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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Data-driven Control with Real-time Uncertainty Compensation for Multi-Fuel Engines

arXiv:2606.16171v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-fuel compression ignition (CI) engines offer superior power density and fuel flexibility. However, achieving consistent and optimal combustion phasing across a wide range of operating conditions remains a major challenge, particularly in the presence of modeling uncertainties. This paper presents a novel, data-driven real-time uncertainty compensation framework for combustion control in multi-fuel CI engines. The proposed approach introduces a pseudo-engine speed that enables dynamic adaptation of control inputs in response to uncertainty affecting the engine. To model the underlying combustion process, a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model is first trained on available input-output data, capturing the nonlinear and fuel-dependent behavior across varying operating conditions. Control inputs are then synthesized through model inversion of the learned GPR surrogate and augmented with an uncertainty compensator designed to mitigate deviations caused by dynamic variations in operating conditions and model inaccuracies. This integrated control strategy allows for real-time input corrections within a finite number of combustion cycles. Theoretical analysis establishes finite-time convergence guarantees for the proposed controller. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method steers the combustion phasing to the desired value in real-time, providing a scalable and adaptive control solution for multi-fuel CI engine operation.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

A note on the $\mathcal{W}_2$-convergence rate of the empirical measure of an ergodic $\mathbb{R}^d$-valued diffusion

arXiv:2502.07704v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this note, we consider a Stochastic Differential Equation under a strong confluence and Lipschitz continuity assumption of the coefficients. For the unique stationary solution, we study the rate of convergence of its empirical measure toward the invariant probability measure. We provide rate for the Wasserstein distance in the mean quadratic and almost sure sense.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Complexity of detecting large coefficients in the Pauli basis

arXiv:2606.19545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of deciding, given a mechanism to prepare a quantum state $\rho$ and a value $\varepsilon > 0$, whether there is some non-identity Pauli matrix $P$ such that $|Tr(P \rho)| \geq \varepsilon$. We consider that the state $\rho$ is described as the result of tracing out some of the qubits of a pure state prepared by a circuit $C$, and we assume the promise that either there is a Pauli matrix satisfying the stated condition or, instead, that for all non-identity Pauli matrices $P$ it is the case that $|Tr(P\rho)|\leq \varepsilon/2$. The problem is in $QCMA$, and we prove that if it belongs to $BQP$ then $NP \subseteq BQP$. The result is obtained through a reduction from the minimum-weight code problem, and it holds even when $\rho$ is assumed to be a pure state (i.e. when no qubits are discarded) and $\varepsilon$ is constant. This resolves an open question regarding the existence of efficient tomographic procedures to find the largest coefficients of a quantum state in the Pauli basis: namely, they do not exist under the standard hypothesis $NP \nsubseteq BQP$.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Boson Sampling as a Probe of Chaotic and Integrable Quantum Dynamics in a Photonic Chip

arXiv:2605.25398v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum chaos plays a key role in understanding complex quantum dynamics, while integrated photonics offers unique advantages for quantum applications, including high-speed operation, scalability, and programmable unitary transformations. However, integrated photonic approaches to probing quantum chaos remain largely unexplored, owing to the absence of a clear connection between programmable photonic dynamics and established chaos diagnostics. In this work, we establish Fock-state boson sampling as a practical probe of quantum chaos by exploiting the sensitivity of multiphoton interference to the random-matrix properties of underlying single-particle unitary dynamics. More importantly, we design and fabricate a programmable quantum photonic chip to experimentally implement this framework, achieving the first integrated-photonic demonstration of quantum-chaos probes based on boson sampling. Experimental results show that the three complementary probes proposed in this work, namely the distance to Porter–Thomas statistics, Shannon entropy, and Out-of-Time-Ordered-Correlator-equivalent observables, exhibit close agreement with theoretical predictions and consistently distinguish chaotic and integrable dynamics. Our work provides a scalable route for investigating complex quantum dynamics on programmable photonic platforms while leveraging the intrinsic advantages of boson sampling through multiphoton interference and complex output statistics.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Reroute, Don't Remove: Recoverable Visual Token Routing for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) project images into hundreds to thousands of visual tokens, making decoder inference expensive in both attention computation and KV-cache memory. Existing visual-token reduction methods largely follow a rank-and-remove paradigm: they score visual tokens, keep a compact subset, and permanently discard the rest. We show that this irreversible action is fragile because visual-token importance changes across decoder depth; tokens ranked low at one stage may become relevant in later layers, especially for grounding-sensitive queries. We propose Reroute, a training-free plug-in that replaces removal with recoverable routing. At each routing stage, selected vision tokens pass through decoder blocks, while deferred tokens bypass the stage and re-enter the candidate pool at the next routing decision. Reroute reuses existing attention-score ranking rules and stage-wise schedules, preserving the theoretical TFLOPs and KV-cache budget class of the pruning method it augments. Across FastV, PDrop, and Nüwa variants on LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen backbones, reroute improves grounding under aggressive token reduction while maintaining general VQA performance. These results suggest that VLM token reduction should not be viewed only as irreversible pruning, but also as recoverable routing. The code can be found here: https://github.com/elmma/mllm-reroute/

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

More with LESS – Local Scene Representations for Tactile Imaging

arXiv:2606.14344v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile imaging seeks to reconstruct the internal structure of soft objects through touch sensing, with applications in medical diagnosis and robotic manipulation. Recent self-supervised learning approaches have shown promising results, but rely on global, unstructured representations and robot-controlled sensing, limiting generalization and practical use. We propose Local Encoder for Spatial Sensing (LESS), an object-centric tactile representation that exploits the local nature of touch. The tactile scene is modeled as a grid of recurrent encoders with local receptive fields, whose states are fused to reconstruct 2D or 3D images of internal structure. This compositional design enables strong generalization: models trained on single-inclusion phantoms accurately image objects with multiple inclusions and varying sizes. The local structure further supports spatial uncertainty estimation. In addition, we enable hand-held tactile imaging via external pose tracking and human-like palpation data, and extend tactile imaging to full 3D reconstruction.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Atlas H&E-TME: Scalable AI-Based Tissue Profiling at Expert Pathologist-Level Accuracy

Hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining is the cornerstone of histopathology, yet scalable, quantitative analysis of H&E whole-slide images (WSIs) remains a central challenge in computational pathology. We present Atlas H&E-TME, an AI-based system built on the Atlas family of pathology foundation models that predicts tissue quality, tissue region, and cell type labels across multiple cancer types, yielding over 4,500 quantitative readouts per slide at cell-level resolution. A key challenge to validating such systems is overcoming morphological ambiguity inherent to H&E-only ground truth and the limited scalability of more informed references drawing on modalities such as immunohistochemistry (IHC). We address this with a dual validation framework combining biologically grounded depth with technical and morphological breadth. For depth, we propose an IHC-informed multi-pathologist consensus protocol that substantially improves inter-rater agreement over conventional H&E-only annotation. This yields a molecularly grounded reference against which we compare Atlas H&E-TME and pathologists working from H&E alone. For breadth, we benchmark Atlas H&E-TME on over 200,000 high-confidence H&E-only pathologist annotations across 1,500+ cases spanning eight cancer types and their most common metastatic sites, with subtypes covering >90% of clinical cases per cancer type, drawn from 25+ sources and 8+ scanner models. Benchmarked against the IHC-informed consensus, Atlas H&E-TME matches or exceeds pathologist H&E-only performance and generalizes consistently and robustly across this broad morphological and technical scope. In doing so, Atlas H&E-TME turns the H&E slide – the most ubiquitous data in pathology – into a scalable, quantitative window into the tumor and its microenvironment, laying a foundation for the next generation of tissue-based biomarkers in translational and clinical research.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

ReSET: Accurate Latency-Critical NVFP4 Reasoning via Step-Aware Temperature Scaling

arXiv:2606.13233v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) improve complex problem-solving by generating long intermediate reasoning traces, but this substantially increases inference costs. NVFP4 inference offers a promising approach to reduce both computational and memory costs through hardware-supported low-precision execution. However, directly applying NVFP4 to LRMs introduces two practical limitations: reasoning accuracy degrades under quantization, and existing NVFP4 kernels do not fully realize latency benefits in small-batch autoregressive decoding. In this work, we analyze the effect of NVFP4 quantization on token-level uncertainty during reasoning. We show that quantization increases incorrect sampling at low-entropy symbolic tokens, while causing over-concentration on a small set of tokens in high-uncertainty reasoning steps. Based on this observation, we propose ReSET, a reasoning-step entropy-based temperature-scaling method that estimates step-level uncertainty online and adapts the decoding temperature using both token-level and step-level entropy signals. To address the latency gap, we further design a CUDA-core small-$M$ NVFP4 kernel for latency-critical autoregressive decoding. Across reasoning benchmarks and model scales, ReSET improves NVFP4 reasoning accuracy by up to $\sim\!$2 points over the NVFP4 baseline. Our CUDA-core small-$M$ kernel further improves latency-critical decoding, delivering up to $2.5\!\times$ kernel-level speedup over NVFP4 vLLM and approximately $2\!\times$ end-to-end decoding speedup over BF16. Code is available at https://github.com/aiha-lab/ReSET.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Multi-Label Test-Time Adaptation with Bayesian Conditional Priors

Multi-label recognition with frozen Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is brittle under distribution shift: standard zero-shot inference scores labels independently, ignoring co-occurrence structure and producing incoherent label sets where dominant concepts suppress weaker but compatible labels. We introduce Bayesian Conditional Priors (BCP) Estimation, a gradient-free test-time adaptation method that injects label dependency without tuning the backbone. BCP views zero-shot logits as a proxy for marginal posteriors under a fixed image-text likelihood and attributes shift-induced errors mainly to a mismatched label prior. For each test image, it selects a high-confidence anchor label and applies an anchor-conditioned Bayesian refinement. This update is closed-form in logit space and admits a pointwise mutual information (PMI) interpretation, explicitly promoting compatible labels and suppressing incompatible ones. BCP operates without target annotations by estimating anchor-conditioned priors online from the unlabeled test stream via lightweight second-order co-occurrence statistics, adding negligible overhead beyond a single forward pass. Across standard multi-label benchmarks and multiple CLIP backbones, BCP consistently outperforms strong TTA baselines, e.g., improving RN50 average mAP from 57.31 to 69.22 and ViT-B/16 from 62.61 to 71.79.

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

A 3D Isovist World Model – Revealing a City's Unseen Geometry and Its Emergent Cross-City Signature

arXiv:2606.03609v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Embodied agents that navigate cities rely on world models that predict how their surroundings will change as they move. But for navigation, what matters is not what the buildings look like; it is where the agent can go. Most world models nonetheless predict appearance, learning how a scene looks rather than the space an agent can move through. Those that do target geometry, such as bird's-eye-view occupancy grids, flatten the three-dimensional environment onto a ground plane, discarding the above-ground and multi-level structure that shapes real navigation. What is missing is a predictive target that captures the navigable geometry an agent actually traverses, without photometric entanglement and without collapsing the third dimension. Our key idea is to model the open volume between buildings, the negative space, encoded as a 3D isovist: a spherical visibility-depth map recording the distance to the nearest surface in every direction. We introduce an embodied world model that predicts the next isovist from a short history of past isovists and a movement action. The prediction is formulated as a depth residual so the decoder inherits sharp building edges, trained with self-rollout scheduled sampling to keep corrupted context on the geometry manifold, and equipped with a persistent latent bird's-eye-view spatial map for cross-path consistency. Our central finding is emergent and unexpected: a single city-blind model trained on Manhattan and Paris develops a cross-city spatial signature, with city identity linearly decodable from its temporal latents far above single-frame baselines, so the signature lives in the learned dynamics rather than in appearance. The representation is lightweight, interpretable, and reproducible, offering a geometric substrate for spatial reasoning in embodied AI, robotics, and urban analysis, released with an open dataset and pipeline.

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

Contaminated Collaboration: Measuring Gender Bias Transfer in LLM-Assisted Student Writing

Gender bias in LLMs has been studied extensively in model outputs, with biased prompts shown to amplify stereotyped generations. Whether such bias propagates into text produced by humans who use these systems, however, remains underexplored. We investigate whether gender bias in an LLM writing assistant transfers into career plan essays written by students. We first verify that a gender-biased prompt induces gender-differentiated language in LLM-generated essays, while a neutral prompt does not. We then recruited participants (N = 123) in a controlled environment to write career plan essays for paired biographical profiles differing only in gender under three conditions: no AI assistance, neutral LLM assistance, or gender-biased LLM assistance. Students in the biased condition produced essays with a significantly larger agentic gap and more gender-stereotypic occupation suggestions than those in the control and neutral conditions. Our results also reveal that this bias transfer is asymmetric: agency is suppressed in female-target essays while male-target writing remains largely unaffected. Our findings highlight the risk of bias propagation in AI-assisted writing, calling for fairness-aware design in educational AI tools.

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

Trajectory-Level Redirection Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies bring natural language into closed-loop robot control, enabling robots to execute manipulation tasks directly from text instructions. The same interface gives text a recurring role in control because the prompt is reused at every replanning step, and each prompt-conditioned action changes the future observations on which the policy acts. Existing VLA attacks study adversarial prompts that elicit targeted low-level actions or make such actions persist across changing images. We identify a stronger trajectory-level failure mode: a prompt that still $appears$ to specify the intended task but redirects the final physical outcome. We mathematically formalize this setting as $command-preserving trajectory redirection$, a prompt-only threat model in which the attacker chooses one prompt before the episode, all policy and environment components remain fixed, and the prompt must stay close to the benign instruction while omitting target words and correction language. To find such prompts, we introduce an on-policy prompt search method that uses rollouts to discover perturbations whose closed-loop behavior tracks a target task while satisfying the command-preserving constraints. Experiments in simulation and on hardware show that near-benign prompt perturbations can redirect VLA rollouts to attacker-specified targets. These results expose a trajectory-level vulnerability in VLA instruction grounding: text that appears to preserve the intended command can still give an adversary control over the robot's final physical outcome. Project website: https://vla-redirection-attack.github.io/

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

RippleBench: Capturing Ripple Effects Using Existing Knowledge Repositories

arXiv:2512.04144v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Targeted interventions on language models, such as unlearning or model editing, aim to modify specific information, but their effects often propagate to related, unintended areas (e.g., removing virology content may degrade performance on allergies); these side-effects are commonly referred to as the ripple effect. We introduce RippleBench-Maker, an automatic pipeline that retrieves semantic neighbors of any source concept from a knowledge repository and generates multiple-choice questions at varying semantic distances. We instantiate this framework using WikiRAG, an open-source RAG system over English Wikipedia, to construct RippleBench-WMDP-Bio (584 seed topics, 352,961 questions), and evaluate eight unlearning methods on Llama3-8B-Instruct. All eight exhibit accuracy drops that are largest near the unlearned target and decay with semantic distance, each with a distinct propagation profile. We replicate these findings across Mistral-7B, Zephyr-7B, and Yi-34B; cross-model delta curves are nearly identical, suggesting ripple effects are a property of the unlearning method rather than the base model. We validate all major pipeline stages using a four-experiment Mechanical Turk study (5,200+ responses, 61 workers). We release all code, data, and infrastructure.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DySink: Dynamic Frame Sinks for Autoregressive Long Video Generation

Autoregressive long video generation often adopts bounded-memory streaming for efficiency, typically combining local windows for short-term continuity with static early-frame sinks as long-range anchors. However, this fixed allocation keeps early frames cached even when the current visual state has substantially diverged from them, while discarding potentially more relevant intermediate history. As a result, the retained long-range context may become less adaptive and bias generation toward outdated cues; in severe cases, RoPE-induced phase re-alignment can homogenize inter-head attention and cause sink collapse, where content regresses toward sink frames. We propose DySink, a retrieval-based framework that maintains a compact memory bank and selects visually relevant historical frames as dynamic frame sinks. DySink couples adaptive retrieval with a sink anomaly gate, which detects excessive inter-head consensus over retrieved context and suppresses collapse-prone context. Experiments on minute-long videos show that DySink consistently improves dynamic degree over strong baselines while also achieving higher temporal quality. The code and model weights will be released at https://github.com/yebo0216best/DySink.

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

SciHorizon-GENE: Benchmarking LLM for Life Sciences Inference from Gene Knowledge to Functional Understanding

Large language models (LLMs) have shown growing promise in biomedical research, particularly for knowledge-driven interpretation tasks. However, their ability to reliably reason from gene-level knowledge to functional understanding, a core requirement for knowledge-enhanced cell atlas interpretation, remains largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce SciHorizon-GENE, a large-scale gene-centric benchmark constructed from authoritative biological databases. The benchmark integrates curated knowledge for over 190K human genes and comprises more than 540K questions covering diverse gene-to-function reasoning scenarios relevant to cell type annotation, functional interpretation, and mechanism-oriented analysis. Motivated by behavioral patterns observed in preliminary examinations, SciHorizon-GENE evaluates LLMs along four biologically critical perspectives: research attention sensitivity, hallucination tendency, answer completeness, and literature influence, explicitly targeting failure modes that limit the safe adoption of LLMs in biological interpretation pipelines. We systematically evaluate a wide range of state-of-the-art general-purpose and biomedical LLMs, revealing substantial heterogeneity in gene-level reasoning capabilities and persistent challenges in generating faithful, complete, and literature-grounded functional interpretations. Our benchmark establishes a systematic foundation for analyzing LLM behavior at the gene scale and offers insights for model selection and development, with direct relevance to knowledge-enhanced biological interpretation.

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

Towards One-for-All Anomaly Detection for Tabular Data

arXiv:2603.14407v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tabular anomaly detection (TAD) aims to identify samples that deviate from the majority in tabular data and is critical in many real-world applications. However, existing methods follow a ``one model for one dataset (OFO)'' paradigm, which relies on dataset-specific training and thus incurs high computational cost and yields limited generalization to unseen domains. To address these limitations, we propose OFA-TAD, a generalist one-for-all (OFA) TAD framework that only requires one-time training on multiple source datasets and can generalize to unseen datasets from diverse domains on-the-fly. To realize one-for-all tabular anomaly detection, OFA-TAD extracts neighbor-distance patterns as transferable cues, and introduces multi-view neighbor-distance representations from multiple transformation-induced metric spaces to mitigate the transformation sensitivity of distance profiles. To adaptively combine multi-view distance evidence, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scoring network is employed for view-specific anomaly scoring and entropy-regularized gated fusion, with a multi-strategy anomaly synthesis mechanism to support training under the one-class constraint. Extensive experiments on 34 datasets from 14 domains demonstrate that OFA-TAD achieves superior anomaly detection performance and strong cross-domain generalizability under the strict OFA setting. The source code is available at https://github.com/Shiy-Li/OFA-TAD.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Quantizing Time-Series Models As Dynamical Systems: Trajectory-Based Quantization Sensitivity Score

arXiv:2606.13300v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Trajectory-based Quantization Sensitivity Score (TQS), a metric that reframes post-training quantization (PTQ) through the lens of dynamical-systems stability. By modeling the network's rollout as a discrete-time dynamical system, TQS characterizes how quantization-induced errors propagate and amplify over the rollout horizon. Unlike conventional PTQ methods, where sensitivity analysis is often coupled to the quantization procedure, TQS enables a priori sensitivity estimation decoupled from quantizer selection and bit-width assignment. This separation allows for quantization budget planning even for black-box or compiled networks with fused operators. Building on this, we present TQS-PTQ, a flexible mixed-precision framework that requires no calibration data or costly second-order approximations. Our experiments show that a dynamical-systems perspective provides a robust, high-performing pathway for low-precision deployment in resource-constrained settings.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Using AI in engineering education: a balancing act, driven by clear purpose

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Based on a questionnaire of 100 higher-education students, predominantly from engineering-related fields, and a critical review of recent literature, this chapter examines how students use and perceive Large Language Models (LLMs) in engineering education. Students primarily value LLMs for writing support, conceptual clarification, coding assistance, and brainstorming, while simultaneously expressing concerns about inaccuracies, bias, overreliance, academic integrity, and the burden of verification. Through an analysis of two dominant metaphors, namely LLMs as an "oracle" and as a "tutor," the chapter shows how these systems cultivate expectations of authority, expertise, and personalized learning that often exceed their actual capabilities. The chapter further argues that students' attachment to the promises of efficiency and personalized support reflects a form of "cruel optimism," where the perceived benefits of LLMs often depend on the very skills, vigilance, and expertise that students are still developing. Overall, the chapter argues for a purpose-driven and context-sensitive approach to AI integration in engineering education, emphasizing critical AI literacy, reflective assessment design, pedagogical caution, and consideration of broader ethical and environmental impacts.

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

Can Machine Learning Forecast Rice Yields in Data-Constrained Settings? Satellite Climate Data, National Crop Statistics, and Lessons from Sierra Leone

arXiv:2606.13959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sierra Leone's agriculture operates with almost no data-driven decision support, and no published machine learning study has examined the country's crop yields. We ask whether rice yield can be forecast from data Sierra Leone currently has. Using 25 years of FAOSTAT production data (2000-2024) for nine major crops, we train XGBoost, Gradient Boosting, and Random Forest under a strict anti-leakage protocol with expanding-window walk-forward evaluation across seven held-out years, benchmarked against naive persistence. No model trained on crop statistics alone outperforms persistence. Augmenting with free satellite climate data (CHIRPS rainfall, NASA POWER temperature) reverses this result: a climate-only XGBoost reduces forecast error by one third (RMSE 284 vs 428 kg/ha), a gain that holds for a linear model and is robust to excluding the anomalous 2018 season. Early-season (May-June) rainfall is the dominant predictor, implying seasonal yield risk is observable months before harvest. No model anticipated the 2018 collapse, whose origins were institutional rather than climatic. We translate the findings into policy recommendations for Sierra Leone's Feed Salone Strategy, with a fully open-source pipeline.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SciRisk-Bench: A Risk-Dimension-Aware Benchmark for AI4Science Safety

arXiv:2606.18936v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in AI for Science (AI4Science) workflows, from scientific question answering and literature analysis to laboratory planning and autonomous discovery. This progress creates an urgent need for safety benchmarks that evaluate not only scientific competence, but also whether models recognize and avoid risks in high-stakes scientific contexts. Existing AI4Science safety datasets cover several disciplines and task formats, leaving the underlying risk dimensions underspecified. We introduce SciRisk-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate AI4Science safety from two complementary perspectives: explicit risk dimensions and scientific disciplines. SciRisk-Bench covers 7 disciplines, 31 subdisciplines and 10 risk dimensions. In the experimental section, we evaluate both mainstream LLMs and science-oriented LLMs across risk dimensions, disciplines, and sub-disciplines, enabling fine-grained diagnosis of where scientific models remain unsafe.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

BRICKS-WM: Building Reusability via Interface Composition Kinetics for Structured World Models

arXiv:2606.16489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has achieved remarkable success in continuous control by leveraging latent world models. However, prevailing approaches typically rely on monolithic latent dynamics, entangling environment dynamics into a coupled process. This coupling severely limits reusability: altering the agent necessitates retraining the entire world from scratch, even if the environment remains constant. To address this, we introduce BRICKS-WM (Building Reusability via Interface Composition Kinetics for Structured World Models), a framework for the modular assembly of structured world models. Driven by the insight that the physical world is composed of independent entities, we posit that global dynamics can be modeled as a composition of distinct dynamical modules interacting via latent interfaces. As a minimal instantiation, we factorize the latent state space into an actuated Agent module and an external Background module, bridged by a learned latent interface. Unlike prior object-centric methods that prioritize visual segmentation, BRICKS-WM enforces a functional separation in transition dynamics, ensuring that background dynamics remains agnostic to the agent's dynamics. Empirically, BRICKS-WM achieves control performance comparable to strong monolithic baselines when trained from scratch, and enables the reuse of frozen background dynamics across agents.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

IAPO: Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization for Tool Use in Small Multimodal Agents

arXiv:2606.11652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates reinforcement learning (RL) methods for improving tool-calling capabilities in multimodal small language model (SLM) agents. While existing works have explored various reward designs to improve agentic tool-calling ability, these approaches face inherent limitations for SLM training, especially under multimodal scenarios. First, many existing methods evaluate tool use correctness through exact matching against certain ground-truth or predefined formats. However, this assumption is often unsuitable for multimodal tasks, where multiple tool use paths may be valid and annotated tool trajectories are typically unavailable. Second, such sparse and brittle binary rewards provide little guidance on how to improve the underlying decision process, making them particularly difficult for multimodal SLM to learn from. To address these issues, we propose Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization (IAPO), an RL algorithm for improving tool use in multimodal SLM by aligning the model's attribution across input components with that of a stronger teacher. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-3B show that the proposed method improves visual question answering accuracy by an average of 3% across six test sets compared with existing visual tool use work, by helping the model attend to the most relevant input evidence.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Approximating optimal decoding of quantum LDPC codes with narrow frontiers

arXiv:2606.20513v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Frontier decoder, a pruned dynamic-programming decoder for sparse quantum decoding problems. Frontier processes error variables in a chosen order, merges prefixes with the same residual syndrome and logical label, and approximates logical-coset posterior masses by retaining only a narrow scored frontier. Without pruning, the recursion is exact ordered inference with exponential complexity. In the code-capacity setting, the decoder reaches thresholds close to optimal for the surface code and the color code. In the circuit-level noise model, it achieves state-of-the-art performance with a very small average retained list size: less than 100 for the gross code $[[144,12,12]]$ at a physical error rate of $0.001$. When the list size is constant, the decoder has linear complexity, suggesting the possibility of low-latency implementations.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

From Concept-Aligned Tokens to Vulnerable Features: Mechanistic Localization of Jailbreaks

Jailbreak attacks expose a persistent failure mode in safety-aligned LLMs: models can be pushed into harmful behavior, but the internal representations enabling this shift remain poorly localized. Recent mechanistic safety studies often explain such behavior through broad representational objects, including global refusal directions, activation steering vectors, and refusal-related SAE features. We instead ask whether jailbreak vulnerability can be traced to finer-grained, prompt-conditioned SAE feature subgroups. We introduce a token-driven mechanistic pipeline that decomposes the residual stream of Gemma-2-2B into Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features and identifies feature subgroups associated with unsafe behavior. Using single-category unsafe examples from BeaverTails to reduce cross-category interference, we extract harmful concepts from adversarial responses and align them with concept-relevant prompt tokens through subspace similarity. We then apply three feature-grouping strategies: cluster-based, hierarchical-linkage, and single-token-driven, to identify SAE feature subgroups across all 26 layers. Finally, we amplify the top features in each subgroup and evaluate the resulting generations with a standardized harmfulness judge. Single-token-driven grouping achieves harmfulness comparable to full cluster-based grouping, showing that individual harmful prompt tokens are sufficient to localize vulnerability-relevant SAE feature subgroups without relying on broader cluster-level aggregation. These subgroups appear across early and mid-to-late layers, with stronger concentration in mid-to-late layers, where targeted steering exposes specific model vulnerabilities. Overall, our results suggest that jailbreak susceptibility can be traced to sparse, token-localized SAE feature subgroups, complementing prior accounts based on broad adversarial, refusal, or steering directions.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Through the PRISM: Preference Representation in Intermediate States of Video Diffusion Models

Evaluating video generation with clean, pixel-based reward models disconnects evaluation from the noisy diffusion process and incurs massive VAE decoding costs. In this paper, we challenge this paradigm by asking a fundamental question: Can a powerful video generator inherently discriminate preferences directly from noisy latents? To answer this, we introduce PRISM (Preference Representation in Intermediate States of Diffusion Models). PRISM employs a lightweight Query-based Aggregation head with a frozen video diffusion backbone to decode preference signals from noisy latents. Surprisingly, PRISM not only achieves SOTA preference accuracy but also unlocks strong noise-robustness, which enables early-stage Best-of-$N$ sampling. This allows for filtering suboptimal candidates at the very beginning of denoising, drastically reducing computation while boosting video quality. We also reveal a strong positive correlation between a backbone's generative performance and its inherent evaluative power, enabling self-improving video backbones.