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

ROVE: Unlocking Human Interventions for Humanoid Manipulation via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.17011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human interventions provide crucial corrective signals for post-training Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, enabling seamless humanoid interventions is a formidable systems challenge due to complex whole-body kinematics and dexterous-hand control. Consequently, the collected intervention trajectories are often suboptimal, and methods that rely on human interventions as expert supervision can absorb hesitant, inefficient, or even erroneous behaviors. To address both the system and algorithmic challenges, we propose ROVE, a reinforcement learning framework for humanoid VLA post-training with imperfect human interventions. First, ROVE introduces a human-in-the-loop pipeline capable of collecting deployment and intervention data for humanoid manipulation. Second, it utilizes Optimistic Value Estimation (OVE) to prioritize high-value behaviors from mixed-quality trajectories. To further robustify value estimation, we incorporate cross-embodiment human experience videos to provide rich supervision for long-tailed failure and recovery modes. The resulting critic yields informative advantage signals, steering the VLA actor to focus on high-value behaviors rather than indiscriminately imitating all actions. On challenging real-world contact-rich and fine-grained humanoid manipulation tasks, ROVE outperforms experience-learning baselines and consistently improves across multiple rollout-intervention iterations.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Spatial Localization of Relativistic Quantum Systems: The Commutativity Requirement and the Locality Principle. Part II: A Model from Local QFT

arXiv:2604.04173v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper is the second and final part of a two-part study. We construct positive-energy relativistic spatial localization observables in Minkowski spacetime within standard quantum field theory, using the stress–energy–momentum tensor smeared with suitable test functions. For each fixed timelike direction, the construction gives positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) on spacelike hypersurfaces, well defined on every $n$-particle sector and satisfying a relativistic causality condition excluding superluminal propagation of detection probabilities. The observables are built from local or quasi-local field-theoretic quantities, thus providing a rigorous version of earlier heuristic proposals. In the one-particle sector, the construction reduces to the observable previously introduced by the author, and its first moment gives the Newton–Wigner position operator under appropriate normalization and centering assumptions. Because the Reeh–Schlieder theorem prevents the normally ordered stress–energy–momentum tensor from being positive on the full Fock space, we use quantum energy inequalities to obtain lower bounds controlling deviations from positivity. This leads to regularized operator families, bounded from below, which approximate the localization effects. Finally, we define conditional localization observables for finite laboratories through modified local energy operators. By Haag duality, the corresponding conditional POVMs belong to local von Neumann algebras and commute for causally separated regions, in accordance with the Araki–Haag–Kastler framework. The results show how commutativity of localization observables is recovered for conditional measurements in finite spacetime regions.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Response-Aware Multimodal Learning for Post-Treatment Visual Acuity Forecasting

Long-term visual acuity (VA) forecasting after anti-VEGF therapy is important for counseling and follow-up planning in diabetic macular edema (DME), yet remains challenging when only early post-treatment findings are available. While prior OCT-based methods mainly focus on short-term response or single-endpoint prediction, multi-horizon VA forecasting from early longitudinal data remains insufficiently under-explored. In this study, we assembled a real-world cohort of 188 anti-VEGF–treated DME patients with paired baseline and month-1 OCT scans, along with tabular OCT-derived biomarkers and non-imaging clinical variables. Using only these early data, we formulate a multi-horizon VA forecasting problem aimed at predicting visual outcomes at 3, 6, 12, 18, and 24 months, reflecting clinically meaningful follow-up intervals. We propose ReVA, a response-aware multimodal framework that combines baseline and month-1 OCT features with tabular variables to capture disease status and early treatment response. ReVA integrates spatial OCT attention, dependency-aware tabular encoding, and cross-modal fusion to predict patient-specific long-term VA trajectories. The proposed framework achieves MAE=0.1246, RMSE=0.1621, and R^2=0.6064 for 24-month VA prediction, with consistent performance across all forecast horizons. Our findings show that incorporating early treatment-response signals enables clinically meaningful long-term visual acuity forecasting, supporting data-driven decision support for routine anti-VEGF management. Code and pretrained models will be released on https://github.com/nguyenpbui/ReVA.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Worst-case depth hierarchy for shallow quantum circuits

arXiv:2606.16425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Circuit depth is a central resource in complexity theory. While bounded-depth classical circuits admit well-understood hierarchy theorems, the internal structure of constant-depth quantum computation remains comparatively unexplored. We prove an explicit depth hierarchy theorem for $\mathsf{QNC}^0$. For each $d\ge 12$, we construct a family of two-round interactive problems on which no depth-$(d-1)$ quantum circuit can achieve near-perfect success, regardless of gate set, circuit size, or ancillary qubits. In contrast, we prove that our construction admits realizations by simple bounded fan-in quantum circuits of depth larger than $d$ by a small constant factor. Moreover, all bounded fan-in classical circuits of sublogarithmic depth (in the input size) fail to achieve perfect success on these tasks for every $d$, yielding a hierarchy of problems that show unconditional quantum advantage of $\mathsf{QNC}^0$ over $\mathsf{NC}^0$. A key obstacle is the scarcity of lower bound techniques for quantum circuits. To address this, we develop methods to analyze how depth affects a circuit's ability to realize nonlocal correlations amongst its output qubits in a fine-grained manner. Our approach exploits the correspondence between constraint systems and nonlocal games, translating group-theoretic constructions into rigid operator-valued constraint systems and then into non-local games. In particular, we construct constraint systems whose unique faithful operator-valued solutions require every perfect strategy, and every near-perfect strategy to a fixed precision, to implement multi-controlled phase operations. This reduces to a nonlocal unitary-synthesis problem, yielding depth lower bounds for both shallow quantum and classical circuits. These results show that increasing depth strictly increases computational power within $\mathsf{QNC}^0$, establishing a genuinely quantum hierarchy.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Token-Level LLM Collaboration via FusionRoute

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strengths across diverse domains. However, achieving strong performance across these domains with a single general-purpose model typically requires scaling to sizes that are prohibitively expensive to train and deploy. On the other hand, while smaller domain-specialized models are much more efficient, they struggle to generalize beyond their training distributions. To address this dilemma, we propose FusionRoute, a robust and effective token-level multi-LLM collaboration framework in which a lightweight router simultaneously (i) selects the most suitable expert at each decoding step and (ii) contributes a complementary logit that refines or corrects the selected expert's next-token distribution via logit addition. Unlike existing token-level collaboration methods that rely solely on fixed expert outputs, we provide a theoretical analysis showing that pure expert-only routing is fundamentally limited: unless strong global coverage assumptions hold, it cannot in general realize the optimal decoding policy. By augmenting expert selection with a trainable complementary generator, FusionRoute expands the effective policy class and enables recovery of optimal value functions under mild conditions. Empirically, across both Llama-3 and Gemma-2 families and diverse benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, code generation, and instruction following, FusionRoute outperforms both sequence- and token-level collaboration, model merging, and direct fine-tuning, while remaining competitive with domain experts on their respective tasks.

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

RL-Index: Reinforcement Learning for Retrieval Index Reasoning

arXiv:2606.16316v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieving external knowledge is essential for solving real-world tasks, yet it remains challenging when the relationship between a query and its relevant knowledge involves implicit and complex reasoning beyond surface-level semantic or lexical matching (e.g., mathematical problems relying on the same theorem or coding requiring deep reasoning). Existing approaches primarily rely on query-side reasoning (e.g., query rewriting), which introduces significant online latency and underutilizes the opportunity to perform reasoning over the knowledge corpus itself (i.e., index-side reasoning). In this paper, we propose RL-Index, an agentic indexing framework that formulates retrieval index reasoning as a reinforcement learning problem. Instead of performing reasoning at query time, RL-Index shifts reasoning to the indexing stage by augmenting documents with LLM-generated rationales that explicitly encode the latent query-knowledge relationship. To optimize the quality of these rationales, we employ Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and use retrieval similarity as a verifiable reward signal, enabling direct optimization of indexing decisions for retrieval effectiveness. Extensive experiments on the BRIGHT benchmark demonstrate that RL-Index consistently improves both retrieval and downstream question-answering performance, while significantly reducing online inference latency. Moreover, the learned rationale augmentation generalizes across diverse retrievers and generators, highlighting its robustness as a plug-and-play indexing strategy across different retrieval systems.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Learned JPEG Compression for DNN Vision

JPEG, a lossy image compression technique designed for human viewers, has maintained its dominance for decades. However, in the era of artificial intelligence (AI), a substantial portion of image data, often compressed by JPEG, is and will continue to be consumed by deep neural networks (DNNs) instead of humans, thus creating a need to optimize JPEG for DNN inference performance. To this end, we propose learned JPEG compression for DNN vision (J4D), a novel training framework for determining JPEG encoding parameters to minimize compression rate while maximizing DNN inference performance. The major challenge of solving this optimization problem lies in representing the JPEG codec and compression rate in closed form. By incorporating a differentiable soft quantizer based on a probabilistic quantization scheme, we not only obtain a differentiable proxy for the JPEG codec, but are also able to compute the entropy of the coded source analytically, which is a close estimate of the actual compression rate. Equipped with both the differentiable JPEG codec and the information-theoretic rate estimator, we are then able to solve the aforementioned optimization problem with backpropagation. After training, the learned encoding parameters will be subsequently used in actual JPEG encoding based on probabilistic quantization. Extensive experimental results across multiple datasets and DNN architectures demonstrate that J4D consistently and significantly outperforms the default JPEG and other competitive JPEG codecs optimized for DNNs. Notably, compared to the default JPEG, J4D achieves an increase in accuracy by as much as 11.60% at the same rate, or a reduction of compression rate up to 80.05% at the same accuracy. Additionally, with the help of J4D, we show the potential to design universal JPEG encoding parameters for various DNN architectures for the first time.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Probe-and-Refine Tuning of Repository Guidance for Coding Agents

arXiv:2606.20512v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based coding agents need higher-level operational knowledge about a repository (which files house which subsystems, how to run the test suite, which workflows have historically led to wrong fixes) that does not exist in the code itself. Engineers typically maintain \texttt{AGENTS.md} files to supply this context as instructions for coding agents, but whether they help is contested: recent studies disagree on whether LLM-generated guidance improves or harms agent performance. In this paper we show that how the guidance is produced is the decisive variable, and introduce probe-and-refine tuning: a procedure that uses synthetic bug-fix probes to iteratively diagnose and patch a repository's guidance file through single-shot LLM calls, with no agent loop or tool use during tuning. On SWE-bench Verified across four independent trials with Qwen3.5-35B-A3B at 200 steps, probe-and-refine achieves 33.0\,\% mean resolve rate vs.\ 28.3\,\% for the static knowledge base used to initialize it and 25.5\,\% for an unguided baseline ($p < 0.001$ for both probe-and-refine contrasts). The improvement comes from coverage rather than precision: refined guidance produces evaluable patches for 14.5 percentage points (pp) more instances while per-patch precision remains statistically constant ($\sim$59\,\%, $p = 0.119$), showing that improved guidance helps agents reach the correct file rather than improving the quality of the changes they make. Further, a step-budget experiment shows that guidance is what lets the agent use a larger step budget productively, and a cross-model experiment with NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B finds that the tuning loop degrades when the model cannot generate sufficiently diagnostic output, though per-patch precision remains constant even then.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

ZIVARI-TLBO: A Zero-Cost Inter-Group Evaluated-Elite Relay Mechanism for Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization

arXiv:2606.17087v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: ZIVARI-TLBO is a grouped Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization (TLBO) method that augments an existing population-state controller with a fixed inter-group evaluated-elite relay. At each scheduled event, every group offers its already evaluated elite to the next group in a fixed ring; the elite replaces the receiver's worst eligible learner only when its stored objective value is better. Because the exact relay copies an already evaluated solution and its stored fitness, it requires no additional objective-function calls. The frozen gts-v4-cm-fixed implementation is evaluated under equal 10,000-evaluation budgets on eight classical functions at dimensions 10, 30, 50, and 100, with 30 matched seeds, and on five constrained engineering problems. A direct ablation against the same grouped landscape-aware controller without relay records 728/11/221 wins/ties/losses and a rank-biserial effect size of 0.624 across dimensions. In an eight-method multidimensional comparison, WOA obtains the best average rank (2.914) and ZIVARI-TLBO ranks second (3.382); ZIVARI-TLBO significantly outperforms TLBO, MCTLBO, DE, PSO, and GWO, loses significantly to WOA, and is not significantly different from HHO after Holm adjustment. Feasibility-aware engineering results are mixed and sensitive to the current static-penalty formulation. The evidence supports a scoped relay contribution and budget-consistent information-sharing mechanism, but not universal state-of-the-art, global-convergence, engineering-dominance, or CEC superiority claims.

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

Trusted Multi-View Deep Learning Classification of Fetal Congenital Heart Disease with Feature-level and Decision-level Fusion

Congenital heart disease (CHD) refers to the abnormal anatomical structure caused by the abnormal development of the heart and great vessels during embryonic development. Traditional diagnostics often fail to achieve high accuracy and efficiency, especially given the complexity of cardiac anatomy. This study presents a specialized multi-view deep learning framework for CHD binary classification using echocardiographic images. A large-scale CHD dataset, including five views, was used to train the model, enabling it to integrate multi-angle image data. The framework utilizes advanced feature extraction and attention mechanisms to improve diagnostic precision and reliability. An uncertainty-based decision-making component is also integrated to handle low-quality images, enhancing diagnostic outcomes. Experimental results show that this method achieves top-tier performance on our dataset and provides a robust tool for early CHD detection, underscoring its potential for clinical use. The dataset and source code will be released upon paper acceptance.

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

Multi-Scale Separable Fourier Neural Networks for Solving High-Frequency PDEs

arXiv:2605.31027v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a novel neural network architecture, termed Multi-Scale Separable Fourier Neural Networks (MS-SFNN), for the accurate and efficient solution of linear and nonlinear high-frequency partial differential equations (PDEs). MS-SFNN exploits a separable representation: given a $d$-dimensional input, it employs $d$ independent subnetworks – each acting on a single coordinate – and constructs basis functions via element-wise multiplication of their outputs. The PDE solution is approximated as a linear combination of these basis functions, with coefficients determined by least squares. Critically, all network weights and biases are randomly initialized once, from a uniform distribution with unit variance, and remain fixed thereafter. To enhance expressivity, a tunable scaling factor is introduced in each subnetwork to modulate the frequency content of the resulting basis functions. Fourier features are explicitly embedded through cosine activations, endowing the method with strong spectral approximation capabilities. To mitigate the memory bottleneck associated with dense collocation in high-frequency or three-dimensional problems, we replace automatic differentiation with analytically derived basis function derivatives and develop a memory-efficient batched QR decomposition algorithm for solving large-scale least-squares systems. Numerical experiments demonstrate that MS-SFNN achieves unprecedented accuracy across a range of challenging PDEs, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods such as Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINN) and Separated-Variable Spectral Neural Networks (SV-SNN).

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

PorTEXTO: A European Portuguese Benchmark for Visual Text Extraction

European Portuguese (pt-PT) is largely absent from OCR benchmarks, which skew toward high-resource languages. The few benchmarks that cover pt-PT focus on historical artifacts and literature. This work addresses modern OCR applications, introducing PorTEXTO, the first benchmark for contemporary and culturally relevant pt-PT visual text extraction. To ascertain quality, we employ an annotation pipeline combining transcriptions from a frontier LVLM with exhaustive review by native speakers. We observe a sharp performance drop from synthetic to real world samples in most models, and find that, currently, specialized multilingual data is a better driver for pt-PT performance than model size or resolution budget, motivating the release of open pt-PT OCR resources.

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

Intelligent Automation for Embodied Benchmark Construction: Pipelines, Embodiments, Simulators, and Trends

arXiv:2606.12207v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied intelligence now spans navigation, household assistance, manipulation, autonomous driving, aerial agents, and multimodal large-model control. This expansion has made benchmark construction a central bottleneck for reliable evaluation. Unlike static datasets, embodied benchmarks combine task specifications, environments, robot data, demonstrations, annotations, metrics, evaluation scripts, and release policies into a single evaluation system. This survey reviews the literature through a five-stage construction pipeline: requirement and task construction, data acquisition, data cleaning and annotation, benchmark suite generation and metric definition, and evaluation execution with diagnostic feedback. For each stage, the survey analyzes the transition from manual curation to traditional automation, foundation-model assistance, and agentic closed-loop workflows. It also compares qualitative construction costs across human labor, data and asset acquisition, compute and simulation, validation and debugging, governance and maintenance, and rework risk. The main conclusion is that automation does not simply reduce benchmark cost. Instead, it often shifts cost toward validation, auditability, version control, and long-term governance. Progress in embodied evaluation will therefore depend not only on larger benchmark suites, but also on construction pipelines that are diagnosable, auditable, and responsibly refreshable.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Mana: Dexterous Manipulation of Articulated Tools

Articulated tool manipulation remains a major challenge in dexterous robotics due to the need to coordinate internal degrees of freedom and contact-rich interactions. While prior work has largely focused on rigid objects, articulated tool use remains underexplored because of its physical complexity and the difficulty of learning functional grasping and manipulation policies. We present Mana (Manipulation Animator), a general sim-to-real framework that reinterprets dexterous manipulation as an animation problem. Inspired by computer animation, Mana employs a coarse-to-fine pipeline that transforms procedurally-generated grasp keyframes into manipulation trajectories through motion planning and reinforcement learning. The data generation process is largely automatic, requiring only a few mouse clicks to specify functional affordances (

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Sub-Riemannian spectral distance

arXiv:2606.12804v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the ``div-grad type" sub-Laplacian with respect to Popp's volume on a compact equiregular sub-Riemannian manifold $M$. Since Popp's volume is canonically determined by the sub-Riemannian structure of $M$, the spetra of the sub-Laplacian carry geometric meanings. In this paper, we first embed $M$ into the Hilbert space of square-summable sequences using eigenfunctions and then define a spectral distance between two compact equiregular sub-Riemannian manifolds. Our result is a sub-Riemannian analogue of Berard-Besson-Gallot's classical work in the Riemannian case.

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

Scalable and Interpretable Representation Alignment with Ordinal Similarity

arXiv:2606.16379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating representation similarity is fundamental to representation learning. However, existing metrics suffer from significant limitations: they lack interpretability due to shifting baselines, lack robustness to outliers, and are computationally intractable for large datasets, forcing reliance on heuristic approximations. To address this, we develop an ordinal-similarity framework, instantiated by the Triplet (TSI) and Quadruplet (QSI) Similarity Indices, which measure alignment by quantifying the consistency of ordinal relationships. We theoretically demonstrate this formulation is inherently interpretable, robust to outliers, and computationally efficient. Finally, we establish a formal equivalence between TSI and local neighborhood alignment, measured by Mutual Nearest Neighbors. Empirically, we validate these properties and show that ordinal similarity offers a scalable approach to measuring alignment, enabling practitioners to better understand and design representations.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

RetailBench: Benchmarking long horizon reasoning and coherent decision making of LLM agents in realistic retail environments

arXiv:2606.15862v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents have made rapid progress on short-horizon, well-scoped tasks, yet their ability to sustain coherent decisions in dynamic long-horizon environments remains uncertain. We introduce RetailBench, a data-grounded simulation benchmark for evaluating tool-using LLM agents in single-store supermarket operation. RetailBench models retail management as a partially observable decision process and is designed to support thousand-day-scale simulations. In this environment, agents must manage pricing, replenishment, supplier selection, shelf assortment, inventory aging, customer feedback, external events, and cash-flow constraints. We evaluate seven contemporary LLMs under representative agent frameworks over a 180-day evaluation horizon and compare them with a privileged oracle policy. Results show substantial variation across models: only a small subset survives the full evaluation horizon, and even the strongest LLM runs remain substantially behind the oracle policy in final net worth and sales outcomes. Behavioral analysis attributes these gaps to incomplete evidence acquisition, surface-level decision making, and the lack of a consistent long-horizon policy. RetailBench provides a controlled testbed for studying reliable autonomy in economically grounded long-horizon decision-making.

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

In-Context Learning Is Provably Bayesian Inference: A Generalization Theory for Meta-Learning

arXiv:2510.10981v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper develops a finite-sample statistical theory for in-context learning (ICL), analyzed within a meta-learning framework that accommodates mixtures of diverse task types. We introduce a principled risk decomposition that separates the total ICL risk into two orthogonal components: Bayes Gap and Posterior Variance. The Bayes Gap quantifies how well the trained model approximates the Bayes-optimal in-context predictor. For a uniform-attention Transformer, we derive a non-asymptotic upper bound on this gap, which explicitly clarifies the dependence on the number of pretraining prompts and their context length. The Posterior Variance is a model-independent risk representing the intrinsic task uncertainty. Our key finding is that this term is determined solely by the difficulty of the true underlying task, while the uncertainty arising from the task mixture vanishes exponentially fast with only a few in-context examples. Together, these results provide a unified view of ICL: the Transformer selects the optimal meta-algorithm during pretraining and rapidly converges to the optimal algorithm for the true task at test time.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Early Anomaly-Onset Detection based on Wigner–Ville Distribution Slice Spectra: A Transmission-Grid Test Case

arXiv:2606.15856v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Operational disturbance monitoring in power networks requires decisions to be made from waveform windows as they arrive, rather than from completed records after the event. This study evaluates full-vector Wigner–Ville Distribution Slice (WVDS) spectra for sequential anomaly-onset detection in high-voltage grid-voltage waveforms. The approach keeps the bilinear midpoint interaction structure of the Wigner–Ville distribution and represents each 128-sample voltage window by a 128-dimensional slice spectrum, avoiding manually selected fault-frequency markers. WVDS is used with a baseline-normalized deviation (BND) score and is compared against the BND of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT-BND), raw-window autoencoders, FFT autoencoders, and WVDS autoencoders under the same thresholding and three-window persistence rule. A synthetic autoencoder–clustering teacher is used to select RTE fault records that start from an initially normal region and then transition to anomalous behavior. On the filtered test set, FFT-BND achieves the highest sensitivity, whereas WVDS-BND provides the lowest false-alarm operating point, reducing record-level pre-onset false alarms to 0.69%. The autoencoder comparison follows the same selectivity pattern: WVDS reconstruction decreases false alarms relative to FFT reconstruction but misses more examples. The results indicate that preserved WVD cross-term information can form a selective representation for online grid-waveform anomaly monitoring when false alarms are costly.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Entity Binding Failures in Speech LLM Reasoning: Diagnosis and Chain-of-Thought Intervention

Speech Large Language Models (SLLMs) underperform their text counterparts on complex reasoning. We reveal that this gap is not a uniform cognitive deficit. Evaluating two architecturally diverse SLLMs, we show speech-to-text (S2T) matches or exceeds text-to-text (T2T) on spatial, syntactic, and factual tasks. Yet on logical tasks requiring entity tracking, S2T accuracy collapses to chance. We diagnose this as an entity binding failure: continuous speech features blur precise entity-property associations during implicit reasoning. To validate this diagnosis, we introduce Entity-Aware Chain-of-Thought (EA-CoT), a lightweight inference-time intervention forcing SLLMs to enumerate entities and bind them to claims before reasoning. EA-CoT bridges the gap, even when spoken names are misrecognized, yielding up to a 24.4 percentage-point accuracy gain. Ablations confirm the gains stem from explicit semantic binding, reframing the gap as an elicitation failure rather than a missing capability.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

A Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-Based Transformer Method for Solving the Open Shop Scheduling Problem

arXiv:2606.13682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The open shop scheduling problem (OSSP) arises in many industrial and service settings but remains computationally challenging as the number of jobs and machines increases. While exact methods quickly become intractable, classical dispatching rules and metaheuristics may require substantial tuning to maintain solution quality at large scales. This study develops a Transformer-based scheduling policy for OSSP using an encoder-decoder architecture with multi-head attention. The model is trained on Taillard benchmark instances (4x4, 5x5, 7x7, and 10x10) using only the processing-time matrix as input and produces feasible schedules with makespans typically within 15-30% of best-known values. To evaluate scalability, the trained policy is applied without retraining to randomly generated instances from 40x40 to 100x100 and compared against classical dispatching heuristics, including SPT, LPT, MWKR, and EST. Across these large instances, the Transformer achieved average gaps of 12.89-15.12% relative to a standard lower bound. Compared with EST, the Transformer remained competitive, typically within a modest margin, while substantially outperforming SPT and LPT. These results indicate that a Transformer policy trained on small OSSP instances can generalize to substantially larger problems and provide a feature-light, learning-based alternative to classical dispatching rules.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

ASyMOB: Algebraic Symbolic Mathematical Operations Benchmark

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to symbolic mathematics, yet existing evaluations often conflate pattern memorization with genuine reasoning. To address this gap, we present ASyMOB, a high-resolution dataset of 35,368 validated symbolic math problems spanning integration, limits, differential equations, series, and hypergeometrics. Unlike prior benchmarks, ASyMOB systematically perturbs each seed problem using symbolic, numeric, and equivalence-preserving transformations, enabling a fine-grained assessment of generalization. Our evaluation reveals three key findings: (1) most models' performance collapses under minor perturbations, while top systems exhibit an apparent regime shift in robustness; (2) integrated code tools stabilize performance, particularly for weaker models; and (3) we identify examples where Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) fail while LLMs succeed, as well as problems solved only via a hybrid LLM-CAS approach, highlighting a promising integration frontier. ASyMOB serves as a principled diagnostic tool for measuring and accelerating progress toward building verifiable, trustworthy AI for scientific discovery.

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

CODA-BENCH: Can Code Agents Handle Data-Intensive Tasks?

Advanced agents are increasingly demonstrating the potential to operate as autonomous engineers, creating a growing demand for evaluation benchmarks that capture the complexity of real-world development. Such environments typically involve both complex code and large-scale data (i.e., file system). However, existing benchmarks usually evaluate code-centric or data-centric capabilities in isolation, leaving a clear gap with real development scenarios. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing CODA-BENCH, the first benchmark to jointly evaluate code and data intelligence in a data-intensive environment. We construct a data-intensive Linux sandbox based on the Kaggle ecosystem (containing hundreds of datasets), where agents must actively explore complex file hierarchies to identify relevant resources and generate code for data-driven analytical tasks. CODA-BENCH comprises 1,009 tasks spanning 31 communities, with each task environment containing an average of 980 files, simulating realistic data scale and noise. Evaluations of advanced agents reveal that even top-performing systems struggle to effectively integrate data discovery with code execution, achieving a success rate of only 61.1%. These results highlight a substantial gap in current agentic capabilities for data-intensive tasks and point to promising directions for future research.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Preventing postpartum depression through mitigating breastfeeding grief: A convergent parallel mixed methods study

Background: Women who did not meet their breastfeeding goals often experience breastfeeding grief (BG) and may be likely to have postpartum depression (PD). Furthermore, PD is nearly twice as common in African American (AA) women as in Non-Hispanic White women. No research exists on BG and its role in PD. This study examined the BG experiences of AA women and its possible contributions to PD symptoms. Methods: A convergent parallel mixed methods design was used. A purposive sample of 16 AA women with children aged 6 months to 2 years with BG participated in individual semi-structured interviews about their experiences of BG and completed an online survey including the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS). Qualitative and quantitative data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis and descriptive statistics, respectively. Both data were integrated using joint display of data and side-by-side comparison. Results: The mean age of participants was 29.5 years. Four meaning-based themes about BG were generated including: We looked forward to breastfeeding, But it did not go as expected, So we grieve, and These would have helped. From quantitative results, 87.5% of participants reported a history of PD symptoms and almost 44% had EPDS scores >11. All participants reported that experiencing BG contributed to their PD symptoms. Findings suggest that BG influenced PD symptoms in AA women without prior diagnosis of depression. Conclusions: Qualitative and quantitative findings from this novel exploratory study revealed an overlap that AA women with BG report PD symptoms. Clinicians should support women to achieve their breastfeeding goals to prevent BG and PD. Keywords: African American; Breastfeeding grief; Mental health; Mixed methods; Postpartum depression

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Repeated Bilateral Trade: The Quest for Fairness

arXiv:2606.15369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study repeated bilateral trade from a fairness perspective. At each round, a fresh seller-buyer pair arrives, and the platform posts a price before observing the traders' valuations. Trade occurs only if both agents accept the price. Rather than maximizing only the gain from trade, we consider platforms that seek balanced divisions of the generated surplus. We show that natural fairness desiderata lead to a one-parameter Rawls-to-Nash family of fair-gain objectives, obtained by aggregating the seller's and buyer's net gains through nonpositive Hölder means. Unlike the standard gain-from-trade objective and the Rawlsian fair-gain objective studied in prior work, our proposed objectives induce a new statistical structure in which expected rewards are recovered from threshold feedback through a two-dimensional singular-kernel integral identity. This leads to a nonstandard pure-exploration problem whose natural estimators are rectangular double sums with row-column dependence and singular weights. Assuming independent i.i.d. seller and buyer valuation sequences with arbitrary unknown marginals, we characterize the optimal learning rates for the whole Rawls-to-Nash family of fair-gain objectives, giving matching fixed-confidence sample-complexity and regret bounds up to polylogarithmic factors.