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Longitudinal Effects of a Smartphone Game (Tumaini) for HIV Prevention Among Kenyan Adolescents: 45-Month Trajectories of Condom Use–Related Proximal Outcomes From a Randomized Controlled Trial

Background: African adolescents and young adults account for a disproportionate number of new HIV infections. There is an urgent need to identify scalable and cost-effective behavioral HIV prevention strategies for this population. Using a condom at first sex is associated with a higher likelihood of consistent use later. Tumaini (“Hope for the Future” in Swahili; Emory University) is a choose-your-own-adventure smartphone game that has been shown to reduce the risk of unprotected first sex by end line in a 45-month randomized controlled trial in western Kenya. Objective: This study aimed to assess the impact of Tumaini on proximal outcomes related to condom use at first sex (specifically, behavioral intentions, self-efficacy, attitudes, and knowledge) longitudinally across mid-adolescence in the above trial. Methods: Adolescent participants (n=996, mean baseline age 14, SD 0.56 years) were randomized 1:1 to receive either a smartphone loaded with Tumaini or an attention-control math game for 5 to 7 weeks at 3 time points (mean age 14.0, SD 0.56; 15.3, SD 0.55; and 16.0, SD 0.56 years, respectively). They completed a behavioral survey at 13 time points, through mean age 17.7 (SD 0.56) years. Using generalized estimating equations and controlling for age at baseline, we modeled mean scores (overall and stratified by gender) on a range of condom-related survey items over time to assess mean differences at specific time points. We applied appropriate Bonferroni corrections to inferences about cross-arm differences in mean changes relative to baseline at 4 time points (after each intervention period and at end line; α=.05/4) and within-arm mean changes relative to baseline at each of the 12 post-baseline time points (α=.05/12). Analyses were conducted as intent-to-treat. Results: At end line, 97.8% (n=974) of the sample had been retained. Participants in both arms dedicated a mean total of >30 hours to their assigned game. There was significant improvement across all condom-related proximal outcomes in the intervention arm relative to the control arm immediately after initial intervention exposure. For almost all outcomes, a significant cross-arm difference was also present at end line and for most outcomes at the 2 intervening comparison time points. Some outcomes saw stronger intervention effects on female participants (eg, self-efficacy to refuse unprotected sex) or male participants (eg, knowledge that condoms are an effective way to prevent HIV). In each arm, intention to use a condom at first sex was consistently higher among male participants; however, female intervention-arm scores overtook male control-arm scores following initial intervention exposure. Conclusions: Tumaini significantly improved theory-based proximal outcomes related to condom use, with effects sustained 45 months post initial exposure and 16 months post most recent exposure. Adolescents benefited from even short-term exposure, though repeated exposure generally sustained and reinforced intervention effects. As access to smartphones increases, Tumaini has potential for high scalability and impact on condom-related outcomes. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04437667; https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04437667
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Investigating the Effect of Hospital Infection Control Informatization on Optimizing Microbiological Specimen Submission Before Antibiotic Therapy: Failure Mode and Effects Analysis

Background: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses a critical global health threat, with inappropriate antibiotic use being a major driver. Timely microbiological specimen submission before initiating antibiotic therapy is a cornerstone of antimicrobial stewardship (AMS), enabling pathogen-directed therapy and reducing unnecessary broad-spectrum exposure. However, suboptimal compliance remains common due to workflow interruptions, technological barriers, and behavioral factors. Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), a proactive risk-assessment method widely used in health care quality improvement, provides a systematic framework to identify process vulnerabilities and prioritize corrective actions. Despite its increasing application, few studies have integrated FMEA with hospital informatization to optimize microbiological specimen submission workflows in routine AMS practice. Objective: This study aimed to systematically identify workflow risks affecting preantibiotic microbiological specimen submission and to design, implement, and evaluate informatization-enabled interventions using an FMEA-based framework. Methods: FMEA was conducted at a tertiary hospital in China. A multidisciplinary team identified potential failure modes across 4 domains: health information systems, personnel, administration, and external support. Risk Priority Numbers (RPNs) and Action Priority (AP) indices were calculated for each failure mode. Targeted interventions were implemented, including dual-verification barcode scanning, artificial intelligence-driven clinical decision support alerts, EHR-integrated training modules, and automated compliance dashboards. Pre- and postintervention specimen submission rates (January 2024-December 2024) were analyzed using the Mann-Kendall trend test. Results: The top 5 failure modes included PDA barcode scanning failures (RPN=175), inadequate clinical decision support (RPN=140), insufficient clinician awareness (RPN=56), suboptimal oversight mechanisms, and patient-related barriers. Postintervention, significant upward trends were observed in overall specimen submission rates (
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FinToolBench: Evaluating LLM Agents for Real-World Financial Tool Use

arXiv:2603.08262v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into the financial domain is driving a paradigm shift from passive information retrieval to dynamic, agentic interaction. While general-purpose tool learning has witnessed a surge in benchmarks, the financial sector, characterized by high stakes, strict compliance, and rapid data volatility, remains critically underserved. Existing financial evaluations predominantly focus on static textual analysis or document-based QA, ignoring the complex reality of tool execution. Conversely, general tool benchmarks lack the domain-specific rigor required for finance, often relying on toy environments or a negligible number of financial APIs. To bridge this gap, we introduce FinToolBench, the first real-world, runnable benchmark dedicated to evaluating financial tool learning agents. Unlike prior works limited to a handful of mock tools, FinToolBench establishes a realistic ecosystem coupling 760 executable financial tools with 295 rigorous, tool-required queries. We propose a novel evaluation framework that goes beyond binary execution success, assessing agents on finance-critical dimensions: timeliness, intent type, and regulatory domain alignment. Furthermore, we present FATR, a finance-aware tool retrieval and reasoning baseline that enhances stability and compliance. By providing the first testbed for auditable, agentic financial execution, FinToolBench sets a new standard for trustworthy AI in finance. The tool manifest, execution environment, and evaluation code will be open-sourced to facilitate future research.
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CoCo: Code as CoT for Text-to-Image Preview and Rare Concept Generation

arXiv:2603.08652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advancements in Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have significantly advanced text-to-image (T2I) generation, particularly through the integration of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, existing CoT-based T2I methods largely rely on abstract natural-language planning, which lacks the precision required for complex spatial layouts, structured visual elements, and dense textual content. In this work, we propose CoCo (Code-as-CoT), a code-driven reasoning framework that represents the reasoning process as executable code, enabling explicit and verifiable intermediate planning for image generation. Given a text prompt, CoCo first generates executable code that specifies the structural layout of the scene, which is then executed in a sandboxed environment to render a deterministic draft image. The model subsequently refines this draft through fine-grained image editing to produce the final high-fidelity result. To support this training paradigm, we construct CoCo-10K, a curated dataset containing structured draft-final image pairs designed to teach both structured draft construction and corrective visual refinement. Empirical evaluations on StructT2IBench, OneIG-Bench, and LongText-Bench show that CoCo achieves improvements of +68.83%, +54.8%, and +41.23% over direct generation, while also outperforming other generation methods empowered by CoT. These results demonstrate that executable code is an effective and reliable reasoning paradigm for precise, controllable, and structured text-to-image generation. The code is available at: https://github.com/micky-li-hd/CoCo
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Agentic Critical Training

arXiv:2603.08706v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training large language models (LLMs) as autonomous agents often begins with imitation learning, but it only teaches agents what to do without understanding why: agents never contrast successful actions against suboptimal alternatives and thus lack awareness of action quality. Recent approaches attempt to address this by introducing self-reflection supervision derived from contrasts between expert and alternative actions. However, the training paradigm fundamentally remains imitation learning: the model imitates pre-constructed reflection text rather than learning to reason autonomously. We propose Agentic Critical Training (ACT), a reinforcement learning paradigm that trains agents to identify the better action among alternatives. By rewarding whether the model's judgment is correct, ACT drives the model to autonomously develop reasoning about action quality, producing genuine self-reflection rather than imitating it. Across three challenging agent benchmarks, ACT consistently improves agent performance when combined with different post-training methods. It achieves an average improvement of 5.07 points over imitation learning and 4.62 points over reinforcement learning. Compared to approaches that inject reflection capability through knowledge distillation, ACT also demonstrates clear advantages, yielding an average improvement of 2.42 points. Moreover, ACT enables strong out-of-distribution generalization on agentic benchmarks and improves performance on general reasoning benchmarks without any reasoning-specific training data, highlighting the value of our method. These results suggest that ACT is a promising path toward developing more reflective and capable LLM agents.
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A Robust Incomplete Multimodal Low-Rank Adaptation Approach for Emotion Recognition

arXiv:2507.11202v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Emotion Recognition (MER) often encounters incomplete multimodality in practical applications due to sensor failures or privacy protection requirements. While existing methods attempt to address various incomplete multimodal scenarios by balancing the training of each modality combination through additional gradients, these approaches face a critical limitation: training gradients from different modality combinations conflict with each other, ultimately degrading the performance of the final prediction model. In this paper, we propose a unimodal decoupled dynamic low-rank adaptation method based on modality combinations, named MCULoRA, which is a novel framework for the parameter-efficient training of incomplete multimodal learning models. MCULoRA consists of two key modules, modality combination aware low-rank adaptation (MCLA) and dynamic parameter fine-tuning (DPFT). The MCLA module effectively decouples the shared information from the distinct characteristics of individual modality combinations. The DPFT module adjusts the training ratio of modality combinations based on the separability of each modality's representation space, optimizing the learning efficiency across different modality combinations. Our extensive experimental evaluation in multiple benchmark datasets demonstrates that MCULoRA substantially outperforms previous incomplete multimodal learning approaches in downstream task accuracy.
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FuzzingRL: Reinforcement Fuzz-Testing for Revealing VLM Failures

arXiv:2603.06600v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) are prone to errors, and identifying where these errors occur is critical for ensuring the reliability and safety of AI systems. In this paper, we propose an approach that automatically generates questions designed to deliberately induce incorrect responses from VLMs, thereby revealing their vulnerabilities. The core of this approach lies in fuzz testing and reinforcement finetuning: we transform a single input query into a large set of diverse variants through vision and language fuzzing. Based on the fuzzing outcomes, the question generator is further instructed by adversarial reinforcement fine-tuning to produce increasingly challenging queries that trigger model failures. With this approach, we can consistently drive down a target VLM's answer accuracy -- for example, the accuracy of Qwen2.5-VL-32B on our generated questions drops from 86.58\% to 65.53\% in four RL iterations. Moreover, a fuzzing policy trained against a single target VLM transfers to multiple other VLMs, producing challenging queries that degrade their performance as well.
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RACER: Risk-Aware Calibrated Efficient Routing for Large Language Models

arXiv:2603.06616v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiently routing queries to the optimal large language model (LLM) is crucial for optimizing the cost-performance trade-off in multi-model systems. However, most existing routers rely on single-model selection, making them susceptible to misrouting. In this work, we formulate LLM routing as the $\alpha$-VOR problem to minimize expected set size while controlling the misrouting risk, and propose a novel method -- RACER, extending base routers to output model sets that can be subsequently aggregated for improved output. In particular, RACER constructs nested model sets via augmented scoring and utilizes finite-sample concentration bounds to calibrate a threshold that allows for both variable set sizes and abstention. We theoretically prove that RACER achieves rigorous distribution-free risk control on unseen test data in a post-hoc and model-agnostic manner. Extensive experiments verify our theoretical guarantees and demonstrate that RACER consistently enhances downstream accuracy across a wide range of benchmarks.
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HEARTS: Benchmarking LLM Reasoning on Health Time Series

arXiv:2603.06638v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rise of large language models (LLMs) has shifted time series analysis from narrow analytics to general-purpose reasoning. Yet, existing benchmarks cover only a small set of health time series modalities and tasks, failing to reflect the diverse domains and extensive temporal dependencies inherent in real-world physiological modeling. To bridge these gaps, we introduce HEARTS (Health Reasoning over Time Series), a unified benchmark for evaluating hierarchical reasoning capabilities of LLMs over general health time series. HEARTS integrates 16 real-world datasets across 12 health domains and 20 signal modalities, and defines a comprehensive taxonomy of 110 tasks grouped into four core capabilities: Perception, Inference, Generation, and Deduction. Evaluating 14 state-of-the-art LLMs on more than 20K test samples reveals intriguing findings. First, LLMs substantially underperform specialized models, and their performance is only weakly related to general reasoning scores. Moreover, LLMs often rely on simple heuristics and struggle with multi-step temporal reasoning. Finally, performance declines with increasing temporal complexity, with similar failure modes within model families, indicating that scaling alone is insufficient. By making these gaps measurable, HEARTS provides a standardized testbed and living benchmark for developing next-generation LLM agents capable of reasoning over diverse health signals.
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Geodesic Gradient Descent: A Generic and Learning-rate-free Optimizer on Objective Function-induced Manifolds

arXiv:2603.06651v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Euclidean gradient descent algorithms barely capture the geometry of objective function-induced hypersurfaces and risk driving update trajectories off the hypersurfaces. Riemannian gradient descent algorithms address these issues but fail to represent complex hypersurfaces via a single classic manifold. We propose geodesic gradient descent (GGD), a generic and learning-rate-free Riemannian gradient descent algorithm. At each iteration, GGD uses an n-dimensional sphere to approximate a local neighborhood on the objective function-induced hypersurface, adapting to arbitrarily complex geometries. A tangent vector derived from the Euclidean gradient is projected onto the sphere to form a geodesic, ensuring the update trajectory stays on the hypersurface. Parameter updates are performed using the endpoint of the geodesic. The maximum step size of the gradient in GGD is equal to a quarter of the arc length on the n-dimensional sphere, thus eliminating the need for a learning rate. Experimental results show that compared with the classic Adam algorithm, GGD achieves test MSE reductions ranging from 35.79% to 48.76% for fully connected networks on the Burgers' dataset, and cross-entropy loss reductions ranging from 3.14% to 11.59% for convolutional neural networks on the MNIST dataset.
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Thinking with Gaze: Sequential Eye-Tracking as Visual Reasoning Supervision for Medical VLMs

arXiv:2603.06697v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision--language models (VLMs) process images as visual tokens, yet their intermediate reasoning is often carried out in text, which can be suboptimal for visually grounded radiology tasks. Radiologists instead diagnose via sequential visual search; eye-tracking captures this process as time-ordered gaze trajectories that reveal how evidence is acquired over time. We use eye-gaze as supervision to guide VLM reasoning by introducing a small set of dedicated gaze tokens. These tokens are trained to predict gaze-selected image patch indices in temporal order, encouraging the model to follow human-like evidence acquisition and integration. Experiments on MIMIC-EYE and multiple external zero-shot benchmarks show consistent gains over baselines, achieving state-of-the-art in-domain performance and improved out-of-domain robustness. These results highlight temporally ordered gaze as an effective supervision signal for learning visually grounded medical reasoning.
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Regression Models Meet Foundation Models: A Hybrid-AI Approach to Practical Electricity Price Forecasting

arXiv:2603.06726v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electricity market prices exhibit extreme volatility, nonlinearity, and non-stationarity, making accurate forecasting a significant challenge. While cutting-edge time series foundation models (TSFMs) effectively capture temporal dependencies, they typically underutilize cross-variate correlations and non-periodic patterns that are essential for price forecasting. Conversely, regression models excel at capturing feature interactions but are limited to future-available inputs, ignoring crucial historical drivers that are unavailable at forecast time. To bridge this gap, we propose FutureBoosting, a novel paradigm that enhances regression-based forecasts by integrating forecasted features generated from a frozen TSFM. This approach leverages the TSFM's ability to model historical patterns and injects these insights as enriched inputs into a downstream regression model. We instantiate this paradigm into a lightweight, plug-and-play framework for electricity price forecasting. Extensive evaluations on real-world electricity market data demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art TSFMs and regression baselines, achieving reductions in Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of more than 30% at most. Through ablation studies and explainable AI (XAI) techniques, we validate the contribution of forecasted features and elucidate the model's decision-making process. FutureBoosting establishes a robust, interpretable, and effective solution for practical market participation, offering a general framework for enhancing regression models with temporal context.
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Contextual Counterfactual Credit Assignment for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in LLM Collaboration

arXiv:2603.06859v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) systems powered by large language models (LLMs) are frequently optimized via sparse terminal-only feedback. This shared signal entangles upstream decisions, obstructing accurate decision-level credit assignment. To address this trajectory-level diffusion, we introduce Contextual Counterfactual Credit Assignment (\textbf{\texttt{C3}}). Instead of distributing rewards across an entire episode, \textbf{\texttt{C3}} isolates the causal impact of individual messages by freezing the exact transcript-derived context, evaluating context-matched alternatives via fixed-continuation replay, and applying a leave-one-out (LOO) baseline. This localized intervention extracts unbiased, low-variance marginal advantages for standard policy-gradient optimization. Evaluated across five mathematical and coding benchmarks under matched budgets, \textbf{\texttt{C3}} improves terminal performance over established baselines. Mechanistic diagnostics further show that these gains are accompanied by higher credit fidelity, lower contextual variance, and stronger inter-agent causal dependence. Our code is available at https://github.com/EIT-EAST-Lab/C3.
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Diffusion Controller: Framework, Algorithms and Parameterization

arXiv:2603.06981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Controllable diffusion generation often relies on various heuristics that are seemingly disconnected without a unified understanding. We bridge this gap with Diffusion Controller (DiffCon), a unified control-theoretic view that casts reverse diffusion sampling as state-only stochastic control within (generalized) linearly-solvable Markov Decision Processes (LS-MDPs). Under this framework, control acts by reweighting the pretrained reverse-time transition kernels, balancing terminal objectives against an $f$-divergence cost. From the resulting optimality conditions, we derive practical reinforcement learning methods for diffusion fine-tuning: (i) f-divergence-regularized policy-gradient updates, including a PPO-style rule, and (ii) a regularizer-determined reward-weighted regression objective with a minimizer-preservation guarantee under the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. The LS-MDP framework further implies a principled model form: the optimal score decomposes into a fixed pretrained baseline plus a lightweight control correction, motivating a side-network parameterization conditioned on exposed intermediate denoising outputs, enabling effective gray-box adaptation with a frozen backbone. Experiments on Stable Diffusion v1.4 across supervised and reward-driven finetuning show consistent gains in preference-alignment win rates and improved quality-efficiency trade-offs versus gray-box baselines and even the parameter-efficient white-box adapter LoRA.
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Looking Back and Forth: Cross-Image Attention Calibration and Attentive Preference Learning for Multi-Image Hallucination Mitigation

arXiv:2603.07048v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, they are prone to hallucinations in multi-image tasks. We attribute this issue to limitations in existing attention mechanisms and insufficient cross-image modeling. Inspired by this, we propose a structured hallucination mitigation framework involving Cross-Image Attention calibration and Preference Learning (CAPL). CAPL explicitly enhances inter-image interactions at the architectural level while reinforcing reliance on genuine cross-image evidence during training, thereby improving the model's perception and modeling of cross-image associations. Specifically, we (i) introduce a selectable image token interaction attention mechanism to establish fine-grained cross-image entity alignment and information flow; (ii) design a cross-image modeling-based preference optimization strategy that contrasts reasoning outcomes under full inter-image interaction and those obtained when images are mutually invisible, encouraging the model to ground its predictions in authentic visual evidence and mitigating erroneous inferences driven by textual priors. Experimental results demonstrate that CAPL consistently improves performance across multiple model architectures, achieving stable gains on both multi-image hallucination and general benchmarks. Notably, performance on single-image visual tasks remains stable or slightly improves, indicating strong generalization capability.
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Efficient Personalized Reranking with Semi-Autoregressive Generation and Online Knowledge Distillation

arXiv:2603.07107v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative models offer a promising paradigm for the final stage reranking in multi-stage recommender systems, with the ability to capture inter-item dependencies within reranked lists. However, their practical deployment still faces two key challenges: (1) an inherent conflict between achieving high generation quality and ensuring low-latency inference, making it difficult to balance the two, and (2) insufficient interaction between user and item features in existing methods. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Personalized Semi-Autoregressive with online knowledge Distillation (PSAD) framework for reranking. In this framework, the teacher model adopts a semi-autoregressive generator to balance generation quality and efficiency, while its ranking knowledge is distilled online into a lightweight scoring network during joint training, enabling real-time and efficient inference. Furthermore, we propose a User Profile Network (UPN) that injects user intent and models interest dynamics, enabling deeper interactions between users and items. Extensive experiments conducted on three large-scale public datasets demonstrate that PSAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both ranking performance and inference efficiency.
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Deep Expert Injection for Anchoring Retinal VLMs with Domain-Specific Knowledge

arXiv:2603.07131v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) show immense potential for automated ophthalmic diagnosis. However, their clinical deployment is severely hindered by lacking domain-specific knowledge. In this work, we identify two structural deficiencies hindering reliable medical reasoning: 1) the Perception Gap, where general-purpose visual encoders fail to resolve fine-grained pathological cues (e.g., microaneurysms); and 2) the Reasoning Gap, where sparse visual evidence is progressively overridden by massive language priors in deeper transformer layers, leading to ungrounded hallucinations. To bridge these gaps, we propose EyExIn, a data-efficient framework designed to anchor retinal VLMs with expert knowledge via a Deep Expert Injection mechanism. Our architecture employs an Expert-Aware Dual-Stream encoding strategy that decouples visual representation into a general stream for anatomical context and a specialized expert stream for pathological semantics. To ensure high-fidelity integration, we design a Semantic-Adaptive Gated Fusion module, which dynamically amplifies subtle lesion signals while filtering irrelevant background noise. Furthermore, we introduce Adaptive Deep Expert Injection to embed persistent "Vision Anchors" by integrating fused visual features as residual biases directly into intermediate LLM layers. This mechanism creates a visual shortcut that forces the reasoning stack to remain strictly grounded in visual evidence. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms massive proprietary systems. EyExIn significantly enhances domain-specific knowledge embedding and achieves state-of-the-art precision in ophthalmic visual question answering, advancing the development of trustworthy ophthalmic AI.
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Sparsity and Out-of-Distribution Generalization

arXiv:2603.07388v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Explaining out-of-distribution generalization has been a central problem in epistemology since Goodman's "grue" puzzle in 1946. Today it's a central problem in machine learning, including AI alignment. Here we propose a principled account of OOD generalization with three main ingredients. First, the world is always presented to experience not as an amorphous mass, but via distinguished features (for example, visual and auditory channels). Second, Occam's Razor favors hypotheses that are "sparse," meaning that they depend on as few features as possible. Third, sparse hypotheses will generalize from a training to a test distribution, provided the two distributions sufficiently overlap on their restrictions to the features that are either actually relevant or hypothesized to be. The two distributions could diverge arbitrarily on other features. We prove a simple theorem that formalizes the above intuitions, generalizing the classic sample complexity bound of Blumer et al. to an OOD context. We then generalize sparse classifiers to subspace juntas, where the ground truth classifier depends solely on a low-dimensional linear subspace of the features.
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Dial: A Knowledge-Grounded Dialect-Specific NL2SQL System

arXiv:2603.07449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enterprises commonly deploy heterogeneous database systems, each of which owns a distinct SQL dialect with different syntax rules, built-in functions, and execution constraints. However, most existing NL2SQL methods assume a single dialect (e.g., SQLite) and struggle to produce queries that are both semantically correct and executable on target engines. Prompt-based approaches tightly couple intent reasoning with dialect syntax, rule-based translators often degrade native operators into generic constructs, and multi-dialect fine-tuning suffers from cross-dialect interference. In this paper, we present Dial, a knowledge-grounded framework for dialect-specific NL2SQL. Dial introduces: (1) a Dialect-Aware Logical Query Planning module that converts natural language into a dialect-aware logical query plan via operator-level intent decomposition and divergence-aware specification; (2) HINT-KB, a hierarchical intent-aware knowledge base that organizes dialect knowledge into (i) a canonical syntax reference, (ii) a declarative function repository, and (iii) a procedural constraint repository; and (3) an execution-driven debugging and semantic verification loop that separates syntactic recovery from logic auditing to prevent semantic drift. We construct DS-NL2SQL, a benchmark covering six major database systems with 2,218 dialect-specific test cases. Experimental results show that Dial consistently improves translation accuracy by 10.25% and dialect feature coverage by 15.77% over state-of-the-art baselines. The code is at https://github.com/weAIDB/Dial.
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Backdoor4Good: Benchmarking Beneficial Uses of Backdoors in LLMs

arXiv:2603.07452v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Backdoor mechanisms have traditionally been studied as security threats that compromise the integrity of machine learning models. However, the same mechanism -- the conditional activation of specific behaviors through input triggers -- can also serve as a controllable and auditable interface for trustworthy model behavior. In this work, we present \textbf{Backdoor4Good (B4G)}, a unified benchmark and framework for \textit{beneficial backdoor} applications in large language models (LLMs). Unlike conventional backdoor studies focused on attacks and defenses, B4G repurposes backdoor conditioning for Beneficial Tasks that enhance safety, controllability, and accountability. It formalizes beneficial backdoor learning under a triplet formulation $(T, A, U)$, representing the \emph{Trigger}, \emph{Activation mechanism}, and \emph{Utility function}, and implements a benchmark covering four trust-centric applications. Through extensive experiments across Llama3.1-8B, Gemma-2-9B, Qwen2.5-7B, and Llama2-13B, we show that beneficial backdoors can achieve high controllability, tamper-resistance, and stealthiness while preserving clean-task performance. Our findings demonstrate new insights that backdoors need not be inherently malicious; when properly designed, they can serve as modular, interpretable, and beneficial building blocks for trustworthy AI systems. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/bboylyg/BackdoorLLM/B4G.
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