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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Stochastic Schrödinger Diffusion Models for Pure-State Ensemble Generation

arXiv:2605.03573v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum machine learning increasingly relies on pure-state representations, motivating generative models that sample directly in quantum representation space rather than perturbing classical inputs and re-encoding. We introduce Stochastic Schrödinger Diffusion Models (SSDMs), a score-based generative framework that defines diffusion, scores, and reverse-time sampling intrinsically on the complex projective manifold $\mathbb{CP}^{d-1}$ under the Fubini–Study metric. SSDMs combine a Riemannian Ornstein–Uhlenbeck forward diffusion with a stochastic Schrödinger realization, and learn reverse-time dynamics driven by the Riemannian score. Our central technical contribution is a local-time learning objective that exploits the local Euclidean OU limit of intrinsic manifold diffusions in Fubini-Study normal coordinates to obtain an analytic teacher score, bypassing the intractable transition densities that limit existing Riemannian score-based models. Across synthetic, physics-inspired (TFIM, XXZ), and quantum feature-state benchmarks up to $14$ qubits, SSDMs match target pure-state ensembles by orders of magnitude on MMD and observable statistics over both ambient Euclidean and matched Riemannian score-based baselines, and improve representation-level diagnostics for downstream quantum kernel methods.

02.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Adhesion and polarity-driven morphogenesis: Mechanisms and constraints in tissue formation

by Yoshiyuki T. Nakamura, Chikara Furusawa, Kunihiko Kaneko Embryonic development in multicellular organisms exhibits diverse morphogenetic patterns, which can generally be categorized into fundamental types such as monolayer and multilayer spheres, as well as cell masses. Furthermore, we identify two distinct processes for the formation of spherical structures. These basic patterns are thought to be governed by the microscopic properties of intercellular adhesion. However, the specific mechanisms linking the microscopic factors to the emergence of distinct macroscopic morphogenetic patterns remain poorly understood. In this study, we explore how different morphogenetic patterns arise by employing a computational model that incorporates intercellular adhesion and polarity. Our results demonstrate that all fundamental morphogenetic patterns can be generated through the interplay of two key parameters: the polarity strength of the cell and the regulation of polarity via mechanical signals. Furthermore, analytical considerations reveal key mechanisms underlying the formation of these patterns. These findings highlight the critical role of physical constraints in morphogenesis and suggest potential applications to the design of artificial tissues and organoids.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

The biological clock of multimorbidity: temporal dynamics of disease co-occurrence in primary care

Multimorbidity is the dominant clinical reality of primary care, yet the temporal dynamics governing when and how persistent comorbidity associations emerge remain poorly characterised. Most large-scale comorbidity studies adopt a single observation window after an index diagnosis, implicitly assuming that associations detectable at one year are equally detectable at five. Using 11 years of electronic health records from 5,821,197 individuals in Catalan primary care, we applied a matched cohort design across nine complementary follow-up windows, five cumulative (0-1 to 0-5 years) and four conditional (1-2 to 4-5 years), to 1,315 index diseases, identifying 144,030 significant directed comorbidity associations in the five-year network. We found that 60.1% of these associations required at least three years of follow-up and were undetectable in shorter-window analyses, demonstrating that observation window length is a primary determinant of which comorbidities can be observed. To organise this temporal heterogeneity, we introduce the biological clock of multimorbidity: a two-dimensional framework that positions ICD-10 disease categories according to their rates of cumulative signal attenuation and the persistence of conditional risk. This framework identifies four reproducible temporal patterns (episodic, chronic stable, chronic progressive, and transient-persistent) that are robust under bootstrap resampling, leave-one-disease-out sensitivity analysis, and alternative clustering approaches. The biological clock is systematically modulated by sex, with Blood/Immune and Musculoskeletal disorders showing the largest sex differences in temporal dynamics. Network analysis identified 19 disease "initiators" that generate broad downstream comorbidity burdens and 21 "sinks" representing convergent endpoints of multiple disease trajectories. Comparison with hospital-based Danish data from 6,909,676 individuals showed that shared associations were 2.7-fold enriched over chance expectation (hypergeometric test, p

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

Mitigating Content Shift and Hallucination in GenAI Image Editing via Structural Refinement

Generative AI (GenAI) image editors, such as Nano Banana, produce visually compelling results for retouching tasks, enabling non-experts to edit images through text prompts alone. However, the generative nature of these models often introduces spatial misalignment, texture distortion, and content hallucination, all of which are detrimental to downstream workflows that require pixel-level fidelity. We identify a problem setting we call "structure-preserving GenAI fusion" for black-box GenAI image retouching: retain the perceptual enhancements of a GenAI output while enforcing structural faithfulness to the original input image. To address this problem, we propose a post-processing framework that fuses an input image with its GenAI-enhanced counterpart by first establishing coarse spatial and photometric correspondences, then performing a fusion stage that transfers desired enhancements while suppressing hallucinated content. In the absence of direct prior work in this setting, we evaluate our framework against representative methods from photorealistic style transfer and image fusion. Our experiments demonstrate that our method better preserves aesthetic quality while maintaining pixel-level structural consistency and the input resolution.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Detecting AI Coding Agents in Open Source: A Validated Multi-Method Census of 180 Million Repositories

arXiv:2606.24429v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI coding agents are entering the open-source supply chain, yet their diverse and often invisible traces leave their prevalence poorly understood. We introduce a multi-layered detection framework that integrates configuration-file scanning, commit-message analysis, author-identity matching, and bot-signature lookup across World of Code (180M+ Git repositories), classifying agent traces into four behavioral types. No single method captures more than a fraction of activity: multi-method detection identifies 850,157 Claude Code commits in one snapshot, of which bot-account lookup_the signal most adoption studies rely on_recovers only 28,154 (3.3%), a 30x relative-recall gap, so single-signal prevalence estimates are biased low by at least this factor. Every detection pattern is hand-validated (495 labels) with per-cell precision and Wilson confidence intervals. Across snapshots from December 2024 to April 2026, commit-attributed agents generate over 320,000 commits per month; Claude Code leads (886,122 commits across 17,295 projects) and dominates silent, configuration-file-only adoption (21,078 projects). Compared against an independent pull-request census (AIDev), the two channels capture nearly disjoint agent populations_a PR census misses 79% of commit-detected Claude Code adopters and essentially all Codex adopters_and different kinds of work: PR-deployed cloud agents (Codex, Cursor) surface as feature work, while commit-deployed in-editor agents (Claude Code, OpenHands, Aider) surface as maintenance. The observed work profile follows deployment and detection mode rather than the tool itself, so no single channel is representative.

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

Naive Visual Memory is Not Enough: A Failure-Mode Study of GUI Agents

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents are increasingly used to automate complex computer tasks across applications, websites, and operating systems. To improve their reliability, recent work has introduced experiential memory, where agents retrieve prior trajectories to guide decision-making in similar states. More recent approaches further extend this idea to visual memory by storing and retrieving screenshots from past interactions, providing agents with richer contextual information than text-only memories. However, the effect of visual memory in GUI agents remains insufficiently understood: it is unclear which failures visual memory mitigates, or which failures it exacerbates. To systematically analyze the effect of visual memory, we introduce a taxonomy of four GUI agent failures (i.e., cognitive failure, visual state misunderstanding, hidden operation blindness, and grounding error) that map to distinct stages of the perception-reasoning-action pipeline. We find that prepending full-image memory has a divergent effect on the failure distribution: it reduces state-level failures but worsens action-level ones, and increases hidden operation blindness and grounding error. Motivated by this finding, we propose Action-Grounded Visual Memory (AGMem), an action-grounded memory framework for GUI agents. The core idea of AGMem is to store image crops that capture the local GUI region closely related to a successful action or a recovery, rather than storing full screenshots. Experiments on OSWorld show that AGMem improves task success rates by 33.3 % over full-image memory. These results demonstrate that AGMem is an effective representation for visual memory in GUI agents.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

When Dynamics Models Read the Wrong Time Steps: Label-Free Event Credit Re-Anchoring for Robust Global Readouts

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17572v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned dynamics models often answer global physical questions, such as fault severity or impact stiffness, by pooling a per-step feature sequence into one readout vector. This sequence-to-global interface creates an under-studied temporal credit problem: with only trajectory-level supervision, a model can predict accurately in training conditions while reading from abundant smooth correlates rather than the brief physical events that determine the target. We call this failure temporal credit dilution. It is not exposed by the training loss and is not removed by standard physics-informed residuals, because the error lies in where the global readout assigns functional credit. We introduce Credit-in-Event, an interface-level probe for measuring how much pooled credit lands on event steps, and prove in closed form that a pooled linear reader routes credit to a spurious background channel as the event fraction shrinks. We then propose CREST, a training-free and label-free readout that estimates a transient event core from learned features and re-anchors the pooled representation through event-versus-rest contrast. Across simulated gear and impact systems, recurrent and attention encoders, and public bearing vibration data, CREST reduces out-of-distribution error while restoring event credit. Ablations show that stable-step selection and receptive-field shrinking fail, confirming that the gain comes from event-core credit re-anchoring rather than a generic locality or stability prior.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Comparing Human Gaze and Vision-Language Model Attention in Safety-Relevant Environments

Human visual attention plays an important role in how people perceive and respond to environments containing potential risks. This study investigates whether large vision-language models can identify the same regions of a scene that attract human attention in safety-relevant environments. Eye-tracking data were collected from ten participants viewing 33 scene images representing environments with varying levels of potential risk using Pupil Invisible wearable glasses. Gaze coordinates were mapped onto stimulus images to generate population-averaged human gaze heatmaps. In parallel, GPT-4o was prompted through the OpenAI Vision Application Programming Interface (API) to generate spatial predictions of visual attention, which were converted into saliency maps for comparison with human gaze patterns. Spatial alignment between human gaze heatmaps and model-generated saliency maps was evaluated using four complementary metrics: Pearson correlation (r = 0.515 +- 0.117), Normalised Scanpath Saliency (NSS = 0.988 +- 0.323), Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL = 1.766 +- 0.844), and Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve using the Judd formulation (AUC-Judd = 0.806 +- 0.076). A cross-model comparison with Gemini Pro, Gemini Flash, and Claude showed that all models exceeded the AUC-Judd chance baseline of 0.5 and achieved positive NSS scores. Gemini Pro demonstrated the strongest spatial localisation according to three of the four metrics, whereas GPT-4o produced the closest distributional match to human attention as measured by KL divergence. These findings suggest that large vision-language models can identify regions that broadly correspond to where humans direct visual attention in safety-relevant scenes without requiring eye-tracking training data. The results highlight the potential of vision-language models as a scalable tool for approximating human attentional patterns.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Model-based inference of gene expression noise from single-cell RNA-sequencing data

The heterogeneity of expression levels among genetically identical cells, termed gene expression noise, is a property of the gene expression process whose importance in the biology of organisms and their evolution is increasingly recognized. Measuring gene expression noise requires single-cell expression data, as obtained from single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNASeq). Its estimation, however, is challenging owing to (i) the presence of technical noise in addition to biological noise, and (ii) the heterogeneity of cell types in the sampled population. We propose a maximum-likelihood framework to infer biological noise from scRNASeq data, while accounting for technical noise, dropout probabilities, and distinct cell sequencing depths. We demonstrate the parameter identifiability using simulations and that the resulting noise estimates are uncorrelated from the mean gene expression, and therefore do not need extra correction in downstream analyses, easing intra- and inter- genome comparisons. Using two technical replicates of scRNASeq data from the wild yeast *Saccharomyces paradoxus*, we show that expression noise can be inferred in a reproducible manner.

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

Vocabulary Dropout for Curriculum Diversity in LLM Co-Evolution

Co-evolutionary self-play, where one language model generates problems and another solves them, promises autonomous curriculum learning without human supervision. In practice, the proposer quickly converges to a narrow distribution of problems that satisfy the reward function. This diversity collapse renders the curriculum uninformative for the solver, stalling the co-evolutionary loop. We introduce vocabulary dropout, a random mask applied to the proposer's output logits during both policy training and curriculum generation, as a lightweight mechanism to sustain diversity. The mask is hard and non-stationary, preventing the proposer from locking into fixed token sequences. Training Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B on mathematical reasoning via R-Zero, we find that vocabulary dropout sustains proposer diversity across lexical, semantic, and functional metrics throughout training. It also yields solver improvements averaging +4.4 points at 8B, with the largest gains on competition-level benchmarks. Our findings suggest that explicit action-space constraints, analogous to the structural role that game rules play in classical self-play, can help sustain productive co-evolution in language. Vocabulary dropout is one simple instantiation of this principle.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

A Neuromorphic Trigger for Efficient Audio Event Detection

arXiv:2606.17775v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficient processing of continuous audio streams remains a key challenge for real-time and resource-constrained systems. This paper introduces a neuromorphic trigger for audio event detection, based on a spiking neural network (SNN) that selectively gates input to downstream models. The proposed trigger acts as a low-cost front-end, identifying salient audio segments and forwarding only these to a more computationally intensive model for tasks such as classification. The trigger is implemented as a lightweight fully connected SNN and evaluated on two representative tasks: Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) and Sound Event Detection (SED). For ASD, the trigger achieves a one-second segment-based F1 score of 0.97 on a class-agnostic form of the URBAN-SED dataset, demonstrating high reliability in identifying relevant audio regions. For SED, the trigger is combined with the Dang classifier on the DCASE 2017 Challenge Task 2 dataset, showing a potential $42.6\times$ reduction in FLOPs while reducing the lower bound of the event-based error rate from 0.41 to 0.25. These results highlight the potential of neuromorphic triggers as real-time, energy-efficient front-end filters, enabling substantial reductions in computational cost.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A Solver-Free Training Method for Predict-then-Optimize

arXiv:2606.19587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a scalable method for training prediction (machine learning) models in the predict-then-optimize paradigm, where model outputs serve as coefficients for a subsequent linear optimization task. Directly minimizing the empirical decision regret is intractable for linear programming and combinatorial optimization since the decision mapping is piecewise constant, and the gradients are zero almost everywhere. While existing methods address this by smoothing the differentiation process, they suffer from scalability issues, since a computationally expensive solver call is required for every gradient evaluation. To address this, we propose a decision-focused learning pipeline based on a measure transformation principle, which yields a new surrogate loss that is completely optimization-solver-free during training. We establish theoretical guarantees, including Fisher consistency and excess risk bounds. Empirically, our method achieves decision quality competitive with state-of-the-art methods while reducing training time by orders of magnitude.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

IAPO: Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization for Tool Use in Small Multimodal Agents

arXiv:2606.11652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates reinforcement learning (RL) methods for improving tool-calling capabilities in multimodal small language model (SLM) agents. While existing works have explored various reward designs to improve agentic tool-calling ability, these approaches face inherent limitations for SLM training, especially under multimodal scenarios. First, many existing methods evaluate tool use correctness through exact matching against certain ground-truth or predefined formats. However, this assumption is often unsuitable for multimodal tasks, where multiple tool use paths may be valid and annotated tool trajectories are typically unavailable. Second, such sparse and brittle binary rewards provide little guidance on how to improve the underlying decision process, making them particularly difficult for multimodal SLM to learn from. To address these issues, we propose Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization (IAPO), an RL algorithm for improving tool use in multimodal SLM by aligning the model's attribution across input components with that of a stronger teacher. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-3B show that the proposed method improves visual question answering accuracy by an average of 3% across six test sets compared with existing visual tool use work, by helping the model attend to the most relevant input evidence.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Explicit Solution of Infinite-Horizon Linear Backward Stochastic Volterra Integral Equations

arXiv:2603.15479v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study linear backward stochastic Volterra integral equations (BSVIEs) on the infinite time horizon. By introducing weighted function spaces with exponential decay, we establish existence and uniqueness of adapted M-solutions. We construct an infinite-horizon resolvent kernel and derive explicit formulas for the solution components (Y,Z,K) using a Girsanov transformation and Hida Malliavin calculus. The results extend the finite-horizon theory of Hu and Oksendal to the infinite horizon framework.

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

Adaptive Inference-Time Scaling via Early-Step Latent Verification for Image Editing

Instruction-based image editing has made notable progress with recent advances in generative models. However, the quality of the edited result is still influenced by the randomly sampled initial noise, particularly in complex editing scenarios. An unsuitable initial noise may lead to unsatisfactory editing results. Recent inference-time scaling methods address this issue by sampling multiple initial noises and selecting better candidates. Nevertheless, most of them follow a decode-then-verify scheme which introduces an efficiency-accuracy trade-off. When decoding is performed after limited inference steps, the decoded images often remain too noisy for reliable assessment, whereas sufficiently denoised images require much higher computational cost. To address this issue, we propose VeriLatent, a plug-and-play adaptive inference-time scaling framework with early-step latent verification for image editing. Specifically, we propose a novel verifier that scores each initial noise through a latent-space editing activation map at an early stage. It identifies promising candidates by assessing whether they can induce an effective edit in the correct region. This enables efficient early pruning without decoding latents into images. Building on this, we further develop an adaptive search strategy for inference-time scaling. It allocates inference budgets according to editing difficulty, thereby reducing the number of function evaluations (NFE). Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and different base models demonstrate that VeriLatent consistently improves both editing performance and inference-time scaling efficiency.

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

A Data-Centric Framework for Detecting and Correcting Corrupted Labels

arXiv:2606.11699v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The performance of machine learning and deep learning models largely depends on the quality of the training data. However, the quality of the real-world datasets is often compromised by noisy labels, which can substantially degrade model accuracy and reliability. To address this challenge, we propose Relabeler, an end-to-end data-centric framework for detecting and correcting corrupted labels. For corrupted label detection, Relabeler jointly leverages both local and global relationships among data instances to identify potentially noisy samples. After detecting suspicious instances, Relabeler further performs label correction by estimating the most probable clean label for each instance based on both its input features and observed noisy label. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, noise types, and noise rates demonstrate that Relabeler consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 58% improvement in label correction precision and 6% improvement in downstream task performance.

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

EurekAgent: Agent Environment Engineering is All You Need For Autonomous Scientific Discovery

LLM-based agents have shown increasing potential in automating scientific discovery. Given an optimizable metric and an execution environment, they can propose, validate, and iterate scientific solutions, and have produced results that outperform human-designed approaches. As model capabilities continue to improve, we argue that the bottleneck for autonomous scientific discovery is shifting from prescribing agent workflows to designing agent environments: the resources, constraints, and interfaces that shape agent behavior. We frame this as environment engineering: building environments that amplify productive behaviors, such as open-ended exploration, systematic artifact management, and inter-agent collaboration, while suppressing harmful behaviors, such as reward hacking and high-friction human oversight. We present EurekAgent, an environment-engineered agent system for metric-driven autonomous scientific discovery. EurekAgent engineers the environment along four dimensions: permissions engineering for bounded agent execution and isolated evaluation; artifact engineering for filesystem and Git-based collaboration; budget engineering for budget-aware exploration; and human-in-the-loop engineering for easy human supervision and intervention. EurekAgent sets new state-of-the-art results on multiple mathematics, kernel engineering, and machine learning tasks, including new state-of-the-art 26-circle packing results discovered with less than $11 in total API cost. We open-source our code and results, and call for environment engineering as a core research direction for developing reliable autonomous research agents.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

IntElicit: Eliciting and Assessing Contextualized Creativity via Dialogue Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.12086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contextualized assessment offers high ecological validity for evaluating creativity but introduces a critical challenge: observed performance may be confounded with cognitive proficiency (domain knowledge) and agency (willingness to engage). Meanwhile, in the age of generative AI, creative problem solving increasingly occurs in tool-mediated and human–AI interactive environments, making fully static assessment less aligned with contemporary creative practice. To address these issues, this paper proposes IntElicit, a framework for eliciting and assessing contextualized creativity via dialogue policy optimization. IntElicit functions as a constrained adaptive AI Interviewer: it provides non-directive knowledge and agency scaffolds in multi-turn interaction to reduce non-creative confounders, while preserving participants' responsibility for generating the creative content being evaluated. Specifically, to tackle sparse rewards and potential reward hacking (e.g., answer dictation) in open-ended educational dialogue, IntElicit introduces a decomposed process reward mechanism. This mechanism aligns the policy with pedagogical elicitation, rewarding prompts that draw out participant reasoning rather than producing optimal answers on their behalf. Extensive experiments, including participant simulation and a human subject study (N=64), show that IntElicit improves elicited creative outcomes over expert-designed baselines. Together, the results suggest that interactive elicitation can reveal creative potential that static FPSP-style assessment may miss, providing a formative and diagnostic lens for contextualized creativity assessment in AI-mediated learning contexts.

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

RUB: Evaluating Residual Knowledge in Unlearned Models

Machine Unlearning (MUL) has emerged as a key mechanism for privacy protection and content regulation, yet current techniques often fail to guarantee the complete removal of sensitive information. While most existing works focus on verifying the execution of unlearning, they overlook the critical question of whether models remain robust against adversarial attempts to recover forgotten knowledge. In this work, we advocate for the principle of Robust Unlearning, which requires models to be both indistinguishable from retrained counterparts and resilient against diverse adversarial threats. To instantiate this principle, we propose a unified benchmark, RUB (Robust Unlearning Benchmark), that systematically evaluates the robustness of unlearning algorithms across classification, image-to-image reconstruction, and text-to-image synthesis. Within this framework, we introduce the Unlearning Mapping Attack (UMA) as a generalizable method to detect residual information, and demonstrate how existing attack strategies can be adapted into this framework as long as they conform to the generic UMA framework. Our experiments across discriminative and generative tasks reveal that state-of-the-art unlearning methods remain vulnerable under these evaluations, even when passing standard verification metrics. By positioning robustness as the central criterion and providing a benchmark for adversarial evaluation, we hope RUB paves the way toward more reliable and secure unlearning practices. The codebase and model checkpoints in RUB will be published.

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

On Subquadratic Architectures: From Applications to Principles

arXiv:2606.12364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers dominate modern sequence modeling, but their quadratic attention incurs substantial computational cost. Subquadratic architectures offer a scalable alternative. However, it remains unclear which designs yield the most effective sequence models. We compare three leading approaches: xLSTM, Mamba-2, and Gated DeltaNet. We evaluate these models on tasks with complex dependencies: (1) code-model pre-training, (2) distillation of code models from large language models, and (3) pre-training of time-series foundation models. Across these settings, xLSTM delivers the strongest overall performance. To explain xLSTM's advantage, we present a unified formulation and analyze the underlying architectural mechanisms, focusing on state tracking and memory dynamics. Our results show that xLSTM enables more flexible and stable memory correction via its gating scheme. We corroborate these findings on controlled synthetic length-generalization tasks. Overall, our findings indicate that xLSTM's gains on complex tasks stem from robust state tracking and accumulation.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Data-Driven Dynamic Assortment in Online Platforms: Learning about Two Sides

arXiv:2606.11118v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study a dynamic assortment problem on a two-sided service platform with incomplete information and heterogeneous customers in a discrete-time setting. In each period, a customer arrives seeking service, and the platform chooses an assortment of sellers to display. The customer then proposes a transaction to at most one seller in the assortment according to a multinomial logit choice model. After a fixed number of periods, sellers review the proposals they have received and each chooses at most one customer according to another multinomial logit choice model, after which the cycle repeats. A key challenge is that the platform does not know the choice-model parameters of either customers or sellers in advance. To our knowledge, this is the first study of a dynamic assortment problem in which both sides' choice parameters are unknown. We develop a data-driven algorithm that learns these parameters while optimizing the platform's objective over time. We evaluate performance using regret, which measures revenue loss relative to a clairvoyant benchmark that knows all parameters and customer arrivals in advance. We show that the algorithm's worst-case regret grows polylogarithmically over time, and we derive a matching lower bound, establishing its rate optimality.

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

Better Adherence, Richer Context: A Field Evaluation of LLM-Powered Conversational Voice Diaries for Sleep

arXiv:2606.18596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sleep diaries are central to behavioral sleep medicine and cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, yet daily completion is difficult to sustain, and static forms often provide limited context for interpreting night-to-night sleep variation. We designed an LLM-powered conversational voice diary that delivers clinically grounded morning and evening sleep diary questions through proactive smart-speaker prompts, structured conversational intake, and adaptive follow-up dialogue. We evaluated the system in a four-week between-subjects field study with 30 university students, comparing it with a text-based mobile diary using matched diary items, reporting windows, and reminder intervals. Compared with the text-based diary, the conversational voice diary showed higher adherence and elicited more detailed contextual self-report about routines, stressors, environmental conditions, and other sleep-related factors. Participants also described the voice diary as easier to integrate into daily routines, despite longer perceived completion time. However, voice-based conversational intake produced lower completeness for some structured diary fields, revealing a trade-off between expressive richness and structured precision. These findings show both the promise and the challenge of using LLM-powered conversational voice assistants for longitudinal health self-report.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Is Code Better Than Language for Algorithmic Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For tool-augmented language models, comparing natural-language reasoning with code-execution pipelines is difficult because the comparison changes both the intermediate representation and the execution mechanism. We separate these factors with an intermediate intervention: the model expresses its reasoning as executable code, and the language model simulates that code in context to produce an answer. On a 40-task verifiable algorithmic benchmark, deterministic code execution outperforms natural-language reasoning by +31.6pp. We observe that the intermediate intervention is not meaningfully different from natural-language reasoning (+0.15pp). These results suggest that, in our evaluated setting, changing the intermediate representation alone does not explain the tool-use advantage, providing evidence for the performance gains requiring reliable external execution. We formalize this intuition with a simple statistical decision-theoretic model that characterizes when execution dominates end-to-end risk in our disentangled trace-generation/execution regime. We validate our theory using a reconstruction intervention that leverages a proxy language model to infer natural-language reasoning traces from code representations, recovering performance comparable to the original natural-language reasoning pipeline. All experiments are at https://github.com/TerryTong-Git/ToolProj.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Proactive Conversational Assistant for a Procedural Manual Task based on Audio and IMU

Real-time conversational assistants for procedural manual tasks often depend on video input, which can be computationally expensive and compromise user privacy. For the first time, we propose a real-time conversational assistant that provides comprehensive guidance for procedural manual tasks using only lightweight privacy-preserving modalities such as audio and IMU inputs from a user's wearable device to understand the context. Using a furniture assembly task and a cooking task, we show how this assistant proactively communicates step-by-step instructions to a user performing a procedural task, and answers user questions. We illustrate the data generation method and the system design to achieve such an assistant. On observing that an off-the-shelf language model is a talkative assistant but is not always able to answer questions correctly, we demonstrate how finetuning the model improves its ability to limit unnecessary dialogues with a 50% increase in the precision, while also improving its ability to answer questions correctly, measured by a 150% increase in the recall of answers. We further describe how such an assistant is implemented on an edge device with no dependence on the cloud.