Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12674

Evoflux: Inference-Time Evolution of Executable Tool Workflows for Compact Agents

Authors:

Kushal Raj Bhandari↗Ling Yue↗Ching-Yun Ko↗Dhaval Patel↗Shaowu Pan↗Pin-Yu Chen↗Jianxi Gao↗

arXiv:2606.12674v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compact language models (LMs) reduce cost, latency, and deployment risk for tool agents. Yet MCP-style tool use requires more than isolated function calling: an agent must discover tools from live catalogs, satisfy schemas, preserve dependencies across intermediate outputs, and ground final responses in executed evidence. Small planners often generate plausible workflow graphs that fail under tool resolution, parameter validation, dependency tracking, or execution. We argue that this failure mode is poorly handled by small-corpus distillation. A few hundred teacher traces can teach workflow format, but rarely cover the recovery behavior needed to repair failed plans over changing tool catalogs. We introduce Evoflux, an inference-time evolutionary search method that treats compact tool use as the repair of executable tool workflows. It evolves typed workflow graphs through structured edits, execution feedback, adaptive intensity, meta-guided redesign, and diversity pruning. On held-out MCP-Bench tasks spanning live MCP servers and 250 tools, Evoflux raises execution feasibility from roughly 3% to 17-24% across small planners. In contrast, SFT and SFT+DPO on the same search-mined data match, underperform, or collapse below zero-shot performance; ReAct reaches higher peaks, but with higher variance and token cost. These results show that execution-grounded search is more reliable under scarce teacher-trace budgets.

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02.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18214

Time and Killed Resolvents in Reflected Optimal Stopping with a Max Payoff

Authors:

Louis Shuo Wang↗Ye Liang↗

arXiv:2606.18214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study infinite-horizon optimal stopping for normally reflected two-dimensional diffusions in the positive quadrant with max payoff \(G(x_1,x_2)=x_1\vee\alpha x_2\). The non-smooth payoff produces a singular stopping-gain measure on the kink set \(\Delta=\{x_1=\alpha x_2\}\). We prove $\displaystyle \Gamma^\Delta(dx) = -\frac{n^\top a(x)n}{2\sqrt{1+\alpha^2}}\,\sigma_\Delta(dx)$, with $n=(1,-\alpha)$, so the diagonal component is non-positive and strictly negative under local ellipticity. This implies that every interior kink point lies in the continuation region. We further show that the correct value representation uses the resolvent killed at first entry into the stopping set, $\displaystyle V=G-R_r^{\mathcal C}\Gamma$, and give a closed-form reflected Brownian counter-example showing that the unrestricted reflected resolvent is generally wrong. A reflected Brownian benchmark and numerical experiments illustrate the local-time, resolvent-gap, and diagonal-avoidance mechanisms.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12210

Can News Predict the Market? Limits of Zero-Shot Financial NLP and the Role of Explainable AI

Authors:

Ali M Karaoglu↗Shreyank N Gowda↗

Can financial news reliably predict short-term stock movements? Despite advances in large language models, this question remains unresolved. We revisit this problem using a zero-shot natural language processing framework, investigating whether models can extract actionable signals from financial news without domain-specific training. We design a structured pipeline that combines zero-shot natural language inference with temporal aggregation, explicitly modelling recency and event-dependent impact horizons when integrating information across articles. To address the need for transparency in high-stakes settings, we introduce a multi-layered explainability framework that links predictions to token-level, article-level, and aggregate evidence, and produces grounded natural language rationales. Across multiple models and prediction horizons, we find that zero-shot approaches consistently fail to outperform simple baselines, with particularly weak performance on negative movements, suggesting deeper structural limitations in mapping news sentiment to short-term price dynamics. However, explainability signals reliably distinguish between trustworthy and unreliable predictions, offering practical value even when accuracy is limited. These findings highlight the limits of zero-shot financial NLP and motivate a shift toward decision-support systems that prioritise transparency and uncertainty awareness. Code: https://github.com/alimert05/zero-shot-stock-xai

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04.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2605.11558

A Composite Activation Function for Learning Stable Binary Representations

Authors:

Seokhun Park↗Choeun Kim↗Kwanho Lee↗Sehyun Park↗Insung Kong↗Yongdai Kim↗

arXiv:2605.11558v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation functions play a central role in neural networks by shaping internal representations. Recently, learning binary activation representations has attracted significant attention due to their advantages in computational and memory efficiency, as well as interpretability. However, training neural networks with Heaviside activations remains challenging, as their non-differentiability obstructs standard gradient-based optimization. In this paper, we propose Heavy Tailed Activation Function (HTAF), a smooth approximation to the Heaviside function that enables stable training with gradient-based optimization. We construct HTAF as a sigmoid hyperbolic tangent composite function and theoretically show that it maintains a large gradient mass around zero inputs while exhibiting slower gradient decay in the tail regions. We show that Spiking Neural Networks, Binary Neural Networks and Deep Heaviside neural Networks can be trained stably using HTAF with gradient-based optimization. Finally, we introduce Implicit Concept Bottleneck Models (ICBMs), an interpretable image model that leverages HTAF to induce discrete feature representations. Extensive experiments across various architectures and image datasets demonstrate that ICBM enables stable discretization while achieving prediction performance comparable to or better than standard models.

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05.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2509.22020

Task-Adaptive Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Weather Foundation Models

Authors:

Shilei Cao↗Hehai Lin↗Jiashun Cheng↗Yang Liu↗Guowen Li↗Xuehe Wang↗Juepeng Zheng↗Haoyuan Liang↗Meng Jin↗Chengwei Qin↗Hong Cheng↗Haohuan Fu↗…

arXiv:2509.22020v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While recent advances in machine learning have equipped Weather Foundation Models (WFMs) with substantial generalization capabilities across diverse downstream tasks, the escalating computational requirements associated with their expanding scale increasingly hinder practical deployment. Current Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, designed for vision or language tasks, fail to address the unique challenges of weather downstream tasks, such as variable heterogeneity, resolution diversity, and spatiotemporal coverage variations, leading to suboptimal performance when applied to WFMs. To bridge this gap, we introduce WeatherPEFT, a novel PEFT framework for WFMs incorporating two synergistic innovations. First, during the forward pass, Task-Adaptive Dynamic Prompting (TADP) dynamically injects the embedding weights within the encoder to the input tokens of the pre-trained backbone via internal and external pattern extraction, enabling context-aware feature recalibration for specific downstream tasks. Furthermore, during backpropagation, Stochastic Fisher-Guided Adaptive Selection (SFAS) not only leverages Fisher information to identify and update the most task-critical parameters, thereby preserving invariant pre-trained knowledge, but also introduces randomness to stabilize the selection. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of WeatherPEFT on three downstream tasks, where existing PEFT methods show significant gaps versus Full-Tuning, and WeatherPEFT achieves performance parity with Full-Tuning using fewer trainable parameters. The code of this work is available at https://github.com/ShileiCao/WeatherPEFT.

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06.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18963

Online Reward-Punishment Learning from Fixed-Channel Perceptual Event Streams without Environment Rewards

Authors:

Zirong Li↗

arXiv:2606.18963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study online reward-punishment learning when the environment provides no scalar reward or evaluative label. At each step the agent receives only a fixed-channel perceptual packet, and quantities such as pain, energy, contact, damage, or cognitive error are treated as perceptual dimensions whose valence must be inferred from transition consequences. OHIRL separates four roles: M_psi learns next-packet prediction, D_omega models residual dynamics, C_eta is a fixed internal post-transition trajectory evaluator, and B_xi learns to use the resulting value evidence for later policy updates and action scoring. C_eta uses a recovery-positive and persistence/growth-negative residual-regulation orientation; a coefficient-origin audit shows that equal-unit, raw-equal, and random monotone variants preserve more than 92% of the released top-action rankings, while sign inversion preserves 0%. The reward-free protocol exposes observation transitions while withholding environment rewards, delayed external evaluators, success labels, and action-goodness labels. A conditional error decomposition separates B_xi evidence-estimation error from residual policy-optimization error. In a 2x2-XOR packet task, medicine and chili acquire opposite value under visual XOR contexts, and the same pain or spice increase can be positive or negative depending on consequence structure; B_xi reaches 0.952 balanced reward-sign accuracy. In a full online-interleaved audit, M_psi reaches holdout R2=0.907, B_xi reaches 0.940 sign accuracy, and the policy reaches 0.979 optimal-action accuracy, while immediate packet scores, prediction-error rewards, shuffled targets, zero reward, and error-reduction controls collapse. Hidden-reward CartPole and Taxi controls, public-context no-leakage audits, and module-role ablations further test information boundaries and component necessity.

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07.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13504

A refined thermodynamic analysis of nonsecular master equations

Authors:

Mohamed Boubakour↗Talia Szikman↗Cyril Elouard↗

arXiv:2606.13504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a systematic thermodynamic analysis of nonsecular master equations. We consider master equations resulting either from the partial secular and the geometric-arithmetic approximations, two approximations ensuring the positivity of the system's dynamics when some of its transition frequencies are too small to enable the full secular approximation. Both cause the system to relax towards a steady state which is not the Gibbs state of its bare Hamiltonian. Nonetheless, we build a unified, consistent thermodynamic framework for those dynamics. Starting from a microscopic expression of the second law based on system-environment correlations, we employ a systematic perturbation theory to preserve the positivity of the second law despite the approximations done on the dynamics. We show that, in spite of the weak system-bath coupling, the system-bath interaction energy participates to the energy balance, as well as the Lamb-shift. Those extra contributions give rise to work performed by the system on the bath when the former is out of equilibrium. We compare this microscopic entropy production with the definition based on the contractivity of the reduced system dynamics (Spohn inequality). We show that, unlike for secular master equations, the two entropy production rates differ because of the presence of non-vanishing stationary coherences in the energy eigenbasis. However, in the case of a single thermal bath, the difference is purely transient, and no work can be cyclically extracted from the steady-state despite its non-Gibbs form. Finally, we illustrate our results with a simple example, clarifying and completing the thermodynamic picture of Markovian dynamics in the quantum regime.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18681

Moving Beyond Diversity: Visual Token Pruning as Subspace Reconstruction for Efficient VLMs

Authors:

Jaeyeon Lee↗Shunjie Wen↗Dong-Wan Choi↗

Despite their remarkable performance, Vision Language Models (VLMs) incur substantial computational overhead due to the large number of visual tokens. While diversity maximization has become a dominant strategy for token reduction, existing methods rely on cosine-based normalized similarity that discards magnitude information, failing to faithfully approximate the original feature representation and leading to suboptimal performance, particularly on compositional multi-skill reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce SPARE, a subspace reconstruction method that reformulates token pruning as a column subset selection problem and explicitly minimizes reconstruction error. By iteratively selecting tokens with large projection residuals, SPARE performs reconstruction-driven pruning beyond angular diversity. Moreover, we reveal a counterintuitive anti-relevance phenomenon: tokens with lower image-text relevance score can better preserve contextual information. Based on this finding, we incorporate anti-relevance into SPARE as an additional selection criterion to promote context-aware token selection. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that SPARE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, with strong gains on compositional tasks. When applied to LLaVA, SPARE removes up to 94% of visual tokens while retaining 95% of the baseline performance, all in a fully training-free manner.

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09.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20008

VIMPO: Value-Implicit Policy Optimization for LLMs

Authors:

Zhewei Kang↗Aosong Feng↗Sergey Levine↗Dawn Song↗Xuandong Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.20008v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become a central tool for improving the reasoning ability of large language models, but current methods face a trade-off between simplicity and credit assignment. Group-relative methods such as GRPO avoid training a critic, but typically assign a trajectory-level advantage to every token. Actor-critic methods provide denser learning signals, but require a learned value function with its own training instability. We introduce VIMPO, a critic-free policy optimization method that derives a policy-implied value function from the optimality conditions of KL-regularized reinforcement learning. For autoregressive generation, the resulting value recurrence can be written in terms of policy-reference log-ratios and anchored by the terminal condition that no future reward remains at the end of a trajectory. This gives a simple value loss that incorporates outcome-level verifiable rewards without training a critic. The same derivation also yields a critic-free actor advantage, allowing VIMPO to separate reward incorporation through the value loss from policy improvement through a PPO-style actor update. On mathematical RLVR benchmarks, VIMPO improves over GRPO across MATH-500, AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and OlympiadBench, with especially larger gains on competition-style evaluations. Under noisy rewards, VIMPO retains a consistent advantage over GRPO, suggesting that policy-implied value optimization can provide finer credit assignment while preserving the practical simplicity of critic-free training.

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10.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14560

Free Heavy-Tailed Lunch for Muon: A Theoretical Justification of Empirical Success

Authors:

Florian H\"ubler↗Thomas Pethick↗Suvrit Sra↗

arXiv:2606.14560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-Euclidean optimisation methods with matrix-valued updates, such as Muon and Scion, have recently shown strong empirical performance for training Transformer models, yet their theoretical advantages over Euclidean methods remain poorly understood. We address this gap in the heavy-tailed non-convex regime, where stochastic gradients have bounded $p$-th central moments, $p \in (1,2]$. We show that certain non-Euclidean methods achieve optimal sample complexity under stronger stationarity measures, while Euclidean methods incur additional dimension-dependent costs. As a consequence, for $m \times n$ matrices, Muon finds an $\varepsilon$-stationary point in nuclear norm within $\mathcal{O}\left(\min\{m, n\} \frac{\Delta_1 L}{\varepsilon^2} \left(\frac \sigma \varepsilon \right)^{\frac p {p-1}}\right)$ samples, absorbing heavy-tailed noise without extra dimension dependence, unlike Euclidean methods. We further prove this sample complexity, including its dimension dependence, is optimal for all first-order methods under nuclear-norm stationarity. Experiments on large language models support our theory. Surprisingly, our results suggest that other Schatten geometries beyond the spectral geometry of Muon can perform competitively in certain settings.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16428

Lect\=uraAgents: A Multi-Agent Framework for Adaptive Personalized AI-Assisted Learning and Embodied Teaching

Authors:

Jaward Sesay↗Yue Yu↗Siwei Dong↗Yemin Shi↗Guangyao Chen↗B\"orje F. Karlsson↗

Effective personalized AI-assisted learning demands systems that can not only generate accurate learner-specific educational materials, but also dynamically adapt their instruction to diverse learners. However, existing educational agents have primarily focused on lecture content automation and simulations, which often fall short of modelling multimodal and embodied instructional methods tailored for the individual learner. To this end, we propose Lect\=uraAgents - a multi-agent framework that enables personalized learning through end-to-end adaptive embodied teaching. At its core, Lect\=uraAgents mirrors a professor-student relationship, in which a ProfessorAgent leads a collaborative team of specialized subordinate agents through research, planning, review, and embodied delivery of lecture contents that adapt to a learner's needs. The framework offers three main contributions: (1) a hierarchical multi-agent architecture for end-to-end personalized learning; (2) an adaptive embodied teaching mechanism, wherein the ProfessorAgent executes visible and pedagogically motivated teaching actions (e.g., handwrite, highlight, underline, etc.) over contents in a teaching environment; and (3) a Teaching Action-Speech Alignment (TASA) algorithm that employs salience-based heuristics and temporal semantic segmentation to generate coherent teaching action sequences aligned with learner profiles. We evaluate Lect\=uraAgents on diverse courses at high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels using sample-specific rubric-based analysis; with generated lecture materials and teaching actions assessed and validated by expert educators. Experimental results show consistent gains in lecture content quality, embodied teaching quality, assessment, and personalization over existing approaches, positioning Lect\=uraAgents as a pedagogically well-grounded framework for personalized learning at scale.

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12.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:8b9ad26ce23316e6b98de95e57b45447

Modelling the public-health impact of indoor air quality interventions on respiratory virus transmission

Authors:

Howes↗Jeyapragasan↗Williamson↗Carel↗Koos↗Swett↗J. L↗Montavon↗Belenky↗Lietar↗Fitzjohn↗Charles↗…

Respiratory virus transmission occurs in indoor settings where ventilation, occupancy, and dwell time determine exposure levels. Improving indoor air quality (IAQ) therefore could help reduce disease burden associated with respiratory viruses, yet its population-level impact remains poorly quantified. Here, we develop an individual-based transmission modelling framework that links within-location airborne dynamics to individual infection risk and population-level spread, whilst explicitly incorporating heterogeneity in ventilation and baseline indoor air quality across locations. We use this modelling approach to evaluate IAQ-improving interventions (air-quality interventions or AQIs), using hypothetical endemic and pandemic pathogen archetypes with properties similar to SARS-CoV-2 and influenza, and evaluate how effects on key epidemiological metrics (such as annualized incidence and epidemic final size) depend on AQI coverage, efficacy and allocation strategy. At 20% AQI intervention coverage and 80% efficacy, annualized incidence was reduced by approximately 7.2% for an endemic 'SARS-CoV-2-like' respiratory virus, and 17.0% for an endemic 'influenza-like' virus; at 60% coverage (80% efficacy) the reductions were 26.3% and 56.4%, respectively. Targeting AQI installation to the highest-risk locations outperformed random allocation: for SARS-CoV-2-like transmission, 20% coverage at 80% efficacy cut absolute incidence by 10.8% when targeted versus 7.2% when random; for influenza-like transmission, this comparison was 28.9% versus 17.0%. In epidemic scenarios, random installation at 40% coverage and 60% efficacy reduced final size by 23.7% (influenza-like) versus 6.3% (SARS-CoV-2-like). These results support treating clean indoor air as core public-health infrastructure and prioritising risk-based deployment of IAQ-improving interventions to maximise population-level benefit within budgetary and operational constraints.

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13.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:932d1753dc6f5dae42b4af427c53b4a5

Intra-arterial recombinant human TNK tissue-type plasminogen activator (rhTNK-tPA) thrombolysis for acute medium vessel occlusion (MeVO-TNK): Study rationale and design

Authors:

Deng↗Liu↗C.-C↗Wang↗Y.-H↗Ao↗D.-H↗Huang↗Xie↗Zhang↗Kong↗Q.-Q↗…

Background The optimal management of acute ischemic stroke caused by medium vessel occlusion (MeVO) remains uncertain. Recent randomized trials have failed to demonstrate a clear benefit of endovascular therapy in this population, whereas intra-arterial thrombolysis (IAT) has emerged as a biologically plausible alternative. However, prospective evidence supporting IAT in MeVO is lacking, and the optimal dosing strategy for stand-alone IAT remains undefined. Aim To preliminarily evaluate the efficacy and safety of intra-arterial tenecteplase (IA-TNK) plus standard medical therapy (SMT) compared with SMT alone in patients with acute MeVO stroke, and to explore a stepwise IA-TNK dosing strategy. Design The MeVO-TNK trial is a multicenter, prospective, randomized, open-label, blinded-endpoint (PROBE), exploratory phase II study. A total of 60 participants with imaging-confirmed MeVO will be randomized 1:1 to receive either IA-TNK plus SMT or SMT alone. Participants presenting beyond 6 hours from symptom onset must demonstrate salvageable penumbral tissue on advanced imaging. Those assigned to the intervention group will receive up to two intra-arterial boluses of tenecteplase (0.0625 mg/kg per bolus), with the second bolus administered based on angiographic assessment of reperfusion and safety. Outcomes The primary efficacy outcome is final infarct volume measured at 72{+/-}24 hours after randomization. Secondary efficacy outcomes include the proportions of patients achieving modified Rankin Scale (mRS) scores of 0-1, 0-2 and 0-3 at 90 days, a shift analysis of the mRS distribution at 90 days, early neurological deterioration, and National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale score at 7 days or discharge. The primary safety outcome is symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage within 24 hours. Conclusions This trial will provide preliminary evidence on the biological efficacy, reperfusion potential and safety of stand-alone IA-TNK for acute MeVO stroke, helping to address an important evidence gap and inform the design of future confirmatory studies.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11470

The Periodic Table of LLM Reasoning: A Structured Survey of Reasoning Paradigms, Methods, and Failure Modes

Authors:

Avinash Anand↗Mahisha Ramesh↗Avni Mittal↗Ashutosh Kumar↗Erik Cambria↗Zhengkui Wang↗Timothy Liu↗Aik Beng Ng↗Simon See↗Rajiv Ratn Shah↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across natural language processing tasks, yet reliable reasoning remains an open challenge. Although modern LLMs show progress in structured inference, multi-step problem solving, and contextual understanding, their reasoning behavior is often inconsistent and sensitive to prompting strategies, task design, and model scale. This survey provides a systematic analysis of more than 300 recent papers from arXiv, Semantic Scholar, Google Scholar, Papers with Code, and the ACL Anthology to examine how reasoning capabilities emerge in LLMs and where they fail. We make three main contributions. First, we introduce a structured taxonomy of LLM reasoning research, covering Chain-of-Thought reasoning, multi-hop reasoning, mathematical reasoning, common sense reasoning, visual and temporal reasoning, code and algorithmic reasoning, retrieval-augmented reasoning, tool-augmented and agentic reasoning, and reinforcement learning-based reasoning. Second, we analyze methodological trends across these paradigms, including prompting methods, model architectures, training objectives, reward modeling, and evaluation benchmarks. Third, we synthesize recurring limitations and failure modes, such as reasoning hallucinations, brittle multi-step inference, weak causal abstraction, and poor cross-domain generalization. By organizing a rapidly expanding literature, this survey offers a unified view of the current capabilities and limitations of reasoning in LLMs. We also identify emerging research directions, including meta-reasoning, self-evolving reasoning frameworks, multimodal reasoning, and socially grounded reasoning. Overall, this work aims to serve as a reference for developing more robust, interpretable, and generalizable reasoning systems in future language models.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15037

ReportQA: QA-Based Radiology Report Evaluation

Authors:

Yiming Shi↗Shaoshuai Yang↗Xi Chen↗Haolin Li↗Hengyu Zhang↗Che Jiang↗Kaiwen Wang↗Xun Zhu↗Dong Xie↗Fei Wang↗Dejing Dou↗Miao Li↗…

Radiology report evaluation is essential for advancing automated report generation. Natural language generation metrics have limited clinical relevance. Clinical efficacy (CE) metrics evaluate important medical findings, but focus mainly on presence and cover only a limited set of entities. Due to heavy reliance on manual annotations, it is difficult for CE metrics to extend clinical entities or attributes. In clinical practice, radiology reports serve as a medium for information transfer. Clinicians use them to perform downstream diagnostic tasks without directly inspecting images. Based on this insight, we propose ReportQA, a clinical-related and flexible radiology report evaluation framework, supporting detailed quantitative analysis of radiology report generation systems. We first collect datasets covering multiple imaging modalities and anatomical regions. We then construct knowledge trees of clinical entities and attributes with radiologist guidance, and use large language models (LLMs) to extract structured information from raw reports. Next, we generate QA pairs from predefined templates and apply quality control through self-filtering and report-based filtering. During evaluation, the report is treated as context, and an LLM acts as a judge model to answer the QA pairs. Based on the resulting QA accuracy, we introduce QAScore metric. Compared with existing metrics, QAScore shows better alignment with radiologist judgments. Experiments on multiple state-of-the-art vision-language models reveal that current report-based inference paradigms struggle to learn fine-grained clinical representations and exhibit strong negative prior biases. In contrast, question-driven inference provides a more effective alternative. For reproducibility and extensibility, we release the knowledge trees, structured reports, and QA pairs, along with the pipeline code for QA construction and evaluation.

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16.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18733

SWE-Future: Forecast-Conditioned Data Synthesis for Future-Oriented Software Engineering Agents

Authors:

Qiao Zhao↗JianYing Qu↗Jun Zhang↗Yehua Yang↗Hanwen Du↗Zhongkai Sun↗

arXiv:2606.18733v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Realistic coding-agent benchmarks often replay public GitHub issues and pull requests, making them vulnerable to overlap with model pretraining, fine-tuning, synthetic-data generation, or benchmark-driven model selection. Fully synthetic tasks avoid direct historical replay, but can drift away from real repository needs. We propose SWE-Future, a forecast-conditioned data synthesis method for future-oriented coding tasks. Given a forecast snapshot at time $T_0$, the method uses only pre-$T_0$ repository evidence to forecast future feature implementation/enhancement, bugfix, and refactor task families. We first validate this forecasting step retrospectively: after forecasts are fixed, later pull requests are used only to measure whether the predicted task families match future repository work. In an 80-repository study, the forecaster achieves 58.1\% future-work relevance under the main semantic matching metric. We then use validated forecast families as conditioning signals to synthesize a 200-task coding-agent dataset across 61 repositories from a task-generation snapshot, rather than replaying the later pull requests used for validation. SWE-Future shows that repository-evolution forecasts can guide realistic, future-oriented coding-task synthesis while reducing direct dependence on historical pull-request replay.

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17.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2602.03293

Anomaly Detection via Mean Shift Density Enhancement

Authors:

Pritam Kar↗Rahul Bordoloi↗Olaf Wolkenhauer↗Saptarshi Bej↗

arXiv:2602.03293v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Unsupervised anomaly detection stands as an important problem in machine learning. Existing unsupervised anomaly detection algorithms rarely perform well across different anomaly types, often excelling only under specific structural assumptions. This lack of robustness also becomes particularly evident under noisy settings. We propose Mean Shift Density Enhancement (MSDE), a fully unsupervised framework that detects anomalies through their geometric response to density-driven manifold evolution. MSDE is designed as a general purpose anomaly detection framework, based on the principle that normal samples, being well supported by local density, remain stable under iterative density enhancement, whereas anomalous samples undergo large cumulative displacements as they are attracted toward nearby density modes. To operationalize this idea, MSDE employs a weighted mean-shift procedure with adaptive, sample-specific density weights derived from a manifold learning-based fuzzy neighborhood graph. We evaluate MSDE on an anomaly detection benchmark comprising 46 real-world tabular datasets, four realistic anomaly generation mechanisms, and six noise levels. Compared to 13 established unsupervised baselines, MSDE achieves consistently strong, balanced and robust performance for several standard classification metrics, at several noise levels and on average over several types of anomalies. These results demonstrate that displacement-based scoring provides a robust alternative to the existing state-of-the-art for unsupervised anomaly detection.

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18.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:43959628b96f9aefe23ac94ed0b82689

Beyond the Apnea-Hypopnea Index: Physiological and Demographic Predictors of Excessive Daytime Sleepiness in Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Authors:

Tan↗Parekh↗Wickramaratne↗S. D↗

Excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) is a common but inconsistently predicted symptom of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). OSA is typically diagnosed with polysomnography (PSG), and the current standard for severity assessment is the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI). AHI has many limitations, including its inability to explain physiological mechanisms or reflect variability in patient symptoms, such as EDS. This retrospective study aims to find physiological and demographic parameters that better predict EDS in patients with OSA and to evaluate whether these parameters outperform AHI using PSG data from the Mount Sinai Integrative Sleep Center. Clinical variables used to predict EDS included arousal index (AI), average oxygen desaturation during sleep, average heart rate during sleep, and AHI, along with demographic variables including age, sex, and BMI. Hypothesis tests, logistic regression models, and decision tree classifier models were performed on the data to discriminate sleepy from nonsleepy patients as determined by an Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS) score [≥] 10. AI and oxygen desaturation were found to be the most predictive physiological variables, and sex and BMI were found to be the most predictive demographic variables. The final decision tree model with these four variables outperformed the AHI in predicting EDS. These findings suggest that daytime sleepiness in OSA can be better explained by measures of apnea burden, oxygenation impairment, and patient demographics than by AHI alone, although these remain only modestly predictive. Future studies should focus on investigating more comprehensive physiological markers, multi-night sleep data, and more objective assessments of sleepiness.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15971

SAG: SQL-Retrieval Augmented Generation with Query-Time Dynamic Hyperedges

Authors:

Yuchao Wu↗Junqin Li↗XingCheng Liang↗Yongjie Chen↗Yinghao Liang↗Linyuan Mo↗Guanxian Li↗

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers an effective approach for large language models to access external knowledge. However, existing methods rely on dense similarity retrieval and face inherent limitations in handling structured constraints and multi-hop reasoning. Incorporating knowledge graphs partially alleviates these issues, but at the cost of semantic fragmentation, high maintenance overhead, and difficult incremental updates. This paper introduces SAG (SQLRetrieval Augmented Generation), a structured architecture for retrieval and agent systems. Instead of pre-building a global static graph, SAG converts each chunk into one semantically complete event and a set of indexing entities, then uses SQL join queries to dynamically link events that share entities into local hyperedges,constructing, at query time, a dynamically instantiated local index structure. This design avoids the need for global graph rebuilding and ongoing maintenance; the system naturally supports incremental writes, concurrent processing, and continuous scaling through its reliance on standard database infrastructure. Across HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHop, and MuSiQue, three standard multi-hop benchmarks,SAG achieves the best results on 8 out of 9 Recall@K metrics, reaching 80.0% Recall@5 on MuSiQue, the benchmark with the highest multi-hop reasoning demands.SAG has also been deployed at a production scale of hundreds of millions of data items, with online retrieval latency kept within seconds. Project site and code are available at https://github.com/Zleap-AI/SAG-Benchmark.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14579

VISTA: View-Consistent Self-Verified Training for GUI Grounding

Authors:

Xinyu Qiu↗Yunzhu Zhang↗Heng Jia↗Shuheng Shen↗Changhua Meng↗Linchao Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.14579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When applying Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for GUI Grounding, rollouts are sampled from a single screenshot view; groups often become either all failures on difficult instances or all successes on easy ones, yielding no useful relative advantage. We propose VISTA (View-Consistent Self-Verified Training), a GRPO-based training framework that constructs each comparison group from multiple target-preserving views of the same GUI instance.Each view is generated by a crop that keeps the target element visible and remaps its box exactly, so model rollouts are compared across semantically equivalent but geometrically different inputs. To stabilize short coordinate generation without turning reinforcement learning into unconditional imitation, VISTA further adds a self-verified cross-view anchor: an oracle answer optimized with an advantage-weighted loss, excluded from the group baseline and activated only when the model has produced a maximum-reward rollout. Across five GUI-grounding benchmarks and multiple Qwen backbones, VISTA consistently improves grounding accuracy.On ScreenSpot-Pro, it raises Qwen3-VL 4B/8B/30B-A3B from 55.5/52.7/53.7 to 63.4/65.8/67.0. Robustness analyses further show higher worst-view accuracy and lower prediction flip rates.

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21.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11579

Tensor-Network-Based Distributed Quantum Dynamics on Independent Quantum Computers

Authors:

Anurag Dwivedi↗Melissa C. Revelle↗Daniel S. Lobser↗Brian K. McFarland↗Edward C. Tortorici↗Christopher G. Yale↗Susan M. Clark↗Philip Richerme↗Srinivasan S. Iyengar↗

arXiv:2606.11579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an approach based on tensor networks for distributed quantum computing simulation of chemical wavepacket dynamics in a continuous variable representation. The central idea is that the tensor-network representation of the multidimensional time-evolution operator naturally induces an elevated Hilbert space where the dynamics decomposes into a set of independent lower-dimensional propagations. This transformation converts an entangled quantum evolution into a set of parallel computational tasks that can be executed asynchronously across heterogeneous quantum and classical computing architectures. The resulting formalism establishes a direct connection between tensor-network decompositions, uniformly controlled quantum circuits, and asynchronous distributed quantum computing. The approach is developed with a goal towards hybrid quantum/classical implementation, and is appropriate for a general heterogeneous mixture of quantum hardware systems. The experimental realization of the asynchronously distributed quantum processes that arise from the tensor-network decomposition are carried out on the Sandia National Laboratories' trapped-ion quantum computer, where the circuits are compiled using native partial-entangling $XX(\theta)$ gates, reducing the expected two-qubit gate infidelity by more than 30\% relative to conventional fully entangling decompositions. We demonstrate the methodology by quantum computing the vibrational spectra of a small protonated water cluster that shows critical quantum nuclear behavior. Such water cluster systems have been found to be challenging for experimental action spectroscopy and for theory, and here, for the first time, we provide results for vibrational spectroscopy that are in agreement with the respective classical results to within 4cm$^{-1}$, thus allowing for the potential for spectroscopic accuracy from quantum computations.

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22.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16961

Beyond the Smile: A Hybrid Convolutional VAE for Crypto Volatility Surfaces

Authors:

Sadanand Singh↗Allam Reddy↗Manan Chopra↗

arXiv:2606.16961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a convolutional variational autoencoder for cryptocurrency implied-volatility surfaces, together with a deployable predictor that combines it with a quadratic smile re-fit through a deterministic per-tenor routing rule. Trained on 6,034 fully-filled hourly Binance Options surfaces of BTC and ETH spanning May-October 2023 and parameterised on a common $6 \times 7$ tenor-delta grid, the model attains a hidden-cell surface-completion RMSE in the 0.94-1.56 vol-point range across both markets and mask rates 10-50%. The hybrid predictor attains 0.83 vol points at 50% masking against 7.00 for the smile re-fit alone, an eightfold reduction obtained at no additional inference cost. Under structurally-correlated hole patterns that emulate the withdrawal of an entire tenor of strikes, the smile re-fit incurs 9.6-13.1 vol points of error while the learned model remains at 1.5-1.9, isolating a regime in which the generative model is the only viable predictor. Joint training on BTC and ETH improves the in-distribution model on both markets by 9-27% relative to the better-performing single-symbol counterpart, indicating a substantially shared vol-surface manifold across the two largest cryptocurrencies over the observation window. The hybrid is calendar- and butterfly-arbitrage-free at the listed strikes, a property that the parametric smile re-fit alone fails at high mask rates. The per-snapshot reconstruction error of the trained model flags the late-October ETF-anticipation rally and the August $17$, $2023$ flash crash as elevated-error periods without supervision. All training and evaluation infrastructure is released to support reproducible follow-on work.

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23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2602.02355

Mitigating Heterogeneity-Induced Drift in Hierarchical Sign-Based Federated Learning

Authors:

Amirreza Kazemi↗Seyed Mohammad Azimi-Abarghouyi↗Gabor Fodor↗Carlo Fischione↗

arXiv:2602.02355v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hierarchical federated learning (HFL) is well suited for large-scale wireless and Internet of Things systems, where devices communicate with nearby edge servers before reaching the cloud. In these environments, uplink bandwidth and latency impose strict communication constraints, making aggressive gradient compression essential. One-bit sign-based stochastic gradient descent methods provide an attractive solution in flat federated settings, but their behavior in hierarchical edge–cloud architectures remains insufficiently understood, especially under inter-cluster data heterogeneity. To address this gap, we develop a sign-based HFL framework in which devices transmit binary stochastic-gradient signs to edge servers, edge servers apply majority voting, and the cloud periodically aggregates edge models. Our analysis reveals that inter-cluster heterogeneity induces a persistent bias term in the convergence bound, reflecting the drift of edge models toward local objectives. This term cannot be removed by increasing the number of training rounds or by tuning standard hyperparameters alone. We therefore propose \(\mathtt{DC-HierSignSGD}\), a drift-corrected sign-based HFL algorithm in which devices apply a cloud-assisted gradient correction before taking the sign. We show that this pre-sign correction mitigates the non-vanishing heterogeneity-induced bias while preserving binary device–edge communication during the repeated local sign-update steps. Experiments under severe inter-cluster heterogeneity demonstrate that \(\mathtt{DC-HierSignSGD}\) improves the stability and accuracy of sign-based HFL and achieves performance comparable to full-precision hierarchical SGD with substantially lower device–edge communication.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16036

Trusting Right Predictions for Wrong Reasons: A LIME Based Analysis of Deep Learning Interpretability in Lung Cancer Diagnosis

Authors:

Samarpan Poudel↗Vladislav D Veksler↗

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality, with approximately 2.5 million new cases and 1.8 million deaths annually, making reliable diagnosis a clinical priority. Although deep learning models have achieved strong performance in lung cancer classification, evaluation has largely focused on predictive accuracy, leaving their decision-making processes insufficiently examined. This study compares three architecturally distinct models: a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a pretrained ResNet50, and a Vision Transformer (ViT), trained on the IQ-OTH/NCCD lung cancer CT dataset. Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) were applied to investigate model reasoning. In addition to standard performance metrics, a dual-correlation framework was introduced to measure both prediction agreement and explanation agreement across model pairs. All three models achieved strong classification performance, with ResNet50 attaining 98.61% accuracy, CNN 97.91%, and ViT 93.75%, while all achieved ROC-AUC scores of 0.99. Prediction correlations exceeded 0.99 across all model pairs, indicating highly consistent outputs. However, LIME explanation correlations remained below 0.26, revealing substantial differences in the image regions used to reach those predictions. Analysis of misclassified samples further identified a consistent spatial pattern: incorrect predictions were associated with attention outside the lung parenchyma, whereas correct predictions focused primarily within lung regions. These findings demonstrate that prediction agreement is a poor proxy for reasoning consistency, and that interpretability evaluation must be treated as an independent validation criterion alongside predictive performance in clinical AI systems.

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25.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11417

Signed Compression Progress on a Sealed Audit is Goodhart-Resistant

Authors:

Ayush Mittal↗Dhruv Gupta↗

arXiv:2606.11417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compression progress is a long-standing proposal for intrinsic motivation: reward an agent when its world model becomes better at predicting or compressing experience. The folk claim is that this reward is "credible" because it is paid only for learning. We make this precise and prove it. If intrinsic reward is the signed decrease of a fixed sealed-audit loss, r_t = E(theta_{t-1}) - E(theta_t), then cumulative reward telescopes exactly to endpoint audit improvement, so no policy can push reward up indefinitely while true audit performance stagnates or degrades. For finite audit panels the same result holds with a sharp false-positive budget: cumulative empirical reward is at most true audit improvement plus 2 Delta_n(F, delta), the uniform audit deviation of the model class. This is horizon-free: adaptivity over time costs nothing once the sealed panel uniformly controls the class. The theorem also identifies the failure modes: the guarantee disappears if progress is clipped, scored on the agent's own stream, exposed to a high-capacity model on a reusable panel, or applied to a neural class that makes Delta_n vacuous. We give a Lean 4 mechanization of the structural core (telescoping, the finite-audit bound, finite Gibbs, and the entropy floor) and an experiment suite on ARC-TGI grid-transformation generators with adaptive holdout attacks. Experiments confirm the theory: finite-audit deviation scales as n^{-0.527}; signed progress resists clip-farming, stream leakage, and noisy-TV curiosity; naive reusable audits are exploitable by black-box scalar feedback, while standard release defenses keep the attack below the 2 Delta_n threshold. Signed compression progress on a sealed audit is an accounting signal of genuine improvement.

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