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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Minim: Privacy-Aware Minimal View for Agents via Trusted Local Sanitization

arXiv:2606.13949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern LLM-powered autonomous agents increasingly rely on rich user interface (UI) state observations to achieve reliable action grounding in complex digital environments. However, many deployments transmit the full UI state to remote inference servers even when most elements are irrelevant to the current task, which can leak sensitive but unnecessary context such as authentication codes, private notifications, and background application states. We propose MINIM, a trusted local broker that performs privacy-aware minimization on the client side before any observation leaves the device. Grounded in Contextual Integrity (CI), MINIM learns a dual-score representation for each UI element by predicting an inherent sensitivity score (s) and a task-conditioned necessity score (n). These scores drive a ternary disclosure policy that keeps essential elements, abstracts sensitive attributes when needed, and removes task-irrelevant content. We optimize a CI-aware objective that penalizes necessity errors more strongly on high-risk content, enabling aggressive pruning while preserving task-critical information. Experiments on real-world UI observations derived from WebArena show that MINIM substantially reduces task-irrelevant sensitive leakage while preserving task-critical semantic context and the interactive affordances required for reliable agent actions.

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

Learning to Annotate Delayed and False AEB Events: A Practical System for Extreme Class Imbalance and Asymmetric Label Noise

arXiv:2606.19186v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) optimization relies on accurately annotated real-world trigger events, particularly rare but critical delayed and false AEB triggers that expose system deficiencies. However, these minority samples comprise less than 5% of thousands of daily triggers, making manual annotation prohibitively expensive at scale. We present the first automated AEB annotation framework to address this problem. During development, we identified two fundamental challenges that severely impair delayed/false trigger annotation accuracy: (1) Extreme class imbalance where delayed/false triggers are overwhelmed by true triggers; (2) Asymmetric label noise where mislabeled majority samples (true triggers) suppress minority samples (delayed/false triggers) learning. To overcome these challenges, we propose two key innovations: (1) Specific data augmentation that synthesizes realistic samples by manipulating focal target attributes, transplanting ego-vehicle dynamics, and masking non-focal agents; (2) noise suppression using stable hardness estimation and probe-guided adaptive threshold to clean mislabeled true trigger samples. Crucially, we deploy our model as a practical annotation system with full-stack architecture, efficiently identifying critical delayed/false triggers from thousands of daily AEB events. Production results demonstrate 80% improvement in recall of delayed/false triggers and 50% reduction in manual workload. Beyond immediate gains, the system enables continuous self-improvement through accumulated high-quality annotations, establishing a necessary data foundation for on-vehicle AEB system optimization

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Multi-Agent Framework for Audit Risk Assessment with Explicit Uncertainty and Evidence Conflict Modeling

arXiv:2606.15640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Audit risk assessment increasingly benefits from combining heterogeneous evidence sources, yet existing approaches typically produce point predictions without quantifying how well different evidence streams agree. We propose UMAR (Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Agent Risk Assessment), a framework that employs three specialized agents: an MD&A Text Agent, a Financial Ratio Agent, and a CAM Agent, each producing independent risk scores with calibrated uncertainty estimates. An Uncertainty Aggregator based on Dempster-Shafer evidence theory fuses these scores while explicitly measuring inter-agent conflict. We evaluate UMAR on a U.S. dataset of 3,200 firm-year observations from SEC 10-K filings (2019-2023), with financial restatement as the target label. Experimental results show that UMAR achieves an AUROC of 0.782 and a PR-AUC of 0.341, outperforming logistic regression, XGBoost, FinBERT, and single-agent and dual-agent LLM baselines. UMAR attains the lowest expected calibration error (ECE = 0.052) among all methods and identifies evidence-conflict patterns that correlate with actual restatement risk, offering auditors potentially actionable and interpretable risk signals.

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

FireRed-Image-Edit-1.0 Technical Report

We present FireRed-Image-Edit, a diffusion transformer for instruction-based image editing that achieves state-of-the-art performance through systematic optimization of data curation, training methodology, and evaluation design. We construct a 1.6B-sample training corpus, comprising 900M text-to-image and 700M image editing pairs from diverse sources. After rigorous cleaning, stratification, auto-labeling, and two-stage filtering, we retain over 100M high-quality samples balanced between generation and editing, ensuring strong semantic coverage and instruction alignment. Our multi-stage training pipeline progressively builds editing capability via pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. To improve data efficiency, we introduce a Multi-Condition Aware Bucket Sampler for variable-resolution batching and Stochastic Instruction Alignment with dynamic prompt re-indexing. To stabilize optimization and enhance controllability, we propose Asymmetric Gradient Optimization for DPO, DiffusionNFT with layout-aware OCR rewards for text editing, and a differentiable Consistency Loss for identity preservation. We further establish REDEdit-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning 15 editing categories, including newly introduced beautification and low-level enhancement tasks. Extensive experiments on REDEdit-Bench and public benchmarks (ImgEdit and GEdit) demonstrate competitive or superior performance against both open-source and proprietary systems. To support future research, our code, models, and benchmark suite are publicly available at https://github.com/FireRedTeam/FireRed-Image-Edit/ .

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Large-scale semantic mapping of learner agency and autonomy reveals what measurement and generative AI research overlook

arXiv:2606.10881v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learner agency and autonomy are foundational to personal development, yet a pervasive "jingle-jangle" fallacy (i.e. identical terms denoting different constructs, distinct terms denoting identical ones) has substantially hindered cumulative knowledge. Treating meaning as a phenomenon constituted through use in linguistic practice, we extracted 8,954 definitions and 2,700 scale items from over 14,000 publications, to investigate how researchers actually used learner agency and autonomy with a semantic analysis pipeline. The definitional landscape of two constructs resolves into three dimensions: regulation and control of learning (task), intrinsic motivation and internal decision-making (person), and social-relational action (sociocultural), thereby empirically quantifying the jingle-jangle fallacy. Existing scales, however, systematically underrepresent the sociocultural dimension. Critically, current generative AI research in education concentrates on learning regulation and control, narrowing the behavioral repertoire that AI-mediated learning environments are designed to cultivate. Beyond conceptual clarification, this work carries direct implications for conceptualization, measurement, and practice towards supporting the multidimensional learner agency and autonomy.

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

TerraBench: Can Agents Reason Over Heterogeneous Earth-System Data?

arXiv:2606.13148v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Climate and environmental decision-making increasingly requires reasoning across heterogeneous inputs, including gridded physical data, satellite imagery, geospatial context, and simulator outputs. Weather and climate foundation models can forecast well, but do not reason interactively in language, while large language models (LLMs) reason in language but cannot operate directly on high-dimensional Earth-system data. As a result, real scientific workflows in Earth-science remain underserved. We introduce TerraBench, a benchmark for grounded Earth-science reasoning, built on TerraAgent, a ReAct-style executable framework that interleaves reasoning, tool calls, and observations to couple LLM planning with scientific tools for environmental retrieval, geospatial processing, simulation, and artifact-backed computation. TerraBench unifies analysis of Earth observation imagery, gridded data, GIS reasoning and simulation in a single executable interface, whereas prior benchmarks isolate these capabilities into narrow individual tasks. It is also the first in this space to pair process-level tool-use metrics with tolerance-aware numeric scoring. The benchmark comprises 403 extensive agentic tasks across three tracks (Fundamentals, Simulator-Grounded, and Document-Grounded Verification) and eight application domains with 24,500 verified execution steps. These results indicate that reliable Earth-science agents must go beyond tool access to coordinate heterogeneous workflows, parameterize tools precisely, and preserve artifact provenance.

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

"**Important** You should give me full credits!": Exploring Prompt Injection Attacks on LLM-Based Automatic Grading Systems

arXiv:2606.03090v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly accelerated recent research on LLM-based automatic grading (AG) systems. Benefiting from the strong instruction-following capabilities and broad prior knowledge of LLMs, educators can deploy AG systems across diverse tasks using only natural language rubrics while achieving satisfactory grading performance. Despite these advantages, new security concerns may also arise. In particular, prompt injection (PI) attacks have recently become a major threat to LLM-based applications. In the context of AG, attackers can potentially exploit PI vulnerabilities to manipulate grading systems into assigning artificially high scores regardless of the actual answer quality. Such behavior poses serious risks to the fairness, reliability, and integrity of educational assessment. In this work, we study PI attacks in AG systems, and systematically investigate the effectiveness of such attacks in educational scenarios. We further evaluate the effectiveness of existing defensive strategies against these attacks. Through comprehensive experiments under rubric-based grading settings, we demonstrate that current LLM-based AG systems remain highly vulnerable to PI attacks. We hope that our findings raise awareness of this emerging threat and motivate future research toward secure, robust, and trustworthy LLM-based educational systems.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Beyond-Third-Order Quantum Coherence in Two-Dimensional Spectroscopy via Order-Selective Isolation

arXiv:2606.12794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central challenge in nonlinear spectroscopy is the order-selective readout of weak higher-order responses that spectrally overlap with dominant lower-order signals. This bottleneck is particularly severe in two-dimensional (2D) spectroscopy, where extending conventional phase-cycling schemes to higher orders rapidly increases measurement and analysis complexity. Here we introduce a computation-assisted strategy that combines rotating-frame acquisition with a frame-shift tracking algorithm to separate signals by their frame-dependent spectral shifts. In a rubidium vapor experiment, we use this approach to isolate a 7th-order nonlinear contribution from coexisting 3rd-order components, enabling direct access to higher-order quantum-coherence dynamics without sacrificing operation at comparatively high pulse intensities. The method is broadly compatible with multidimensional spectroscopy platforms and provides a practical route to probing many-body and collective ultrafast dynamics beyond third order.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Are Frontier LLMs Ready for Cybersecurity? Evidence for Vertical Foundation Models from Dual-Mode Vulnerability Benchmarks

arXiv:2605.23243v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We evaluate whether frontier LLMs are ready for cybersecurity through a dual-mode benchmark: white-box function-level vulnerability detection (VulnLLM-R, across C/Java/Python) and black-box web application security testing (five production-style applications with 118 ground-truth vulnerabilities across 20+ CWE families, which we will open-source). We test six frontier models (GPT-5.4, Codex~5.3, Claude Opus~4.6, Sonnet~4.6, Gemini~3.1~Pro and Gemini~3~Flash) and two domain-specialized models across four testing paradigms. Our findings are sobering: (1)~every frontier model produces 10-50% false positive rates in white-box detection, systematically over-predicting vulnerabilities; (2)~in black-box testing, frontier models achieve only 4-8% ground-truth coverage, improving to just 10-19% even with external security tools (Playwright MCP, Burp Suite MCP); (3)~structured penetration-testing methodology encoded in domain-specialized agents raises per-family detection above 50%, demonstrating that methodology, not scale, is the primary lever; and (4)~a domain-specialized defense model achieves the highest precision (0.904) and lowest false positive rate (9.7%) among all models, on a single GPU. We identify the absence of structured security testing traces end-to-end request/response sequences, failure-heavy data, and multi-step attack chains as the fundamental training data bottleneck, and propose self-play security testing as a data generation strategy. Our results make the case for vertical foundation models purpose-built for cybersecurity.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

GH-ESD: Grounded Hypothesis-Driven Error Slice Discovery for Instance-Level Vision Tasks

Systematic failures of vision models on semantically coherent subsets, known as error slices, reveal limitations in robustness and evaluation. Existing slice discovery approaches largely model slices as clusters in representation space or combinations of predefined attributes. While effective for image-level classification, such formulations are insufficient for instance-level tasks such as object detection and segmentation, where failures often arise from contextual relational and spatially grounded visual patterns. We propose GH-ESD (Grounded Hypothesis-Driven Error Slice Discovery), a generate and verify framework that reformulates slice discovery as grounded hypothesis generation and statistical verification. GH-ESD constructs relational failure hypotheses using LLM priors and grounded visual evidence, discovers hypothesis slices at the instance level via Vision Language Models, and verifies them through statistical trend analysis over instance-level errors. We also introduce GESD (Grounded Error Slice Dataset), a new benchmark for instance-level error slice discovery, providing expert-defined and spatially grounded slices derived from detection and segmentation failures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GH-ESD consistently outperforms baselines, improving Precision@10 by 0.10 (0.73 vs. 0.63) on the GESD benchmark for detection tasks, while also supporting segmentation scenarios. GH-ESD identifies interpretable slices that facilitate actionable model improvements. The GESD dataset will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

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

Uncertainty Estimation for Molecular Diffusion Models

arXiv:2606.13451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have seen wide adoption for 3D molecular generation, yet they offer no principled signal of when a generated molecule is likely to be of low quality. We propose a post-hoc method for estimating per-sample uncertainty in pretrained molecular diffusion models. Building on a Laplace approximation of the denoising network, we measure the variability of the noise prediction across the generation trajectory. Empirically, we show that the resulting uncertainty score is informative of sample quality, exhibiting a negative correlation with established sample-level quality metrics. We further study how the proposed uncertainty score can be used to filter generated samples, improving model performance via test-time scaling.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

From hotspot dependence to distributed robustness in resistance-aware lead optimization

Drug resistance remains a recurrent failure mode in targeted anticancer and antiviral therapy, and resistance evidence often enters only after compound selection. ResistAgent is an evidence-constrained framework that converts mutational liabilities into design-time objectives through site- and combo-aware resistance mapping, deterministic mechanism diagnosis and robust counter-design. In EGFR-Erlotinib and HIV-RT-Rilpivirine, the framework separated residue-level liabilities from observed HIV combination liabilities and linked prioritized mutations to anchor loss, pocket rearrangement, electrostatic shifts and contact redistribution. Same-budget paired searches showed that robust objectives changed lower-tail mutant-panel behavior and interaction-dependence profiles while prioritizing robustness over average-affinity behavior. Under predefined liability panels, selected robust-best trajectories shifted support away from mutable hotspot contacts toward more distributed interaction networks. Supplementary physical summaries and ranking-first benchmarks support the scope of this resistance-aware design strategy while preserving clear boundaries for prospective validation.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

3D Scene Graphs: Open Challenges and Future Directions

3D Scene Graphs (3DSGs) have emerged as a powerful representation for spatial AI by combining geometric grounding with semantic and relational abstractions of the environment. Their expressiveness has made them relevant to a broad range of problems in robotics and computer vision, including manipulation, navigation, task planning, scene understanding, and many others. However, the field remains fragmented: different communities adopt distinct formulations, construction pipelines, and evaluation protocols, making it difficult to compare methods, identify common assumptions, and assess remaining challenges for robust real-world deployment. This survey provides a unified and critical review of 3DSGs, with particular emphasis on open challenges and future directions. We first formalize 3DSGs under a common definition and analyze the principal modeling choices that characterize existing formulations, including node and edge attributes, hierarchical structure, dynamic scene representations, and affordance-aware extensions. We then review how 3DSGs are built from raw sensory observations, discussing the most common terminologies, conventions, and techniques. Finally, we examine downstream applications and evaluation strategies, from intrinsic graph quality to task-level performance. To support the community, we also provide a dedicated website that organizes and extends the surveyed content, accessible at https://3dscenegraphs.com/.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Residual Context Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to purely autoregressive language models because they can decode multiple tokens in parallel. However, state-of-the-art block-wise dLLMs rely on a "remasking" mechanism that decodes only the most confident tokens and discards the rest, effectively wasting computation. We demonstrate that recycling computation from the discarded tokens is beneficial, as these tokens retain contextual information useful for subsequent decoding iterations. In light of this, we propose Residual Context Diffusion (RCD), a module that converts these discarded token representations into contextual residuals and injects them back for the next denoising step. RCD uses a decoupled two-stage training pipeline to bypass the memory bottlenecks associated with backpropagation. We validate our method on both long CoT reasoning (SDAR) and short CoT instruction following (LLaDA) models. We demonstrate that a standard dLLM can be efficiently converted to the RCD paradigm with merely ~300 million tokens. RCD consistently improves frontier dLLMs by 4-11 percentage points in accuracy with minimal extra computation overhead across a wide range of benchmarks. Notably, on the most challenging AIME tasks, RCD nearly doubles baseline accuracy and attains up to 4-5x fewer denoising steps at baseline's peak accuracy.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Inhibited radiative decay enhances single-photon emitters

arXiv:2511.23301v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum networks and modular quantum computers require efficient spin-photon interfaces, often realized using optical resonators that enhance radiative decay on a desired transition. However, this requires small mode volumes and high quality factors, which limits multiplexing capacity and demands precise frequency tuning. Here, we demonstrate an alternative approach that circumvents these bottlenecks for upscaling. Using a W1 silicon photonic crystal waveguide with a tailored photonic bandgap, we selectively inhibit unwanted decay pathways, thereby redirecting emission to the desired transition. This enables efficient photon collection over a large frequency range, allowing the resolution and individual addressing of tens of erbium dopants. Their lifetimes are preserved, or even increased, compared to bulk material. The extended mode volume of the devices enables the use of lower dopant concentrations, thereby improving emitter coherence. Our approach can be combined with Purcell enhancement and applied to other spin-qubit platforms, opening intriguing perspectives for photonic quantum technologies.

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

SpatialClaw: Rethinking Action Interface for Agentic Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning, the ability to determine where objects are, how they relate, and how they move in 3D, remains a fundamental challenge for vision-language models (VLMs). Tool-augmented agents attempt to address this by augmenting VLMs with specialist perception modules, yet their effectiveness is bounded by the action interface through which those tools are invoked. In this work, we study how the design of this interface shapes the agent's capacity for open-ended spatial reasoning. Existing spatial agents either employ single-pass code execution, which commits to a full analysis strategy before any intermediate result is observed, or rely on a structured tool-call interface that often offers less flexibility for freely composing operations or tailoring the analysis to each task. Both designs offer limited flexibility for open-ended, complex 3D/4D spatial reasoning. We therefore propose SpatialClaw, a training-free framework for spatial reasoning that adopts code as the action interface. SpatialClaw maintains a stateful Python kernel pre-loaded with input frames and a suite of perception and geometry primitives, letting a VLM-backed agent write one executable cell per step conditioned on all prior outputs, enabling the agent to flexibly compose and manipulate perception results and adapt its analysis to both intermediate text and visual observations and the demands of each problem. Evaluated across 20 spatial reasoning benchmarks spanning a broad range of static and dynamic 3D/4D spatial reasoning tasks, SpatialClaw achieves 59.9% average accuracy, outperforming the recent spatial agent by +11.2 points, with consistent gains across six VLM backbones from two model families without any benchmark- or model-specific adaptation.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Learning the Geometry of Data: A Mathematical Review of Shape Space Analysis

arXiv:2606.17022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central objective of machine learning is to identify structure and patterns in data. Advances in data acquisition have increasingly produced datasets whose observations possess rich geometric form, giving rise to shape spaces that encode variability in object geometry. Such datasets arise across a wide range of disciplines, including biology, medicine, anthropology, and computer vision, where subtle geometric differences often carry important scientific information. Traditional machine learning methods, however, are frequently ill-equipped to account for the nonlinear geometric structure underlying these data. This survey synthesizes a rapidly growing body of work on shape space analysis, which provides a mathematical and computational framework for the study of geometric data. Drawing on ideas from differential geometry, statistics, and machine learning, we organize the literature around a common analytical pipeline: shape representation and parameterization, the rigorous construction of robust geodesic metrics, statistical analysis on shape spaces, and geometry-aware learning methods. We discuss how these tools enable the characterization of shape variability, the comparison of geometric objects, and the analysis of structural trajectories across populations and time. To illustrate the breadth of the field, we highlight applications spanning multiple scales of biological organization, including studies of subcellular morphology and primate tooth evolution. Across these and many other domains, researchers face common challenges arising from complex, nonlinear, and often unaligned geometric variation. The review concludes by identifying key theoretical and computational challenges, as well as emerging opportunities driven by increasingly large and diverse geometric datasets.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Large Language Model Agents Are Not Always Faithful Self-Evolvers

Self-evolving large language model (LLM) agents continually improve by accumulating and reusing past experience, yet it remains unclear whether they faithfully rely on that experience to guide their behavior. We present the first systematic investigation of experience faithfulness, the causal dependence of an agent's decisions on the experience it is given, in self-evolving LLM agents. Using controlled causal interventions on both raw and condensed forms of experience, we comprehensively evaluate four representative frameworks across 13 LLM backbones and 9 environments. Our analysis uncovers a striking asymmetry: while agents consistently depend on raw experience, they often disregard or misinterpret condensed experience, even when it is the only experience provided. This gap persists across single- and multi-agent configurations and across backbone scales. We trace its underlying causes to three factors: the semantic limitations of condensed content, internal processing biases that suppress experience, and task regimes where pretrained priors already suffice. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions about self-evolving methods and underscore the need for more faithful and reliable approaches to experience integration.

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

Geometric and Quantum Kernel Methods for Predicting Skeletal Muscle Outcomes in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

arXiv:2601.00921v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and skeletal-muscle dysfunction is clinically important. Quantum machine learning is increasingly explored for biomedical prediction, but its value in small biomarker cohorts requires benchmarking against strong classical baselines. We analysed a cigarette-smoke COPD cohort of 213 animals with blood and bronchoalveolar-lavage biomarkers to predict tibialis anterior muscle weight, muscle quality, and force. We developed a kernel-geometric quantum hybrid method in which synthetic symmetric positive definite (SPD) references are mapped through a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, compressed using train-only random projection, normalised, and supplied to low-dimensional quantum regression circuits. We benchmarked this approach against classical ridge/kernel models, SPD relational representations, and quantum-kernel regression (QKR). All methods were evaluated using condition-stratified repeated cross-validation. The largest numerical improvement was observed for muscle weight, where the proposed method had the numerically lowest mean root mean squared error (RMSE), approximately 1.8% below the best classical comparator; paired fold-level testing did not establish statistically significant superiority after Holm adjustment, but the endpoint is biologically meaningful. The method also had the numerically lowest mean RMSE for muscle quality. For force, biomarker-only Ridge performed best, suggesting a more linear endpoint structure.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Training-Free Adversarial Robustness in Computational MRI

Deep learning (DL) methods have become the state-of-the-art for reconstructing sub-sampled magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. However, studies have shown that these methods are susceptible to small adversarial input perturbations, resulting in major distortions in the output images. Various strategies have been proposed to reduce the effects of these attacks, but they require retraining. In this work, we propose a novel approach for mitigating adversarial attacks on MRI reconstruction models without any retraining. Based on the idea of cyclic measurement consistency, we devise a novel mitigation objective that is minimized in a small ball around the attack input. Results show that our method substantially reduces the impact of adversarial perturbations across different datasets, attack types/strengths and PD-DL networks, and qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms conventional mitigation methods. We also introduce a practically relevant scenario for small adversarial perturbations that models impulse noise in raw data, which relates to herringbone artifacts, and show the applicability of our approach in this setting. Finally, we show our mitigation approach remains effective in two realistic extension scenarios: a blind setup, where the attack strength or algorithm is not known to the user; and an adaptive attack setup, where the attacker has full knowledge of the defense strategy.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Reducing Learner Redundancy in Boosting via Residual Orthogonalization

arXiv:2606.17567v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While sequential residual fitting is the bedrock of standard boosting frameworks, it inherently breeds learner redundancy by repeatedly revisiting correlated error components. To address this bottleneck, we propose a shift from residual fitting to residual orthogonalization and introduce SCBoost. Our framework tackles redundancy through two complementary mechanisms: Spectral Residual Projection (SRP) and Covariance-Regularized Weighting (CRW). During training, SRP projects each residual target onto the orthogonal complement of the historical prediction subspace, forcing successive learners to capture only novel empirical innovations. During aggregation, CRW optimizes ensemble weights on a validation set with an explicit covariance penalty to mitigate remaining correlations. Theoretically, we provide a finite-sample geometric characterization proving that SRP yields an exact additive residual-energy decomposition. Furthermore, under an isotropic-noise assumption, we rigorously establish the conditions under which this projection improves the effective Signal-to-Noise Ratio. Extensive experiments across ten benchmark datasets demonstrate that SCBoost delivers strong out-of-the-box performance, particularly in accuracy and F1 score. This work reinterprets boosting through a geometric lens, suggesting that explicit redundancy control is a principled and necessary step toward more efficient ensemble architectures.

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

Understanding Scam Trends and Rail Paths from Reddit Self-Disclosure Narratives

Online scam behavior is inherently multi-stage, and the lifecycle includes temporally ordered rails and events rather than isolated signals. Existing works analyze characteristics of scam types and rails, but they do not track scam trends across years. Moreover, the work on the relations between rails is hampered due to the lack of open-source datasets with annotations and coverage of different scam types. To address these gaps, we build a dataset to analyze the yearly trend of scam characteristics and rail paths using Reddit self-disclosure narratives from 2023 to 2025. We collect 21,304 posts from scam-related subreddits with at least one rail among identity, communication, platform, and payment for trend analysis by heuristic annotation. Then, we label 1,800 posts containing explicit or recoverable scam chains by an LLM-assisted method for scam path analysis. The method is evaluated with human annotation. Lastly, we run a topic model on the comments of the posts to analyze the community support behavior. The results reveal that scam processes are predominantly multi-rail. Across years, different scam types and rail components dominate. Different scam types vary systematically in path complexity. Reddit support behaviors have become more detailed over time. This work supports synthetic scam chain data simulation and AI-related scam risk assessment, though findings may not generalise to other platforms.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Fanconi Anemia as a Window into Premalignant Field Cancerization of the Oral Mucosa

Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) evolves through stepwise clonal expansion within genetically altered mucosa fields, yet actionable biomarkers remain undefined. Leveraging Fanconi anemia (FA), a cancer predisposition syndrome with extreme HNSCC risk due to defective DNA interstrand crosslink repair, we profiled premalignant changes in the oral cavity using noninvasive brush biopsies. Consistent with our prior demonstration of genomic instability in FA-associated SCCs, we detected pathogenic TP53 variants in 26% and copy number alterations in 60.5% in clinically normal-appearing oral mucosa of individuals with FA. These subclinical clonal expansions define candidate biomarkers of early clonal evolution amenable to serial sampling for risk stratification and prevention studies. Since FA-associated SCCs share genomic features with sporadic HNSCC, these findings may extend to the broader population. We also identify somatic reversion of a pathogenic FANCB variant, providing evidence of genomic self-correction and suggesting a potential avenue for gene-based cancer prevention in FA.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

ReportQA: QA-Based Radiology Report Evaluation

Radiology report evaluation is essential for advancing automated report generation. Natural language generation metrics have limited clinical relevance. Clinical efficacy (CE) metrics evaluate important medical findings, but focus mainly on presence and cover only a limited set of entities. Due to heavy reliance on manual annotations, it is difficult for CE metrics to extend clinical entities or attributes. In clinical practice, radiology reports serve as a medium for information transfer. Clinicians use them to perform downstream diagnostic tasks without directly inspecting images. Based on this insight, we propose ReportQA, a clinical-related and flexible radiology report evaluation framework, supporting detailed quantitative analysis of radiology report generation systems. We first collect datasets covering multiple imaging modalities and anatomical regions. We then construct knowledge trees of clinical entities and attributes with radiologist guidance, and use large language models (LLMs) to extract structured information from raw reports. Next, we generate QA pairs from predefined templates and apply quality control through self-filtering and report-based filtering. During evaluation, the report is treated as context, and an LLM acts as a judge model to answer the QA pairs. Based on the resulting QA accuracy, we introduce QAScore metric. Compared with existing metrics, QAScore shows better alignment with radiologist judgments. Experiments on multiple state-of-the-art vision-language models reveal that current report-based inference paradigms struggle to learn fine-grained clinical representations and exhibit strong negative prior biases. In contrast, question-driven inference provides a more effective alternative. For reproducibility and extensibility, we release the knowledge trees, structured reports, and QA pairs, along with the pipeline code for QA construction and evaluation.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Visual Verification Enables Inference-time Steering and Autonomous Policy Improvement

arXiv:2606.18247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world should learn from their experience and improve over time. This requires a mechanism of practicing and learning from feedback. In this paper, we propose VERITAS, a generator-verifier framework for generalist robot policies for inference-time policy steering and self-improvement. We use a pre-trained generalist robot policy as a ``generator'' and pair it with a gradient-free ``visual verifier'' that evaluates actions at inference time. This framework enables inference-time steering that improves policy performance without additional training. We demonstrate that inference-time verification consistently outperforms vanilla generalists without training on additional demonstration data. Additionally, we demonstrate that the verified rollouts provide effective supervision for offline policy improvement: policies fine-tuned on verified self-generated trajectories achieve consistent performance gains. Notably, we find that post-training with verified rollouts achieves comparable efficiency to expert demonstrations, while requiring no human interventions. Our results highlight inference-time verification as a practical and scalable mechanism for improving robotic policies during deployment.