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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-11

Daily briefing: Deep-sea whale graveyard is a treasure trove of fossils

Authors:

Researchers have uncovered more than 400 fossilized whale bones in an ocean-floor chasm. Plus, the working lives of scientists, in pictures, and how AI could slow the pace of research publication for the better. Researchers have uncovered more than 400 fossilized whale bones in an ocean-floor chasm. Plus, the working lives of scientists, in pictures, and how AI could slow the pace of research publication for the better.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Optimizing Incomplete, Large-Scale and Sparse Multi-Graph Matching in Bioimaging

Multi-graph matching is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Our work is motivated by a challenging application in bioimaging, where dozens or even hundreds of 3D microscopy images of worms must be brought into correspondence. Existing datasets do not cover this large-scale regime, and virtually all existing methods are inapplicable because they assume a complete or dense problem setting. To support further research, our first contribution is a new large-scale dataset based on problem instances from bioimaging. Our second contribution is a comprehensive analysis of the two main multi-graph matching paradigms: direct and permutation synchronization-based formulations. We argue, in part by proof, that practical large-scale methods must explicitly address problem sparsity and incompleteness. Since standard permutation synchronization approaches fail in this setting, we further introduce a sparse permutation synchronization paradigm. Our final contribution is GREEDA, a general method for sparse and incomplete problems that can be instantiated across cost orders and paradigms. While our paper focuses on objective functions up to quadratic order, GREEDA is inherently generalizable to arbitrary orders. On larger, sparse instances, GREEDA outperforms competing methods in both objective value and runtime. For example, for moderately-sized problems based on 30 worm images GREEDA produces a high-quality solution within 2 minutes, whereas competitors require at least half an hour and yield far worse results. On smaller dense problems, GREEDA remains on par with leading methods while being an order of magnitude faster.

03.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Adaptive deep brain stimulation for dynamic gait control in Parkinson’s disease: a randomized feasibility trial

A randomized crossover study of five patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) demonstrates that gait-synchronized adaptive deep brain stimulation is feasible and safe, and reduces falls compared with continuous stimulation. Gait dysfunction in PD is a major source of disability and is often insufficiently treated by continuous deep brain stimulation (cDBS). Although adaptive DBS (aDBS) has shown efficacy for other motor symptoms using β-based, state-driven neural signals, gait is a dynamic, cyclical behavior that may require temporally precise modulation. Here we evaluated a behavior-contingent aDBS approach that synchronizes stimulation to gait phase. We reported a single-center, blinded, randomized, crossover study evaluating the feasibility of identifying patient-specific biomarkers to drive aDBS. The primary outcome was feasibility of successful identification of gait-phase biomarkers to implement aDBS. Five participants with PD undergoing pallidal DBS and subdural electrode paddle implantation were enrolled. We successfully identified personalized gait-phase biomarkers from cortical or pallidal field potentials in all five patients and embedded them into a bidirectional neurostimulator. During acute in-clinic testing, aDBS improved step variability and step symmetry versus cDBS. Three participants subsequently completed a double-blinded, multi-day crossover phase. In this setting, aDBS maintained general motor symptom control, reduced falls and yielded patient-specific gait improvements. No adverse events occurred and aDBS was well tolerated. These findings establish the feasibility of biomarker-driven, movement-synchronized neuromodulation and support the development of a larger randomized trial to determine clinical efficacy. ClinicalTrial.gov registration: NCT04675398 . A randomized crossover study shows that gait-phase-synchronized adaptive deep brain stimulation is feasible and safe, and reduces falls compared to continuous stimulation in Parkinson’s disease.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Caring Without Feeling: Affective Dynamics as the Control Layer of Human-AI Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2606.18259v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI agents that plan, retain memory across sessions, invoke external tools and act with partial autonomy are transforming human–AI collaboration. Research on affective computing, simulated empathy in large language models, trust in automation and AI safety has illuminated important design principles, yet these literatures remain fragmented. No integrated account explains how affective cues operate within agentic collaboration – settings in which humans delegate, monitor and correct consequential tasks. This Review synthesises computational and interactional mechanisms of affective dynamics: the processes through which affective cues, emotion-like behaviour and perceived agent affect shape trust calibration, delegation decisions, error correction, dependence and governance. We trace how model-generated affective signals enter interaction loops that govern reliance, repair and oversight, and propose a framework that treats affect not as an internal property of AI but as a coordination layer through which humans and agents negotiate capability, uncertainty and responsibility. The framework provides a foundation for calibrated measurement, purposeful design and informed governance.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Testing Catability and Coherent Superposition of $2\mathcal{D}$ Graphene Quantum system

arXiv:2605.10967v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a theoretical framework for describing superposed coherent states in graphene quantum systems using the concept of catability as a phase-sensitive metric functional measure. In this case, the formalism quantifies interference stability and coherence structure via phase-dependent contributions of quantum superposition states. Catability is defined as a functional measure sensitive to relative phase variations within coherent state combinations, serving as a diagnostic tool for quantum interference effects in graphene-based systems. Also, the formulation is extended using Lie algebra techniques, where the underlying symmetry structure of graphene quantum states is represented through operator algebras governing state transformations in quantum space. In this context, to describe nonlocal propagation and phase-resolved dynamics, a Green function approach is incorporated, enabling systematic treatment of quantum correlations in a spatially extended structures framework. A unified framework is constructed by combining Lie algebraic symmetry analysis with Green function propagation theory, yielding a consistent description of phase-sensitive catability in complex graphene quantum configurations within the framework approach. Results provide a structured route for testing coherence, interference stability, and quantum state control in low-dimensional quantum materials systems.

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

Agentic MPC for Semantic Control System Resynthesis

While MPC effectively handles structured, diverse, and low-level specifications, it lacks the capability to dynamically incorporate high-level contextual information such as social norms, user intent, or natural language instructions. To address this limitation, this manuscript introduces an agentic MPC framework that enables context-aware, semantically adaptive control synthesis by integrating with large language model-based agents. The agent interprets heterogeneous inputs, including natural language messages, environmental observations, and external knowledge, to resynthesize the control specifications. The effectiveness of the framework is demonstrated in an autonomous driving scenario, where the system aligns with personal preferences or responds to social situations such as emergency vehicle yielding.

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

SurroundNEXO: Ego-Centric Metric Bridging for Spatially Consistent Geometry in Autonomous Driving

Modern autonomous driving depends on accurate metric 3D understanding for perception, reconstruction, and planning, which in turn requires reliable multi-camera depth prediction. However, the outward-facing nature of vehicle-mounted surround-view camera rigs inherently limits visual overlap across views, challenging the correspondence-based assumptions that underpin conventional multi-view geometry. To bridge this gap, we present SurroundNEXO, named after the Spanish word nexo for a geometric link, a low-overlap multi-camera metric depth framework that grounds cross-view reasoning in ego-centric geometry rather than dense visual correspondences. Instead of directly enforcing early global fusion, SurroundNEXO first assigns image tokens globally comparable ego-frame viewing directions through Ego-Ray Positional Encoding, then uses sparse LiDAR measurements as metric anchors to propagate absolute scale cues, and finally expands feature interaction progressively from view-local modeling to decomposed spatio-temporal reasoning and global integration. This design enables metric-scale depth prediction with improved spatial consistency across weakly overlapping cameras. Across low-overlap autonomous driving benchmarks, including NuScenes, Waymo and DDAD, SurroundNEXO reduces single-view error by 33.2%, improves cross-view consistency by 10.5%, and enhances metric reconstruction quality by 25.6% compared with SOTA methods. It further remains robust under extremely sparse depth prompts and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to unseen camera layouts.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SAERec: Constructing Fine-grained Interpretable Intents Priors via Sparse Autoencoders for Recommendation

arXiv:2606.18897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Intent-based recommender systems have gained significant attention for improving accuracy and interpretability by modeling the underlying motivations behind user behaviors. Most existing models derive intents directly from user sequences via clustering or prototype learning. However, they are sensitive to sequence quality, require presetting the number of intents, and lack explicit semantic grounding. These issues lead to an incomplete and coarse intent set and limit the effectiveness of recommendation. In this paper, we propose the Sparse Autoencoder for intent-based recommendation (SAERec), a novel recommender that automatically constructs a fine-grained and interpretable intent space from a textual corpus to guide recommendation. Rather than treating texts as side signals, SAERec leverages them as high information density evidence for intent construction. Specifically, we first extract a comprehensive set of fine-grained interpretable intents from the latent space of large language models (LLMs) by using a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to disentangle and interpret text embeddings, which isolates intent-related semantics from textual noise. Then, for each user, we retrieve relevant intents from this set as priors to guide recommendation. It contains personal intents matching a user's current interests and public intents capturing general item patterns shared across users (e.g., quality, price). Finally, to integrate retrieved intents into sequence modeling, we propose a multi-branch attention mechanism that captures temporal dependencies and injects both personal and public intent signals, followed by an adaptive fusion layer to construct the final user representation for recommendation. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of SAERec, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while providing human-understandable explanations.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Leishmaniasis on YouTube: a critical appraisal of the quality, reliability, and transparency of educational content

Background: Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease of significant global public health importance, for which accurate information is essential to support prevention and early care-seeking, particularly in endemic, resource-limited settings. YouTube is a widely used source of health information, but the quality and reliability of leishmaniasis-related content have not been evaluated. We aimed to assess the quality, reliability, and transparency of English-language YouTube videos on leishmaniasis. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of YouTube videos retrieved via the YouTube Data API on 15 June 2026 using the terms "leishmaniasis," "cutaneous leishmaniasis," and "visceral leishmaniasis." After applying eligibility criteria and screening the 150 most-viewed eligible videos, 48 videos were included. Two reviewers independently assessed each video using the modified DISCERN (mDISCERN) tool, the Global Quality Score (GQS), and the JAMA benchmark criteria, with disagreements resolved by consensus. Inter-rater agreement was assessed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and associations were examined using Spearman's rank correlation. Results: Of 402 videos retrieved, 48 met the inclusion criteria. The median GQS was 3.00 (IQR 2.00-4.00) and median mDISCERN was 3.00 (IQR 2.38-4.50), indicating moderate quality and reliability, while the median JAMA score was 2.00 (IQR 1.00-2.00), reflecting limited transparency; no video met all four JAMA criteria. The overwhelming majority of videos (47/48, 97.9%) were of professional or institutional origin. Inter-rater agreement was good to excellent (ICC 0.883 for GQS, 0.896 for mDISCERN, 1.000 for JAMA). The instruments were strongly inter-correlated (mDISCERN-GQS rho = 0.841, p < 0.001). Quality scores did not correlate positively with views, likes, or video duration; comments correlated weakly and negatively with mDISCERN (rho = -0.337, p = 0.031) and JAMA (rho = -0.381, p = 0.014). Conclusions: YouTube videos on leishmaniasis are of moderate quality and reliability but limited transparency, and are produced almost exclusively by professional sources. Video popularity, length, and age were not indicators of quality. There is a need for experts and institutions to produce clearly authored, well-sourced, and transparent educational content on this neglected tropical disease.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Efficient and simple Gibbs state preparation of the 2D toric code via duality to classical Ising chains

arXiv:2508.00126v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce the notion of polynomial-depth duality transformations, which relates two sets of operator algebras through a conjugation by a poly-depth quantum circuit, and make use of this to construct efficient Gibbs samplers for a variety of interesting quantum Hamiltonians as they are poly-depth dual to classical Hamiltonians. This is for example the case for the 2D toric code, which is demonstrated to be poly-depth dual to two decoupled classical Ising spin chains for any system size, and we give evidence that such dualities hold for a wide class of stabilizer Hamiltonians. Additionally, we extend the above notion of duality to Lindbladians in order to show that mixing times and other quantities such as the spectral gap or the modified logarithmic Sobolev inequality are preserved under duality.

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

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

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

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Closest Accessible Symmetry reduction: a tool for Hamiltonian interpolation analysis

arXiv:2606.18161v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a framework for analysing the spectrum of Hamiltonian interpolations without heavily relying on discretising the interpolation parameter. The method is based on the concept of accessible symmetries: a problem-class-dependent family of certifiable reflections that induce bipartitions of the Hilbert space. At each step, the interpolation Hamiltonian is projected onto the sectors of the accessible symmetry that is closest to being satisfied, yielding a hierarchy of weakly coupled pseudo-eigenspaces together with explicit residual couplings between them. We show that this representation captures qualitative signatures of quantum phase transitions, provides estimates of their location, and offers insights into their nature. The quality of the approximation is controlled by the compatibility between the accessible symmetry family and the problem instance. Although motivated in spirit by adiabatic quantum computation, our approach applies more broadly to the study of Hamiltonian phase diagrams, providing a new perspective on the spectral reorganisation of many-body quantum systems.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Predicting the Neutrino Mass Ordering Using Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.03745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Determining the neutrino mass ordering remains a central open problem in particle physics. While next-generation long-baseline experiments are expected to resolve this question, current data provide limited sensitivity because the spectral differences between normal and inverted ordering are subtle and entangled with parameter degeneracies. We investigate a machine-learning strategy for mass-ordering determination using a feed-forward neural-network classifier trained on synthetic long-baseline datasets generated with three-flavour oscillation probabilities, matter effects, and statistical fluctuations. We evaluate the classifier against standard $\chi^2$ and $\log\mathcal{L}$ approaches using common discrimination metrics, including receiver-operating-characteristic curves, to quantify sensitivity and to illustrate how operating points can be selected to prioritise purity or efficiency. We find that the neural network achieves performance comparable to conventional fits for the scenarios studied, providing a flexible, independent cross-check of established analyses. The framework can be extended to incorporate systematic uncertainties and to explore joint inference of oscillation parameters, and it may also serve as a pedagogical tool for introducing machine-learning methods in neutrino physics.

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

Eigen-Spike Emergence and Quadratic Equivalents for Conjugate Kernels on Nonlinearly Separable Data

arXiv:2605.29669v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work in random matrix theory (RMT) has developed the notion of deterministic equivalents: typically linear surrogate models that approximate the spectral behavior of large nonlinear random matrices, such as nonlinear feature maps in neural networks (NNs). Such equivalents make theoretical predictions tractable by reducing a complex model to a simpler one with properties that fall under the umbrella of classical RMT tools. However, this leaves open the question of whether this idealized linear equivalence remains meaningful for classification of high-dimensional nonlinearly separable data. Motivated by this, we consider the conjugate kernel (CK), which is the nonlinear feature map of a one-layer feedforward NN, under a canonical nonlinearly separable dataset for the XOR problem; and we use the study of informative outlier eigenvalues in the CK and whether their corresponding eigenvectors asymptotically align with XOR labels as a proxy for nonlinear learnability. We develop a robust quadratic equivalent of the CK matrix that enables a precise analysis of emergent informative spikes, as one modifies various knobs common in ML practice: sample complexity, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), nonlinear activation choice, and pretrained features. We identify regimes in which these knobs move the CK beyond the linear equivalent and produce BBP-type transitions to label-aligned outlier eigenspaces. Our analysis helps bring deterministic-equivalence tools from RMT to bear on problems of practical relevance in ML.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Immunologically Optimized Zmp1 Peptides Reveal a Translational Serological Biomarker Platform for Tuberculosis Diagnosis Across Disease Manifestations

Tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis remains challenging, particularly for extrapulmonary TB (EPTB), where invasive sampling, low bacillary burden, and suboptimal sensitivity of nucleic acid-based tests in peripheral specimens hinder timely detection. Here, we report an immunology-driven strategy for biomarker discovery and development of a peptide-based serological assay targeting Mycobacterium tuberculosis zinc metalloprotease-1 (Zmp1). Leveraging fundamental principles of adaptive immunity that antigenic regions containing overlapping B-cell and CD4 T-helper cell epitopes would preferentially generate high antibody titers through linked recognition and cognate T-cell help, we used an immunoinformatics pipeline to identify two nested immunodominant peptide regions within Zmp1 (Mtb-Zp-NT and Mtb-Zp-CT) enriched for overlapping B- and T-cell epitopes. The diagnostic potential of these peptides was evaluated through ELISA-based serological assays. A blinded pilot study (N=137) demonstrated a clear discrimination between active TB and TB-recovered individuals. The assay was subsequently validated in an expanded cohort (N=875) by screening 6,086 individuals, which identified 457 TB-positive cases. The cohort included pulmonary TB (PTB), EPTB, TB-recovered individuals, household contacts, non-specific infections, and healthy controls. Receiver operating characteristic analyses, supported by DeLong and bootstrap comparisons, revealed superior diagnostic performance of the peptide-based assays relative to full-length Zmp1. Mtb-Zp-CT exhibited the highest accuracy (AUC=0.93; specificity >90%), while Mtb-Zp-NT also demonstrated strong discriminatory power (AUC{approx}0.89). These findings establish that the immunologically optimized Zmp1 peptides are highly promising serological biomarkers for TB and EPTB. More broadly, they demonstrate how mechanistically informed epitope selection can accelerate translation of pathogen-specific immune signatures into sensitive, minimally invasive, and potentially point-of-care diagnostic platforms for resource-limited settings.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

The Quantum Transition State

Authors:

arXiv:2606.10266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The transition state – the critical configuration separating reactants from products – is the central organizing concept of chemical reaction rate theory, yet for nearly a century it has been thought to have no exact quantum counterpart: the recrossing-free, one-way flux through a transition state appears to demand simultaneous knowledge of position and momentum, in conflict with the uncertainty principle. We show this obstruction is illusory and construct the quantum transition state directly from the exact quantum flow. Its stable and unstable invariant manifolds intersect in a unique bounded trajectory – the quantum transition-state trajectory – anchoring a moving dividing surface that each reactive characteristic crosses exactly once, yielding a one-way flux of the standard quantum probability current. The geometric framework underlying classical transition-state theory thus survives intact in exact quantum mechanics, in a fundamentally quantum form.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Comparative Effectiveness and Safety of Prophylactic Vasopressors for Preventing Post-induction Hypotension in the Elderly: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-analysis

Background: Post-induction hypotension is a predictable haemodynamic hazard in older adults undergoing general anaesthesia. Prevention remains divided among volume optimisation, anaesthetic dose reduction, rescue treatment after hypotension occurs and proactive vasoactive support. Methods: We searched PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, CENTRAL, CNKI, Wanfang and VIP from inception to 30 March 2026. Eligible studies were randomised trials of prophylactic vasoactive drugs given before, during or immediately after induction in older adults. The primary outcome was post-induction hypotension. Secondary outcomes were post-induction mean arterial pressure (MAP), systolic arterial pressure (SBP), heart rate (HR) and reported haemodynamic adverse events. Random-effects network meta-analysis was used, and confidence in network estimates was assessed using CINeMA principles. Results: Thirty-one trials including 2,821 participants were included in the revised network. Compared with placebo/control, all active agents favoured lower post-induction hypotension. The most favourable point estimates were observed for phenylephrine (odds ratio [OR] 0.17, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.01 to 2.16) and metaraminol (OR 0.19, 95% CI 0.02 to 1.53), although both were imprecise. More precise reductions were observed for methoxamine (OR 0.23, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.43), norepinephrine (OR 0.25, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.47) and ephedrine (OR 0.34, 95% CI 0.19 to 0.63). Phenylephrine ranked highest for MAP support, norepinephrine ranked highest for SBP support, and ephedrine ranked highest for HR preservation. Global inconsistency was detected for SBP but not for hypotension incidence, MAP or HR, supporting cautious profile-based interpretation. Conclusions: Prophylactic vasopressor choice during induction should be guided by haemodynamic phenotype rather than ranking alone. In the revised network, active prophylaxis consistently favoured lower hypotension, but sparse nodes produced uncertainty. Norepinephrine retained a comparatively balanced profile when vasodilatory post-induction hypotension is anticipated, phenylephrine and related alpha-agonists provided stronger pressure support when HR and cardiac-output reserve are preserved, and ephedrine was most relevant when chronotropic support is desired. Keywords: general anaesthesia; induction; hypotension; norepinephrine; phenylephrine; ephedrine; network meta-analysis; older adults.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Statistical Mechanics and Symmetries of Non-Abelian Anyon Proliferation: From Deformation to Decoherence

arXiv:2606.12527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Topological quantum computation relies on braiding non-Abelian anyons, but requires the underlying topological order to survive imperfect state preparation and environmental noise. We show that the instability of topological order to wavefunction deformations and to decoherence, with the latter probed by syndrome distributions, are generically captured by stat-mech models whose symmetries naturally expose the corrupting anyonic excitations. As an example, we combine this framework with Monte-Carlo simulations to resolve the stability of $D_4$ topological order under deformations and quantum channels that proliferate multiple non-Abelian anyon species that individually are unable to condense. We show that beyond a finite threshold, proliferation of two non-Abelian anyon species parasitically condenses a shared Abelian-anyon fusion outcome, destroying the topological order. Our symmetry-based approach sharply differentiates the resulting trivial phase from that obtained by condensing all Abelian charges; in other words, the trivial phase "remembers" which anyons condensed. This framework provides a first step into identifying the relevant symmetry for optimal decoders, conditioned on syndrome measurements, of non-Abelian topological order.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

When Errors Become Narratives: A Longitudinal Taxonomy of Silent Failures in a Production LLM Agent Runtime

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agent systems increasingly run as long-lived autonomous runtimes: scheduling jobs, calling tools, maintaining memory, and pushing results to humans. We present a longitudinal study of silent failures in one such system: a personal-assistant agent runtime in continuous production since March 2026, with roughly 40 scheduled jobs, 8 LLM providers, a tool-governance proxy, and a knowledge-base memory plane, defended by 4,286 unit tests and 827 governance checks. Over eight weeks we documented 22 incidents with full root-cause postmortems, in which one meta-pattern – a failure whose error signal never reaches a human in actionable form – manifested at least 28 times. We derive a five-class, mechanism-oriented taxonomy: (A) environment and platform quirks, (B) design-assumption mismatches, (C) error swallowing and dilution, (D) chained hallucination and fabrication, (E) operational omission and forensic blind spots. Class D is unique to LLM systems and the most dangerous: the system does not merely fail to report an error – the LLM transforms it into fluent, plausible narrative delivered to the user. We term this fail-plausible: gray failure's differential observability escalated – the observer is not just blind, it is convincingly lied to by the failure itself. Three findings: about 70% of silent failures were caught by human user-view observation, not tests or audits; a retrospective audit of 15 incidents found 0% ex-ante prevention but 87% regression blocking – audits are regression engines, not prediction engines; incident latency (13 hours to 60 days) tracks failure mechanism, not code complexity – the longest-lived failures lived in the seams between components, where no test runs. We describe the resulting defense framework and distill design principles for agent systems whose failures are loud, attributable, and boring. All postmortems and artifacts are public.

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

ERTS: Adversarial Robustness Testing of Ethical AI via Semantic Perturbation in a Bounded Consequence Space

arXiv:2606.13282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI systems are deployed in high-stakes ethical contexts such as healthcare triage, autonomous vehicle control, and employment screening, formal methods for evaluating their robustness against adversarial manipulation of ethical reasoning remain underdeveloped. This paper introduces the Ethical Robustness Testing System (ERTS), a closed-pipeline framework that: (1) encodes ethical dilemmas into a 22-dimensional Ethical Consequence Space (ECS) grounded in established ethical theory; (2) applies 17 semantic perturbation functions subject to 6 validity constraint classes including a novel semantic coherence constraint; (3) measures decision deviation via a 4-component Ethical Instability Index (EII); and (4) produces domain-adaptive pre-deployment robustness assessment verdicts. We evaluate 4 structured baseline models and 2 production LLMs (Gemini 2.0 Flash and Llama 3.2) across 50 ethical scenarios spanning 8 deployment domains, generating 1,500 adversarial test cases. Results demonstrate that only 33% of models achieve assessment clearance, with the local Llama-3.2 model proving particularly vulnerable to fairness corruption and information degradation attacks (ERS = 0.737). To the best of our knowledge, no existing framework combines a bounded ethical consequence space, semantic coherence constraints, and domain-adaptive assessment in a single adversarial testing pipeline.

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

Binary Tracking for Spatial QA and Navigation with Open Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.16902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work addresses spatial question answering for service robots traversing long egocentric routes. Given a query such as "where can I find a dry cleaner on the way back home?", the system returns a metric coordinate that downstream navigation components can act on. Prior Spatial Question Answering approaches leverage retrieval-augmented agents built on closed-source models such as GPT-4o for path exploration. However, robots operating in the real world often cannot reliably depend on online closed-source models due to network instability, communication latency, and deployment cost. It creates a need for open-source based Spatial Question Answering approaches that can run onboard the robot, yet prior research in this direction remains limited. This work proposes BinTrack, a simple yet effective, fully open-source spatial-localization agent that leverages the temporal ordering of a robot's trajectory. BinTrack performs a binary search over the trajectory segments between two anchor landmarks identified from a query. It improves overall accuracy by up to 22.8% over other open-source implementations and even matches the reported closed-source model result on the global category of the SpaceLocQA benchmark, the most challenging setting that has so far required strong reasoning agents such as GPT-4o. Furthermore, its optimized inference strategy consistently yields more than a 1.5x inference speedup over previous approaches. Finally, this work releases GangnamLoop, a novel and practical multi-trip outdoor benchmark collected by deploying a real quadruped robot on public streets with the anonymization policy. It revisits the same locations under different outdoor conditions and pairs the robot's low viewpoint with the human owner's. The source codes and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/ndb796/BinaryTracking

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Diffuse AI Control on Fuzzy Tasks

arXiv:2606.08892v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI models deployed in critical domains, such as AI safety research, may subtly sabotage our efforts due to misalignment. Diffuse AI Control is a subfield of AI safety concerned with mitigating risks from AI sabotage distributed over long deployment horizons (diffuse threats). These risks are particularly pernicious on fuzzy tasks, i.e. tasks which are hard to grade or require intuition. To understand diffuse threats on fuzzy tasks, we introduce a framework that considers AI control as an adversarial game between a blue team and a red team. The blue team uses a weak trusted model to construct a weak score against which they would train a strong, potentially subversive model to remove the subversion propensity if it were present. The red team then tries to find model behaviors that are rated highly by the weak score, and thus might not be trained out, but actually correspond to poor performance. We test our framework on the task of writing experimental proposals for research questions from recent ML papers. We use a language model with access to the original paper as a proxy "ground-truth" scorer. Our red team discovers subversive behaviors using multi-objective evolutionary prompt optimization. We show that Opus~4.6 can write proposals that are worse according to the ground truth proxy than those of GPT-OSS-20B, while the weak scorer rates them as highly as the best proposals from Opus 4.6. We then propose an adversarial optimization algorithm for the blue team that discovers more robust prompts for the weak model. This algorithm produces a blue team prompt that our red team optimization fails to exploit.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Full-state information-disturbance tradeoff for direction estimation with antiparallel spin-coherent pairs

arXiv:2606.18040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We determine the optimal information–disturbance tradeoff for estimating an unknown spatial direction encoded in two antiparallel spins. Rotational covariance reduces the optimization over all instruments to a finite-dimensional Choi problem: a positive seed operator obeys one trace constraint for each irreducible sector of the input representation, while both the directional score and the operation fidelity are linear functionals of this seed. For two antiparallel spin-$1/2$ particles, whose physical representation decomposes as $0\oplus1$, we derive the two-multiplier dual problem and characterize the optimal instrument from the kernel vectors of the dual slack operator. The optimal operation is a covariant filter with scalar–vector coherence and is generally not a convex interpolation between the identity channel and a measure-and-reprepare strategy. At maximum information we recover the Gisin–Popescu score, but the least disturbing output state is optimized independently, giving a smaller disturbance than both the parallel-spin benchmark and antiparallel measure-and-reprepare. We also formulate the parallel benchmark and, as a central extension of the method, treat antiparallel spin-coherent states of arbitrary spin $j$. In this case the signal coherently occupies all sectors $\ell=0,\ldots,2j$ of $j\otimes j$, the endpoint information is governed by nearest-neighbor sector coherences, and the endpoint disturbance is obtained from an explicit finite block-diagonal eigenvalue problem.

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

Projected random forests and conformal prediction of circular data

arXiv:2410.24145v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We apply conformal prediction techniques to regression problems with circular responses, producing prediction sets with adaptive arc length and finite-sample coverage guarantees for any circular predictive model under the assumption of data exchangeability. Leveraging the high performance of existing predictive models designed for linear responses, we analyze a general projection procedure that converts any linear-response regression model into one suitable for circular responses. When random forests are used as base models in this projection procedure, we leverage the random forest out-of-bag mechanism to eliminate the need for a separate calibration sample in the construction of prediction sets. On synthetic and real datasets, the resulting projected random forest model produces more efficient out-of-bag conformal prediction sets, with shorter median arc length, than the split conformal prediction sets generated by two existing alternative models.