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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Detecting and Mitigating DDoS Attacks with AI: A Survey

arXiv:2503.17867v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distributed Denial of Service attacks represent an active cybersecurity research problem. Recent research shifted from static rule-based defenses towards AI-based detection and mitigation. This comprehensive survey covers several key topics. Preeminently, state-of-the-art AI detection methods are discussed. An in-depth taxonomy based on manual expert hierarchies and an AI-generated dendrogram are provided, thus settling DDoS categorization ambiguities. An important discussion on available datasets follows, covering data format options and their role in training AI detection methods together with adversarial training and examples augmentation. Beyond detection, AI based mitigation techniques are surveyed as well. Finally, multiple open research directions are proposed.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation in LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct: A Mechanistic Interpretability Audit of Ethical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavioral audits of Large Language Models on moral prompts measure what the model says, not the internal computation producing it. We use Transluce, an AI-driven mechanistic-interpretability platform, to examine LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct on 54 moral prompts in four batteries: 17 dilemmas, policy, and meta-ethical questions (B1); 6 role-playing scenarios (B3); and a controlled trolley contrast varying the switching mechanism with people fixed (B4, 15 prompts) or identity attributes with mechanism fixed (B5, 16 prompts). Two complementary metric families, five cluster-level metrics and a six-metric neuron-level panel, converge on a Situational Anchor Effect: domain-specific representations dominate the top of the activation list across every battery. The model's ethics-labeled capacity stays essentially constant; its salience (rank, priority, top-of-list presence) is highly sensitive to the interpretive frame the prompt selects. The B4-vs-B5 contrast confirms the model attends to whichever surface feature varies: aggregate ethics metrics are indistinguishable, but the dominant non-ethics distractor mirrors the design. A multi-temperature audit identifies a candidate ethics neuron (L16/N3837) stable across temperatures; a cross-model behavioral proxy on two frontier models yields preliminary evidence of divergence in self-reported moral focus, consistent with an Alignment Wrapper in which RLHF re-orders surface text without removing underlying domain-first frames. We unify these as Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation: the prompt's surface vocabulary selects a feature manifold, and the moral conclusion is downstream of that selection. Behavioral alignment must be supplemented by Mechanistic Alignment: a research program asking whether ethics-related features can be shown causally privileged under controlled frame variation, not merely loud in the explanation.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Running the Gauntlet: Re-evaluating the Capabilities of Agents Beyond Familiar Environments

arXiv:2606.14397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As agentic systems continue to evolve and are widely deployed in real-world scenarios, there is a growing demand to faithfully evaluate their capabilities. However, current benchmarks are typically built on popular applications with relatively simple tasks and focus on a narrow set of capabilities while overlooking broader dimensions, resulting in saturated performance on modern agents and failing to probe their limitations. To this end, we introduce GauntletBench, a web-based benchmark for evaluating agent generalisation in challenging scenarios, focusing on three underexplored capabilities (temporal perception, graphical understanding, and 3D reasoning), across five less-covered professional applications (Video Editor, Workflow Builder, 3D Modeller, Flight Analyser, and Circuit Designer), each with 20 vision-intensive tasks (100 in total). Our benchmark provides a modular pipeline that comprises an environment compatible with both open- and closed-source agent frameworks, a controlled web-based application, a well-structured task suite, and an automated evaluation engine with diverse metrics. Contrary to widespread expectations, our empirical results reveal that frontier agentic systems remain far from achieving human-level performance. Even the state-of-the-art agent achieves only a 19.1% success rate on our GauntletBench, highlighting the limitations in these overlooked capabilities and generalisation. By comparison, non-expert human annotators achieve over 80% success on our challenging yet feasible tasks, revealing the substantial gap between current agent capabilities and those required for complex real-world scenarios.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Implementation of two-qubit Rydberg operations on neutral Rb-87 atoms in systems with different intermediate states

arXiv:2606.13975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work presents an experimental setup for implementing two-qubit operations on neutral atoms ($^{87}$Rb) with the possibility of using two different Rydberg excitation schemes. One of them uses 5P$_{1/2}$ as the intermediate level and applies the second-stage beam locally to the addressed atoms. The second scheme uses the 6P$_{3/2}$ level; in this scheme, the particles to be entangled are moved to a separate zone through which both Rydberg beams pass. The advantages and limitations of both schemes are analyzed. Based on numerical modeling performed with a Julia package developed by the authors, it is demonstrated that the spatial configuration has a greater effect on quantum-operation fidelity than the choice of intermediate level. An experimental implementation of the scheme using the 6P$_{3/2}$ level is demonstrated, making it possible to achieve a two-qubit operation fidelity of 94%.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Sub-Poissonian Statistics and Quantum Non-Gaussianity from High-Harmonic Generation

arXiv:2602.10882v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum technologies are powered by platforms to generate complex non-classical states of matter or light to realize applications. We investigate the non-classical properties of high-harmonic generation in semiconductors, an emerging photonic platform. Measuring the click statistics of three double-digit orders, we evaluate witness operators to certify the non-classicality of the generated states. We show that higher-order harmonics driven by a coherent laser are squeezed and entangled. The properties of the emission are well retrieved with an entangled Gaussian state model, obtained by numerical state optimization to multiple observables. Additionally, we perform inter-order heralded measurements to engineer the quantum state of the emission. The heralded states have distinct properties, showing sub-Poissonian photon statistics. Further, we witness the generation of a quantum non-Gaussian state, a resource highly relevant for quantum information. With this, we establish high-harmonic generation as a platform for generating quantum optical resources.

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

A Diffusion Approximation for Temporal-Difference Learning with Linear Features under Markovian Noise

arXiv:2606.18183v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation is a core method for policy evaluation. Its classical continuous-time description is an ordinary differential equation (ODE), which captures the asymptotic mean dynamics but neglects stochastic fluctuations determining the error floor. We introduce a stochastic differential equation (SDE) approximation for linear TD(0) under Markovian noise. The resulting model distinguishes the contraction dynamics governed by the projected Bellman operator from the influence of Markovian sampling. As a consequence, the model explains the constant-stepsize error floor through the interaction between Markovian long-run covariance and the contraction geometry of the projected Bellman operator.

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

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Efficient Magic State Factory Via Transversal Non-Clifford Gate

arXiv:2606.16199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Magic-state preparation is a central component of fault-tolerant quantum computing. Recent theoretical and experimental successes in code-switch-based magic-state preparation have underscored the promise of these methods for quantum error correction. Similarly, magic-state cultivation has likewise been demonstrated in both numerical and experimental settings. However, a thorough comparison between magic-state cultivation and code-switch-based magic-state factories is still missing. In this work, we carry out end-to-end simulations of magic-state preparation using code switching and compare its resource requirements and performance against magic-state cultivation. As part of this analysis, we develop a lattice-surgery protocol for transfer between the doubled color code and the rotated surface code. We extend the complete code-switching protocol to the $d=5$ doubled color code and perform the corresponding end-to-end simulations. Finally, we propose two fault-tolerant magic-state preparation protocols that combine phase-kickback checks with a transversal non-Clifford gate.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Unlocking Latent Dimensions: Exploring Representations of Large-Scale X-ray Scattering Data using Variational Autoencoders

arXiv:2606.14999v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific user facilities generate X-ray scattering data faster than traditional workflows can process them. We address this challenge across two settings, offline dataset exploration and live on-the-fly analysis. We train a domain-specific attention-based Convolutional Variational Autoencoder (C-VAE) on 1.5 million X-ray scattering images to learn low-dimensional representations capturing structural variation across diverse experimental conditions. The learned latent space reveals well-organized clusters and smooth trajectories reflecting experimental progression. It further supports controlled synthetic scattering image generation across diverse structural states. When deployed without retraining, the model organizes time-resolved film formation experiments at two synchrotron facilities into interpretable latent structures. Benchmarking against DINOv3 (ViT-7B), a general-purpose vision foundation model, demonstrates that domain-specific training yields more interpretable latent organization for scattering data. Both workflows are integrated within Latent Space Explorer, a component of the MLExchange platform, supporting interactive structural exploration across archived datasets and live experiments.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI

We introduce Cosmos 3, a family of omnimodal world models designed to jointly process and generate language, image, video, audio, and action sequences within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. By supporting highly flexible input-output configurations, Cosmos 3 seamlessly unifies critical modalities for Physical AI – effectively subsuming vision-language models, video generators, world simulators, and world-action models into a single framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that Cosmos 3 establishes a new state-of-the-art across a diverse suite of understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating omnimodal world models as scalable, general-purpose backbones for embodied agents. Our post-trained Cosmos 3 models were ranked as the best open-source Text-to-Image and Image-to-Video models by Artificial Analysis, and the best policy model by RoboArena at the time the technical report was written. To accelerate open research and deployment in Physical AI, we make our code, model checkpoints, curated synthetic datasets, and evaluation benchmark available under the Linux Foundation's OpenMDW-1.1 License at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3. The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

TrustErase: Auditable Instant Machine Unlearning with Passport-Embedded Representations

arXiv:2606.17122v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The demand for privacy-compliant AI has amplified the need for machine unlearning; yet, existing retraining or distillation-based methods remain unverifiable and computationally costly. We introduce TrustErase, a verifiable, data-free unlearning framework leveraging passport-embedded representations for instant, modular, and auditable forgetting. By treating passports as cryptographic keys within parameter-efficient adaptation layers, TrustErase enables the removal of specific classes or datasets through simple deactivation, without retraining, fine-tuning, or access to the original data. A singular value based decomposition conceals passports within model weights, ensuring that unlearning actions remain transparent and provably compliant. Evaluations on MNIST, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 show that TrustErase matches or exceeds state-of-the-art benchmarks such as DELETE, L2UL, and Boundary Shrink, while operating in a strictly data-free regime. Ultimately, TrustErase establishes a new paradigm for trustworthy, accountable, and instantly forgettable AI systems.

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

MyPCBench: A Benchmark for Personally Intelligent Computer-Use Agents

Current benchmarks for computer-use agents evaluate models in impersonal environments. This leaves a gap between evaluation and deployment where personal assistants are expected to work across a user's whole digital life, including their context, historical data, and logged-in accounts. This gap is widest on web tasks, where live web evaluations cannot exercise sites that require logging in or personal information, the kind of site a real personal assistant has to drive. We introduce MyPCBench, which tests computer-use agents as personal assistants on a Linux desktop populated with 17 simulated real-world web applications and a full desktop stack, all seeded for one canonical persona, Michael Scott from The Office. We define 184 tasks in this environment, each inspired by a real request drawn from the OpenClaw community, and benchmark six closed and open-weight models with a uniform computer+bash tool surface. We find that the best model, Claude Opus 4.6, fully solves 55.4\% of the tasks, the only model above 50\%. Model failures cluster on tasks that span many applications and on long trajectories, where personalization stresses an assistant the most. We release the environment, task set, and agent harness at https://mypcbench.com.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Fixed-Point Reasoners: Stable and Adaptive Deep Looped Transformers

arXiv:2606.18206v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Looped architectures provide an inductive bias toward learning step-by-step procedures for tasks that require compositional reasoning. The number of effective layers reached by looping determines the quality of the solution these models find. Like deep architectures, looped architectures are prone to a signal propagation problem induced by depth as the halting decision is postponed. In this paper, we address this signal propagation issue using pre-norm layers and residual scaling. Building on these architectural modifications, we propose FPRM, a Transformer-based Fixed-Point Reasoning Model that uses fixed-point convergence as an end-to-end halting mechanism in a looped architecture. We show that fixed-point halting allows FPRM to adapt its compute to task difficulty. FPRM is effective on common reasoning benchmarks, namely Sudoku, Maze, state-tracking, and ARC-AGI.

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

Ultrafast On-chip Online Learning via Spline Locality in Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

arXiv:2602.02056v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ultrafast online learning is essential for high-frequency systems, such as controls for quantum computing and nuclear fusion, where adaptation must occur on sub-microsecond timescales. Meeting these requirements demands low-latency, fixed-precision computation under strict memory constraints, a regime in which conventional Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are both inefficient and numerically unstable. We identify key properties of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) that align with these constraints. Specifically, we show that: (i) KAN updates exploiting B-spline locality are sparse, enabling superior on-chip resource scaling, and (ii) KANs are inherently robust to fixed-point quantization. By implementing fixed-point online training on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), a representative platform for on-chip computation, we demonstrate that KAN-based online learners are significantly more efficient and expressive than MLPs across a range of low-latency and resource-constrained tasks. To our knowledge, this work is the first to demonstrate model-free online learning at sub-microsecond latencies.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Measuring Epistemic Resilience of LLMs Under Misleading Medical Context

Large language models (LLMs) now reach expert-level scores on medical licensing exams, encouraging the assumption that high scores imply safe medical judgment while patients increasingly use them for health advice. We show this assumption is fragile: when misleading context is injected into questions that LLMs originally answer correctly, they abandon the correct answer. We call the ability to maintain correct judgment under adversarial context epistemic resilience, and introduce MedMisBench to measure it. MedMisBench contains 10,932 medical question items and 48,889 misleading context-option pairs spanning medical reasoning, agentic capability, and patient-journey evaluation. Across 11 model configurations, mean accuracy falls from 71.1% on original questions to 38.0% under focused misleading context, with 51.5% attack success. The most damaging injections are formal, rule-like fabrications: authority-framed falsehoods reach 69.5% attack success and exception-poisoning claims reach 64.1%. A 14-member clinical panel from 7 countries identified serious potential harm in 38.2% of reviewed cases. MedMisBench exposes a structural blind spot in LLM evaluation in medical settings: existing benchmarks measure what models know, but not whether they preserve correct medical judgment under misleading context.

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

First, do NOHARM: towards clinically safe large language models

arXiv:2512.01241v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are routinely used by physicians and patients for medical advice, yet their clinical safety profiles remain poorly characterized. We present NOHARM (Numerous Options Harm Assessment for Risk in Medicine), a 1,100-task benchmark of primary care-to-specialist consultation cases to measure the frequency and severity of harm from LLM-generated medical recommendations. NOHARM covers 10 specialties, with 12,747 expert annotations for 4,249 clinical management options. Across 28 LLMs, recommendations carried the potential for severe harm in up to 22.6% of cases, with errors of omission accounting for more than 80% of severe errors. In a randomized trial of 101 generalist physicians, human benchmark performance significantly improved with AI assistance, yet physicians remained far from realizing the potential of AI tools, frequently ignoring essential advice surfaced by AI. Safety performance tracked general-intelligence and medical-knowledge benchmarks across the full range of models but decoupled at the frontier. Despite strong performance on existing evaluations, widely used AI models can produce medical advice with the potential for severe harm at non-trivial rates, highlighting the importance of explicit measurement of clinical safety.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Static Leaderboards: Predictive Validity for the Evaluation of LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.19704v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent benchmarks are growing fast, but no single benchmark touches more than four or five of the dimensions that deployment exposes. This paper aggregates the largest coordinated deep-dive of one MCP-based industrial-agent benchmark to date: fourteen parallel implementation studies covering new asset classes (including a multi-modal visual extension), alternative orchestrations, retrieval strategies, reasoning modes, infrastructure optimizations, and evaluation-methodology probes. Consolidating those studies with seven prior agent benchmarks, we argue that aggregate-score leaderboards systematically underspecify deployed-agent evaluation. Rankings derived from aggregate scores do not transfer to out-of-distribution settings; recent public-to-hidden competition retrospectives provide direct empirical evidence of this rank instability. We propose ranking configurations by predictive validity, the correlation between in-sample and out-of-sample rank, rather than in-sample mean, and report a twelve-tier measurement apparatus that exposes the deployment-relevant dimensions HELM and its agent-era successors collapse. The position is operationalized through three falsifiable out-of-distribution criteria with explicit thresholds; existing evidence partly supports it but is too thin to confirm. We close with a pre-registered pilot design and a field-level vision for what the next generation of agentic benchmarks should report.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

DiagFlowBench: Evaluating How Language Models Handle Off-Procedure Inputs in Grounded Diagnostic Dialogue

arXiv:2606.17904v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models increasingly serve as advisory systems in maintenance operations. To prevent hallucination, recent systems ground these models in procedural documentation to constrain them to approved steps. In practice, however, operator queries frequently stray from this path, requiring models to recognise out-of-scope inputs mid-conversation, a dynamic that current benchmarks rarely prioritise. We introduce DiagFlowBench, a dataset of 50 industrial diagnostic flowcharts from a consumer manufacturer converted into 1,676 multi-turn conversations that contrast compliant with out-of-scope utterances. Evaluating a panel of ten commercial and open-weight models reveals high variability in abstention rates, with models commonly selecting a real but contextually inadequate step rather than fabricating facts. The inherent plausibility and authority of this mapped but wrong advice exposes a challenging vulnerability for grounding systems.

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

ASTRA: A Scalable Next-Generation ATCO Training Simulator with Autonomous Simpilots

arXiv:2606.18319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Air Traffic Control Operators (ATCOs) are vital in ensuring the safe, orderly, and efficient flow of air traffic, yet training capacity is constrained by reliance on specialized human trainers known as simpilots, who must role-play both pilots and ATCOs in a simulated airspace. Existing automated solutions rely on Western-centric speech models that perform poorly in Singaporean operational contexts, with off-the-shelf systems exhibiting Word Error Rates (WER) of up to 107.80% on Singaporean-accented aviation speech. We introduce ASTRA, an end-to-end training simulator that automates these simpilot roles through a pipeline that transcribes ATCO speech, interprets instructions, and generates appropriate pilot and ATCO responses using locally adapted voice models. Our fine-tuned Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) pipeline reduces WER to 23.45%, substantially outperforming existing approaches in this domain. Beyond traffic simulation, ASTRA incorporates an AI-assisted performance evaluation framework that assesses trainee radiotelephony communications across accuracy, brevity, and completeness, achieving post-optimization scores of 91.7%, 88.2%, and 86.9%, respectively. Built on open-source foundations such as DSPy and Unsloth, this approach enables scalable, standardized ATCO assessment while reducing instructor workload.

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

Know Your Limits : On the Faithfulness of LLMs as Solvers and Autoformalizers in Legal Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on reasoning tasks, but whether this reflects faithful logical inference or heuristic approximation remains unclear. We study this question in legal entailment by comparing three paradigms, including pure LLM classification, LLM-based Formal Reasoning, and solver-based Formal Reasoning using the Z3 SMT solver, on a re-annotated subset of ContractNLI across five LLMs. Our re-annotation reveals a systematic and measurable gap between pragmatic legal interpretation and strict formal entailment, where a substantial proportion of legally sound inferences are not formally grounded without additional unstated assumptions. While introducing formal structure improves accuracy, with LLM-based Formal Reasoning achieving the highest benchmark performance, we show that this gain does not imply faithful reasoning. We identify three recurring failure modes: scope laundering, where LLMs report solver-inconsistent classifications without executing the underlying formal reasoning, producing conclusions that appear logically grounded but are not; implicit constraint blindness, where LLMs overlook logical constraints present in formal representations; and program synthesis failures, where LLMs generate incorrect Z3 code despite structured prompting. Critically, scope laundering persists across all models, raising serious concerns about the faithfulness of LLM-based formal reasoning as a proxy for symbolic execution. These results reveal a fundamental gap between benchmark accuracy and logical faithfulness.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Unstable Features, Reproducible Subspaces: Understanding Seed Dependence in Sparse Autoencoders

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to interpret neural network representations, but their utility depends on whether the learned features are reproducible across training runs. We study this question through feature stability: for each SAE feature, we estimate the probability that a similar feature reappears in an independently trained SAE. This yields a scalable per-feature signal that separates stable from unstable features. In a large-scale study across seeds, models, layers, dictionary sizes, and SAE variants, we find a pronounced functional asymmetry: stable features carry most of the reconstruction- and prediction-relevant signal, while unstable features have weak marginal impact and are dominated by low-frequency surface-form triggers in both activation statistics and automatic explanations. Geometrically, unstable features are individually non-reproducible but concentrate in reproducible lower-rank subspaces, suggesting that seed dependence often reflects basis ambiguity within a shared region of activation space rather than pure noise. A controlled synthetic model makes this mechanism explicit, showing that low-rank ground-truth features can be recovered at the subspace level while remaining non-identifiable as individual SAE latents across seeds. Finally, by pooling unique cross-seed features, we construct more stable SAEs while preserving explained variance in this setting. Together, these results show that unstable features are not merely failed or noisy latents: they have weak individual functional impact, but reflect reproducible low-dimensional structure that standard SAEs resolve differently across seeds.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

A Robust Strontium Tweezer Apparatus for Quantum Computing

arXiv:2601.16564v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neutral atoms for quantum computing applications show promise in terms of scalability and connectivity. We demonstrate the realization of a versatile apparatus capable of stochastically loading a 5x5 array of optical tweezers with single $^{88}$Sr atoms featuring flexible magnetic field control and excellent optical access. A custom-designed oven, spin-flip Zeeman slower, and deflection stage produce a controlled flux of Sr directed to the science chamber. In the science chamber, featuring a vacuum pressure of $3 \times 10^{-11}$ mbar, the Sr is cooled using two laser cooling stages, resulting in $\sim 3 \times 10^5$ atoms at a temperature of 5(1) $\mu$K. The optical tweezers feature a $1/e^2$ waist of 0.81(2) $\mu$m, and loaded atoms can be imaged with a fidelity of $\sim 0.997$ and a survival probability of $0.99^{+0.01}_{-0.02}$. The atomic array presented here forms the core of a full-stack quantum computing processor targeted for quantum chemistry computational problems.

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

SoftMoE: Soft Differentiable Routing for Mixture-of-Experts in LLMs

arXiv:2606.17952v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures enable scaling LLM parameters under a fixed inference budget by activating only a small subset of experts via top-$k$ routing. While this preserves causality and suits autoregressive language models, the discrete top-$k$ operator is not differentiable, forcing a fixed number of active experts per input and resulting in inefficient use of computation. We propose SoftMoE, which replaces discrete routing with a truncated soft top-$k$ LapSum relaxation, allowing gradient-based optimization of expert routing. We further parameterize the mean number of active experts per layer and impose a global budget constraint, enabling the model to learn how to allocate expert capacity across layers. SoftMoE remains fully compatible with autoregressive modeling and achieves performance comparable to or better than sparse MoE on language modeling and downstream tasks, while activating significantly fewer experts. Notably, the learned allocation is highly non-uniform, with later layers activating more experts. The source code is publicly available$^\dagger$.

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

Online Convex Optimization with Sublinear Noisy Probes

arXiv:2606.14640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study Online Convex Optimization (OCO) over a convex set $K\subseteq \mathbb R^d$, where in each round $t$ the learner selects $x_t\in K$ and then observes a convex loss $f_t:K\to[0,1]$, with the goal of minimizing regret to the best fixed decision in hindsight. We introduce a unified probing model that generalizes two recent lines of work: sublinear best-expert queries in the experts setting, and pairwise (comparison-based) feedback available every round in OCO. In our framework, the learner has a budget of $k\le T$ pairwise probes; on a probed round it may query two points and learn which one has smaller loss. Our main result shows that even a sublinear and noisy probe budget can provably improve worst-case regret in the full feedback OCO regime. With $k$ $\delta$-noisy pairwise probes, we obtain: $ Reg_T \le O\left(\min\left\{\sqrt{dT\ln T},\; \frac{dT\ln T}{k|1-2\delta|}\right\}\right) $, which is tight (up to logarithmic factors in $T$) across $T$, $k$ and $\delta$. Specifically regarding the noise parameter $\delta \in [0,1]$, the regret guarantee smoothly degrades as the oracle response approaches a coin flip, i.e., $\delta$ is close to $\frac{1}{2}$. When applying the same techniques to a finite $K$ for the prediction with $d$ experts setting, the resulting rates are instead completely tight in all parameters, including $d$. Our analysis gives a streamlined treatment of pairwise probing in OCO by quantifying the benefit of probing via a variance reduction effect, combined with a second-order (variance-based) analysis of Continuous Exponential Weights.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Agents' Last Exam

Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long horizon, economically valuable, real world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 sub fields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is below 1%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP relevant impact.