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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Epistemic Constitutionalism Or: how to avoid coherence bias

作者:

Large language models increasingly function as artificial reasoners: they evaluate arguments, assign credibility, and express confidence. Yet their belief-forming behavior is governed by implicit, uninspected epistemic policies. This paper argues for an epistemic constitution for AI: explicit, contestable meta-norms that regulate how systems form and express beliefs. Source attribution bias provides the motivating case: I show that frontier models enforce identity-stance coherence, penalizing arguments attributed to sources whose expected ideological position conflicts with the argument's content. When models detect systematic testing, these effects collapse, revealing that systems treat source-sensitivity as bias to suppress rather than as a capacity to execute well. I distinguish two constitutional approaches: the Platonic, which mandates formal correctness and default source-independence from a privileged standpoint, and the Liberal, which refuses such privilege, specifying procedural norms that protect conditions for collective inquiry while allowing principled source-attending grounded in epistemic vigilance. I argue for the Liberal approach, sketch a constitutional core of eight principles and four orientations, and propose that AI epistemic governance requires the same explicit, contestable structure we now expect for AI ethics.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Recursive Agent Harnesses

Recursive language models (RLMs) showed that recursion over model calls is an effective strategy for long-context reasoning, and production coding agents have begun to write code that spawns subagents at scale, most recently in Anthropic's dynamic workflows. We name and study the pattern between these two lines of work, where the recursive unit is a full agent harness with filesystem tools, code execution, and planning rather than a model call with no tools. We call this the Recursive Agent Harness (RAH) and frame it as harness recursion, the code-first extension to the model recursion of RLMs. A parent agent generates and runs an executable script that spawns subagent harnesses in parallel for fine-grained workloads and uses structured function calls for small subtasks. We provide a controlled evaluation on long-context reasoning. With the backbone held fixed at GPT-5 to match the published Codex and RLM baselines, RAH improves the Codex coding-agent baseline from 71.75% to 81.36% on Oolong-Synthetic (199 samples, 13 context-length buckets up to 4M tokens), a gain attributable to the harness rather than the model. With a stronger backbone, Claude Sonnet 4.5, the same design reaches 89.77%.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Stabilizing the Q-Gradient Field for Policy Smoothness in Actor-Critic Methods

arXiv:2601.22970v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Policies learned via continuous actor-critic methods often exhibit erratic, high-frequency oscillations, making them unsuitable for physical deployment. Current approaches attempt to enforce smoothness by directly regularizing the policy's output. We argue that this approach treats the symptom rather than the cause. In this work, we theoretically establish that policy non-smoothness is fundamentally governed by the differential geometry of the critic. By applying implicit differentiation to the actor-critic objective, we prove that the sensitivity of the optimal policy is bounded by the ratio of the Q-function's mixed-partial derivative (noise sensitivity) to its action-space curvature (signal distinctness). To empirically validate this theoretical insight, we introduce PAVE (Policy-Aware Value-field Equalization), a critic-centric regularization framework that treats the critic as a scalar field and stabilizes its induced action-gradient field. PAVE rectifies the learning signal by minimizing the Q-gradient volatility while preserving local curvature. Experimental results demonstrate that PAVE achieves smoothness comparable to policy-side smoothness regularization methods, while maintaining competitive task performance, without modifying the actor.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomics reveal nonredundant sepsis-associated host-response signatures in critical illness

Background: Plasma proteomics may identify host-response signatures in sepsis, but it is unclear whether extracellular vesicle (EV)-enriched plasma provides distinct or redundant information compared with plasma. We compared paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomes in critically ill patients with sepsis and critically ill non-sepsis controls (CINS). Methods: In this prospective observational study, paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma samples were analyzed from 56 critically ill adults, including 40 patients with sepsis and 16 CINS patients. Protein abundance was quantified using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. Analyses compared proteomic depth, protein overlap, global concordance between compartments, and differential protein abundance between CINS and sepsis. Exploratory Gene Ontology enrichment was performed as a supplementary analysis. Results: EV-enriched plasma expanded proteomic detection, identifying 2,476 filtered proteins compared with 506 in plasma. Only 386 proteins were detected in both compartments, while 2,090 were unique to EV-enriched plasma and 120 were unique to plasma. Among shared proteins, plasma and EV-enriched plasma showed modest global concordance across critically ill patients (Spearman coeff = 0.322, p = 9.19 x 10^-11), with similar findings in sepsis alone. Differential abundance analysis identified 11 sepsis-associated proteins in plasma and 22 in EV-enriched plasma. Only SAA1, SAA2, and IGFBP6 were significant in both compartments. Exploratory pathway analysis supported acute-phase and inflammatory enrichment in plasma sepsis-associated proteins, while EV-enriched signals were directionally plausible but did not meet prespecified FDR thresholds. Conclusion: Plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomics capture related but nonredundant sepsis-associated host-response information in critically ill patients.

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

ReA-OVCD: Reliability-Aware Open-Vocabulary Change Detection via Semantic and Spatial Refinement

Unlike traditional remote sensing change detection that relies on predefined categories, Open-Vocabulary Change Detection (OVCD) identifies land cover changes flexibly using arbitrary text prompts. However, existing methods suffer from an inherent trade-off when modeling changes: instance-level comparison overlooks fine-grained semantic variations (e.g., partial building extensions), while direct pixel comparison proves unreliable, yielding unstable responses and boundary artifacts due to semantic ambiguity and spatial inconsistency. To this end, we propose an efficient training-free Reliability-Aware Open-Vocabulary Change Detection (ReA-OVCD) framework. It first derives candidate change regions from pixel-wise semantic discrepancies to ensure flexible and detailed localization. To ensure reliability, it subsequently introduces a collaborative refinement strategy to explicitly model change validity from both semantic and spatial perspectives. Specifically, we develop a Semantic Change Reasoning (SCR) module that reassesses changes by jointly analyzing distributional divergence and response variation, enabling the suppression of incidental inconsistencies while preserving reliable semantic shifts. In addition, a Boundary-aware Change Refinement (BCR) module is designed to mitigate artifacts stemming from boundary misalignment and uncertainty through validating whether candidate regions are supported by reliable interior pixels. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets (LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, DSIFN, and SECOND) demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving $\mathrm{F}_{1}^{C}$ improvements of 2.13\% to 9.75\% with higher computational efficiency. The code is publicly available at \https://github.com/Funny0101/ReA-OVCD

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

The Range Shrinks, the Threat Remains: Re-evaluating LLM Package Hallucinations on the 2026 Frontier-Model Cohort

arXiv:2605.17062v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Spracklen et al. (USENIX Security '25) showed that code-generating large language models hallucinate package names that do not exist on PyPI or npm at rates ranging from 5.2% on commercial models to 21.7% on open-source models, creating an attack surface for slopsquatting – the registration of malicious packages under hallucinated names. We replicate their methodology on five frontier code-capable LLMs released between October 2025 and March 2026: Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5.4-mini, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.2. Across 199,845 paired Python and JavaScript prompts validated against PyPI and npm master lists, we measure overall hallucination rates between 4.62% (Claude Haiku 4.5) and 6.10% (GPT-5.4-mini) – an order-of-magnitude compression of the inter-model spread observed by Spracklen, but not a retirement of the threat. Beyond replication, we identify a set of 127 package names (109 on PyPI, 18 on npm) that all five evaluated models invent identically; following coordinated disclosure with PyPI Security and Socket.dev, 53 of these (41 on PyPI, 12 on npm) remain registrable by an attacker after each registry's existing defenses, constituting a model-agnostic supply-chain attack surface that no single-model study can reveal. We further document a Python-over-JavaScript hallucination asymmetry that inverts Spracklen's 2024 finding, identify a Haiku-below-Sonnet inversion within the Anthropic family, and observe a Jaccard-similarity peak between DeepSeek V3.2 and GPT-5.4-mini (J = 0.343) suggestive of shared training-data origins.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Towards Responsibly Non-Compliant Machines

arXiv:2606.12147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider the problem of engineering autonomous intelligent agents that are capable to responsibly not comply with user requests. We argue that machine non-compliance comes in many different forms, and sketch the issues we should pursue on the road of accomplishing responsibly non-compliant intelligent machines. We anchor responsible non-compliance in justifications for task refusal, pathways to override the non-compliance, as well as careful tracking of security risks and liability transfers.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Can Open-Source LLM Agents Replace Static Application Security Testing Tools? An Empirical Assessment

arXiv:2606.11672v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper explores the value of agentic AI tools for cybersecurity purposes. We evaluate the efficacy of a general-purpose GenAI Large Language Model- (GenAI-) based agent when powered by three different Ollama-hosted general-purpose open source models. We assess each agent's performance using precision, recall, false positive count, and a calculated composite score based upon the interplay of the captured metrics, against the baseline performance of an existing, vetted Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tool, Bandit. Our findings refute the notion that a modern open-source GenAI LLM-based agent is currently suitable for the specialized task of SAST scanning under realistic conditions.

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

Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset: A Historical Document Dataset for Offline Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition with CRNN-Based Baseline Evaluation

Automatic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is inherently a challenging task, and its complexity is further increased when dealing with cursive scripts. Although significant efforts have been made on various cursive scripts, research regarding Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition (UHTR) has been relatively limited. This lag of research is primarily due to the unique challenges posed by its script, and the scarcity and unavailability of benchmark datasets. Therefore, to advance research in UHTR, this study presents a specialized real dataset called the Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset (UKHD). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first offline Urdu handwritten text lines dataset specifically curated from the materials written by Katibs in historical times. It encompasses a diverse range of flat nib writing variations in the Nastalique calligraphic style. Additionally, the effectiveness of different CRNN-based hybrid models has been evaluated to identify the optimal architecture for Urdu Katib Handwriting Recognition (UKHR). Among the analyzed models, the CNN-BGRU-CTC model showed more robust performance, with low Character Error Rate (CER) and Word Error Rate (WER). This research work aims to support and encourage the research community in developing a robust recognition system for preserving Urdu handwritten literature.

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

TerraMind: Large-Scale Generative Multimodality for Earth Observation

arXiv:2504.11171v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present TerraMind, the first any-to-any generative, multimodal foundation model for Earth observation (EO). Unlike other multimodal models, TerraMind is pretrained on dual-scale representations combining both token-level and pixel-level data across modalities. On a token level, TerraMind encodes high-level contextual information to learn cross-modal relationships, while on a pixel level, TerraMind leverages fine-grained representations to capture critical spatial nuances. We pretrained TerraMind on nine geospatial modalities of a global, large-scale dataset. In this paper, we demonstrate that (i) TerraMind's dual-scale early fusion approach unlocks a range of zero-shot and few-shot applications for Earth observation, (ii) TerraMind introduces "Thinking-in-Modalities" (TiM) – the capability of generating additional artificial data during finetuning and inference to improve the model output – and (iii) TerraMind achieves beyond state-of-the-art performance in community-standard benchmarks for EO like PANGAEA. The pretraining dataset, the model weights, and our code are open-sourced under a permissive license.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Hybrid VQE-CVQE algorithm using diabatic state preparation

arXiv:2512.04801v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a hybrid variational quantum algorithm that has variational parameters used by both the quantum circuit and the subsequent classical optimization. Similar to the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE), this algorithm applies a parameterized unitary operator to the qubit register. We generate this operator using diabatic state preparation. The quantum measurement results then inform the classical optimization procedure used by the Cascaded Variational Quantum Eigensolver (CVQE). We demonstrate the algorithm on a system of interacting electrons and show how it can be used on long-term error-corrected as well as short-term intermediate-scale quantum computers. Our simulations performed on IBM Brisbane produced energies well within chemical accuracy.

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

SierpinskiCam: Camera-Controlled Video Retaking with Sierpinski Triangle Pattern Cues

Generating novel renderings of a scene along user-defined camera trajectories from a single monocular video, dubbed video retaking, is a compelling but difficult problem in content creation and visual effects. Existing geometry-guided approaches reconstruct a 4D representation from the source video and render it along the target trajectory to condition video diffusion models. However, this guidance degrades as the target camera departs from the source trajectory, leaving newly revealed regions sparse or entirely missing. We propose SierpinskiCam, which addresses this limitation by augmenting geometry-based guidance with Sierpinski dome texture cues that contains rich trackable features even under large viewpoint changes. We further introduce a reference video conditioning mechanism that appends source-video tokens to the target-token sequence and separates the two streams with negative RoPE indices, enabling appearance grounding without architectural modification or per-video adaptation. Extensive experiments show that SierpinskiCam achieves significant gains in camera controllability, geometric consistency, and video quality across diverse and challenging retaking scenarios. Project page: https://hyelinnam.github.io/SierpinskiCam/.

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

The Road to Artificial SuperIntelligence: A Comprehensive Survey of Superalignment

arXiv:2412.16468v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has sparked discussion on Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), a hypothetical AI system that surpasses human intelligence. Although ASI remains hypothetical and far beyond current AI capabilities, discussing its potential and exploring its feasibility and potential risks is critical for the development of future AI systems. The idea of superalignment originates from scalable oversight, which studies how to supervise increasingly capable AI systems when direct human supervision becomes insufficient. In this paper, we focus on the superalignment problem: "The process of supervising, controlling, and governing artificial superintelligence." We first review scalable oversight paradigms-Sandwiching, Self-Enhancement, and Weak-to-Strong Generalization – then analyze the limitations of current paradigms through the lens of possibility and impossibility, discuss key challenges, and propose pathways for the safe and continual improvement of future AI systems.

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

Decoupled Motion Representation Learning for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection in dynamic scenes remains challenging due to the highly coupled motions among targets, imaging platforms, and dynamic backgrounds. Existing multi-frame methods usually perform implicit temporal modeling, where coherent background dynamics dominate motion correspondence learning, leading to an inherent trade-off between detection and false alarms. In this work, we observe that background motions exhibit strong global coherence, whereas small targets mainly correspond to sparse local motion anomalies. Moreover, many false-alarm responses maintain high consistency with globally coherent motion patterns, indicating that they mainly originate from coherent background dynamics rather than genuine target motions. Based on these observations, we propose a decoupled motion representation learning framework for moving infrared small target detection. Specifically, an explicit motion branch is introduced to model globally coherent motion dynamics using pretrained optical flow priors, together with a structure-preserving self-supervised adaptation strategy for infrared motion correspondence learning. Meanwhile, an implicit motion branch based on deformable feature alignment is designed to capture target-sensitive local motion anomalies under coherent motion guidance. Furthermore, a coherent-motion-guided local anomaly reasoning module is proposed to identify and suppress coherent-motion-induced false responses during localized motion modeling. Extensive experiments on two challenging infrared small target detection benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in dynamic scenes with complex motions, while maintaining favorable inference efficiency.

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

TokenPilot: Cache-Efficient Context Management for LLM Agents

As LLM agents are deployed in long-horizon sessions, context accumulation drives up inference costs. Existing approaches utilize text pruning or dynamic memory eviction to minimize token footprints; however, their unconstrained sequence mutations alter layouts, introducing prefix mismatches and cache invalidation. This reveals a critical trade-off between text sparsity and prompt cache continuity. To address this, we present TokenPilot, a dual-granularity context management framework. Globally, Ingestion-Aware Compaction acts as a framework harness to stabilize prompt prefixes and eliminate open-world environmental noise at the ingestion gate. Locally, Lifecycle-Aware Eviction monitors the ongoing residual utility of context segments, enforcing a conservative batch-turn schedule to offload content segments only when task relevance expires. Experiments on PinchBench and Claw-Eval under both isolated and continuous modes demonstrate that TokenPilot reduces costs by 61% and 56% in isolated mode, and 61% and 87% in continuous mode, while maintaining competitive performance compared to prior systems. TokenPilot has been integrated into LightMem2 at https://github.com/zjunlp/LightMem2.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Randomized, Controlled, Double Blind Clinical Study to Evaluate Use of Hydron Alkaline Ionised Water (HAIW) in Healthy Participants

Background and Objectives: Alkaline Ionized Water (AIW) is considered among the highest quality healthy drinking water worldwide and is widely discussed for its various health benefits. Hydron Alkaline Ionized Water (HAIW) is produced through electrolysis, resulting in a stable pH of approximately 9.5 with a negative Oxidation Reduction Potential (ORP), making it an antioxidant beverage. The objective of this study was to evaluate the safety of HAIW and its effects on digestion, sleep, energy, and overall quality of life in healthy participants compared to Packaged Drinking Water (PDW). Materials and Methods: A randomized, controlled, double blind, prospective clinical study was conducted in which a total of 24 healthy participants between the age group of 21 to 40 years were randomized in a 1:1 ratio to either HAIW Group or Packaged Drinking Water Group with equal gender distribution. Participants were hospitalized for 7 days and asked to consume at least 3 litres of the assigned water daily. Primary outcomes were safety-related laboratory parameters and adverse event monitoring. Secondary outcomes included assessment of digestion (appetite, digestion, bowel habits), urine parameters, sleep quality, freshness after waking, fatigue, energy/stamina/strength, quality of life, and global assessment Results: All 24 participants completed the study with no dropouts. Baseline demographics were comparable between the two groups. Assessment of primary safety-related laboratory parameters including Complete Blood count, liver function tests, renal function tests, blood sugar, Electrocardiogram and serum electrolytes showed non-significant change from baseline to 7 days and remained within normal limits in both groups, with non-significant difference between groups (p>0.05). HAIW showed significantly better improvement in appetite, digestion, and bowel habits from Day 2 onwards compared to Packaged drinking water. Sleep quality and freshness after waking up showed significant improvement from Day 3 and Day 2 respectively in the HAIW and PDW group, with significantly better improvement in HAIW group. Fatigue scores showed significant reduction at Day 6 and 7 in both groups with non-significant difference between groups. A total of 5 adverse events were reported (3 in HAIW, 2 in PDW), all unrelated to study products and were mild in nature. Global assessment showed excellent to good overall safety and tolerability in both groups. Conclusion: HAIW was well tolerated by all participants without any adverse effects. All laboratory safety parameters remained within normal range. HAIW demonstrated significant improvements in digestive function (appetite, digestion, bowel habits), sleep quality, and freshness after waking as compared to PDW. The study concludes that HAIW can be safely consumed. HAIW improves digestive and sleep-related functions.

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

Another Look at Log-PCA for Probability Measures: A Dynamical Formulation and Statistical Convergence

arXiv:2606.17196v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper is concerned with learning principal variations of random probability measures on $\mathbb{R}^m$ under the Wasserstein geometry. We introduce a new dynamical formulation to interpret the log-PCA, a linearized principal geodesic analysis, as a variational approach. Our differentiable version, termed as the Wasserstein Tangential PCA (WT-PCA), captures the local principal modes of geodesic variations of a (weighted) probability measure on the Wasserstein space via its covariance operator at barycenter. Based on the dynamical perspective and leveraging parallel transport structure of the optimal transport problems, we derive a general statistical convergence rate of the empirical WT-PCA when estimated from data in terms of the 2-Wasserstein distance between the population and empirical barycenter reference measures.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Prevalence and Correlates of Ideal Cardiovascular Health among Ugandan Adolescents: A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors often emerge during adolescence and track into adulthood, yet data on cardiovascular health (CVH) in sub-Saharan Africa remain limited. We assessed the prevalence and correlates of ideal CVH among Ugandan adolescents. Methods: We analysed baseline data of adolescents enrolled in a cluster-randomised controlled trial being conducted in urban (Kampala) and rural (Jinja) districts of Uganda. In this study, Ideal CVH was defined as meeting "ideal" status of 5-7 of the American Heart Association's Life's Simple 7 metrics. Random-effects logistic regression was used to identify factors associated with ideal CVH, accounting for village-level clustering. Results: We recruited 1316 participants with a mean age of 13.2 years, of whom 58.1% were female. Overall, the prevalence of ideal CVH was 66.8% (95% CI: 64.2% - 69.3%). The prevalence was higher in Jinja (74.4%, 95%CI: 70.9% - 77.7%) than Kampala (59.6%, 95%CI: 55.8%-63.2%) and the difference was evident (p

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

SPI: Query-Depth-Adaptive Indexing for Streaming RAG in Vector Databases

Vector databases (VecDBs) are increasingly deployed in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines where query processing and document ingestion occur concurrently. The index layer needs to provide low-latency search while incorporating new vectors without frequent global rebuilding. Existing VecDB pipelines typically operate within a uniform representation regime, despite substantial variation in the semantic granularity required across queries. This motivates an index design that supports incremental updates while adapting retrieval depth to query distribution and complexity. We propose Semantic Pyramid Indexing (SPI), a VecDB-layer indexing framework that organizes embeddings into $L$ semantically aligned resolution levels and selects retrieval depth per query via a lightweight uncertainty-aware controller. SPI supports progressive coarse-to-fine ANN search, level-wise streaming insertion without global rebuilds, and distributed execution through LSH partitioning with asynchronous gRPC coordination. Unlike hierarchical ANN structures with fixed traversal rules (e.g., SPANN), SPI adapts resolution at query time while remaining compatible with FAISS and Qdrant backends. On MS MARCO and Natural Questions, SPI achieves competitive Recall@10 with lower latency under the same dense encoder family, yielding a 1.4–2.3$\times$ average retrieval latency reduction under fixed Recall@10 targets relative to comparable approximate-ANN baselines. A prototype scaling study up to 8 nodes shows $6.2\times$ throughput scaling (${\approx}73\%$ efficiency); the 16-node configuration is included for completeness but shows diminishing efficiency. We provide a top-$K$ stability guarantee: queries with sufficient retrieval margin return an identical top-$K$ set at a shallower level. Code and configurations are available at https://github.com/FastLM/SPI_VecDB.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Bridging Single Distortion Artifacts and Mmultifactorial Clinical Quality: Few-shot Biparametric MRI Quality Assessment via Distortion-trained Prototypical Networks

Clinical prostate multi-parametric MRI relies heavily on high-quality diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), yet reading DWI is frequently compromised by geometric distortion, often caused by rectal air. Assessing quality via the PI-QUAL scoring system is an emerging clinical standard, but it is subjective, time-consuming and suffers from a class imbalance where low-quality cases are diverse and relatively scarce. Using the PRIME clinical trial as an example, there are $6\%$ images with PI-QUAL scores lower than 4, $87\%$ of DWI issues are due to distortion. Many of the other clinical quality issues are under-represented. To address this common dual-scarcity of annotated clinical data, we propose a few-shot biparametric prototypical network for automated image quality assessment (IQA). Our framework utilizes a dual-branch 3D ResNet to fuse T2-weighted and DWI features, providing anatomical context to distinguish true morphology from distortion. To handle real-world heterogeneity, we introduce feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) and a gradient reversal layer (GRL) to align feature distributions conditioned on varying b-values while suppressing acquisition-related biases. We demonstrate that a model meta-trained solely on comparatively objective, readily obtainable distortion labels can effectively adapt to predicting complex, multi-factorial clinical quality scores such as PI-QUAL using only five representative samples. Experimental results on two datasets show that our method significantly outperforms few-shot learning baselines for this challenging IQA task, offering a practically feasible and data-efficient solution for standardizing prostate MRI quality control in clinical workflows.

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

Pixel-Level Residual Diffusion Transformer: Scalable 3D CT Volume Generation

Generating high-resolution 3D CT volumes with fine details remains challenging due to substantial computational demands and optimization difficulties inherent to existing generative models. In this paper, we propose the Pixel-Level Residual Diffusion Transformer (PRDiT), a scalable generative framework that synthesizes high-quality 3D medical volumes directly at voxel-level. PRDiT introduces a two-stage training architecture comprising 1) a local denoiser in the form of an MLP-based blind estimator operating on overlapping 3D patches to separate low-frequency structures efficiently, and 2) a global residual diffusion transformer employing memory-efficient attention to model and refine high-frequency residuals across entire volumes. This coarse-to-fine modeling strategy simplifies optimization, enhances training stability, and effectively preserves subtle structures without the limitations of an autoencoder bottleneck. Extensive experiments conducted on the LIDC-IDRI and RAD-ChestCT datasets demonstrate that PRDiT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models, such as HA-GAN, 3D LDM and WDM-3D, achieving significantly lower 3D FID, MMD and Wasserstein distance scores.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Scenario-based Probing and Steering Cultural Values in Large Language Models–Extended Version

Large Language Models (LLMs) are deployed across cultural contexts but often reflect homogenized values inherited from training data. Evaluations of cultural alignment typically rely on direct prompting with survey-style questions, which frequently elicit neutral or safety-aligned responses and fail to capture underlying model preferences. We propose a framework for probing and steering latent cultural representations in LLMs along the two Inglehart–Welzel axes of the World Values Survey (WVS). By translating social value questions into scenario-based behavioral dilemmas, we extract token-level probabilities to measure implicit values and apply activation steering, optionally combined with country-conditioned prompting, to shift model behavior without retraining. Across three open-source LLMs and four target cultures, we find substantial variation in steerability and identify latent entanglement, where interventions along one cultural dimension induce shifts along another. This coupling mirrors correlations in human WVS data and persists across activation, prompt, and hybrid steering. It constrains axis-independent alignment, though general task performance is largely preserved.

24.
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.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Causal Inference with Generative Artificial Intelligence: Application to Texts as Treatments

In this paper, we demonstrate how to enhance the validity of causal inference with unstructured high-dimensional treatments like texts, by leveraging the power of generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). Specifically, we propose to use a deep generative model such as large language models (LLMs) to efficiently generate treatments and use their internal representation for subsequent causal effect estimation. We show that the knowledge of this true internal representation helps disentangle the treatment features of interest, such as specific sentiments and certain topics, from other possibly unknown confounding features. Unlike existing methods, the proposed GenAI-Powered Inference (GPI) methodology eliminates the need to learn causal representation from the data, and hence produces more accurate and efficient estimates. We formally establish the conditions required for the nonparametric identification of the average treatment effect, propose an estimation strategy that avoids the violation of the overlap assumption, and derive the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator through the application of double machine learning. Finally, using an instrumental variables approach, we extend the proposed GPI methodology to the settings in which the treatment feature is based on human perception. The GPI is also applicable to text reuse where an LLM is used to regenerate existing texts. We conduct simulation and empirical studies, using the generated text data from an open-source LLM, Llama 3, to illustrate the advantages of our estimator over state-of-the-art causal representation learning algorithms.