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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A non-asymptotic bound on the TV distance between a Wishart matrix and an appropriately scaled GOE matrix

arXiv:2606.16018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this note, we prove a non-asymptotic version of a theorem by Bubeck, Ding, Eldan, and Rácz, showing that a Wishart matrix is close in total variation to an affine transformation of a GOE matrix. The proof mirrors the proof given by Bubeck et al., with some changes made to make it non-asymptotic.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

HAMNO: A Hierarchical Adaptive Multi-scale Neural Operator with Physics-Informed Learning for Dynamical Systems

arXiv:2606.11963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural operators provide a powerful framework for learning solution mappings of partial differential equations directly in function space. However, many existing architectures still struggle to represent nonlinear time-dependent systems that involve multi-scale structures, long-range interactions, and stable long-time evolution. In this work, we introduce the Hierarchical Adaptive Multi-scale Neural Operator (HAMNO), a neural-operator architecture that combines local convolutional representations, global spectral operators, and hierarchical encoder-decoder processing. The central component of HAMNO is a data-dependent gating mechanism that adaptively balances local and global information at each spatial location, allowing the model to resolve fine-scale features while preserving long-range dependencies. We further develop a physics-informed extension, PI-HAMNO, based on a multi-objective loss strategy that combines data fitting with strong- and weak-form physics constraints. The strong-form term penalizes the domain-integrated squared PDE residual in physical coordinates, while the weak-form term is constructed by multiplying the governing residual by finite-element test functions and evaluating the resulting element integrals using centroid-based tetrahedral quadrature. The framework is evaluated on non-periodic Allen-Cahn (AC), Cahn-Hilliard (CH), and Swift-Hohenberg (SH) equations defined on cubic domains. Across long-horizon rollout, data-limited training, out-of-distribution initial-condition shifts, and random-seed variations, HAMNO improves predictive accuracy over standard neural-operator baselines, while PI-HAMNO further enhances stability, physical consistency, and data efficiency. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/MBamdad/HAMNO .

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Understanding the Rejection of Fixes Generated by Agentic Pull Requests – Insights from the AIDev Dataset

arXiv:2606.13468v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding agents are increasingly used to generate pull requests (PRs) that propose code fixes in software projects. From a first exploration of the AIDev dataset, we find that 46.41\% of the fixes proposed by the agents Copilot, Devin, Cursor, and Claude are rejected. This represents a significant amount of wasted resources that require human reviews, verifications, and running tests and validations for fixes that are merely discarded. Our goal in this paper is to understand the failure modes of AI-agents, an understanding that is crucial for better integrating AI-agents as efficient teammates. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative study on a representative sample of 306 non-merged pull requests created or co-authored by the agents mentioned earlier, followed by a quantitative analysis of the reasons for rejection. Our qualitative findings identify 14 reasons divided into four high-level categories for rejecting AI-agent fixes. We observe that developers can reject fixes due to fixes whose implementation is incorrect (e.g., incomplete, wrong approach), fixes that do not pass the continuous integration (CI) pipelines and fail tests, fixes for which the agent is unable to perform the implementation (e.g., no code generated, sessions lost), and fixes whose priority is low. Our results shed light on the importance of better guiding the model at these levels: (1) proposing hints about the approach to follow for fixing an issue, (2) outlining constraints or limitations regarding the approaches that should not be taken, and (3) instructing the agent on how to validate the implementation through CI pipelines and without introducing a breaking change. Our results suggest the need for good prioritization of tasks so that generated fixes do not lead to wasted human review efforts or wasted agent resources (e.g., tokens, compute, or allowed number of requests).

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Authority, Truth, and Citation Bias: A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Benchmark for Studying Epistemic Susceptibility in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.13104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed in citation-augmented settings, yet the effect of citation presence on model behavior independent of factual content remains poorly understood. We introduce AuthorityBench, a 220,564-prompt multi-domain benchmark that isolates how citation-based authority signals influence epistemic behavior in LLMs. The benchmark uses a fully balanced 2x2 factorial design crossing claim veracity with citation veracity, the first to do so, across four domains (general knowledge, science, law, and medicine), with controlled variation over 40 prompt templates, four venue prestige tiers, and a country-coded author name dataset. Evaluating seven models on 12 structured research questions, we find that citation presence, whether real or fabricated, consistently increases hallucination rates relative to a no-citation baseline. The effect is strongest when fabricated citations accompany true claims, raising hallucination rates by 3 to 22 percentage points and reaching 35 to 77% in the general knowledge domain, while legal claims are comparatively robust and venue prestige and author demographics show negligible impact. All datasets and evaluation code are available at: https://github.com/floating-reeds/AuthorityBench

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

Contrastive Geometric Learning Unlocks Unified Structure- and Ligand-Based Drug Design

arXiv:2601.09693v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Structure-based and ligand-based computational drug design have traditionally relied on disjoint data sources and modeling assumptions, limiting their joint use at scale. In this work, we introduce Contrastive Geometric Learning for Unified Computational Drug Design (ConGLUDe), a single contrastive geometric model that unifies structure- and ligand-based training. ConGLUDe couples a geometric protein encoder that produces whole-protein representations and implicit embeddings of predicted binding sites with a fast ligand encoder, removing the need for predefined pockets. By aligning ligands with both global protein representations and multiple candidate binding sites through contrastive learning, ConGLUDe supports ligand-conditioned pocket prediction in addition to virtual screening and target fishing, while being trained jointly on protein-ligand complexes and large-scale bioactivity data. Across diverse benchmarks, ConGLUDe achieves competitive zero-shot virtual screening performance, substantially outperforms existing methods on a challenging target fishing task, and demonstrates state-of-the-art ligand-conditioned pocket selection. These results highlight the advantages of unified structure-ligand training and position ConGLUDe as a step toward general-purpose foundation models for drug discovery.

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

UP-NRPA: User Portrait based Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation for Planning with Large Language Models in Goal-oriented Dialogue Systems

To address the challenge that current dialogue policy planning methods struggle to dynamically adapt to diverse user characteristics, this paper proposes a User Portrait based Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation (UP-NRPA) online framework with Large Language Models. In contrast to conventional approaches dependent on model training and require offline reinforcement learning policy models for user groups, UP-NRPA enables dynamic customization of dialogue strategies through an adaptive mechanism. This is achieved by leveraging real-time user feedback alongside personality, preferences, and objectives mapped from the current user portrait, thereby adapting to user characteristics without offline reinforcement learning. In collaborative and non-collaborative dialogue benchmarks, UP-NRPA demonstrated considerable benefits, achieving an impressive 100% success rate in multiple dialogue tasks. Particularly in negotiation tasks, the sale-to-list ratio (SL) increased by 56.41%. This demonstrates that UP-NRPA can adapt to diverse user needs without requiring a training mechanism, enabling the dialogue system to adapt to user characteristics.

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

Q-Fold: Query-Aware Focus-Context Spatio-Temporal Folding for Long Video Understanding

Long-video understanding remains challenging for multimodal large language models, because temporally extended videos often contain thousands of frames and are therefore expensive to process exhaustively. Existing methods usually construct compact visual inputs from long videos under a limited visual budget. However, most of them still follow a frame-centric paradigm and apply similar representations to retained content regardless of its importance. This makes it difficult to preserve both high-fidelity visual evidence and broad temporal coverage. To address this issue, we propose Q-Fold, a training-free input construction framework for long-video understanding. Instead of treating isolated frames as the basic modeling unit, Q-Fold operates on contiguous temporal segments and constructs a heterogeneous Focus–Context representation under query guidance. Query-relevant segments are preserved as high-fidelity Focus Frames, while less relevant segments are folded into chronology-preserving contextual layouts. In this way, Q-Fold preserves critical visual evidence and broad temporal coverage, while better maintaining local temporal continuity within short segments. Experiments on four long-video benchmarks with multiple Video-MLLMs show that Q-Fold consistently improves performance without increasing the input budget. Notably, it achieves gains of up to 9.1 percentage points on an ultra-long video benchmark. Code will be made publicly available.

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

Stable Menus of Public Goods: AI-Enabled Progress

作者:

arXiv:2606.16989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Using an open problem from the EC 2025 paper "Stable Menus of Public Goods" as a testbed, we conduct experiments to understand the effectiveness of different AI-for-EconCS research workflows. Specifically, we study three questions: Does providing human intuition in the prompt help? Does automated multi-turn interaction help? And, does an LLM outperform a first-year PhD student? Regarding the first two questions, we provide evidence for the following workflow suggestions: (1) prompting with human intuition can encourage the LLM to have better "taste", (2) multi-turn workflows help when the pipeline encourages "ambitious" steps. Regarding the third question, using an unpublished manuscript written by the paper's senior authors prior to collaborating with the first-year PhD student, we compare the effectiveness of the LLM with that of the first-year PhD student, and find that the LLM is slightly less effective.

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

When AUC Misleads: Polarization-Aware Evaluation of Deepfake Detectors under Domain Shift

Recent advances in generative AI, such as diffusion models and face-swapping tools, have enabled the creation of highly realistic deepfakes, leading to real-world harms including financial fraud and non-consensual explicit content. In response, deepfake detection has become an active research area, with recent methods increasingly focusing on improving generalization to unseen manipulations. This is typically evaluated using the Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) measured separately across multiple datasets. However, such an evaluation fails to reflect real-world scenarios where detectors face a mixture of data sources and varying artifact types. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel metric, Cross-dataset AUC (Cross-AUC) that averages per-domain AUCs with a measure of prediction polarization for taking into account the robustness to domain shift. The polarization extent is quantified by the Wasserstein Distance between class score distributions. Cross-AUC not only assesses the generalization capabilities of deepfake detectors under domain shifts more realistically, but it is also interpretable as it better explains the reason behind a drop in performance. Experiments performed on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate its practical relevance.

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

Conditional Local Importance by Quantile Expectations

arXiv:2411.08821v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Global variable importance measures are commonly used to interpret the results of machine learning models. Local variable importance techniques assess how variables contribute to individual observations. Current, popular methods, including LIME and SHAP, provide useful measures of feature contribution in the prediction space, while leaving opportunities for improved characterization of local structure in the model loss space. Additionally, they are not natively adapted for multi-class classification problems. We propose a new model-agnostic method for calculating local variable importance, CLIQUE, that highlights locally dependent relationships, provides improved stability over permutation-based methods, and can be directly applied to multi-class classification problems. Simulated and real-world examples show that CLIQUE emphasizes locally dependent information, captures interaction behavior beyond what can be evaluated by correlations, and assigns zero importance in regions where the response is invariant to changes in variables.

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

Graph Regularized Non-negative Reduced Biquaternion Matrix Factorization for Color Image Recognition

Non-negative reduced biquaternion matrix factorization (NRBMF) uses the product of reduced biquaternion (RB) matrices to incorporate the non-negativity constraints of color image pixels into the factorization process. However, NRBMF mainly focuses on reconstruction accuracy and does not explicitly exploit the local geometric structure of image data, which may limit the discriminative ability of the obtained low-dimensional coefficient representations. To address this issue, we propose a graph regularized non-negative reduced biquaternion matrix factorization (GNRBMF) model for color image recognition. The proposed model incorporates a graph Laplacian regularizer into the reduced biquaternion coefficient matrix, encouraging nearby samples in the original space to have similar coefficient representations. Meanwhile, GNRBMF retains the non-negativity property of NRBMF in the reduced biquaternion algebra. To solve the optimization problem, a component-wise alternating projected gradient algorithm is derived, and its convergence properties are analyzed. Experimental results on three color image datasets show that the proposed GNRBMF model achieves competitive or superior recognition performance compared with several methods in most tested settings.

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

World Engine: Towards the Era of Post-Training for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous vehicles must operate safely in the real world, where errors can have severe consequences. Although modern end-to-end driving policies excel in routine scenarios, their reliability is limited by the scarcity of safety-critical ``long-tail'' events in real driving datasets. These rare interactions define the practical safety boundary of the learned policy, yet they are difficult to collect at scale in the real world. Here we show that this fundamental limitation can be addressed by post-training pre-trained driving models on synthesized high-stakes interactions. We introduce World Engine, a generative framework that reconstructs high-fidelity interactive environments from real-world logs and systematically extrapolates them into realistic safety-critical variations. This paradigm enables reinforcement-based post-training to align policies with safety constraints, circumventing the physical risks inherent in real-world exploration. On a public benchmark built on nuPlan, World Engine substantially reduces failures in rare safety-critical scenarios and yields significantly larger gains than scaling pre-training data alone. Furthermore, when deployed on a production-scale autonomous driving system, the resulting policy reduces simulated collisions and demonstrates measurable improvements in on-road testing, showing that post-training on synthesized, safety-critical interactions offers a scalable and effective pathway to safer autonomous driving. The full codebase suite, including training, is released to the public.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Uplift Modeling under Structural Biases: Insights into Metric Stability and Model Robustness

arXiv:2603.20775v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In personalized marketing, uplift models estimate the incremental effect of an intervention by modeling how customer behavior would change under alternative treatments using counterfactual analysis. However, real-world marketing data often exhibit various biases, such as selection bias, spillover effects, measurement error, and unobserved confounding. These biases can adversely affect both the accuracy of uplift estimation and the validity of evaluation metrics. Despite the importance of bias-aware assessment, there remains a lack of systematic studies evaluating how different models and metrics perform under such biased conditions. To bridge this gap, we design a systematic benchmarking framework. Unlike standard predictive tasks, real-world uplift datasets inherently lack counterfactual ground truth. This limitation renders the direct validation of evaluation metrics infeasible and prevents the precise quantification of biases. Therefore, a semi-synthetic approach serves as a critical enabler for systematic benchmarking. This approach effectively bridges the gap by retaining real-world feature dependencies while providing the ground truth needed to isolate structural biases. Our investigations reveal that (i) uplift targeting and prediction can manifest as distinct objectives, where proficiency in one does not ensure efficacy in the other; (ii) while many models exhibit inconsistent performance under diverse biases, TARNet shows notable robustness, providing insights for subsequent model design; (iii) the stability of evaluation metrics is linked to their mathematical alignment with the ATE, suggesting that ATE-approximating metrics yield more consistent model rankings under structural data imperfections. These findings suggest the need for more robust uplift models and evaluation metrics under real-world data imperfections.

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

Gaussian Process Prior Variational Autoencoder for Endoscopic Videos

Endoscopic video analysis is essential for gastrointestinal diagnosis and computer-assisted interventions, but video sequences are routinely degraded by specular reflections, motion artifacts, and missing frames. These transient corruptions can distract clinicians, reduce image interpretability, and disrupt downstream tasks such as 3D reconstruction and navigation. Effective restoration therefore requires methods that exploit temporal continuity rather than treating frames in isolation. We introduce a Gaussian Process Prior Variational Autoencoder (GPVAE) framework for endoscopic video restoration that replaces the standard factorized latent prior with a temporal Gaussian process prior, enabling interpolation of missing frames with uncertainty-aware reconstruction. The framework combines endoscopy-specific encoders, including a convolutional EndoVAE backbone and pretrained Vision Transformer encoders from GastroNet-5M, with two scalable GP approximations: Hierarchical Prior Approximation (HPA) and Sparse Precision Approximation (SPA). Specular reflections are handled using a DUCKNet-based masking pipeline that excludes corrupted pixels from the reconstruction objective. On the C3VDv2 colonoscopy dataset, the best GPVAE variants reduced image reconstruction RMSE by 21.9\% on average, and by up to 26.1\%, relative to matched VAE baselines. Downstream trajectory RMSE was reduced by 12.7\% on average across classical visual odometry and a pretrained PoseNet, at an average increase of 27.3\% in training time per epoch. Finally, the GP posterior provides per-frame uncertainty estimates that reflect temporal support and offer a confidence signal for restored frames.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

ReRAM-aware Model Finetuning addressing I-V Non-linearity and Retention Errors

arXiv:2606.17471v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional CPU, GPU, and NPU architectures are increasingly limited by the von Neumann bottleneck. While In-Memory Computing (IMC) using ReRAM crossbar arrays offers a high-density, energy-efficient alternative, its practical deployment is constrained through their non-idealities. Existing hardware-aware training frameworks often require training from scratch, which is computationally prohibitive for modern large-scale models. In this work, we propose a finetuning-based hardware-aware training algorithm that enables robust DNN deployment on ReRAM with minimal training overhead. Our approach mitigates I-V non-linearity by applying a range-shrunk sinh transformation and incorporates retention errors directly into a regularization loss during the finetuning process. We evaluate our framework across models and tasks such as image classification and question-answering (QA). Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves similar accuracy on large-scale models like ResNet18 and DeiT-Tiny as the base model. In-case of ImageNet for MobileNetV3 families the technique has only less than 2% accuracy degradation. Further, applying the technique on the SQuAD v2 dataset results in only 1 point degradation of F-1 score.

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

Getting Better at Working With You: Compiling User Corrections into Runtime Enforcement for Coding Agents

Interactive LLM agents are becoming part of daily work, but they do not reliably become easier to work with over time: a correction remembered in one session may still be violated in the next. We study this gap between preference access and preference compliance. In tasks derived from anonymized real-user friction cases, Mem0 memory still leaves 57.5% of applicable preference checks violated. We introduce Test-time Rule Acquisition and Compiled Enforcement (TRACE), a drop-in skill-layer pipeline for coding-agent runtimes that mines user corrections, rewrites them as atomic rules, and compiles them into runtime checks that must pass before an agent completes future tasks. Unlike runtime checks written ahead of time by developers, TRACE skills come from the user's own chat corrections. We evaluate TRACE with simulated user-in-the-loop experiments on ClawArena coding-agent tasks and MemoryArena-derived memory-intensive tasks. On ClawArena, TRACE reduces held-out preference violation from 100.0% to 37.6% on in-distribution tasks and from 100.0% to 2.0% on out-of-distribution tasks. On MemoryArena-derived tasks, TRACE reduces in-distribution violation from 100.0% to 60.5% while matching or exceeding the strongest memory baseline on task pass. These results suggest that compiling corrections into runtime enforcement can address a repeated-friction failure mode that memory alone does not reliably solve, reducing the need for users to restate the same correction across future sessions. Experiment code is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/TRACE_exp, and the deployable skill is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/tellonce.

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

Is It You or Your Environment? A Bayesian Inference Framework for Genomically-Anchored Personalized Physiological Interpretation

arXiv:2606.13556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized health AI systems face a fundamental cold-start problem: machine learning models for physiological interpretation require weeks of individual behavioral data before they can distinguish constitutional variation from environmentally driven deviation. We propose a solution grounded in causal inference and Bayesian prior design. An individual's genomic profile serves as an exogenous genetic anchor – a domain-informed, personalized prior that is fixed at conception, immune to reverse causation, and available before a single behavioral observation is collected. The anchor initializes a Bayesian belief state over an individual's physiological set point G-hat = mu + sum(beta_i * g_i), where beta_i are GWAS-derived effect sizes and g_i are risk-allele counts. Each incoming physiological measurement P produces a non-constitutional deviation delta = P - G-hat that separates the signal attributable to environment and state from the constitutionally fixed baseline. As behavioral data accrue, the prior decays according to G-hat_t = w(t)*G-hat_genomic + [1-w(t)]*P-bar_t, transitioning from genome-dominated to empirical-baseline-dominated inference. The same observed HRV of 55 ms generates a suppression hypothesis for a person whose prior predicts 80 ms, and an enhancement hypothesis for a person whose prior predicts 30 ms – a reversal impossible without a personalized anchor. We develop this architecture across six physiological domains, grading genomic priors by evidence strength, distinguishing robustly replicated anchors (FTO, FADS1/2, FKBP5) from contested candidate genes (SLC6A4, MAOA, DRD2). We address the inference boundary between association, Mendelian randomization, and individual token causation, and define four constraints for deployment: evidence-graded priors, dynamic decay, ancestry-matched effect sizes, and attribution rather than deterministic output.

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

Beyond Case Law: Evaluating Structure-Aware Retrieval and Safety in Statute-Centric Legal QA

arXiv:2604.06173v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Legal QA benchmarks have predominantly focused on case law, overlooking the unique challenges of statute-centric regulatory reasoning. In statutory domains, relevant evidence is distributed across hierarchically linked documents, creating a statutory retrieval gap where conventional retrievers fail and models often hallucinate under incomplete context. We introduce SearchFireSafety, a structure- and safety-aware benchmark for statute-centric legal QA. Instantiated on fire-safety regulations as a representative case, the benchmark evaluates whether models can retrieve hierarchically fragmented evidence and safely abstain when statutory context is insufficient. SearchFireSafety adopts a dual-source evaluation framework combining real-world questions that require citation-aware retrieval and synthetic partial-context scenarios that stress-test hallucination and refusal behavior. Experiments across multiple large language models show that graph-guided retrieval substantially improves performance, but also reveal a critical safety trade-off: domain-adapted models are more likely to hallucinate when key statutory evidence is missing. Our findings highlight the need for benchmarks that jointly evaluate hierarchical retrieval and model safety in statute-centric regulatory settings.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Structure Over Nonlinearity: Explicit Interaction Architectures for Dynamical Learning

arXiv:2606.19101v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most learning architectures for dynamical systems rely on generic nonlinear function approximation, often requiring high model complexity to capture structured behaviors. In this work, we propose an alternative paradigm in which modeling capability arises primarily from structure rather than from expressive nonlinearities. We introduce a class of explicit structured dynamical units based on wave-inspired interaction structures with internal state. Inspired by wave-based computational principles, the proposed units adopt a strictly causal organization that eliminates algebraic loops, yielding fully explicit models that can be evaluated without implicit solvers. Stacking such units produces layered dynamical architectures with emergent hierarchical behavior. Through experiments on a nonlinear system identification task, we show that depth improves both representation quality and generalization, even under limited parameter optimization. In particular, the proposed architectures produce informative internal representations even under readout-only fitting, indicating that useful dynamical structure emerges from the organization of interactions prior to substantial parameter optimization. These results suggest that structure-first design provides a viable and effective alternative to conventional black-box approaches for learning dynamical systems, highlighting the role of interaction structure as a primary source of model expressivity.

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

Contract-Based Compositional Shielding for Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.14130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe coordination problems surface in multi-agent reinforcement learning when global safety cannot be enforced by any agent unilaterally: the admissibility of one agent's action may depend on the dynamics of other agents. Decentralised shields can enforce safety at runtime, but purely factorised permissions often exclude optimal team behaviour that is safe only through coordination. We study deterministic safety guarantees for agents trained and deployed under decentralised execution, recovering team-optimal safe behaviour without centralised runtime control. Agents have a shared global specification $\phi$ in the safety fragment of Linear Temporal Logic ($\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ ), and select among tuples of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations whose conjunction implies the global specification $\phi$. Each agent may rely on the other agents' local obligations as assumptions because the whole contract tuple is certified simultaneously and allows projection into local action masks. At learning time, a non-stationary multi-armed bandit chooses among a library of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations to select the tuple that optimises team reward, all without forgoing end-to-end safety. We evaluate the approach across 6 environments and 15 algorithmic variants.

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

Reward-SQL: Boosting Text-to-SQL via Stepwise Execution-Aware Reasoning and Process-Supervised Rewards

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have improved Text-to-SQL performance. However, RL-based approaches still struggle with complex queries due to two key limitations: insufficient stepwise execution-aware reasoning grounded in database feedback, and the lack of process-level rewards for guiding reasoning optimization. To address these issues, we propose CoCTE, a divide-and-conquer and execution-aware reasoning framework that progressively composes SQL queries through intermediate view validation and structured Common Table Expressions (CTEs), improving both accuracy and interpretability. To realize a CoCTE reasoning process, we develop Reward-SQL, a unified approach with three stages: (1) model initialization, which equips LLMs with structured CoCTE reasoning capabilities; (2) process reward design, which delivers fine-grained, execution-aware supervision; and (3) process-supervised RL and inference, which integrates process rewards into training and guides the inference stage by process rewards. This paper addresses the core challenges in Reward-SQL and makes the following contributions. We introduce a process reward model (PRM) that combines execution-aware trajectory scoring with entropy-based step weighting, providing dense and interpretable supervision across reasoning steps. We integrate PRM into both RL training and inference stages, stabilizing optimization and improving trajectory exploration with process-level signals. Experiments show that Reward-SQL significantly outperforms baselines with comparable model sizes, and exhibits strong cross-domain generalization.

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

Target-confidence Recourse Using tSeTlin machines: TRUST

arXiv:2606.18832v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Counterfactual explanations are widely used to provide algorithmic recourse in high-stakes decision-making systems. Most existing methods seek the smallest change to an input that flips a model's decision. However, decision-makers often rely not only on predicted labels but also on confidence thresholds and risk margins. Counterfactuals that barely cross a decision boundary can be fragile and unstable under noise or model variation. In this paper, we propose Target-confidence Recourse Using tSeTlin machines (TRUST), a framework in which users explicitly specify the desired prediction confidence for recourse. Rather than generating counterfactuals and evaluating confidence afterward, TRUST directly searches for minimal changes that satisfy a user-defined confidence target, enabling comparison of recourse options in terms of cost, confidence, and robustness. We instantiate TRUST using a Probabilistic Tsetlin Machine (PTM) combined with Bayesian optimization. The probabilistic clause-based structure of PTM links prediction confidence to the stability of decision rules. We show that counterfactuals satisfying the same rules can still differ substantially in reliability depending on how securely they satisfy those rules, revealing whether decisions are supported by robust or fragile clause activations. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that target-confidence counterfactuals produce more robust and interpretable recourse than conventional boundary-based approaches. Across multiple benchmarks, TRUST achieves perfect robustness while maintaining low recourse cost, including an L2 distance of 0.10 on the Haberman dataset at 0.92 confidence. By explicitly controlling confidence and exposing rule-level stability, TRUST provides actionable recourse for high-stakes decision support.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

A soluble bi-specific fusion protein for the improved expansion of human CD8+ CAR-T cells

The success of Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cell therapy is heavily dependent on the quality of the final cellular product. Current expansion protocols often rely on reagents that require removal from cell culture media, posing logistical challenges in manufacturing, and can also lead to terminal differentiation. Here, we evaluate the use of a soluble, bead-free T cell activator, T cell expansion protein (T-CEP), as a streamlined alternative for generating potent CAR-T cells. Human T cells were activated with T-CEP or known T cell activators (Dynabeads and TransAct) and transduced with either CD19 or interleukin-13 (IL-13) mutein (tetravariant-13; TV-13)-based CAR lentiviral vectors. Our results demonstrate that T-CEP supports robust CAR-T cell expansion and achieves transduction efficiencies comparable to commercial reagents for both types of CAR-T cells. Notably, T-CEP significantly favored the expansion of CD8+ T cells, yielding an enhanced CD27+ phenotype and a lower CD4:CD8 ratio compared to TransAct. Cytotoxicity assays confirmed that T-CEP-expanded CAR-T cells possess cytolytic function equivalent to commercial reagents for both CARs, while exhibiting lower levels of inflammatory cytokine secretion. In summary, T-CEP represents a competitive alternative to existing expansion agents, as it does not require its removal during CAR-T manufacturing and generates a CD8+ dominant, less-differentiated phenotype without compromising efficacy.