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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

JailbreakOPT: Tool-Assisted Iterative Jailbreak Prompt Optimization

arXiv:2606.11425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jailbreak attacks expose persistent safety weaknesses in large language models (LLMs), but existing stateless single-turn methods face a trade-off: hand-crafted prompts are expressive but static, while iterative prompt optimization can adapt but often relies on low-level mutations that require many target queries. We propose JailbreakOPT, a tool-assisted framework for improving iterative single-turn jailbreak prompt optimization. JailbreakOPT organizes diverse atomic jailbreak prompts into an attack tool library and composes them through a unified intra-episode optimization abstraction to generate stronger standalone attack prompts. To reuse experience across attack episodes, JailbreakOPT further frames tool selection as a contextual bandit problem and applies contextual Thompson sampling to guide exploration and exploitation based on past outcomes. Experiments across multiple target LLMs and attack goals show that JailbreakOPT improves attack success rate (ASR) while reducing the number of attacks until success (No.A) compared with atomic single-turn attacks and existing iterative optimization baselines. This paper may contain offensive or harmful content.

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

CADO: From Imitation to Cost Minimization for Heatmap-based Solvers in Combinatorial Optimization

arXiv:2602.08210v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Heatmap-based solvers have emerged as a promising paradigm for Combinatorial Optimization (CO). However, we argue that the dominant Supervised Learning (SL) training paradigm suffers from a fundamental objective mismatch: minimizing imitation loss (e.g., cross-entropy) does not guarantee solution cost minimization. We dissect this mismatch into two deficiencies: Decoder-Blindness (being oblivious to the non-differentiable decoding process) and Cost-Blindness (prioritizing structural imitation over solution quality). We empirically demonstrate that these intrinsic flaws impose a hard performance ceiling. To overcome this limitation, we propose CADO (Cost-Aware Diffusion models for Optimization), a streamlined Reinforcement Learning fine-tuning framework that formulates the diffusion denoising process as an MDP to directly optimize the post-decoded solution cost. We introduce Label-Centered Reward, which repurposes ground-truth labels as unbiased baselines rather than imitation targets, and Hybrid Fine-Tuning for parameter-efficient adaptation. CADO achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks, validating that objective alignment is essential for unlocking the full potential of heatmap-based solvers.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Towards Scalable Customization and Deployment of Multi-Agent Systems for Enterprise Applications

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems demonstrate strong performance on complex reasoning and task execution, enabling broad enterprise applications. However, production deployment remains challenging due to domain-specific customization requirements and high latency and inference costs in agentic workflows. We propose a unified framework for customization and efficient deployment of multi-agent systems in real-world settings. The first stage, Agentic Model Customization, combines continual pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and preference optimization to adapt a compact model to specialized domains while retaining strong agentic capabilities. The second stage, Inference Optimization, integrates speculative decoding and FP8 quantization with targeted calibration to enable cost-efficient serving with minimal quality loss. Across enterprise workloads, our framework enables rapid domain adaptation and achieves a 4.48x speedup in throughput while maintaining performance and improving robustness on long-tail scenarios.

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

Correction scheme for molecular total energies from quantum phase estimation under limited qubit resources

arXiv:2603.02715v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a practical method for accurately evaluating molecular total energies using a hybrid approach that integrates fault-tolerant quantum computers with classical computing. Our scheme consists of two complementary components: quantum dominant orbital selection (QDOS) and subspace dynamical correlation (SDC). QDOS extracts only the essential active orbitals from the complete active space (CAS) configuration interaction (CI) state on a quantum computer, yielding a compact active space suitable for classical CASCI calculations. SDC then evaluates dynamical-correlation corrections for the CASCI energy using this compact state, which remains tractable on classical machines. To demonstrate that the CAS energy obtained on a quantum computer can be post-corrected by SDC, we examine two frameworks: multireference perturbation theory and tailored coupled-cluster theory. Our scheme enables effective treatment of relatively large molecular systems by combining limited quantum and classical resources.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Model Stealing Through the Lens of Model Multiplicity

arXiv:2606.15493v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model stealing attacks, where adversaries create high-fidelity surrogate models, are a significant threat to the intellectual property of machine learning services. Conventional wisdom suggests these surrogates could provide adversaries with economic leverage comparable to the original service providers. This paper challenges this assumption by evaluating model stealing attacks beyond mere fidelity to the target model. Because query-based extraction provides only partial supervision of the target's input-output behavior, the surrogate is not uniquely identified: many near-optimal surrogates can achieve comparable fidelity while differing in deployment-relevant properties. Instead of performing a classic learning-based model stealing attack, we compute the Rashomon Set (i.e., the set of almost-equally-accurate models) of surrogate models, and evaluate its diversity using multiplicity metrics (ambiguity, discrepancy, and Rashomon Capacity) and group fairness metrics. Across tabular, medical imaging, and NLP tasks, our experiments on real-world datasets reveal that despite exhibiting similar fidelity to the target model, surrogate models can display significant variances in other critical performance metrics. These findings cast doubt on the presumed equivalence between high-fidelity surrogates and the target model in practical deployment scenarios.

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

Towards Distributed Inference of LLMs on a P2P Network

arXiv:2606.17059v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prefix caching can reduce LLM inference latency by reusing KV caches across requests with shared prompts, but cluster-scale reuse is challenging because caches are partitioned across nodes. We propose a decentralized, prefix-cache-aware routing scheme for peer-to-peer LLM serving. Each node maintains a local radix tree of its own cached prefixes and asynchronously refreshed estimates of peer caches using periodic anti-entropy. Requests are routed to the node with the longest estimated prefix match, without centralized coordination or KV-cache transfer. Stale metadata only causes cache misses, not incorrect outputs, making weak consistency sufficient for correctness. Evaluation on simulated MMLU workloads show that decentralized routing improves latency under low communication delay and skewed prefix distributions, while high network latency and affinity-induced hotspots limit its benefits.

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

A T-API-Compliant ReAct Agentic Loop for Optical Networks: Generic vs. Domain-Specific Tool Abstractions

arXiv:2606.18000v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optical networks need intent-driven, closed-loop agentic management, a key enabler for higher autonomy levels. We present the first T-API-compliant reasoning and act (ReAct) loop. We show that domain-specific composite tools achieve 90% oracle-validated correctness with threefold token savings compared to generic tools.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Approximating Whittle-Matern Fields over Discretized Manifolds

arXiv:2606.13827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Markovian Whittle-Matérn fields have been convergently approximated by discrete Gauss Markov Random Fields (GMRFs) with sparse precision matrices using a Finite Element approximation of the two-parameter family, \[ (\kappa^2 - \Delta)^{\alpha/2} u = \mathcal{W}, \;\; \kappa \in \mathbb{R}, \; \alpha \in \mathbb{N}. \] of SPDEs. Using recent developements in the analysis of Discrete Exterior Calculus (DEC), we present a different, yet closely related, convergent GMRF approximation to these Matérn fields over complete, boundaryless Riemannian manifolds discretized as well-centered simplicial complexes. This convergent method (i) is agnostic to $\alpha, \kappa$ and thus allows a universal approximation scheme for the precision and covariance matrices of the entire $(\alpha, \kappa)$-family of GMRFs, so they may be inferred rather than guessed. (ii) inherently models pointwise and piecewise-smoothed measurements of a random field and approximates both equally well (iii) is computationally independent of the interpolants used - it suffers no overhead if one convergent interpolant were replaced with another suitable interpolant over the same mesh. Furthermore, we show that, on discretizations that are well-connected in a precise sense, and volume-concentrated, the precision matrices are spectral functions of a graph-laplacian. We provide a low rank approximator to the family of such Matérn GMRFs and mention a use case: reducing the number of measurements needed to model the GMRF by compressed-sensing.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Hybrid Transformer-Mamba for Weakly Supervised Volumetric Medical Segmentation

Weakly supervised segmentation enables model training from plane-level labels. Existing methods often rely on 2D encoders, neglecting the volumetric nature of medical data. We propose TranSamba, a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture designed to capture 3D context via cross-plane modeling. TranSamba augments a Vision Transformer backbone with Cross-Plane Mamba blocks, leveraging linear-time modeling for efficient information exchange across neighboring planes. This exchange improves in-plane self-attention and subsequent attention maps for object localization. TranSamba maintains linear time complexity and constant space complexity with respect to the input volume depth. Extensive experiments on three datasets covering diverse modalities and pathologies show that TranSamba achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the generalizable efficacy of cross-plane modeling. Code is available at: https://github.com/YihengLyu/TranSamba.

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

FlowBender: Feedback-Aware Training for Self-Correcting Conditional Flows

Conditional diffusion and flow models routinely fail to satisfy the very constraints that define their task. For instance, a depth-conditioned model often produces images whose re-extracted depth disagrees with the input, even though the forward operator–the depth predictor defining the constraint–is available during both training and inference. Existing approaches generally fall into two categories: supervised models that treat the conditioning signal as a static cue and ignore alignment information at inference, and guidance-based methods that consult it through hand-tuned linear updates, typically trading fidelity to the condition against the plausibility of the generated sample. We argue that the fundamental gap in both paradigms is that the model is never trained to utilize its own alignment error. We introduce FlowBender, a closed-loop framework that treats this error as a first-class input, training the network to learn a correction policy conditioned on inference-time feedback. At each step, an unguided look-ahead pass estimates the clean signal, a task-specific deviation is computed via the forward operator, and a refinement pass consumes this signal to produce a corrected velocity. We propose several variants of FlowBender, including a gradient-based formulation for differentiable operators and a zero-order variant for non-differentiable settings such as JPEG compression. For efficient sampling, we introduce a prior-step shortcut that enables closed-loop correction at a minimal additional computational cost. Across image-to-image translation, restoration, and 3D mesh texturing, FlowBender consistently outperforms standard supervised baselines, alignment-loss-augmented training, and state-of-the-art inference-time guidance, improving fidelity and plausibility simultaneously rather than trading them against each other. Project page: https://flow-bender.github.io/

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

RLRC: Reinforcement Learning-based Recovery for Compressed Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2506.17639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLA) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities and strong potential in complex robotic manipulation. However, their large parameter sizes and high inference latency hinder real-world deployment, especially on resource-constrained platforms. To address this, we conduct a systematic empirical study of model compression for VLAs. Building on these insights, we present RLRC, a three-stage compression and recovery pipeline consisting of structured pruning, performance recovery via SFT and RL, and subsequent quantization. The RL stage incorporates a critic warm-up strategy and BC loss regularization to stabilize training and preserve policy behavior. RLRC achieves up to an 8 times memory reduction and 2.3 times inference speedup while maintaining the original task success rate. Extensive experiments across multiple VLA backbones show that RLRC consistently outperforms existing compression baselines, highlighting its effectiveness for on-device deployment. Project website: https://rlrc-vla.github.io

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

Dual-branch Prompting for Multimodal Machine Translation

Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT) typically enhances text-only translation by incorporating aligned visual features. Despite the remarkable progress, state-of-the-art MMT approaches often rely on paired image-text inputs at inference and are sensitive to irrelevant visual noise, which limits their robustness and practical applicability. To address these issues, we propose D2P-MMT, a diffusion-based dual-branch prompting framework for robust vision-guided translation. Specifically, D2P-MMT requires only the source text and a reconstructed image generated by a pre-trained diffusion model, which naturally filters out distracting visual details while preserving semantic cues. During training, the model jointly learns from both authentic and reconstructed images using a dual-branch prompting strategy, encouraging rich cross-modal interactions. To bridge the modality gap and mitigate training-inference discrepancies, we introduce a distributional alignment loss that enforces consistency between the output distributions of the two branches. Extensive experiments on the Multi30K dataset demonstrate that D2P-MMT achieves superior translation performance compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/MentaY/DDP.

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

A fairness-aware extension of Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis for ranking

arXiv:2606.17756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fairness has become a central concern in ranking problems involving individuals or social groups, particularly under the Responsible Artificial Intelligence agenda. In Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis (SMAA) provides a robust framework for handling uncertainty and incomplete preference information, but it does not explicitly address fairness in the resulting rankings. This paper proposes SMAA-Fair, a fairness-aware extension of SMAA for ranking problems. The approach reweights the simulated rankings generated by SMAA according to their level of group fairness, so that fairer rankings contribute more strongly to the acceptability indices and central weights vector. The framework is independent of the aggregation model and can incorporate different fairness metrics. In this study, Statistical Parity, normalized discounted Kullback–Leibler divergence (rKL) and normalized discounted cumulative Kullback–Leibler divergence (nDKL) are adopted. Rankings are derived from the fairness-adjusted acceptability matrix using expected ranking and maximum acceptability ranking. We also derive the central weight according to the degree of fairness in the obtained rankings. Numerical experiments with synthetic and real data show that SMAA-Fair improves the representation of protected groups among favourable ranking positions, while preserving robustness to preference uncertainty.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

From Proteome Mining to Structural Validation: Phosphopyruvate Hydratase as a Structurally Tractable Drug Target in Kinetoplastid Parasites

Chagas disease, caused by Trypanosoma cruzi, demands novel therapeutic strategies that overcome the toxicity and limited efficacy of current treatments. To address this need, herein we report an integrative, target-centric strategy that combines parasite proteome mining, structural modeling, and experimental validation. Functional enrichment and druggability analyses identified phosphopyruvate hydratase (PPH) as a promising candidate due to its essential metabolic role and limited similarity to human homologs. Notably, proteome mining revealed the presence and conservation of PPH across kinetoplastid parasites, including Leishmania donovani, supporting its evaluation beyond T. cruzi. For the selected PPH sequences, AlphaFold-derived three-dimensional models underwent extensive molecular dynamics refinement, yielding stable conformational ensembles suitable for structure-based studies. Using this validated model, virtual screening of the Latin American Natural Products Database - LANaPDB - identified aptosimon as a top-ranked compound candidate. Molecular dynamics simulations further showed ligand-dependent binding behavior, suggesting alternative binding modes distinct from the canonical substrate configuration. In vitro assays demonstrated consistent antiparasitic activity against intracellular T. cruzi amastigotes (IC50 = 3.52 ug/mL) and Leishmania donovani promastigotes (IC50 = 13.06 ug/mL), supporting the biological relevance of the aptosimon-related lignan chemotype, hinokinin, across two kinetoplastid parasite models. Together, these results support PPH as a structurally tractable and biologically relevant candidate target, while identifying an aptosimon-related lignan chemotype, represented experimentally by hinokinin, as a cross-species antiparasitic scaffold that warrants further biochemical target-validation studies.

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

TaskFusion: Continual Anomaly Detection for Heterogeneous Tabular Data

arXiv:2606.11844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual anomaly detection in tabular data is challenging and remains largely underexplored, particularly in settings with heterogeneous feature schemas, distribution shifts, and severe class imbalance. In many real-world applications, data arrive sequentially from diverse domains, rendering conventional continual learning methods ineffective due to their reliance on a fixed input space. We propose a continual learning (CL) method, which can overcome these challenges and continually learn from different tasks. Our method consists of three main parts: our AGF model, Taskfusion augmentation, and outlier exposure. The AGF-model maps task-specific features into a shared space, then aligns distributions to reduce representation drift, and learns anomaly decision boundaries in the aligned space. To improve stability, we introduce Taskfusion augmentation, combining boundary-aware interpolation within tasks to refine the model anomaly boundaries and cross-task mixing to transfer anomaly structure across datasets. To handle class imbalance and memory constraints, we employ tabular dataset distillation to store compact synthetic replay samples, which are jointly used with augmented data in an outlier exposure objective for robust anomaly detection. We evaluate the approach on 21 heterogeneous datasets across multiple domains. Results show that our approach substantially improves continual anomaly detection performance over sequential fine-tuning and other CL baselines while reducing catastrophic forgetting and maintaining stable detection across heterogeneous datasets.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Applications of quantum annealing to magnetic dipole hyperfine structure constants: First results beyond energies for atoms

arXiv:2606.20166v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We report the first results of the magnetic dipole hyperfine structure (HFS) constants of neutral $\mathrm{Li}$, Li-like $\mathrm{Be}$, neutral $\mathrm{Na}$, and Na-like $\mathrm{Mg}$ using a modified version of the Quantum Annealer Eigensolver (QAE) algorithm on D-Wave's quantum hardware. The results are benchmarked against relativistic configuration interaction with multiconfiguration Dirac Hartree-Fock (MCDHF) calculations using the General-purpose Relativistic Atomic Structure Package (GRASP), and simulated annealing. In our modified QAE, a zooming-and-sigma-annealing approach with a floating-point encoding scheme is adopted to estimate the ground-state eigenvalue and eigenvector of the relativistic Dirac-Coulomb Hamiltonian matrices ($H_{\mathrm{DC}}$) constructed from 11 or fewer configuration state functions (CSFs). For calculations with extended correlation orbital sets, we applied a CSF truncation scheme, retaining only CSFs (up to 12) that make significant contributions to the ground-state wavefunction. Our modified QAE precision is kept limited to three decimal places (up to 10 qubits). Hardware demonstrations on the D-Wave quantum processing unit (QPU) yielded results that were completely consistent with GRASP (at the chosen precision) in determining the magnetic dipole HFS constants, with accuracy varying across systems and $H_{\mathrm{DC}}$ matrix dimensions.

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

Effective and Low-cost Lane-based Map Localization for Vehicle-Centric Route Generation

Driver-centric route representation plays a vital role in intuitive driving guidance systems. This paper presents OLRA, a low-cost, map-localization-based framework that derives driver-view-aligned routes by matching map-based navigation routes with camera-detected lane markings. This alignment process mutually enhances vehicle localization accuracy and visual route consistency. To bridge the evaluation gap across different paradigms, we introduce practical route evaluation metrics and benchmark OLRA against OpenPilot, a representative direct-generation approach. Experimental results on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that OLRA outperforms OpenPilot in complex road segments and in route estimation at distance beyond 20 meters, achieving lower overall Euclidean error. This study is expected to promote future research in low-cost, maplocalization-based route generation methods.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

When batch correction corrupts gene expression: uncovering distortions in correlation structures

Batch correction is essential for integrating datasets and enabling population-level insights into health and disease. Embedding-based approaches are among the most widely used solutions, but here we highlight a critical, overlooked limitation: these methods can distort feature-to-feature (e.g., gene gene) relationships, potentially undermining downstream analyses. We investigate this issue and introduce a novel metric to quantify it.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Simultaneous Estimation of Partial-Transpose Moments with Active Memory Independent of the Moment Order

arXiv:2606.14204v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the simultaneous estimation of partial-transpose moments $p_j(\rho_{AB})=\mathrm{Tr}[(\rho_{AB}^{T_B})^j]$, $j=2,\ldots,K$, of an unknown bipartite $n$-qubit state from independent copies under an explicit active-memory constraint. We give a sequential qubit-reuse realization of the partial-transpose permutation that uses at most $2n+1$ active qubits, independent of $K$, and estimates all moments $p_2,\ldots,p_K$ to uniform additive error $\epsilon$ with total copy complexity $O(K\log K/\epsilon^2)$. We also prove two converse bounds. First, any uniformly accurate simultaneous estimator requires $\Omega(K/\epsilon^2)$ copies in the worst case. Second, the same scaling holds on an explicit isospectral two-qubit negative-partial-transpose (NPT) family whose ordinary moments are constant while the partial-transpose moments vary. These results characterize the copy complexity of the partial-transpose moment hierarchy up to a logarithmic factor and extend simultaneous nonlinear-functional estimation from ordinary state powers to partial-transpose spectral data under active quantum memory independent of the target moment order.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum ergodicity and semiclassical measures: mathematical results

arXiv:2606.12098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this chapter we review some results describing the high-frequency eigenmodes of the Laplacian on compact manifolds, or Euclidean domains, for which the geodesic flow is chaotic. We focus on the macroscopic distribution of these eigenmodes, which is described by the concept of semiclassical measure. The main result on the question is the Quantum Ergodicity theorem, originally due to Schnirelman. We provide the detailed proof of this theorem, including the adjustments necessary to treat the case of manifolds with boundary. We also discuss the Quantum Unique Ergodicity conjecture, and some progress towards this conjecture for strongly chaotic (Anosov) systems. In particular, we describe the constraints on admissible semiclassical measures, in terms of their Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy, as well as more recent delocalization results.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Self-attention-based non-linear basis transformations for compact latent space modelling of dynamic optical fibre transmission matrices

arXiv:2406.07775v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimode optical fibres are hair-thin strands of glass that efficiently transport light. They promise next-generation medical endoscopes that provide unprecedented sub-cellular image resolution deep inside the body. However, confining light to such fibres means that images are inherently scrambled in transit. Conventionally, this scrambling has been compensated by pre-calibrating how a specific fibre scrambles light and solving a stationary linear matrix equation that represents a physical model of the fibre. However, as the technology develops towards real-world deployment, the unscrambling process must account for dynamic changes in the matrix representing the fibre's effect on light, due to factors such as movement and temperature shifts, and non-linearities resulting from the inaccessibility of the fibre tip when inside the body. Such complex, dynamic and nonlinear behaviour is well-suited to approximation by neural networks, but most leading image reconstruction networks rely on convolutional layers, which assume strong correlations between adjacent pixels, a strong inductive bias that is inappropriate for fibre matrices which may be expressed in a range of arbitrary coordinate representations with long-range correlations. We introduce a new concept that uses self-attention layers to dynamically transform the coordinate representations of varying fibre matrices to a basis that admits compact, low-dimensional representations suitable for further processing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on diverse fibre matrix datasets. We show our models significantly improve the sparsity of fibre bases in their transformed bases with a participation ratio, p, as a measure of sparsity, of between 0.01 and 0.11. Further, we show that these transformed representations admit reconstruction of the original matrices with < 10% reconstruction error, demonstrating the invertibility.

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

Categorical Prior Lock-in: Why In-Context Learning Fails for Structured Data

arXiv:2606.11961v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as conditional generators for structured data, relying on in-context learning (ICL) to adapt to new distributions without parameter updates. We investigate the limits of ICL for structured generation under distribution mismatch, using high-cardinality tabular data as a controlled test case, and identify a structural failure mode we term categorical prior lock-in: the inability of ICL to update the model's prior over token distributions inherited from pre-training. Across two 7B-parameter open-weight models, ICL improves numerical fidelity with additional examples but exhibits a sharp ceiling on categorical distributions, failing to reproduce rare classes entirely. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA) overcomes these limitations but introduces measurable memorization risk and, in some cases, destabilizes structured output generation, highlighting a fundamental trade-off between adaptability and privacy.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Attention Sinks in Diffusion Transformers: A Causal Analysis

Attention sinks – tokens that receive disproportionate attention mass – are assumed to be functionally important in autoregressive language models, but their role in diffusion transformers remains unclear. We present a causal analysis in text-to-image diffusion, dynamically identifying dominant attention recipients per timestep and suppressing them via paired, training-free interventions on the score and value paths. Across 553 GenEval prompts on Stable Diffusion~3 (with SDXL corroboration), removing these sinks does not degrade text-image alignment (CLIP-T) or preference proxies (ImageReward, HPS-v2) at $k{=}1$; only under stronger interventions ($k\!\geq\!10$) does HPS-v2 exhibit a metric-dependent boundary, while CLIP-T remains robust throughout. The perceptual shifts induced by suppression are nonetheless sink-specific – $\sim\!6\times$ larger than equal-budget random masking – revealing an empirical dissociation between trajectory-level perturbation and semantic alignment in diffusion transformers. \footnote{Code available at https://github.com/wfz666/ICML26-attention-sink.}