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

GASE: Gaussian Splatting-Based Automated System for Reconstructing Embodied-Simulation Environments

Training embodied agents in the real world requires skilled operators and expensive hardware. Simulation environments offer a compelling alternative by enabling large-scale, cost-effective data augmentation. Consequently, rapidly constructing high-fidelity simulation scenes with a minimal sim-to-real gap has become a critical objective in robot learning. While reconstruction-based methods provide superior visual quality, current workflows are hindered by inefficient data acquisition and subpar foreground object extraction. We thus propose GASE, a highly automated system for simulation scene construction. GASE leverages multi-view video streams from panoramic camera arrays to enable rapid environment scanning. To ensure high-quality asset generation, our pipeline introduces a camera-pose-based strategy that robustly extracts objects across frames in the 2D domain, followed by high-fidelity scene inpainting. Foreground objects and the static background are then reconstructed independently and seamlessly imported into physics simulators for policy training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GASE outperforms existing 3D Gaussian-based methods in segmentation accuracy by over 10\% while achieving state-of-the-art inpainting quality. Furthermore, real-robot deployments across manipulation and navigation tasks maintains a performance gap of less than 10\% compared to policies trained purely on real-world data. These results confirm that GASE provides an efficient and highly effective solution for bridging the sim-to-real gap. Code will be released.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Knowing When to Quit: A Principled Framework for Dynamic Abstention in LLM Reasoning

LLMs utilizing chain-of-thought reasoning often waste substantial compute by producing long, incorrect responses. Abstention can mitigate this by withholding outputs unlikely to be correct. While most abstention methods decide to withhold outputs before or after generation, dynamic mid-generation abstention considers early termination of unpromising reasoning traces at each token position. Prior work has explored empirical variants of this idea, but principled guidance for the abstention rule remains lacking. We present a formal analysis of dynamic abstention for LLMs, modeling abstention as an explicit action within a regularized reinforcement learning framework. An abstention reward parameter controls the trade-off between compute and information. We show that abstaining when the value function falls below this reward strictly outperforms natural baselines under general conditions. We further derive a principled and efficient method to approximate the value function. Empirical results on mathematical reasoning and toxicity avoidance tasks support our theory and demonstrate improved selective accuracy over existing methods.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton: Learning Compliant Whole-body Policies with Real-time Torque Feedback

arXiv:2606.14218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For robots to work safely in household environments, they need to be compliant and react to torque and force feedback during contact. However, the majority of existing data collection pipelines still lack the ability to capture force and torque data for learning active compliant policies. In this paper, we present Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton (UME), an upper-limb exoskeleton that provides real-time haptic torque feedback while recording whole-arm configurations and joint torque signals for teleoperation. With transparent torque feedback, human operators can even unsheathe kinematically constrained objects while blindfolded. UME is low-cost, lightweight, and portable. Equipped with an embedded IMU, it enables teleoperation for mobile manipulation. With our proposed universal retargeting algorithm, UME can teleoperate a range of robots, including the 7DoF OpenArm, 7DoF Franka, and 6DoF X-ARM. We demonstrate that this combination of capabilities enables learning bimanual, whole-body, and active compliant policies that operate effectively in highly constrained spaces. The learned robust autonomous policies achieve high success rates across a variety of tasks, including long-horizon mobile manipulation, force-mediated box flipping, visually occluded box pushing, and space-constrained tabletop manipulation. Videos, code, and additional information can be found at https://ume-exo.github.io.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

When Confidence Lacks Concepts: Interpretable OOD Detection via Representation Perturbations

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable performance across medical imaging tasks, yet their tendency to overgeneralize under distributional shifts poses a major obstacle to safe clinical deployment. Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection methods aim to mitigate this risk, but most existing approaches rely on opaque internal signals with poorly understood semantic meaning, limiting trust in safety-critical settings. In this work, we propose an interpretable OOD detection framework that probes the stability of model predictions under class-conditioned semantic perturbations. Leveraging sparse autoencoders (SAEs), we learn class-specific concept vectors from in-distribution data that disentangle dense intermediate representations into sparse, semantically meaningful components. At inference, we perturb deeper-layer representations using the concept vectors associated with the model's predicted class and measure the class logits stability. We hypothesize that in-distribution samples exhibit low sensitivity to such perturbations, as their representations align with class-specific semantic directions, whereas OOD samples show amplified deviations due to representational misalignment. By framing OOD detection as a concept conditioned stability analysis, our approach provides both a discriminative OOD signal and an interpretable lens into the internal mechanisms driving model uncertainty, making it particularly suitable for high stakes medical applications.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ERQA-Plus: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Reasoning in Embodied AI

Generalist embodied agents require more than object recognition: they must reason about spatial relations, actions, procedures, human intentions, environmental constraints, and commonsense consequences from situated visual observations. Yet existing visual and embodied question answering benchmarks often provide limited control over the reasoning dependencies being tested, making it difficult to distinguish grounded embodied reasoning from shortcut-driven visual or linguistic pattern matching. We present ERQA-Plus, a diagnostic benchmark for reasoning in embodied AI. ERQA-Plus contains 1,766 question-answer instances grounded in 711 robot-centric images and organized according to a structured taxonomy spanning perceptual, action-centric, social-interaction, navigation-environmental, and contextual commonsense reasoning. The dataset is constructed using a multi-stage generation and validation pipeline that combines taxonomy-guided question generation, automatic quality judging, iterative revision, and human assessment to improve visual grounding, answer validity, and reasoning quality. We benchmark representative general-purpose vision-language models and embodied models, including LLaVA-NeXT-8B, Prismatic-7B, MiniCPM-V-4.5-8B, Qwen3-VL, RoboRefer-8B, and RoboBrain2.5-8B. Although the strongest model, Qwen3-VL-32B, achieves 83.4% overall accuracy and 61.4 SBERT score, category-level results reveal persistent weaknesses in spatial reasoning, procedural reasoning, event prediction, and intention inference. ERQA-Plus therefore provides a fine-grained evaluation framework for measuring not only whether embodied agents answer correctly, but also which forms of embodied reasoning they can and cannot perform reliably. The dataset is available https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingdas/erqa-plus and the project page at https://github.com/LUNAProject22/erqa-plus.

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

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Discrete-Time Gaussian Process Mixtures for Robot Policy Learning

arXiv:2505.03296v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Mixture of Discrete-time Gaussian Processes (MiDiGap), a novel approach for flexible policy representation and imitation learning in robot manipulation. MiDiGap enables learning from as few as five demonstrations using only camera observations and generalizes across a wide range of challenging tasks. It excels at long-horizon behaviors such as making coffee, highly constrained motions such as opening doors, dynamic actions such as scooping with a spatula, and multimodal tasks such as hanging a mug. MiDiGap learns these tasks on a CPU in less than a minute and scales linearly to large datasets. We also develop a rich suite of tools for inference-time steering using evidence such as collision signals and robot kinematic constraints. This steering enables novel generalization capabilities, including obstacle avoidance and cross-embodiment policy transfer. MiDiGap achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse few-shot manipulation benchmarks. On constrained RLBench tasks, it improves policy success by 76 percentage points and reduces trajectory cost by 67%. On multimodal tasks, it improves policy success by 48 percentage points and increases sample efficiency by a factor of 20. In cross-embodiment transfer, it more than doubles policy success. We make the code publicly available at https://midigap.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

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

Sycophancy as Material Failure under Pushback Loading: A Multi-Axis Characterization Across Three Loading Cases and up to Seventeen Material Charges

Sycophancy in LLMs is documented across 70+ papers, but expert agreement on construct boundaries remains low (ICC=.184; Ye et al., 2026). The construct fragments because behavioral classification depends on which surface form is privileged. We adopt a materials-science framing: conversation as test specimen under load, LLM-model as material charge, pushback as progressive load, stance-flip as material failure. We characterize this failure across three loading cases (debate n=1000; false-presuppositions n=3400; ethical-setting n=3400; 10-17 material charges per case; 7800 specimens total) using 14 turn-level axis-measurements spanning velocity, damage accumulation, frame-drift, brittleness, and direction stability, plus three speaker-resolved axes from an independent pipeline. The measurements are Hooke-coupled ($\sigma = E \cdot \varepsilon$ analog) and reproduce across loading cases with effects up to $|r_{rb}| = 0.35$ on debate; the sign structure adds a second pattern: the ethical-setting case inverts the velocity and accumulation blocks. Variance composition partitions into two profiles: debate is charge-dominated (brittle-fracture-like: the material grade decides), false-presuppositions and ethical-setting are topic-dominated (creep-like: the load decides); the ratios (2.03 vs 0.13/0.17) are estimator-dependent, for debate even in direction. Cross-judge reliability (GPT-4o vs Haiku 4.5) shows debate scoring is judge-robust (Cohen's $\kappa = 0.88$) while false-presupposition scoring is judge-sensitive ($\kappa = 0.36$) – a caveat single-judge benchmarks must report. This is the methodological move Ye et al.'s diagnosis calls for: a multi-axis characterization that does not depend on which surface form of the construct one privileges.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Physics-Informed Variational Quantum Classifier for Phase Detection in Strongly Correlated Matter

arXiv:2606.14489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The characterisation of quantum phases in strongly correlated systems is a crucial milestone for the deployment of quantum sensors. In this work, we present a Physics-Informed Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) designed to detect the topological phase transition between the Fermi polaron quasiparticle and the molecular bound state. Unlike conventional Machine Learning approaches, our quantum architecture is constructed via the Trotterised time-evolution of an effective Hamiltonian, ensuring that the learnable parameters correspond to interpretable physical quantities. We show that the VQC efficiently discovers the optimal interferometric protocol, specifically the evolution time and effective bath interactions required to maximise the visibility of Ramsey fringes, thereby clearly distinguishing the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) and Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) regimes. Furthermore, we report the validation of this classifier on the QRed superconducting quantum processor (BSC-CNS). Despite the intrinsic hardware noise and decoherence, the VQC preserves the relative ordering of the topological phases. We demonstrate that the physics-informed architecture achieves a linear gate complexity $\mathcal{O}(N)$, bypassing the exponential memory wall of classical simulation and ensuring scalability to many-body regimes.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

How far have we gone in Generative Image Restoration? A study on its capability, limitations and evaluation practices

Generative Image Restoration (GIR) has achieved impressive perceptual realism, but how far have its practical capabilities truly advanced compared with previous methods? To answer this, we present a large-scale study grounded in a new multi-dimensional evaluation pipeline that assesses models on detail, sharpness, semantic correctness, and overall quality. Our analysis covers diverse architectures, including diffusion-based, GAN-based, PSNR-oriented, and general-purpose generation models, revealing critical performance disparities. Furthermore, our analysis uncovers a key evolution in failure modes that signifies a paradigm shift for the perception-oriented low-level vision field. The central challenge is evolving from the previous problem of detail scarcity (under-generation) to the new frontier of detail quality and semantic control (preventing over-generation). We also leverage our benchmark to train a new IQA model that better aligns with human perceptual judgments. Ultimately, this work provides a systematic study of modern generative image restoration models, offering crucial insights that redefine our understanding of their true state and chart a course for future development.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Geometry-Aware Superpixel Graph Transformer with Metadata for Skin Lesion Classification

Automated skin cancer classification from dermoscopic images remains challenging due to heterogeneous lesion structure, strong intra-class variability, and subtle visual differences between benign and malignant cases. Existing CNN/ViT pipelines typically rely on global or patch-level features and often combine patient metadata via late fusion, which limits spatially grounded multimodal reasoning. We present a novel region-based graph learning framework that explicitly models lesions as graphs of spatially coherent superpixel regions represented as frozen CNN features. To capture fine-grained lesion arrangements, we encode inter-regional geometry as edge attributes and introduce a dedicated metadata context node connected to all regions, providing structured integration of demographic/clinical variables within the same relational space. Node representations are updated using our edge-aware graph transformer followed by attention-driven propagation, and a final graph-level embedding for benign-malignant classification. Experiments on four public benchmarks demonstrate that explicit region-level relational modeling and graph-native multimodal fusion yield consistent gains over the state-of-the-art. Consequently, we establish a new graph-centric perspective in which CNN features are modeled as relational nodes and improved through contextual integration, yielding more expressive and robust classifications.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Self-Guidance: Enhancing Neural Codecs via Decoder Manifold Alignment

arXiv:2606.12940v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural speech codecs based on Vector-Quantized VAEs (VQ-VAEs) are core audio tokenizers for speech LLMs, yet their reconstruction fidelity is bottlenecked by quantization error. Modifying the quantizer or increasing model capacity are common fixes, but they complicate downstream language modeling. Our core idea is to align the decoder's internal feature manifolds when processing both the quantized tokens and their original continuous embeddings, using a lightweight feature-mapping loss. This requires minimal training overhead and no inference-time changes. Applied to XCodec2, self-guidance improves all reconstruction metrics, achieving state-of-the-art low-bitrate performance. Notably, it enables a 4x codebook reduction without fidelity loss, which downstream TTS experiments show significantly improves LLM-based synthesis by simplifying the token modeling space. Multiple statistical observations and visualizations corroborate the enhanced internal manifold alignment in the decoder. Extensive experiments confirm its generality across various inductive biases. Self-guidance thus establishes an efficient, broadly applicable method for high-fidelity neural audio coding.

12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Don’t compete, collaborate: why collective funding applications are the future

Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them. Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Developing a Unified Criminal Justice Pathway into Drug and Alcohol Treatment from Police Custody: A Public Health Service Evaluation and Pathway-Design Project in Blackpool, United Kingdom

Introduction: Blackpool, England's most deprived local authority, has the highest drug-related death rate in the country. People in police custody with problem substance use are a key Core20PLUS5 inclusion-health group, yet referral from the police into structured drug and alcohol treatment is fragmented and relies heavily on self-report. We evaluated the current police-to-treatment route in Blackpool and designed an evidence-informed unified pathway. Materials and Methods: A mixed-methods service evaluation and pathway-design project was conducted during a six-month General Practice / Public Health rotation. Routinely collected referral data from Horizon (the local specialist drug and alcohol service) covering the 47-month period from December 2019 to October 2023 were analysed. Findings were triangulated with national policy, the Project ADDER and Liaison and Diversion evaluations, and the international evidence on police-led pre-arrest diversion. Results: Of 5,900 total referrals into Horizon over 47 months, only 269 (4.56%) originated from the police. Police referrals accounted for fewer than 5% of monthly referrals in 30 of 47 months, for 5 to 9.9% in 16 months, and for >/= 10% in only one month (10.8%, December 2022). Blackpool recorded 76 drug-misuse deaths in 2019-21 (19.4 per 100,000, approximately four times the England rate). A six-step unified pathway is proposed: Initiate Referral (opt-out, from ADDER Police and Liaison and Diversion); Initial Assessment; Tailored Treatment Plan; Continuous Support; Collaboration and Monitoring; and Evaluation and Adjustment. Conclusions: Police contact is markedly under-used as a gateway to treatment despite Blackpool having the highest drug-related mortality in England. An opt-out, multi-agency pathway anchored in Core20PLUS5 has the potential to narrow the treatment gap, reduce re-offending, and address the structural health inequalities that drive premature mortality.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Learning Geometric Representations from Videos for Spatial Intelligent Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.05833v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at 2D semantic understanding but lack intrinsic 3D awareness, resulting in representations that fail to maintain geometric and spatial consistency across video frames. Given the scarcity of large-scale 3D data, we present GeoVR, a novel framework that learns geometric representations using purely 2D video sequences. This approach effectively restructures the semantic latent space within MLLMs to unlock spatial intelligence. Rather than employing superficial feature mixing, GeoVR reshapes the internal representations of the MLLM by distilling geometry knowledge from pre-trained 3D foundation models. This is accomplished through a multi-objective learning strategy driven by four complementary geometric targets: (1) estimating inter-frame camera poses to embed varying viewpoint dynamics, (2) regressing dense depth maps to anchor physical distances, (3) predicting a metric scale factor for real-world calibration, and (4) distilling multi-scale 3D features to align the intermediate feature space. Guided by these explicit physical and geometric constraints, the model's internal representations naturally develop strong 3D awareness. Extensive experiments on spatial reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that GeoVR achieves state-of-the-art performance, establishing a new paradigm for endowing foundation models with spatial intelligence.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quasi-local Edge Mode in XXX Spin Chain/Circuit with Interaction Boundary Defect

arXiv:2603.17835v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the Heisenberg spin-1/2 model on a semi-infinite chain - or, equivalently, a trotterized unitary SU(2) symmetric six-vertex quantum circuit - with a boundary defect where the interaction between the two spins nearest the edge differs from that in the bulk. For sufficiently strong boundary interaction we explicitly construct a conserved operator quasi-localized near the boundary using a matrix-product ansatz. This quasi-local edge mode leads to non-decaying boundary correlation functions, corresponding to a nonzero boundary Drude weight. The correlation length of the edge mode diverges at a finite critical value of the boundary interaction, signaling a transition to ergodic boundary dynamics for subcritical interactions.

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

Exploring How Agent Voice Accents Shape Human-AI Collaboration in K-12 Group Learning

arXiv:2606.12805v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collaboration is widely recognized as a cornerstone of 21st-century education, yet teachers still encounter persistent challenges in fostering productive peer interaction. LLM conversational peer agents introduce new possibilities for mediating in-person group work, raising questions about how persona design, particularly their voice characteristics, shapes learners' perceptions, trust, and interactional dynamics. While prior work has examined agent accent effects in one-to-one settings, little is known about how these effects manifest in groups. We conducted a between-subjects mixed-methods study with 33 teachers examining how a GenAI voice agent with different accents (British, Indian, and African American) influenced collaboration and agent perception. Across surveys, group interaction analyses, and artifacts, we find that accent shaped participants' mental models and the roles the agent assumed in group interaction. The British-accented agent was largely treated as a tool and engaged in detached, utility-based ways, whereas Indian- and African American-accented agents were more readily anthropomorphized and integrated as peers. These role expectations influenced trust, engagement, and reliance over time. This work advances understanding of how GenAI's sociolinguistic design features shape group dynamics in CSCL, with implications for designing culturally inclusive AI partners in group learning.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Confidence Calibration for Multimodal LLMs: An Empirical Study through Medical VQA

arXiv:2606.19950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show great potential in medical tasks, but their elicited confidence often misaligns with actual accuracy, potentially leading to misdiagnosis or overlooking correct advice. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of the relationship between accuracy and confidence in medical MLLMs. It proposes a novel method that combines Multi-Strategy Fusion-Based Interrogation (MS-FBI) with auxiliary expert LLM assessment, aiming to improve confidence calibration in Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA). Experiments demonstrate that our method reduces the Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by an average of 40\% across three Medical VQA datasets, significantly enhancing MLLMs' reliability. The findings highlight the importance of domain-specific calibration for MLLMs in healthcare, offering a more trustworthy solution for AI-assisted diagnosis.

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

Confidence is Not Reliability: Rethinking MC Dropout in Brain Tumour Segmentation

Glioma segmentation in multiparametric MRI is a critical component of treatment planning. A segmentation model that fails silently on treatment-critical sub-regions represents a patient safety risk that overlap-based metrics such as Dice scores cannot expose. We ask whether voxel-level uncertainty estimation via Monte Carlo (MC) Dropout can reliably identify segmentation errors in clinically critical sub-regions, and whether calibration failure modes are detectable from standard reporting metrics alone. In an empirical two-model case study on 126 BraTS21 patients, we evaluate a high-performance pretrained SegResNet and a locally trained UNet with residual units (UNet-Res). MC dropout preserved segmentation accuracy ($|\Delta Dice|$ $

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

Short Chains, Deep Thoughts: Balancing Reasoning Efficiency and Intra-Segment Capability via Split-Merge Optimization

While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in solving complex tasks through the generation of long reasoning chains, this reliance on verbose generation results in significant latency and computational overhead. To address these challenges, we propose CoSMo (Consistency-Guided Split-Merge Optimization), a framework designed to eliminate structural redundancy rather than indiscriminately restricting token volume. Specifically, CoSMo utilizes a split-merge algorithm that dynamically refines reasoning chains by merging redundant segments and splitting logical gaps to ensure coherence. We then employ structure-aligned reinforcement learning with a novel segment-level budget to supervise the model in maintaining efficient reasoning structures throughout training. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and backbones demonstrate that CoSMo achieves superior performance, improving accuracy by 3.3 points while reducing segment usage by 28.7\% on average compared to reasoning efficiency baselines.

20.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-10

Interpreting higher-order dependence in multimorbidity using cohort data: A partial information decomposition approach

by Cillian Hourican, Geeske Peeters, René J. F. Melis, Almar Kok, Natasja M. van Schoor, Sandra Wezeman, Mike Lees, Marcel G. M. Olde Rikkert, Rick Quax In the context of multimorbidity, clinical features seldom act in isolation: symptoms, signs and behaviours form interdependent systems in which joint effects on function can be demonstrated only when features are considered together. We introduce an open, reusable workflow that detects and interprets these “together-only” interactions using bivariate Partial Information Decomposition (PID; two sources to one target), linking synergy-based dependence to the broader network of clinical variables rather than to a single target. The workflow estimates synergy with small-sample bias correction and summarises each pair in a Breadth–Uniformity–Synergy–Total (BUST) map: breadth of synergy across target variables (broad “generalist” vs narrow “specialist” patterns), cross-stratum uniformity across age, sex and multimorbidity (uniform vs subgroup-specific), synergy strength, and total shared information. Simple diagnostics contrast observed targets with additive expectations, revealing the specific joint configurations through which non-additive effects arise. Applied to data from the Longitudinal Ageing Study Amsterdam, we treated all health-related variables—covering symptoms, clinical signs, behaviours, lifestyle factors, and self-rated health indicators—as both sources and targets in the PID framework. This symmetric design permits synergy to be quantified for every pair of variables with respect to every other variable. The workflow identifies synergistic constellations that additive models miss. Multidomain cliques involving subjective health, pain, cognition and grip strength showed multiple non-additive configurations, whereas pairs such as alcohol use with grip strength exhibited focused, narrow but uniform synergy. Notably, the pairs with the strongest synergistic contributions were largely distinct from those with the highest total mutual information, indicating that synergy captures dependency structure overlooked by conventional association measures. Rather than a new measure, this work provides a bias-aware workflow that makes higher-order dependence visible and transferable. Our results support synergy-aware mapping as a practical complement to conventional multimorbidity analyses: it highlights specific combinations of routinely assessed features whose joint states may be especially informative across multiple health targets and therefore candidates for prioritised joint assessment and future multi-domain intervention studies.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Stochastic epidemic model with varying infectivity and waning immunity: the law of large numbers with unbounded infectivity

arXiv:2606.11845v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We revisit the large population limit of our epidemic model with infection age dependent infectivity and progressive immunity waning, under the assumption that the supremum in $t$ of the random infectivity function has a finite expectation, while the previous proofs assumed that this supremum admits a deterministic upper bound.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Cutoff for asymmetric shelf shuffle

arXiv:2606.18039v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A mechanical shuffler consists of $m$ shelves. A deck of $n$ cards, arranged in increasing order, is dealt from the bottom sequentially. Each card is assigned a shelf uniformly at random and placed on the top (bottom) of the existing pile with probability $p$ ($1-p$) independently. We refer to this as asymmetric shelf-shuffle. We find the law $\nu_{n, m}^{(p)}$ of the permutation induced by the asymmetric shelf-shuffle and show that the pair consisting of the number of descents and the number of valleys is a sufficient statistic. This generalizes a result of Diaconis, Fulman, and Holmes (Ann. Appl. Prob., 2013) corresponding to the case $p=1/2$. For $p=1/2$, Chen and Ottolini (ECP, 2025) established the cutoff in the total variation distance near $\lfloor n^{5/4}\rfloor$. We establish the cutoff for the asymmetric shelf shuffle. Let $\nu_n$ be the uniform measure on the set of all permutations $S_n$ of $\{1, \ldots, n\}$. For a fixed $p\neq 1/2$ and $c>0$, we show that \[\operatorname{TV}\left(\nu_{n, \lfloor cn^{3/2}\rfloor }^{(p)}, \nu_n\right)=1-2\Phi\left(-\frac{|2p-1|}{4\sqrt{3}c}\right)+O_{c, p}(n^{-1/2})\;.\] We also establish the cutoff in the separation distance near $m\approx n^{2}$ and in the relative entropy near $m=n^{3/2}$. In both cases, we also obtain the cutoff profile explicitly.

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

As You Wish: Mission Planning with Formal Verification using LLMs in Precision Agriculture

arXiv:2606.18519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Though robotic systems are now being commercialized and deployed in various industries, many of these systems are highly specialized and often require an advanced skill set to operate and ensure they perform as instructed. To mitigate this problem, we recently introduced a mission planner leveraging LLMs to synthesize mission plans in precision agriculture based on mission descriptions provided in natural language. While the system demonstrates impressive performance, it also suffers from the inherent ambiguities of natural language. In this paper, we extend our system to address this issue by introducing multiple feedback loops in the planning architecture that leverage linear temporal logic (LTL) to ensure the mission planning system meets the specifications formulated by the user while still using natural language. To mitigate potential bias, this is achieved by using two different commercial LLMs in charge of the specification and verification subtasks. Through extensive experiments, we highlight the strengths and limitations of integrating mission verification into a fully autonomous pipeline, particularly regarding an LLM's ability to generate valuable LTL formulas, and show how our proposed implementation addresses and solves these challenges.

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

Minimal Filling Architectures of Polynomial Neural Networks: Counterexamples, Frontier Search, and Defects

arXiv:2605.09609v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We provide counterexamples to the unimodal minimal filling architecture conjecture for polynomial neural networks (PNNs) with power activation functions. Fixing the input and output widths, the conjecture states that any minimal filling architecture has unimodal widths for the hidden layers. We found counterexamples via a frontier search, recursive dimension bounds on neurovarieties, and symbolic computation. Notably, several subarchitectures of our main example exhibit large defect, in contrast with the predominantly small-defect behavior observed in prior literature.