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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Why heritage sites are at risk in a warming world — and how to save them

Authors:
William Megarry↗

As rising seas and intensifying disasters threaten historic sites worldwide, new ways to understand, preserve and adapt these places are needed urgently. As rising seas and intensifying disasters threaten historic sites worldwide, new ways to understand, preserve and adapt these places are needed urgently.

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02.
Science (Express) 2026-05-21

Nodeless superconducting gap and electron-boson coupling in (La,Pr,Sm)3Ni2O7 films | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

The discovery of superconductivity in Ruddlesden-Popper (RP) bilayer nickelate films under ambient pressure provides an opportunity to directly investigate electronic energy scales of the superconducting state and the pairing mechanism. We report angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements of superconducting (La,Pr,Sm) 3 Ni 2 O 7 thin films by developing an ultra-high vacuum cryogenic sample quenching and transfer technique. A superconducting gap of ~18 meV with coherence peaks is observed along the Brillouin zone diagonal. The finite gap persists across the entire Brillouin zone, revealing the absence of gap nodes. A kink is observed in the energy-momentum dispersion at ~70 meV below Fermi level, indicating an electron-boson coupling. The simultaneous observation of a nodeless superconducting gap and electron-boson coupling provides insight into the pairing symmetry and gluing mechanism in RP bilayer nickelates.

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

Where, What, Why, and Importance: Structured Defect Grounding for Text-to-Image Feedback

Authors:
Huaisong Zhang↗Hao Yu↗Yuxuan Zhang↗Jiahe Wang↗Xinrui Chen↗Haoxiang Cao↗Feng Lu↗Wendong Zhang↗Changqian Yu↗Chun Yuan↗

Despite generating increasingly photorealistic images, text-to-image (T2I) models still exhibit localized, subtle, and structurally complex failures. Diagnosing these failures requires instance-level feedback that answers where a defect occurs, what type it is, why it is defective, and its importance to overall image quality. While recent dense-feedback methods move beyond scalar supervision, their heatmap-centric representations still formulate diagnosis as pixel-field regression, making it difficult to localize variable-cardinality defects and bind semantic reasons to individual failures. To address this representation bottleneck, we propose Structured Defect Grounding (SDG), which casts T2I diagnosis as structured set prediction by modeling each defect as a (location, type, reason, importance) tuple. To make this formulation trainable and measurable, we introduce SDG-30K, a 30K-image dataset with box-grounded annotations across four modern T2I generators, together with a dedicated evaluation protocol, SDG-Eval. Building on this structured representation, we further present a diagnosis-to-alignment framework in which a Vision-Language Model (VLM) serves as the SDG detector, and BoxFlow-GRPO converts predicted defect sets into box-derived, importance-weighted spatial rewards for diffusion model alignment. Extensive experiments show that our SDG detector outperforms leading proprietary VLMs on structured defect grounding, while SDG-guided rewards consistently improve T2I alignment and support localized image refinement. These results establish SDG as a unified, instance-level interface for diagnosing, evaluating, and enhancing modern generative models.

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

Pixels to Proofs: Probabilistically-Safe Latent World Model Control via Parallel Conformal Robust MPC

Authors:
Devesh Nath↗Anutam Srinivasan↗Haoran Yin↗Ruitong Jiang↗Jeffrey Fang↗Glen Chou↗

We present SLS^2, a framework for safe feedback motion planning from pixels using robust model predictive control (MPC) in learned latent world models. Our approach trains an action-conditioned joint-embedding world model with compact Markovian latent states, enabling efficient gradient-based trajectory optimization through learned latent dynamics. To enforce safety for the true system despite imperfect latent predictions, we inform a GPU-accelerated system level synthesis (SLS) robust MPC scheme with conformal prediction to obtain calibrated latent error bounds and robust latent-space constraint sets. We further learn and conformalize a latent constraint checker, allowing the SLS planner to impose probabilistic safety constraints during closed-loop execution. We evaluate our method on vision-based control tasks, where it improves both goal-reaching performance and safety over latent world-model and safe-planning baselines.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Transformers Learn the Mestre-Nagao Heuristic

Authors:
Pranav Venkata Konda↗

arXiv:2606.15036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We train a two-layer transformer encoder to classify rational elliptic curves $E/\mathbb{Q}$ of conductor $\leq 10000$ as either rank 0 or rank 1 from the first 128 normalized Frobenius traces. We achieve >99% accuracy on both classes, and accuracy is essentially unchanged on test curves with no isogeny or quadratic-twist relative in the training set. We then apply techniques from mechanistic interpretability such as attention analysis, linear probing, activation patching, logit attribution, and neuron-level circuit analysis to reverse-engineer the algorithm the (centroid in function space) model learned. We find that a sparse circuit of 20 out of 512 layer-1 MLP neurons is sufficient for rank prediction under a linear probe with an AUROC of 0.992 at plateau, implementing a push-pull detector architecture of rank-0 and rank-1 detectors with a one-sided readout. However, we notice that the model has sub-optimal readout problems indicating a mismatch in rank-order between the readout pathway and the discriminative circuit. Critically, the learned input weights of the top discriminating neuron match the Mestre-Nagao sum heuristic weights $\log(p)/(p\cdot \log{B})$ with a Spearman coefficient $r = 0.997$ and Pearson coefficient $r = 0.952$: the model has learnt a result from analytic number theory from the Frobenius trace data alone. We additionally find that all 50 independently trained models concentrate CLS attention on prime positions at 2-50$\times$ the rate of composite positions. The CLS embedding encodes $\log{L(E,1)}$ with $R^2 = 0.962\pm 0.011$ across the 50 models (after controlling for the conductor). Activation patching analysis reveals that attention weights are dissociated from causal information flow. Additionally, the 50 solutions from training are near-identical in function space (with pairwise agreement $>$98.8%) despite large weight space barriers.

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

Visual-Seeker: Towards Visual-Native Multimodal Agentic Search via Active Visual Reasoning

Authors:
Zhengbo Zhang↗Changtao Miao↗Jinbo Su↗Zhaowen Zhou↗Chunxia Zhang↗Xukai Wang↗Ruiqi Liu↗Kaiyuan Zheng↗Jiansheng Cai↗Bo Zhang↗Zhe Li↗Shiming Xiang↗…

arXiv:2606.15231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in many visual tasks, but they often struggle with factual grounding when confronted with complex, open-world scenarios. While recent multimodal deep search agents attempt to address this issue by utilizing external tools, the visual-native search paradigm remains underexplored. Existing methods primarily rely on simple images with explicit semantics and text-only evidence trajectories, limiting the agent's ability to perform multi-hop, cross-modal reasoning and search. To address these limitations, we propose Visual-Seeker, a visual-native multimodal deep search agent via active visual reasoning. Rather than treating vision as a static input, our agent actively attends to fine-grained visual details, dynamically harvests visual evidence throughout the search process. To unlock its visual-native potential, we design an active visual reasoning data pipeline and synthesize 5K high-quality multimodal trajectories for model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance across five challenging multimodal search benchmarks, even surpassing several proprietary models, validating robust visual-native reasoning and search in real-world web environments. The code and data can be accessed at: https://github.com/ZhengboZhang/Visual-Seeker.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

QueryGaussian: Scalable and Training-Free Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Retrieval

Authors:
Xiuyuan Zhu↗Ke Lu↗Zijie Yang↗Chao Yue↗Jian Xue↗Dongming Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.19733v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiently retrieving specific 3D instances from large-scale scenes via natural language prompts remains a formidable challenge in multimedia analysis. Existing approaches predominantly follow a "scene-level embedding" paradigm, which requires distilling high-dimensional semantic features into every 3D primitive. This strategy suffers from a fundamental architectural bottleneck: memory and computational costs scale linearly with scene complexity, inevitably triggering out-of-memory (OOM) failures in city-scale environments. To address this barrier, we propose QueryGaussian, a training-free framework for expeditious and scalable open-vocabulary 3D instance retrieval. Unlike holistic semantic distillation, QueryGaussian employs an instance-level query mechanism that decouples semantic understanding from geometric representation. Specifically, we leverage pre-trained 2D vision models to interpret user prompts and lift segmentation masks into 3D via a concurrent maximum-weight association strategy, ensuring semantic-visual consistency. To mitigate projection ambiguity, we introduce a temporal fusion module with multi-stage adaptive density clustering. Experimental results demonstrate that QueryGaussian not only matches the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods but also delivers a decisive efficiency leap, reducing GPU memory usage by over 70% and accelerating inference by 180x. Crucially, QueryGaussian enables expeditious instance retrieval on city-scale scenes containing tens of millions of Gaussians using consumer-grade hardware.

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

Agentic Framework for Deep Learning workload migration via In-Context Learning

Authors:
Qiyue Liang↗Steven Ingram↗George Vanica↗Andi Gavrilescu↗Newfel Harrat↗Hassan Sipra↗Sethuraman Sankaran↗

arXiv:2606.15994v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Translating deep learning models from PyTorch's flexible, object-oriented design to JAX's functional, stateless setup is usually a manual and error-prone task. Automated migration is challenging because Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with strict and dynamic API alignment and are prone to mistakes for exacting operations. We propose a fully autonomous system that combines In-Context Learning (ICL) with oracle-driven self-debugging. First, we curated an ICL context that serves as a strict reference for idiomatic JAX styling and test case generation. Second, instead of depending on the LLM to deduce mathematical outputs, we run the source PyTorch modules to get their actual dynamic tensor states. This creates an unchangeable execution oracle. We then use an autonomous agentic loop to synthesize tests based on the oracle data. The test cases are executed repeatedly, and the traceback is sent back to the LLM for self-correction. Ablations show that combining ICL references with oracle grounding and self-debugging greatly outperforms pure instructional and basic agentic baselines. This improvement does not add an excessive computational overhead. Our lightweight pipeline achieves 91% numerical equivalence (compared to baseline: 9%, instruction + self-debugging: 27%) on neural modules, providing a highly reliable, scalable blueprint for cross-framework migration. This has been validated across several state-of-the-art models including SAM (segment anything), T5, Code Whisper amongst others showing high numerical equivalency. Code: https://github.com/AI-Hypercomputer/accelerator-agents/tree/main/MaxCode

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Theory of Mind Utility: Formal Specification of a Mentalizing Mechanism

Authors:
Nikolos Gurney↗Stacy Marsella↗

arXiv:2606.12721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inferring others' beliefs requires more than reading surface signals; it requires tracking who told them what, in what order, and how credibly. The Theory of Mind Utility (ToM-U) formalizes this epistemic state inference problem at the computational level of analysis, specifying what mentalizing computes and why without commitment to algorithmic or neural implementation. ToM-U achieves this by constructing Local Epistemic World Models (LEWMs) – directed typed graphs that represent agents, state nodes, and the epistemic relationships among them – and evaluating discrete candidate LEWMs against observed behavior until one achieves sufficient confidence. Five formal definitions specify the LEWM structure, agent node properties including ordered information access history, a bounded proliferation mechanism for recursive mentalizing, three inference procedures, and a residue function that captures the structured trace left by failed mentalizing attempts. ToM-U differs from Bayesian Theory of Mind and adjacent formal accounts, which presuppose rather than derive belief states, and from simulation theory and theory-theory, which lack a formal apparatus for epistemic state inference. The architecture generates directional, falsifiable predictions about mentalizing failure that follow from structural properties of the model rather than auxiliary assumptions, and positions ToM-U as a domain-agnostic mechanism upstream of goal inference and other downstream social cognitive processes.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Why Commodity WiFi Sensors Fail at Multi-Person Gait Identification: A Systematic Analysis Using ESP32

Authors:
Oliver Custance↗Saad Khan↗Simon Parkinson↗

WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) has shown promise for single-person gait identification, raising interest in its use for contactless biometrics, continuous authentication, and passive identification. However, the feasibility of multi-person identification on low-cost commodity devices remains unclear. A critical question is whether weak multi-person performance is primarily an algorithmic limitation, or whether it reflects a more fundamental sensing ceiling on commodity WiFi hardware. We address this question through a systematic empirical study using commodity ESP32 WiFi sensors. We evaluated six different signal separation methods–FastICA, SOBI, PCA-ICA, NMF, Wavelet, and Tensor decomposition–across seven scenarios spanning 1-10 people in both controlled and realistic indoor environments. To investigate beyond classification accuracy, we introduce three diagnostic metrics: intra-subject variability (ISV), inter-subject distinguishability (ISD), and performance degradation rate (PDR). In all methods, performance remains moderate (39%-56% accuracy), with limited evidence that algorithmic choice alone solves the problem. The best-performing method, NMF, reaches 56% accuracy, while all methods exhibit extremely high feature-space overlap (97%-99%), unstable within-subject representations, and marked environmental sensitivity. These findings suggest that, under commodity ESP32 CSI constraints, dense multi-person gait identification is limited more by sensing quality and spatial diversity than by the chosen separation algorithm. Our results have direct implications for security and privacy: they call into question the practicality of commodity WiFi CSI as a robust multi-user biometric primitive for authentication, while also placing important bounds on the passive identification capabilities achievable with low-cost off-the-shelf WiFi hardware.

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

Authorship Attribution in Multilingual Machine-Generated Texts

Authors:
Lucio La Cava↗Dominik Macko↗R\'obert M\'oro↗Ivan Srba↗Andrea Tagarelli↗

As Large Language Models (LLMs) have reached human-like fluency and coherence, distinguishing machine-generated text (MGT) from human-written content becomes increasingly difficult. While early efforts in MGT detection have focused on binary classification, the growing landscape and diversity of LLMs require a more fine-grained yet challenging authorship attribution (AA), i.e., being able to identify the precise generator (LLM or human) behind a text. However, AA remains nowadays confined to a monolingual setting, with English being the most investigated one, overlooking the multilingual nature and usage of modern LLMs. In this work, we introduce the problem of Multilingual Authorship Attribution, which involves attributing texts to human or multiple LLM generators across diverse languages. Focusing on 18 languages – covering multiple families and writing scripts – and 8 generators (7 LLMs and the human-authored class), we investigate the multilingual suitability of monolingual AA methods in terms of their cross-lingual transferability, and the impact of generators on attribution performance. Our results reveal that while certain monolingual AA methods can be adapted to multilingual settings, significant limitations and challenges remain, particularly in transferring across diverse language families, underscoring the complexity of multilingual AA and the need for more robust approaches to better match real-world scenarios.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Posterior Continuation with Noise-Conditioned Frequency Exposure for Diffusion Inverse Problems

Authors:
Feng Tian↗Yixuan Li↗Weili Zeng↗Weitian Zhang↗Yichao Yan↗Xiaokang Yang↗

Diffusion posterior sampling solves inverse problems by combining a pretrained diffusion prior with measurement-consistency guidance. However, full-band guidance can be unreliable at high noise levels, where clean estimates contain score-induced errors and high-frequency measurement directions are weakly identifiable. We argue that posterior guidance should expose measurement frequencies according to the instantaneous diffusion noise level. Based on this principle, we propose a posterior continuation framework that constructs a family of intermediate posteriors whose likelihood emphasizes currently reliable frequency bands and gradually returns to full-band consistency. We instantiate this framework with a stabilized sampler that combines a diffusion predictor, frequency-limited likelihood refinement, and a Haar-domain commitment rule that commits reliable coarse corrections while deferring weakly identifiable details. Across super-resolution, inpainting, and deblurring, our method achieves competitive-to-state-of-the-art restoration performance, including up to 5 dB PSNR improvement on motion deblurring over strong baselines in evaluations on FFHQ and ImageNet.

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

Pruning via Causal Attribution Preserves Reasoning Performance in Large Language Models

Authors:
Amogh Sheth↗Biruk Assefa↗Yi Wen Huang↗Andrew Lin↗Yuhao Ge↗

Large language models (LLMs) excel at multi-step reasoning but incur substantial inference cost. We introduce Causal Attribution Pruning (CAP), a training-free method that identifies critical attention heads by measuring their causal impact on reasoning tasks and uses these head-level scores to guide fine-grained weight pruning. For each attention head, CAP estimates the expected performance degradation when the head is masked during forward passes on a small calibration set of reasoning problems. These causal scores are then converted into weight-level importance values for the corresponding projection matrices. Unlike magnitude-only or activation-based criteria, CAP's interventional measurement directly captures each head's functional contribution, yielding relative accuracy gains of up to 61% over Wanda on ARC-Challenge at 20% sparsity. We evaluate CAP on GSM8K, StrategyQA, and ARC-Challenge using Llama-3-8B-Instruct and Mistral-7B-Instruct at 10%, 20%, and 50% sparsity. At moderate sparsity (10-20%), CAP improves over Wanda in most model-benchmark configurations. with especially large gains on ARC-Challenge for Llama-3. Our results suggest that attention-head-level causal attribution can better preserve reasoning performance on downstream benchmarks than correlational pruning criteria at equivalent sparsity, while remaining limited by coarse MLP attribution at 50% sparsity.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Light-weight Pronunciation Assessment via Discrete Speech Token Surprisal

Authors:
Syeda Faiza Ahmed Sara↗Shammur Absar Chowdhury↗

Training automated pronunciation assessment often relies on labeled learner errors or non-native corpora that are costly to collect. We propose a lightweight framework trained only on native speech resources, operating unsupervised or lightly calibrated with a small set of scored utterances. At inference, learner speech is discretized with an SSL encoder and a K-means codebook. A token language model trained on native sequences computes surprisal where higher surprisal indicates phonotactic deviation. We add a transcript-guided Text2DUnit–DTW module that predicts native token sequences from reference text and aligns them to acoustic tokens to derive error-sensitive features. Surprisal and alignment features are fused via simple regression. On SpeechOcean762, PCC improves from 0.60 to 0.66 with transcript guidance, near supervised baselines. Cross-dataset evaluation on L2-ARCTIC shows consistent gains.

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

Occupational Prompting Reveals Cultural Bias in Large Language Models

Authors:
Maksim E. Eren↗Andrea Brennen↗Ryan C. Barron↗Eric Michalak↗

Social roles shape expectations, priorities, and judgments, yet it remains unclear how large language models (LLMs) associate occupational identities with broader cultural value patterns. Prior work used nationality-based cultural prompting to study how LLM responses to value-survey questions align with human cultural benchmarks. In this paper, we extend that framework by replacing cultural prompting with occupational prompting to examine how professional-role cues influence value-survey responses in open-weight LLMs. Using a survey-grounded evaluation pipeline based on questions from the Integrated Values Surveys, we project model responses into the two-dimensional Inglehart–Welzel cultural space. We prompt open-weight LLMs to answer questions under occupational identities such as accountant, teacher, engineer, and nurse, and then analyze how these occupation-conditioned responses are positioned on the cultural map. Our results show that when open-weight LLMs are prompted with occupations rather than national identities, their responses remain within a broadly Western-leaning region of the cultural map. However, different occupations introduce shifts within this region, producing distinct occupational skews. This indicates that occupational prompts are not treated as neutral role labels, but instead elicit structured value patterns. These findings extend survey-based evaluation of cultural bias beyond nationality-based prompting and provide a framework for studying how occupational personas shape value expression in LLMs.

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17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Generativism: Toward a Learning Theory for the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence

Authors:
Shan Li↗Juan Zheng↗

arXiv:2606.12441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The four dominant learning theories of behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism, and connectivism show significant conceptual limitations as generative artificial intelligence (AI) proliferates in educational settings. These frameworks were formulated before the emergence of AI systems capable of generating, synthesizing, and reasoning about knowledge. This article critically examines each learning theory and identifies assumptions challenged by generative AI's affordances. Drawing on research in distributed cognition, extended mind, human-AI collaboration, AI literacy, cognitive offloading, and metacognition, the article proposes Generativism as a learning theory for the generative AI age. Generativism posits that learning increasingly occurs through the iterative co-construction of knowledge between human learners and AI systems. The proposed framework is organized around four principles: epistemic partnership, distributed agency, generative literacy, and adaptive metacognition. The framework offers a foundation for rethinking instructional design, learning, assessment, and expertise development in contexts where generative AI plays an integral role in cognition.

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

S-SPPO: Semantic-Calibrated Self-Play Preference Optimization

Authors:
Xiwen Chen↗Wenhui Zhu↗Jingjing Wang↗Peijie Qiu↗Zhipeng Wang↗Huayu Li↗ZhengXiao He↗Xuanzhao Dong↗Prayag Tiwari↗Mingkun Xu↗Yujian Xiong↗Feng Luo↗…

arXiv:2606.01561v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is often formulated via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). However, the standard Bradley-Terry instantiation of DPO is limited in modeling common departures from transitivity in human preferences. To address this, recent work has introduced Self-Play Preference Optimization (SPPO), which iteratively refines the policy by training on self-generated win-lose pairs. Our investigation, however, reveals a critical instability in SPPO: the optimization is prone to policy degeneration when the preference oracle assigns overly confident wins to semantically indistinguishable responses. To mitigate this, we propose S-SPPO, a dual-space semantic calibration framework comprising: i) Supervision Calibration via semantic gating, which anneals win rate targets toward the maximum-entropy baseline as semantic overlap increases; and ii) Representation Calibration via latent repulsion to enforce geometric diversity to prevent manifold collapse and maintain latent diversity between chosen and rejected samples. Theoretically, we show that the calibration preserves the constant-sum game structure, facilitating convergence to a Nash Equilibrium. Empirically, S-SPPO avoids the performance degradation seen in prior methods, achieving 52.19% win rate and 47.46% length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 with Llama-3-8B, without using additional human-annotated preferences during training. The code will be available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/s-sppo.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

The Wrong Kind of Right: Quantifying and Localizing Misfired Alignment in LLMs

Authors:
Naihao Deng↗Yiming Feng↗Chimaobi Okite↗Kaijian Zou↗Lu Wang↗Rada Mihalcea↗Yulong Chen↗

Warning: This paper studies stereotypes and biases, and contains potentially disturbing examples, used for illustration purposes only. Our findings should not be interpreted as an argument against alignment. Instead, this paper highlights the need for principled approaches to more advanced alignment. Alignment aims to ensure that large language models (LLMs) behave safely and reliably, including by avoiding unsafe inferences. However, we show that such safety-oriented behaviors can misfire: models may reject warranted conclusions even when they are explicitly supported by context. We call this failure mode misfired alignment, where alignment-induced changes cause LLMs to override explicit evidence. To quantify this phenomenon, specifically on stereotype-related alignment, we introduce VETO, a benchmark consisting of 2,032 BBQ-derived contrastive pairs, and define a new metric, Misfired Alignment Rate (MAR), which measures on a 0 to 100 scale how often a model fails on a stereotype-related question but succeeds on its contrastive counterpart. We benchmark 25 LLMs on VETO, and show that all LLMs, including the most recent ones, exhibit non-trivial (4.7 to 18.9%) MARs while all human participants achieve 0.0% MAR. Controlled priming experiments further show that alignment-induced cues can substantially amplify MAR across LLMs, indicating that these failures are not merely artifacts of individual examples but can be induced by safety-related framing. Mechanistic analyses on open-weight LLMs reveal late-layer suppression of evidence-supported answers, and comparisons between instruct and base LLMs suggest that this suppression emerges after instruction training. These findings show that current alignment methods can overgeneralize surface-level safety cues, to the point of overriding objective evidence, motivating more work on alignment objectives that better preserve contextual grounding.

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20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Mixing Times for the Facilitated Exclusion Process

Authors:
James Ayre↗Paul Chleboun↗

arXiv:2402.18999v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The facilitated simple exclusion process (FEP) is a one-dimensional exclusion process with a dynamical constraint. We establish bounds on the mixing time of the FEP on the segment, with closed boundaries, and the circle. The FEP on these spaces exhibits transient states that, if the macroscopic density of particles is at least $1/2$, the process will eventually exit to reach an ergodic component. If the macroscopic density is less than $1/2$ the process will hit an absorbing state. We show that the symmetric FEP (SFEP) on the segment $\{1,\ldots,N\}$, with $k>N/2$ particles, has mixing time of order $N^{2}\log(N-k)$ and exhibits the pre-cutoff phenomenon. For the asymmetric FEP (AFEP) on the segment, we show that there exists initial conditions for which the hitting time of the ergodic component is exponentially slow in the number of holes $N-k$. In particular, when $N-k$ is large enough, the hitting time of the ergodic component determines the mixing time. For the SFEP on the circle of size $N$, and macroscopic particle density $\rho \in(1/2,1)$, we establish bounds on the mixing time of order $N^{2}\log N$ for the process restricted to its ergodic component. We also give an upper bound on the hitting time of the ergodic component of order $N^{2}\log N$ for a large class of initial conditions. The proofs rely on couplings with exclusion processes (both open and closed boundaries) via a novel lattice path (height function) construction of the FEP.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Weighted Bayesian Conformal Prediction

Authors:
Xiayin Lou↗Peng Luo↗

arXiv:2604.06464v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conformal prediction provides distribution-free prediction intervals with finite-sample coverage guarantees, and recent work by Snell \& Griffiths reframes it as Bayesian Quadrature (BQ-CP), yielding powerful data-conditional guarantees via Dirichlet posteriors over thresholds. However, BQ-CP fundamentally requires the i.i.d. assumption. Meanwhile, weighted conformal prediction handles distribution shift via importance weights but remains frequentist, producing only point-estimate thresholds. We propose Weighted Bayesian Conformal Prediction (WBCP), which generalizes BQ-CP to arbitrary importance-weighted settings by replacing the uniform Dirichlet $\Dir(1,\ldots,1)$ with a weighted Dirichlet $\Dir(\neff \cdot \tilde{w}_1, \ldots, \neff \cdot \tilde{w}_n)$, where $\neff$ is Kish's effective sample size. We prove four theoretical results: (1)~$\neff$ is the unique concentration parameter matching frequentist and Bayesian variances; (2)~posterior standard deviation decays as $O(1/\sqrt{\neff})$; (3)~BQ-CP's stochastic dominance guarantee extends to per-weight-profile data-conditional guarantees; (4)~the HPD threshold provides $O(1/\sqrt{\neff})$ improvement in conditional coverage. We instantiate WBCP for spatial prediction as Geographical BQ-CP, where kernel-based spatial weights yield per-location posteriors with interpretable diagnostics. Experiments on synthetic and real-world spatial datasets demonstrate that WBCP maintains coverage guarantees while providing substantially richer uncertainty information.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

LentiAvatar: Pseudo-Multiview Reconstruction and Subpixel Prism Rendering for Real-Time Stereoscopic Communication

Authors:
Chufeng Fang↗Dongdong Teng↗Lilin Liu↗

Real-time stereoscopic video communication has long been a goal of immersive telepresence, yet practical systems still require specialized capture rigs or reduce remote users to a single portrait view. We present LentiAvatar, a Gaussian head-avatar system that connects monocular avatar capture with subpixel-encoded glasses-free lenticular display for real-time autostereoscopic communication. From a monocular portrait video, LentiAvatar reconstructs a controllable head avatar and optimizes it for the lateral viewing zones induced by the display. The method uses natural head turns as pseudo-multiview (PMV) supervision to constrain regions that are otherwise weakly observed in monocular training, including hair, ears, jaw contours, and neck boundaries. Reliable side frames are yaw-binned, aligned to virtual cameras, and supervised within a strict head-and-hair domain; contour-aware losses and staged regularization further suppress ghosting, alpha leakage, and depth instability while preserving lateral detail. At runtime, LentiAvatar renders 32 virtual views and encodes them into a 4K lenticular raster with calibrated subpixel-routing masks. The live-tracker prototype sustains 10.65 FPS, and a subject-specific distilled driver raises the same display pipeline to 38.49 FPS.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Patients With Personality: Realistic Patient Simulation through Controlled Diversity and Selective Disclosure

Authors:
Moritz Schlager↗Friederike Jungmann↗Samuel Schmidgall↗Philipp Raffler↗Franziska Hartl↗Eva Wende↗Paula Ro{\ss}m\"uller↗Conrad Ketzer↗Avinatan Hassidim↗Dale R. Webster↗Yossi Matias↗Yun Liu↗…

arXiv:2606.17441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simulating realistic patient interactions is a key requirement to testing clinical applications of LLMs at scale without time-consuming and expensive user studies. However, existing approaches often lack realism and controllability, often oversharing information unprompted, and failing to capture the wide variability of patient behavior. Here, we introduce PatientsWithPersonality (PWP), a patient simulation framework that generates realistic yet diverse virtual patient responses through explicit personality parametrization over a latent patient state. Grounded in HEXACO, a six-dimensional personality space used to quantify and parameterize human behavioral traits, our approach enables fine-grained control over conversational style, cooperativeness, and information disclosure within a unified framework. In a clinician evaluation, PWP is judged nearly as realistic as recorded human actors and clearly ahead of prior simulators, while being flagged as "too informative" far less often. Conditioning on HEXACO axes yields personas whose configured traits are recoverable by both clinicians and an autorater, span a substantially wider behavioral footprint than the closest baseline, and prevent oversharing. Altogether, our framework paves the way for more accurate and informative LLM benchmarking through our realistic and steerable patient simulator.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MCR-VQGAN: A Scalable and Cost-Effective Tau PET Synthesis Approach for Alzheimer's Disease Imaging

Authors:
Jin Young Kim↗Jeremy Hudson↗Jeongchul Kim↗Qing Lyu↗Christopher T. Whitlow↗

Tau positron emission tomography (PET) is a critical diagnostic modality for Alzheimer's disease (AD), but its widespread clinical adoption is hindered by radiation exposure, limited availability, high clinical workload, and substantial financial costs. To address these limitations, we propose the Multi-scale CBAM Residual Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network (MCR-VQGAN) to synthesize high-fidelity tau PET images from structural T1-weighted MRI. MCR-VQGAN advances the standard VQGAN architecture through three enhancements: multi-scale convolutions, ResNet blocks, and Convolutional Block Attention Modules (CBAM), which collectively improve the capture of local and global features. Using 222 paired T1-weighted MRI and tau PET scans from the ADNI database, we trained and compared MCR-VQGAN against cGAN, WGAN-GP, CycleGAN, and baseline VQGAN. MCR-VQGAN achieved superior image synthesis performance across all metrics (MSE = 0.0056 +/- 0.0061, PSNR = 30.65 +/- 4.47 dB, SSIM = 0.9263 +/- 0.0469). A CNN-based AD classifier trained on real tau PET achieved comparable accuracy on real (63.64%) and synthetic (65.91%) images, indicating that diagnostically relevant features are preserved. Regional SUVR-equivalent analysis across Braak-defined ROIs further indicated strong agreement between real and synthetic tau PET (Pearson r = 0.78-0.88; ICC = 0.71-0.84), with the strongest agreement in Braak V/VI (ICC = 0.838). Together, these results suggest that MCR-VQGAN offers a promising and scalable surrogate for conventional tau PET imaging, potentially improving the accessibility of tau biomarkers for AD research and clinical workflows.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Neural ensemble Kalman filter: Data assimilation for compressible flows with shocks

Authors:
Xu-Hui Zhou↗Lorenzo Beronilla↗Michael K. Sleeman↗Hangchuan Hu↗Matthias Morzfeld↗Andrew M. Stuart↗Tamer A. Zaki↗

arXiv:2602.23461v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data assimilation (DA) for compressible flows with shocks is challenging because many classical DA methods generate spurious oscillations and nonphysical features near uncertain shocks. We focus here on the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF). We show that the poor performance of the EnKF may be attributed to the bimodal forecast distribution that can arise in the vicinity of an uncertain shock location; this violates the assumptions underpinning the EnKF, which assume a forecast which is close to Gaussian. To address this issue we introduce the new neural EnKF. The basic idea is to systematically embed neural function approximations within ensemble DA by mapping the forecast ensemble of shocked flows to the parameter space (weights and biases) of a deep neural network (NN) and to subsequently perform DA in that space. The nonlinear mapping encodes sharp and smooth flow features in an ensemble of NN parameters. Neural EnKF updates are therefore well-behaved only if the NN parameters vary smoothly within the neural representation of the forecast ensemble. We show that such a smooth variation of network parameters can be enforced via physics-informed transfer learning, and demonstrate that in so-doing the neural EnKF avoids the spurious oscillations and nonphysical features that plague the EnKF. The applicability of the neural EnKF is demonstrated through a series of systematic numerical experiments with the inviscid Burgers' equation, the Sod shock tube, and a two-dimensional blast wave.

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