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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Stability of Khintchine-type inequalities via log-monotonicity

arXiv:2606.19313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate Khintchine-type inequalities for the weighted sums $S=\sum_ka_kX_k$ of independent copies of a symmetric random variable $X$. We show how log-monotonicity of the sequence $r_k(X)=k! \mathbb{E}[X^{2k}]/(2k)!$ implies sharp comparisons between the $L_p$ and $L_2$ norms of $S$ for every even integer $p\geq 2$, extending classic Khintchine-type inequalities and yielding new results in the log-convex setting. We also investigate the stability of our inequalities. Our first stability inequality sharpens the classic inequality by a deviation of the coefficient vector from the coordinate extremizers, while the second quantifies deviation from the Gaussian limit. Our results recover recent stability inequalities for random signs and apply to a broad class of distributions, including type-$\mathscr{L}$ random variables, ultra sub-Gaussian random variables and Gaussian mixtures.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Uncertainty Decomposition for Clarification Seeking in LLM Agents

Recent position papers argue that the classical aleatoric/epistemic uncertainty framework is insufficient for interactive large language model (LLM) agents and call for underspecification-aware, decomposed, and communicable uncertainty representations that can unlock new agent capabilities such as proactive clarification seeking and shared mental-model building. Practical deployment constraints – black-box APIs, interactive latency budgets, and the absence of labeled trajectories – rule out logprob-based, multi-sampling, and training-based methods, leaving prompt-based estimation as the most viable family for surfacing such signals at deployment time. We answer this call with a simple prompt-based decomposition that separates action confidence from request uncertainty (u), enabling the agent to ask for clarification when the task specification is ambiguous. To evaluate it, we introduce two clarification-augmented benchmarks (WebShop-Clarification and ALFWorld-Clarification) in which 50% of tasks are deliberately underspecified, and systematically compare the proposed decomposition against ReAct+UE and Uncertainty-Aware Memory (UAM) across five LLM backbones (GPT-5.1, DeepSeek-v3.2-exp, GLM-4.7, Qwen3.5-35B, GPT-OSS-120B) on these variants together with the standard WebShop, ALFWorld, and REAL benchmarks for fault detection. Averaged across the five backbones, the proposed decomposition improves clarification F1 on ALFWorld-Clarification by 73% over ReAct+UE and by 36% over UAM, and leads clarification F1 on every backbone on WebShop-Clarification and on four of five backbones on ALFWorld-Clarification, indicating that the gains generalize beyond a single LLM.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

Evaluating cell type annotations in single-cell omics in the absence of ground truth

Accurate cell type annotation is essential for single-cell transcriptomics, directly shaping downstream analyses and biological interpretations. Yet, objective evaluation of annotation quality remains a major challenge. Here, we argue that a cell type or cell state label has practical utility only if it captures a molecular pattern that is reproducible across biological replicates. Based on this principle, we introduce inter-sample consistency (ISC), a quantitative framework to assess annotation quality in single-cell RNA-seq datasets. Unlike existing cluster validation approaches, ISC distinguishes annotations that generalize across samples and individuals from those driven by technical or unwanted variation, thereby providing principled criteria for annotation quality and transferability. When applied to published single-cell atlases, ISC reveals widespread reproducibility gaps and provides actionable guidance for repairing inconsistent annotations. Notably, ISC enables benchmarking of automated cell type annotation tools even when ground-truth labels are unavailable, providing interpretable metrics to guide their development and evaluation. Implemented as the scTypeEval Bioconductor package, this framework offers a broadly applicable resource for evaluating and improving cell type annotations in single-cell RNA-seq experiments.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Libra: Efficient Resource Management for Agentic RL Post-Training

arXiv:2606.03077v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a standard post-training paradigm for shaping large language models (LLMs) into capable agents. In agentic RL, the rollout stage generates trajectories while invoking tools, producing long-tailed and non-stationary workloads that expose two fundamental challenges in resource management. First, due to the long-tail distribution, a small fraction of trajectories dominates rollout makespan. Second, rollout and training are subject to cross-stage imbalance, as they exhibit strong asymmetry in compute patterns, memory demands, and sensitivity to sequence length. Compounding this asymmetry, the sequence length distribution drifts continuously as the policy evolves, rendering any static resource split progressively suboptimal. We present Libra, a resource management system to address both challenges via two core mechanisms. The first is a global resource planner that jointly optimizes GPU allocation across rollout and training clusters. It leverages an elastic hybrid pool to enable lightweight, non-blocking worker reallocation between stages. The second is a causality-driven multi-level feedback queue (C-MLFQ) scheduler, which routes requests to heterogeneous rollout buckets based on causal signals derived from tool-return outcomes, rather than relying on fragile length predictions. Evaluated on 48 A800 GPUs, Libra achieves up to 3.0x higher throughput and converges up to 2.5x faster in reward compared to the baselines.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quasi-local Edge Mode in XXX Spin Chain/Circuit with Interaction Boundary Defect

arXiv:2603.17835v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the Heisenberg spin-1/2 model on a semi-infinite chain - or, equivalently, a trotterized unitary SU(2) symmetric six-vertex quantum circuit - with a boundary defect where the interaction between the two spins nearest the edge differs from that in the bulk. For sufficiently strong boundary interaction we explicitly construct a conserved operator quasi-localized near the boundary using a matrix-product ansatz. This quasi-local edge mode leads to non-decaying boundary correlation functions, corresponding to a nonzero boundary Drude weight. The correlation length of the edge mode diverges at a finite critical value of the boundary interaction, signaling a transition to ergodic boundary dynamics for subcritical interactions.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

LP-Based Algorithms for Scheduling in a Quantum Switch

作者:

arXiv:2603.27812v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider scheduling in a quantum switch with stochastic entanglement generation, finite quantum memories, and decoherence. The objective is to design a scheduling algorithm with polynomial-time computational complexity that stabilizes a nontrivial fraction of the capacity region. Scheduling in such a switch corresponds to finding a matching in a graph subject to additional constraints. We propose an LP-based policy, which finds a point in the matching polytope, which is further implemented using a randomized decomposition into matchings. The main challenge is that service over an edge is feasible only when entanglement is simultaneously available at both endpoint memories, so the effective service rates depend on the steady-state availability induced by the scheduling rule. To address this, we introduce a single-node reference Markov chain and derive lower bounds on achievable service rates in terms of the steady-state nonemptiness probabilities. We then use a Lyapunov drift argument to show that, whenever the request arrival rates lie within the resulting throughput region, the proposed algorithm stabilizes the request queues. We further analyze how the achievable throughput depends on entanglement generation rates, decoherence probabilities, and buffer sizes, and show that the throughput lower bound converges exponentially fast to its infinite-buffer limit as the memory size increases. Numerical results illustrate that the guaranteed throughput fraction is substantial for parameter regimes relevant to near-term quantum networking systems.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Right or Wrong, Models Comply: Directional Blindness in LLM Moral Judgment

As language models take integrated roles across many domains, the response of LLMs to user pushback becomes a critical alignment property. Yet many existing evaluations treat compliance as unidirectional, measuring whether models resist pressure but not whether they resist it selectively. We introduce Compliance Asymmetry (A = BCR/HCR), a bidirectional diagnostic that compares beneficial output change under helpful nudges with harmful change under misleading nudges. Across 9 models and 972,000 nudge-condition responses, we find that this selectivity differs in factual and moral judgments: models follow helpful nudges more than harmful ones on factual questions (A = 1.58), but follow both directions at nearly identical rates on moral questions (A = 1.04). This phenomenon persists across model families, capability levels, and nudging types. Interestingly, we also find that chain-of-thought prompting amplifies helpful and harmful compliance together, while identity-based prompting suppresses both by nearly identical margins. These results identify direction-blind moral compliance as a distinct failure mode in current LLMs and suggest that alignment should target directionally calibrated updating rather than lower compliance alone.

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

Graphical Causal Reasoning for Root Cause Analysis in Cloud Networks

arXiv:2606.13532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cloud-computing relies on large-scale networks which are inherently complex systems. In this paper, we present a novel approach to root cause analysis (RCA) of cloud network incidents, leveraging graph-based causal discovery techniques. Our method addresses the limitations of rule-based automation by introducing a spatiotemporal grouping strategy and an automation ontology to reduce the dimensionality of the problem. We construct a causal graph from binary time series data using bivariate Granger causality and conditional independence tests. For inference, we introduce a probabilistic method that assigns edge-specific conditional probabilities as a function of time lag, allowing for interpretable, time-aware root cause scoring via causal graph traversal. We evaluated the system using a labeled dataset of 35 production incidents from a major cloud provider. The model successfully recalled the correct root cause in 85.7% of incidents and produced an exact match in 74.3%. In production, the deployed system has been used in over 800 real-world incidents, with positive qualitative feedback from network engineers. These results highlight the practicality of a data-driven, causal approach to RCA in dynamic and large-scale operational environments.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

AdaSR: Adaptive Streaming Reasoning with Hierarchical Relative Policy Optimization

Large reasoning models typically follow a read-then-think paradigm: they observe the complete input, reason over a static context, and then produce the answer. Yet many real-world scenarios are inherently dynamic, such as audio and video stream, where information arrives as a continuous stream and models must reason, update, and respond under partial observations. Recent streaming reasoning methods allow models to think while reading, but they largely rely on supervised imitation of pre-constructed trajectories, which limits their flexibility. In this paper, we propose AdaSR, an adaptive streaming reasoning framework that enables models to reason during input streaming and perform final deliberation once the stream is complete, learning when to think, and how much computation to allocate across different stages. To optimize this hierarchical reasoning process, we introduce Hierarchical Relative Policy Optimization (HRPO), which decomposes policy optimization into streaming reasoning and deep reasoning phases, providing more fine-grained advantage assignment instead of uniformly distributing a single sequence-level advantage over all tokens. HRPO integrates format, accuracy, and adaptive thinking rewards to enforce valid reasoning protocols, preserve final task performance, and encourage latency-aware computation allocation. Experiments show that AdaSR achieves a better balance among reasoning accuracy, computational efficiency, and streaming latency compared with supervised fine-tuning baseline. We release our code at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/StreamingLLM/tree/main/AdaSR.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

GPO: Learning from Critical Steps to Improve LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2509.16456v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in various domains, showing impressive potential on different tasks. Recently, reasoning LLMs have been proposed to improve the reasoning or thinking capabilities of LLMs to solve complex problems. Despite the promising results of reasoning LLMs, enhancing the multi-step reasoning capabilities of LLMs still remains a significant challenge. While existing optimization methods have advanced the LLM reasoning capabilities, they often treat reasoning trajectories as a whole, without considering the underlying critical steps within the trajectory. In this paper, we introduce Guided Pivotal Optimization (GPO), a novel fine-tuning strategy that dives into the reasoning process to enable more effective improvements. GPO first identifies the `critical step' within a reasoning trajectory - a point that the model must carefully proceed to succeed at the problem. We locate the critical step by estimating the advantage function. GPO then resets the policy to the critical step, samples the new rollout and prioritizes the learning process on those rollouts. This focus allows the model to learn more effectively from pivotal moments within the reasoning process to improve the reasoning performance. We demonstrate that GPO is a general strategy that can be integrated with various optimization methods to improve reasoning performance. Besides theoretical analysis, our experiments across challenging reasoning benchmarks show that GPO can consistently and significantly enhance the performance of existing optimization methods, showcasing its effectiveness and generalizability in improving LLM reasoning by concentrating on pivotal moments within the generation process.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Meta-Learning Transformers to Improve In-Context Generalization

arXiv:2507.05019v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In-context learning enables transformer models to generalize to new tasks based solely on input prompts, without any need for weight updates. However, existing training paradigms typically rely on large, unstructured datasets that are costly to store, difficult to evaluate for quality and balance, and pose privacy and ethical concerns due to the inclusion of sensitive information. Motivated by these limitations and risks, we propose an alternative training strategy where we leverage a collection of multiple, small-scale, and domain-specific datasets. We empirically demonstrate that the increased quality and diversity of such data improve the generalization abilities of in-context learners beyond their training domain, while achieving comparable performance with models trained on a single large-scale dataset. We investigate this paradigm by leveraging meta-learning to train an in-context learner on the Meta-Album collection under several settings. Firstly, we show the performance in a controlled environment, where the test domain is completely excluded from the training knowledge. Secondly, we explore the robustness of these models to forgetting in a continual scenario where the information is accessible for a limited time. Finally, we explore the more challenging unsupervised scenario. Our findings demonstrate that transformers still generalize for in-context prediction when trained on a curated dataset collection while offering advantages in modularity and replaceability.

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

S-SPPO: Semantic-Calibrated Self-Play Preference Optimization

arXiv:2606.01561v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is often formulated via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). However, the standard Bradley-Terry instantiation of DPO is limited in modeling common departures from transitivity in human preferences. To address this, recent work has introduced Self-Play Preference Optimization (SPPO), which iteratively refines the policy by training on self-generated win-lose pairs. Our investigation, however, reveals a critical instability in SPPO: the optimization is prone to policy degeneration when the preference oracle assigns overly confident wins to semantically indistinguishable responses. To mitigate this, we propose S-SPPO, a dual-space semantic calibration framework comprising: i) Supervision Calibration via semantic gating, which anneals win rate targets toward the maximum-entropy baseline as semantic overlap increases; and ii) Representation Calibration via latent repulsion to enforce geometric diversity to prevent manifold collapse and maintain latent diversity between chosen and rejected samples. Theoretically, we show that the calibration preserves the constant-sum game structure, facilitating convergence to a Nash Equilibrium. Empirically, S-SPPO avoids the performance degradation seen in prior methods, achieving 52.19% win rate and 47.46% length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 with Llama-3-8B, without using additional human-annotated preferences during training. The code will be available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/s-sppo.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Beyond Algorithms: Conceptual Innovation in Medical Imaging AI

arXiv:2606.19270v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence has driven rapid progress in medical imaging research, producing increasingly sophisticated algorithms and steady improvements on benchmark tasks. However, this algorithm-centric trajectory has also revealed a growing imbalance: while computational methods advance rapidly, the conceptual foundations that define imaging tasks, evaluation metrics, and clinical meaning sometimes remain underexamined. In this Perspective, we distinguish algorithmic innovation, which focuses on improving computational implementations and performance within a fixed problem definition, from conceptual innovation, which reframes what problems are posed, how success is measured, and why an approach is clinically relevant. We argue that prevailing incentive structures, training pathways, and publication norms disproportionately reward algorithmic novelty, particularly for early-career researchers, while at times undervaluing conceptual contributions that are essential for scientific maturation and clinical translation. Through representative examples from medical imaging AI, we show how insufficient conceptual grounding can lead to misaligned objectives, fragile generalization, and limited real-world impact. We conclude with actionable recommendations for researchers, mentors, reviewers, and journals to better recognize, support, and integrate conceptual innovation alongside algorithmic advances.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SkillChain-Gym: A Benchmark for Reskilling-Aware Production-Inventory Control under Disruptions

arXiv:2606.17266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Production planning increasingly has to treat workforce capability as a decision variable: certifications lapse when skills are not maintained, new products require skills the current workforce does not hold, and reskilling competes for the same worker hours needed for production. Existing operations benchmarks usually treat labor as exogenous, while workforce-planning models with skills and learning are rarely released as reusable testbeds. We introduce SkillChain-Gym, a benchmark specification for reskilling-aware production-inventory control: a single-site environment with stylized worker skill-state dynamics, hard threshold certification, forgetting, and capacity-consuming training actions constrained by the same per-worker time budget as production. The benchmark includes seed-controlled disruption scenarios, three feasibility modes with projection diagnostics, deterministic replay, and metrics covering operations, resilience, capability growth, and training-access distribution. We evaluate production-only, reactive adaptive, water-filling adaptive, and static-insurance policies with budget variants over 60-shift horizons with paired statistical tests. The results are regime-dependent rather than a ranking. Training-capable policies dominate the production-only baseline, and maintenance training is necessary under forgetting even without disruptions. Among training-capable classes, adaptive training helps when bottlenecks are visible in the forecast, while a lean static cross-training plan, a deliberately favorable comparator whose structure encodes relevant skill contingencies, acts as strong insurance under surprise shocks and absenteeism. Capacity slack and the forgetting rate govern the boundary between these regimes. No policy class dominates across regimes, motivating forecast-driven controllers that decide when to buy skill insurance and when to react.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Individual Control Barrier Functions-Guided Diffusion Model for Safe Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.12640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning allows control policies to be learned directly from data without online interaction, making it suitable for safety-critical tasks. Recent studies have applied diffusion models to offline reinforcement learning to leverage their strong capacity for modeling complex data distributions. However, existing approaches primarily focus on single-agent settings, leaving the safety challenges in multi-agent environments largely unexplored. In this work, we propose a safe offline multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm that embeds neural individual control barrier functions into the diffusion model to enhance safety during trajectory generation, with control policies recovered through inverse dynamics. We evaluate our algorithm across diverse benchmarks, demonstrating substantial safety improvements while maintaining competitive rewards.

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

ARB4WM: An Adversarial Robustness Benchmark for World Models in Continuous Control

arXiv:2606.16605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models are widely used in robotic and agentic engineering control systems due to their ability to learn latent dynamics for planning and decision-making. As these systems are increasingly deployed in safety-critical settings, understanding their robustness under adversarial conditions has become essential. However, existing evaluations lack a unified benchmark for testing adversarial threats across the policy, value, and latent-dynamics levels of world-model agents. To fill this gap, we present ARB4WM, a unified evaluation framework for pre-deployment robustness and risk assessment of world-model agents under visual perturbations. ARB4WM defines five white-box loss objectives across these three levels and studies their effects when combined with single-step or multi-step perturbation strategies and temporal attack modes, including full-frame, half-sequence, and sparse-frame exposure. Specifically, we evaluate four Dreamer-style agents across 20 tasks from MetaWorld and the DeepMind Control Suite under different loss objectives, perturbation strategies, and temporal attack modes. Results show that attacks targeting value estimation, latent representations, and RSSM dynamics can be as damaging as direct policy disruption, and that early or frequent perturbations are especially harmful, while input-level defenses provide limited recovery under adaptive attacks. These findings suggest that safety, risk, and reliability assessment for world models should cover multiple component-oriented attack objectives and temporal exposure protocols rather than relying solely on action-space robustness. Source code is available at https://github.com/zaoanguai/ARB4WM.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Minimum Distance Summaries for Robust Neural Posterior Estimation

arXiv:2602.09161v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Simulation-based inference (SBI) enables amortized Bayesian inference by first training a neural posterior estimator (NPE) on prior-simulator pairs, typically through low-dimensional summary statistics, which can then be cheaply reused for fast inference by querying it on new test observations. Because NPE is estimated under the training data distribution, it is susceptible to misspecification when observations deviate from the training distribution. Many robust SBI approaches address this by modifying NPE training or introducing error models, coupling robustness to the inference network and compromising amortization and modularity. We introduce minimum-distance summaries, a plug-in robust NPE method that adapts queried test-time summaries independently of the pretrained NPE. Leveraging the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) as a distance between observed data and a summary-conditional predictive distribution, the adapted summary inherits strong robustness properties from the MMD. We demonstrate that the algorithm can be implemented efficiently with random Fourier feature approximations, yielding a lightweight, model-free test-time adaptation procedure. We provide theoretical guarantees for the robustness of our algorithm and empirically evaluate it on a range of synthetic and real-world tasks, demonstrating substantial robustness gains with minimal additional overhead.

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

Attention Expansion: Enhancing Keyphrase Extraction from Long Documents with Attention-Augmented Contextualized Embeddings

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved strong performance in keyphrase extraction (KPE), largely due to their ability to generate rich contextualized representations. However, long-document KPE remains challenging because salient keyphrase evidence may be scattered across distant document sections that cannot be jointly captured within the limited context window of most PLMs. Although long-context large language models (LLMs) can process broader textual contexts, their computational cost limits their practicality for efficient and high-throughput KPE. To overcome this limitation, we propose an attention expansion mechanism that augments PLM token representations with information from surrounding out-of-context chunks using pre-trained word embeddings. The proposed mechanism expands the effective contextual scope of PLM-based KPE models without requiring full-document attention or expensive LLM-based inference. We evaluate our approach across five PLM backbones, including general-purpose, scientific, task-specific, and long-context encoders, using two training regimes and five benchmark corpora from scientific and news domains. Experimental results demonstrate that attention expansion consistently enhances KPE performance across all evaluation settings, outperforming state-of-the-art models and yielding notable improvements in F1 score. The improvements extend to domain-specific, task-specialized, and native long-context models, showing that the proposed mechanism provides complementary information rather than merely compensating for limited input length. These results establish attention expansion as an efficient and effective strategy for long-document KPE.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum-HPC Software Stacks and the openQSE Reference Architecture: A Survey

arXiv:2604.20912v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum resources are increasingly integrated into high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud environments, but quantum high-performance computing (QHPC) software stacks remain isolated, often proprietary, full-stack solutions lacking common interfaces across runtime, resource management, orchestration, and execution layers. This paper analyzes nine production QHPC stacks and identifies common design patterns and emerging requirements, covering deployment models, application interaction patterns, SDK support, and readiness for fault-tolerant operation. The survey exposes consistent needs in runtime abstraction, resource management, interconnect semantics, and observability. Based on these findings, we propose the open quantum-HPC software ecosystem ( openQSE) reference architecture as a first step toward unifying the state-of-the-practice. openQSE defines a set of layer boundaries that allow different implementations to interoperate while preserving deployment flexibility, and is structured to support both current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) workloads and future fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) systems without changes to upper-layer application interfaces.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Geometric Domain Adaptation via Optimal Transport for Linear Regression in R^2

arXiv:2606.14023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimal Transport has become recently a powerful method for domain adaptation by aligning source and target distributions. We study a supervised domain adaptation problem where source and target domains are related by a rotation or a translation or a homothety in $\mathbb{R}^2$. We prove that the optimal transport map recovers the underlying map when using a $p-$norm cost with $p \geq 2$. Based on this insight, we develop a method combining $K-$means and optimal transport to estimate the underlying map, enabling adaptation of linear regression models when target data is scarce. Simulations demonstrate improved performance over baseline methods. Rather than relying on highly expressive deep learning architectures, we focus on classical machine learning models to emphasize interpretability and theoretical insight. This perspective allows us to explicitly characterize the role of optimal transport in recovering geometric transformations such as rotations, translations, and homotheties. Our contributions include a theoretical result linking optimal transport and rotations, translations and homothecies in $\mathbb{R}^2$, and a practical method for adaptation in linear regression offering both conceptual clarity and applied value in domain adaptation tasks in this space.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Expert in Ultrasound Skills: Feasibility of an IMU-video platform to describe technical profiles during focused cardiac ultrasound. Pilot study

Background: Focused cardiac ultrasound (FoCUS) is operator dependent and requires coordinated probe manipulation, image interpretation and iterative visual feedback. Existing assessment approaches often emphasize final image quality or expert rating. We developed Expert in Ultrasound Skills (EXUS) , a platform that synchronizes transducer-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) data with ultrasound video, and evaluated its technical feasibility during FoCUS acquisition. Methods: This observational pilot study included 6 operators performing two repetitions of a four-view FoCUS protocol, yielding 12 analytical sessions and 48 planned acquisitions. Feasibility was defined by acquisition completion, video availability, start/stop events, fused IMU-video windows, temporal coverage, complete human label entries and IMU integrity. A 100-image Likert rating task was used to summarize pairwise inter-rater agreement for still-frame image quality assessment. Results: All 48 planned acquisitions were completed with video, start/stop events, fused windows and complete human label entries. Temporal coverage was at least 90% in 47/48 acquisitions. IMU integrity endpoints exceeded the 80% threshold: 43/48 acquisitions had no extreme IMU-derived artifact, 43/48 had no active-segment IMU restart and 44/48 had no complete motion flatline. Mean pairwise exact agreement for the Likert task was 38.9%, with mean quadratic-weighted Cohen's kappa of 0.564. Post hoc profiles varied across duration, visual quality, mechanical load and motor efficiency. Conclusions: EXUS was technically feasible for synchronized IMU-video capture during FoCUS. The pilot supports multimodal acquisition data as a way to describe technical profiles and generate formative feedback hypotheses, but the post hoc indices are not validated competency measures. Keywords: focused cardiac ultrasound; point-of-care ultrasound; inertial measurement unit; medical education; deliberate practice

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

Discrimination-free Insurance Pricing with Privatized Sensitive Attributes

arXiv:2504.11775v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fairness has become an important concern in insurance pricing as insurers increasingly rely on machine learning models to predict expected losses. At the same time, regulatory and privacy constraints often restrict insurers' ability to access or use sensitive attributes such as gender or race. Recent actuarial research addresses fairness in this context through the concept of the discrimination-free premium, which removes both the direct and indirect effects of sensitive attributes while preserving actuarial consistency. However, implementing this approach typically requires access to the sensitive attributes themselves, which may not be available in practice. This paper studies the estimation of discrimination-free insurance premiums when sensitive attributes are observed only in privatized or noise-perturbed form. We consider a multi-party data setting in which insurers observe non-sensitive attributes and outcomes, while a trusted third party holds privatized sensitive attributes generated through a privacy mechanism. Within this framework, we develop statistical methods for estimating discrimination-free premiums using only the privatized attributes. We study two settings of practical relevance: when the privacy mechanism is known and when its noise level is unknown. For both cases, we establish theoretical guarantees for the proposed estimators. Numerical experiments and empirical applications demonstrate that the proposed approach enables fair insurance pricing while respecting privacy and regulatory constraints.

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

A Definition of Good Explanations and the Challenges Explaining LLM Outputs

arXiv:2606.14838v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How to define a good explanation is a long-standing philosophical debate which has found recent renewed interest in the context of AI outputs. Explainability is crucial for AI adoption in many contexts, but in order to produce good explanations of AI systems, we must first have an understanding of what good explanations are. In this paper we propose a definition inspired by the notion of counterfactual explanations, however we argue that one must also take into account the interlocutor's prior beliefs in each fact that could be offered in an explanation. We explore the ramifications of this definition for AI explainability and, in particular, why LLM outputs are difficult to produce good explanations for.

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

HumP-KD: A Hybrid Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Stage Progressive Knowledge Distillation Framework for Efficient Fire Classification

Real-time fire classification systems require models that are simultaneously accurate, computationally efficient, and deployable on resource-constrained hardware. This work proposes HumP-KD, a Hybrid Uncertainty-aware Multi-stage Progressive Knowledge Distillation framework for efficient fire classification. Two datasets, FlameVision and Dataset-II, containing 8,600 and 31,309 images, are used. Various CNN and transformer baselines are applied under standard preprocessing, online augmentation, Gaussian noise and motion blur robustness conditions. The proposed HumP-KD model distills knowledge from two frozen heterogeneous transformer teachers, Swin-Tiny and ViT-Base, along with their Meta-MLP ensemble, into a lightweight MobileViT-S student via three tightly integrated components. Hierarchical Progressive Knowledge Distillation employs a Hierarchical Feature Builder. It generates a fused spatial attention mask to guide distillation toward discriminative regions selectively. Multi-Stage Knowledge Distillation progressively activates three distillation stages across training. On Dataset-II, HumP-KD achieves a mean F1 score of $0.9876 \pm 0.0063$ across 10 independent trials, significantly outperforming the MobileViT-S baseline trained without distillation ($0.9537 \pm 0.0351$), with statistical significance confirmed by both independent t-test ($p = 0.0195$) and Wilcoxon signed-rank test ($W = 1$, $p = 0.0039$). The proposed method also demonstrates strong generalization across datasets and robustness under degraded visual conditions. The student model retains only 4.94M parameters and 19.01Mb model size, representing a $5.7\times$ parameter reduction over Swin-Tiny and a $17.5\times$ reduction over ViT-Base, while achieving 37.72 CPU FPS, making it suitable for real-time deployment.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

CoVR-R:Reason-Aware Composed Video Retrieval

Composed Video Retrieval (CoVR) aims to find a target video given a reference video and a textual modification. Prior work assumes the modification text fully specifies the visual changes, overlooking after-effects and implicit consequences (e.g., motion, state transitions, viewpoint or duration cues) that emerge from the edit. We argue that successful CoVR requires reasoning about these after-effects. We introduce a reasoning-first, zero-shot approach that leverages large multimodal models to (i) infer causal and temporal consequences implied by the edit, and (ii) align the resulting reasoned queries to candidate videos without task-specific finetuning. To evaluate reasoning in CoVR, we also propose CoVR-Reason, a benchmark that pairs each (reference, edit, target) triplet with structured internal reasoning traces and challenging distractors that require predicting after-effects rather than keyword matching. Experiments show that our zero-shot method outperforms strong retrieval baselines on recall at K and particularly excels on implicit-effect subsets. Our automatic and human analysis confirm higher step consistency and effect factuality in our retrieved results. Our findings show that incorporating reasoning into general-purpose multimodal models enables effective CoVR by explicitly accounting for causal and temporal after-effects. This reduces dependence on task-specific supervision, improves generalization to challenging implicit-effect cases, and enhances interpretability of retrieval outcomes. These results point toward a scalable and principled framework for explainable video search. The model, code, and benchmark are available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/CoVR-R.