio understanding, music classification, speech emotion, and speech transcription demonstrate the effectiveness of CoAT. Further analysis confirms that the auxiliary supervision propagates from the thinking positions to the model's textual responses.

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

Phys-JEPA: Physics-Informed Latent World Models for Multivariate Time-Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.16076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multivariate forecasting in physical systems requires models that predict coupled temporal variables while preserving meaningful state evolution. Deep forecasters can fit temporal correlations, and physics-informed models can regularize predictions with scientific constraints, but these directions are often connected only at the decoded-output level. As a result, the hidden predictive state that generates future trajectories may remain statistically useful but physically unstructured. We introduce Phys-JEPA, a physics-informed joint-embedding predictive architecture for multivariate time-series forecasting. Phys-JEPA learns a latent world model in which predictive states are decomposed into physical and residual components, and physical consistency is imposed directly on latent states and latent transitions rather than only on decoded forecasts. This formulation uses known physical variables to organize the representation space while retaining residual capacity for unresolved dynamics. On Jena Climate 2009–2016, Phys-JEPA reduces aggregate MSE from 0.12482 to 0.12273 and temperature MSE from 0.01892 to 0.01831 at H=24. On Traffic, full Phys-JEPA improves aggregate MSE over the supervised baseline across all tested horizons, reducing H=192 MSE from 0.800784 to 0.773873. On Electricity, the best variant depends on horizon: static latent consistency is strongest at H=24 and H=48, while full Phys-JEPA gives the best aggregate and target-variable MSE at H=192. These initial results suggest that moving physics-informed learning from output space to latent predictive state space is a promising direction for interpretable temporal world models.

12.
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.=

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

Maximum Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Mean-Field Games with Average Reward

arXiv:2606.16759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study inverse reinforcement learning for discrete-time, infinite-horizon mean-field games (MFGs) under an average-reward criterion. Expert demonstrations are assumed to arise from a stationary mean-field equilibrium under an unknown reward, and the goal is to recover a policy explaining the observed behaviour via the maximum causal entropy principle. We formulate the inverse problem by enforcing consistency with the expert mean-field term and long-run feature expectations, treating two reward classes within a unified occupation-measure framework. For finite-dimensional linear rewards, we give a convex dual reformulation with an explicit log-partition objective, and prove smoothness and curvature properties justifying constant-step-size gradient descent. For infinite-dimensional RKHS rewards, we develop a Lagrangian relaxation whose inner-maximising policy is characterised by a soft Bellman equation. The main obstacle is the absence of a discount-factor contraction. We resolve this by introducing a minorisation-based sub-stochastic kernel that yields a strict contraction of the soft Bellman operator. We establish Fréchet differentiability and Lipschitz smoothness of the log-likelihood score, leading to a gradient ascent algorithm with convergence guarantees. Two numerical examples, a malware-spread MFG and an RKHS-based consumer-choice model, show that the recovered policies closely match expert behaviour.

14.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Associations between hematologic dynamics during pregnancy and obstetric complications: A retrospective observational study

by Veronica Tozzo, Rachel Petherbridge, Kaitlyn James, Sarah Hsu, Deepti Pant, Chloe Michalopoulos, Brody H. Foy, Tanayott Thaweethai, Christopher Mow, Jacqueline Maya, Carolina Batlle Camero, Lydia Shook, Kathryn J. Gray, Logan Mauney, John M. Higgins, Camille E. Powe Background Pregnancy alters hematologic state as measured by complete blood count (CBC), but the longitudinal changes in CBC indices that define healthy pregnancies are not well established. In a large cohort based at an academic health system in the United States, we aimed to define reference intervals and typical longitudinal changes in CBC indices during pregnancy. We then tested for associations between extreme CBC values for gestational age or extreme longitudinal changes in CBC indices and obstetric complications. Methods and findings We studied nine CBC indices in individuals with singleton pregnancies who delivered after 30 weeks’ gestation and presented for prenatal care prior to 20 weeks. The electronic health record (EHR)-based Maternal Health Cohort (Massachusetts General Hospital; 1998–2016) formed our discovery cohort of 45,992 pregnancies, 18% of which had relevant complications. We developed a validation cohort of 48,868, 27% with complications from EHR data in the Mass General Brigham healthcare system from 2016 to 2024. In pregnancies without complications in the discovery cohort, we derived gestational-age-specific reference intervals (2.5th–97.5th percentile) and established typical intra-pregnancy longitudinal changes. In the validation cohort, we then tested CBC values outside of the 26–29 weeks’ gestation reference interval and CBC rare changes (uncommon changes in magnitude and direction) between 7–14 and 26–29 weeks’ gestation for association with a composite outcome (hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, small for gestational age birthweight, preterm birth) and its individual components using generalized estimating equations. Derived reference intervals differed from those in the literature for mean red cell volume, mean red cell hemoglobin, red cell count, and mean red cell hemoglobin concentration; reference intervals for other indices were similar to those previously published. In validation, hematocrit, hemoglobin, and red cell count values above their gestational-age specific reference intervals were associated with increased risk of the composite obstetric outcome: odds ratios (ORs) of 1.4 (95% CI [1.2, 1.5] p 

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Hantavirus Disease in Uruguay: Trends and Mortality Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Introduction: Hantavirus disease is an emerging and potentially severe zoonosis of global distribution. In Uruguay, it is transmitted by rodents inhabiting peridomestic, suburban, and rural areas. Global incidence is estimated at 150,000 to 200,000 cases per year, with up to 300 annual cases in the Americas. Since 1997, Uruguay's Ministry of Public Health (MPH) has monitored Hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HCPS), the most common clinical presentation in the region. By 2019, a total of 271 cases had been identified in the country, with an estimated mortality rate of nearly 50%. Objectives: To describe the clinical, epidemiological, and occupational characteristics of patients with Hantavirus disease in Uruguay during the pre-pandemic (2018-2019) and pandemic (2020-2021) periods. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional, observational study was conducted, including all serologically confirmed cases of Hantavirus infection reported to the MPH between 2018 and 2021. Clinical and demographic data were extracted from the mandatory reporting form for zoonotic diseases. Incidence and case fatality rates were calculated, and factors associated with fatal outcomes were analyzed. Results: A total of 58 confirmed cases were identified between 2018 and 2021. Most patients were male (62%), with a mean age of 36.5 years (SD 16). A decline in incidence was observed during 2020-2021, with no significant change in case fatality. Direct rodent exposure was the most frequently associated risk factor. Montevideo and Canelones were the most affected departments. Renal and pulmonary involvement were significantly associated with mortality. Conclusion: Hantavirus remains a relevant public health concern in Uruguay. Although a decrease in incidence was observed during the COVID-19 pandemic years, case fatality rates remained high. The findings underscore the need for sustained surveillance and early recognition, particularly in urbanizing regions.

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

Simple Domain Generalization Methods are Strong Baselines for Open Domain Generalization

In real-world applications, a machine learning model is required to handle an open-set recognition (OSR), where unknown classes appear during the inference, in addition to a domain shift, where the data distribution differs between the training and inference phases. Domain generalization (DG) aims to handle the domain shift situation where the target domain of the inference phase is inaccessible during the model training. Open domain generalization (ODG) considers DG and OSR. Domain-augmented meta-learning (DAML) is a method targeting ODG; however, it has a complicated learning process. By contrast, although various DG methods have been proposed, they have not been evaluated in ODG situations. In this study, we comprehensively evaluate the existing DG methods in ODG and show that the two simple DG methods, CORrelation ALignment (CORAL) and maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), are competitive with DAML in several cases. In addition, we propose simple extensions of CORAL and MMD by introducing the techniques used in DAML, such as ensemble learning and Dirichlet mixup data augmentation. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that the extended CORAL and MMD can perform comparably to DAML with lower computational costs. This suggests that the simple DG methods and their simple extensions are strong baselines for ODG.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Tumour evolution as ground truth for cancer whole-genome sequencing

Cancer genomes are shaped by evolutionary processes that couple mutagenesis, clonal selection, chromosomal instability, spatial growth and treatment response into structured genomic patterns, yet current benchmarking strategies largely ignore this evolutionary dependency. Here, we present SCOUT, a large-scale synthetic whole-genome sequencing resource of over 200 samples, designed for systematic benchmarking of tumour genomic analysis and evolutionary inference under controlled evolutionary ground truth. Unlike conventional task-specific simulations, SCOUT models tumour evolution as a latent generative process that simultaneously shapes mutations, copy-number alterations, variant allele frequencies, mutational signatures and clonal architectures. SCOUT recapitulates key features of solid and haematological malignancies, including driver mutations, chromosomal instability, intratumour heterogeneity, spatial sampling and treatment-associated evolutionary dynamics in tumour and matched-normal longitudinal and multi-region sequencing designs. Using SCOUT, we benchmarked widely used methods for somatic variant detection, copy-number analysis, mutational signature inference and tumour evolutionary reconstruction. Across analytical tasks, performance deteriorated in low-purity, highly subclonal and structurally complex tumours, while spatial sampling bias and hypermutation generated spurious evolutionary signals that confounded tumour interpretation across multiple inference layers. Evolutionary simulations further distinguished lineage-restricted genetic bottlenecks from multi-lineage resistance dynamics associated with tumour plasticity. Tumour purity consistently exerted a stronger effect on inference accuracy than sequencing depth. Together, our results establish evolutionary ground truth as a prerequisite for reproducible benchmarking and biologically interpretable analysis of cancer whole-genome sequencing data.

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

Fractured Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining. Similarly, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and its extension, Long CoT, improve accuracy by generating rich intermediate reasoning trajectories, but these approaches incur substantial token costs that impede their deployment in latency-sensitive settings. In this work, we first show that truncated CoT, which stops reasoning before completion and directly generates the final answer, often matches the full CoT sampling while using dramatically fewer tokens. Building on this insight, we introduce Fractured Sampling, a unified inference-time strategy that interpolates between full CoT and solution-only sampling along three orthogonal axes: (1) the number of reasoning trajectories, (2) the number of final solutions per trajectory, and (3) the depth at which reasoning traces are truncated. Through extensive experiments on five diverse reasoning benchmarks and several model scales, we demonstrate that Fractured Sampling consistently achieves superior accuracy-cost trade-offs, yielding steep log-linear scaling gains in Pass@k versus token budget. Our analysis reveals how to allocate computation across these dimensions to maximize performance, paving the way for more efficient and scalable LLM reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/BaohaoLiao/frac-cot.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Exploring Starts Are Not Enough: Counterexamples and a Fix for Monte Carlo Exploring Starts

arXiv:2606.15247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The asymptotic behaviour of Monte Carlo Exploring Starts (MCES) is a long-standing open question in reinforcement learning, even in the tabular setting. We investigated the convergence properties of tabular MCES by constructing examples in which the algorithm converges to suboptimal solutions. This paper presents new counterexamples for both initial-visit and first-visit MCES and gives a convergence-restoring modification for the initial-visit case. We show that stable suboptimal solutions may exist for initial-visit MCES with sample-average updates even when greedy actions are updated more often than non-greedy actions on average. However, by scaling learning rates inversely to update frequencies on a state-by-state basis, convergence to optimality is guaranteed. Unlike previous uniformisation methods, this modification is applicable to large-scale problems that require approximating the estimated value function. We then extend the example to show that sample-average first-visit MCES may also converge to suboptimal solutions. This largely settles a fundamental open problem and shows that exploring starts alone do not guarantee convergence to optimality. More broadly, these results highlight that convergence depends critically on the relative size and frequency of updates applied to different actions, making the choice of learning rates and the balance between exploration and exploitation central to the analysis of MCES and the implementation of scalable Monte Carlo control methods.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Probing Semantic Alignment, Lexical Invariance, and Syntactic Influence in LLM Metaphor Processing

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on metaphor detection and interpretation tasks, yet it remains unclear what such behavioral success reveals about metaphor processing. We present a diagnostic analysis that examines the limits of behavioral evidence by probing three complementary dimensions: semantic attribute alignment, lexical invariance, and syntactic sensitivity. Using geometric probing, we assess whether model-generated interpretations align with reference semantic attributes; through context-varying substitution, we analyze the stability of lexical associations between metaphorical and literal expressions; and via controlled syntactic perturbations, we examine sensitivity in metaphor detection. Our analysis reveals that LLM-generated interpretations can exhibit semantic drift relative to reference attributes; stable lexical anchors persist across contextual conditions, potentially supporting conventional metaphors while biasing novel metaphors requiring contextual integration; and detection performance is sensitive to syntactic irregularities. These findings suggest that strong behavioral performance may reflect heterogeneous underlying signals, highlighting the need for caution when interpreting metaphor benchmarks as evidence of robust, integrated semantic understanding.

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

Dissecting model behavior through agent trajectories

arXiv:2606.17454v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agent performance is not just a modeling problem, it is fundamentally a systems problem. The advanced capabilities of models are realized through agent harnesses. Therefore, a gap between model assumptions and harness behavior can easily prevent the model's full capabilities from translating into agent performance. We formalize this as the `intent-execution' gap: the mismatch between what the model intends and what the harness executes, and vice versa. We argue that minimizing this intent-execution gap is as important as other aspects of harness design such as tools and execution loops. To illustrate the impact of this harness-model alignment, we develop a simple and customizable harness called `Simple Strands Agent' (SSA). SSA aims to find the bulk of common patterns which generalize across different model families (such as Claude, Gemini, GPT, Grok, Qwen), as well as a small number of model-specific preferences. We make two contributions: (i) we $reproduce or improve on the pass@1$ performance reported by diverse model-provider families on popular agentic benchmarks (SWE-Pro, SWE-Verified and Terminal-Bench-2), and (ii) building on an $analysis of 138k trajectories generated by SSA$, we look beyond the $\texttt{pass@1}$ numbers which tend to be relatively even across frontier models. By representing agent trajectories in code state-spaces, we observe model-level differences in problem-solving behavior. Finer-grained metrics such as edit frequency, testing activity, and phase-transitions reveal how individual models allocate effort across different stages of autonomous problem solving.

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

Deep Temporal Modeling and Ensemble Fusion for Multimodal Emotion Recognition from Physiological Signals

Physiological stress and emotion recognition are important for health monitoring and affective computing. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of deep learning models such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN), and Transformer on the WESAD dataset for multimodal affect recognition using wrist and chest sensor signals. We perform ablation studies to assess the individual contributions of each modality by training models on wrist-only and chest-only inputs. In addition, we implement a late-fusion ensemble strategy that combines predictions from all three architectures trained on multimodal input. We also employ early fusion at the sensor level by concatenating wrist and chest signals before feeding them into each model. Our results show that Transformer models consistently achieve the highest accuracy in multimodal settings, while TCN models perform best in the wrist-only configuration. The ensemble method yields the highest overall accuracy (98.91 +/- 0.13%) and macro-F1 score (98.56 +/- 0.17%). These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of sensor fusion and ensemble-based fusion in developing robust systems for physiological emotion recognition.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Priors Persist Through Suppression: A Stroop Paradigm for Lexical Override

作者:

Glossaries, technical specifications, and system prompts routinely ask language models to use familiar words in unfamiliar ways. When this works, the local rule does not install the new meaning on top of the old one; the pretrained prior keeps operating underneath, and its strength still shows through. We test this with a Stroop-style paradigm: a remapping rule (doctor means forest) pitted against the query word's lexical-prior distractor (hospital), with matched neutral controls. Across 11 open-weight models spanning four families and 1B-9B parameters, lexical-prior strength predicts interference even after item-level controls for answer prior, frequency, tokenization, and prompt wording. Activation patching on five aligned models locates a source-position triplet (definition subject, definition target, query word) that nearly fully recovers the conflict effect (aggregate $R \in [0.92, 1.06]$); a definition-target swap shows the triplet performs binding rather than identity matching. Dissociation experiments isolate target preservation as the binding-specific signature: distractor suppression occurs under matched, swap, and item-mismatched conditions alike, whereas target logit collapse occurs only when the definition-target position is corrupted. Behavior and mechanism converge on the same channel: the prior's strength both predicts which overrides fail and marks where the causal repair lands.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

VISA: VLM-Guided Instance Semantic Auditing for 3D Occupancy World Models

Semantic 3D occupancy provides a voxelized world state for autonomous driving and robot decision making, but object and rare-class errors can affect free-space interpretation, collision checking, and temporal state propagation. We show that a common VLM strategy, aligning 3D voxel or object features with crop-caption embeddings, improves text-space similarity without reliably improving closed-set occupancy mIoU. Motivated by this mismatch, we propose VISA, a training-time semantic auditing approach for existing occupancy world models. VISA queries an offline VLM on a representative crop of each physical object instance, obtains a structured audit with class hypotheses, plausible confusions, reliability, attributes, and evidence, and propagates it along the object track. The audit is grounded to matched 3D object voxels and distilled into semantic logits through reliability-weighted taxonomy, attribute-factor, and scene-level audit graph losses, while inference remains unchanged and requires no VLM. On nuScenes, averaged across three runs, VISA improves OccWorld from 19.06 to 20.05 mIoU and GaussianWorld from 21.36 to 21.91 mIoU; on GaussianWorld, object mIoU improves from 18.18 to 19.16 and rare-class mIoU from 15.60 to 16.79. These results suggest that VLMs are better suited to closed-set occupancy as reliability-aware semantic auditors than as generic caption-embedding targets.

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

Creative Collision: Directorial Persona Steering and Competition in Large Language Models

Activation steering has emerged as a powerful tool for shaping the behaviour of large language models at inference time, yet most prior work injects a single semantic direction into the residual stream. We study the richer setting in which two semantically opposing steering vectors are superimposed – a regime we call Creative Collision. Concretely, we construct directorial persona vectors for Steven Spielberg (optimistic, redemptive moral valence) and Martin Scorsese (dark, morally ambiguous) via mean-difference activation contrast on curated screenplay-derived corpora, then interpolate between them with a scalar mixing parameter $\alpha \in [0,1]$ and a steering coefficient $\lambda$. Across five evaluation axes – moral valence, generation coherence, surface style, directional dominance, and vector geometry – three principal findings emerge: (i)~Spielberg's representational signature exhibits robust directional dominance, suppressing Scorsese's moral influence across almost the entire interpolation range; (ii)~intermediate collision points paradoxically improve generation coherence relative to pure single-director steering at high $\lambda$; and (iii)~both personas localise maximally to layer~28 of a 40-layer decoder-only transformer, revealing a shared moral-tone substrate. These results illuminate the geometry of competing semantic directions in transformer residual streams and have direct implications for controllable creative generation and value-aligned narrative synthesis.