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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.AI) 2026-06-11

Resource-Aware LLM Reasoning for Mobile Edge General Intelligence

arXiv:2509.23248v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enabled an emergence of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) with powerful reasoning and autonomous decision-making capabilities. This integration with edge computing has led to the development of Mobile Edge General Intelligence (MEGI), which brings real-time, privacy-preserving reasoning to the network edge. However, deploying LLM-based agentic AI reasoning in MEGI environments poses significant challenges due to the high computational demands of reasoning and the limited resources of edge devices. To address these challenges, we propose a joint optimization framework for efficient LLM reasoning deployment in MEGI. First, we systematically review enhancement methods to identify mechanisms suitable for edge adaptation. Subsequently, we present a distributed framework that synergizes reasoning enhancement via adaptive CoT prompting with scalable deployment through a distributed MoE architecture. An important innovation of this approach involves modeling reasoning depth as a dynamic network resource variable, which is optimized jointly with expert activation and transmission power. This mechanism allows the system to dynamically regulate expert networks and reasoning complexity according to task requirements and device capabilities. Experimental evaluations in mobile edge environments demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively balances reasoning quality and resource efficiency. The results show that with less than one second of additional inference time, both accuracy and latency satisfaction rate can reach 90\%, validating the practical viability of deploying sophisticated LLM reasoning in resource-constrained MEGI systems.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

PLaID++: A Preference Aligned Language Model for Targeted Inorganic Materials Design

arXiv:2509.07150v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising approach to improve correctness in LLMs, however, in many scientific problems, the objective is not necessarily to produce the correct answer, but instead to produce a diverse array of candidates which satisfy a set of constraints. We study this challenge in the context of materials generation. To this end, we introduce PLaID++, an LLM post-trained for stable and property-guided crystal generation. We find that performance hinges on our crystallographic representation and reward formulation. First, we introduce a compact, symmetry-informed Wyckoff text representation which improves computational efficiency and encourages generalization from physical priors. Second, we demonstrate that temperature scaling acts as an entropy regularizer which counteracts mode collapse and encourages exploration. By encoding symmetry constraints directly into text and guiding model outputs towards desirable chemical space, PLaID++ generates structures that are thermodynamically stable, unique, and novel at a $\sim$50\% greater rate than prior methods and conditionally generates structures with desired space group properties. Our work demonstrates the potential of adapting post-training techniques from natural language processing to materials design, paving the way for targeted and efficient discovery of novel materials.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Population-scale genomics reveals divergent pathogenicity of variant classes across paralogous collagen IV genes

Monoallelic pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants in COL4A3 and COL4A4 occur in approximately 1 in 106 individuals, yet whether these paralogous genes confer equivalent pathogenicity for the same variant classes has not been tested at population scale. Using whole-genome sequencing data from the UK Biobank (UKB; n = 500,000), with replication in the All of Us Research Program (n = 414,000), we performed per-variant association testing, gene-based collapsing analyses and phenome-wide association studies (PheWAS) across haematuria, proteinuria and chronic kidney disease. We identified 64 COL4A3 and 92 COL4A4 rare variants significantly associated with haematuria or proteinuria, generating a quantitative allelic series for clinical variant interpretation. Glycine substitutions within collagenous domains conferred similar risks in both genes. In contrast, truncating and non-collagenous domain (NC1) missense variants were strongly associated with haematuria and proteinuria in COL4A4 carriers but showed substantially attenuated or absent associations in COL4A3 carriers despite comparable carrier frequencies and predicted pathogenicity scores. These findings were independently replicated in All of Us. Genome-wide association analysis identified the COL4A3/COL4A4 locus as the dominant genetic determinant of haematuria, with the signal attributable to the aggregate effects of rare coding variants and no evidence of independent common variant or trans-acting modifier effects. These findings demonstrate substantial gene-specific differences in tolerance to truncating and NC1 variants between COL4A3 and COL4A4, challenging assumptions of equivalent pathogenicity across paralogous collagen IV genes. Gene identity and not variant class alone, should inform risk stratification, variant interpretation and genetic counselling in individuals carrying collagen IV risk genotypes.

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

Vernier: Probing Representational Misalignment Behind Lexical Gaps in Causal Reasoning

Authors:

Instruction-tuned language models can answer the same causal-reasoning question differently after its English variable names are replaced by type-preserving placeholders, although the structural causal model and the gold answer are unchanged. We ask whether this lexical gap reflects information loss in the placeholder view or a misaligned read-out from a representation that still carries answer-relevant content. Vernier uses a paired-view weight update as an instrument and then inspects the mechanism left after the gap closes. In the working regimes, the evidence favours representational misalignment. A variable-name probe becomes more accurate on the placeholder view, and activation patching on Qwen-7B, Qwen-14B, and Llama-3.1-8B shows that the decision-token representation can transfer answer identity between views. The update that realigns the views is counterfactual augmentation over original and placeholder prompts, while the answer-subspace KL mainly sharpens intermediate answer-belief agreement. Success is bounded by model family, scale, and task. CRASS transfer is reliable across Qwen scales and Llama, e-CARE remains weak, and preliminary non-causal rename tasks show a similar qualitative pattern.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Novel loci and multi-omics risk models for rheumatoid arthritis through a million-participant genome-wide association meta-analysis

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) remains incompletely understood, limiting targeted prevention. In this work, genome-wide association study meta-analyses were performed for RA and seropositive RA, comprising approximately one million participants of European ancestry. Eight and six novel genomic risk loci were defined for RA and seropositive RA, and candidate causal genes were identified, highlighting relevant biological pathways, including established immune pathways and estrogen metabolism. Novel disease-specific polygenic risk scores (PRSs) were constructed, enhancing predictive performance over clinical risk factors (incremental C-statistics of 2.7 and 5.1 for RA and seropositive RA, respectively). In parallel, integrating metabolomic data into high-dimensional models enhanced risk stratification over models based on clinical risk factors and genomics, particularly for seropositive RA, where the hazard ratio of the highest decile increased from 4.869 to 5.697. These findings expand the understanding of genetic factors underlying RA and support the value of including PRSs in risk assessment, while suggesting metabolomic integration may further enhance risk stratification, particularly for seropositive RA.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Malliavin Calculus for the stochastic Cahn-Hilliard equation driven by fractional noise

arXiv:2601.10490v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The stochastic partial differential equation analyzed in this work is the Cahn-Hilliard equation perturbed by an additive fractional white noise (fractional in time and white in space). We work in the case of one spatial dimension and apply Malliavin calculus to investigate the existence of a density for the stochastic solution $u$. In particular, we show that $u$ admits continuous paths almost surely and construct a localizing sequence through which we prove that its Malliavin derivative exists locally, and that its law is absolutely continuous with respect to the Lebesgue measure on $\bf R$, establishing thus that a density exists. A key contribution of this work is the analysis of the stochastic integral appearing in the mild formulation: we derive sharp estimates for the expectation of the $p$-th power ($p \geq 2$) of the $L^{\infty}(D)$-norm of this stochastic integral as well as for the integral involving the $L^{\infty}(D)$-norm of the operator associated with the kernel appearing in the integral representation of the fractional noise, all of which are essential for this study.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Scale or Reason? A Compute-Equivalent Analysis of Reasoning Distillation

Distilling reasoning traces from strong teacher models has become the standard recipe for building capable small language models. Yet reasoning traces are 5-20$\times$ longer than standard instruction fine-tuning (IFT) outputs, meaning every practitioner who chooses reasoning distillation implicitly forgoes training a larger IFT model on the same compute budget. Whether this trade-off is worthwhile remains unaddressed. We study it with a controlled experiment: a single teacher generates paired IFT and reasoning outputs for identical prompts by toggling only its reasoning mode, isolating supervision format as the sole variable. Training students at five scales (0.5B to 14B) and evaluating on 18 benchmarks, we find that at matched FLOPs, IFT lies on or near the Pareto frontier across the majority of configurations. Reasoning reaches the Pareto frontier only on open-ended tasks at 7B and above. Even there, a sequential curriculum mixing just 25-50\% reasoning data with IFT captures most of the accuracy benefit at far lower compute cost.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Queues with Correlated Service Times – the $M/M_D/c$ Model

arXiv:2606.24881v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper studies multi-server queueing systems with correlated service times, modeled as the $M/M_D/c$ queue, which is a natural extension of the recent work by Thapa and Zhao [Thapa-Zhao:2026]. In this model, arrivals follow a Poisson process, while service times across servers exhibit dependence captured by the Marshall–Olkin multivariate exponential distribution (MO-MVED). We first develop a rigorous sample-path construction of the system and establish that the resulting queueing process is a continuous-time Markov chain. We then analyze the stationary behavior of the $M/M_D/c$ model. In the homogeneous case, we derive a complete solution via geometric tail structure and explicit boundary equations, recovering a tractable one-dimensional representation. In the heterogeneous case, we establish a general framework combining a geometric tail with a finite boundary system, and prove existence, uniqueness, and nonnegativity of the stationary distribution. The above results provide a unified analytic framework extending classical $M/M/c$ theory to correlated-service settings, and reveal how dependence among service times fundamentally affects system performance and structure. Beyond the $M/M_D/c$ model, We next study the interplay between Marshall–Olkin service dependence and queue-state Markovianity. On the one hand, Marshall–Olkin dependent service completions are shown to preserve Markovianity for a broad class of queueing systems. On the other hand, if a queueing process admits a Markovian state description without tracking service ages, residual service times, or service phases, then its service mechanism must satisfy a weak multivariate lack-of-memory property and consequently belongs to the Marshall–Olkin family. These results provide a probabilistic foundation for the use of Marshall–Olkin multivariate exponential service times in Markovian queueing models.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

EvoTrainer: Co-Evolving LLM Policies and Training Harnesses for Autonomous Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.03108v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous LLM training is often framed as recipe search, which leaves the training harness largely static. This limitation sharpens in agentic RL, where shifting bottlenecks and scalar rewards mask diverse failure modes. We introduce EvoTrainer, an autonomous training framework that co-evolves LLM policies and training-side harnesses through empirical feedback: it diagnoses rollout-level evidence, revises diagnostics, backtests interventions, and accumulates reusable skills. Evaluated on mathematical reasoning, competitive-programming code generation, and repository-level software engineering, EvoTrainer matches or exceeds the human-engineered RL references under the same data, codebase, and evaluation protocol, with the largest gain on long-horizon agentic SWE. Trajectory analyses show that retained strategies diverge across domains, evolving diagnostics prevent invalid high-scoring branches from being promoted, and reusable skills shape later search. Autonomous LLM RL should move beyond recipe search toward joint evolution of policies and the training harnesses that interpret them.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

EgoCS-400K: An Egocentric Gameplay Dataset for World Models

The shift from video generation to interactive world modeling places new demands on data: beyond captioned videos, world models require temporally aligned video-action-language trajectories grounded in the actions, camera motion, states, and events that drive future scene changes. However, such data is difficult to obtain at scale. Web video datasets offer broad visual coverage but lack executable actions and reliable states; robotic datasets provide action and state supervision but are costly and limited in scene diversity; and existing simulators often lack large-scale human-driven interaction trajectories. In this paper, we introduce EgoCS-400K, a large-scale replay-grounded egocentric Counter-Strike dataset for world models, built from public professional CS and CS2 match demos that preserve human gameplay trajectories and enable parsing, replaying, rendering, and temporal alignment. We extract player states, view directions, movements, keyboard/button inputs, view-angle changes, weapon usage, game events, and round-level context, and render clean first-person videos from the same trajectories. EgoCS-400K contains over 400,000 first-person videos and 10,000 hours of gameplay from more than 1,000 matches and 40,000 rounds, covering 13 maps and 10 player viewpoints per round. It supports a range of interactive visual modeling tasks, including action-conditioned future prediction, state- and event-aware scene rollout, replay-grounded captioning, and agent egocentric action understanding. By connecting visual observations with human actions, camera motion, game states, and events at scale, EgoCS-400K serves as a practical bridge between passive web videos, controllable game simulation, and costly real-world embodied data.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

A non-invasive liquid biopsy resolves the diagnostic blind spot in chronic kidney disease

Chronic kidney disease is a major global health burden, and its early detection is critical for delaying progression to kidney failure using recently developed targeted therapies. However, current diagnostic screening relies heavily on blood markers that are confounded by muscle mass, and on urine tests that frequently miss structural damage occurring without protein leakage. This creates a critical diagnostic blind spot that hinders timely intervention. Here we show a non-invasive liquid biopsy platform that quantifies a specific protein marker, MUC1, on urinary extracellular vesicles to accurately assess renal parenchymal integrity. By bypassing the systemic metabolic noise of traditional blood tests, our assay provides a remarkably stable, person-specific functional signature. Following extensive validation across diverse cohorts, our longitudinal analysis demonstrated that the discrepancy between this novel urine-based readout and standard blood tests unmasks hidden renal vulnerability, successfully predicting rapid functional decline. By comprehensively evaluating both tubular and glomerular integrity from a single spot urine sample, these findings establish a completely non-invasive, highly scalable prescreening tool that resolves the diagnostic blind spot, enabling broader early detection strategies and ushering in a new era of proactive risk management.

13.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-09

Adjuvanted inactivated rabies virus-vectored Lassa virus vaccine in healthy adults: a phase 1 trial

Lassa fever causes substantial morbidity and mortality in West Africa, and no licensed vaccine is available. We evaluated LASSARAB, an inactivated rabies virus-vectored Lassa virus (Josiah strain) glycoprotein complex vaccine. We conducted a randomized, controlled, dose-escalation phase 1 trial. Participants (total n = 54) received two intramuscular doses of LASSARAB containing 700 (n = 15), 1,400 (n = 15) or 2,800 (n = 14) relative units of antigen formulated with the TLR-4 agonist 3D-6-acyl PHAD-SE adjuvant, or licensed rabies vaccine control (n = 10), administered 28 days apart. This protocol-defined interim analysis reports the primary safety evaluation and secondary immunogenicity assessments through day 61. There were no prespecified hypotheses or formal power calculations. All primary safety end points demonstrated an acceptable safety profile. After dose 1, local solicited adverse events occurred in 86.7–100.0% of LASSARAB groups and 80% of controls; systemic events in 33.3–71.4% and 60.0% of controls. After dose 2, local solicited adverse events occurred in 66.7–86.7% of LASSARAB groups and 55.6% of controls; systemic events in 53.3–71.4% of LASSARAB groups and 55.6% of controls. Events were predominantly mild and self-limited. Unsolicited adverse events occurred in 28.6–60.0% of LASSARAB groups and 20.0% of controls. No serious adverse event, immune-mediated condition or sensorineural hearing loss occurred. Safety laboratory abnormalities occurred in 13.3–66.7% of LASSARAB groups and 30.0% of controls (14 mild, 6 moderate and none severe). After two doses, Lassa virus GPC IgG ELISA seroconversion (≥fourfold rise) was achieved in 100.0% (44 of 44) of LASSARAB recipients and 0.0% (0 of 10) of controls. Rabies glycoprotein IgG ELISA seroconversion (≥fourfold rise) and neutralizing antibody by rapid fluorescent focus inhibition test (RFFIT) seroprotection (≥0.5 IU ml−1) were also 100% across all groups, including controls. LASSARAB + 3D-6-acyl phosphorylated hexaacyl disaccharide (PHAD)-SE demonstrated a favorable safety profile and immunogenicity against Lassa and rabies viruses. The per-protocol final study report will include safety and durability through day 394. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT06546709 . An interim report of a first-in-human phase 1 trial found an adjuvanted, combination inactivated rabies-vectored, Lassa fever vaccine (LASSARAB + 3D-6-acyl PHAD-SE) to be safe and induced immunogenicity to both Lassa and rabies viruses in healthy participants.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Multi-agent rendezvous in fluid flows via reinforcement learning

arXiv:2606.11274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rendezvous is a critical task for multi-agent systems, requiring agents to coordinate to meet at an unspecified location. However, achieving this in fluid environments presents a challenge, as it remains unclear how agents can exploit underlying fluid kinematics to facilitate convergence. In this study, we adopt a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach to develop physics-informed rendezvous strategies in vortical flows. Compared to a naive strategy, where agents navigate toward their counterparts, MARL strategies significantly improve the rendezvous rate. MARL strategies also show transferability across varying vortex intensities, vortex scales, and swarm sizes. By breaking the symmetry of the state-action map, MARL strategy leverages a non-intuitive mechanism that prevents agents from becoming trapped in separate vortices, thereby enhancing rendezvous success. Additionally, a heuristic strategy is extracted from the learned strategy and also outperforms the naive strategy. Furthermore, a theoretical analysis demonstrates that fluid deformation impedes the rendezvous process. Large finite-time Lyapunov exponents identify where fluid effects separate adjacent agents, suggesting that targets should be planned in weak-deformation regions. Our findings reveal the important role that agent-fluid interactions play in multi-agent tasks and highlight the MARL capability to explore swarm intelligence in complex flow environments.

15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer with all-to-all connectivity

Quantum computers require both high-fidelity operations and large qubit numbers to surpass classical capabilities1. Trapped-ion platforms have demonstrated the highest gate fidelities of any modality2–6 but scaling to larger qubit numbers while preserving performance has remained a central challenge. We report on Quantinuum Helios, a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor based on the quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD) architecture7. Helios features 137Ba+ hyperfine qubits8,9, all-to-all connectivity enabled by a rotatable ion storage ring connecting two quantum operation regions by a junction10,11, speed improvements from parallelized operations12 and a new software stack with real-time compilation of dynamic programs13. Averaged over all operational zones in the system, we achieve average infidelities of 2.5(1) × 10−5 for single-qubit (1Q) gates, 7.9(2) × 10−4 for two-qubit (2Q) gates and 3.3(5) × 10−4 for state preparation and measurement (SPAM), none of which are fundamentally limited and probably able to be improved. These component infidelities are predictive of system-level performance in both random Clifford circuits and random circuit sampling (RCS), the latter demonstrating that Helios operates well beyond the reach of classical simulation and establishes a new frontier of fidelity and complexity for quantum computers14. A new quantum computer, Quantinuum Helios, which is a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor built on the QCCD architecture, demonstrates performance well beyond classical capabilities and provides a path for scaling up quantum computing.

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

Visual Verification Enables Inference-time Steering and Autonomous Policy Improvement

arXiv:2606.18247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world should learn from their experience and improve over time. This requires a mechanism of practicing and learning from feedback. In this paper, we propose VERITAS, a generator-verifier framework for generalist robot policies for inference-time policy steering and self-improvement. We use a pre-trained generalist robot policy as a ``generator'' and pair it with a gradient-free ``visual verifier'' that evaluates actions at inference time. This framework enables inference-time steering that improves policy performance without additional training. We demonstrate that inference-time verification consistently outperforms vanilla generalists without training on additional demonstration data. Additionally, we demonstrate that the verified rollouts provide effective supervision for offline policy improvement: policies fine-tuned on verified self-generated trajectories achieve consistent performance gains. Notably, we find that post-training with verified rollouts achieves comparable efficiency to expert demonstrations, while requiring no human interventions. Our results highlight inference-time verification as a practical and scalable mechanism for improving robotic policies during deployment.

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

Distilling Answer-Set Programming Rules from LLMs for Neurosymbolic Visual Question Answering

arXiv:2606.03269v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Visual Question Answering (VQA) is the task of answering questions about images, requiring the integration of multimodal input and reasoning. Modular approaches that incorporate logic-based representations into the reasoning component offer clear advantages over end-to-end trained systems, particularly in terms of interpretability. However, adapting or extending these representations when task requirements change can place a significant burden on developers. To address this challenge, we present an approach for distilling rules from Large Language Models (LLMs). Our method prompts an LLM to extend an initial VQA reasoning theory, expressed as an answer-set program, to meet new requirements of the task. Examples from VQA datasets guide the LLM, validate the results, and help correct erroneous rules by leveraging feedback from the ASP solver. We demonstrate that our approach is effective across diverse VQA datasets. Notably, only a few examples are needed to elicit correct rules from LLMs. Our experiments suggest that rule distillation from LLMs is a promising alternative to traditional data-driven rule learning approaches. Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Measuring Research Difficulty of Academic Papers: A Case Study in Natural Language Processing

With the rapid growth of the number of academic papers, systematically evaluating the difficulty of research and its relationship to academic impact offers important significance for research topic selection and resource allocation. However, current studies lack quantitative assessments of research difficulty and its correlation with academic impact. This paper proposes a comprehensive evaluation system for research difficulty, incorporating factors such as academic collaboration, content, and references. Taking the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) as a case study, we extract both internal and external features from academic papers, compute multiple research difficulty indicators. We assign their weights using the entropy weight method and perform a weighted sum to obtain the research difficulty score of academic papers. This paper uses the citation frequency of academic papers to measure academic impact. To validate our approach, NLP experts assessed the difficulty of a sample of papers, and correlation analyses confirmed the reliability of our measurement. Empirical results reveal that in NLP, factors such as the number of pages, reference count, and participation of high-level institutions are significantly associated with academic impact. Moreover, we identify an inverted U-shaped relationship between research difficulty and academic impact. It suggests that moderately difficult research tends to achieve greater academic impact.

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

Structuring Sparsity: Block-Sparse Featurizers Capture Visual Concept Manifolds

What is the geometry of a visual percept? The most widely used protocols for decomposing neural network representations into interpretable parts treat concepts as isolated directions, yet recent work shows that concepts are often realized as geometric structures in low dimensional regions of activation space. We turn to the literature of Structured sparsity to close this gap, and show that block sparsity, which groups directions into blocks, is the prior matched to a generative model in which a representation is a sparse sum of low-dimensional manifolds: the modern, learned form of a classical idea in visual neuroscience, where a visual feature is carried by a coordinated group of neurons rather than a single tuned one. We implement three variants of block-sparse featurizers (BSFs) and, through a minimum-description-length analysis, show that all three describe activations more compactly than direction-based featurizers, with the recovered concepts typically two- to four-dimensional. We then use BSFs to (i) recontextualize prior work, showing that curve detectors in InceptionV1 actually read from a single continuous curve manifold, (ii) discover novel manifolds including shadows and lighting in DINOv3, and (iii) support interpretable control of image generation in diffusion models (SDXL) via manifold steering.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Healthy Heart Actions Right Time (HHART): Co-design priorities to connect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community and clinic activities for healthy hearts

Aim: Healthy Heart Actions Right Time (HHART) is a multi-phased research project that seeks to identify, implement and evaluate strategies to connect community and clinical activities to reduce the burden of heart disease for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The aim in Phase One was to identify priority activities for two participating services. Background: The ongoing effects of colonisation drive a disproportionate burden of heart disease for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Clinical and community groups both have established strengths in reducing the risk of heart disease, but these are not always well connected. Methods: Using a case study methodology in two locations we partnered in a 12-month co-design process to identify priority activities to connect clinical and community activities. Findings: Three priorities emerged from the Phase One co-design process: (i) community-led gardening as a strategy to promote heart health through connection and healthy lifestyles; (ii) community days to increase engagement in heart checks and strengthen community-clinic relationship; and (iii) clinic-led development of culturally relevant education resources to promote clinician confidence and community heart health knowledge.

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

SoK: AI-Augmented Binary Reversing

arXiv:2606.17398v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Binary reversing is fundamental to software understanding, vulnerability discovery, malware investigation, and firmware auditing. However, it remains inherently challenging due to the irreversible loss of semantic information during compilation. Recent advances in machine learning, large language models (LLMs), and agentic AI systems have accelerated the adoption of AI-augmented binary reversing. Yet, the resulting body of work has become increasingly fragmented across reversing domains, artifact representations, learning approaches, and evaluation practices. This paper presents the first comprehensive systematization of knowledge on AI-augmented binary reversing. We analyze 144 research papers published since 2015, and organize them into 22 binary reversing domains according to the inference tasks. We further introduce a unified taxonomy spanning conventional and AI-augmented reversing pipelines. Our taxonomy connects traditional analysis techniques, binary-derived artifacts, representation strategies, learning paradigms, and downstream inference tasks, while clarifying the emerging roles of LLMs and agentic AI systems. By establishing a common vocabulary and structured framework, we provide a holistic view of the field's evolution over the past decade. Our study reveals common structures underlying seemingly disparate approaches, highlights persistent technical challenges and evaluation gaps, and identifies promising opportunities for future research. Collectively, these insights clarify the current state of the field and provide a foundation for the next generation of reliable and scalable AI-augmented binary reversing systems.

22.
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.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fodor and Pylyshyn's Systematicity Challenge Still Stands

The recent successes of neural networks producing human-like language have caused significant stir in cognitive science, with many researchers arguing that classical puzzles about human cognition and challenges to artificial intelligence are being solved by neural networks. A notable case is the argument from systematicity due to Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn, argues that humans display systematic biconditional dependencies. For example, someone can understand the sentence "John saw Mary" just in case that they understand the sentence "Mary saw John." Symbolic systems explain this systematicity of language and thought, while neural networks offer no immediate explanation. Several recent articles argue that this challenge has now been met by neural networks. In particular, Brenden Lake and Marco Baroni argue that their meta-learning for compositionality protocol matches and perhaps explains human systematicity. We demonstrate that these conclusions are premature. Among other results, we found that their model struggles to learn rules that are even slightly out of distribution compared to their training data. Furthermore, the model behaves unsystematically even on many within-distribution problems. We conclude that Fodor and Pylyshyn's challenge to neural networks remains unmet.

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

HemExp: Clinically-Guided Latent Diffusion for Modeling Hematoma Expansion

Hematoma expansion (HE) after spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) is a major determinant of acute triage and treatment decisions in neurosurgical care. However, most existing methods provide either a binary expansion risk or a single follow-up volume, limiting uncertainty-aware decisions. We introduce HemExp, a clinically-guided latent diffusion model that generates patient-specific follow-up non-contrast CT images, along with segmentations of intraparenchymal and intraventricular hemorrhage. Generation is conditioned on baseline imaging, clinical variables, and an explicit expansion indicator, enabling controllable simulation of realistic clinical scenarios. HemExp uses a hemorrhage-aware multi-head variational autoencoder and models progression as the difference between baseline and follow-up latent representations with a conditional diffusion model. The model is trained on paired scans from 450 patients across multiple centers and evaluated on 107 patients from a held-out institution. HemExp produces spatial HE probability maps by generating multiple synthetic follow-up images per patient to estimate distributions of plausible follow-up hematoma volumes. Perturbing clinical inputs such as symptom-onset-to-imaging time or anticoagulant status shifts the predicted follow-up volume distribution. HemExp extends binary predictors and demonstrates robust estimation of clinically relevant outcomes in the imaging space, such as hematoma volume, intraventricular involvement, and mass effects. Overall, our results support controllable latent diffusion as a promising direction for uncertainty-aware modeling of early ICH progression.

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

SPDA-SAM: A Self-prompted Depth-Aware Segment Anything Model for Instance Segmentation

Recently, Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated strong generalizability in various instance segmentation tasks. However, its performance is severely dependent on the quality of manual prompts. In addition, the RGB images that instance segmentation methods normally use inherently lack depth information. As a result, the ability of these methods to perceive spatial structures and delineate object boundaries is hindered. To address these challenges, we propose a Self-prompted Depth-Aware SAM (SPDA-SAM) for instance segmentation. Specifically, we design a Semantic-Spatial Self-prompt Module (SSSPM) which extracts the semantic and spatial prompts from the image encoder and the mask decoder of SAM, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce a Coarse-to-Fine RGB-D Fusion Module (C2FFM), in which the features extracted from a monocular RGB image and the depth map estimated from it are fused. In particular, the structural information in the depth map is used to provide coarse-grained guidance to feature fusion, while local variations in depth are encoded in order to fuse fine-grained feature representations. To our knowledge, SAM has not been explored in such self-prompted and depth-aware manners. Experimental results demonstrate that our SPDA-SAM outperforms its state-of-the-art counterparts across twelve different data sets. These promising results should be due to the guidance of the self-prompts and the compensation for the spatial information loss by the coarse-to-fine RGB-D fusion operation.