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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Which Sections of a Research Paper Best Reveal Its Research Methods? Evidence from Library and Information Science

Research methods are essential carriers of knowledge contribution in academic papers. Automatic multi-label classification of research methods can support knowledge services such as method retrieval, review generation, and research intelligence analysis. While existing studies primarily rely on titles and abstracts, abstracts often provide only limited methodological information, whereas utilizing full-text content faces challenges related to excessive length and information redundancy. Therefore, this paper proposes a segment combination strategy by partitioning the full-text content according to its physical postion. Using an annotated corpus of 1,954 full-text articles from three representative journals in Library and Information Science (JASIST, LISR, and JDoc), we evaluate the classification performance of various segments and their combinations across multiple models. Experimental results indicate that methodological information is distributed unevenly within the full-text content, with the middle-to-late and final segments exhibiting greater discriminative power. Furthermore, integrating bibliographic metadata with cross-segment combination strategies effectively enhances classification performance.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimising Entanglement Distillation Policies

arXiv:2606.14908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement distillation is a fundamental operation in quantum information processing used to obtain higher-fidelity entangled pairs from a supply of less entangled quantum states using local operations aided by classical communication (LOCC). In a physically relevant setting, where states with an initial fidelity of $f_0$, probabilistically generated over multiple, $m$, memory pairs distributed between two parties, Alice and Bob, are pairwise distilled, the optimal policy identifies the system-configuration dependent sequence of entanglement generation and distillation operations that need to be performed in order to minimize the expected time to reach some target fidelity $f_T>f_0$. Here, we formulate and systematically analyze this task as a Markov decision problem and using a value iteration algorithm, obtain optimal deterministic policies that minimize the expected waiting time required to reach a target fidelity. Our results show that the expected waiting time under the optimal policy decreases with increasing generation probability $p$ and number of quantum memories $m$ - as expected. In contrast, it exhibits non-monotonic behavior with respect to $f_0$ for a fixed fidelity gap, $(\Delta f = f_T-f_0)$. While the optimal policy consistently outperforms baseline policies such as the greedy, nested and entanglement pumping policies, its relative advantage is regime-dependent, being determined by the system parameters ($p,f_0,f_T,m$), and exhibits a nontrivial dependence on the fidelity gap $\Delta f$. Our results highlight the value of formulating entanglement distillation as a Markov decision problem, enabling the systematic design of policies that achieve target fidelity thresholds for quantum information tasks in realistic resource-constrained settings.

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

Adaptive Oscillatory-State Alignment for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.06010v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-term time series forecasting benefits from inductive biases that expose recurring temporal structure. Existing periodic forecasting methods typically model recurrence through predefined periods, global spectral components, or fixed learnable templates. However, real-world temporal dynamics are rarely rigidly periodic: around a nominal cycle, oscillatory behavior often exhibits non-rigid periodicity (NRP), where cycle magnitude, cycle alignment, and local cycle duration vary over time. Under these conditions, fixed-template periodic modeling can become fundamentally mismatched to the underlying temporal states. We propose AOSNet, a Hilbert-guided forecasting framework that reformulates periodic forecasting from fixed template matching to adaptive oscillatory-state alignment. AOSNet extracts analytic-signal descriptors from both the observed sequence and a learnable global oscillatory prior, then adaptively aligns local states through a descriptor-conditioned gate that selectively preserves reliable observations while softly correcting mismatched regions. The learned prior serves not as a rigid repeated template but as a flexible oscillatory reference interpreted through local state dynamics. Experiments on eight public benchmarks and two cloud workload traces demonstrate leading or highly competitive accuracy with a compact model size and low inference latency, supporting repeated forecasting settings such as capacity planning and autoscaling. Controlled synthetic studies that isolate cycle-magnitude and cycle-alignment variation and combine them with cycle-duration changes show that the advantage of oscillatory-state alignment increases as NRP intensifies.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

SceneMiner: Identity-Preserving Multi-Task Fine-Tuning for Unified BEV Scene Mining

Mining hard, safety-critical scenes from driving logs is bottlenecked by the absence of difficulty labels, and no single proxy, collision risk, trajectory ambiguity, or semantic rarity suffices to find such scenes on its own. We present SceneMiner, a unified, camera-only bird's-eye-view pipeline that emits complementary mining signals from a frozen vision-language backbone in a single forward pass, with no LiDAR or radar: a retrieval embedding for text-prompted scenario search, a multi-label scene-tag distribution, and a continuous physics-based risk score (a motion forecast is a byproduct, not a contribution). Building such a multi-head model exposes our central finding, a failure mode we term cross-task interference: adding or upgrading one head shifts a shared activation stream and degrades weight-frozen sibling heads, so freezing parameters alone is insufficient. Our contribution, identity-preserving multi-task fine-tuning, removes this interference by zero-initializing every new sub-module and freezing every parameter that feeds the shared stream. The mining heads are thereby preserved bit-identically while training only ~102k parameters. The tagging head reaches mAP 0.4614 (micro-F1 0.5557) on 20 scene tags by pooling each scene into 32 visual tokens, and the embedding head supports text-prompted retrieval, validated qualitatively. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/sceneminer_anonymous-64E5

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Edge Flow: A Tractable and Predictive Continuous-Time Model for Gradient Descent at the Edge of Stability

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18080v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gradient descent in deep learning may operate at the edge of stability (EoS), a regime in which the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian hovers near the stability threshold $2/\eta$, where $\eta$ is the learning rate. Classical analysis tools such as gradient flow and the descent lemma do not apply here, motivating the search for a continuous-time model valid at EoS. We propose Edge Flow, a system of three coupled ordinary differential equations that provides a tractable, faithful, and predictive model of gradient descent dynamics at EoS. Edge Flow decomposes the dynamics into a center, an oscillation direction, and an oscillation magnitude. The center follows a modified gradient flow on a symmetrized loss; the direction tracks a top eigenvector of the Hessian via Rayleigh quotient dynamics; and the magnitude grows or decays exponentially depending on whether the sharpness exceeds or falls below the threshold $2/\eta$. Crucially, sharpness stabilization emerges from the coupled dynamics via a self-stabilization feedback loop. Discretizing Edge Flow only requires two gradient evaluations and one Hessian–vector product at each iteration. We demonstrate empirically that Edge Flow tracks the dynamics of gradient descent at least as faithfully as previously proposed continuous-time EoS models, while in addition resolving the oscillation of the sharpness at the onset of EoS, and that it provides a principled framework for understanding and mitigating instabilities in this regime.

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

Invariants of Sequential Circuits and Generalized Non-Abelian Statistics

arXiv:2606.11527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-invertible symmetries in quantum many-body systems generally give rise to sequential unitary circuits that move symmetry defects. In this paper, we investigate invariants defined by sequences of such circuits, which move non-invertible defects and generate a Berry phase evaluated on quantum states with defects. We show that this Berry phase generally defines an invariant under local deformations, provided that the sequential circuits preserve the locality of those deformations. This invariant also rules out a short-range-entangled state that preserves the non-invertible symmetry, thereby signaling the 't Hooft anomaly of a non-invertible symmetry purely in terms of unitary operators acting on a state. We then apply this framework to loop excitations in three spatial dimensions and identify a new loop excitation in the (3+1)D $\mathbb{D}_4$ topological order, which we dub a non-Abelian fermionic loop. Using the invariant of sequential circuits, we characterize the statistics of non-Abelian fermionic loops. In addition, we find a new (3+1)D mixed topological order with a single non-Abelian fermionic loop, whose long-range entanglement is protected by an invariant of sequential circuits.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

ForecastBench-Sim: A Simulated-World Forecasting Benchmark

Forecasting benchmarks for general-purpose AI systems usually inherit the constraints of the real world: outcomes resolve slowly, tail events are rare, and counterfactual questions are difficult to score. We introduce ForecastBench-Sim, a simulated-world forecasting benchmark built on game rollouts from Freeciv, a turn-based strategy game modelled on the Civilization series. Forecasters receive a fixed world report (a structured snapshot of the current game state) and answer questions about hidden future states; the benchmark then continues the simulation and scores forecasts. Because the world is simulated, the same setup can generate continuous or binary forecasting questions at arbitrary time horizons, paired intervention worlds for conditional or causal questions, and resolved examples of rare or disruptive outcomes. We describe the benchmark pipeline, question families, scoring protocol, and release artifacts, and report validation slices from model evaluations and an anonymized human pilot. ForecastBench-Sim is intended to complement real-world forecasting benchmarks by providing controlled, immediately resolvable tasks for studying probabilistic reasoning under dynamic world states.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Online Reward-Punishment Learning from Fixed-Channel Perceptual Event Streams without Environment Rewards

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study online reward-punishment learning when the environment provides no scalar reward or evaluative label. At each step the agent receives only a fixed-channel perceptual packet, and quantities such as pain, energy, contact, damage, or cognitive error are treated as perceptual dimensions whose valence must be inferred from transition consequences. OHIRL separates four roles: M_psi learns next-packet prediction, D_omega models residual dynamics, C_eta is a fixed internal post-transition trajectory evaluator, and B_xi learns to use the resulting value evidence for later policy updates and action scoring. C_eta uses a recovery-positive and persistence/growth-negative residual-regulation orientation; a coefficient-origin audit shows that equal-unit, raw-equal, and random monotone variants preserve more than 92% of the released top-action rankings, while sign inversion preserves 0%. The reward-free protocol exposes observation transitions while withholding environment rewards, delayed external evaluators, success labels, and action-goodness labels. A conditional error decomposition separates B_xi evidence-estimation error from residual policy-optimization error. In a 2x2-XOR packet task, medicine and chili acquire opposite value under visual XOR contexts, and the same pain or spice increase can be positive or negative depending on consequence structure; B_xi reaches 0.952 balanced reward-sign accuracy. In a full online-interleaved audit, M_psi reaches holdout R2=0.907, B_xi reaches 0.940 sign accuracy, and the policy reaches 0.979 optimal-action accuracy, while immediate packet scores, prediction-error rewards, shuffled targets, zero reward, and error-reduction controls collapse. Hidden-reward CartPole and Taxi controls, public-context no-leakage audits, and module-role ablations further test information boundaries and component necessity.

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

Models That Know How Evaluations Are Designed Score Safer

The validity of AI safety evaluations depends on models behaving consistently across controlled and deployment settings. Prior work has identified test-time contextual cues, such as hypothetical scenarios, as a source of verbalized evaluation awareness and subsequent behavioral shift. In this paper, we investigate a potential explanation of this phenomenon: evaluation meta-knowledge, defined as parametric knowledge about the structural traits that characterize evaluations. Similar to dataset contamination, where benchmark exposure leads to higher performance through memorization, we hypothesize that models trained on texts describing evaluation practices may implicitly learn to recognize and respond to evaluation-like contexts, for instance, through exposure to scientific articles or social media posts about AI benchmarking. To test this, we fine-tune models on synthetic documents describing evaluation traits such as verifiable structures or moral dilemmas. Evaluating this fine-tuned model on six safety benchmarks, we find that it is significantly safer than the base model and control model. This behavioral shift persists even when restricting the analysis to responses lacking explicit verbalization of evaluation awareness. Our results demonstrate that evaluation meta-knowledge may inflate safety benchmark performance, introducing a novel confounder that is independent of explicit memorization or verbalized evaluation awareness, thus, challenging to detect. These findings have important implications for the design and interpretation of AI safety evaluations. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/compass-group-tue/arxiv2026_evaluation_meta_knowledge.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Wasserstein Convergence of ODE-Based Samplers in Decentralized Diffusion Model via Velocity Field Decomposition

arXiv:2606.15835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion models have achieved impressive empirical success in generative tasks, and their convergence theory is now relatively well understood. Motivated by privacy and scalability, recent decentralized diffusion architectures replace a single global velocity field with multiple local experts and a routing mechanism, yielding a sampling dynamics with stochastic expert switching that falls outside standard diffusion convergence analyses. In this work, We study a decentralized diffusion framework with stochastic velocity fields and ODE-based sampling. We establish a convergence guarantee in Wasserstein-2 distance, showing that the distribution of the $N$-step discretization converges to the analytical solution at rate $\mathcal{O}(N^{-1/2}+\varepsilon)$ in $W_2$, where $\varepsilon$ captures the neural approximation errors. To our knowledge, this is the first $W_2$ convergence result for decentralized diffusion models with an ODE-based sampling scheme.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Hardy and Cabello Arguments in Spatial and Temporal Frauchiger-Renner Scenarios

arXiv:2606.15467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate Hardy- and Cabello-type logical structures within spatial and temporal extensions of the Frauchiger–Renner (FR) framework, embedding these constructions directly into the FR multi-observer architecture. In the spatial multi-observer scenario, both Hardy and Cabello contradictions arise, with the Cabello construction yielding the stronger violation,$\(\Delta_Cabello^{\max}=0.1078\)$, which exceeds the maximal Hardy probability $\(P_{H}^{\max}=\frac{5\sqrt{5}-11}{2}\approx 0.09017\)$. We then develop a sequential temporal FR protocol based on coherent multi-observer measurements performed on a single spin-$\tfrac12$ system. In this temporal setting, the Hardy contradiction disappears identically due to dynamical constraints imposed by sequential state updates, whereas a finite Cabello-type violation survives, \(\Delta_Cabello^{\max}\approx 0.0674\). Our results establish a fundamental structural distinction between spatial entanglement and temporal multi-observer correlations in FR-type logical scenarios, and demonstrate that certain observer-independent description failures persist even without spacelike separation.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Hua-Chen New Theory of Economic Optimization

arXiv:2504.19134v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Between 1957-1985, Chinese mathematician Loo-Keng Hua pioneered economic optimization theory through three key contributions: establishing economic stability's fundamental theorem, proving the uniqueness of equilibrium solutions in economic systems, and developing a consumption-integrated model 50 days before his death. Since 1988, Mu-Fa Chen has been working on Hua's theory. He introduced stochastics, namely Markov chains, to economic optimization theory. He updated and developed Hua's model and came up with a new model (Chen's model) which has become the starting point of a new economic optimization theory. Chen's theory can be applied to economic stability test, bankruptcy prediction, product ranking and classification, economic prediction and adjustment, economic structure optimization. Chen's theory can also provide efficient algorithms that are programmable and intelligent. {Stochastics} is the cornerstone of Chen's theory. There is no overlap between Chen's theory, and the existing mathematical economy theory and the economics developments that were awarded Nobel Prizes in Economics between 1969 and 2024. The distinguished features of Chen's theory from the existing theories are quantitative, calculable, predictable, optimizable, programmable and can be intelligent. This survey provides a theoretical overview of the newly published monograph [5rw24]. Specifically, the invariant of the economic structure matrix, also known as the Chen's invariant, was first published in this survey.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Service-Induced Congestion in Memory-Constrained LLM Serving

arXiv:2606.15555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In large language model (LLM) serving, each request accumulates persistent graphics processing unit (GPU) memory during service as its key-value cache grows with every generated token. Under high concurrency, aggregate memory usage therefore increases endogenously over time: the service process itself creates future capacity pressure. When memory capacity is exceeded, systems evict active requests, discarding cached state and restarting them later, which wastes computation and reduces throughput. We develop a discrete-time dynamical model of memory-constrained LLM inference that captures admission, memory growth, and eviction under continuous batching. In the saturated-input regime, the system admits both eviction-free fixed points and limit cycles with evictions. For homogeneous workloads, we show that the eviction-free equilibrium is unstable and that, except for a Lebesgue-measure-zero exact-capture set, the system converges to a unique worst-case limit cycle that is asymptotically stable outside this exceptional set, with throughput losses as large as 50%. For heterogeneous workloads, we prove a stability criterion in the two-class common-input setting and explain how the survival-polynomial mechanism generalizes to multiple classes and heterogeneous-input lengths. Under an input-dominated scaling regime, coprime decoding lengths stabilize the eviction-free equilibrium, while non-coprime lengths create synchronized modes that drive instability. These results characterize when workload heterogeneity desynchronizes completions and helps stabilize memory-constrained serving. More broadly, we identify service-induced congestion as a structural instability mechanism and derive scheduling design principles for sustaining high throughput.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The AI Legal Specialist: A Juridically Autonomous Professional Profile for AI Governance

arXiv:2606.12415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid global expansion of artificial intelligence regulation has generated, across multiple jurisdictions, a demand for legal expertise dedicated to AI that the market has addressed in a fragmented manner. Data protection officers extend their remit beyond data protection law; privacy lawyers reposition themselves toward AI; compliance officers add AI chapters to their existing manuals. This paper argues that none of these adaptive responses adequately covers the professional space opened by the emerging global AI regulatory landscape, of which the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) is the most comprehensive instance, alongside the Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI, the United States executive and sectoral framework, and analogous initiatives in the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, China, Japan, Singapore, and beyond. A distinct professional profile is required: the AI Legal Specialist, conceived as a jurist – understood broadly to encompass any professional with advanced legal training – operating at the intersection of legal interpretation and AI governance. The profile is juridically autonomous: it derives its existence from the structure of regulatory obligations generated wherever AI is subject to substantive regulation, rather than from any technical standard or the extension of adjacent roles. The paper provides a juridically grounded definition of the profile, argues for its autonomy from adjacent figures and international standards, proposes a reference competence architecture aligned with the European e-Competence Framework (e-CF, EN 16234-1) as a methodological choice, and articulates the conditions for its operational measurement through key performance indicators. The contribution is intended as a foundation for international standardization of the profile and as a reference for practice, curricula, and adoption across jurisdictions.

15.
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/

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Second-order PACF asymptotics and discrimination between fractional Gaussian noise and $\operatorname{FARIMA}(0,d,0)$

Authors:

arXiv:2605.31416v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fractional Gaussian noise and $\operatorname{FARIMA}(0,d,0)$ have the same long-memory pole $|\theta|^{-2d}$ and hence the same leading PACF law $\alpha(n)\sim d/n$. We show that this agreement breaks at the first non-universal order. For $0

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

Natively Unlearnable Large Language Models

Unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific training data sources, but this has proved challenging because the contributions of different sources are entangled within the model. Isolating source contributions to disjoint parameters makes removal easier, though it obstructs joint learning across sources. We propose NULLs (Natively Unlearnable LLMs), a model class that satisfies the two opposing goals of isolating source-specific contributions and learning jointly across sources, by training a set of shared backbone neurons alongside a pool of sparsely activated sinks. During training, information specific to a source naturally concentrates in its sinks while information shared across sources accumulates in the backbone. A source is then unlearned at deployment by disabling its corresponding sinks, with no gradient updates and no access to the retained data. We show that NULLs scales to Wikipedia's ~6M articles, isolating each as an independent source. Unlearning a single article removes knowledge specific to it while preserving facts shared with semantically related articles, closely matching retraining from scratch. We note that unlearning with NULLs is also robust: in a case study of unlearning the Harry Potter books, NULLs resists both adversarial extraction and relearning that reverses post-hoc unlearning. Finally, NULLs preserves general language capabilities, matching a standard transformer on downstream benchmarks. Together, these results suggest that source-level unlearning need not be an afterthought. It can be built natively into LLM training while retaining the benefits of shared representation learning.

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

LLM-Powered AI Agent Systems and Their Applications in Industry

arXiv:2505.16120v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has reshaped agent systems. Unlike traditional rule-based agents with limited task scope, LLM-powered agents offer greater flexibility, cross-domain reasoning, and natural language interaction. Moreover, with the integration of multi-modal LLMs, current agent systems are highly capable of processing diverse data modalities, including text, images, audio, and structured tabular data, enabling richer and more adaptive real-world behavior. This paper comprehensively examines the evolution of agent systems from the pre-LLM era to current LLM-powered architectures. We categorize agent systems into software-based, physical, and adaptive hybrid systems, highlighting applications across customer service, software development, manufacturing automation, personalized education, financial trading, and healthcare. We further discuss the primary challenges posed by LLM-powered agents, including high inference latency, output uncertainty, lack of evaluation metrics, and security vulnerabilities, and propose potential solutions to mitigate these concerns.

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

Are you speaking my languages? On spoken language adherence in multimodal LLMs

While Large Language Model (LLM) based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) enables seamless multilingual use, models often misidentify the output language, compromising transcription fidelity and downstream application quality. To preserve flexibility and code-switching capabilities, we propose a soft prompting approach that hints at potential spoken languages without strictly constraining the output. We formally define this challenge as a lack of language adherence, introduce a novel metric to quantify violations, and evaluate three mitigation strategies: (1) zero-shot prompting for robust guidance under uncertainty, (2) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to improve prompt adherence, and (3) Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to enforce adherence during decoding. We present a comparative analysis of these methods across multiple languages, evaluating effectiveness in reducing the language violation while maintaining overall ASR performance. Finally, we discuss trade-offs to guide strategy selection under various compute constraints.

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

Edit Knowledge, Not Just Facts via Multi-Step Reasoning over Background Stories

arXiv:2602.02028v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enabling artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, to update knowledge and flexibly apply it during reasoning remains a central challenge. Existing knowledge editing approaches emphasize atomic facts, improving factual recall but often failing to integrate updated information into a coherent framework usable across contexts. In this work, we argue that knowledge update is fundamentally a reasoning problem rather than a memorization problem. Consequently, a model should be trained in situations where the new information is instrumental to solving a task, combined with pre-existing knowledge, and exercised through multi-step reasoning. Based on this insight, we propose a training strategy based on three principles. First, new knowledge is introduced as a coherent background story that contextualizes novel facts and explains their relation to existing knowledge. Second, models are trained using self-generated multi-hop questions that require multi-step reasoning involving the new information. Third, training is done using knowledge distillation, forcing a student model to internalize the teacher's reasoning behavior without access to the novel information. Experiments show that models trained with this strategy effectively leverage newly acquired knowledge during reasoning and achieve remarkable performance on challenging questions that require combining multiple new facts.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Geometry-Aware Superpixel Graph Transformer with Metadata for Skin Lesion Classification

Automated skin cancer classification from dermoscopic images remains challenging due to heterogeneous lesion structure, strong intra-class variability, and subtle visual differences between benign and malignant cases. Existing CNN/ViT pipelines typically rely on global or patch-level features and often combine patient metadata via late fusion, which limits spatially grounded multimodal reasoning. We present a novel region-based graph learning framework that explicitly models lesions as graphs of spatially coherent superpixel regions represented as frozen CNN features. To capture fine-grained lesion arrangements, we encode inter-regional geometry as edge attributes and introduce a dedicated metadata context node connected to all regions, providing structured integration of demographic/clinical variables within the same relational space. Node representations are updated using our edge-aware graph transformer followed by attention-driven propagation, and a final graph-level embedding for benign-malignant classification. Experiments on four public benchmarks demonstrate that explicit region-level relational modeling and graph-native multimodal fusion yield consistent gains over the state-of-the-art. Consequently, we establish a new graph-centric perspective in which CNN features are modeled as relational nodes and improved through contextual integration, yielding more expressive and robust classifications.

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

Adaptive and Explicit safe: Triggering Latent Safety Awareness in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606.16808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex tasks, they remain highly vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreaks and direct harmful queries. To address this vulnerability, prior works depend heavily on external manual data annotation for safety alignment. However, we observe that LRMs can inherently identify safety risks when being re-presented with original queries alongside their own reasoning trajectories – a capability we term Latent Safety Awareness. To leverage this safety awareness, we first employ Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to explicitly induce safe tags to trigger safety analysis and guidance following the initial reasoning content for unsafe queries, while preserving standard responses for general queries to ensure adaptive triggering. Subsequently, we apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to further enhance the correctness and stability of the safety analysis and guidance. Notably, responses required for both training stages are entirely generated by models being optimized. With (Safe Trigger) SFT and DPO, experimental results demonstrate significant safety enhancement. For example, the Attack Success Rate (ASR) of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B, on average, drops 24.65% and 36.72% on harmful and jailbreak benchmarks, respectively. Finally, our Safe Trigger method exerts almost no negative impact on general performance or user experience.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

The Machine Learning Approach to Moment Closure Relations for Plasma: A Review

arXiv:2511.22486v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The requirement for large-scale global simulations of plasma is an ongoing challenge in both space and laboratory plasma physics. Any simulation based on a fluid model inherently requires a closure relation for the high order plasma moments. This review compiles and analyses the recent surge of machine learning approaches developing improved plasma closure models capable of capturing kinetic phenomena within plasma fluid models. We survey two methodological families: neural-network surrogates (from multilayer perceptrons to Fourier neural operators, the latter recently reproducing both linear and non-linear Landau damping online within a fluid solver) and equation-discovery methods such as sparse regression; and organise the studies by whether they are tested offline against reference data or online within a time-evolving solver. We outline the challenges associated with machine-learning closures, including off-diagonal pressure-tensor accuracy, generalisation beyond the training distribution, and stable integration into large-scale simulations, and the directions future research might take to address them.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Position: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces!

arXiv:2504.09762v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has become a standard method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. These intermediate tokens have been called \say{reasoning traces} or even \say{thinking traces} – implicitly anthropomorphizing the traces, and implying that these traces resemble steps a human might take when solving a challenging problem, and as such can provide an interpretable window into the operation of the model's thinking process to the end user. In this position paper, we present evidence that this anthropomorphization isn't a harmless metaphor, and instead is quite dangerous – it confuses the nature of these models and how to use them effectively, and leads to questionable research. We call on the community to avoid such anthropomorphization of intermediate tokens.

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

Rethinking Structural Anomaly Detection: From Decision Boundaries to Projection Operators

arXiv:2606.15280v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most existing anomaly detection methods rely on estimating a probability density or learning an enclosing decision boundary, implicitly assuming that normal data occupies a region of non-zero volume in the ambient space. In contrast, structural anomaly detection considers data that lies near a low-dimensional manifold, creating a mismatch between the inductive bias of existing methods and the structure of the data, often resulting in degraded performance. To address this mismatch, we introduce a geometric perspective. Specifically, we learn a projection operator onto the manifold of normal samples and define a sample as anomalous if it is altered by this projection. This formulation naturally integrates the inductive bias of manifold-supported data and reframes anomaly detection in terms of a projection residual, thereby resolving issues arising from modeling degenerate distributions. Notably, it provides a unifying interpretation of reconstruction-based methods by explaining their success and failure in terms of projection quality. In particular, it explains the strong generalization ability of projection-aligned models as a consequence of contraction behavior toward the manifold. Moreover, by decoupling anomaly detection from probabilistic modeling, it reduces the tendency to misclassify rare but normal samples, a widely recognized limitation of existing approaches. Empirically, we demonstrate that projection-aligned methods achieve strong performance, outperforming boundary-based methods while improving upon existing reconstruction-based approaches.