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

Fanar-Sadiq: A Multi-Agent Architecture for Grounded Islamic QA

Large language models (LLMs) can answer religious knowledge queries fluently, yet they often hallucinate and misattribute sources, which is especially consequential in Islamic settings where users expect grounding in canonical texts (Qur'an and Hadith) and jurisprudential (fiqh) nuance. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves grounding, however, a single retrieve-then-generate pipeline is insufficient for diverse Islamic queries, including verbatim scripture, citation-grounded guidance, and rule-constrained computations such as zakat and inheritance. To address these challenges, we present Fanar-Sadiq, a bilingual Arabic-English Islamic QA system built on a multi-agent, tool-augmented architecture. It is a core component of the Fanar AI platform. Fanar-Sadiq routes Islamic queries to specialized modules within an agentic tool architecture. It supports intent-aware routing, retrieval-grounded fiqh answers with normalized citations and verification traces, exact verse lookup with quotation validation, and deterministic Sunni zakat and inheritance calculators with madhhab-sensitive branching. We evaluate the end-to-end system on public Islamic QA benchmarks and show strong effectiveness and efficiency. It is publicly accessible through an API and Web application and has received over 1.9M accesses in less than a year (https://api.fanar.qa/docs).

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

When Correct Edges Cannot Be Verified: A Provenance Gap in Incomplete KGQA and a Provenance-Favoring Completion Policy

Incomplete Knowledge Graph Question Answering (IKGQA) requires completing missing edges to continue reasoning. A growing line of work verifies completed edges against retrieved text, treating textual support as a proxy for edge quality. We ask a question that, to our knowledge, has not been systematically tested: does textual verifiability actually track correctness? Exploiting the gold deleted triples provided by the standard random-deletion protocol, we measure both. The finding is counterintuitive: among gold-correct completed edges, 76-96% have no supporting passage even under exhaustive retrieval, robustly across deletion rates (20%/40%), datasets (CWQ/WebQSP), and relation types (structural, commonsense, long-tail). Most Freebase-style facts simply do not occur as head-tail co-mentions in text. Textual faithfulness therefore measures provenance, not correctness – separated by a paradigm-level gap no in-corpus retrieval closes. This reframes edge completion. Since most completed edges – correct or not – are causally redundant for the answer (95-97% of correct answers do not depend on any unsupported edge), the central question shifts from "is the edge correct?" to "admit or abstain under provenance uncertainty?" Within this framing we present TGComplete, a provenance-favoring admission policy that retrieves evidence at a reasoning breakpoint, verifies a candidate through a lightweight loop, and abstains when support is absent. Against the generate-to-complete baseline GoG, it attains higher edge precision against gold (15-21% vs 3-14%), with no statistically detectable EM loss and 3.1-7.4 times higher strict faithfulness of admitted edges – at the cost of lower recall. We position TGComplete not as uniformly better, but as a principled point on a precision/provenance-recall trade-off, appropriate when auditability matters.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Effective Dimension Governs Generalization in Quantum Kernel Vision Models

arXiv:2606.20183v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent quantum vision models-quantum vision transformers and quantum convolutional networks-report two striking but unexplained empirical phenomena: (i) ansatze with more, or more uniformly distributed, entanglement generalize better, and (ii) injecting quantum noise can improve test accuracy rather than degrade it. These observations are currently treated as curiosities, discovered by grid search and explained, if at all, by hand. We show that both are manifestations of a single, measurable quantity: the effective dimension $d_eff$ of the (noise-shaped) quantum feature kernel. Working primarily with quantum-kernel vision models-a quantum feature map read out by a kernel classifier-we give a spectral account in which entanglement structure and quantum noise are two knobs that move $d_eff$; in an overfitting regime, contracting $d_eff$ acts as ridge-like regularization. We analyze the mechanism: an exact decomposition of the depolarized kernel $K_p=(1-p)^2K+\tfrac{p(2-p)}{D}\mathbf{1}\mathbf{1}^\top$ with $d_eff(K_p)\to1$, a contraction result (and its boundary) for amplitude damping, a kernel-machine capacity bound, and a capacity/alignment risk decomposition; the monotone contraction operative in our entangled experiments is verified empirically, not proven in general. Along the one-parameter depolarizing family the collapse is instead exact by construction; we use it only to confirm the kernel decomposition to machine precision and at up to $12$ qubits, not as evidence for $d_eff$. Amplitude damping contracts $d_eff$ and lifts test accuracy by up to $+13\%$ along an inverted-U sweet spot; the effect's sign flips between the over- and under-fitting regimes; noise injection matches an explicit spectral-filtering frontier. Our results organize two reported anecdotes into a single measurable principle for designing quantum-vision models.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Dual-Granularity Orthogonal Disentanglement for Generalizable Audio Deepfake Detection

arXiv:2606.16532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio deepfake detectors often fail to generalize across speakers, as they learn speaker-identity features rather than synthesis artifacts, known as implicit identity leakage. Existing methods address this but incur architectural complexity or training instability. This paper proposes a dual-granularity orthogonal disentanglement framework enforcing feature independence at two levels: sample-level cosine orthogonality captures directional decorrelation, while batch-level cross-covariance regularization eliminates linear correlations across embedding dimensions. A curriculum disentanglement schedule progressively strengthens the orthogonality constraint without auxiliary networks or adversarial dynamics. Experiments on ASVspoof 2019 LA, ASVspoof 2021 DF, and In-the-Wild datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 1.35%, 7.88%, and 21.58% equal error rates (EER), respectively, surpassing gradient reversal disentanglement by 2.60% absolute on cross-dataset transfer.

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

EnvShip-Bench: An Environment-Enhanced Benchmark for Short-Term Vessel Trajectory Prediction

arXiv:2606.15240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vessel trajectory prediction is important for intelligent shipping, maritime surveillance, and navigation safety. However, existing public maritime AIS resources are often limited by inconsistent forecasting protocols, uneven data quality, and the lack of benchmark-ready contextual annotations, which hinder fair comparison and context-aware modeling. To address this gap, we present EnvShip-Bench, a unified benchmark for short-term vessel trajectory prediction built from large-scale raw AIS data from the Danish Maritime Authority (DMA) and NOAA through a common processing pipeline. EnvShip-Bench adopts a standardized forecasting protocol with 10 minutes of observation, 10 minutes of prediction, and 20-second sampling in vessel-centric local metric coordinates. Beyond the large-scale core benchmark, it provides a quality-first compact subset for efficient and reproducible experimentation, together with synchronized environmental and nearby-vessel context extensions. As a result, EnvShip-Bench supports trajectory-only, environment-aware, and interaction-aware forecasting under a unified evaluation framework. Extensive benchmark statistics and analysis demonstrate that EnvShip-Bench offers a standardized, extensible, and context-aware foundation for maritime trajectory forecasting research.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Somatic variant detection in normal tissues from single-cell sequencing data

A crucial advantage of single-cell sequencing (SCS) is its ability to identify somatic variants in individual cells, enabling phylogenetic analysis of cellular populations within bulk tissues. While identifying somatic variants in tumor tissues via SCS has become a common practice, doing so in normal tissues remains challenging due to the rarity of somatic variants in normal cells. To evaluate the feasibility of somatic variant calling from widely available single-nucleus RNA-seq (snRNA-seq) and single-nucleus ATAC-seq (snATAC-seq) data, we profiled a Cell-line mix of six HapMap samples prepared by the SMaHT consortium using 10x Genomics 5' snRNA-seq (12k cells with 36k mean reads per cell) and snATAC-seq (11k cells with 14k median high-quality fragments per cell) for variant calling. PacBio long-read whole genome sequencing (WGS) data (109x) generated from individual cell lines were used as ground truth. Two computational tools, Monopogen and SComatic, were used for somatic variant calling from the SCS data. Monopogen achieved single nucleotide variant (SNV) detection accuracies of 93.30% in the snRNA-seq and 99.64% in the snATAC-seq data, both of which outperformed SComatic (74.35% and 94.29%, respectively). Monopogen also consistently detected somatic SNVs at cellular fractions as low as 0.5% (2.54% in snRNA and 0.81% in snATAC) in individual samples. Notably, snATAC-seq exhibited higher genomic coverage breadth and larger number of variants detected than snRNA-seq. While the SCS data have lower overall genome coverage than that of the bulk WGS, the single-cell level variant resolution allows Monopogen to assign variants to their cells of origin with over 80% accuracy in both RNA and ATAC modalities, thereby facilitating studies of clonal evolution and cell-type-specific mutagenesis. Other benchmarking methods were also evaluated (DeepVariant, Cellsnp-lite and Mutect2) for comparison. In conclusion, our study demonstrated the feasibility of performing reliable single-cell somatic mutation calling in a cell-line mixture and discussed the strengths and limitations of current computational methods when applied to normal tissues.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Experimental violation of a Bell-like inequality for causal order

arXiv:2506.20516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum mechanics is compatible with scenarios where physical processes happen in an indefinite order. In theory, this feature could be detected through violations of inequalities on the observed correlations, analogous to Bell inequalities. However, experimental demonstrations of such violations have been missing until recently due to the complexity of the required setup. Here we report an experimental violation of a Bell-like inequality involving the correlations of four parties, one of which is spacelike separated from the others. Our demonstration employs 3 km fiber spools to simulate spacelike separation, and achieves high-speed operations in photonic time-bin encoding, nanosecond synchronization, and accurate temperature stabilization. These experimental advances enable a violation by 5.7 standard deviations and open a path towards a certification of indefinite order in conditions that guarantee spacelike separation with existing state-of-the-art devices. However, the certification is not device-independent, as it relies on knowledge about the setup to exclude bidirectional signaling–a loophole inherent to implementations in classical acyclic spacetimes, which may be resolved in future quantum-spacetime tests.

08.
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.

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

SemanticXR: Low Power and Real-time Queryable Semantic Mapping with an Object-Level Device-Cloud Architecture

Semantic mapping is a core service that enables grounded interactions in emerging Extended Reality (XR) applications such as AI assistants and spatial object search. Deploying this capability on mobile XR devices requires a system that is open-vocabulary, real-time, and low-power. Existing approaches are compute-intensive and assume server-class resources. Cloud offloading offers a practical path, but no existing system splits semantic mapping across the device-cloud boundary or manages its communication, execution, and memory footprint. We present SemanticXR, the first device-cloud system for real-time, open-vocabulary semantic mapping and querying under XR power, bandwidth, and memory constraints. Our key insight is to elevate semantically identifiable objects to first-class units of communication, execution, and memory across the device and server. On the server, object-level parallelism and geometry downsampling improve mapping latency, while object-level depth-mapping co-design reduces upstream bandwidth. On the device, an object-level sparse local map with incremental updates and update prioritization enables network-robust querying with bounded memory and downstream bandwidth. Object-level configurable resource usage vs. quality trade-offs let applications and the system adapt mapping to application requirements and operating conditions, respectively. Against a device-cloud baseline with the same perception models, object-level organization improves server-side mapping latency by 2.2X at equal semantic quality. Depth-mapping co-design maintains upstream bandwidth under 2.5 Mbps. On the device, SemanticXR sustains sub-100 ms query latency for up to 10,000 objects even under network drops, supports tens of thousands of objects within 500 MB, and scales downstream bandwidth with map changes, not total scene size. The system adds only 2% device power during normal operation.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Mix-QVLA: Task-Evidence-Aware Mixed-Precision Quantization of Vision-Language-Action Models

We propose Mix-QVLA, a task-evidence-aware mixed-precision PTQ framework for VLA models. Mix-QVLA anchors each quantized variant to the full-precision action-token reference decision and evaluates whether quantization preserves task-relevant evidence across key VLA functional boundaries. It computes normalized gradient-weighted task-evidence maps from boundary activations and compares full-precision and quantized maps using evidence-mass and attribution-distribution distortion, capturing changes in both the strength and allocation of decision-supporting evidence. A soft-bottleneck objective aggregates boundary-level degradation into layer-wise sensitivity scores. Mix-QVLA further models sensitivity throughout task execution, capturing phase-dependent shifts in layer importance rather than assuming a fixed sensitivity profile. The resulting evidence- and time-aware scores guide mixed-precision bit allocation under model-size and BitOps budgets. Extensive evaluations on OpenVLA-style policies show that Mix-QVLA improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off of low-bit VLA deployment. On LIBERO, Mix-QVLA reduces OpenVLA-OFT memory from 15.4 GB to 4.1 GB, retains 96.3 average success compared with 97.1 for the BF16 model, and achieves a 1.52x inference speedup.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Attacking the First-Principle: A Black-Box, Query-Free Targeted Mimicry Attack on Binary Function Classifiers

arXiv:2605.18231v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Binary function classifiers play a crucial role in maintaining the security and integrity of software systems by detecting malicious code and unauthorized modifications. However, machine learning-based classifiers are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can evade detection. In this study, we present Kelpie, a novel framework for executing mimicry attacks, a stronger type of targeted evasion attacks, on binary function classifiers in a black-box, zero-query setting. Unlike previous approaches that rely on querying the target classifier to refine untargeted evasion attacks, Kelpie leverages code transformations that preserve the functionality of malicious payloads while causing them to be misclassified as we want. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that Kelpie can successfully execute mimicry attacks against six state-of-the-art binary function classifiers representing different model architectures without requiring direct interaction with them. We further validate our approach with a practical demonstration, involving a keylogger and a wiper concealed within benign-looking functions embedded in an application. This work, to our best knowledge, is the first to demonstrate such a mimicry attack in a black-box, zero-query context, raising important questions about the reliability and security of existing machine learning-based binary function classifiers.

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

Surrogate-Assisted Framework for SI-Compliant Interconnect Design Optimization Using the Earth Mover's Distance

arXiv:2606.15234v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a deterministic, machine-assisted framework for SI-compliant PCB design based on the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD). In contrast to conventional surrogate-based optimization methods that rely on iterative black-box search procedures, the proposed approach follows an interpretable, sequential evaluation strategy. Neural surrogate models are first used to efficiently predict waveform describing features from topology-dependent design parameters. A decision tree then acts as a physically motivated quality gate that identifies SI-compliant waveforms according to predefined SI criteria. Within the resulting valid solution space, the Earth Mover's Distance is employed as a similarity metric to rank candidate designs according to their proximity to an ideal reference signal. This enables not only the deterministic identification of admissible parameter regions but also a transparent prioritization of physically superior solutions without inverse modeling or stochastic search procedures. The methodology is demonstrated using a large-scale set of simulated DDR3 fly-by waveforms. By combining surrogate prediction, interpretable classification, and EMD-based waveform evaluation, the framework provides an explainable and computationally efficient alternative to conventional optimization strategies for supporting PCB development with AI-based methods.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Regional Climate Model Emulation with Diffusion Approaches: What is the Added Value of Generative Machine Learning?

arXiv:2606.14570v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emulators provide a cost-effective alternative to regional climate models (RCMs) by capturing their dynamical downscaling function. They link large-scale predictors simulated by global climate models (GCMs) to RCM-simulated high-resolution fields of the target variable, here precipitation. Machine learning methods, typically deep learning, are cheaper than running RCMs in computation time and energy. Among them, generative models are appealing because they can simulate ensembles of local high-resolution fields consistent with the predictors. This ensemble, which we call the uncertainty envelope, remains to be properly assessed for added value. Here, we make three contributions. First, we introduce ParamDiffusion, a new two-stage diffusion-based framework, and compare it with a state-of-the-art diffusion approach. Second, we expand standard validation through a comprehensive framework aligned with climate-science needs, examining specific precipitation events, including extremes. Third, within this framework, we assess the added value of diffusion approaches relative to deterministic methods. We intercompare four deep-learning models: a deterministic model designed to capture the precipitation tail; a parametric probabilistic model based on it; a recently proposed diffusion approach; and ParamDiffusion, which couples the parametric model with a diffusion model. Our results show that diffusion-based approaches reproduce climatological precipitation statistics with high skill, including distributional tails and spatially compounded extremes, while generating spatially detailed fields. However, none of the assessed models consistently accounts for the most extreme RCM-simulated events within its uncertainty envelope. Diffusion models are therefore promising for probabilistic RCM emulation, but progress is still required before they can reliably represent high-impact precipitation extremes.

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

Peak-Based Nuclide Identification in HPGe $\gamma$-Spectrometry with Machine Learning and SHAP

arXiv:2606.14874v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-purity germanium gamma spectra often require time-consuming analyses from subject matter experts. Photopeaks within these spectra are carefully fitted and numerical methods are employed to assist with nuclide identification (NID) and quantification. Amending the list of nuclides identified by analysis software can be nontrivial. When many samples need to be analyzed, it is therefore challenging to make timely and correct decisions. Supervised machine-learning-based NID can serve as an expert-informed, automated tool to improve the initial set of radionuclides suggested to an analyst and more effectively drive subsequent quantification. To that end, we implemented machine learning models that map photopeaks carefully fitted by analysts to NID results for experimental spectra containing various isotopic combinations drawn from a set of 65 isotopes. The best model achieved an F1 score of 0.97, markedly surpassing the F1 score of 0.84 achieved by traditional software when compared using a nuclide library comprising the same 65 isotopes assessed by the models. Finally, we illustrated the most important input features for model predictions using Shapley Additive Explanations. These explanations revealed that the models use physically relevant photopeaks when making predictions for the isotopes in our nuclide library.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Concrete Subspace Learning based Interference Elimination for Multi-task Model Fusion

arXiv:2312.06173v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Merging models fine-tuned from a common, extensively pre-trained large model but specialized for different tasks has been demonstrated as a cheap and scalable strategy to construct a multi-task model that performs well across diverse tasks. Recent research, exemplified by task arithmetic, highlights that this multi-task model can be derived through arithmetic operations on task vectors. Nevertheless, current merging techniques frequently resolve potential conflicts among parameters from task-specific models by evaluating individual attributes, such as the parameters' magnitude or sign, overlooking their collective impact on the overall functionality of the model. In this work, we propose the CONtinuous relaxation of disCRETE (Concrete) subspace learning method to identify a common low-dimensional subspace and utilize its shared information to track the interference problem without sacrificing much performance. Specifically, we model the problem as a bi-level optimization problem and introduce a meta-learning framework to find the Concrete subspace mask through gradient-based techniques. At the upper level, we focus on learning a shared Concrete mask to identify the subspace, while at the inner level, model merging is performed to maximize the performance of the merged model. We conduct extensive experiments on both vision domain and language domain, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/tanganke/subspace_fusion

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

Calibrated Triage, Not Autonomy: Confidence Estimation for Medical Vision-Language Models

A vision-language model can answer a question about a medical image fluently and confidently while barely using the image, leaning instead on language priors. In medicine this is the failure that matters most, because the answer looks trustworthy and is not, and the only protection is a confidence score reliable enough to tell the system when to abstain. We ask a deployment question rather than an accuracy one: how much imaging work a model can safely handle alone, and which confidence signal makes that possible. We evaluate seven confidence estimators across five open-weight LVLMs and three medical visual-question-answering datasets spanning broad clinical imaging, radiology, and pathology, with every probe trained only on natural images and applied without adaptation. Recast as bounded selective prediction (automate a case only when confidence clears a threshold, defer the rest), the comparison is cautionary. The standard metrics are poor guides: discrimination barely separates the methods, and the weak calibration of a cheap self-report is cheaply removed by off-domain temperature scaling without changing deployable yield. What distinguishes a usable estimator is the high-confidence region a clinician acts on: the weakest baselines are confidently wrong on 41 to 45 percent of their errors against 1 to 4 percent for the best probe, and no estimator is reliably best across domains or models. Safe handoff is governed at two levels: base-model competence sets a ceiling, so a well-calibrated score recovers roughly a third of radiology cases at a 20 percent error tolerance but almost none of pathology; the confidence layer then decides how much of that ceiling is reachable. The usable role today is calibrated triage, not autonomy: automate the cases a calibrated score marks safe, route the rest to a clinician. We release all outputs, correctness judgments, and confidence scores, with code.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Block algebra for morphing circuits

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Morphing circuits are a new paradigm for quantum error correction that relaxes hardware requirements. We present four constructions for CNOT-based CSS morphing circuits with explicit qubit connectivity degrees. All four constructions are specified in block algebra notation, with entries in algebras generated by permutation matrices. The first three are obtained by rewriting existing surface- and color-code morphing circuits; the fourth is a new three-round construction modeled on the 6.6.6 color code. The surface-code construction recovers the morphing circuit of Ref. [ST25] for two-block group algebra codes. Numerical search then instantiates these permutation matrices using regular representations of finite groups. [ST25] M. H. Shaw and B. M. Terhal, Phys. Rev. Lett. 134(9), 090602 (2025).

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

Polynomial-Time Mistake-Bounded Language Generation

arXiv:2606.16077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this note, we introduce a polynomial-time version of the mistake-bounded language generation (MBLG) framework due to Kleinberg, Peale, and Reingold (2026). We observe that the family of parities of variables, and the family of conjunctions of literals, are polynomial-time MBLG. Our main result states that the family of monotone Boolean functions with polynomially-many maxterms is polynomial-time MBLG. This family includes all monotone Boolean functions, computable by polynomial-size decision trees. Our technique can be presented as a new combinatorial game about writing numbers on a board.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Learn from Your Mistakes: Tree-like Self-Play for Secure Code LLMs

arXiv:2606.03489v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in code generation, they remain prone to replicating subtle yet critical vulnerabilities endemic to their training data. Current alignment techniques, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), typically apply coarse-grained optimization at the sequence level. This approach often fails to address the localized nature of security flaws, where a single incorrect token choice can compromise an entire program. To bridge this gap, we introduce Tree-like Self-Play (TSP), a framework that reframes secure code generation as a fine-grained sequential decision process. Unlike standard methods that blindly maximize likelihood, TSP constructs a decision tree where the model explores branching trajectories–generating both secure "golden paths" and vulnerable variants. By treating code generation as a self-play game, the model learns to strictly discriminate against its own localized errors. This provides a dense, on-policy learning signal that forces self-correction precisely at the critical decision nodes where vulnerabilities typically emerge. Our experiments demonstrate that TSP fundamentally enhances model reliability. In Python security benchmarks, TSP boosts CodeLlama-7B's pass rate (SPR@1) to 75.8%, significantly outperforming SFT (57.0%) and unstructured self-play baselines. Crucially, TSP induces robust out-of-distribution generalization: the model not only reduces vulnerabilities in unseen categories (CWEs) by 24.5% but also successfully transfers security principles learned from C/C++ to diverse languages, including Python, Go, and JavaScript. This suggests that TSP does not merely memorize patches, but internalizes abstract, language-agnostic security logic.

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

Surveying GenAI-based Automation in Printed Circuit Board Design and Test

arXiv:2606.17074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly used for applications in the hardware and software domains. It purports to reduce the manual effort involved in the development and testing of complex systems before release. Within the hardware space, most tasks have focused on design automation of integrated circuits, particularly with hardware description languages. However, other types of hardware also exist! In this survey, we instead examine how GenAI has been and is being across the printed circuit board (PCB) design life cycle. This includes everything from supply chains, system specification, circuit design, layout and optimisation, validation and test, and PCB assembly and distribution. Through this lens we present a taxonomy of discovered works, categorising them according to their intent and contributions. This survey also identifies key technical challenges that GenAI faces in this space, such as domain-specific data scarcity and limited support for integration with existing PCB tools. Finally, future research directions are discussed: our survey shows that there are many opportunities remaining when considering how GenAI may be integrated into various tasks in PCB design and test.

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

Federated Foundation Language Model Post-Training Should Focus on Open-Source Models

arXiv:2505.23593v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Post-training of foundation language models has emerged as a promising research domain in federated learning (FL) with the goal to enable privacy-preserving model improvements and adaptations to user's downstream tasks. Recent advances in this area adopt centralized post-training approaches that build upon black-box foundation language models where there is no access to model weights and architecture details. Although the use of black-box models has been successful in centralized post-training, their blind replication in FL raises several concerns. Our opinion is that using black-box models in FL contradicts the core principles of federation such as data privacy and autonomy. In this paper, we critically analyze the usage of black-box models in federated post-training, and provide a detailed account of various aspects of openness and their implications for FL.

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

Bernstein-Schur Kernels: Random Features by Sketched Modulation and Radial Randomization

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bernstein–Schur kernels are products of a finite-feature kernel (one with an explicit finite-dimensional feature map) and a completely monotone shift-invariant kernel: nonstationary kernels that fall between the shift-invariant and dot-product templates random features usually exploit, so in general neither Bochner sampling nor polynomial sketching applies to the full kernel directly. We give one random-feature construction for the whole class that randomizes both factors: it sketches the finite modulation and randomizes the completely monotone radial factor, sampling the latter's one-dimensional Bernstein–Widder scale and then applying Gaussian random Fourier features (whose frequency is still $d$-dimensional). The feature dimension is then $Dm$, set by the sketch size $m$ and the radial-draw count $D$, free of the $O(d^2)$ size of the exact modulation feature. Keeping the modulation \emph{exact is the analyzable limit ($m\to\infty$): there we prove unbiasedness, an exact variance for the recommended flat estimator, an expected matrix-Bernstein operator-norm bound (with a matching high-probability tail) controlled by the top eigenvalues of the kernel and modulation Gram matrices together with an intrinsic dimension rather than the crude $N\max_{ij}$ entrywise route, and a deterministic relative-spectral kernel-ridge stability result. By conditioning on the sketch, the doubly-randomized estimator inherits the same intrinsic-dimension operator-norm guarantee plus a single additive sketch term, tunable by $m$ independently of $D$. The motivating instance is the biased $yat$-kernel $k_{yat,b}(w,x)=(w^\top x+b)^2/(\|w-x\|^2+\varepsilon)$, $b\ge0$, whose family span contains the inverse-multiquadric kernel by finite differences in $b$; for it the radial mixture is the IMQ spectral sampler, and one frequency per scale is variance-optimal at a fixed radial-feature budget.

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

Can We Stop Malicious AI? KILLBENCH: A Benchmark for External AI Kill Switch Feasibility

arXiv:2511.13725v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Malicious AI causing harm to humans is not just a Hollywood fantasy. Indeed, as highly capable models such as Claude Mythos emerge and agent systems like OpenClaw rapidly spread, the question of how to stop an AI that acts maliciously – whether by design or by accident – has become urgent. To address this, we propose Killbench, a benchmark for evaluating the Killswitch: a mechanism that halts a malicious AI's in-progress behavior using only external signals. Targeting web agents – the most widely deployed agent domain – Killbench evaluates a range of Kill Switch methods that halt a maliciously operating agent without any access to its internal parameters or the surrounding malicious AI's system, relying solely on external inputs. The benchmark comprises four malicious AI's agent configurations (including an uncensored LLM Agent), 8 harmful scenarios, and malicious prompts constructed from 10 distinct jailbreak patterns. We further construct four External AI Kill Switch defense methods and evaluate them on Grok-4.3, GPT-5.2, Gemma4, Qwen3.6 and Qwen3.5-uncensored, contributing an empirical instrument toward the feasibility of External AI Kill Switches against malicious AI and to the study of AI corrigibility.

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

Geometric bias in eigenspace perturbation under random heterogeneous noise

arXiv:2606.11263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spectral methods rely fundamentally on the stability of principal eigenspaces under random perturbations. Classically, this stability is quantified by the Davis-Kahan and Wedin theorems, which bound the eigenspace error using the operator norm of the noise and the relevant spectral gaps. While these worst-case bounds are sharp for arbitrary deterministic perturbations, they can be wasteful in the low-rank signal-plus-random-noise setting, as they fail to capture the fine-grained interaction between the signal geometry and the noise distribution. In this paper, we study the spectral perturbation of signal-plus-noise matrices corrupted by sparse, random noise with an arbitrary, inhomogeneous variance profile. We demonstrate that under heterogeneous noise variances, the empirical eigenvectors suffer a systematic, deterministic geometric bias that is entirely invisible to classical perturbation bounds. By leveraging the Quadratic Vector Equation (QVE) and establishing fine-grained isotropic local laws, we derive near-optimal, non-asymptotic perturbation bounds for the leading eigenspaces in the operator and $2\to\infty$ norms. The bounds separate the usual signal-to-noise contribution, stochastic fluctuations, and structured geometric bias terms determined by the alignment between the signal eigenspaces and the row-wise variance profile.

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

Seeing Roads Through Words: A Language-Guided Framework for RGB-T Driving Scene Segmentation

Robust semantic segmentation of road scenes under adverse illumination, lighting, and shadow conditions remain a core challenge for autonomous driving applications. RGB-Thermal fusion is a standard approach, yet existing methods apply static fusion strategies uniformly across all conditions, allowing modality-specific noise to propagate throughout the network. Hence, we propose CLARITY that dynamically adapts its fusion strategy to the detected scene condition. Guided by vision-language model (VLM) priors, the network learns to modulate each modality's contribution based on the illumination state while leveraging object embeddings for segmentation, rather than applying a fixed fusion policy. We further introduce two mechanisms - one which preserves valid dark-object semantics that prior noise-suppression methods incorrectly discard, and a hierarchical decoder that enforces structural consistency across scales to sharpen boundaries on thin objects. Experiments on the MFNet dataset demonstrate that CLARITY establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA), achieving 62.3% mIoU and 77.5% mAcc.