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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Examining the Cognitive Gap Between Authors and Peer Reviewers on Academic Paper Novelty

Novelty is a crucial metric for assessing the quality of academic papers. Scholars strive to highlight the novel aspects of their work, particularly in the title, abstract, and introduction. Peer review, serving as the gatekeeper of scientific rigor, rigorously evaluates the novelty of papers, yet a cognitive gap may exist between author self-promotion and reviewer evaluation. To investigate this, we analyzed 15,328 academic papers published in Nature Communications from 2016 to 2021, along with their peer-review comments. We found that both reviewers and authors emphasize result-oriented innovation, with reviewers adopting a more comprehensive evaluation perspective. Furthermore, by examining promotional intensity against inherent paper novelty, we found that its effect depends on the paper's actual innovation level. Highly innovative papers benefit from stronger promotional language, receiving more positive evaluations. We also found that promotional language significantly correlates with reviewer disagreement on novelty specifically for papers of moderate innovativeness, whereas it has negligible impact for papers with either very high or very low novelty. This reveals how promotional language operates most prominently in the gray area of academic evaluation.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

BoRAD: Bootstrap your Own Representations for Multi-class Anomaly Detection

Reconstruction-based anomaly detection is attractive for industrial inspection, but scaling it from category-specific training to a one-for-all setting is challenging. A single model must reconstruct diverse normal appearances without copying abnormal details, which exposes two coupled failure modes: identical shortcut, where anomalies pass through the reconstruction path, and mis-reconstruction, where normal categories are confused with one another. We propose BoRAD, a label-free training framework that treats this as a representation-capacity allocation problem. BoRAD uses a shared learnable prototype bank to impose two complementary regularizers: spatial prototype alignment contracts local within-prototype variation to suppress anomaly copying, while prototype-relative global alignment preserves between-prototype structure and improves sensitivity to abnormal angular deviations. The prototype bank and prediction heads are used only during training; inference remains a standard teacher-student feature discrepancy pass, with no class labels, negative pairs, memory retrieval, or prototype lookup. BoRAD achieves competitive one-for-all anomaly detection performance, including 86.2\% mAD on MVTec AD, 80.7\% mAD on VisA and 73.1\% mAD on Real-IAD. Diagnostic analyses further show reduced anomaly leakage, improved normal-category separability, and stronger anomaly-normal score separation.

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

Multi-Grade Deep Learning for Partial Differential Equations with Applications to the Burgers Equation

arXiv:2309.07401v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) show great promise for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), but their deep architectures introduce complex, large-scale, non-convex optimization challenges. Nonlinear PDEs, like the viscous Burgers' equation, compound these difficulties due to steep gradients and shock-like solutions. To address this, we propose a two-stage multi-grade deep learning (TS-MGDL) method. In the first stage, shallow networks are trained progressively grade by grade to fit the target function from low- to high-frequency components; previously learned grades are frozen, and each new residual block is trained solely to minimize the remaining approximation error. The second stage unfreezes and retrains selected layers using the first-stage network as initialization, achieving an interpretable, stable hierarchical refinement while mitigating optimization complexity. Furthermore, we theoretically prove that each grade and stage in TS-MGDL monotonically reduces the loss function under an appropriate optimization strategy. Numerical experiments on 1D, 2D, and 3D viscous Burgers' equations demonstrate that TS-MGDL significantly outperforms single-grade learning (SGL), reducing predictive errors by up to a factor of 60.

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

Riemannian MeanFlow for One-Step Generation on Manifolds

arXiv:2603.10718v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Flow Matching enables simulation-free training of generative models on Riemannian manifolds, yet sampling typically still relies on numerically integrating a probability-flow ODE. We propose Riemannian MeanFlow (RMF), extending MeanFlow to manifold-valued generation where velocities lie in location-dependent tangent spaces. RMF defines an average-velocity field via parallel transport and derives a Riemannian MeanFlow identity that links average and instantaneous velocities for intrinsic supervision. We make this identity practical in a log-map tangent representation, avoiding trajectory simulation and heavy geometric computations. For stable optimization, we decompose the RMF objective into two terms and apply conflict-aware multi-task learning to mitigate gradient interference. RMF also supports conditional generation via classifier-free guidance. Experiments on spheres, tori, SO(3), and SE(3) demonstrate competitive one-step sampling with improved quality-efficiency trade-offs and substantially reduced sampling cost.

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

Mixed-State Topological Order under Coherent Noise

arXiv:2411.03441v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixed-state phases of matter under local decoherence have recently garnered significant attention due to the ubiquitous presence of noise in current quantum processors. One of the key issues is understanding how topological quantum memory is affected by realistic coherent noise, such as random rotation noise and amplitude-damping noise. In this work, we investigate the intrinsic error threshold of the two-dimensional toric code (TC), a paradigmatic topological quantum memory, under these types of coherent noise by employing both analytical and numerical methods based on the doubled-Hilbert-space formalism. A connection between the mixed-state phase of the decohered TC and a non-Hermitian Ashkin-Teller-type statistical-mechanics model is established, and the mixed-state phase diagrams under the coherent noise are obtained. We find remarkable stability of mixed-state topological order under random rotation noise with axes near the $Y$-axis of qubits. We also identify intriguing extended critical regions at the phase boundaries, highlighting a connection with non-Hermitian physics. We argue that these phase boundaries provide upper bounds for the intrinsic error threshold, beyond which quantum error correction becomes impossible. We complement these findings by estimating the error thresholds for random rotation noise under standard quantum error correction, thereby providing lower bounds on the intrinsic error threshold.

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

RegimeVGGT: Layer-Wise Spatially Preserving Redundancy Removal for Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer

Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) recovers dense 3D scene structure from multi-view images in one forward pass, but quadratic cross-frame attention limits its scalability. Existing training-free accelerators reduce computation uniformly along one axis, missing layer heterogeneity. Our spectral, probing, and causal analyses reveal three regimes: shallow layers lack cross-view structure, middle layers drive cross-view alignment, and deep layers are redundant for dense geometry yet their cross-frame attention remains essential for pose. RegimeVGGT applies layer-wise U-shaped compression along two axes: Saliency-Guided Banded Merging protects geometry- and edge-salient tokens, while Selectively Protected K/V Downsampling preserves cross-frame spatial coverage and the pose-critical path through a phase-shifted spatial grid, a reference-frame anchor, and uncompressed camera/register tokens. Training-free, RegimeVGGT achieves a 6.7x speedup over VGGT* at matched reconstruction quality.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

The Measurement Gap in the Automation of EU Law: Benchmarking Doctrinal Legal Reasoning under the EU AI Act

Large language models now produce legal text of at least median quality, yet no existing benchmark can evaluate whether they perform doctrinal legal reasoning, which forms the interpretive core of legal work, rather than the ancillary, paralegal tasks that most current legal-AI evaluations measure. This measurement gap is not only methodological but legal: the EU AI Act makes "appropriate accuracy" a binding requirement for high-risk AI used in the judicial domain, yet that requirement cannot acquire operational content without the very doctrinal-reasoning benchmark the field lacks.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Stalls and Spequlation: Pipelined Execution for Fault Tolerant Quantum Computation

arXiv:2606.19593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum computation requires the coordinated action of three distinct systems: classical control logic, quantum hardware, and classical error decoders. Current scheduling models treat logical operations as atomic, hiding the fact that these subsystems operate sequentially and spend significant time idle. We present a pipelined execution framework that decomposes each logical operation into its component stages i.e. Control, Execute, and Decode. Building on this, we discuss some speculation strategies that allow successor operations to begin processing before their predecessors have completed decoding. We evaluate our framework on several common benchmarks and show that pipelining with speculation reduces total pipeline steps by 20-40% compared to a no-speculation baseline. The most aggressive strategy consistently outperforms conservative alternatives, even though partial rollback is needed at times, because the per-rollback penalty is small relative to the parallelism gained. We further show that speculation facilitates load balancing by distributing work more evenly across the heterogeneous subsystems of a fault-tolerant quantum computer, converting idle time into useful computation while also saving on execution time.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

SAT, MaxSAT, and SMT for QLDPC Distance Computation: A Large-Scale Empirical Study

arXiv:2606.12445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exact distance computation for quantum LDPC (QLDPC) codes plays a central role in validating candidate fault-tolerant quantum-code constructions, yet the computational structure of this problem remains poorly understood. Despite substantial recent progress in QLDPC design, it remains unclear which algorithmic principles govern the practical scalability of exact distance computation and which classes of exact solvers are best suited to this task. To address these questions, we conduct a systematic study of SAT- and MaxSAT-based formulations for exact QLDPC distance computation across representative codes. We further compare these formulations against several established exact-distance approaches in order to better understand the algorithmic landscape of exact QLDPC distance computation. Our study challenges and refines several prevailing intuitions about exact QLDPC distance computation. First, despite the XOR-rich structure of QLDPC parity checks, practical scalability appears to be governed more by the handling of cardinality constraints and optimization bounds than by parity reasoning alone. Accordingly, XOR-aware reasoning does not provide a systematic advantage across our benchmark suite. Second, Brouwer-Zimmermann-style search, long regarded as the benchmark paradigm for exact distance computation in sparse classical codes, no longer maintains its traditional scalability advantage in the QLDPC setting. This finding challenges the expectation that techniques successful for sparse classical codes remain dominant for QLDPC codes. Third, substantial qualitative differences arise even among MaxSAT solvers themselves. Branch-and-bound MaxSAT significantly outperforms unsat-core-based MaxSAT on challenging benchmarks, demonstrating that solver architecture and optimization strategy play a decisive role in practical scalability.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Revisiting Structural Dependency in Autoregressive Multi-Task Table Recognition via Order-Independent Cell-Level Representations

Multi-task table recognition jointly addresses table structure prediction, cell localization, and cell content recognition within a unified framework. Existing approaches often rely on autoregressive decoders to generate table structures and reuse their hidden states for cell localization and content recognition. This autoregressive generation process can make cell representations order-dependent, degrading global consistency across cells. This paper proposes a structural refinement module that produces order-independent cell features through non-causal attention. This design enables parallel inference of cell contents while conditioning each cell on global context encoded in the refined features. Experiments on two large datasets demonstrate consistent gains in cell localization and end-to-end recognition, while reducing overall inference time by around threefold.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Learning to Prompt: Improving Student Engagement with Adaptive LLM-based High-School Tutoring

LLMs can personalize education, although current static-prompt tutoring systems struggle to adapt to diverse academic disciplines. We develop and test a system with subject-aware prompting, based on 14 pedagogical features (e.g., tutor scaffolding, student understanding) extracted from raw transcripts. We first train a prompt routing model in a simulation environment, and then deploy it for online adaptation with actual high-school students. The simulation benchmark shows the router outperforming two static baselines ($0.694$ vs. $0.647$ and $0.64$, $p

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Measurement-Free Toric-Code Memory in Array Globally Controlled Rydberg Array

arXiv:2606.12030v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The central prerequisite of any fault-tolerant quantum architecture is a quantum memory: a block of encoded physical qubits whose logical state is actively preserved against noise across many rounds of error correction. In neutral-atom Rydberg arrays, realizing such a memory is obstructed not by the entangling gates themselves, which are already fast and high-fidelity, but by the auxiliary operations that a conventional error-correction cycle requires: mid-circuit fluorescence measurement, inter-zone atom transport, and locally focused single-qubit addressing. Each of these introduces latency, atom loss, or optical crosstalk that exceeds the cost of the underlying gates by orders of magnitude. These costs accumulate cycle after cycle, progressively degrading the very logical information the code is meant to protect. Here we propose a protocol that stabilizes a toric-code quantum memory without moving, measuring or local addressing atoms. The key is to use a three-species Rydberg atom array for the complete stabilizer cycle, including syndrome extraction, coherent correction, and ancilla reset, under global, species-selective laser pulses. Numerical simulation of a $4 \times 4$ rotated toric code shows a longer qubit lifetime when the physical error rate is below a pseudo-threshold $p^\star \approx 0.034$. The scheme offers a concrete, hardware-efficient route to topological quantum memory in neutral-atom platforms.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Hantavirus Disease in Uruguay: Trends and Mortality Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Introduction: Hantavirus disease is an emerging and potentially severe zoonosis of global distribution. In Uruguay, it is transmitted by rodents inhabiting peridomestic, suburban, and rural areas. Global incidence is estimated at 150,000 to 200,000 cases per year, with up to 300 annual cases in the Americas. Since 1997, Uruguay's Ministry of Public Health (MPH) has monitored Hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HCPS), the most common clinical presentation in the region. By 2019, a total of 271 cases had been identified in the country, with an estimated mortality rate of nearly 50%. Objectives: To describe the clinical, epidemiological, and occupational characteristics of patients with Hantavirus disease in Uruguay during the pre-pandemic (2018-2019) and pandemic (2020-2021) periods. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional, observational study was conducted, including all serologically confirmed cases of Hantavirus infection reported to the MPH between 2018 and 2021. Clinical and demographic data were extracted from the mandatory reporting form for zoonotic diseases. Incidence and case fatality rates were calculated, and factors associated with fatal outcomes were analyzed. Results: A total of 58 confirmed cases were identified between 2018 and 2021. Most patients were male (62%), with a mean age of 36.5 years (SD 16). A decline in incidence was observed during 2020-2021, with no significant change in case fatality. Direct rodent exposure was the most frequently associated risk factor. Montevideo and Canelones were the most affected departments. Renal and pulmonary involvement were significantly associated with mortality. Conclusion: Hantavirus remains a relevant public health concern in Uruguay. Although a decrease in incidence was observed during the COVID-19 pandemic years, case fatality rates remained high. The findings underscore the need for sustained surveillance and early recognition, particularly in urbanizing regions.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

AIPatient Arena: EHR-grounded evaluation of large language models in end-to-end clinical consultation workflows

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly considered for use in clinical consultation tasks, yet most medical evaluations remain static, single-turn, or narrowly outcome-based, limiting their ability to reflect the sequential, uncertain, and interactive nature of real-world care. Here, we propose AIPatient Arena, an EHRs-grounded evaluation framework for assessing the clinical utility of LLMs across eight dimensions of clinical competence. The framework integrates EHR data into patient-specific knowledge graphs, enabling multi-turn physician-patient interactions. We applied AIPatient Arena on a primary cohort of 437 patients and two out-of-distribution validation cohorts of 119 and 67 patients. We observe that LLMs performed well in medical interview questioning skills (QS; mean scores, 4.43-4.99/5), ethical and professional conduct (ET; 4.38-4.93/5), and clarity and transparency of clinical explanations (EX; 3.80-4.72/5). Performance was moderate in information integration (II; 3.19-4.21/5) and medication safety and justification (MS; 3.13-3.78/5), but persistent weaknesses were observed in handling of ambiguous patient responses (HR; 2.57-3.32/5), information coverage (IC; 2.08-3.02/5), and diagnostic accuracy and reasoning (Dx; 2.63-3.55/5). Process-based evaluation revealed recurrent interaction failures, including repetitive questioning, omission of past medical history, and inadequate handling of uncertainty. Richer conversational context improved diagnostic reasoning but yielded limited gains in treatment planning. These findings indicate that final-answer accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating clinical readiness and highlight the importance of assessing how models gather, interpret, and communicate information throughout a consultation. AIPatient Arena provides an EHR-grounded framework for workflow-oriented pre-deployment evaluation of medical LLMs.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Compositionality Emerges in a Narrow Depth-Connectivity Regime: Architecture Constraints and Solution Manifolds

arXiv:2606.19941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compositionality is believed to be the foundation for generalization, enabling models to reuse meaningful primitives in novel combinations. Yet, models trained with standard gradient-based optimization rarely, and often only weakly, exhibit compositional internal structure, and it remains unclear how or why such compositionality forms. In this work, we show that compositionality emerges in a narrow connectivity-depth sweet spot. Along the connectivity axis, compositionality only appears in some specifically sparse networks, heavily depends on which connections remain rather than on weights' sparsity alone. Along the depth axis, compositionality emerges within a narrow, target-dependent regime, peaking at specific depths, while both shallower and deeper networks fail. When either the depth or connectivity condition is violated, gradient descent silently converges to fractured solutions rather than compositional ones. To discover and exploit this emergence, we introduce (i) similarity-based pruning (SP) to recover compositional connectivity and (ii) a heuristic depth predictor to estimate where compositionality is most likely to appear. Finally, we support these empirical findings with a theoretical framework based on compositional sparsity, volume-ratio arguments, and feature-interference bounds, explaining why compositional solutions are reachable only in a narrow depth-connectivity regime.

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

SLUM-i: Semi-supervised Learning for Urban Mapping of Informal Settlements and Data Quality Benchmarking

Rapid urban expansion has fueled the growth of informal settlements in major cities of low- and middle-income countries, with Lahore and Karachi in Pakistan and Mumbai in India serving as prominent examples. However, large-scale mapping of these settlements is severely constrained not only by the scarcity of annotations but by inherent data quality challenges, specifically high spectral ambiguity between formal and informal structures and significant annotation noise. We address this by introducing a benchmark dataset for Lahore, constructed from scratch, along with companion datasets for Karachi and Mumbai, which were derived from verified administrative boundaries, totaling approximately 900 $km^2$ of urban area. This collection is supplemented by four cities from prior literature across Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, with comprehensive data quality assessments provided for each city. We also propose a semi-supervised segmentation framework designed to mitigate the class imbalance and distribution mismatch inherent in standard semi-supervised learning pipelines. Our method integrates a Class-Aware Adaptive Thresholding mechanism that dynamically adjusts confidence thresholds to prevent minority class suppression, and a DINOv2-based unlabeled pool filter that removes out-of-distribution tiles prior to training to reduce covariate shift. Extensive experiments across seven cities spanning three continents, repeated over five random seeds, demonstrate gains of up to +5.9 pp mIoU over state-of-the-art semi-supervised baselines, with both components being architecture-agnostic and adding no inference overhead.

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

Deep Doubly Debiased Longitudinal Effect Estimation with ICE G-Computation

arXiv:2602.12379v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Estimating longitudinal treatment effects is essential for sequential decision-making but is challenging due to treatment-confounder feedback. While Iterative Conditional Expectation (ICE) G-computation offers a principled approach, its recursive structure suffers from error propagation, corrupting the learned outcome regression models. We propose D3-Net, a framework that mitigates error propagation in ICE training and then applies a robust final correction. First, to interrupt error propagation during learning, we train the ICE sequence using Sequential Doubly Robust (SDR) pseudo-outcomes, which provide bias-corrected targets for each regression. Second, we employ a multi-task transformer with a covariate simulator head for auxiliary supervision, regularizing representation learning, and a target network to stabilize training dynamics. For the final estimate, we discard the SDR correction and instead use the uncorrected nuisance models to perform Longitudinal Targeted Minimum Loss-Based Estimation (LTMLE) on the original outcomes. This second-stage, targeted debiasing ensures robustness and optimal finite-sample properties. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our model, D3-Net, robustly reduces bias and variance across different horizons, counterfactuals, and time-varying confoundings, compared to existing state-of-the-art ICE-based estimators.

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

Realizing Native INT8 Compute for Diffusion Transformers on Consumer GPUs: A Fused INT8 GEMM Kernel for Ideogram 4.0

arXiv:2606.14598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training INT8 (W8A8) quantization of diffusion transformers is widely deployed as a speed optimization, yet on consumer Ampere GPUs it is frequently slower than the FP8 and NF4 alternatives it is meant to beat. We trace this to a software artifact: the production "INT8" forward quantizes weights and activations only to immediately dequantize them back to bf16 and run a bf16 matrix multiply, never engaging the GPU's INT8 tensor cores, so the hardware's compute advantage is left entirely unrealized. We close this gap with a single fused Triton INT8 GEMM (int8xint8->int32 on Ampere tensor cores, with per-token x per-channel dequantization and bias folded into the epilogue, autotuned per GEMM shape) dropped into the Ideogram 4.0 diffusion transformer's linear layers in place of the dequantize-to-bf16 path. In the kernel, the int8xint8->int32 accumulation is bit-exact against torch._int_mm and the dequantized output matches the reference at cosine similarity 1.0 with no NaNs, running 2.8-4.2x faster than bf16 per GEMM. End to end it delivers a ~1.1x (~9-10%) speedup at 768px, and at 1024px it generates an image in 156.5 s on a single RTX 3090, faster than the single-card NF4 (164.5 s) and FP8 (172.9 s) baselines, at no measurable quality cost on these point estimates (PickScore/CLIPScore). INT8 thus goes from the slowest variant to the fastest, and 1024px becomes single-GPU feasible. The primary speed criterion (beat FP8, by ~9.5%) is comfortably met; the NF4 margin (~4.9%, single-run n=4) is within run-to-run variance we did not quantify and is best read as consistent with meeting the stretch target. We close with an honest deployment map: the win is specific to consumer Ampere, and on A100 and B200 the same kernel loses to those cards' fast native bf16/FP8 paths.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Compressing Image Style Training into a Single Model Forward

Diffusion-based style transfer must balance inference efficiency with stylization fidelity. Adapter-based methods are efficient, but they inject style as an external condition and can either weaken reference-specific appearance or copy reference semantics into the generated image. Optimization-based personalization methods such as LoRA internalize style more effectively, but require a separate training process for every new style. We introduce i2L (image-to-LoRA), a framework that amortizes style LoRA training into a single forward pass. Given one or more reference images, i2L predicts LoRA weights for a text-to-image model, enabling immediate style instantiation without per-style optimization. The architecture combines an image encoder, learnable LoRA queries, and compressed decoding heads that generate adapted matrices. Training on semantically diverse style pairs encourages the predictor to preserve appearance cues while suppressing reference-content copying. Experiments on Z-Image, FLUX.2, and Hidream-O1 show that i2L improves style fidelity, prompt alignment, and perceptual quality over existing baselines. Because i2L produces explicit LoRA weights, it also supports asymmetric classifier-free guidance, multi-reference style fusion, and composition with controllable-generation modules.

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

Resilient Consensus in Agentic AI

arXiv:2606.15024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems where they must coordinate and agree on shared decisions. We ask whether classical resilient consensus theory, developed for deterministic agents, transfers to LLM agents that may behave adversarially. Framing LLM agreement as a Byzantine consensus game, we run controlled experiments on complete and general communication graphs. We find that prompted LLM agents fail to reach agreement that is achievable in principle: consensus can fail even in settings where classical theory guarantees that a convergent algorithm exists, and this failure persists across temperatures and horizons. At the same time, wrapping the agents with classical resilient consensus filters improves agreement. The benefit of filtering depends on how much robustness the underlying topology already provides. Our results suggest that classical resilient consensus theory is a useful lens for the safety of agentic AI.

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

Getting Better at Working With You: Compiling User Corrections into Runtime Enforcement for Coding Agents

Interactive LLM agents are becoming part of daily work, but they do not reliably become easier to work with over time: a correction remembered in one session may still be violated in the next. We study this gap between preference access and preference compliance. In tasks derived from anonymized real-user friction cases, Mem0 memory still leaves 57.5% of applicable preference checks violated. We introduce Test-time Rule Acquisition and Compiled Enforcement (TRACE), a drop-in skill-layer pipeline for coding-agent runtimes that mines user corrections, rewrites them as atomic rules, and compiles them into runtime checks that must pass before an agent completes future tasks. Unlike runtime checks written ahead of time by developers, TRACE skills come from the user's own chat corrections. We evaluate TRACE with simulated user-in-the-loop experiments on ClawArena coding-agent tasks and MemoryArena-derived memory-intensive tasks. On ClawArena, TRACE reduces held-out preference violation from 100.0% to 37.6% on in-distribution tasks and from 100.0% to 2.0% on out-of-distribution tasks. On MemoryArena-derived tasks, TRACE reduces in-distribution violation from 100.0% to 60.5% while matching or exceeding the strongest memory baseline on task pass. These results suggest that compiling corrections into runtime enforcement can address a repeated-friction failure mode that memory alone does not reliably solve, reducing the need for users to restate the same correction across future sessions. Experiment code is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/TRACE_exp, and the deployable skill is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/tellonce.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Nonlinear Two-Time-Scale Stochastic Approximation: A Sharp Phase Transition and How to Beat It

arXiv:2606.14488v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent finite-time analyses of nonlinear two-time-scale stochastic approximation show that under contractive assumptions the slow iterate $Y_k$ with stepsizes $\beta_k=\Theta(k^{-1})$ and $\alpha_k=\Theta(k^{-a})$, $a\in(1/2,1)$, generally satisfies a mean-square rate of order $k^{-a}$; decoupled $k^{-1}$ rates require strong local linearity. We identify a sharp regularity-dependent boundary. In a rate-determining normal form where the slow drift contains a locally linear leakage and a nonlinear remainder of order $1+\rho$ ($\rho\in[0,1]$), the uncorrected recursion satisfies \[ \mathbb{E}\|Y_k\|^2 \le C\bigl(k^{-1}+k^{-a(1+\rho)}\bigr), \] and a matching scalar Gaussian lower bound shows that the slower term is unavoidable without modifying the update. Thus the decoupled $k^{-1}$ rate is guaranteed for the uncorrected recursion exactly when $a(1+\rho)\ge 1$. This lower bound concerns only the naive update; it is not an information-theoretic obstruction. We demonstrate this by equipping the normal-form recursion with an auxiliary online bias estimator \[ M_{k+1}=M_k+\gamma_k(R(X_k)-M_k),\qquad \beta_k\ll\gamma_k\ll\alpha_k, \] and subtracting $M_k$ from the slow update. Under the same stability, moment, and remainder assumptions, the corrected recursion achieves $\mathbb{E}\|\widetilde Y_k\|^2=O(k^{-1})$ for every $\rho\in[0,1]$, including regimes where the uncorrected update provably suffers the slower rate. Finally, we prove localized transfer theorems that extend the phase-transition mechanism to general nonlinear TTSA in fast-manifold coordinates. The proofs are non-asymptotic and rely on two Abel-transform cancellations: one for the locally linear fast-error leakage, and one for the tracked nonlinear bias.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Recipe-Controlled Decoder Audit for Structural Knowledge-Graph Completion

arXiv:2606.14492v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a recipe-controlled decoder audit (RCDA) for structural transductive knowledge-graph completion (KGC). The audit asks a simple reporting question: before attributing gains to an encoder or training recipe, what changes when the decoder is swapped under the same recipe? Using ComplEx and DistMult as the primary controlled pair, with targeted RotatE/TransE spot-checks, we evaluate seven benchmarks. On five standard KGs, ComplEx-vs-DistMult differences are modest but consistent under our recipe (+0.005 to +0.012 MRR), whereas CompGCN-style encoder effects vary more by dataset. On small KGs, decoder effects become the main diagnostic: Kinship shows a stable ComplEx advantage of +0.143 MRR (6 seeds), while UMLS favours ComplEx by +0.022 MRR in a clean 6-seed server rerun but reverses in an earlier provenance variant. We therefore treat small-KG decoder choice as recipe- and provenance-sensitive rather than as a fixed dataset winner. We further show that decoder choice interacts with encoder depth on WN18RR, and that under our recipe L=0 ComplEx on YAGO3-10 reaches 0.6971 +/- 0.0048 MRR at d=128. The result is a compact audit protocol: report matched decoder rows, log small-KG provenance, and sweep decoder x depth before making encoder-level claims.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

AnomalyMatch: Discovering Rare Objects of Interest with Semi-supervised and Active Learning

arXiv:2505.03509v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Anomaly detection in large datasets is essential in astronomy and computer vision. However, due to a scarcity of labelled data, it is often infeasible to apply supervised methods to anomaly detection. We present AnomalyMatch, an anomaly detection framework combining the semi-supervised FixMatch algorithm using EfficientNet classifiers with active learning. AnomalyMatch is tailored for large-scale applications and integrated into the ESA Datalabs science platform. In this method, we treat anomaly detection as a binary classification problem and efficiently utilise limited labelled and abundant unlabelled images for training. We enable active learning via a user interface for verification of high-confidence anomalies and correction of false positives. Evaluations on the GalaxyMNIST astronomical dataset and the miniImageNet natural-image benchmark under severe class imbalance display strong performance. Starting from five to ten labelled anomalies, we achieve an average AUROC of 0.96 (miniImageNet) and 0.89 (GalaxyMNIST), with respective AUPRC of 0.82 and 0.77. After three active learning cycles, anomalies are ranked with 76% (miniImageNet) to 94% (GalaxyMNIST) precision in the top 1% of the highest-ranking images by score. We compare to the established Astronomaly software on selected 'odd' galaxies from the 'Galaxy Zoo- The Galaxy Challenge' dataset, achieving comparable performance with an average AUROC of 0.83. Our results underscore the exceptional utility and scalability of this approach for anomaly discovery, highlighting the value of specialised approaches for domains characterised by severe label scarcity

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Reward Hacking in Language Model Agents: Revisiting AI Safety Gridworlds

arXiv:2606.15385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reward hacking, where AI systems exploit misspecified objectives to achieve high reward without satisfying intended goals, remains a central challenge in AI safety. Yet most known instances have been discovered post hoc in frontier systems where controlled study is impractical. We adapt the AI Safety Gridworlds framework into a text-based evaluation suite that reformulates classic reinforcement learning safety tasks for language-based agents. Across frontier and mid-scale models, we find that specification gaming emerges zero-shot: models systematically achieve high observed reward while underperforming on hidden safety objectives, and even apparently safe behaviors can reflect misunderstanding rather than principled safety. Reinforcement learning does not correct these failures: direct reward optimization widens the gap between observed and hidden reward, as the model's initial competence causes it to lock into locally rewarding strategies before discovering safer alternatives. This pattern persists across model scales (1.5B–14B) and is not resolved by finer credit assignment, exploration prompts, or entropy regularization. Our results show that reward hacking arises naturally when optimizing proxy objectives with capable language model agents and resists standard mitigations, suggesting that proxy-reward failures in agentic settings may require approaches beyond standard exploration and credit-assignment fixes. To facilitate reproducibility, the code for this work is available at \href{https://github.com/asparius/verl-agent-safety}{our public repository}.