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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Learning New Tasks via Reusable Skills: Skill-Compositional Experts for Embodied Continual Learning

Embodied Continual Learning (ECL) aims to enable robots to continually acquire new manipulation tasks while retaining previously learned behaviors under closed-loop control. Compared with conventional continual learning, ECL suffers from more severe catastrophic forgetting. Feature drift accumulated under closed-loop control progressively propagates through sequential decision-making, leading to degradation of previously learned behaviors. A key challenge in ECL lies in structured skill reuse across continually evolving tasks, since existing methods primarily focus on skill learning without explicitly organizing them for coherent task execution. To address this issue, we propose SCE, a Skill-Compositional Experts framework for ECL. SCE builds a skill base via Compositional Skill Grounding (CSG), which decomposes task demonstrations into reusable skills. Based on this, Dual Execution-and-Transition Experts (DETE) enable new task learning through skill composition, where one branch ensures skill execution and the other supports transitions between skills for coherent behavior. Experiments on LIBERO benchmarks and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that SCE consistently improves retention and overall task performance. Further feature drift analyses and ablation studies verify the effectiveness of our method. Project website: https://eqcy.github.io/sce/.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Using visual biofeedback to reduce step length error at fast walking speeds is feasible after stroke

Background and Purpose: Walking after stroke is often characterized by persistent biomechanical impairments and reduced walking capacity. While visual biofeedback can improve gait mechanics and fast walking can enhance capacity, it is unclear whether individuals post-stroke can effectively use biofeedback at higher walking speeds to address both deficits simultaneously. This study examined the effects of walking speed on the ability of participants with chronic stroke to reduce step length (SL) errors using visual biofeedback. Methods: Sixteen individuals with chronic stroke walked on a treadmill at slow, self-selected, and fast speeds with and without visual SL biofeedback. Absolute SL error relative to individualized targets was calculated for paretic and non-paretic limbs. Linear mixed-effects models with piecewise linear splines assessed the effects of speed, limb, and feedback condition. Post hoc comparisons were performed for significant interactions. Results: At lower speeds, increasing speed reduced SL error in both limbs (p < 0.001). At higher speeds, the effects of speed were dependent on limb and condition (p < 0.001). Paretic SL error increased with speed without feedback but remained stable with feedback (p < 0.001). Non-paretic SL error decreased with speed regardless of condition. SL error was greater in the paretic limb overall (p < 0.001). Discussion and Conclusions: Fast walking alone did not reduce paretic SL errors. Participants with chronic stroke can effectively use visual biofeedback to reduce paretic SL errors at higher speeds, supporting its integration into high-intensity gait training to simultaneously treat biomechanical impairments and walking capacity deficits after stroke.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

Systematic functional annotation of thousands of BAHD acyltransferases in plant genomes using Protein Language Model and phylogenomic tools

The functional annotation of plant genes lags significantly behind their genomic annotation. Closing this gap requires thorough cataloging of reported protein activities alongside predictive methods that scale beyond sequence-similarity inference. Focusing on the BAHD acyltransferase enzyme family as a model, we assembled FuncZymeDB-BAHD, a large database of 2,705 LLM-retrieved and curated enzyme-acceptor-donor activities covering 336 BAHDs from 156 plant species, a 2-to-6-fold expansion over Swiss-Prot and prior compilations. We further developed FuncPred-OG, which maps queries to orthologous groups and previously characterized enzymes in FuncZymeDB-BAHD, returning hits with high evidence provenance. FuncPred-OG enabled functional prediction of over half of BAHDs across 85 plant proteomes, of which five novel predictions were validated via in vitro assays and recent studies. For the remaining BAHDs without FuncPred-OG annotation, we developed FuncPred-AI, where logistic-regression classifiers trained on protein language model embeddings achieved high Area-Under-the-Precision-Recall-curve (AUPR) scores and correct-hit rates up to 93%. FuncPred-AI yielded >1 probable donor/acceptor annotation for 99.9% (8894/8897) of BAHDs in our pan-plant dataset. Finally, the FuncPred workflow and datasets were deployed on a web portal for broader utilization, potentially reducing experimentalist efforts for selecting candidates from days to minutes. Overall, this framework provides a generalizable template for functional annotation of entire enzyme families.

05.
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

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

Communication-Efficient Verifiable Attention for LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.16352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Computation integrity of remote large language model (LLM) serving can be questionable. For conventional deep neural networks (DNNs), the existing TEE-shielded DNN partitioning (TSDP) approach uses Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to compute non-linear components and verify the integrity of linear components offloaded to an untrusted GPU. However, directly applying TSDP to Transformer-based LLMs incurs significant TEE computation and TEE-GPU communication overhead. This paper presents Communication-efficient TEE-GPU Attention (\textsc{VeriAttn}) for accelerating verifiable LLM inference. \textsc{VeriAttn} offloads both linear and non-linear computations of attention to the GPU, while TEE performs verification. Moreover, for prefill, \textsc{VeriAttn} uses a two-level pipeline to overlap data movement, TEE pre-/post-processing, and GPU computation. For decoding, when the key-value cache exceeds available GPU memory, \textsc{VeriAttn} partitions attention across TEE and GPU to reduce repeated key-value transfers. Evaluation on an Intel TDX platform shows that \textsc{VeriAttn} achieves 2.60-3.38$\times$ and 3.86-5.42$\times$ acceleration over TSDP for 6k-token prompts and 10k-token outputs during prefill and decoding, respectively.

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

Characterizing Cultural Localization in AI-Generated Stories

The global use of artificial intelligence has increased interest in assessing the ability to generate culturally localized content, including stories. Cultural localization in stories often occurs through either templated localization – the use of cultural markers (e.g., names, locations) in a generic narrative – or holistic localization – the variation of plots, values, and themes, in addition to cultural markers. We propose a method to measure the degree to which content was generated through templated localization. Specifically, we identify the lexical tokens that distinguish stories across nationalities and measure the similarity of the narratives that remain after removing them. In stories generated by five models on 125 topics for 193 nationalities, our method is able to detect that only a small subset (9-17%) of the vocabulary accounts for the variation across nationalities and that the narratives that remain after removing them contain repeated multi-word sequences, suggesting the presence of a shared culturally-agnostic narrative template. Finally, we characterize the cultural markers for their stereotypicality and offensiveness, finding that markers from 19 countries, mostly located in the Global South, are on average offensive.

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

LLMs as ASP Programmers: Self-Correction Enables Task-Agnostic Nonmonotonic Reasoning

arXiv:2604.27960v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive reasoning milestones but continue to struggle with high computational costs, logical inconsistencies, and sharp performance degradation on high-complexity problems. While neuro-symbolic methods attempt to mitigate these issues by coupling LLMs with symbolic reasoners, existing approaches typically rely on monotonic logics (e.g., SMT) that cannot represent defeasible reasoning – essential components of human cognition. We present "LLM+ASP," a framework that translates natural language into Answer Set Programming (ASP), a nonmonotonic formalism based on stable model semantics. Unlike prior "LLM+ASP" approaches that require manually authored knowledge modules, domain-specific prompts, or evaluation restricted to single problem classes, our framework operates without any per-task engineering and applies uniformly across diverse reasoning tasks. Our system utilizes an automated self-correction loop where structured feedback from the ASP solver enables iterative refinement. Evaluating across six diverse benchmarks, we demonstrate that: (1) stable model semantics allow LLMs to naturally express default rules and exceptions, outperforming SMT-based alternatives by significant margins on nonmonotonic tasks; (2) iterative self-correction is the primary driver of performance, effectively replacing the need for handcrafted domain knowledge; (3) compact in-context reference guides substantially outperform verbose documentation, revealing a "context rot" phenomenon where excessive context hinders constraint adherence.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Scalar-Stepsize Nonuniform Monte Carlo Optimistic Policy Iteration: A Certified Counterexample

arXiv:2606.15978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tsitsiklis proved convergence of Monte Carlo optimistic policy iteration under a uniform update structure and identified nonuniform update frequencies as a delicate obstruction. We give a certified negative answer for the natural scalar-stepsize, unnormalized asynchronous state-value recursion with fixed nonuniform state-selection probabilities. In a three-state, two-action discounted MDP, the nonuniform update frequencies induce a diagonally scaled greedy-policy mean field with a certified nonconstant attracting hybrid periodic orbit. With a bounded unbiased geometric-horizon estimator and Robbins–Monro stepsizes, the original stochastic recursion remains trapped near the cycle with positive probability and therefore fails to converge. The example pinpoints a geometric obstruction: uniform sampling gives radial residual contraction, whereas scalar nonuniform sampling anisotropically distorts the residual dynamics and can generate switched attracting cycles.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Gendered pathways to adolescent mental health: An empirical assessment of a new conceptual framework

Introduction Gender norms and roles are important determinants of physical and mental health in the key period of adolescence. Yet, the gendered pathways to mental health in adolescents are not fully understood. Using a conceptual framework for global adolescent mental health that we developed based on a Delphi process, we empirically investigated the associations between six gender-related constructs and adolescent mental health. Methods We used cross-sectional Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) data from Ethiopia (2020) to explore the associations between sex, gender norms, psychological competencies, gender attitudes, gender roles, with the latter two also serving as mediators, and psychological distress (GHQ-12), using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). Results The SEM model contained measurements from 1,584 adolescents, including 843 girls and 741 boys, with a median age of 13 years. Out of 14 pathways tested, we found statistically significant associations between psychological competencies and psychological distress; sex and gender attitudes; and between gender norms and psychological competencies, gender attitudes, and gender roles. Hence, the gender-related constructs were mostly associated with each other, rather than with psychological distress. Conclusion The gender-related constructs are strongly interrelated, thereby attenuating their individual effects on psychological distress. The interplay of gender-related constructs should be considered when developing interventions to promote mental health in adolescents.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Sign-Language Datasets at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey on Resources, Benchmarks, and Annotation Standards

Sign languages are expressive visual languages used by Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) communities. Despite substantial progress in sign-language recognition, translation, and production, advances remain constrained by fragmented datasets, inconsistent annotations, and limited linguistic coverage. Existing benchmarks often fail to reflect real-world communication needs, and systematic analyses of these limitations remain limited. In this survey, we present a comprehensive index of sign-language datasets, covering 120 resources across 35 sign languages. We analyze key challenges such as modality imbalance, annotation granularity, and signer bias, and outline considerations for future dataset design. We also introduce a 24-field Sign-Language Datasheet and release a public GitHub repository (https://github.com/Ginqwerty/Open-Sign-Language) to support standardized documentation and reproducible evaluation. Overall, our work provides a unified and practical foundation for developing inclusive, robust, and scalable sign-language technologies in real-world applications.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The circulating blood proteome of childhood acute leukemia

The circulating blood proteome provides a systemic readout of disease biology and holds promise for advancing diagnostics and disease monitoring in pediatric leukemia. Here, we profiled 3072 proteins in diagnostic serum from 54 children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), 21 with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), and 12 healthy controls using the Olink Proximity Extension Assay. We observed profound alterations in circulating protein levels in leukemia patients compared with controls and identified immunophenotype-specific proteins, including SIGLEC15 in B-cell precursor ALL (BCP-ALL), NOTCH1 in T-ALL, and CEBPA in AML, all which remained high even in patients with low (

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Implicit vs. Explicit Prompting Strategies for LVLMs in Referential Communication

Two recent studies (Jones et al. (2026); Zeng et al. (2026)) reach apparently contradictory conclusions about whether LVLMs can coordinate on efficient referring expressions. We control for task differences between the studies while directly comparing their prompting styles. We replicate the finding that models can coordinate efficient referring expressions when explicitly prompted to do so, suggesting that other task differences are not responsible for divergent results. However, we also find that the same models fail to infer the need for communicative efficiency from a more implicit prompt, highlighting critical differences between how humans and AI systems communicate.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Data-Forcing Distillation: Restoring Diversity and Fidelity in Few-Step Video Generation

Recent progress has shown promise in distilling multi-step video diffusion models into efficient few-step students. Among them, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) and its successor DMD2 achieved strong generation quality and fast convergence. However, due to the nature of the reverse Kullback–Leibler (KL) objective, these methods exhibit two persistent failure modes: a substantial drop in sample diversity, and visibly over-saturated outputs that deviate from real-video appearance. In this work, we propose Data-Forcing Distillation (DFD), a simple post-training framework that restores diversity and fidelity in DMD with only a single-line of code change. At its core is the teacher score discrepancy to guide the student toward the real-data distribution, pulling it to missing modes (mitigating mode collapse) and away from problematic modes absent in real data (avoiding over-saturation). We provide an in-depth theoretical analysis of our framework and validate our approach on text-to-video, image-to-video, and autoregressive video generation. With only 100–300 steps of finetuning, DFD effectively restores diversity and fidelity on both Wan2.1-1.3B and Cosmos-Predict2.5-2B model, resolving the over-saturation artifacts with significantly better video dynamics and appearance, and even outperforms the teacher model.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Shadowing Program for Medical Students in the Basic Sciences Phase

Introduction Shadowing, as an educational method based on active observation, can foster a realistic understanding of professional roles and enhance the communication skills of medical students. This study aimed to design, implement, and evaluate a shadowing program for basic sciences medical students. Methods This development study was conducted based on the ADDIE model in five phases. The study population consisted of 799 medical students in semesters 2 to 5. The stages included Analysis (determining needs through literature review and expert panels), Design (specifying learning environments and evaluation methods), Development (preparing guides and educational tools), Implementation (within the Medical Ethics course), and Evaluation (using questionnaires and reflection forms). Findings This study aimed to design and evaluate an educational shadowing program based on the ADDIE model. In the Analysis phase, the profiles of 799 students and learning objectives were determined. In the Design phase, a structured program for four types of shadowing was designed. In the Development phase, all guides and educational tools were prepared. In the Implementation phase, the program was carried out with complete coverage and adherence to ethical considerations. Finally, the program evaluation showed that "Motivation to become a good physician" (3.75-3.95) and "Enhancing empathy" (3.50-3.94) received the highest scores, while "Increasing understanding of the basic science-clinical connection" (2.53-2.89) and "Willingness to attend on holidays" (1.87-2.31) received the lowest scores. Conclusion The findings indicate that implementing the shadowing program is an effective method for strengthening the professional attitudes and academic motivation of medical students. However, the program did not significantly improve students perception of the basic science-clinical connection, indicating a need for curricular refinement. The continuation and extension of this program to other levels and fields of medical sciences are recommended.

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

Effects of sparsity and superposition on loss in simple autoencoders

arXiv:2606.18538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One of the major difficulties in the mechanistic interpretability of neural networks is the occurrence of polysemanticity, which suggests that each neuron is typically responsible for multiple different tasks, impeding a clean interpretation of their function. The seminal paper of Elhage et al. (2022) argues that this occurs due to superposition, a phenomenon where the neural network represents distinct features as non-orthogonal directions in a lower-dimensional space, a strategy that allows much greater compression of the data without sacrificing fidelity due to the feature sparsity of input vectors. Elhage et al. (2022) empirically validates these hypotheses in a rather natural and simple autoencoder with sparse inputs. The contribution of the present work is to analyze the mathematical basis for the occurrence and optimality of superposition, while rigorously corroborating some of their findings. In particular, we provide upper and lower bounds for the L2 reconstruction loss, tight in the very sparse regime, for power activation functions. A short list of interesting open problems are also included at the end.

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

Splaxel: Efficient Distributed Training of 3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-scale Scene Reconstruction via Pixel-level Communication

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-fidelity and real-time 3D scene reconstruction, but scaling training to large-scale scenes requires optimizing hundreds of millions of Gaussians across multiple GPUs. Existing distributed approaches either partition scenes into isolated regions, causing global inconsistency, or rely on global Gaussian-level exchanges, which lead to substantial growth in inter-GPU communication and quickly dominate iteration time. We propose Splaxel, a communication-efficient distributed 3DGS training framework based on pixel-level local rendering and global composition. Instead of synchronizing Gaussians, each GPU renders its local subset and exchanges only partial pixel values, maintaining mathematical consistency while keeping communication cost stable as the scene size increases. Splaxel further reduces pixel-level redundancy through geometric and transmittance visibility prediction and improves GPU utilization via conflict-free camera-view consolidation. Evaluated on large-scale datasets with up to 120M Gaussians, Splaxel achieves up to 7.6$\times$ speedup over the state-of-the-art distributed 3DGS framework while preserving high reconstruction quality.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Exact Fourier dimensions of dyadic Mandelbrot cascades under minimal integrability

arXiv:2606.08683v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We determine the Fourier dimension of dyadic Mandelbrot cascades under the minimal Kahane-Peyriere integrability condition. The interval theorem is proved in a vector-valued dyadic cascade model in which sibling weights may have arbitrary dependence. For every balanced energy-admissible vector law, almost surely on non-extinction, dim_F(mu)=dim_E(mu)=dim_2(mu)=D_E(X). In the canonical scalar case, under W>=0, E W=1, E[W log_2^+ W]

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Multi-strain Probiotics Alter Gut Microbiota and Estrobolome Pathways in Primary Dysmenorrhea

Background: Exact cause of primary dysmenorrhoea is unknown but recent evidence uncovers a potential link between gut dysbiosis and benign gynaecological disorder via disruption of estrobolome. Methods: A randomized controlled trial to investigate the effects of multi-strain oral probiotics on primary dysmenorrhoea has been conducted. This is a secondary analysis comparing the stool microbiome in women with primary dysmenorrhoea and those without (control), and the effects of treatment with probiotics versus placebo. Results: Although microbial richness and evenness were comparable between groups (alpha diversity, p > 0.05), gut microbial community composition differed significantly (Bray Curtis PERMANOVA, p = 0.015), characterised by reduced Bifidobacterium adolescentis and Blautia and enrichment of Faecalibacterium in dysmenorrhoea, alongside condition-specific core taxa. Post-intervention analysis revealed significant shifts in microbial community structure between pre- and post-treatment groups (PERMANOVA, F = 2.11, p = 0.005), with probiotic supplementation inducing more consistent and directed microbiome changes than placebo, without altering alpha diversity (p > 0.05). Functional prediction showed no significant difference in overall beta glucuronidase pathway abundance (p > 0.05); however, dysmenorrhoea was associated with higher abundance of beta glucuronidase producing taxa (MaAsLin2, q < 0.05) that were differentially modulated by probiotic treatment. Conclusion: This discovery provides evidence on the microbial disruption in primary dysmenorrhoea as well as the benefit of probiotics to modulate the intestinal microbiota to improve the condition.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

PT-WNO: Point Transformer with Wavelet Neural Operator for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

Point cloud semantic segmentation requires architectures that capture both fine-grained local geometry and broad global scene structure. Transformer-based networks have demonstrated strong performance by focusing on detailed local feature aggregation; however, global context is conveyed primarily through skip connections across encoder-decoder stages, which we argue is insufficient for full scene understanding. We hypothesize that augmenting skip connections with a learnable global feature extraction module allows the network to acquire scene-level knowledge before descending into local detail, leading to richer and more contextually grounded representations. To this end, we propose Point Transformer with Wavelet Neural Operato (PT-WNO), which integrates a shared Wavelet Neural Operator (WNO) branch alongside the skip connections of a point cloud transformer backbone. At each encoder-decoder transition, point features are projected onto a dense 3D volumetric grid where the WNO captures multi-scale global spectral context through learnable wavelet decomposition and reconstruction. These global features are fused back into the network via lightweight adapters, complementing rather than replacing the existing skip connections. Experiments on four large-scale 3D point cloud benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of PT-WNO. On S3DIS (Area 5), PT-WNO achieves 71.59% mIoU, outperforming the Point Transformer v3 (PTv3) baseline by +1.03 points. On DALES it achieves 81.05% mIoU (+1.47 over the baseline). On ScanNet~v2, PT-WNO obtains 76.19% mIoU, remaining competitive with the baseline (76.36%).

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Toward Entanglement Bootstrap for Conformal Field Theory in Any Dimension

arXiv:2606.12540v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Given a quantum critical wavefunction in any dimension, we propose a reconstructed Hamiltonian, analogous to the ones previously found for 1+1d CFT and for 2+1d bosonic liquid topologically-ordered states. We test numerically that, for known regularized approximate CFT groundstates (on the icosahedron and the fuzzy sphere), (1) they are close to the groundstate of their reconstructed Hamiltonian, and (2) the spectrum of their reconstructed Hamiltonian on the unit sphere has CFT properties (integer spacing of descendants) and matches known low-lying energies. We show that this provides an automated method to improve the finite-size effects in a fixed Hilbert space.

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

NOVA: NOise-aware Verbal Confidence CAlibration for Robust Large Language Models in RAG Systems

Accurately assessing model confidence is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in mission-critical factual domains. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is widely adopted to improve grounding, confidence calibration in RAG settings remains poorly understood. We conduct a systematic study across four benchmarks, revealing that LLMs exhibit poor calibration performance especially when noisy contexts are retrieved. Specifically, contradictory or irrelevant evidence tends to exacerbate the model's overconfidence issue. To address this, we propose NOVA Rules (NOise-Aware Verbal Confidence CAlibration Rules) to provide a principled foundation for resolving overconfidence under noise. We further design NOVA, a noise-aware calibration framework that synthesizes supervision from ~2K HotpotQA examples guided by these rules. By performing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with this data, NOVA equips models with intrinsic noise awareness without relying on stronger teacher models. Empirical results show that NOVA yields substantial gains, improving ECE scores by 10.9% in-domain and 8.0% out-of-domain. By bridging the gap between retrieval noise and verbal calibration, NOVA paves the way for both accurate and epistemically reliable LLMs.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Delta-Epsilon-Common Knowledge and Quantitative Agreement Theorems

arXiv:2606.11902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aumann defined common knowledge mathematically and established his now famous Agreement Theorem. We present a novel approach to quantifying how close individuals are to commonly knowing events, $(\delta,\epsilon)$-common knowledge, which is defined for any (and not just countable) probability spaces, and provide quantitative versions of the key results in this field. Specifically, we do this for Aumann's Agreement Theorem and Nielsen's extension thereof to random variables, as well as for the setting in which posteriors are communicated back and forth between individuals. Our results apply in particular to noisy communication settings.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Application of integrated gradients explainability to sociopsychological semantic markers

Classification of textual data in terms of sentiment, or more nuanced sociopsychological markers (e.g., agency), is now a popular approach commonly applied at the sentence level. In this paper, we exploit the integrated gradient (IG) method to capture the classification output at the word level, revealing which words actually contribute to the classification process. This approach improves explainability and provides in-depth insights into the text. We focus on sociopsychological markers beyond sentiment and investigate how to effectively train IG in agency, one of the very few markers for which a verified deep learning classifier, BERTAgent, is currently available. Performance and system parameters are carefully tested, alternatives to the IG approach are evaluated, and the usefulness of the result is verified in a relevant application scenario. The method is also applied in a scenario where only a small labeled dataset is available, with the aim of exploiting IG to identify the salient words that contribute to building the different classes that relate to relevant sociopsychological markers. To achieve this, an uncommon training procedure that encourages overfitting is employed to enhance the distinctiveness of each class. The results are analyzed through the lens of social psychology, offering valuable insights.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Web-based education on Metabolism and Obesity is associated with improved lifestyle and health behaviours among Brazilian school teachers

Background: Obesity is a major global public health challenge, and teachers play a critical role in school-based health promotion. This study examined the perceived impact of a web-based educational program on metabolism and obesity delivered to Brazilian school teachers. Methods: This analytical cross-sectional study included 217 teachers who responded to the evaluation questionnaire after attending the course between 2017 and 2022. Statistical analyses included logistic regression and chi-square tests. Findings: Course completion rate was 81.98%, substantially exceeding the 5-15% typical of global MOOCs. However, ethnic disparities were observed: White respondents were 4.95 times more likely to complete the course than Black respondents (p=0.00097) and Brown respondents were 3.05 times more likely (p=0.0268) than Black respondents. Among non-completers, lack of time (64.7%) was the primary barrier. Participation was concentrated in Sao Paulo (77%), with no respondents from three northern states. Perceived difficulty showed a non-significant trend (p=0.0893) where by Black respondents had the lowest predicted difficulty; the most challenging course material was Scientific Content/Reading papers (50%). Completion was strongly associated with applying learned activities in teaching (p