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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

BrainWorld: A Structural-Prior-Conditioned Generative Model for Whole-Brain 4D fMRI Dynamics

Whole-brain 4D fMRI generation is valuable for modeling functional brain dynamics, yet existing fMRI foundation models mainly target representation learning and downstream prediction rather than conditional predictive generation. We introduce BrainWorld, a structural-prior-conditioned generative model for whole-brain 4D fMRI dynamics. BrainWorld uses sMRI as subject-level anatomical context to guide future fMRI generation, integrating structural information into the denoising process rather than treating it as a parallel modality. Evaluated on 22 datasets spanning diverse cohorts and brain states, BrainWorld generates stable 4D fMRI trajectories up to 400 frames, improves downstream performance through generated-example augmentation, and learns transferable multimodal representations that outperform baselines. Together, these results establish BrainWorld as a condition-aware generative framework for long-horizon brain dynamics modeling and multimodal representation learning.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Maternal-Fetal immune networks and viral signatures in the healthy amniotic cavity

The intrauterine environment has traditionally been viewed as a privileged site protected by the placental barrier. However, emerging evidence suggests that early in utero microbial exposure may prime the developing fetal immune system. Here, using target-enriched metagenomics and high-dimensional proteomics, we characterized the intra-amniotic viral landscape and immune networks in 114 healthy pregnancies including both normal and anomalous fetuses. We identify a sparse yet heterogeneous human viral signature in 26% of samples, predominantly composed of Herpesviridae, Polyomaviridae, and Picornaviridae. Although viral reads abundance was associated with fetal abnormalities, viral detection generally did not induce overt inflammatory activation, supporting a state of immune homeostasis within the amniotic cavity. Instead, viral presence was associated with subtle and selective immune modulation, including altered inducible antimicrobial peptide expression (HBD-2 and HBD-3), coupled with an attenuation of regulatory cytokines. Our results further reveal that the amniotic immune environment is primarily governed by gestational age, transitioning from a Th1-predominant "alert" phase to innate-readiness preceding parturition. These findings suggest that fragments of viral genetic material within the amniotic cavity may contribute to fetal immune instruction without triggering overt inflammation, providing a foundational framework for understanding how "silent" viral-exposure during gestation influences the developmental origins of neonatal immunity.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Developmental Associations Linking Childhood Trauma and Early Cannabis Use to Adolescent DNA Methylation and Psychotic-Like Experiences

Background. Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) index early risk for psychotic disorders and are consistently associated with childhood trauma, yet underlying biological mechanisms remain poorly understood. DNA methylation (DNAm) may capture the biological embedding of early adversity, while adolescent exposures such as cannabis use may modify these processes. We examined epigenome-wide associations of childhood trauma and PLEs, tested the moderating role of early cannabis use, and evaluated DNAm as a potential mediator. Methods. We analysed data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a UK population-based birth cohort. Childhood trauma was assessed prospectively and retrospectively. Epigenome-wide DNAm was measured in peripheral blood at ~17 years using the Illumina 450K array, and PLEs were assessed at 18 using a structured interview. Epigenome-wide association studies were conducted for trauma-DNAm and DNAm-PLEs associations in the final sample (n = 1,457), adjusting for demographic, biological, and technical covariates. Differentially methylated regions (DMRs) were identified using DMRff, followed by functional enrichment analyses. Cannabis use at 15.5 was modelled as a moderator with multiple imputation for missing data. Mediation was tested using the Divide-Aggregate Composite-null Test (DACT). Results. Childhood trauma was associated with widespread DNAm differences, primarily at the regional level, with enrichment in pathways related to cellular stress responses. In contrast, DNAm associated with PLEs was more limited and implicated loci involved in epigenetic regulatory processes. These signatures were largely distinct, and there was no evidence supporting mediation after multiple testing correction. Incorporating cannabis use altered the pattern and extent of DNAm associations, with stronger and more significant signals observed at both CpG and regional levels, although these did not translate into evidence of mediation. Conclusion. Childhood trauma and PLEs show distinct DNAm signatures in adolescence, with trauma-related DNAm reflecting broad stress-related processes and PLE-associated DNAm implicating regulatory mechanisms. We found little evidence that DNAm mediates the trauma-PLE association. Instead, adolescent exposures, particularly cannabis use, may distinctly influence trauma-related epigenetic variation with limited detectable downstream effects on PLEs. These findings support a context-dependent model of epigenetic risk and highlight the need for larger longitudinal studies to clarify causal pathways linking early adversity to psychosis.

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

When Calibration Fails the Vulnerable Hospital: Federated Conformal Risk Control via Risk-Curve Shrinkage

arXiv:2606.20115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conformal risk control (CRC) provides distribution-free guarantees on segmentation quality by calibrating a prediction-set threshold on held-out data. In federated deployments, the standard approach pools calibration scores across sites into a single threshold. We provide the first quantification, on real multi-institutional brain tumor data (FeTS-2022, 1,251 subjects, 20 institutions), showing that this naive pooled CRC protects the average hospital but violates coverage at 40% of individual institutions, with the worst site exceeding the target false-negative rate by 7.8 percentage points. The naive alternative, per-site local CRC, largely restores coverage but inflates prediction sets by 83x, rendering them clinically useless. We propose a shrinkage-based federated CRC protocol: each site transmits only its empirical risk curve (G scalars) to a server, which computes a shrinkage-regularized threshold per site. A single hyperparameter n0 smoothly trades worst-case coverage for prediction-set efficiency; leave-one-site-out sensitivity analysis identifies n0=19, achieving 2.7/20 violations at 2.0x stretch. We further show that direct Lagrangian optimization of coverage budgets fails, concentrating risk on vulnerable hospitals, and that the finite-sample correction term is essential: removing it triples violations. The marginal CRC guarantee is preserved by construction under the stated site-mixture assumption; per-site coverage is validated across four targets with three seeds. No patient-level images, masks, or per-volume scores leave any site.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

MARS: Margin-Adversarial Risk-controlled Stopping for Parallel LLM Test-time Scaling

arXiv:2606.12935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parallel test-time scaling samples many reasoning traces and majority-votes their answers, improving LLM accuracy but requiring traces to run to completion, incurring substantial computational overhead. We observe that probing partial traces at intermediate checkpoints can extract current answers without disrupting generation, revealing an evolving aggregate vote. Based on this observation, we introduce MARS, a margin-adversarial stopping rule that estimates which active traces are likely to change their answers and stops once the leader remains safe under a conservative bound on future vote movement. The rule separates two sources of uncertainty. It learns the trace-level switch probabilities that determine how much of the current margin is likely to be retained, while handling the harder question of where switching traces land through an adversarial bound calibrated from warmup traces. With true switch probabilities, MARS guarantees with high probability that the early-stopped answer matches the full-budget vote. In practice, a five-feature logistic model closely matches oracle switching behavior. Across three reasoning models and three competition-math benchmarks, MARS saves 25-47% of self-consistency tokens and 14-29% on top of DeepConf Online, a strong confidence-weighted baseline that already filters and truncates weak traces, while matching the accuracy of the corresponding full-budget baselines.

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

KEPLA: A Knowledge-Enhanced Deep Learning Framework for Accurate Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

arXiv:2506.13196v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is critical for drug discovery. While recent deep learning approaches have demonstrated promising results, they often rely solely on structural features of proteins and ligands, overlooking their valuable biochemical knowledge associated with binding affinity. To address this limitation, we propose KEPLA, a novel deep learning framework that explicitly integrates prior knowledge from Gene Ontology and ligand properties to enhance prediction performance. KEPLA takes protein sequences and ligand molecular graphs as input and optimizes two complementary objectives: (1) aligning global representations with knowledge graph relations to capture domain-specific biochemical insights, and (2) leveraging cross attention between local representations to construct fine-grained joint embeddings for prediction. Experiments on two benchmark datasets across both in-domain and cross-domain scenarios demonstrate that KEPLA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, interpretability analyses based on knowledge graph relations and cross attention maps provide valuable insights into the underlying predictive mechanisms.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

JGRA: Jacobian Geometry Robustness Assessment in NISQ Noise-Aware Quantum Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.09964v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The NISQ era places stringent constraints on quantum computation, where noise and decoherence fundamentally limit performance. In classical deep learning, model robustness and resilience to perturbations are well studied: deep neural networks (DNNs) maintain high performance despite pruning, noise injection, and structural perturbations due to inherent redundancy in their representations. A central challenge in quantum machine learning is to transfer this notion of robustness to quantum neural networks (QNNs) under realistic NISQ noise. While classical deep learning exhibits robustness through structural redundancy, analogous principles for QNNs remain underdeveloped. We propose JGRA: a framework for assessing robustness in noise-aware QNNs via Jacobian geometry, capturing model sensitivity to parameter perturbations induced by noise. Our method includes entropy-matched noise calibration, noise-aware training, and noise-conditioned Jacobian extraction, yielding geometric descriptors that link clean-regime structure to noisy inference behaviour. We also empirically demonstrate that these descriptors encode predictive information about robustness under unseen noise.

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

OTCHA: Optimal Transport-driven Confidence-aware Latent Hub Alignment for Multi-View Medical Image Classification

Multi-view imaging, such as mammography and chest radiography, is a standard component of clinical practice. However, medical images are often unregistered and contain view-specific artifacts or irrelevant background cues that can obscure diagnostically relevant findings. Many existing methods directly fuse per-view representations, allowing such irrelevant content to contaminate the fused embedding and reducing robustness under varying view configurations. We propose OTCHA, a confidence-aware latent hub token alignment module based on optimal transport (OT) that refines patch tokens before fusion for multi-view classification. OTCHA introduces a set of learnable latent hub tokens shared across views. For each view, we compute an OT plan between patch tokens and hub tokens that jointly considers feature similarity and geometry, and augment the OT formulation with token-conditional dustbins to enable partial matching and discard irrelevant tokens. The resulting transport plan provides token-wise matching confidence, which gates hub-mediated message passing and weights a novel optimal-transport-based representation alignment loss to stabilize refinement. Experiments on three multi-view medical image datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over competing baselines across diverse anatomies and view configurations. Our code is available at https://github.com/labhai/OTCHA.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Daily briefing: Human embryo genomes precisely altered

作者:

The use of ‘base editing’ to precisely tweak human embryos has divided researchers. Plus, the number of lives saved by less-polluting cars in China and how to tip the world towards a sustainable future. The use of ‘base editing’ to precisely tweak human embryos has divided researchers. Plus, the number of lives saved by less-polluting cars in China and how to tip the world towards a sustainable future.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Functional Equivalence in Attention: A Comprehensive Study with Applications to Linear Mode Connectivity

arXiv:2606.17830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural network parameter spaces are inherently non-injective, as distinct parameter configurations can realize identical functions through functional equivalence. While this symmetry is well understood in classical fully connected and convolutional models, it becomes substantially more intricate in modern attention-based architectures. Existing analyses of multihead attention have largely focused on the vanilla formulation, overlooking positional encodings that fundamentally reshape architectural symmetries. In this work, we provide a formal study of functional equivalence in Transformers with positional encodings. Focusing on the two most widely used variants–sinusoidal and rotary positional encodings (RoPE)–we show that sinusoidal encodings preserve the equivalence structure of vanilla attention, whereas rotary encodings significantly reduce the symmetry group, thereby enhancing expressivity. This offers a principled explanation for the growing prominence of RoPE in practice. We further examine how positional encodings affect linear mode connectivity, and through an alignment algorithm, empirically demonstrate that the presence and variability of connectivity across Transformer settings crucially depend on the positional encoding.

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

SGFormer++: Semantic Graph Transformer for Incremental 3D Scene Graph Generation

In this paper, we propose SGFormer++, a novel Semantic Graph Transformer for 3D scene graph generation (SGG), which aims to parse point cloud scenes into semantic structural graphs, where nodes denote detected object instances and edges encode their pairwise relationships, with the core challenge lying in modeling complex global scene structure. While existing graph convolutional network (GCN)-based methods suffer from over-smoothing and limited receptive fields, SGFormer++ leverages Transformer layers as its backbone to enable global message passing. Specifically, we introduce two key components tailored for 3D SGG: (1) a Graph Embedding Layer++ that efficiently integrates edge-aware global context with linear computational complexity, and (2) a Semantic Injection Layer++ that enriches visual features with linguistic priors from large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), boosting semantic representation without introducing extra trainable parameters. To further address the practical challenge of incremental SGG (I-SGG), where new relationship categories arrive sequentially, we equip SGFormer++ with a novel Spatial-guided Feature Adapter, which calibrates predicate features using subject-object spatial geometry to counter scale variation, and a Cascaded Binary Prediction Head that mitigates catastrophic forgetting via task-incremental classifier expansion and logit distillation. Extensive experiments on the 3DSSG benchmark demonstrate that SGFormer++ achieves state-of-the-art performance in both standard and incremental settings: it yields a significant 4.49% absolute improvement in Predicate A@1 under the incremental setting. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Andy20178/SGFormer.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Metric Match: A Subset Selection Approach to Evaluating LLM Judge Reliability

arXiv:2606.15029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM judges are used to reduce the need for costly human labor in evaluating open-ended text generation. However, the reliability of these judges depends critically on their alignment with human raters – a property that itself depends on costly human annotations. In this work, we develop a method (Metric Match) for estimating correlation-based reliability metrics of LLM judges from limited annotations. Metric Match selects a subset of samples for human annotation such that the subset matches the population reliability metric with respect to acquired synthetic labels. We empirically show that Metric Match achieves a win-rate of 0.838 against random subset selection across four different correlation metrics and 15 datasets, with an 18.7% decrease in average estimation error and reduces annotation needs by 32.5%. We provide a cost model and highlight a medical case study where our method saves $1,041.67 compared to random selection for expert annotation. Further, we shift our task from reliability estimation to reliability classification of whether a given judge is above a deployment threshold, outperforming random selection with Metric Match. All project code is publicly available, and we additionally provide an installable package for ease of use.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Gender Differences in AI Literacy Workshop Outcomes and Deepfake Engagement

arXiv:2606.14718v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Artificial Intelligence (AI) literacy initiatives expand in K-12 settings, understanding how gender shapes student baseline perceptions, tool-use, and responsiveness to interventions is essential for equitable curriculum design. This study examines gender differences in AI literacy, safety awareness, and STEM career aspirations among Australian secondary students (Years 7, 8, and 10; N(pre) = 199, n(post) = 136) from two co-educational government schools who participated in a one-day AI literacy workshop. Using statistical regression methods controlling for year level and school, we found that pre-workshop, male students reported significantly higher STEM career interest across all three domains (AI, computer science, and engineering), while female students were significantly more likely to use AI for schoolwork and to seek advice from AI tools. Gender-differentiated patterns also emerged in deepfake behaviours: males were significantly more likely to have created or shared deepfake content. Both genders improved in AI knowledge post-intervention, yet females showed a richer profile of gains: wider conceptual understanding, greater confidence, and meaningful increases in AI and CS career interest that partially narrowed the gender STEM gap. These findings highlight the need for gender-responsive AI curricula, particularly deepfake safety education for male students, and demonstrate that even single-day workshops can narrow gender gaps in STEM aspirations and AI confidence.

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

EvoBrowseComp: Benchmarking Search Agents on Evolving Knowledge

Search Agents – large language models augmented with search tools – have intensified the need for future-proof evaluation benchmarks. Existing benchmarks such as BrowseComp rely on static knowledge, making them vulnerable to test-set contamination and parametric memorization. Consequently, models can achieve high scores through fact recall rather than genuine retrieval, obscuring true browsing competence via reasoning shortcuts. In this paper, we introduce EvoBrowseComp, an evolving benchmark of 400 English and 400 Chinese contamination-free complex questions synthesized via live-web traversal. To collect these questions, we design a three-agent collaborative framework: (1) a QA synthesis agent that retrieves fresh knowledge from the live web to synthesize QA pairs; (2) an information filtering agent that filters retrieved knowledge in terms of credibility and popularity to block parametric shortcuts; and (3) a high-level guidance agent that formalizes questions into reasoning graphs to reduce logical redundancy and shortcuts in synthesized QA pairs. Because the framework supports fully automated synthesis, EvoBrowseComp can be regularly updated to prevent data contamination and maintain temporal freshness. Extensive experiments confirm its great difficulty, requiring broad horizontal search. It establishes a scalable paradigm for auto-updatable, high-difficulty benchmarking that keeps pace with both evolving world knowledge and advancing agent capabilities.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Hybrid VQE-CVQE algorithm using diabatic state preparation

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

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

Resilient Consensus in Agentic AI

arXiv:2606.15024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems where they must coordinate and agree on shared decisions. We ask whether classical resilient consensus theory, developed for deterministic agents, transfers to LLM agents that may behave adversarially. Framing LLM agreement as a Byzantine consensus game, we run controlled experiments on complete and general communication graphs. We find that prompted LLM agents fail to reach agreement that is achievable in principle: consensus can fail even in settings where classical theory guarantees that a convergent algorithm exists, and this failure persists across temperatures and horizons. At the same time, wrapping the agents with classical resilient consensus filters improves agreement. The benefit of filtering depends on how much robustness the underlying topology already provides. Our results suggest that classical resilient consensus theory is a useful lens for the safety of agentic AI.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

RepGene: Toward a Unified Gene Representation Space Robust to Missing Biological Views

Genes can be described through multiple heterogeneous biological views, including genomic sequence, transcript sequence, protein sequence, textual knowledge, and single-cell expression context, yet existing gene embeddings remain largely modality-specific and difficult to compare or reuse when many views are unavailable. We study a narrower but practically important question: whether pretrained embeddings from these distinct sources can be organized into a shared gene representation interface that remains usable under severe missing-modality conditions. To investigate this question, we introduce RepGene, a lightweight single-branch framework that combines modality adapters, a shared encoder, presence-aware fusion, and self-supervised cross-view objectives to map five biological views into one latent space. Our goal is not to claim a new multimodal learning principle or to establish superiority over all simpler fusion strategies, but to provide an initial technical instantiation for testing whether such a shared interface is feasible in a fixed-feature setting. Under a two-stage protocol in which RepGene is trained self-supervised on frozen upstream embeddings and evaluated by downstream linear probing, we find preliminary evidence that the learned representation is broadly competitive in the full-modality setting and remains informative when only partial modality subsets are observed at inference time. The strongest signal in our study is robustness under missing views: average performance changes are often limited when one modality is removed, and even single-view inference remains non-trivial in the evaluated benchmark regime.These results do not resolve unified biological representation learning, and they should be interpreted in light of incomplete simple-fusion baselines, limited architectural ablation, benchmark dependence, and possible upstream feature exposure. We therefore position RepGene as a feasibility study and a starting point for stronger comparisons, broader benchmarks, and leakage-aware validation.

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

"Did you lie?" Evaluating Lie Detectors across Model Scale and Belief-Verified Model Organisms

arXiv:2606.12618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust lie detectors for language models could enable powerful techniques for auditing, monitoring, and post-hoc investigation of model behaviour, but evaluating them requires testbeds where models verifiably believe the opposite of what they say. We show that existing trained model organisms often fail this requirement, leaving prior positive and negative detection results difficult to interpret. We address this with 13 reasoning model organisms whose hidden beliefs are verified in chain-of-thought and shown to generalise to held-out tasks, alongside Varied Deception, a prompted-lying testbed covering a broad range of lie-inducing motivations. On these testbeds we evaluate four detectors: a chain-of-thought judge, a logprob classifier, and two activation probes, including Did-You-Lie (DYL), a new method for training follow-up probes. On prompted lying, across 31 open-weight models spanning 2B to 1T parameters, all four detectors show positive scaling with model capability. However, every activation- and logprob-based detector drops sharply on our trained model organisms, with DYL retaining the most signal; only the chain-of-thought judge remains strong, with 0.82 balanced accuracy, partly as an artefact of our verification process favouring CoT-readable beliefs. Current lie detectors therefore cannot support high-confidence claims about model beliefs, and we suggest research directions that may address some of their current limitations. We release our datasets, model organisms, and trained detectors.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Formation of clusters and coarsening in weakly interacting diffusions

arXiv:2510.17629v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies the clustering behavior of weakly interacting diffusions under the influence of sufficiently localized attractive interaction potentials on the one-dimensional torus. We describe how this clustering behavior is closely related to the presence of discontinuous phase transitions in the mean-field PDE. For local attractive interactions, we employ a new variant of the strict Riesz rearrangement inequality to prove that all global minimizers of the free energy are either uniform or single-cluster states, in the sense that they are symmetrically decreasing. We analyze different timescales for the particle system and the mean-field (McKean-Vlasov) PDE, arguing that while the particle system can exhibit coarsening by both coalescence and diffusive mass exchange between clusters, the clusters in the mean-field PDE are unable to move and coarsening occurs via the mass exchange of clusters. By introducing a new model for this mass exchange, we argue that the PDE exhibits dynamical metastability. We conclude by presenting careful numerical experiments that demonstrate the validity of our model.

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

Discrete optimal transport is a strong audio adversarial attack

arXiv:2509.14959v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we investigate discrete optimal transport (DOT) as a black-box attack against modern automatic speaker verification (ASV) and anti-spoofing countermeasure (CM) systems. Our attack operates as a post-processing distribution-alignment step. Frame-level WavLM embeddings of generated speech (or another person speech) are aligned to an unpaired bona fide speech pool using entropic optimal transport and a top-k barycentric projection, followed by neural vocoding. Unlike gradient-based attacks, the proposed method requires no access to model parameters, gradients, or training data. Experiments on ASVspoof2019 and ASVspoof5 demonstrate that DOT attack substantially increases CM EER and substantially degrades ASV performance across multiple spoofing attacks. The attack transfers across datasets and remains effective after CM fine-tuning. Analysis using speaker similarity, Fréchet Audio Distance, and visualization of embedding distributions suggests that DOT succeeds by shifting source speech toward bona fide regions of the representation space rather than by maximizing speaker similarity. These results indicate that optimal-transport-based distribution alignment represents a previously underexplored attack vector for contemporary ASV and anti-spoofing systems.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning from Delayed Marketplace Feedback for Objective-Weight Adaptation in Three-Sided Dispatch

arXiv:2606.13604v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dispatch in three-sided marketplaces provides a natural setting for reinforcement learning from world feedback: decisions are evaluated by delayed operational outcomes such as delivery speed, courier utilization, and merchant congestion. We present a deployed reinforcement learning system at DoorDash that adapts dispatch objective weights in a large-scale food-delivery marketplace using delayed signals. Rather than replacing the combinatorial assignment optimizer, a store-level policy learned from logged marketplace data selects a discrete multiplier that shifts the dispatch optimizer's tradeoff between delivery quality and batching efficiency. This interface enables offline policy learning under noisy, delayed, and coupled feedback while preserving production feasibility constraints and operational safeguards. We train a shared value function using centralized offline data and decentralized store-level execution, with Double Q-learning targets and a conservative regularizer to reduce out-of-distribution value overestimation. In a production switchback experiment, the offline-trained policy increases batching and reduces courier-side time costs without degrading customer-facing delivery quality. Results illustrate how world feedback from a live economic and logistics system can be used to safely adapt decision policies online.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fractured Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining. Similarly, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and its extension, Long CoT, improve accuracy by generating rich intermediate reasoning trajectories, but these approaches incur substantial token costs that impede their deployment in latency-sensitive settings. In this work, we first show that truncated CoT, which stops reasoning before completion and directly generates the final answer, often matches the full CoT sampling while using dramatically fewer tokens. Building on this insight, we introduce Fractured Sampling, a unified inference-time strategy that interpolates between full CoT and solution-only sampling along three orthogonal axes: (1) the number of reasoning trajectories, (2) the number of final solutions per trajectory, and (3) the depth at which reasoning traces are truncated. Through extensive experiments on five diverse reasoning benchmarks and several model scales, we demonstrate that Fractured Sampling consistently achieves superior accuracy-cost trade-offs, yielding steep log-linear scaling gains in Pass@k versus token budget. Our analysis reveals how to allocate computation across these dimensions to maximize performance, paving the way for more efficient and scalable LLM reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/BaohaoLiao/frac-cot.

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

Beyond Scalar Rewards by Internalizing Reasoning into Score Distributions

Reward models are central to text-to-image post-training, but visual preference is subjective and better represented as a distribution over rubric scores than as a deterministic scalar. Existing scalar, score-token, and pairwise reward models over-compress uncertainty and fine-grained score differences, while reasoning-based generative rewards provide stronger judgments but are costly to deploy and difficult to use as direct optimization signals. We propose Z-Reward, a teacher-student reward modeling framework that decouples reasoning-heavy judgment from efficient reward deployment. The teacher is a large VLM that uses reasoning to infer rubric-aligned score distributions, and is trained with Group-wise Direct Score Optimization (GDSO), which combines policy-gradient rewards from distribution expectations with direct pointwise and pairwise supervision on score distributions and score gaps. The student is trained with Reasoning-Internalized Score Distillation (RISD), which transfers the teacher's reasoning-conditioned score distribution into a compact VLM without requiring explicit reasoning chains at inference time. On our internally annotated evaluation set, the 27B GDSO teacher reaches 89.6% human preference accuracy, outperforming SFT, RewardDance, and GRPO, while the 9B RISD student reaches 88.6%, outperforming the OPD baseline and closely matching the larger teacher. We further show that Z-Reward can serve as a differentiable reward signal for text-to-image optimization, yielding a 41.3% net human-preference improvement over the SFT baseline.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

MoSE: Mixture of Slimmable Experts for Efficient and Adaptive Language Models

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale large language models efficiently by sparsely activating experts, but once an expert is selected, it is executed fully. Hence, the trade-off between accuracy and computation in an MoE model typically exhibits large discontinuities. We propose Mixture of Slimmable Experts (MoSE), an MoE architecture in which each expert has a nested, slimmable structure that can be executed at variable widths. This enables conditional computation not only over which experts are activated but also over how much of each expert is utilized. Consequently, a single pretrained MoSE model can support a more continuous spectrum of accuracy-compute trade-offs at inference time. We present a simple and stable training recipe for slimmable experts under sparse routing, combining multi-width training with standard MoE objectives. During inference, we explore strategies for runtime width determination, including a lightweight test-time training mechanism that learns how to map router confidence/probabilities to expert widths under a fixed budget. Experiments on GPT-style models, various routing regimes, zero-shot downstream reasoning benchmarks, and continual pre-training adaptation of DeepSeek model show that MoSE matches or improves standard MoE at full width and consistently shifts the compute-quality frontier toward lower inference FLOPs. The code can be found at: https://github.com/tnurbek/mose.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Decidable By Construction: Design-Time Verification for Trustworthy AI

arXiv:2603.25414v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A prevailing assumption in machine learning is that model correctness must be enforced after the fact. We observe that the properties determining whether an AI model is numerically stable, computationally correct, or consistent with a physical domain do not necessarily demand post hoc enforcement. They can be verified at design time, before training begins, at marginal computational cost, with particular relevance to models deployed in high-leverage decision support and scientifically constrained settings. These properties share a specific algebraic structure: they are expressible as constraints over finitely generated abelian groups $\mathbb{Z}^n$, where inference is decidable in polynomial time and the principal type is unique. A framework built on this observation composes three prior results (arXiv:2603.16437, arXiv:2603.17627, arXiv:2603.18104): a dimensional type system carrying arbitrary annotations as persistent codata through model elaboration; a program hypergraph that infers Clifford algebra grade and derives geometric product sparsity from type signatures alone; and an adaptive domain model architecture preserving both invariants through training via forward-mode coeffect analysis and exact posit accumulation. We believe this composition yields a novel information-theoretic result: Hindley-Milner unification over abelian groups computes the maximum a posteriori hypothesis under a computable restriction of Solomonoff's universal prior, placing the framework's type inference on the same formal ground as universal induction. We compare four contemporary approaches to AI reliability and show that each imposes overhead that can compound across deployments, layers, and inference requests. This framework eliminates that overhead by construction.