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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Stabilizing Physics-Informed Consistency Models via Structure-Preserving Training

arXiv:2602.09303v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a physics-informed consistency modeling framework for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) via fast, few-step generative inference. We identify a key stability challenge in physics-constrained consistency training, where PDE residuals can drive the model toward trivial or degenerate solutions, degrading the learned data distribution. To address this, we introduce a structure-preserving two-stage training strategy that decouples distribution learning from physics enforcement by freezing the coefficient decoder during physics-informed fine-tuning. We further propose a two-step residual objective that enforces physical consistency on refined, structurally valid generative trajectories rather than noisy single-step predictions. The resulting framework enables stable, high-fidelity inference for both unconditional generation and forward problems. We demonstrate that forward solutions can be obtained via a projection-based zero-shot inpainting procedure, achieving consistent accuracy of diffusion baselines with orders of magnitude reduction in computational cost.

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

Pathway-Structured Privileged Distillation for Deployable Computational Pathology

Integrating transcriptomics and histopathology can improve cancer risk modelling, yet practical use is constrained by the limited availability of RNA profiling in routine settings. Here we introduce Mixture of Pathway Experts (MoPE), a knowledge-distillation framework that reframes multimodal learning as privileged distillation for histology-only inference. MoPE is motivated by the partial observability between RNA profiles and whole-slide images: histology can capture morphology-linked consequences of certain molecular programmes, but cannot be expected to reconstruct the full transcriptomic state. MoPE encodes RNA-derived pathways and transfers the molecular supervision to pathway-indexed pathology experts through memory-usage alignment. Across diverse public benchmarks and two independent breast cancer cohorts, MoPE consistently improved WSI-only inference performance relative to baseline methods. Pathway-usage analyses and human-audited visual inspection provide bounded inspection of model behaviour and candidate morphology-linked readouts. These results support pathway-structured privileged distillation as a promising route to using molecular information during training while preserving RNA-free inference.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Circulators Based on Coupled Quantum Anomalous Hall Insulators and Resonators

arXiv:2505.07770v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Integrated plasmonics is advancing rapidly, enabling a wide range of functionalities to be incorporated onto a single chip. Applications span information processing, computation, quantum sensing, and dark-matter detection. This progress has driven the development of integrated non-reciprocal devices, which are essential for preventing unwanted feedback that can degrade system performance. While non-reciprocal devices have been realized in edge magnetoplasmon materials via classical interference effects, their operation is often limited by the input power range. Here, we demonstrate that topological circulators utilizing asymmetric coupling offer improved input power range, isolation, and insertion loss. In this configuration, we demonstrate the coupling between a chiral edge magnetoplasmonic resonator and a pair of LC resonators is well described by an effective non-Hermitian two-site Hatano-Nelson model with asymmetric directional couplings, resulting in nonreciprocal behavior. The coherent photon-plasmon interaction enables a circulator with up to 50 dB of isolation across a broad range of excitation power. These results suggest that magnetic topological insulators provide a promising platform for realizing asymmetric non-Hermitian couplings at radio frequencies and for exploring regimes of strong directional suppression and possible exceptional-point physics. More broadly, they highlight the potential of topological-material-based microwave devices for future integration with superconducting quantum information platforms.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Optimizing LOCC Protocols on Product Stiefel Manifold

arXiv:2510.06909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Characterizing the operational limits of Local Operations and Classical Communication (LOCC) is a central problem in distributed quantum information, yet remains computationally intractable due to the non-convex geometry of the LOCC set. We introduce a geometric framework that embeds the physical constraints of fixed-round LOCC protocols onto the product Stiefel manifold, converting a constrained protocol-design problem into unconstrained Riemannian optimization. We demonstrate this framework through entanglement distillation: by directly optimizing finite-copy LOCC protocols, we discover achievable protocols whose fidelities match positive partial transpose (PPT) upper bounds to within numerical precision, and we provide numerical evidence for both the operational advantage of adaptive communication rounds and the super-additivity of coherent information under two-way processing. These results establish Riemannian manifold optimization as a practical tool for probing the physical limits of future quantum networks.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Robust Pretty Good Measurement via Hybrid Classical-Quantum Pseudoinverse Approximation and Circuit-Level Realization

arXiv:2606.13150v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretty Good Measurement (PGM) is a near-optimal strategy for quantum state discrimination, but its practical realization becomes unstable when the ensemble operator is singular or ill-conditioned. We introduce a numerically robust PGM formulation based on the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse, replacing the standard inverse square root with a threshold-regularized variant that remains well-defined across different spectral regimes. We develop a hybrid classical-quantum framework that combines pseudoinverse-based spectral preprocessing with quantum circuit realizations using block-encoding and spectral-transformation techniques. The framework incorporates support awareness, yielding physically meaningful measurement operators even in rank-deficient cases, and employs oblivious amplitude amplification to improve circuit-level success probabilities. Extensive numerical and circuit-level simulations show close agreement between theoretical predictions and quantum circuit outputs. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets, including ill-conditioned and degenerate scenarios, demonstrate stable discrimination performance where standard PGM becomes numerically unstable. The results establish a practical hybrid classical-quantum framework for robust quantum state discrimination and extend previous circuit-based implementations of the PGM testing stage toward pseudoinverse-aware measurement design.

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

Deployment-Centered Evaluation: Predicting Query-Level Rejection Risk in a Clinical LLM System

arXiv:2606.12702v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into clinical systems, making it essential to evaluate the real-world utility of these systems. However, static benchmarks tend to measure correctness rather than user acceptance, aggregate performance across queries, and require densely annotated datasets – leading to major blind spots for evaluating clinical systems. In this work, we perform a deployment-centered evaluation of an LLM system embedded within electronic health records at an academic medical center, where user feedback is sparse but closely reflects the deployment conditions. Specifically, we train a pre-response classifier that estimates the risk that a future interaction will result in the user rejecting the LLM response, based on query content and deployment-specific context available before generation. We conduct a prospective analysis of our model over 4.5 months of user feedback, finding that our prediction model achieves an AUROC of 0.719. Further, we estimate the benefit of such predictions in two downstream use cases (guardrail triggering and abstention). Our key conceptual insight is that making use of deployment-specific context (i.e., the provider type, department name, language model used for response), as opposed to only query content, improves the ability to predict whether the user will reject the system output. Altogether, our empirical case study demonstrates the feasibility of predicting user rejection using deployment-specific context, opening the door to targeted guardrails.

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

EvoLMM: Self-Evolving Large Multimodal Models with Continuous Rewards

Recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) have enabled impressive reasoning and perception abilities, yet most existing training pipelines still depend on human-curated data or externally verified reward models, limiting their autonomy and scalability. In this work, we strive to improve LMM reasoning capabilities in a purely unsupervised fashion (without any annotated data or reward distillation). To this end, we propose a self-evolving framework, named EvoLMM, that instantiates two cooperative agents from a single backbone model: a Proposer, which generates diverse, image-grounded questions, and a Solver, which solves them through internal consistency, where learning proceeds through a continuous self-rewarding process. This dynamic feedback encourages both the generation of informative queries and the refinement of structured reasoning without relying on ground-truth or human judgments. When using the popular Qwen2.5-VL as the base model, our EvoLMM yields consistent gains upto $\sim$3\% on multimodal math-reasoning benchmarks, including ChartQA, MathVista, and MathVision, using only raw training images. We hope our simple yet effective approach will serve as a solid baseline easing future research in self-improving LMMs in a fully-unsupervised fashion. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/EvoLMM.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Sequential Deep Learning to Predict Non-Central to Central Geographic Atrophy Progression from OCT Imaging

Purpose: To develop and validate a temporal deep learning framework for predicting geographic atrophy (GA) progression across multi-year horizons using longitudinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) sequences. Design: Retrospective longitudinal cohort study. Subjects, Participants, and/or Controls: A total of 91 patients with dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) were identified from Wake Forest University School of Medicine (2013-2023), yielding 455 OCT volumes. Two prediction cohorts were defined: 32 patients with no GA (NGA) at baseline who subsequently developed GA, and 35 patients whose earliest GA manifestation was non-central GA (NCGA). Non-progressing patients served as negative controls. Methods: OCT B-scan volumes were encoded into visit-level feature representations using three pretrained architectures (ResNet-18, ResNet-50, ViT-B/16). Chronologically ordered visit embeddings, optionally augmented with inter-visit time intervals ({Delta}t), were processed through recurrent neural networks (RNN), long short-term memory networks (LSTM), and Transformer encoders to model longitudinal disease trajectories. Models were trained and evaluated independently for prediction horizons of 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 years using patient-level stratified splits (80/20). Performance was assessed across five random seeds. Main Outcome Measures: Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC), F1-score, and accuracy for predicting two clinically critical transitions: NGA to GA onset and NCGA to central GA (CGA) involvement. Results: For NGA to GA prediction, models achieved ROC-AUC of 0.84-0.94 at 2-4 years and 1.00 at 5-6 years. For NCGA to CGA prediction, Transformer-based models achieved peak AUC of 0.95 at 4 years and 0.96 at 5 years. Longer input sequences (8 visits vs. 4 visits) consistently improved NCGA to CGA performance at extended horizons. Temporal interval encoding improved stability in several LSTM configurations.

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

Hellinger Multimodal Variational Autoencoders

arXiv:2601.06572v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal variational autoencoders (VAEs) are widely used for weakly supervised generative learning with multiple modalities. Predominant methods aggregate unimodal inference distributions using either a product of experts (PoE), a mixture of experts (MoE), or their combinations to approximate the joint posterior. In this work, we revisit multimodal inference through the lens of probabilistic opinion pooling, an optimization-based approach. We start from Hölder pooling with $\alpha=0.5$, which corresponds to the unique symmetric member of the $\alpha-divergence$ family, and derive a moment-matching approximation, termed Hellinger. We then leverage such an approximation to propose HELVAE, a multimodal VAE that avoids sub-sampling, yielding an efficient yet effective model that: (i) learns more expressive latent representations as additional modalities are observed; and (ii) empirically achieves better trade-offs between generative coherence and quality, outperforming state-of-the-art multimodal VAE models.

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

Dynestyx: A Probabilistic Programming Library for Dynamical Systems

arXiv:2606.16985v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: State-space models (SSMs) are the standard formalism for Bayesian treatment of dynamical systems, with natural applications in statistics, signal processing, and machine learning. Despite their importance in both theory and application, dynamical systems have proven difficult to incorporate in modern probabilistic programming languages (PPLs), making state-of-the-art methods less accessible to practitioners and introducing friction in following the "Bayesian workflow." We introduce dynestyx, a probabilistic programming library with first-class support for SSMs, including state-of-the-art methods in the estimation of both states and parameters. Through a single, unified interface, users may specify arbitrary priors for discrete-time or continuous-time dynamical systems, perform inference over mixed-effect data, and make state and parameter estimates with principled uncertainty quantification.

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

Graph Regularized Non-negative Reduced Biquaternion Matrix Factorization for Color Image Recognition

Non-negative reduced biquaternion matrix factorization (NRBMF) uses the product of reduced biquaternion (RB) matrices to incorporate the non-negativity constraints of color image pixels into the factorization process. However, NRBMF mainly focuses on reconstruction accuracy and does not explicitly exploit the local geometric structure of image data, which may limit the discriminative ability of the obtained low-dimensional coefficient representations. To address this issue, we propose a graph regularized non-negative reduced biquaternion matrix factorization (GNRBMF) model for color image recognition. The proposed model incorporates a graph Laplacian regularizer into the reduced biquaternion coefficient matrix, encouraging nearby samples in the original space to have similar coefficient representations. Meanwhile, GNRBMF retains the non-negativity property of NRBMF in the reduced biquaternion algebra. To solve the optimization problem, a component-wise alternating projected gradient algorithm is derived, and its convergence properties are analyzed. Experimental results on three color image datasets show that the proposed GNRBMF model achieves competitive or superior recognition performance compared with several methods in most tested settings.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Dual-Branch Cross-Projection Debiasing through Diffusion-based Disentanglement

Foundation models trained on biased datasets often rely on spurious correlations between target labels and non-causal attributes, resulting in poor generalization on minority groups. Bias mitigation remains challenging due to two fundamental issues. First, when group labels are unavailable, existing group-unsupervised methods typically infer spurious attributes implicitly from model behavior, making it difficult to identify spurious factors that are semantically aligned with real-world biases. Second, even with pseudo spurious supervision, most existing debiasing methods follow a single-branch design that operates within a single shared feature space, where target and spurious attributes are intrinsically entangled. To address the first challenge, we introduce Confidence-guided Bias Concept Mining (CBCM), which leverages diffusion-disentangled, semantically grounded concept representations to identify reliable spurious attributes without attribute annotations. To address the second challenge, we propose Dual-branch Cross-projection Debiasing (DCD), a prompt-tuning framework that separates target and spurious representations into two branches and explicitly removes spurious information through cross null-space projection while preserving target-relevant semantics. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art worst group accuracy among group-unsupervised approaches, while tuning at most 0.22% of the model parameters. The source code is available in the supplementary materials.

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

Auditing Machine Unlearning: A Systematic Research on Whether Models Truly Forget

arXiv:2606.16110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning has been extensively studied in response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements. However, auditing whether unlearning algorithms have truly erased the influence of specific data remains an open challenge. The lack of reliable and practical auditing mechanisms can lead to critical privacy risks, such as residual information leakage. This paper initiates a systematic investigation into whether existing unlearning algorithms can truly forget the designated data. We propose the first practical and general-purpose auditing framework for machine unlearning, inspired by the concept of proof of ignorance. Our framework addresses the key practicality limitations of existing methods by eliminating the need for retraining-from-scratch baselines, avoiding the training of large numbers of shadow models, and requiring no intrusive intervention in the original training process. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we first conduct validation experiments to verify its soundness and completeness. We then perform comprehensive experiments across six datasets and ten representative unlearning methods. The results demonstrate that our framework reliably distinguishes between successful and failed unlearning. In particular, we observe that retraining-based and fine-tuning-based methods can achieve effective unlearning, even when the target data remain in the original dataset. In contrast, de-optimization-based methods fail to achieve true unlearning and instead degrade the model's performance. Fisher/Hessian-based methods also fail to unlearn requested data, even formal certification is provided. Moreover, we show that our framework is robust against fake unlearning attempts and generalizes well to large language models.

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

OpenMedQ: Broad Open Pretraining for Medical Vision-Language Models

We present OpenMedQ, a medical vision-language model pretrained on the broadest fully-open medical mix to date: 14 datasets totaling ~3.35M pretraining samples spanning pathology, radiology, microscopy, and text-only clinical QA. OpenMedQ reaches state-of-the-art BLEU-1 on PathVQA (75.9), beating Med-PaLM M variants up to 562B parameters (~80x larger), and matches the best reported VQA-MED BLEU-1 (64.5). Its vision encoder, transferred to 8 unseen medical classification benchmarks under an identical downstream recipe, obtains the highest average macro-F1 (0.757) among BiomedCLIP (0.745), PMC-CLIP (0.745), PubMedCLIP (0.746), and a from-scratch baseline (0.616). We release our code and an interactive demo is publicly available as a reproducible baseline for the community.

15.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-23

Multi-omics biomarkers of endothelial dysregulation preceding chronic lung allograft dysfunction: A prospective cohort study

Authors:

by Giulia Iacono, Christina Begka, Bailey Cardwell, Carmel Daunt, Roxanne Chatzis, Celine Pattaroni, Alana Butler, Matthew Macowan, Bronwyn Levvey, Gregory I. Snell, Glen P. Westall, Benjamin J. Marsland Background Long-term survival of lung transplant recipients remains limited by chronic lung allograft dysfunction (CLAD). CLAD is only diagnosed following a persistent and substantial decline in lung function, after which irreversible damage to the lungs has occurred, limiting opportunities to effectively intervene at an early stage. There is a critical need for earlier detection prior to its clinical manifestation. The immunological drivers of CLAD remain unclear, limiting the development of predictive biomarkers and new therapies. Methods and findings In this hypothesis-generating, prospective cohort study, we profiled the microbial, metabolic, lipidomic, and gene expression dynamics of longitudinally collected broncho-alveolar lavages (BALs) from 56 CLAD-free lung transplant recipients up to 30 months post-transplant, and compared BALs from 13 CLAD-free patients to BALs from 13 patients who developed CLAD. In CLAD-free patients, the first 6 months post-transplant were hallmarked by diminished microbial diversity and increased abundance of Staphylococcus and Candida, coupled with upregulated innate and adaptive immune responses, and elevated nitric oxide metabolism (FDR 

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GeroEngine: Generative single-cell aging trajectories reveal a bidirectionally traversable identity core and direction-specific inflammatory remodeling

Authors:

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) maps aging tissues at high resolution but is destructive, preventing longitudinal tracking; dropout and zero-inflation artifacts, amplified by shift-invariant linear simulations, confound age-associated variability. We developed GeroEngine, a technical-artifact-aware framework combining VAE-based trajectory simulation, LOPO cross-validation, linear baselines, reverse traversal, and reverse-directed network inference. In microglia and HSCs, the VAE reduced technical-artifact carryover while preserving trajectory heterogeneity and improving alignment to artifact-reduced reference manifolds. Consensus GeroTargets and GeroRegulators defined tissue-specific GeroNetworks organized into three pillars: lineage/replication identity collapse, a sex-dimorphic endocrine/stress core, and inflammatory remodeling. Forward and reverse simulations aligned to the common young[->]old aging axis revealed a sign-coherent, direction-specific program: identity/replication targets were bidirectionally recovered, whereas MHC/NF-{kappa}B inflammatory programs were preferentially forward-recovered. These results support identity collapse as a deep traversable core of aging and nominate upstream homeostatic restoration over downstream inflammatory suppression.

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

Not all Jensen-Shannon Divergence Estimators are Equal

arXiv:2606.16411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Jensen-Shannon divergence is widely reported as a scalar measure of fidelity for synthetic tabular data. Yet, in practice, it is estimated from finite samples using protocols that are often underspecified. This creates a measurement problem. Although the population divergence is well defined, the empirical value depends on the estimator family, sampling protocol, calibration, dimensionality, and class balance. We show that different protocols can yield non-comparable values: marginal-based estimators ignore dependencies in the joint distribution and can severely underestimate divergence, while classifier-based estimators capture joint structure but exhibit strong estimator dependence. We systematically study this behavior across controlled settings with reference divergences and real-world synthetic tabular benchmarks. Our analysis reveals dependence blindness in marginal estimators, prior-shift bias under class imbalance, and estimator sensitivity in high dimensions. To address prior shift, we derive a closed-form posterior correction for classifier-based Jensen-Shannon estimation. Our results show that empirical Jensen-Shannon divergence values are inherently protocol-dependent, making explicit specification of the estimation procedure necessary for meaningful comparison. We provide practical guidelines and an open-source tool for estimator-aware Jensen-Shannon evaluation.

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

Inference-time Policy Steering via Vision and Touch

arXiv:2606.14981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time steering adapts pre-trained generative robot policies during deployment by verifying candidate actions before execution. While prior methods typically perform this verification only with visual observations, vision alone is often insufficient for contact-rich manipulation, where success depends on both global task progress and subtle local interactions such as contact force. We introduce ViTaL, a visuo-tactile inference-time steering framework that formulates multimodal guidance as a bi-level optimization problem. At the high level, visual sampling-and-verification performs long-horizon mode selection, deciding what behavior the robot should execute. At the low level, tactile-guided diffusion editing refines the selected action sequence over a shorter horizon to satisfy local contact requirements. To support outcome-based steering, ViTaL learns a visuo-tactile latent world model and employs semantically aligned visual and tactile verifiers, including a novel text-conditioned tactile reward that scores predicted tactile futures directly in latent space. Across three real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, ViTaL improves overall success by 51% over the base policy, outperforms unimodal steering by at least 33%, and exceeds naive multimodal fusion by at least 20%. Website: https://yilin-wu98.github.io/vital_website.

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

How Reliable are Fairness Audits with Unreliable Data?

arXiv:2506.23033v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fairness audits are a key component of responsible machine-learning deployment. Yet, audit-recommendation reliability under incomplete protected-label access is still poorly understood. In this work, we focused on protected-label missingness in fairness mitigation audits. We introduced a seed-calibrated stress test to separate missingness effects from seed-to-seed movement already present under complete labels. Across ACS/Folktables tasks, missingness settings that retain some protected labels usually do not move selected mitigation methods beyond a complete-label seed-to-seed baseline. At $0%$ protected-label access, candidates collapse to an empirical-risk-minimization baseline and deterministic tie-breaking rather than revealing a broad missingness effect. We also found that threshold optimization can turn fairness gains on a single protected axis into intersectional harm above a seed baseline, and this threshold-optimizer finding persists under random-forest validation. Overall, our results highlight that protected-label missingness should be reported with seed-null calibration, candidate-set context, and intersectional consequences before it is treated as evidence of audit fragility.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Second-Order Bias of LLMs Through Epistemic Entitlement

Evaluations of social bias in LLMs largely focus on whether models generate or imply biased content. However, as LLMs are increasingly used as judges of bias, they may exhibit social biases in subtler ways in how they evaluate biased content, which current methods do not systematically capture. We call this second-order bias: social bias in an LLM's judgment about social bias, which we evaluate through a novel, philosophically grounded reasoning task. Drawing on entitlement epistemology, we conceptualize bias as misplaced foundational knowledge that shapes an agent's rational inquiry, and derive a logical reasoning task for LLMs to judge to whom a biased text is acceptable or non-acceptable. We develop two simple metrics to measure how biased LLM judges are in inferring demographics for acceptability without sufficient support, and how these inferences vary across groups targeted by biased texts. Evaluating open and closed models, we find that our task evades safety guardrails by surfacing bias in model judgment. It varies systematically across target groups, reflects implicit social maps, and shows how models are still triggered by demographic labels. Our work points to the need for LLM bias evaluation in judgment tasks and broadly, for more theoretically grounded approaches to bias evaluation in NLP. We release our code and model responses at https://github.com/uofthcdslab/second-order-bias.

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

Beware of Aliases – Signal Preservation is Crucial for Robust Image Restoration

Image restoration networks are usually comprised of an encoder and a decoder, responsible for aggregating image content from noisy, distorted data and to restore clean, undistorted images, respectively. Data aggregation as well as high-resolution image generation both usually come at the risk of involving aliases, i.e.~standard architectures put their ability to reconstruct the model input in jeopardy to reach high PSNR values on validation data. The price to be paid is low model robustness. In this work, we show that simply providing alias-free paths in state-of-the-art reconstruction transformers supports improved model robustness at low costs on the restoration performance. We do so by proposing BOA-Restormer, a transformer-based image restoration model that executes downsampling and upsampling operations partly in the frequency domain to ensure alias-free paths along the entire model while potentially preserving all relevant high-frequency information.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Autonomy Tax: Defense Training Breaks LLM Agents

arXiv:2603.19423v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks. Practitioners deploy defense-trained models to protect against prompt injection attacks that manipulate agent behavior through malicious observations or retrieved content. We reveal a fundamental capability-alignment paradox: defense training designed to improve safety systematically destroys agent competence while failing to prevent sophisticated attacks. Evaluating defended models against undefended baselines across 97 agent tasks and 1,000 adversarial prompts, we uncover three systematic biases unique to multi-step agents. Agent incompetence bias manifests as immediate tool execution breakdown, with models refusing or generating invalid actions on benign tasks before observing any external content. Cascade amplification bias causes early failures to propagate through retry loops, pushing defended models to timeout on 99\% of tasks compared to 13\% for baselines. Trigger bias leads to paradoxical security degradation where defended models perform worse than undefended baselines while straightforward attacks bypass defenses at high rates. Root cause analysis reveals these biases stem from shortcut learning: models overfit to surface attack patterns rather than semantic threat understanding, evidenced by extreme variance in defense effectiveness across attack categories. Our findings demonstrate that current defense paradigms optimize for single-turn refusal benchmarks while rendering multi-step agents fundamentally unreliable, necessitating new approaches that preserve tool execution competence under adversarial conditions.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

PrototypeNAS: Rapid Design of Deep Neural Networks for Microcontroller Units

arXiv:2603.15106v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enabling efficient deep neural network (DNN) inference on edge devices with different hardware constraints is a challenging task that typically requires DNN architectures to be specialized for each device separately. To avoid the huge manual effort, one can use neural architecture search (NAS). However, many existing NAS methods are resource-intensive and time-consuming because they require the training of many different DNNs from scratch. Furthermore, they do not take the resource constraints of the target system into account. To address these shortcomings, we propose PrototypeNAS, a zero-shot NAS method to accelerate and automate the selection, compression, and specialization of DNNs to different target microcontroller units (MCUs). We propose a novel three-step search method that decouples DNN design and specialization from DNN training for a given target platform. First, we present a novel search space that not only cuts out smaller DNNs from a single large architecture, but instead combines the structural optimization of multiple architecture types, as well as optimization of their pruning and quantization configurations. Second, we explore the use of an ensemble of zero-shot proxies during optimization instead of a single one. Third, we propose the use of Hypervolume subset selection to distill DNN architectures from the Pareto front of the multi-objective optimization that represent the most meaningful tradeoffs between accuracy and FLOPs. We evaluate the effectiveness of PrototypeNAS on 12 different datasets in three different tasks: image classification, time series classification, and object detection. Our results demonstrate that PrototypeNAS is able to identify DNN models within minutes that are small enough to be deployed on off-the-shelf MCUs and still achieve accuracies comparable to the performance of large DNN models.

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

Learning in the Recurrent State: Gradient Descent with Linear Recurrent Networks

arXiv:2410.11687v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Linear recurrent networks (LRNNs) offer linear-time sequence modeling, but standard recurrent updates do not directly expose the supervised products needed for in-context gradient descent. We propose a sufficient constructive inductive bias for LRNNs: equip a diagonal recurrent state with multiplicative readout and a short sliding-window cross-product self-attention update. The resulting architecture, Gradient-based Recurrent In-context Learner (GRIL), can implement minibatch gradient descent on a task-specific linear predictor during a single forward pass. The same design extends to multi-step updates and cross-entropy classification, with a limited MLP-based extension to non-linear regression. Empirically, trained GRILs recover the behavior and parameters predicted by the construction on synthetic ICL tasks, and the same architectural bias yields useful performance on Long Range Arena and language modelling. These results present windowed cross-product self-attention as a practical, testable inductive bias for LRNNs that learn in context through gradient-descent-like updates.

25.
Science (Express) 2026-05-07

TranscriptFormer: A generative cell atlas across 1.5 billion years of evolution | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Single-cell transcriptomics is revolutionizing our understanding of cellular diversity, yet comparing transcriptional programs across the tree of life remains challenging. We developed TranscriptFormer, a family of generative foundation models trained on up to 112 million cells spanning 1.53 billion years of evolution across 12 species. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on cell type classification, even for species separated over 685 million years of evolution, and zero-shot disease state identification in human cells. Developmental trajectories, phylogenetic relationships and cellular hierarchies emerge naturally in TranscriptFormer’s representations without any explicit training on these annotations. This work establishes a powerful framework for quantitative single-cell analysis and comparative cellular biology, thus demonstrating that universal principles of cellular organization can be learned and predicted across the tree of life.