Paper Plaza - AcademicHub

01.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13026

Democracy in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

Authors:

Evangelos Pournaras ↗Srijoni Majumdar ↗Carina Hausladen ↗Dirk Helbing ↗

arXiv:2606.13026v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interfacing Artificial Intelligence (AI) with democracy is one of the most profound challenges of our times. On the one hand, AI comes with opportunities to overcome long-standing challenges in democracy, such as low participation in deliberative and voting processes with poor representation of people. On the other hand, new risks arise from AI algorithms that are privacy-intrusive, biased, manipulative, spread misinformation and influence election results. Moving beyond the over-simplistic question of whether AI is good or bad for democracy, the Handbook on Democracy in the Era of Artificial Intelligence asks instead: how to upgrade democracies and the principles they are built on, using AI? How to engage with AI and on what terms? Which new values and design principles are required to build democratic resilience? In 34 chapters by 59 authors across the world from different disciplines, we explore how AI can empower collective intelligence for democracy (Part 1) and what is the future of deliberative democracy using large language models and social media (Part 2). We also illustrate the role of AI for building resilient self-governance systems (Part 3) and the challenges of transforming democracy in the age of AI (Part 4). We conclude with broader perspectives (Part 5) that re-imagine the interplay of democracy and AI.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2511.20710

Are Neuro-Inspired Multi-Modal Vision-Language Models Resilient to Membership Inference Privacy Leakage?

Authors:

David Amebley ↗Sayanton Dibbo ↗

In the age of agentic AI, the growing deployment of multi-modal models (MMs) has introduced new attack vectors that can leak sensitive training data in MMs, causing privacy leakage. This paper investigates a black-box privacy attack, i.e., membership inference attack (MIA) on multi-modal vision-language models (VLMs). State-of-the-art research analyzes privacy attacks primarily to unimodal AI-ML systems, while recent studies indicate MMs can also be vulnerable to privacy attacks. While researchers have demonstrated that biologically inspired neural network representations can improve unimodal model resilience against adversarial attacks, it remains unexplored whether neuro-inspired MMs are resilient against privacy attacks. In this work, we introduce a systematic neuroscience-inspired topological regularization (tau) framework to analyze MM VLMs resilience against image-text-based inference privacy attacks. We examine this phenomenon using three VLMs: BLIP, PaliGemma 2, and ViT-GPT2, across three benchmark datasets: COCO, CC3M, and NoCaps. Our experiments compare the resilience of baseline and neuro VLMs (with topological regularization), where the tau > 0 configuration defines the NEURO variant of VLM. Our results on the BLIP model using the COCO dataset illustrate that MIA attack success in NEURO VLMs drops by 24% mean ROC-AUC, while achieving similar model utility (similarities between generated and reference captions) in terms of MPNet and ROUGE-2 metrics. This shows neuro VLMs are comparatively more resilient against privacy attacks, while not significantly compromising model utility. Our extensive evaluation with PaliGemma 2 and ViT-GPT2 models, on two additional datasets: CC3M and NoCaps, further validates the consistency of the findings. This work contributes to the growing understanding of privacy risks in MMs and provides evidence on neuro VLMs privacy threat resilience.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.05014

Depth-Attention: Cross-Layer Value Mixing for Language Models

Authors:

Boyi Zeng ↗Yiqin Hao ↗Zitong Wang ↗Shixiang Song ↗He Li ↗Feichen Song ↗Yifan Liu ↗Ziwei He ↗Xinbing Wang ↗Zhouhan Lin ↗

Self-attention selects information freely across the sequence, but across depth, Transformers merely add each layer's output to the residual stream, so later layers cannot selectively reuse earlier-layer representations. Recent cross-layer methods improve this flow but operate on hidden states outside attention, adding state beyond the key-value cache at inference–a cost that becomes increasingly salient as modern LLMs compress the cache with grouped-query and multi-head latent attention. We introduce Depth-Attention, which performs this selection inside the attention module itself: before a layer attends over the sequence, its query attends over the keys of earlier layers at the same token position and mixes their values into the value that self-attention then reads. Because Depth-Attention reuses the standard attention queries, keys, and value-cache slots, storing depth-mixed values in place of the original values, it adds no parameters and introduces no persistent inference state beyond the standard key-value cache–the same cache size as a vanilla decoder and less than hidden-state-based cross-layer methods. On Qwen3-style decoders at 1.5B and 3B parameters, Depth-Attention attains the lowest perplexity and the highest average downstream accuracy, improving over the vanilla Transformer by up to 2.3 accuracy points and surpassing strong cross-layer baselines in perplexity and average accuracy, while adding under 0.01% extra arithmetic FLOPs and no additional persistent inference state. The gains hold from 360M to 3B parameters and extend to looped Transformers.

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04.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17491

A Bayesian Boolean Matrix Factorization with Application to Copy Number Analysis in Cancer

Authors:

Adolphus Wagala ↗Mehmet Samur ↗Giovanni Parmigiani ↗

arXiv:2606.17491v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Binary data factorization is common, but real-valued methods ignore discreteness and yield hard-to-interpret factors. Boolean Matrix Factorization (BooMF) instead decomposes a binary matrix into two lower-rank binary matrices via logical AND and OR, expressing the data as a Boolean disjunction of interpretable patterns. In cancer genomics, BooMF can reveal coordinated feature changes that may drive tumor evolution, unlike rotational or additive decompositions. Most existing BooMF methods are heuristic, greedy, sensitive to initialization, prone to local optima, and do not support principled model selection or uncertainty quantification. We introduce Bayesian Boolean Matrix Factorization (BBMF), a fully conjugate generative model with sparsity-inducing priors. It enforces Boolean constraints, yields interpretable latent factors with coherent uncertainty quantification, and admits Gibbs sampling with closed-form full conditionals. Because cancer evolution often involves widespread, near-simultaneous chromosome-number changes (e.g., whole-genome duplication followed by instability and selection), Boolean factorizations capture these patterns more naturally than additive models. Applied to arm-level copy-number alteration data in multiple myeloma, where entries indicate presence/absence of chromosomal-arm amplifications, BBMF finds a small set of interpretable bicliques linking patient subsets to recurrently co-altered chromosomal arms, providing a compact, biologically meaningful summary of tumor heterogeneity and demonstrating BBMF's utility for uncovering discrete latent structure in complex binary data.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19336

Learning User Simulators with Turing Rewards

Authors:

Yingshan Susan Wang ↗Cedegao E. Zhang ↗Linlu Qiu ↗Zexue He ↗Pengyuan Li ↗Alex Pentland ↗Roger P. Levy ↗Yoon Kim ↗

Learning to simulate human users in interactive settings could advance the training of agent assistants, evaluation of personalization systems, research in the social sciences, and more. Existing approaches generally do so by training a large language model (LLM) to match a single ground truth response, either by maximizing the log probability or by using a similarity reward. We instead propose {Turing-RL}: a Turing-Test-based reinforcement learning approach for training user simulator models. {Turing-RL} uses a discriminative Turing reward with an LLM judge to score how indistinguishable a generated response is from the real user's given the user's history, and the user simulator LLM learns to produce responses indistinguishable from what the user could have said with such rewards. Across two different domains–conversational chat and Reddit forum discussion–we find that {Turing-RL} consistently outperforms baseline methods on both LLM and human evaluation metrics. Our study suggests that optimizing for indistinguishability, rather than response matching, is effective for learning user simulators.

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06.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2603.25450

Cross-Model Disagreement as a Label-Free Correctness Signal

Authors:

Matt Gorbett ↗Suman Jana ↗

arXiv:2603.25450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Detecting when a language model is wrong without ground truth labels is a fundamental challenge for safe deployment. Existing approaches rely on a model's own uncertainty – such as token entropy or confidence scores – but these signals fail critically on the most dangerous failure mode: confident errors, where a model is wrong but certain. In this work we introduce cross-model disagreement as a correctness indicator – a simple, training-free signal that can be dropped into existing production systems, routing pipelines, and deployment monitoring infrastructure without modification. Given a model's generated answer, cross-model disagreement computes how surprised or uncertain a second verifier model is when reading that answer via a single forward pass. No generation from the verifying model is required, and no correctness labels are needed. We instantiate this principle as Cross-Model Perplexity (CMP), which measures the verifying model's surprise at the generating model's answer tokens, and Cross-Model Entropy (CME), which measures the verifying model's uncertainty at those positions. Both CMP and CME outperform within-model uncertainty baselines across benchmarks spanning reasoning, retrieval, and mathematical problem solving (MMLU, TriviaQA, and GSM8K). On MMLU, CMP achieves a mean AUROC of 0.75 against a within-model entropy baseline of 0.59. These results establish cross-model disagreement as a practical, training-free approach to label-free correctness estimation, with direct applications in deployment monitoring, model routing, selective prediction, data filtering, and scalable oversight of production language model systems.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2511.05221

ActiTect: A Generalizable Machine Learning Pipeline for REM Sleep Behavior Disorder Screening through Standardized Actigraphy

Authors:

arXiv:2511.05221v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Isolated rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) is a major prodromal marker of $\alpha$-synucleinopathies, often preceding the clinical onset of Parkinson's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, or multiple system atrophy. While wrist-worn actimeters hold significant potential for detecting RBD in large-scale screening efforts by capturing abnormal nocturnal movements, they become inoperable without a reliable and efficient analysis pipeline. This study presents ActiTect, a fully automated, open-source machine learning tool to identify RBD from actigraphy recordings. To ensure generalizability across heterogeneous acquisition settings, our pipeline includes robust preprocessing and automated sleep-wake detection to harmonize multi-device data and extract physiologically interpretable motion features characterizing activity patterns. Model development was conducted on a cohort of 78 individuals, yielding strong discrimination under nested cross-validation (AUROC = 0.95). Generalization was confirmed on a blinded local test set (n = 31, AUROC = 0.86) and on two independent external cohorts (n = 113, AUROC = 0.84; n = 57, AUROC = 0.94). To assess real-world robustness, leave-one-dataset-out cross-validation across the internal and external cohorts demonstrated consistent performance (AUROC range = 0.84-0.89). A complementary stability analysis showed that key predictive features remained reproducible across datasets, supporting the final pooled multi-center model as a robust pre-trained resource for broader deployment. By being open-source and easy to use, our tool promotes widespread adoption and facilitates independent validation and collaborative improvements, thereby advancing the field toward a unified and generalizable RBD detection model using wearable devices.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2603.12514

CT-VDETR: Semi-supervised 3D Trauma Detection in Computed Tomography (CT) scans using Dense Vertex Relative Position Encoding

Authors:

Shivam Chaudhary ↗Sheethal Bhat ↗Andreas Maier ↗

Accurate detection and localization of traumatic injuries in abdominal CT remain challenging because voxel-level annotations are limited and expensive to obtain. We present a label-efficient framework for 3D abdominal trauma detection that combines self-supervised pretraining with semi-supervised transformer-based detection. First, we use Masked Image Modeling (MIM) on 1098 CT volumes to pretrain a 3D U-Net encoder for anatomical representation learning. Next, we adapt V-DETR to dense volumetric CT through a feature adapter that converts the encoder feature grid into a compact token sequence for transformer decoding. The pretrained encoder is then integrated with V-DETR and 3D Vertex Relative Position Encoding (3D V-RPE) to improve the localization of irregularly shaped injuries. Finally, semi-supervised teacher-student consistency regularization leverages 2,000 additional unlabeled volumes during detector training. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of a 3D DETR-style detector to the RSNA abdominal trauma detection task. On this benchmark, the proposed method achieves 31.33% test mAP@0.50 using only 78 labeled training volumes, corresponding to a 1.53x improvement over supervised-only training. These results show that combining medical-domain pretraining with semi-supervised learning is an effective strategy for label-scarce 3D medical detection.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19951

Investigating Human-Model Discrepancies in Speech Quality Assessment via Acoustic and Prosodic Perturbations

Authors:

Masato Takagi ↗Masaya Kawamura ↗Reo Shimizu ↗Yuma Shirahata ↗

Mean opinion score (MOS) prediction models are widely used as proxy metrics in text-to-speech (TTS) research, yet their ability to capture quality differences beyond acoustic fidelity remains unclear. We investigate this via controlled perturbations on speech: acoustic degradation, prosodic errors, and manipulation of speaker-specific characteristics such as pitch and speaking rate. We obtained MOS predictions for these speech samples from both human listeners and the model, and analyzed the differences in their perceptual characteristics. Results show that most models track acoustic degradation well, while all are insensitive to prosodic errors despite large subjective score drops. For speaker characteristics, models exhibit a double dissociation: strong mean fundamental frequency (F0) biases absent in human ratings, yet insensitivity to speaking rate and F0 variability that humans notice. These findings highlight limitations of scalar MOS prediction beyond acoustic fidelity.

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10.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13374

Temporal Conductance and Bounds on the Voter Model for Dynamic Networks

Authors:

Tatiana Rocha Avila ↗Holger Dell ↗John Lapinskas ↗

arXiv:2606.13374v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The voter model is a classical stochastic process that models how opinions might spread through a network: at each step, every node lazily adopts the opinion of a random neighbour; eventually all nodes share the same opinion (consensus). Stronger connectivity should yield faster consensus. Berenbrink, Giakkoupis, Kermarrec, and Mallmann-Trenn (ICALP 2016) make this precise via the network's conductance: if the network has $m$ edges, minimum degree $d_{\min}$, and conductance at least $\phi$, then the voter model reaches consensus in expected $O(m/(d_{\min}\phi))$ steps. Their results extend to dynamic networks with fixed vertex degrees by considering the network's conductance at each time step. We introduce temporal conductance $\Phi$, a more general connectivity measure for dynamic networks. Unlike static conductance, which collapses to $0$ whenever some snapshot is disconnected, $\Phi$ captures connectivity through edges that appear at different times. We generalise the results of Berenbrink et al. from static conductance to temporal conductance, showing that the expected consensus time of the standard voter model is at most $O(m/(d_{\min}\Phi))$. Moreover, we prove that this bound is tight up to constant factors. We expect temporal conductance to be a useful primitive for analysing other dynamics on temporal networks, and potentially time-inhomogeneous Markov chains more generally.

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11.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14825

Experimental realization of the complete seven-phase Anderson-localization landscape

Authors:

Yao Qin ↗Chao Yang ↗Yuzhe Zhang ↗Yucheng Wang ↗Jingyun Fan ↗

arXiv:2606.14825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Anderson localization has evolved far beyond the conventional dichotomy between extended and localized states. Modern localization theory predicts a complete transport hierarchy comprising extended, critical, and localized phases together with all coexistence phases among them, forming a seven-phase Anderson-localization landscape. Despite its fundamental importance, this hierarchy has never been experimentally realized within a single system. Here we realize the complete seven-phase Anderson-localization landscape in a one-dimensional Floquet photonic lattice. By engineering quasiperiodic hopping profiles containing inhomogeneously distributed hopping zeros, we generate critical states and enable their coexistence with extended and localized sectors. The resulting transport regimes are directly resolved through their distinct spatiotemporal dynamics, including ballistic expansion, confined critical oscillations, and persistent localization. We observe all seven phases, including the elusive triply coexisting extended-critical-localized phase, and experimentally track the phase transitions connecting them. Our results establish the first complete experimental map of the Anderson-localization landscape and provide a unified platform for investigating mobility edges, multifractality, and programmable coherent transport.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18557

DeFAb: A Verifiable Benchmark for Defeasible Abduction in Foundation Models

Authors:

Patrick Cooper ↗Alvaro Velasquez ↗

arXiv:2606.18557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A rule-based logic solver resolves every instance in our benchmark in under 50 microseconds with 100% accuracy; the best frontier language model reaches 65% at best and drops to 23.5% under rendering-robust evaluation (worst case over four surface renderings). We introduce DeFAb (Defeasible Abduction Benchmark), a dataset and generation pipeline that converts four decades of publicly funded knowledge bases into formally grounded instances for defeasible abduction: constructing hypotheses that explain anomalies by overriding defaults while preserving unrelated expectations. Because every hypothesis must pass polynomial-time checks for valid derivation, conservativity, and minimality, DeFAb makes logical rigor the instrument for measuring creativity and theoretical reasoning, scoring the disciplined construction of theory revisions rather than fluent but theory-destroying prose. The pipeline pairs taxonomic hierarchies (OpenCyc, YAGO, Wikidata) with behavioral property graphs (ConceptNet, UMLS) to produce 372,648+ instances across 33.75M materialized rules from 18 sources, in three levels with polynomial-time verifiable gold standards. Four frontier models do not reliably internalize defeasible reasoning: rendering-robust Level 2 accuracy is 7.8-23.5%; chain-of-thought variance (~36 pp) exceeds any inter-model gap; and a matched contamination control isolates a +19.4 pp Level 3 gap. We further release DeFAb-Hard (a 235-instance Level 3 difficulty variant; best model 53.3% vs 100% symbolic) and CONJURE (a kernel-verified transformative-creativity variant of 560 Lean 4/Mathlib instances whose gold answers are definitions the proof kernel did not previously contain, judge-free verifier; a pilot finds zero novel concepts). The same verifier doubles as an exact reward for preference optimization (DPO, RLVR/GRPO). Released under MIT at https://huggingface.co/datasets/PatrickAllenCooper/DeFAb.

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13.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13823

A Stationarity-and-Coupling Criterion for Training-Free Time-Lagged Spectral Embeddings of Multivariate Time Series

Authors:

Siddharth Pal ↗Viktoria Rojkova ↗

arXiv:2606.13823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study training-free fixed-length descriptors for multivariate time series and ask not merely whether such a descriptor performs well, but when it can be expected to work at all. Our object of study is $D(\tau)$, built from a time-lagged correlation matrix truncated at the Marchenko-Pastur edge so that only signal-bearing eigenvalues survive and classified by cosine similarity to class centroids with zero learned parameters. The central contribution is not the descriptor but a falsifiable applicability criterion for it. Working from a stationary Gaussian VAR(1) model, we argue that $D(\tau)$ separates two classes when the signals are approximately stationary and the class information lives in their cross-channel temporal coupling rather than in marginal per-channel power. We derive, semi-formally, three consequences: a distinguishability condition, why the static ($\tau=0$) covariance collapses to chance, and why a stationary but power-discriminated paradigm defeats the descriptor. The criterion is operational: a two-part pre-flight test – an augmented Dickey-Fuller stationarity check and a power-baseline saturation check – predicts applicability before any training. We validate both halves on a mixed assortment. On four paradigms that satisfy the criterion (Sleep-EDF, BCI-IV-2a, MIT-BIH, ESC-50) the descriptor is competitive with strong baselines at a fraction of their cost, reaching $88.5\pm4.5\%$ under 20-subject leave-one-subject-out on Sleep-EDF on a single CPU thread. On three that violate it – non-stationary ERPs, and financial-volatility and wearable-stress regimes that are power-discriminated – it fails exactly as the pre-flight predicts, and these negatives are the more informative half. We are explicit that $D(\tau)$ is not the most accurate representation; its value is a compact, training-free embedding whose domain of validity is known in advance.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2603.19423

The Autonomy Tax: Defense Training Breaks LLM Agents

Authors:

Shawn Li ↗Yue Zhao ↗

arXiv:2603.19423v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks. Practitioners deploy defense-trained models to protect against prompt injection attacks that manipulate agent behavior through malicious observations or retrieved content. We reveal a fundamental capability-alignment paradox: defense training designed to improve safety systematically destroys agent competence while failing to prevent sophisticated attacks. Evaluating defended models against undefended baselines across 97 agent tasks and 1,000 adversarial prompts, we uncover three systematic biases unique to multi-step agents. Agent incompetence bias manifests as immediate tool execution breakdown, with models refusing or generating invalid actions on benign tasks before observing any external content. Cascade amplification bias causes early failures to propagate through retry loops, pushing defended models to timeout on 99\% of tasks compared to 13\% for baselines. Trigger bias leads to paradoxical security degradation where defended models perform worse than undefended baselines while straightforward attacks bypass defenses at high rates. Root cause analysis reveals these biases stem from shortcut learning: models overfit to surface attack patterns rather than semantic threat understanding, evidenced by extreme variance in defense effectiveness across attack categories. Our findings demonstrate that current defense paradigms optimize for single-turn refusal benchmarks while rendering multi-step agents fundamentally unreliable, necessitating new approaches that preserve tool execution competence under adversarial conditions.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2602.00122

VDE Bench: Evaluating The Capability of Image Editing Models to Modify Visual Documents

Authors:

Hongzhu Yi ↗Yujia Yang ↗Yuanxiang Wang ↗Tong Li ↗Zhenyu Guan ↗Tianyu Zong ↗Jiahuan Chen ↗Chenxi Bao ↗Tiankun Yang ↗Haopeng Jin ↗Yixuan Yuan ↗Xinming Wang ↗…

In recent years, image editing models have made significant progress, enabling users to manipulate visual content in a flexible and interactive manner through natural language instructions. However, an important yet underexplored research direction remains dense visual document image editing, which involves modifying textual content within images while faithfully preserving the original text style and background context. Existing methods primarily focus on English scenarios and images with relatively sparse text, and thus cannot adequately address dense, structurally complex documents or non-Latin scripts such as Chinese. To bridge this gap, we propose VDE Bench (Visual Doc Edit Bench), a rigorously human annotated and evaluated benchmark specifically designed to assess the performance of image editing models on bilingual Chinese-English and complex visual document editing tasks. The benchmark comprises a high quality dataset of 942 instruction based image editing samples, whose seed images encompass dense Chinese and English text documents including academic papers, posters, presentation slides, examination materials, and newspapers. Furthermore, we introduce a novel evaluation framework that systematically quantifies editing performance at the OCR parsing level, thereby enabling fine grained assessment of text modification accuracy. Based on this benchmark, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of representative image editing models. Human verification demonstrates a high degree of consistency between human judgments and automated evaluation metrics. VDE Bench constitutes the first systematic benchmark for evaluating the performance of image editing models on bilingual dense text visual documents.

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16.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2604.04342

Generative models for decision-making under distributional shift

Authors:

Xiuyuan Cheng ↗Yunqin Zhu ↗Yao Xie ↗

arXiv:2604.04342v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many data-driven decision problems are formulated using a nominal distribution estimated from historical data, while performance is ultimately determined by a deployment distribution that may be shifted, context-dependent, partially observed, or stress-induced. This tutorial presents modern generative models, particularly flow- and score-based methods, as mathematical tools for constructing decision-relevant distributions. From an operations research perspective, their primary value lies not in unconstrained sample synthesis but in representing and transforming distributions through transport maps, velocity fields, score fields, and guided stochastic dynamics. We present a unified framework based on pushforward maps, continuity, Fokker-Planck equations, Wasserstein geometry, and optimization in probability space. Within this framework, generative models can be used to learn nominal uncertainty, construct stressed or least-favorable distributions for robustness, and produce conditional or posterior distributions under side information and partial observation. We also highlight representative theoretical guarantees, including forward-reverse convergence for iterative flow models, first-order minimax analysis in transport-map space, and error-transfer bounds for posterior sampling with generative priors. The tutorial provides a principled introduction to using generative models for scenario generation, robust decision-making, uncertainty quantification, and related problems under distributional shift.

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17.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17909

A Lindbladian for holographic Brownian motion

Authors:

Daichi Takeda ↗

arXiv:2606.17909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We derive a Lindbladian description of holographic Brownian motion in the high-temperature regime. Starting from the influence functional for a trailing string endpoint, we identify the corresponding quantum master equation and prove that it is completely positive and trace-preserving. We determine the coefficients of the Lindbladian explicitly for two holographic backgrounds: the BTZ black hole and the AdS$_5$ black brane, restricting in the latter case to the endpoint fluctuation along the $x^1$-direction. We then analyze the time evolution of phase-space moments, energy relaxation, and steady states.

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18.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2603.00656

InfoPO: Information-Driven Policy Optimization for User-Centric Agents

Authors:

Fanqi Kong ↗Jiayi Zhang ↗Mingyi Deng ↗Chenglin Wu ↗Yuyu Luo ↗Bang Liu ↗

arXiv:2603.00656v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real-world user requests to LLM agents are often underspecified. Agents must interact to acquire missing information and make correct downstream decisions. However, current multi-turn GRPO-based methods often rely on trajectory-level reward computation, which leads to credit assignment problems and insufficient advantage signals within rollout groups. A feasible approach is to identify valuable interaction turns at a fine granularity to drive more targeted learning. To address this, we introduce InfoPO (Information-Driven Policy Optimization), which frames multi-turn interaction as a process of active uncertainty reduction and computes an information-gain reward that credits turns whose feedback measurably changes the agent's subsequent action distribution compared to a masked-feedback counterfactual. It then combines this signal with task outcomes via an adaptive variance-gated fusion to identify information importance while maintaining task-oriented goal direction. Across diverse tasks, including intent clarification, collaborative coding, and tool-augmented decision making, InfoPO consistently outperforms prompting and multi-turn RL baselines. It also demonstrates robustness under user simulator shifts and generalizes effectively to environment-interactive tasks. Overall, InfoPO provides a principled and scalable mechanism for optimizing complex agent-user collaboration. Code is available at https://github.com/kfq20/InfoPO.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2411.06842

Evaluating Synthetic Data Generation for Domain Generalization in Fetal Brain MRI Segmentation

Authors:

Fetal brain tissue segmentation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is crucial for studying neurodevelopment, but remains challenging due to data heterogeneity and limited annotations. Domain randomization (DR) has recently emerged as a promising strategy for single-source domain generalization by synthesizing training images with randomized artifacts, contrast, and resolution. In this work, we investigate how to maximize the out-of-domain (OOD) generalization of DR-based methods. We evaluate several synthetic data generation strategies for DR, with a particular focus on our recently proposed framework, FetalSynthSeg. We show that simple Gaussian mixture-based intensity modeling outperforms more complex physics-based simulations, and that intensity clustering (subdividing tissue classes based on intensity) improves OOD robustness. Evaluated on 348 fetal subjects from four sites spanning 0.55-3T and both T1w and T2w contrasts, FetalSynthSeg reaches state-of-the-art performance on several FeTA 2024 testing datasets (80-85 Dice score) and, for the first time, offers robust segmentation on modalities other than T2w for fetal brain segmentation (80 Dice on dHCP-T1w dataset). Compared with state-of-the-art methods such as BOUNTI, nnU-Net ensemble, and the FeTA 2024 winner, FetalSynthSeg delivers comparable or superior accuracy while maintaining strong robustness across domain shifts. Our code, model weights, and Docker image ready for easy inference are available at https://hub.docker.com/r/vzalevskyi/fetalsynthseg.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2512.21201

Schrödinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Authors:

Yu He ↗Da Huang ↗Zhenyang Liu ↗Zixiao Gu ↗Qiang Sun ↗Guangnan Ye ↗Yanwei Fu ↗Yu-Gang Jiang ↗

Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires robots to find target objects in unseen environments without task-specific fine-tuning or pre-built maps, a key capability for general-purpose service robots. Yet methods that perform well in simulation often degrade in cluttered real-world scenes with severe occlusion and latent hazards, where large unseen regions make single-scene inference brittle and unsafe. We propose Schrödinger's Navigator, a belief-aware framework that reasons at inference time over multiple trajectory-conditioned imagined 3D futures. Given candidate paths, a trajectory-conditioned 3D world model predicts hypothetical observations and maintains a superposition of plausible scene realizations rather than committing to one map. An adaptive occluder-aware sampler directs imagination to uncertainty-critical regions, while a Future-Aware Value Map (FAVM) aggregates imagined futures for robust, proactive action selection. Experiments in simulation and on a physical Go2 quadruped show that Schrödinger's Navigator outperforms strong ZSON baselines, improving hidden-target discovery and risk-aware waypoint selection in occlusion-heavy navigation scenarios. These results highlight imagined 3D futures as a scalable and generalizable strategy for zero-shot navigation in uncertain real-world environments.

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21.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15219

Can Neural Networks Achieve Optimal Computational-statistical Tradeoff? An Analysis on Single-Index Model

Authors:

Siyu Chen ↗Beining Wu ↗Miao Lu ↗Zhuoran Yang ↗Tianhao Wang ↗

arXiv:2606.15219v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we tackle the following question: Can neural networks trained with gradient-based methods achieve the optimal computational-statistical tradeoff in learning Gaussian single-index models? Prior research has shown that any polynomial-time algorithm under the statistical query (SQ) framework requires $\Omega(d^{s^\star/2}\lor d)$ samples, where $s^\star$ is the generative exponent representing the intrinsic difficulty of learning the underlying model. However, it remains unknown whether neural networks can achieve this sample complexity. Inspired by prior techniques such as label transformation and landscape smoothing for learning single-index models, we propose a unified gradient-based algorithm for training a two-layer neural network in polynomial time. Our method is adaptable to a variety of loss and activation functions, covering a broad class of existing approaches. We show that our algorithm learns a feature representation that strongly aligns with the unknown signal $\theta^\star$, with sample complexity $\widetilde{O} (d^{s^\star/2} \lor d)$, matching the SQ lower bound up to a polylogarithmic factor for all generative exponents $s^\star\geq 1$. Furthermore, we extend our approach to the setting where $\theta^\star$ is $k$-sparse for $k = o(\sqrt{d})$ by introducing a novel weight perturbation technique that leverages the sparsity structure. We derive a corresponding SQ lower bound of order $\widetilde{\Omega}(k^{s^\star})$, matched by our method up to a polylogarithmic factor. Our framework, especially the weight perturbation technique, is of independent interest, and suggests potential gradient-based solutions to other problems such as sparse tensor PCA.

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22.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2411.09058

Time-dependent averages of a critical long-range stochastic heat equation

Authors:

Sefika Kuzgun ↗Ran Tao ↗

arXiv:2411.09058v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the time-dependent spatial averages of a critical stochastic partial differential equation, namely the stochastic heat equation in dimension $d\geq 3$ with noise white in time and colored in space with covariance kernel $\|\cdot\|^{-2}$. The solution to this SPDE is a singular measure and was constructed by Mueller and Tribe in [MT04]. We show that the time-dependent spatial averages of this SPDE over a ball of radius $R$ at time $t$ have different limits under different space-time scales. In particular, when $t\ll R^2$, the central limit theorem holds; when $t=R^2$, the spatial average is a non-Gaussian random variable; when $t\gg R^2$, the spatial average becomes extinct.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19286

Correct Yourself, Keep My Trust: How Self-Correction and Social Connection Shape Credibility in Social Chatbots

Authors:

Biswadeep Sen ↗Yi-Chieh Lee ↗

arXiv:2606.19286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When social chatbots make mistakes, and they do, how they recover determines whether users trust them again. Social chatbots are increasingly integrated into everyday life, yet they remain prone to generating convincing but inaccurate information. The social connection they build with users makes such errors particularly consequential. We conducted a between-subjects experiment (N=120) comparing three error correction strategies: a webpage retraction, self-correction by the same social chatbot, and correction by an expert chatbot. Our results reveal two key findings. First, all three strategies corrected the error equally well, but only self-correction did so without damaging the chatbot's credibility: participants rated self-correcting chatbots significantly higher in both trustworthiness and perceived expertise than chatbots whose errors were corrected by external sources. Second, the strength of the user's social connection with the chatbot, measured through social attraction and self-disclosure, significantly predicted the magnitude of belief change, but only when the chatbot corrected itself. Outsourcing corrections to an external source severed this link entirely. These findings suggest that social chatbots should correct their own mistakes rather than outsource corrections, and that investing in social connection is a functional mechanism that amplifies correction effectiveness, not merely a design feature. We discuss implications for designing chatbots that maintain long-term credibility while effectively addressing their own errors.

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24.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:79bfa8e43bebe84179d3aa5324c087d2

Symptom-based phenotype discovery in motor neuron disease using natural language processing of electronic health records

Authors:

Abdulle ↗Dinu ↗Wu ↗Kim ↗Budhdeo ↗Yao ↗Tomlinson ↗Al-Chalabi ↗Dobson ↗Iacoangeli ↗

Background: Motor neuron disease (MND) is a fatal neurodegenerative condition with significant clinical heterogeneity that is incompletely captured by existing phenotype classifications based on onset site. Electronic health records (EHRs) contain detailed symptom documentation in clinical narratives that may enable data-driven discovery of clinically meaningful patient subgroups. Methods: We developed a natural language processing (NLP) pipeline using MedCAT to extract symptoms from clinical notes of 2,361 people with a confirmed diagnosis of MND at a tertiary neurology center. MND cohort confirmation used three complementary methods: clinic attendance records, text-based diagnosis detection, and NLP extraction with negation detection. Extracted symptoms were filtered to Unified Medical Language System semantic type T184 (Sign or Symptom) with removal of negated concepts. Patients were clustered using latent class analysis on binary symptom profiles. Survival differences were assessed using Kaplan-Meier analysis, log-rank tests, and Cox proportional hazards regression. Results: From the first clinical notes, we identified four clusters of symptoms among 872 patients and 76 symptoms: Motor-Bulbar (n=373), Motor-Tremor (n=154), Sensory-Pain (n=222), and Motor-Respiratory (n=123). When extended to all clinical notes (n=2,065; 184 symptoms), these reorganized into three clusters: Autonomic-Respiratory (n=472), Nocturnal-Respiratory (n=338), and Classic Motor (n=1,255). Survival differences were significant across all clusters in both the first notes and all notes analyses (log-rank p < 0.001). Conclusions: NLP-based symptom extraction from EHRs identifies clinically meaningful MND subgroups that extend beyond traditional onset-site classifications. Autonomic-respiratory symptom burden is associated with poorer survival while a newly identified Sensory-Pain subtype with a better prognosis. These data-driven phenotypes may improve prognostication and inform targeted supportive care.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2603.22922

Quality Over Clicks: Iterative Reinforcement Learning for Early-Stage E-Commerce Query Suggestion

Authors:

Qi Sun ↗Kejun Xiao ↗Huaipeng Zhao ↗Tao Luo ↗Xiaoyi Zeng ↗

Existing dialogue systems rely on query suggestion to enhance user engagement. Recent approaches mainly optimize generative models using click-through rate (CTR) models to align with user preferences. However, these methods are less effective in early-stage deployment scenarios, where click feedback is sparse and insufficient for training a reliable CTR model. To bridge this gap, we propose QualEQS, a quality-first iterative reinforcement learning framework for e-commerce query suggestion. We formalize actionable suggestion quality along three dimensions that directly affect downstream usability: answerability, factuality, and information gain. To continuously improve from online traffic without click supervision, we further propose group-level disagreement among candidate suggestions to identify ambiguous query contexts and mine hard training cases for iterative refinement. We also introduce EQS-Benchmark, a dataset of 16,949 real-world e-commerce queries for offline training and evaluation. Experiments show that our quality-based offline metrics correlate strongly with online performance, providing a practical evaluation recipe for sparse-feedback deployment. In both offline and online settings, QualEQS consistently outperforms strong baselines, yielding a 6.81% improvement in online ChatPV in a real-world enterprise-level conversational shopping assistant system.

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